“Hello,” I said. “No. I’m sorry we couldn’t both win.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, I am. Jack Fenton and the rest of the board send their regrets, as well.” I took off my coat and hung it on a coat tree. “But they expect that you, of all people, will understand.”
“Right,” he said.
I settled uninvited into a Western-style chair that was angled into a corner of the room with a triangular table and a matching chair. There was a telephone on the table. I pointed to it. “May I use this?”
He gave me a quizzical look, but nodded.
I phoned the police station and left word with Ailey Mason about where to find Derek, and then I called the office. I hoped, for many reasons, that Faye had chosen to work today. When she answered the phone, I was relieved. I told her Derek was alive and, at least compared to her probable fantasies, well. Her initial stiffness dissolved into embarrassment and apologies, but I didn’t want to deal with them or with her at the moment. As tactfully as possible, I put her off until the next day. When I hung up, Michael was doodling on paper with a pen, appearing uninterested in my conversations. I knew he would be too stubborn to ask any questions.
“Are you busy?” I inquired.
“As a matter of fact, no.” He looked up. “Now that we’re not going to be developing Tenth Street, I have some free time I didn’t expect to have. So no, I’m not busy.”
“It’s only one building, Michael.”
“It’s the one we wanted to start with.”
“So renovate around it. We’ll spruce it up. We’ll consult with you. We’ll try to coordinate with your renovation designs for the rest of the neighborhood. Don’t give up, Michael.”
He squinted at me as if I were a speck on his horizon.
“You kill me,” he said, and then, with a furious sort of frustration, “Why that building? Why—out of all the buildings in this godforsaken town that I should have stayed out of once I left it—why that one?”
“Because it was presented to us as the best site by a group of people who had put tremendous effort into the search,” I said. But what I was really thinking was, Yeah, why that one? Although what I told him was true, I wondered for the first time if there might not be more to it than that. How did MaryDell Paine’s committee come to pick the very building, the very odd building, where her crazy brother used to go to church?
I didn’t discuss that with Michael, but said instead, “You never used to give up so easily.” His involuntary grimace made me instantly regret the observation; it had been excruciatingly tactless. I rushed to make verbal amends: “I’m sorry, I mean … listen, so you don’t get the first building you wanted … what else is on your wish list? What was your next purchase going to be?”
He took a while to decide to answer me. “Well, after the basement, we were going after some of the properties that are in better repair. We wanted to get them while they’re still fairly reasonable, and we wanted to start with properties that wouldn’t require that much outlay to renovate. They’d be quick showplaces for us.”
“Which ones, for instance?”
“You are still a cheerleader, Jenny,” he said, with a tone of nastiness that I chose to ignore. “Go team, right? Okay, my next approach was to the guy in the brown house on the south corner—”
“Perry Yates?”
“Yes.”
No wonder Yates was so opposed to us, I thought.
“He has a couple of other properties around there,” Michael said. “We thought we’d try for all of them and that would give us a good start on the project. But hell, I don’t know, now, I just don’t think your project fits in with ours….”
“You scared of a few crazy people?”
“Maybe,” he said bluntly.
“Did you buy the house across the street from the church, Michael?”
“I told you, we haven’t bought any other properties, Jenny. And I also told you we were going to start with the better ones, not the old rattraps like that one. You don’t listen to me. Hell, you never did pay any attention to me.”
I ignored that. “Who bought it, do you know?”
“No.”
“Could you find out?”
He regarded me with displeasure. “You do not lack for nerve, Swede.” But he wheeled his chair up to the computer on the desk and punched the keyboard. I walked over to stand behind him, reading the multilist information over his shoulder. The name of the buyer wasn’t there.
“Do you remember the name of the real estate company on the ‘For Sale’ sign?” he asked.
“I’m not sure there was a name,” I said. “It may have just been one of those generic ‘For Sale’ signs.”
“Well, then it was probably a private transaction, and we wouldn’t have it listed here. Whoever bought it probably got a better deal than the sellers did … that neighborhood is ripe for gentrification, and everybody in the business knows it.” He glanced over his shoulder to give me a sour look.
“There are other buildings, Michael.”
“What else do you want to know?”
“Look up something around Fourth Street, will you?”
“What do you mean, something?”
“Oh, one of those new condos; see if there’s anything listed with maybe three, four bedrooms, two-story, completely renovated—”
“You and the cop moving?”
“We’re looking,” I said vaguely. “What do you have?”
He rolled through the neighborhoods on his monitor, finally stopping at a screen full of expensive condos. “We don’t have anything listed over there, yet. We were hoping to renovate our own neighborhood and offer our own quarter-million-dollar condos.”
“That’s what they’re selling for?” I asked, ignoring his sarcasm.
“See for yourself,” he said, pointing at the screen.
The Fourth Street condos were, indeed, selling for all of that, and more. What had Derek done, I wondered, sold his own modest condo, pooled resources with Sammie Gardner, and then purchased one of those costly beauties? If so, he had moved even faster than I had in getting the church basement. If he’d moved that fast while he worked for me, I wouldn’t have had to fire him.
“Interesting,” I said.
Without warning, Michael wheeled around to face me in his chair. He grabbed my wrists and pulled me down into a hard, angry kiss. When I regained my balance and got some leverage, I pushed myself away from him.
From a safe distance, I regarded him.
“You asked for that,” he said.
“I didn’t.”
He looked down at his hands; he was flushed and breathing hard. So was I, and I felt sick to my stomach. After Butts, this was too much. Maybe it was my fault. I walked over to the coat tree to get my coat and put it on.
“Goddamn it,” he said in a low voice.
I looked back at him. I wanted to say, Stop this, this is silly, but then, I wasn’t the one suffering from unrequited whatever-it-was. It wasn’t my place to tell him how he ought to feel. A hundred other sentences formed in my brain, and backed up in my mouth. But I had a history of always saying to Michael the very things he didn’t want to hear and of doing exactly what he hoped I wouldn’t. I was tempted to at least say, “I’m sorry,” but I wasn’t sure I had anything to be sorry about. And besides, even that used to annoy him. So, for once I kept my mouth shut. Feeling awkward and frustrated, I walked out the door and closed it quietly behind me. It did occur to me to be very grateful that I hadn’t married him any of those times I had had the chance. I hoped that one of these days he’d figure out that he ought to be equally grateful.
Feeling shaky, I walked back to my car.
It had been a long time since I’d had to spurn the advances of two men in the same day. I did not consider it a compliment. It filled me with self-doubt. Was I putting out signals I didn’t intend?
I had a strong urge to see Geof, but the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of two homicide ca
ses, wasn’t a good time to interrupt his work. I thought of Marsha, but she’d be with a client now. My other friends would be at work, and my sister wasn’t exactly my choice of company on any given day. I knew what was wrong with me: I was feeling lonely because two old friends—Derek and Michael—were seeming long ago and far away from me. On an impulse, I drove by the downtown municipal park to see if Rosalinda was sitting on her bench, but she wasn’t there.
You can’t just drive around all afternoon, feeling sorry for yourself, I decided; you ought to get to work on some other foundation business. This thought gave me the excuse I needed to visit another old friend. She wouldn’t be at work; she was long retired from teaching. But she had never retired from the knack of making people feel better.
34
My old sixth-grade teacher, Miss Lucille Grant, lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a brick fourplex in a shabbily genteel part of town. She was over eighty now, a big, plain, heavy woman who lived alone, but for the frequent company of former pupils like me. We seemed to regard Miss Grant—or Miss Lucille as we called her in our thoughts—as a beloved, elderly aunt who’d loved, scolded, and influenced us as few others had in our lives.
Over English Breakfast tea and real scones with clotted cream, I related to her the story of Mob (”Poor fellow,” she said); of Michael (”So handsome, but so badly spoiled,” she said of that former pupil); of Derek (”Oh my,” she said, “oh dear, that’s very bad”); and Rodney Gardner (”Bound for a bad end”); of the old church basement (”What a fine idea!”); of the pregnant girl (”Poor little baby”); of the artist with the two girls; of the Walking Cigar who looked like Wayne Newton (”Is that a rock-and-roll singer, dear?”); and of poor old Grace Montgomery (”Fear and hatred breed their own kind”).
I talked, and she listened. I talked, and she poured. I talked, and she spread plum jam on another scone for me. I talked about my trustees (which made her smile); about Marsha Sandy and her boyfriend (”He’s not from here, is he?” she asked); and about Rosalinda (”Poor child,” she said). I told her about my problems with Faye; about MaryDell Paine and her husband who cut his brother-in-law’s head out of pictures (”Just like him!” she said of that former pupil); and about surly maids and barking dogs. I talked, and she let me, until I ran out of words and felt better.
“Jennifer, dear,” she said when I’d finished, “walk over to that bookcase, please … yes, that’s the one … and get out my King James version of the Bible, will you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I found it and laid it on her lap.
Miss Grant began leafing through the index, murmuring as she searched, “There are two or three different versions, although I believe they are sufficiently similar so that it doesn’t matter which one …”
She found the reference she sought and thumbed backward to … “All right. Mark five, verses three through twenty. Oh my, no, this won’t do, the King James calls him ‘Legion,’ and I believe you told me that he calls himself ‘Mob.’” She closed the Bible decisively and held it out to me. “Put this back, dear, and fetch me the Good News Bible. I’m sorry to say we’ll have to read that version instead.” I did as I was told—just as we had all fetched and carried for her in the sixth grade—while she fretted aloud about the “sad lack of poetry and majesty” in the Good News Bible. But when she had it in her hands, she thumbed through its index, saying in a schoolteacherish voice, “How shall we look it up, Jennifer? Under parables? Insanity? Jesus? Mob? Demons? Oh yes, all right … here it is under miracles … ‘driving out demons’ … we’ll use Mark again.”
She leaned forward once more to read to me, and I leaned back again to listen. I closed my eyes and was once more in the schoolroom, listening to this vibrant teacher with the magical storyteller’s way about her….
“Jesus and his disciples arrived on the other side of Lake Galilee, in the territory of Gerasa,” she read, giving it the entrancing feeling of “once upon a time.” “As soon as Jesus got out of the boat, he was met by a man who came out of the burial caves there. This man had an evil spirit in him …”
With my eyes still closed, I smiled, because her voice had descended dramatically on the word “caves,” and she had put a chilling vibrato into “evil spirit.” If I had been eleven years old, I’m sure I would have hugged my arms, shivered, and giggled softly to my friends.
“… and lived among the tombs.”
She gave those words equal weight, like Lived-Among-The-Dead. I smiled to myself again.
“Nobody could keep him tied with chains any more; many times his feet and his hands had been tied, but every time he broke the chains and smashed the irons on his feet.”
Smashed, she said.
“He was too strong for anyone to control him. Day and night he wandered among the tombs and through the hills, screaming and cutting himself with stones.”
I wasn’t smiling anymore; I was imagining a bleeding, screaming maniac, haunting the tombs like a crazed beast. “I am wounded,” the confession on the blackboard had said, but had he meant physically, psychologically, emotionally, or, maybe, spiritually? Had Kitt bled from cuts to his body or to his soul? I was seeing the townspeople, my own townspeople, gazing with frightened eyes at the hills where he roamed, this walking nightmare of a man. On his face, I imposed a distorted version of the photograph of MaryDell Paine’s younger brother. It gave my vision a terrifying immediacy.
“He was some distance away when he saw Jesus; so he ran, fell on his knees before him, and screamed in a loud voice, ‘Jesus, Son of the Most High God! What do you want with me? For God’s sake, I beg you, don’t punish me!’ (He said this because Jesus was saying, ‘Evil spirit, come out of this man!’)
“So Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name!’
“The man answered, ‘My name is “Mob”—there are so many of us!’ And he kept begging Jesus not to send the evil spirits out of that region.
“There was a large herd of pigs near by, feeding on a hillside. So the spirits begged Jesus, ‘Send us to the pigs, and let us go into them.’
“He let them go, and the evil spirits went out of the man and entered the pigs. The whole herd—about two thousand pigs in ail—rushed down the side of the cliff into the lake and was drowned.
“The men who had been taking care of the pigs ran away and spread the news in the town and among the farms. People went out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they saw the man who used to have the mob of demons in him. He was sitting there, clothed and in his right mind; and they were all afraid. Those who had seen it told the people what had happened to the man with the demons, and about the pigs.
“So they asked Jesus to leave their territory.”
Miss Grant shook her head sadly at the frailty of humans.
“As Jesus was getting into the boat, the man who had had the demons begged him, ‘Let me go with you!’
“But Jesus would not let him. Instead, he told him, ‘Go back home to your family and tell them how much the Lord has done for you and how kind he has been to you.’
“So the man left and went all through the Ten Towns, telling what Jesus had done for him. And all who heard it were amazed.”
Before I opened my eyes, I thought: And they lived happily ever after. When I glanced up at Miss Grant, she was paging backward through the New Testament.
“According to Luke,” she said, when she found her reference point, “the poor man called himself Mob because … ‘many demons had gone into him. The demons begged Jesus not to send them into the abyss.’” When she looked up at me, there was compassion in her blue eyes. “I suspect he was a paranoid schizophrenic with severe psychosis, don’t you, dear? And really, wasn’t it a favor to him that Jesus drove the demons out entirely rather than giving him drugs? So only the pigs suffered the side effects.”
“You,” I said fondly, “are putting me on.”
She smiled. “I am struck by the coincidence of the man named Mob, and
the pigs in the water in the old lady’s bathtub. Aren’t you, dear?”
I stared at her. “No. Yes. Does it mean something?”
“Well, if it does,” she said with a sweet, firm confidence that was familiar to me, “I’m sure you’ll think of something, Jennifer, dear.”
I was reminded of how, in the sixth grade, we used to ask Miss Grant questions. More often than not, her reply was: “I think you can figure that out for yourself.” And so, of course, we were forced, actually, to think, always a painful process. When we brought our pitiful results to her, she would either say, “Let’s think about that a little more, shall we?” Or, “How very clever of you!” And so we never learned if she had known the answer all along.
I rose, kissed her soft cheek, and thanked her. Just be fore I left, I got down to the foundation business I’d had in mind when I arrived: “Miss Grant, ever since Michael Laurence left town, we’ve had a vacancy on our board of trustees. Would you let me suggest your name for nomination?”
“I think I might enjoy that,” she admitted, with a smile that was nearly mischievous. “I know all those boys.”
And that, to my extreme pleasure, took care of that. She was the one female in town whom none of my old-fashioned “boys” would dare to oppose. I credited myself with brilliant inspiration.
Then I trotted along to “think about that”—the coincidence of the pigs—“a little more.” After seeing Miss Lucille, I felt—there’s no other word for it—cleansed.
35
I grabbed a very late lunch at the Buoy.
Then I called the artist, Marianne Miller, to ask if I might drop by to see her again. She told me that if I didn’t mind visiting while she mixed paints and while the girls raced about, it was fine with her. “But I really don’t want to disturb you while you’re working,” I said. To which she laughed wearily and replied, “Disturb? In this house? You don’t throw blocks, do you?”
“No,” I admitted, smiling at the phone.