That trip felt the same to me, Harry checking in with Rosa to go over the day’s receipts, time with Harry, time alone, but when Harry followed me to Brownsville to have lunch before I resumed my schedule, he was silent, almost morose. We were kissing good-bye in the parking lot of The Courtyard Palms before he told me what was bothering him.
“Honey, I’ve got to tell you, I know what we’ve said, but I want something more. I want you here all the time. With me.” He hugged me and laughed. “Don’t say anything now. I know your lag time on responses. Think about it; that’s all I ask. Just think. You’d gain a dog.” His laughing mouth was in my hair, but I think he said, “I love you, lass.”
I finished in Brownsville—I sell mostly Spanish translations there—and then headed for Alice, my last stop for the day, feeling the resisting pull of Harry and the tide all the way as I struggled to bring the Malibu up from the sea like a diver struggles to reach the surface. All the way, the car and the wind kept whispering to me, “Harry, Steven, Harry, Steven.”
When I pulled into my motel at Alice, I knew I couldn’t think about Harry anymore. Not until I resolved whatever this Steven thing was.
I’d neglected reading lately and had brought several books in from the car to help put me to sleep. It was only seven o’clock, but I was tired. What a selection; a Norton paperback of Bleak House, dear neglected Prusilla, and Steven Hyatt’s gift of best-loved poems. I made my decision and was reaching for the book when the phone rang.
I knew who it was before I answered. It was like knowing the train station was in Europe. Some things you just know.
“Lydia?”
“How did you know where I am?”
“Did you enjoy your time on the island?”
“Steven, stop it. You frighten me.”
“I don’t mean to, Lydia.”
“What do you want? What do you want from me? I don’t know you.”
“No, but you know someone who does. I did make a mistake. I did call the wrong number, but it was still your number.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There were two numbers, but one was not in service. The working one was your number.”
All day I’d felt like I was drowning, and now I knew I was. I gasped for air before I spoke again. “Okay, where did you see these numbers? Where were they?”
“You know where I found them,” he said accusingly.
“No, I don’t.” I curled into a ball on the upper right side of the bed, pulling the bedspread over my legs to warm them in the sudden chill I felt. “I honestly don’t know one thing you’re talking about. Did you see the numbers in Europe?”
“How do you know about Europe?” he asked in a suspicious tone.
“I don’t,” I protested again. “I don’t know anything. Please believe me, and leave me alone. There’s been some dreadful mistake.”
“Maybe so, but all I’ve got is you. You’ve got to help me.”
“Help you? You’ve killed someone, and you’re asking me to help you?”
There was such a long pause before he answered that I was tempted to ask, “Are you there?” Then he spoke in that strangled way that I had come to recognize as his way of expressing frustration. “I’m not a killer. I have never killed anyone, but, yes, there is a man who … died. I’m caught up in it all, but I had nothing to do with it.” Desperation replaced the frustration in his voice. “I’m asking you again, please help me. Or I might die, too … and if you’re as innocent as you say … maybe even you.”
His words frightened me, but I couldn’t miss the ring of sincerity in his tone. I believed him, but I had questions I needed to ask to quell the reservations that still quivered in my mind. “Why me, Steven?” I shivered again. It seemed so intimate to be calling him by his first name.
“Lydia, Honey, whoever you are, somehow you know more about this than you’re letting on. Even if you don’t, you are my only source to find out what really happened. You’ve got to help me.” For the first time in our conversations, Steven sounded angry. “Goddamn it, you and your friends can’t go on playing games like this … not with my life … not with everything I’ve—”
“You called me Honey,” I interrupted. Harry was right, I did suffer lag time. What I had first thought had been an overfamiliarity on Steven’s part, I recognized belatedly as my name.
He said, “That’s your name, isn’t it? Your real name?”
I wondered again: How did he know I was in Alice … at this motel? How did he know my name? I gasped again. “You’re .. . you’re in my house!”
He didn’t answer.
“You son of a bitch, get out of my house!” I shouted, and for the first time in my life, I slammed the receiver down.
Panic-stricken, I snatched up the belongings I had taken into the motel. My nightgown dragged in the gray Texas dirt from the half-closed suitcase; papers stuck out of the briefcase. I threw the lot into the backseat and gunned the Chevy out of the motel drive, leaving the door to my room open, light from the room where I had thought I was safe spilling out into the night.
The rain started about Temple. If it had been light, I would have seen the clouds, but in the dark with headlights searching the road, I saw only the sudden curtain of silvery Mylar-like rain that pelted the windshield. My reaction was so violent that the car skidded on the wet asphalt highway. As I corrected the slide, I realized how tense I had been for the past few hours, letting my anger carry me over the miles without thought or reason.
Shaking, I fell behind an eighteen-wheeler, following its taillights like a horse on a lead, not waking from the ensuing trance until I saw the truck’s brake lights flash red, signaling a stop. I had followed my guide off the highway into the parking lot of an all-night truck stop.
The rain never stopped as I pumped gasoline into the car, visited the ladies’ room, and bought canned Cokes, some cheese-and-crackers, and filled my thermos with coffee. No one paid me any attention and only a quick thought of Steven Miller flashed through my mind as I paid for the fuel with the same credit card I’d given him before I left Fort Worth almost two weeks ago.
As I slipped anonymously back into the driver’s seat, I was glad I hadn’t had to talk to anyone. I could have—should have—taken the time to call someone. Maybe Silas. I had allowed my fury and indignation to carry me miles before that rational thought crossed my mind. But what would I have said to Silas? That I had not told him I had received a second phone call? How would I have explained that? I hate those mystery stories where the heroine thought she could solve everything herself, that she felt empowered to face down hordes of bad guys. My life became fiction as I hit the road again and Steven—Day Twelve slipped into Steven—Day Thirteen about the time I passed a darkened Stagecoach Inn at Salado.
The anger I’d felt back in Alice slowly seeped from my heart, and I began to experience an unexplainable fear as the Chevy, responding to the pressure of my pedal foot, pushed away the raindrops that danced in the headlights.
Fear and I were old friends—not the extended heart-stopping version I’d been experiencing for the past two weeks since the first phone call—but the little eruptions of it that had kept my life in check over the years.
Fear of the third floor of our house; nightmares of waking in the middle of the night from a sweaty sleep where I had tried, tried so desperately, to reach the third floor from the second, only to wake and find my father soothing me, reminding me that the third floor could only be reached from the outside by way of the white wooden stairs that led to the gingerbread widow’s walk that topped off our oddity of a home.
He’d even taken my hand one time and led me in the middle of the night up those steps, my thin nightgown providing frail armor for such a campaign, into the top floor that haunted me. That it was his office, that it was only three big rooms with file cabinets containing a couple of sofas and a rich, red-and-blue patterned Persian rug, that there was nothing there to hurt me, never mattered. The dream would come again
another night and I’d wind up twisting and moaning as my dream-self frantically tried to escape from the confines of the second floor by searching for a way to the third.
The third floor and the pantry.
I’d never go in the pantry and neither would my gentle, quiet mother. We’d never told Father or even talked about it to each other. But our eyes knew. When we’d bring home the groceries from the store, we’d work together to put them away by silently opening the small door in the kitchen that led to a practical use of the space under the inside stairs.
Without words, she’d shown me how to put the cans and jars on the shelves by reaching only as far as the arm could extend—no farther; that was only three cans’ length when I was younger, six now that I was grown.
And there was a smell—an odor—that came from under the steps and filled the back of the pantry. Father had murmured something about mice, admonishing us to be careful of the traps that only he set and emptied, reinforcing our unspoken dread of the storage area. We’d sometimes had incongruous meals like sauerkraut with the roast instead of peas, because once having retrieved a can, although the wrong one, nothing would induce us to risk sticking our arms back into the darkened little room.
Finally, there was the fear of doing something wrong.
I’d only been bad once.
My parents had been delighted when I’d made friends with two little boys who lived on the corner. Older, I had been their big sister, sometimes semi-baby-sitter, and always their friend. Maybe I was their leader, but I liked these little people; children were strange to me in my isolated setting.
I don’t remember whose idea it had been to start collecting the toys from the nursery school down the alley, maybe mine, maybe James’s or little Norman’s. At first, we had stuck to righteous rules; only the toys that were flung over the meshed-steel fence were ours for the picking. If they were in the alley, they were there for the taking, weren’t they?
Then there was the doll that was stuck halfway out of the play yard, its arms reaching through the chain links into the alley. The doll had been begging to escape, hadn’t it? I think it was Norman who’d pulled it through the opening, but I know it was me who crawled under the house to add it to the other booty in the cardboard box. The three of us never played with the toys; we only took them and hid them away. We didn’t dare play with them—or even want to.
One of us, probably with the others squealing excitedly from the safety of the weed-infested alley, had finally broken the rule and slipped into the deserted playground at twilight to retrieve … What? A ball, a toy soldier? Then we all became twilight scavengers, scooping up everything left from the day’s play.
We didn’t know that it was inevitable that we would be discovered, so I was surprised one day when my father took me by my hand and led me into the backyard. “Honey, there are some toys missing from the nursery school,” he said. “The headmaster called and said you and James and Norman were taking them. Is that true?”
It was a waking nightmare. I flushed and broke out into a colder sweat than I ever had when dreaming. But I led him to the hole that went under the house and scrambled through it to drag out a small cardboard box overflowing with stolen treasure.
James, Norman, and I had to take the box back to the nursery and apologize. We did it correctly and prettily, with James and I exchanging only sly looks as we performed our obeisance. Norman was too young to know that I had brought out only the smallest of the boxes. The enormity of my crime hit home when I had blindly felt around in the darkness under the porch for the loot. I realized there were three boxes crammed with ill-gotten toys.
There was no way I was going to show my father the grand scope of our crime. I knew he was too old to stoop and walk crablike into the hole to find them himself, so I softened the deed with bringing to light only the one piece of evidence. And afterward, when he’d taken me to Forest Park and I rode the merry-go-round, forcing myself to wave at him with each revolution, I’d felt guilty over the other two boxes and had cried. He’d only said, “Your mother and I never want to hear of you doing anything like that again. Now, would you like a snow cone?”
Maybe I would have felt better if I had been spanked, but neither of them ever touched me in anger, and I’ve never done anything wrong again in my life, so maybe his gentleness was the best punishment. Or maybe it was always thinking of the unused and neglected toys moldering away under the house, sending out a damp smell that was unpleasant and sour. Not like the smell from the pantry—not scary—but frightening in its own way.
These were the old fears that I carried with me into Fort Worth in the early dawn of that new day. They filled the car, and I welcomed their familiarity, feeling more comfortable with the known dreads than I did with the new fear that kept stabbing at me through my bemused, road-induced state of mind.
The rain let up when I entered the city limits and the freeway lights lit a liquid shimmering road all the way to the south side. It was only when I was parking the car in the clinic garage in the space reserved just for me that the skies opened again. If I had driven the last few blocks just a little faster, I would have made it to my back door before the deluge began. Instead, I had to race through stinging rain, my way lit by unearthly lightning followed by an ear-shattering blast of thunder, its pounding reaching me just as I pushed open the screen door of the back porch.
I had my key ready, but when I tried to insert it into the brass lock, the door moved away from me, swinging inward. The door was unlocked, and my slight push opened it, begging me to enter.
ELEVEN
The kitchen was quiet and empty.
I creaked across the linoleum, not daring to turn on any lights, and glancing behind me at the unusually dark clinic, I realized it would be a futile gesture, anyway; the electricity seemed to be off as far as I could see. There was only darkness and the fury of the rain with occasional startling bolts of lightning to change the scene.
I used one of the flashes to orient myself and then felt my way to the kitchen table, depositing my purse and briefcase on top of the red-and-white checkered tablecloth.
There is a swinging door to the dining room, and when I inched it open, I could see some kind of light coming from the living room. I stood there holding on to the door for what seemed an eternity, but the light never moved. It was so low and fixed in just one spot that I decided it was the glow of a fire, either in my fireplace or the house was on fire.
That alarming thought gave me courage to slip on through the swinging door and creep toward the living room, the thick carpet masking my footsteps. I thought that if the house was on fire, I would run back the way I’d come in and call … Where from and who I’d call filled my mind as I crossed through the half-opened sliding doors between the rooms.
The light did start low and then angled up in a triangle to capture the old painting of an Italian Villa that has hung always to the right of the fireplace. When I was a child, I had liked to study that painting, trying to imagine what lay behind the one bright yellow door under the veranda of red tiles.
I traced the light from the painting back to its source, and the next explosion of lightning helped me see that it was one of those massive flashlights—heavy chrome and almost three feet long. Silently, I shuffled toward it and whimpered in the thunder that followed the lightning as I knelt down to pick up the flashlight. Without the aid of the outside illumination, I missed the end of the flashlight, and on my hands and knees, flattened my hand on the carpet, moving it in expanding circles to find it.
I touched a human hand and heard a moan at the same time.
When I screamed and pulled back, I felt something else; it was cold and wet, like the stuff in one of those buckets you have to thrust your hand into at the school Halloween carnival.
I held my wet hand up like a claw and lunged toward the big end of the flashlight, and as my hand closed around it, I heard someone say, “Lydia?”
I grasped the flashlight with both hands and r
aised it to use as a weapon if I had to, but when there was no further movement or sound, I let the light drop in an unsteady arc toward the floor.
There was a man lying facedown on the floor. He was still and, something shiny and black covered the side of his face that was turned toward me. The shiny stuff was wet-looking, and it dripped over his nose and chin onto my carpet.
I slowly lowered the light and put it under the man’s face. He groaned and said “Lydia” again. In the distorted disclosure of the flashlight, I recognized one of my Stevens—Steven Miller—and again I cried aloud, first without words, then, “Steven, oh, Steven. What has happened? Good god, what has happened? Steven … Steven?”
When I grasped his hands, they were cold and clammy. I rubbed them the best I could while still wielding the heavy light. When I laid it down beside him, angling it so that I could get a better look, he opened the only eye he could and said in a hoarse voice, “Honey?”
“Yes, Steven. Oh, yes, it’s me. Honey.”
“I was watching …” His voice faltered. “… watching the house.”
“Don’t talk, Steven. I’m going to get help.”
“No,” he said and one of those cold hands moved to hold me near him. “I watched the house,” he repeated. “And he caught me … hit me when I wasn’t looking.”
“Oh, Steven,” I cried.
“It’s all right, Honey.” Steven’s voice was definitely weaker, and I leaned close to him as he managed to whisper. “It was all a mistake, anyway.”
I knew I should be calling for help—if the phone worked—but I was compelled to stay by Steven’s side. Leaning closer to hear his voice, I thought I understood him to say, “A mistake … we scared each other … saw me first … asked me if I was Lydia and hit …”
This time Steven’s voice faded out for good, and I loosend my hands from his and walked on my knees to the phone desk where with wet and shaking fingers, I dialed 911 on the still operable telephone.
The Complete Honey Huckleberry Box Set Page 5
