by Jane Langton
“It looks to me as if the older you are, the safer you are from these so-called accidents.” Homer watched a squirrel run along a branch and make a daring leap to another tree. “I think I’ll talk to that Dr. Stefano who looks after all you people. I’ve got a kind of a sort of a hazy idea of the beginnings of a thought.” He tapped his forehead. “Doesn’t happen often. Congratulate me.”
Julian was not amused. The lines framing his mouth deepened. “What about Charlotte?” said Julian. “Do you think she’s in danger? I hate to think of her living there with Pete. He could try again, any time at all.”
“Oh, God, I don’t know. Keep an eye on her, will you?”
Homer went away and left Julian to his fears. He didn’t know what else to do. He felt like a heel.
33
Love is a thirst that is never slaked.
Journal, March 28, 1856
“Hello,” said Hope Fry, standing at the counter and looking soberly at Ananda Singh. The new fervor that had drawn her to the hardware store poured out of her like bubbles from a bubble pipe, foaming throughout the store. The bubbles of her ardor popped against the racks of pruning shears, the shelves of sandpaper, the toaster-ovens.
“My worthy opponent,” said Ananda graciously. He smiled at her. “May I help you?”
“My father needs a box of screws.”
After Homer’s schooling, Ananda was now an expert on the subject of nails and screws. “Ah, but I must ask you, does he want wood screws? Flat or round-headed screws? Phillips-head screws?”
His strong male expertise added fuel to Hope’s fire. Oh, he knew so much. “Wood screws,” she said quickly. “About … um, an inch long.”
When her transaction was completed she lingered only a moment, trying to think of something to say. Failing, she hurried away, too quickly to hear Ananda’s puzzled response to another customer, “What is it, please, a socket wrench?”
Next day when she came back to the hardware store to ask for a paring knife, she found Bonnie Glover sitting on the counter. Bonnie had discovered Ananda on her own. One day, looking across the street from the Porcelain Parlor where she was waiting on a woman customer, she had seen him leaning aluminum ladders up against the display windows of the hardware store. She had abandoned the customer in the middle of a sale and barged right across the street to introduce herself.
Now as Hope walked into the hardware store, Bonnie was firmly parked on the counter with her plump silky knees crossed and her high heels dangling over the nested waste-baskets. Her silvery lipstick and blue eyeshadow were in odd contrast with the rack of caulking guns beside her.
Hope dodged out of sight behind the electric drills, then melted out of the store and stalked away up the street, wondering how she could get to know Ananda Singh without inventing phony errands. Her father was acquainted with him, she knew that. Homer and Mary Kelly knew him. In fact, Ananda was living with the Kellys, down there on Fair Haven Bay. What if she dropped in on them on Saturday morning? Probably Ananda didn’t work on Saturday. She might find him at home.
But it was only Mary Kelly who answered the door on Saturday morning. “Well, hi, there, Hopey, what a surprise. Come on in.”
“I just thought I’d walk along the river,” said Hope. “I mean, I thought I ought to ask if it’s okay.”
“Well, of course you can walk along the river. Would you like a glass of cold cider first?”
“Oh, yes.” Hope followed Mary inside and looked eagerly left and right. “Is—anybody else at home?”
“Anyone else? Why, no. Homer’s gone to get his hair cut. And then he has a doctor’s appointment or something. We have a guest these days, but he’s working today.”
“A guest?”
“Yes, a young kid from India. He and Homer are in cahoots. He’s a real old-fashioned full-blooded transcendentalist. You know, a Thoreau person, like your dear father.” Then Mary remembered. “Well, you know him. You were on that television program together.”
Hope was disappointed not to find Ananda at home. “We sort of met, that’s right.”
Mary seized the opportunity to act as a surrogate mother. “Really, Hope, I was surprised at you. How could you support that Walden Green project? It’s counter to everything your father believes in.”
Hope’s feelings were in confusion. She felt guilty and rebellious at the same time. Touched by Mary’s maternal scolding, she wanted to lean on her and cry. Instead she argued back, but her tone was despairing. “My father’s so impossible. Oh, I get so sick of the whole thing.”
Mary put two glasses of cider on the low table in front of the sofa. Sitting down beside Hope, she tried a new tack. “What did you think of Ananda Singh?”
“Oh—well, he was awfully good.” Hope looked at Mary and looked away. “Is he—is he going to stay long?”
“I don’t know. I hope so.”
Hope took one sip of her cider, then banged down the glass and stood up, knocking over a chair. Absently she righted it, and then she wandered up and down the small living room, staring at the map of the river on the wall, peering at books and magazines, inspecting the pears in a bowl. Then, turning suddenly to Mary, she said, “I didn’t know this house was big enough to have a guest room.”
“Oh, yes, it has one. It’s very small.” Mary stood up, too, and opened a door. “You see?”
Hungrily Hope inspected Ananda’s room. It was immaculate. The bed was made, although not very well. Books and papers lay on a small table. The pencils were at right angles to the books. There was a small framed picture of an Indian-looking girl on Ananda’s dresser. It was Ananda’s sister, Maya, but Hope didn’t know that. Her heart sank. She turned to the books—The Maine Woods, The Natural History Essays, Walden, Civil Disobedience. They were all by Henry Thoreau.
Hope turned to Mary with an anguished face. Her feelings were like a boil on the end of her nose. She was entirely exposed.
Mary took pity on her. Mary herself was not immune to the attractions of Ananda Singh. She had told Homer it was a good thing she was twice Ananda’s age, or she’d run away with him to the end of the world. “He’s from Simla,” she told Hope kindly. “He came here to study Thoreau. He’s very poor.”
“Poor? He’s poor?” Hope was astonished. Then Bonnie Glover had been mistaken. Of course she had been mistaken. The world’s richest bachelor wouldn’t be working in a hardware store. It was some other Indian person who was so fabulously wealthy. Well, what did it matter? Hope sighed with longing. “Thank you, Mrs. Kelly.” She turned away. At the bottom of the porch steps she walked vaguely toward her father’s car.
“Aren’t you going for a walk?” said Mary, calling down from the porch.
“A walk?” Hope looked back at her blankly. “Oh, a walk. No, I guess not.”
Later that afternoon Mary went to the Star Market, and then she picked up Ananda at the hardware store. Triumphantly he showed her his first paycheck. He had worked a full week. “From now on I must pay you more rent. You and Homer are too kind. Truly you must allow me—”
“No, no.” Mary glanced at the worn knees of Ananda’s jeans. The boy had only a single pair of shoes. And then she had a thought. She remembered Hope Fry and the way she had stared so dolefully into Ananda’s room. “I wonder,” she said. “Perhaps I’ve thought of something. Well, we’ll talk about it later.”
At home in the privacy of her bedroom she called Oliver Fry and asked him if he’d like to rent a room to young Ananda Singh.
Oliver was charmed. “Certainly we’ll have him. This place has six bedrooms. It was meant to be a boarding house. And we could use a little extra income. How much do you think the kid can pay?”
“Well, not very much, I’m afraid.”
“Well, anything’s better than nothing.” There was a pause, and then Oliver cleared his throat. Mary could detect his anxiety. “I don’t know what Hopey will think. She’s been so queer lately.”
“Oh, I bet she’ll take it in good stride,” sa
id Mary comfortably.
34
This is not the figure that I cut. This is the figure the
tailor cuts. That presumptuous and impertinent
fashion whispered in his ear, so that he heard
no word of mine.
Journal, January 14, 1854
Homer Kelly was on his way to the barbershop. His wife had told him he needed a haircut, and when he looked in the mirror he had to admit she was right. His hair was sticking up all over as if struck by lightning.
He hated to take the time. For one thing he was worried about Julian Snow and Charlotte Harris, and he had a new idea he wanted to work on. For another, he was falling behind in his preparations for the fall semester. There was a new course, new to Homer although it had been part of Harvard’s core curriculum for years. It was one of those fast-moving lecture courses that wipe away ignorance in huge strokes, galloping through the centuries at high speed. But, good God, the broader the stroke, the more full it was of lies. Before sweeping and swabbing with his big brush, he had to prepare the way with a private pursuit of niggling detail. Sometimes Homer envied the specialists, those dry professors who insert a narrow splinter into the past, then pluck it out and pick their teeth.
Homer left his car in the Walden Street parking lot and strode past half a dozen of Mimi Pink’s boutiques. Thank God for Alphonso Domingo. In this desert of sillified merchandise his barbershop was an oasis of dingy reality. Mimi Pink’s shop windows made Homer wince, and he kept his eyes fixed on the sidewalk.
But at the barbershop he stopped short. It looked different. There was a barber pole outside, twisting with stripes of pink and white. And Alphonso had put up a snappy new turquoise awning. The faded lettering on the window, BARBER HOP, was gone, replaced by a hanging wooden sign with words in gold leaf, HUGO’S HAIR HARMONIES.
Homer quailed. Who in the hell was Hugo? And where was Alphonso Domingo?
Venturing inside, he was horrified to discover that the old barber chairs had been cleared away. In their places were a couple of turquoise lounge chairs from some interstellar star-ship. A girl and a guy in matching turquoise jumpsuits were working on a guy and a girl. The girl on the lounge chair was Mimi Pink herself. The guy in the jumpsuit, who was obviously Hugo, was clipping her neck up to the tops of her ears, then bushing out her hair on each side and flattening the top into a sort of mesa. Homer stared at it, imagining tiny Navahos tramping around it in a rain dance.
“I’m ready now,” said the jumpsuited girl, glancing at Homer. “Like take a seat.”
“Where’s Alphonso Domingo?” said Homer, scandalized.
“Oh, he’s retired,” said Hugo, winking at Mimi Pink.
Mimi tittered. Homer was dismayed. With gingerly caution he lowered himself onto the lounge chair. Twenty minutes later he emerged from Hugo’s Hair Harmonies shampooed, shaped, styled, blown dry, and separated from twenty-five dollars. He felt like a fool.
Creeping back into his car, he was careful not to look at himself in the rearview mirror as he drove down Main Street. He was on his way to Emerson Hospital to look for the doctor who took care of all the people at Pond View, Dr. Stefano.
Homer had an old fondness for hospitals. In this one he had proposed to his wife. The signs directing the visitor here and there pullulated with interest—EMERGENCY, X RAY, PHYSICAL THERAPY, OBSTETRICS. It was in these sterile places that people entered the world and left it. Dramatic crises worked themselves out in operating rooms deep underground. Homer wanted to poke his nose into all the rooms and say, “Hey, how are you? What are they doing to you? Wow, no kidding!”
Dr. Stefano’s office was in the new wing. Homer found it on the third floor. Opening the door, he recoiled. For the second time in the last hour he was assaulted by interior decoration. Dr. Stefano’s waiting room was a cave of gray and pink. Gray louvers hid the glorious view of the river. Huge gray silk flowers rose from a pink vase. Immense airbrushed pictures of opalescent blossoms covered the walls. The carpet was dusty pink, silencing his footsteps as he approached the receptionist.
She was a teenager in a high state of cosmetic finish, but she smiled at Homer in a friendly way, and her corny greeting won him over, “What can I do you for?”
“Is Dr. Stefano in?”
“No, sorry. Hey, that’s a really fabulous hairstyle you’ve got there. Listen, you haven’t got an appointment, right? But it’s okay. He’ll be back soon, and we’ve had a cancellation. I mean like you’re in luck.”
“Well, good. But maybe you can help me. My name’s Kelly, Homer Kelly. I’m conducting an investigation into the deaths of several people who lived at the trailer park called Pond View. I’m sort of a—”
“Detective!” The girl’s eyes widened.
Homer smiled modestly, not wanting to deny an assumption that was, thank God, no longer true. “I have a list here, the names of all the people who live in the park. I wonder if you could look them up and tell me about their general health?”
The receptionist invited him into the doctor’s office. “I’m Cheryl,” she said with a dazzling smile. With the list between her teeth she squatted on the floor and whipped through a file drawer with nimble fingers. “Oh, shit,” she said as one of her pasted-on fingernails came off, revealing a normal girlish nail bitten to the quick. Her pretty fingers went on searching, then paused again, and Cheryl glanced up at Homer. “That’s funny. Charlotte and Peter Harris aren’t here. Neither are Stuart LaDue or Porter McAdoo.” Rapidly she flicked through another drawer. “You know what? I think they’ve all been taken out, all the ones on your list.”
Cheryl teetered to a standing posture on her four-inch heels. “And I remember some of them myself—Mrs. Harris and Mr. Snow and Mr. and Mrs. Ryan and Mrs. Mooney. They certainly were patients of Dr. Stefano’s, and their files ought to be here.” Then Cheryl beamed. “Oh, here comes Dr. Stefano. Hi, Dr. Stefano! Hey, Dr. Stefano, this is a detective, you know, from the police, and he wants to know about the people at the trailer park, you know, Pond View, and you know what? We can’t find their files. I mean like they’re all missing.”
Dr. Stefano nodded at Homer and sat down at his desk with a groan. He looked tired. Homer was glad to see that he didn’t match his office suite. His face wasn’t part of any decorating scheme. It was lined and puckered with stillborn babies and burst appendixes and dying men and women. “That’s strange,” he said.
“Like maybe you took them out yourself?” said Cheryl encouragingly.
“No, but look here, I don’t really need the files. I can tell you about all those people. Most of the physicians around here have their memories locked up in their computerized records. I’ve got them up here.” Dr. Stefano tapped his head. “What do you want to know?”
Homer explained his theory. “I may be wrong, but I wonder if someone isn’t trying to shorten the life expectancy of the trailer park. Somebody, I think, wants to see the residents die off as soon as possible. They’re not doing anything about the oldest ones, because those folks can be depended on to expire before long. But the youngest are being helped into early graves. That’s what I think. I admit it’s a shaky theory.”
The doctor looked shocked. “But that would be terrible. Are you talking about the deaths of Alice Snow and Shirley Mills?” Dr. Stefano’s wan face sagged. “I assumed Mrs. Mills died of a coronary thrombosis, but I admit I didn’t call in a pathologist. You’re not counting the deaths of Norman Peck and Madeline Raymond? They were very elderly, and they certainly passed away from natural causes.”
“No, but since then there have been attempts on the lives of Julian Snow and Charlotte Harris. Failed attempts, thank God.”
“Good heavens.”
Homer paced the dusty-rose carpet. “Let’s start with Alice Snow. I’m puzzled about Mrs. Snow, because she doesn’t fit my theory. I understand she was an invalid. I should think this erstwhile killer might have started with some healthier person who could otherwise have been expected to live for years
.”
“Alice Snow was no invalid,” said Dr. Stefano sharply.
Homer was flabbergasted. “She wasn’t? But everybody said she was bedridden.”
Dr. Stefano smiled grimly. “She might have been bedridden, but she wasn’t ill. She was as healthy as you or me.”
“Then that means—” Homer brightened. “Somebody knew she wasn’t really ill. Somebody knew she might live a long time if she weren’t dealt with. They could have found that out from your missing file.”
“You mean somebody stole my files in order to establish who was going to die of natural causes and who needed to be finished off?”
“Precisely. So if I could find those files in someone’s possession, we’d know who’s been creating the nastiness at Pond View.”
“Diabolical,” said the doctor.
Homer said good-bye and escaped from the new wing of the hospital into the bald sunshine of the out-of-doors, where the flowers were blazing orange marigolds and screaming scarlet salvias rather than pallid blossoms like the ones in Dr. Stefano’s office.
He spent the next day doing his duty by Julian Snow, going from one mobile home to another at Pond View, asking about the Ryans’ keys, inquiring about tools that might have drilled a hole in Julian’s gas pipe, letting his eyes rove inquisitively over the exposed surfaces of tables and counters, looking surreptitiously for Dr. Stefano’s missing files. From his great height Homer inspected the tops of refrigerators. He knew from long experience that those belonging to short people were always dusty. He had seen hundreds like that. Sometimes he had even kindly offered to wash them himself. But even the dusty ones at Pond View were not laden with Dr. Stefano’s purloined files.
And nobody admitted possessing a key to the Ryans’ trailer. It was easier to inspect the collections of tools, looking for one that might have stripped the insulation from the cord of Charlotte’s electric iron, or drilled a hole in Julian’s gas line, or tinkered malevolently with Julian’s machine at the landfill.
