In a moment, he would be distracted enough so that she could make it out the window. He stood up and walked behind her. She was frightened he would grab her hands. She leaned on one arm and asked him, “How did you set her up?” She smiled. “You set her up, right?”
“Oh. Her. I’ll tell you how. Some years ago, I caught her out. I saw her at a chicken-meat film. You know, kiddies. I couldn’t believe it. I knew I could use it against her. I knew it even then. It was so easy. I only had to watch her. Follow her lead. It was so easy when I pursued you. Always being right next door. I knew she would take the children’s pictures. I used to watch her watching them. Then, when you fell in love with your detective,” his expression changed, “I was very angry at you, Claire.”
She remembered the searing landing of the radio behind her in the bathtub. Yes, she knew now that he had been angry. “But,” his voice went back to its nonchalant meander, “I only had to choose another sister.”
He put the tips of his fingers in his mouth and touched them with his tongue. “It had to be Carmela, though. Zinnie—” He rubbed his fingertips back and forth across his fleshy bottom lip. “—never wanted me. Zinnie knew something was wrong.”
“She didn’t,” Claire shook her head.
“Oh, she did. She told me once to stay away from Michaelaen. Did you know that?”
“No.”
Stefan wrinkled up his nose. “I don’t know why. It wasn’t as though I’d come on to him.”
“But Mrs. Dixon—”
“Then she started this bloody book with Mary,” he interrupted. He looked at Claire with endearing eyes. “I mean, I couldn’t have that.” He yawned.
“But how did you find her?” Claire wondered out loud. “When even the police couldn’t?”
“Find her?” he laughed. “What do you think—she just walked off the grounds and grabbed a bus? Uh!” He tut-tutted her naiveté. “That was all arranged. I was waiting with a car.” He banged his chest. “Me! I drove her back and put her in her own house before they knew she was missing!” His voice changed again. “She was very good, staying put in the attic. But then she got frightened. She went to see her friend. I had to kill her. It was all becoming,” he shrugged, “so tiresome.”
There was a noise from down the block. Claire’s heart stopped and listened. Could it be them, coming home first? She strained to hear. Stefan threw his head back. She watched his upraised chin. She watched his eyes watch, sideways, listening, too, and then come back to her. They locked eyes. She felt herself shrink. She was the hunted bird, locked safe inside his paws. “You hear?” The corners of his mouth turned up. “They’ve gone.”
She bolted. She was going to throw herself through the window but he threw himself in front of her, they fell to the floor, and he covered her completely with his body. He drew her hair back into a bundle with his delicate hands. “If it could only always be like this.” He quivered, catching her face in his hands.
Her arms were pinned behind her. He lifted her onto the bed. His breath was sour on her face. A smart pain ripped her left side. She was dazed for a moment by the stinging of it, the tangible feeling in the midst of her fear and then she realized what it was. It was the hatpin she’d wrapped in her hanky and taken for her mother. She had forgotten. It was on the floor. If only she could get her hands on it.…
Stefan’s hands ran down her shoulders. He cupped her breasts and reached behind her, grabbing hold of her wrists. He was excited, breathing heavily. What was he going to do? What did he want? Oh, please, she prayed, let him try to rape me before he kills me, just give me time to stab him, please.
A noise at the front door shocked them both momentarily. They were like lovers, caught at love. Claire started to scream but Stefan was faster. He covered her mouth with his hands and shoved the end of a knitted blanket into it. He bound her wrists with the measuring tape from her sewing box. She flung herself, a netted mackerel, around the bed. She would fall off and someone would hear her. Stefan fell on top of her and pinned her down. Her tongue was pressed down with the fuzzy pressure of the blanket. It was terrible. Terrible. Surely they would hear her moans. Then she saw what Stefan had in his hand. He was going to hit her with the iron fruitman’s hammer she kept by the bed to be safe from prowlers. She froze. He tied her knees with something. She did not want to die like this. Stefan smiled without teeth; a patronizing, malevolent smile. Tears of despair welled up and out of her and streamed down her face. She did not want to die.
At the front door down the stairs, Freddy turned and faced Jupiter Dodd. “If I let you in for a cup of coffee,” he said flirtatiously, “it really only means a cup of coffee.”
“Heh, heh, heh,” said Jupiter.
Upstairs, Stefan removed Claire’s boots and bound her feet carefully, lovingly, with the venetian blind cord. His hands were mottled black from the mascara she’d rubbed on the boots. He pulled the cord tight and knotted it good.
“Porco!” Freddy said. “She took the key out! I swear, it’s always here.”
“Come on,” Jupiter said, “I’m freezing. Let’s just go to the restaurant.”
“It must be here someplace,” Fred insisted, grappling through the snow. “What I didn’t understand,” he muttered, “was why Lola Schneewittchen refused to marry Doc? I mean after she knew he was going back to medical school.”
“Yes. One can’t help thinking staying on in Wisconsin with the bashful one was a dumb move.”
“To open a nail salon,” Freddy shuddered.
“My shoes are ruined,” Jupiter remarked.
Sirens wailed again on Jamaica Avenue. “Something must be going on,” Fred said.
Claire and Stefan lay together upstairs on the bed. They strained their ears, marking off the two men’s progress. They listened as the two of them trod off, happy, involved. They heard two car doors slam. The car drove away up the block.
Stefan rolled her over. His eyes met hers again. She thought, I won’t even know now if I’m pregnant. I’ll never even know. The tears ran from her eyes and she could hear herself, far far away, whimpering. I wanted to tell Anthony he would have a new brother or sister, she thought. I wanted to hold him once more and just smell his sweet skin.
Stefan devoured her face with his eyes. He hugged her to him with an intimate, cherishing embrace. They understood each other now. She had often wondered how those poor children had felt before he killed them. Now she knew.
Stefan was dreaming: something long ago, it was back in Poland. They were on holiday. They were running in a field of tall grain. She wanted something. His mother caught him and they laughed, rolling, over and over and over.…
“Claire?” a small voice came from the doorway. They looked together at Dharma standing there in silhouette. “Claire?” she said again.
“No!” Stefan sat up and swiped his hair back guiltily. “No, Dharma, go back downstairs. Go wait for me where I told you.”
“My father,” Dharma said, “I mean Andrew …” She stopped, confused.
“What about Andrew?” Stefan said, alert, sitting straight up in the half light, the room as though moonlit from all the snow.
“He’s groaning. I think he’s hurt. I think we have to call Doctor Finneran.”
“Be a good girl, now, Dharma,” Stefan said with no edge to his voice. “Go stay with him while I help Claire. And then I’ll come and help Andrew.”
Dharma wasn’t sure what to do. This was her father. Her real father. But Claire—what was going on? Maybe they were having sex. That was it. She turned and went back down the stairs. Claire saw, as Dharma passed under the hall light, that the child was wearing lipstick. With all the terrible force of her life, with no arms to project herself and no voice with which to scream, Claire shoved Stefan off of her. She saw him in passing as if in slow motion, rocking on one leg, as the other leg whipped into the air ungracefully, off balance, while she ploughed into the window. The window broke, but Claire remained on the one side of it, hampered by the
sill and the odd, bent broken pieces of the blinds. A siren screamed nearby, came nearer still, then passed them, going somewhere else. Surprised—they both had thought it was for them—they turned and faced each other. Only Dharma stood once more now at the door, summoned by the bright commotion. The hat pin glittered, broken in the other glass, the flower, coddled in the dusky splinters, this blue ember in its ashes. “My mother,” Dharma said. She took one look at Claire. She picked up the hat pin. Stefan held out his hand. He knew that she would give it to him. Dharma stuck it, without hesitation, through his open palm.
Stunned, thrust forward by the pain, he staggered past them. Then, ridiculously, like some lofty, mythological white horse, he rose up solemnly and passed, affronted, from their sight.
Dharma ran to Claire. She tried to free her hands but her own now trembled so, she couldn’t. She pulled the blanket tenderly from Claire’s mouth and they heard him going down the stairs and outside into the cold. They heard him running, fast and coatless, up Richmond Hill towards his darker sacrilegious grounds, the woods. His shortcut home.
Mr. Kinkaid, out on the sidewalk, the only one of them not to go with Narayan’s dead body to the hospital, watched Stefan Stefanovitch run up into the woods. His body looked all red against the whiteness, and there were dogs, a lot of dogs he had, running nipping at him in the quiet snow.
EPILOGUE
On the second Sunday of Advent, with the fireplace at long last opened and a fire lit, Claire prepared macaroni puttanesca while Red Torneo sat, propped up with dandy pillows, and ate unsalted popcorn in Claire’s noisy rocker.
“What I don’t understand,” he said, smacking the dog (Red hated all dogs), “is where was that guy Andrew while all of this was going on?”
Claire stood still for a moment, remembering. It seemed such a long time ago. “Andrew”—she licked her fingers to test the ratio of capers to garlic to Gaeta olives—“was knocked out on the kitchen floor. Stefan met him here because he figured Dharma had her jewelry here. He’d searched Andrew’s house and hadn’t found it. Then Stefan had given Andrew a mickey. Right there, as a matter of fact.” She pointed to the spot on the floor where Floozie had taken refuge. Far enough away from Red Torneo’s range. Remembering, the dog got up and moved herself over again. The little chicken. That whole night of chaos she’d hidden from everything in Michaelaen’s big closet. Stefan had kicked her first, and good. So she’d hid. No Lassie she, they all acknowledged.
No, thought the dog, but still here to think about it.
“Where the hell is Johnny?” Red growled.
“Don’t get so excited. He’ll be back before the pasta’s in the pot. He always is.”
Red nodded approval. Johnny wasn’t hanging at the track anymore, at least. He was selling his share of the horse on Tuesday. At least Wiggins could breed her. Get something out of her. Effing horse almost lost them the house. Johnny was always gettin’ mixed up in these schemes. Too much energy. Red looked around the great big kitchen. Woulda been a shame if they’d lost this place. “You know, your husband, he ain’t too bright.”
“Oh, yes?”
“I mean, he goes out and leaves a broad like you all alone with a handsome lookin’ fella like me.”
“Shut up, Red.”
“Mommy?”
“Wash your hands. Dinner in fifteen.”
On that night, when everything had happened, Red Torneo’s heart had stopped in a craps game down in Brooklyn. The guy next to him had stopped playing, taken a good long look at Red, leaned right over, and threw the dice back in for a seven.
Well, the ambulance had come. The paramedics had jolted him back to life, but when Johnny had heard that one from the other men, it gave him something to think about.
So now, Claire figured, not only were they an AA and Al Anon family, but a Gambler’s Anonymous one as well.
“I’m not dependent on nuthin’ but my family, now,” Johnny would boast, his eye on the clock.
Red shuffled the cards he always carried in his pocket. “So, what happened to all them jewels? In that tin box?”
Claire emerged from the pantry carrying a nice head of Boston lettuce. “They’re being sold. Iris is handling it. The money will go to a fund for sexually abused children. It was Dharma’s idea and Andrew and Carmela agreed.” She looked up and smiled. “Though I believe Andrew agreed under protest.”
Red shook his head sadly. “I can’t get over how Stefanovitch jumped off that bridge there up in the woods. I mean, hey, what a way to go. I don’t care what you did, being driven off a bridge by a snarlin’ pack of bloodthirsty dogs—” He held his cheek.
“Yes,” Claire said.
“And then bleedin’ to death. Christ.”
“Yes.”
“Sad about the other fella, though. That there Pakistani fella.”
Claire clattered the dirtied bowls into the sink and filled it with warm suds. She still couldn’t talk about that, about Narayan.
There would be another letter in a day or two from Swamiji. He hadn’t gone to Berkeley after all. He hadn’t had the heart without dear Narayan. Perhaps next year. It had been difficult for him, the trip to Benares with the body. Standing with Narayan’s distraught family at the Ganges. He wasn’t going to say it hadn’t been difficult. And yes, beautiful. There had been a splendid grace as well. Having Zinnie along with him had—well, he didn’t know how he would have gotten through it without Zenobia. He wanted Claire to know that he was doing all right, though. Coming along. He didn’t want her overwrought and worried about him now. Now that she had other things on her mind.
“Anthony!” she shouted, “call your Aunt Zinnie and Michaelaen and see if they’ve left their apartment yet. If they’re still home, tell them I’ve already put the macaroni in.”
“Awright, Ma,” he said.
Claire put an English muffin on a small plate, spread cream cheese across it, and put some of that nice plum preserve with the slivovitz on, too. She pulled the teabag out of the good teacup, the Aynsley Pembroke, she’d like that, and wound it and squashed it around a spoon.
Dharma came in and headed straight for the refrigerator. “Wait a minute,” Claire said to her. “Take this up to Carmela and tell her if she doesn’t eat it, she’s got to go live with Mommy and Daddy and the dogs. Oh. Take a napkin.”
Dharma made a face at Anthony and minced, in charge and show-offy, out of the room with the tray.
Johnny’s car honked and came sweeping up the driveway.
“He’s here!” Anthony whooped, not bothering to turn off the tap, and he flew out the back door.
“You let him get away with that?” Red crooked his thumb at the door and glowered at the water left running.
“Ma! Daddy got a big load of wood in the trunk!”
Claire clicked her tongue. She’d wanted to go with him to get it. She shook her head, resigned. Johnny always did things as he pleased. Red made as if to get up. “Don’t you move,” she boxed him in. “That’s all I need. Another heart attack.”
Johnny appeared at the doorway. His eyes were steeped with anxiety at the solemnity of his very own wood for the fire.
She laughed. “Wait, I’ll help.”
“Oh, no, you won’t.” He looked her up and down. “Kinkaid’s out here.” He lined his forehead at her. “We got enough for supper?”
Red rolled his tongue around his cheek. He couldn’t stand Kinkaid. As soon as the two of them got together, though, they rigged up a game of gin rummy.
Mary and Stan barged, red-faced, through the double Dutch doors. Mary wore her inevitable small tower of white bakery boxes. Johnny, Kinkaid, and Stan each carted their great manly piles of wood.
“Looks like birch,” Mary admired. “Nothing burns prettier than birch.”
“Burns too quick,” Kinkaid said.
Johnny tore apart a loaf of semolina bread from the counter and stuffed a bite into his mouth.
“Wash your hands,” Claire said.
“Wash
your hands. Wash your hands,” Anthony mimicked. “Wash your hands.”
Johnny smacked him on the head. “Don’t make fun of your mother!”
“Don’t hit him!” she yelled.
“What can I do?” Mary rolled up her sleeves.
“You can put those spoons around the table, would you, Mom?”
“Hang on! Make that louder!” Stan rushed to the radio. “That’s Tchaikovsky!”
Johnny sat down and started right in scarfing big black salty olives.
“Save some for the rest, will you?” Claire scolded, passing him the hot cherry peppers anyhow.
“Wait till you hear this,” he told them all. “Soon, we won’t be having any more of these petty, contemptible money worries.”
Petty? Claire’s antenna went right up. Contemptible? Pretty hoity-toity terms for Johnny. Right away she knew something was up. “What’s up?” She stood at his elbow with a dish of sliced tomatoes.
“Now, don’t go sayin’ nuthin’ until I’m through, all right?” He stopped, his eyes going from face to face, waiting for their undivided attention. “I got this honey of a deal. You all know that old pipe-cleaner factory? They made it into condos and none of them sold? Well, say hello to the new owner. Of the whole thing! Well, I mean, not yet. But soon. Real soon.”
“What?”
“Yeah,” he grinned. “Well. Me and Andrew. See, we got it all figured out—”
“Anthony! Shut that television off and come to the table.”
Carmela, the poet from her tower, deigned to come down and have a look in on what was going on. Claire pushed her into a seat before she could think about how it would look. She had to be hungry, up there rewriting her play since days and days, insisting still that art be more important than people. Claire had thought she would give up writing altogether, what with the offhand, sidestepping reviews of her play as the mere backdrop to real tragedy it had been. And then no one had understood why the lead singer had taken off, not to return, more than halfway through the performance. By the time the whole story came out it was anyway the next day and, in New York, who cared anymore?
Foxglove Page 31
