Love Nest

by Andrew Coburn

  He turned from the window, lips peeled back as if to sing. “Who killed her?”

  “Why you asking me?”

  “Somebody must know.”

  “That’s something even time might not tell you.”

  Thirteen

  Her absence acted harshly on him. He missed her presence across the supper table while hating the brooding stillness of the house and the way each evening darkness fell upon it as if from the swing of an ax. He missed the way she had entered a room and brightened it, enlivened it, and sometimes he missed her as he did the Saturday suppers of his childhood, the mere notion of which could cause him to lust for a lavish plate of homemade kidney beans flavored in juices and salt pork, brown bread on the side. Yet, a week later when she phoned in an excited voice to tell of her job, he was cool, his manner not unlike that of a cynical parole officer. He said, “I didn’t realize you had office skills.”

  “I don’t, Sonny, but I’m learning. Mrs. Foss, she’s the secretary, is training me. She’s a grump, doesn’t know what to make of me, but I’m winning her over. Yesterday we had lunch together at Lem’s. I looked for you.”

  He felt a surge of jealousy. “Rollins is Bauer’s lawyer. Is that how you got the job?”

  “I swear it isn’t. Mrs. Gately recommended me.”

  “Same thing.”

  “I thought you wanted me to get a job. A real one. This is real.”

  “I didn’t mean in Andover.”

  “Where, Sonny, the North Pole? Would that be far enough away from you?”

  “It’s not that,” he said. “It’s just that you’re doing it wrong. All wrong.”

  “Then tell me how to do it.”

  “A clean break.”

  “This is as clean as I can make it, Sonny.”

  After he hung up, he went into the bathroom and shaved, though he had nowhere to go, nothing in mind. He considered phoning the neighbor Norma but decided against it, recalling her anger the last time he had seen her, the foulness hurled at him from the open window of her car. He thought of other women he had known, but they were married now or remarried, most no longer in town. He wiped the mirror clean with a towel. His hair looked dead, and he feared a comb would not rouse it. Under the shower, he washed it and for the first time in a long time wondered seriously and deeply about the number of years left to him on earth. Drying himself, he figured it did not matter as long as the number stayed shadowed. That way there would always seem time for everything.

  The telephone rang. It was Melody again.

  “It doesn’t make a difference what kind of job I have, does it? I mean, it wouldn’t change anything between us, would it?”

  He wondered where she was calling from, for her voice seemed far away, interference on the line, now and then a pip.

  “Sonny.”

  “Yes, I’m listening.”

  “If I hadn’t been a whore, would you have me?” Then she laughed. “But if I hadn’t been one, we wouldn’t have met. And I wouldn’t have liked that.”

  He decided she was in Boston, for he heard occasional sounds in the background, roommates, the sudden rise of music.

  “Sonny, have you read Rain?”

  “What?”

  “It’s a story in a book Sue lent me. Or maybe it was Nat. I forget who wrote it. I’m not good on authors’ names, are you?”

  “No,” he said.

  “It’s about us, Sonny, or it could be. I don’t want it to be.”

  “I’ve never read it.”

  “You should,” she said. “You definitely should, but you won’t. Would you like me to come see you?”

  “It’s late,” he said, and the words felt alien on his mouth, as if a stranger had stuck them there.

  “You’re right of course. You’re always right.”

  He slept fitfully that night, waking in the middle of it with what he felt was a cold footprint on his heart. Early in the morning, not much after dawn, crows screeched as if they were clawing somebody to death. He crawled out of bed and stumbled to the window to make sure it was not so.

  She called him again a couple of weeks later to tell him that the leaves were turning, that the trees around William Rollins’s house were scarlet and gold. One maple in particular, she said, looked like a firestorm. He said, “What are you doing at his house?”

  “I have a key, Sonny.”

  He went stone quiet, his mind as near a blank as he could make it.

  “It’s not what you think,” she said quickly. “It’s like it was with us — except for that one time.” He wanted no details, but she went on. He could not stop her, her voice rising as if she were talking to somebody a little deaf. “He’s looking for a mother, Sonny, but I’m too young. So he says a sister will do.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “You know it isn’t.”

  “He sounds sick.”

  “He isn’t. He’s a good man. He wears a nightshirt of soft cotton. Ticking. He looks so old-fashioned in it. For years he’s wondered about himself. I tell him it’s all for nothing. Needless, I mean. We all need people in different ways. Except for you, Sonny. At least that’s what you like people to believe.”

  A week passed, and he did not hear from her. At the station he shut the door of his cubicle, rang up Attorney Rollins’s office, and asked for her. The secretary, Mrs. Foss, said that Miss Haines no longer worked there, which took him aback.

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know. Who is this?”

  “A friend.”

  “I can’t help you.”

  “It’s important.”

  “Would you like to speak with Attorney Rollins?”

  He disconnected. That evening he drove by Rollins’s house several times, slowly, hesitating near the drive where a small light bit out some of the darkness. Her car was not there. Once, through a lit window, he glimpsed Rollins with a drink in hand. He considered calling the Boston number but did not.

  One night he dreamed of her. Her eyes were two dark secrets in a perfectly pale face. She did not look like herself but like a girl he had had a crush on in eighth grade, Lucy somebody, her father a farmer when the town had farms.

  Portions of Ballardvale Road flamed with sumac and fire bush. Leaves covered his garden, and he raked them up. Each night turned colder, the moon brighter. Then, when he had half-succeeded in forgetting her, she phoned. The hour was late, and he felt an enormous distance between them. “I just washed my hair,” she said.

  “That’s why you called?”

  “No, to see how you’re doing.”

  “You left your job,” he said.

  “Some time ago.”

  “Why?”

  “Wasn’t for me.”

  His spirits flared and his face brightened from hearing her voice. He visualized the luster of her washed hair. He tried to sound offhand. “So what are you doing now?”

  “You could say I’m counseling.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Exactly?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’m being good to Alfred’s son.”

  He stiffened in the instant. “You’re always being good to somebody.”

  “It’s not like you think.”

  “It never is,” he said, enduring a stomach spasm. “I already know too much about the kid, so don’t tell me any more.” But he knew she would, at her own pace, as if it were his duty to listen, his obligation to understand. Once he tried to interrupt her, but she kept on, her voice touching him in the vitals, on the raw. Finally she finished, and he felt a languor come over him. “They’re using you,” he said.

  “Harriet, not Alfred. But that’s OK.”

  “Doesn’t it make you feel dirty?”

  “Were we dirty, Sonny?” A pain broke loose inside him and roamed at will. She said, “Love and kindness can’t be dirty, can they?” He had no answer, for it was the wrong question.

  He said, “Are you back in the business?”

  “N
o.”

  “It sounds like it.”

  “I can’t help how it sounds.”

  He thought back to when he was a child sitting with his parents in a pew in Christ Church, no complications, seldom a shadow, all the faces of the congregation plump and simple, rosy and pure. Or so it had seemed.

  “Sonny, I’ve come to a decision. I think you’ll be proud of me.”

  “What is it?”

  “I won’t bother you again. I promise.”

  • • •

  She returned to William Rollins’s house to retrieve some things she had left behind. She tossed an unused flask of hand lotion and a half-read paperback mystery into her denim shoulder bag. Rollins accompanied her into the guest room and pushed open the accordion doors of the closet where he had hung her rain slicker among his mother’s dresses, which his eyes caressed. Here and there he rattled the wooden hangers as if to stir life into the finer garments. “I wish you’d look through them, there might be something you want.” He seemed all at once too large for his voice. The words trickled out of him. “She was your size, you know. Exactly.”

  She did not bother to point out his memory lapse. One evening a few weeks ago, at his urging, she had tried on two of the dresses, each too full in the bosom and too high in the waist. He, however, had slipped easily into one of his father’s suits, a near-perfect fit, four pennies in one of the pockets, along with a single ticket stub from an Andover movie theater that no longer existed.

  He said, “She was like you with your rich skin. She never had to put paint on her face or tint on her eyelids. A little lipstick was plenty. She never used perfume, only plain soap and water, and whatever man she was meeting would know she was going to smell good all over. My father said she had the gift of eternal youth, and whenever she had a bad day he joked that the gods were jealously taking revenge. He never questioned her, even when he had indisputable cause. There wasn’t a bone in her body he couldn’t have broken if he’d put his mind to it. Instead, he worshiped her.”

  He stopped talking to rest his fingers against a throbbing throat muscle, and she used the time to extricate the slicker from its hanger and drape it over her arm.

  “I’m running off at the mouth, aren’t I?” he said. His face was flushed. “It’s the first time I’ve felt embarrassed with you.”

  “You needn’t be.”

  “I know that,” he said. “I’ve always known it.”

  He walked with her down the stairs and opened the front door and followed her out. She lowered her head as her hair flew back heavily in the wind. The Mondale sticker on her little car reflected its colors on her hair.

  Rollins said, “He won’t win, you know. He doesn’t have a chance. Most people are like me and the sergeant. We’ll all vote for the other fellow.” His eyes were abstracted, as if there were little correspondence between what he was saying and what he was thinking. “Fantasies, you see, are what we live on, the sergeant no less than I. And Alfred Bauer more than most.”

  She opened the car door and tossed the slicker inside. When she turned back to him, he smiled slightly, his Adam’s apple shifting over the loosened knot of his necktie.

  “You must be careful. So much of my mother is in you.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Yes,” he said. “You’re a fantasy people can touch.” His smile turned mordant, unforgiving. “I’ve often wondered about that accident. Whether my father could have avoided the truck.”

  She set herself to leave, a hip leaning into the car. He reached out quickly, snared one of her hands, and gripped the fingers as if to crush them.

  “You’re free to come back anytime, any hour.”

  “I probably won’t.”

  “I know,” he said and frowned. “What will you do?”

  “What I always do,” she said, and withdrew her hand the instant he began to hurt it.

  Fourteen

  At the Silver Bell Motor Lodge, Chick the desk clerk said, “You can’t see her. She’s got high-powered people with her. Big business deal.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Hush-hush, Sonny. My mouth is sealed.”

  “You’re very loyal to her, aren’t you?”

  “Sure I am. Why shouldn’t I be? She’s a fine lady.”

  “But what would you do if you couldn’t work here anymore?”

  “Drop down and die. Everybody’s got to do it sometime.” His wrinkled face cracked into a smile. “I don’t get much sleep, so I got a lot to catch up on. Every time I yawn I think how good it’s going to be.”

  “You make it sound wonderful.”

  “You’re dead lots longer than you’re alive, so you got to see the bright side.”

  “Not when you’re nineteen. That’s how old she was.”

  “That’s not fair, Sonny. I mean, not fair to me. You’re acting like …”

  “Like what, Chick?”

  “Like I don’t know.”

  “If there were things I didn’t know and you did, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”

  “Everything.”

  “I don’t believe you, Chick, but it’s nothing personal. I just don’t believe anybody.” Dawson reached into the depths of his coat and produced a coffee cup half out of its paper wrapping. “Give this to Mrs. Gately when she’s done with her business and tell her I’ll be waiting for her in room forty-six.”

  “Forty-six? Sure, Sonny. I’ll give you the key.”

  “You don’t seem surprised.”

  Chick drew in his lower lip as if to ponder his reply. “Each new day, Sonny, that surprises me. I can’t think of nothing else that does.”

  “Nor I, Chick,” Dawson said and took the key.

  He drove his car around to the rear of the motel. In the room he opened the drapes and tossed his coat on the bed, where it fell in a way that disturbed him, the flop of the arms invoking too keen an image. He was about to remove it when the phone rang, Chick on the line.

  “I tried to listen at the door, Sonny, see how long she’d be, but I couldn’t hear anything. Could be an hour, maybe more.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “How about I have someone bring you a sandwich or something, pot of coffee you want it?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “You sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Sonny, I thought all this was kind of cleared up. I mean, you know, the boy.”

  “No, I don’t know, Chick. Do you?”

  “I told you I didn’t.”

  “Then why are you bothering me?”

  “Because I saw her last night. I mean, who she said she was, just fooling.”

  “Who did you see?”

  “On television. Tina Turner. It didn’t look nothing like her, Sonny, but it made me sad.”

  Dawson replaced the receiver, left the coat where it was, and sank into a chair facing the window. It was late in the day, and the sky had the rosy color of gasoline. He watched the wind pick up and push through a towering stand of firs. Through the window, it sounded like the ruffle of a drum. He closed his eyes.

  Paige Gately woke him with a touch on the arm and then stepped back on fashionable high heels, her neat silvery hair garnering light from the lamp she had switched on. Her lips suggested the flare of a match. With sluggish effort, Dawson drew himself erect in the chair. “I was dreaming,” he said.

  “How pleasant.”

  “Not really.” He stretched a leg to get rid of a small cramp. “How did your business meeting go?”

  “That’s not your concern.”

  “Did you get the cup?”

  “Not my pattern.”

  “I hoped it’d be close.”

  “A famous man once said close only counts in horseshoes and grenades. Is that your new jacket?”

  He fingered one of the buttons. “Yes, do you like it?”

  “It almost suits you,” she said and moved imperturbably toward the bed, brushing aside his rumpled coat, sweeping away a
dangling sleeve, and sitting hard on the edge. He watched her cross her legs.

  “That’s where she was killed.”

  “I don’t need to be reminded, Sergeant. If it hadn’t happened here, it would have happened somewhere else. She was ill-starred. She came out of the wrong womb. Blame that big bastard in the sky.”

  “You’re a cool one, Mrs. Gately.”

  “Do you think I had no feeling for her? I’m the one got her the job with Rollins, and I’m the one got her off drugs. I suppose you think you did it.”

  “I wouldn’t know.” His tone was curiously light, his smile vacant. “I do know I let her down.”

  “I’m sure you did, but I doubt you ever promised her anything.”

  “Not with words.”

  “Then you’ll have to live with that.”

  “Is that what you’re doing?”

  Her throat tightened. “Why are you here, Sergeant? Why am I here?”

  “To help.”

  “Nothing I can do for you.”

  They faced each other more with an ear than an eye, as if they were listening to each other through a thin wall, their voices mere murmurs but each word charged. “The least I can do is bring in her killer.”

  She said, “Get yourself a shovel.”

  “Can I be sure it was him?”

  She rose from the bed’s edge and ever so slightly leaned toward him on her high heels. “Does it matter anymore? Would it bring her back? If it did, she’d stink of the grave and hate you for it. As it stands now, she died loving you. We talked a lot, so you have my word.”

  “Why do I feel you know everything?”

  “I seem to know everything. It’s how I get ahead.”

  “Is that how you got the Silver Bell?”

  She did not answer. Making fists, she stretched her arms obliquely and arched her back. “I’ve had a long day, Sergeant. I’m leaving.”

  “I’m staying,” he said, and she brought her arms down fast as if alerted by an inner signal.

  “You worry me,” she said.

  “I should,” he replied, his green eyes luminescent like a cat’s.

  “This is private property. You’re not a paying guest.”

  “Have Chick register me. And tell him I’ll have that sandwich now.”

  She hesitated, unsure and unsettled. “Anything else?”