“I didn’t want to run away, but I couldn’t think of… You were so…”
“No, don’t remind me!” he said. “It is painful to think of the last couple of months. You were clever to go. You are a clever girl. A talented girl.”
Mimi could feel the tears coming, welling up in her. Relief and release from all that anger. And sadness, too. Sadness at the part she had played in this.
“You will not have to worry about me being a pest anymore.”
“Lazar, I-”
“No. It’s true. I have been a pest. But I have come to my senses, okay? And I am leaving NYU.”
Mimi was on her guard again. “What do you mean?”
“I mean what I say. There were rumors in the department. My reputation was… how can I put this delicately?” He laughed. “I cannot put it delicately. Let’s just say, my reputation was catching up to me. So, to save myself the mortification of being dismissed, I have offered my resignation.”
“Lazar, I never said anything-”
“To the dean? Of course, you didn’t. You didn’t need to. I have no one to blame but myself. But all is not lost. I have found work.”
“You have?”
“I’m going to Baylor.”
“Where’s that?”
Lazar laughed. “A good question,” he said. “It’s in Waco, Texas. I have to learn how to say that. It’s Way-co, yes? I did not know this at first.”
“You’re moving to Texas?” Mimi tried to imagine Lazar in a cowboy hat.
“It’s the largest Baptist university in the world,” he said. “Me teaching in a Baptist university. Communication studies. I tell you, my world is… how shall I say this? Changing?” he said. “Yes, that puts a good spin on it. Changing.”
Mimi was shaking with relief. He was moving thousands of miles away. And she refused to feel guilty, and yet “You will be happy?” he asked. She wasn’t sure, but there did not seem to be any malice in what he was saying. “Because it is important to me, after everything, that you are happy. Well, a little bit sad. Yes?”
“Okay,” she said meekly. “But-”
“No but s, Meem. You be happy. That is good. And before I get too ridiculous, let me just say thank you for the good times and say good-bye, you delightful creature.”
And it was over.
Quietly he hung up. And she knew he would not call again. Which is when she started to really cry. She cried so much she thought she would drown the little house, and so she went outside. And then she heard the sound of a branch cracking.
When she spoke to him-the man in the trees, wherever he was-she felt as if she was in some bizarre off-off-Broadway play. The girl who talks to trees. She spoke without fear because, quite frankly, she had nothing left in her. She was emotionally exhausted. And if this monster dropped out of the tree with Jason’s mask on his face and a gleaming meat cleaver in his hand, she would have only laughed in his face.
She went inside and took her little vial of poisonous spray to bed with her. To sleep, perchance to scream.
Her mind drifted in and out of the elevator in the many-floored House of Sorrow. Ding! Regret. Ding! Denial. Ding! Outrage. But finally she dozed off, only to wake suddenly with the words “up there” clanging in her head like a fire alarm.
Up there?
She had heard someone say it. She could almost hear someone saying those two words in her head. “Up there.” For a moment or two she couldn’t figure out why the words seemed so jarring. Then it came to her.
Cramer Lee on the street outside the Hungry Planet, his eyes filled with concern.
No one’s been bothering you up there.
That’s what he had said. But there was a problem with that. A big problem.
She had never told him where she lived.
Was she crazy? Well, there was one way to find out. She flipped on her lamp and looked at her watch. Not even eleven. She crawled across the mattress to the chair where she hung her purse and looked through it until she found the business card with his phone number scrawled on the back. Then she flipped on the lights in the front room and sat at her desk. With the card in front of her, she punched in Cramer’s numbers. Then she leaned on the desk, her eyes staring straight ahead, willing it to be him who answered. It wasn’t. “Hello,” said a sleepy woman’s voice.
And Mimi pushed END. But it wasn’t because she had woken up Mrs. Lee, if that’s who it was. She terminated the call because of something very odd she saw before her on the wall. One of her father’s telephone numbers. A number he had etched over more than once and drawn an elaborate frame around. Beside it were the initials M.L. The number was the same one she had just called.
PART THREE
Sometimes the pain was too much.
He wanted to scream but he couldn’t scream. His mouth felt as if it were wired shut, and so the scream smashed around in his head like some enraged, caged, wild thing, shaking every bone of his skull, exhausting him.
He dreamed.
He was in the tunnel again, a small bag clutched in his teeth. Then he was in the room under where she lay. He took the bag from his mouth and laid it in the corner of the room of dirt, like a good dog returning something to his master. Then he stood, though he could not stand up all the way. He listened, his ear pressed against the roof that was her floor. In his dream he could hear her breathing; resting his palms on the trapdoor, he could almost feel her. It was as if he was holding her up. There was a noise in the room. She was stirring, awake-if he could only reach her. He had to try to explain. He knew what he would say-he’d had a lot of time to think about it. Could he change the past? No. But he could change that small piece of the past that was him-that was still him. He would say something like that. He couldn’t think beyond that. Couldn’t think what she would say, couldn’t reach her, couldn’t “Cramer? It’s all right,” she said, her voice urgent but so quiet, speaking just to him. “Shhh, calm down already.”
He felt-imagined-no, felt her hand on his chest, just lying there. “Shhh. Listen…”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Cramer woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of a drive shaft torquing too high. His eyes snapped open. There were headlights out in the yard. The cops, he thought, almost relieved, as if getting arrested would give his misery some real shape. But by then the screaming motor had crested the steep driveway and was clunking on bad suspension across the yard, and he knew no cop would drive a vehicle in that bad condition.
He slipped out of bed, stepped over the sopping clothes strewn across his floor, and stared out the window. Waylin Pitney’s ghostly panel truck was pulling into its usual place behind the drive shed on the lip of the hill, pulling as far forward as the space allowed to hide the truck from anyone passing by on the road.
Lights were on downstairs. And as soon as the engine was cut, Cramer heard the screen door slam. Mavis stepped out into the yellow light seeping from the front window. She was in a sleeveless summer dress. There wasn’t much back to the dress, from what he could see. Her hair was all done up. This wasn’t a surprise visit. Not to her, at least.
From around the corner of the drive shed, Waylin appeared, the yard light revealing a white tee, jeans, and cowboy boots. His long shadow was behind him and then it passed him, as if in a hurry to get to Mavis. But only his shadow hurried.
“Hi ya, doll,” he shouted.
“Hi yourself,” she said. She had her hands clasped behind her back, and she was swiveling left and right from the waist like some teasing schoolgirl. Waylin stopped halfway across the yard to look back, apparently to make sure the vehicle was out of sight. And Cramer could hear through his open window his mother swear. But not out of anger, he thought. She had sworn because she couldn’t wait one more second. Then she was running in her bare feet across the yard to Waylin, and he was twirling her in the air.
Cramer made his way back to bed and pulled the covers up over his head, hoping the party wouldn’t get too loud. Hoping it wouldn’t end in
a fight.
The next thing he knew it was morning. Exhaustion had grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and dragged him down into oblivion. Not even his mother’s midnight cowboy could keep him awake.
When Cramer thumped downstairs, Mavis was making something from a cookbook, still wearing the little floral number with no back she’d had on the night before.
“There’s flapjacks,” she said in a cheery voice. But the flapjacks were cold. Cramer wandered over to the window. The Taurus was gone.
“How am I supposed to get to work tonight?”
“Since when do you work on Sunday?” said his mother, without looking up from the cookbook.
Cramer stared at her, astonished. “I work an eight-night shift and then have a four-day break,” he said. “It’s been that way for three years. It has nothing to do with what day of the week it is. I thought you knew that.”
She glanced back at him, but the resentment in his voice had not registered. “Oh, didn’t I tell you?” she said. “Merv phoned.”
“My shift manager?”
“I don’t know any other Mervs, honey,” she said. “Anyway, he said to tell you you’re laid off. Just temporary-like. He was nice about it.”
Cramer stared at her in disbelief. Then he went to the phone and made the call. It was true. Nothing to do with Cramer. A bit of a work slowdown. Only be a few days.
“I thought you were going to make me full-time,” said Cramer.
“And I am, Cramer. You can count on it. Just not right now. Relax. You take a bit of a vacation, okay? God knows you deserve one.”
And that was that.
Mavis turned toward him, holding out her arms. “And since when do you come downstairs of a morning without saying, ‘Good morning, Mama’?”
But he didn’t go to her. He felt cut adrift. It was as if someone had drilled a row of holes in Cramer himself and he was sinking.
“Ah, come on,” said Mavis. “It’s not so bad, is it?”
Something happened to her when Waylin was around. She started talking like someone from another time-another planet. She reverted to some fifties idea of Mrs. Good Wife-a southern variety, about to serve up catfish and collard greens.
“Actually, it is bad,” he said. “I’ve got this bank loan, just to name one thing.”
That seemed to jog her out of her playacting. He glanced toward the porch that was her studio. Her abandoned studio. There was still no sign of newly stretched canvases, new jars of paint. He wanted to ask her what she had done with the money, but all he had to do was look at her to get his answer. The dress was new. She lowered her eyes, then turned back to the cookbook.
Cramer strolled outside in his boxers and torn T-shirt to have a look at the day. He picked his way barefoot to the edge of the hill and looked down the bank to where Bunny should have been.
He swallowed hard, clenched his fists, and closed his eyes tight with the effort to keep the obscenities inside him. He knew who was responsible for this. Peters. It had to be. Well, Peters would pay. But first of all, he had to recover Bunny.
You can’t sink a canoe.
She’d be floating somewhere, up to her gunnels, but still afloat. He held a wet finger up. There wasn’t a whisper of wind. Good. There would be just the current to carry her, and the current in the stretch of the river where he had lost her was not strong. Carrying the weight of a full cargo of water, she wasn’t going to be moving any too fast.
He’d take the old canoe from the drive shed and a length of rope and something to stop up the holes temporarily. He’d get her to shore, empty her, and then drag her home. He’d fix her. She’d be as good as new. And hell, he had all day. Day and days!
He picked his way to the drive shed, his bare feet finding every sharp stone the yard had to offer. He wondered how drunk or high his mother must have been last night to sail across here to her man without feeling anything.
He opened the door and looked inside the drive shed. The old canoe wasn’t there. It had been straddling a couple of sawhorses last time he looked. Was he wrong? Maybe it was in the old barn? But it wasn’t there, either.
It felt like a plot.
He had dared to think his luck was changing, and it was, but it was only getting a whole lot worse! He smashed the flats of his fists against his temples. He had to get a grip. Deal with one loss at a time. The battered aluminum canoe was not the kind of thing anyone would steal. No one in his right mind. Or hers.
He looked toward the house. As if he had summoned her, Mavis appeared at the kitchen door with a dustpan, the contents of which she threw onto the path. Her eyes scanned the yard. He ducked back into the shadow of the barn door. Then, when she had gone back inside, he made his way down the hill to the creek and walked along it from his own landing place up past the outbuildings to a little glade of trees. And there it was. She had hidden the old canoe there, not wanting him to know she was using it. Why?
Back in the house, Cramer changed and made himself a few sandwiches. Mrs. Good Wife was in her room. Cramer didn’t bother to say good-bye.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
"We call the cops!”
They were in the front room, Jay leaning on the desk, Mimi seated at it, and Iris leaning against the wall.
“This is what Roach meant when he said ‘if anything happens,’” said Jay. “Something has happened.”
“Not really,” said Mimi.
“No, I mean we have a clue. There is a connection.”
“It’s circumstantial,” said Iris.
“Cripes, you’ve been working for a lawyer for a couple of weeks and suddenly you’re an expert?” Iris glowered at Jay. “No, seriously,” he said, “this is the guy who you say used to follow me around in high school, right? Suddenly it turns out his telephone number is on the wall of this house. That may be a coincidence, but it’s a hell of a big one.”
“You’re right,” said Mimi. “And so we need to find out what the connection is between”-she looked at the wall-“M.L. and this house.”
“Presumably the L stands for Lee,” said Iris. “And the woman you talked to must be the M. Didn’t you say Cramer was talking about his mother? Maybe it’s her?”
“Possibly,” said Mimi. “She sounded about the right kind of age.”
“Hold it, you two,” said Jay. “Stop with the detective games right now.” His face was red; Mimi had never seen him so steamed up. He pulled out his cell phone. “Maybe you’re forgetting I got robbed, big-time.”
“I’m not forgetting,” said Mimi. “So did I.”
Jay was busily scrolling through his phone list. Then he swore. “I didn’t input Roach’s number,” he said. Then he looked at Mimi. “Did I give you his card?” She nodded and he held out his hand.
“Jay, I’ll give it to you, but will you just let me try to talk this through? Please?”
He rolled his eyes and pocketed his cell phone.
“Jay,” said Iris. “Just listen to what she has to say.”
Jay sat back down on the edge of the desk. “Okay,” he said without looking up. “Shoot.” His hands were in his lap, the fingers woven together so tightly, the knuckles were red.
Mimi leaned back in her chair, scrubbed her face with her hands. What was she doing? Why was she so reluctant to call the cops? She kind of knew.
“First of all,” she said, “the thing that tipped me off in the first place was him saying ‘up there’ as if he knew where I lived.” The others nodded. “Now that struck me as bizarre, since I know I never told him. But if-and this is just a ‘for instance’- if he happened to live around here, then he might have seen me drive by. Ms. Cooper is pretty distinctive in these parts, right? Or he might have seen me out running.”
“So why didn’t he say anything about it?” said Jay.
“I didn’t ask. And like I said, he’s shy.”
She glanced at Jay, and he bobbed his head slightly. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. “I’ll buy that, but it doesn’t explain the number o
n the wall.”
Mimi crossed her arms. “I know. That I can’t figure out. My dad must have known whoever M. Lee is. And that is very freaky, I admit. But it isn’t really criminal.”
Jay just looked exasperated. “So we’re back to feelings. Is that all you’ve got?”
Mimi didn’t want to admit it, but feelings were exactly what she had. And she might as well express them. “Cramer Lee is just this boy-”
Jay groaned. “He must be around my age if we were in school together, for Christ’s sake.”
“Okay, he’s this guy. But he’s like a boy. He’s not ironic. He’s not wily or crafty. He’s shy-kind of a bumbler-but he’s really sweet.”
Jay frowned. “As in really hot?”
“No,” said Mimi, throwing up her hands. “I mean yes, he’s okay, but that is totally not what I’m saying. There is something about him that is… I don’t know. I keep feeling there’s something there-”
“Oh, come on,” said Jay. “You’ve talked to him twice. Twice!”
“I realize that. And all I’m saying is that I’d like to talk to him again before we sic the cops on him. If his goofiness around me is a put-on, then he’s, like, this brilliant actor. And I don’t think that’s possible. Not him.”
“So he’s infatuated?” said Iris.
“Maybe. But… Well, there is something about him. And seriously, I am not talking about his bod. Give me credit, okay? There is just this magnetic thing…”
Jay was staring at the floor so intently, she followed his gaze as if maybe there was a clue down there no one had noticed yet. Then he looked at her.
“Are you interested in him?”
Mimi sighed. “I don’t think so.”
Jay shook his head. “Because your track record with regards to boyfriends isn’t exactly great, is it?”
Mimi bit her lip.
“That was totally harsh,” said Iris.
“I’m sorry,” said Jay, his voice sullen.
Mimi glanced at him. “Yeah, well, I guess I had that coming. For all you know, I’m this total loser when it comes to men. Maybe I’m into abuse. Masochism.”
The Uninvited Page 19
