Kendra worked in the office at Bottom-Buck Barney’s car lot on Sylvester Street, just a couple of blocks over from Madison. They were strong on “hot.” They ran “hot” coupons in their newspaper ads, and their noisy TV commercials promised “hot” deals and “hot” credit for everyone. It is the type of business that is all too common in our area since the relocation of the freeway.
“Would you like to come to church with us tomorrow morning?” I asked Kendra. Thea and I invited her regularly, but she’d accepted only twice.
Now Kendra looked at her watch, as if today’s time had something to do with tomorrow’s services. “I’m sorry. I’m meeting a friend in the morning.” She didn’t elaborate on what the plans with that friend were. “But I’ll try to go with you again one of these days.”
“Any time,” Thea said.
“Right now I’m going to go take a shower.” Kendra lifted her arms in a chicken flap. “The air-conditioning in the office is on the blink, and I feel as if I’ve been running a marathon through that hot chili.” Her expression suddenly went serious, and she tapped the window frame lightly with a fingernail that sent off iridescent shimmers. “But you two pray for me, okay? It’s … especially important right now.”
Kendra momentarily looked so grim, perhaps even a little frightened, and I wished she’d say more. But she just gave us a fingertip wave and flashed one of her million-dollar smiles.
We both watched her traipse to the concrete steps that led to the basement apartment, her spiked heels shortening her stride.
I like Kendra, and I pray for her. She might dress a bit skimpily, and definitely too flashy for my taste, but she is personable and sweet, considerate and helpful. A wonderful tenant, Thea said. Kendra paid her rent on time, didn’t play screaming music, didn’t overload the trash can. Yet there was something about her …
“Does Kendra ever strike you as …” I paused, trying to corral the appropriate word. “A bit mysterious?”
“Mysterious?” Thea raised her eyebrows. “In what way?”
“Don’t you wonder why a nice young woman would want to work at a sleazy place like Bottom-Buck Barney’s?”
“Jobs can be hard to find.”
True.
I fingered the steering wheel, considering. The usual roar of traffic, now punctuated by a wailing siren, billowed up from the nearby freeway exit. At one time, Madison Street had been quietly residential, curving gently to a rural road below, but the city had reached out like a hungry blob of protoplasm and engulfed us. A white church with a tall steeple and a bell that could be heard for miles had stood at the intersection then. Now the street ended a few doors down from my house, at a concrete barrier decorated with red reflectors, with a breakneck drop-off to the busy exit below. Hundreds of cars now drove every day over the spot where the church had once stood.
“This isn’t an area most single, well-bred young ladies would choose to live in,” I suggested.
“We’re well-bred old ladies, and we live here. Besides, I don’t charge much rent. And it’s convenient to Kendra’s job.”
“She doesn’t seem to have any family or friends.”
“Her family is all out in California, remember?” Thea said. “And she hasn’t lived here long enough to make many friends.”
“But why did she leave California to begin with? I thought half the young women in the country wanted to go to California.”
“She must be part of the other half.” Thea leaned her head back against the seat. Her blue eyes went dreamy. “Maybe she left because of a broken heart. Maybe she was madly in love, and he was killed in some terrible accident. An earthquake, maybe. Or suffered some tragic fatal illness. And she just couldn’t stay there anymore after he was gone.”
“She doesn’t look as if she’s pining away. Did she ever mention anyone who got killed or died?”
Thea frowned at my practical line of thought. “No. But she probably wouldn’t. She’s a … what do they call it? A very private person. And often she seems so … lost in thought.”
True. In spite of Kendra’s usually breezy attitude—and Thea’s tendency to romanticize situations—an air of preoccupation did linger around Kendra. I sometimes saw her in one of Thea’s old lounge chairs under the weeping willow out back, sitting with a book in her lap but not reading. Just staring into space as if she were concentrating every cell in her brain on something.
Yet I also saw a lot of determination in Kendra. She’d already moved up from just filling out forms at Bottom-Buck Barney’s to a position as assistant to the manager. Perhaps Barney’s was just a stepping-stone to some higher goal Kendra had planned.
“Did she have references when she rented the apartment?”
“Oh yes,” Thea said. “Including a letter from a pastor.”
Which seemed odd, considering her lack of church contact here. “Local references?”
“No. California.”
“Did you check them out?”
“No,” Thea admitted. “I didn’t want to spend the money on long-distance calls. But I could have. They all had addresses and phone numbers. She wouldn’t have given them to me if the people were going to report that she stole the furniture or left cigarette burns in the carpet.”
True.
“Did she put up a security deposit on the apartment?”
“Oh yes. And she didn’t try to get me down on the amount. Although she didn’t have much in the way of belongings when she moved in.” Thea frowned as if she hated to admit any flaw in her perfect tenant. “Just one suitcase and a couple of boxes of household things. Most people have more.”
“She probably didn’t want to move a lot of stuff all the way from California.” My reasons for thinking Kendra mysterious were fizzling under scrutiny. Yet … “She’s apparently had time to make one friend here.”
Guilt jabbed me even as I said that. It sounded snide. Sly and gossipy. And probably quite unjustified. Just because Kendra’s young man rarely came to the apartment to pick her up, and never came in daylight, didn’t necessarily mean anything. Nor did the fact that she’d never introduced him to Thea. Those small niceties were probably as outdated as girdles and beehive hairdos.
Yet there was that evening when Thea and I were coming down the back steps after dark as he was heading for the basement entrance. He didn’t see us until he was almost on top of us, and he’d turned away so hastily that he left a big footprint in the marigold border. All we’d gotten was a glimpse of a tall, lanky man with long arms and an angular jawline. Well-dressed but older, and not the kind of hunk I’d have expected Kendra to go for. And rude. Not a word of apology for almost bowling us over.
I expected Thea to come up with an instant counterargument to my weighted comment about Kendra’s “friend.” Instead she fingered the clasp of her purse and scowled at the moss-covered concrete wall beside the basement steps.
“Sometimes,” Thea said, “I’ve wondered if maybe he’s married.”
Oh, I hope not. But also an all-too-viable possibility.
“And sometimes she does seem a little mysterious,” Thea conceded.
Now it was my turn to ask. “In what way?”
“Well, she colors her hair. I’ve seen the L’Oréal cartons in the trash.”
“That isn’t mysterious,” I scoffed. “Half the women in the country color their hair. We tried it, remember?”
“But how many natural blondes go dark?” Thea countered.
“What makes you think she’s a natural blonde?”
“She just has a … blond air about her. I do remember something about being a blonde, you know,” Thea added, her tone a bit huffy. “In fact, maybe I’ll go back to being one.”
I remember being a brunette before my hair started to go gray. I also remember when Thea and I had plunged into what a magazine ad called “the stunning new universe of color.” Thea’s gray-into-beige results were passable, but my transformation from mousy to fiery orange-auburn had been so “stunning” that I
’d washed my hair twice a day for three weeks. Now Thea had gone elegantly white. And I was still possum gray.
“I’m almost certain she dyes her eyebrows too,” Thea said.
Dyed eyebrows? Now that struck me as more unusual. Not something I’d ever thought about trying. Could it be taken as more than a simple cosmetic enhancement, perhaps even a disguise?
“She doesn’t avoid answering questions about herself,” Thea went on. “But when I ask her something, she always seems to take a minute to think it over before she answers.”
Yes, that was true, I realized now that Thea mentioned it. Once I’d asked Kendra what her father did out in California, and she had said he was a teacher. Surely nothing out of the ordinary there. Yet there had been that small hesitation before Kendra made the statement, as if she were running an internal check to be sure it didn’t contradict something she’d told one of us earlier.
“Or sometimes,” Thea added now, “I ask her something, and next thing I know we’re talking about me again, not her. So instead of her telling me about earthquakes in California, I’m telling her about making hollyhock dolls when I was a girl, or how I used to turn the handle on Mama’s old washing machine.”
I now remembered how Kendra had smoothly segued our conversation away from her father and into asking about my years as librarian at the Madison Street branch of the city library.
Thea and I sat in the car a few minutes more, as if watching the basement steps might reveal some significant new information about Kendra. When it didn’t, I reached over and patted Thea’s hand. “Why don’t you go take a nap, and I’ll bring some salad and cobbler over later. If Kendra hasn’t gone back to work yet, we’ll invite her up.”
“Oh, that sounds good, but …” Thea flexed her shoulders, as if the weight of Aunt Maude’s tombstone lay across them. “Actually, I think I’ll just fix a Cup O’ Noodles and go right to bed.”
I looked at my watch. “At 6:00?”
“I know it’s early, but I’m so tired. I didn’t sleep well last night. But come over for breakfast before church. I’ll get some of those nice Sara Lee cinnamon rolls out of the freezer.”
Thea had once cooked everything from old-fashioned molasses cookies to crepe aux pommes from a French cookbook, but she didn’t do much cooking from scratch these days.
“Be sure to take your pills,” I said.
3
I sat at the kitchen table turning well-worn pages of C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters and absentmindedly finishing up a bowl of leftover chicken pot pie, which is the way I usually eat these days. I didn’t make a cobbler after all, since doing it just for myself didn’t seem worth the effort. After washing up the dishes and with a long evening ahead of me, I wondered again about taking up some arts-and-craftsy type hobby. I always feel as if I should be doing something constructive instead of just sitting there in front of the blaring TV.
Then the inevitable question, like some annoying little voice inside me. And this something constructive would be … ?
I used to crochet pink and blue Christmas angels that were best-sellers at the annual Rummage and Crafts fund-raiser for the church at the bottom of Madison Street. But the big new church that had absorbed the small community church after the freeway relocation is not inclined toward rummage sales, and I already have a rather formidable population of angels gathering dust in an upstairs bedroom.
Tying fishing flies for Harley also used to keep my hands busy. One fly I invented, the Ugly Bug, so named by our son, Colin, was what Harley always called his “secret weapon.” He claimed he could catch trout with an Ugly Bug when no one else was catching anything.
But Harley no longer needs Ugly Bugs.
Perhaps a part-time job? I’d done that a few times. Once I helped a wealthy widow organize her husband’s library of books for an auction. Another time I worked in a secondhand bookstore, until it closed down. I’d enjoyed the work. The money too. But there isn’t a thriving job market for retired librarians anymore.
The thunderclouds that had been rolling around since midafternoon let loose with a crack! that jolted me out of my pity party. I dashed around unplugging things and closing windows and relishing the sudden aura of excitement. Gusts of wind whipped around the house, stirring scents of dust and coming rain. Blue bolts lit up the windows like TV screens gone berserk. One seemed to explode right there in the living room with me. The lights flickered off and on. Hail hammered the roof. The phone made ominous tings, like ghost calls from some other realm.
Harley always said to stay away from the phone in a storm, but I tried to call Thea anyway. No answer. I debated running through the hail to check on her. As a small girl, Thea had crouched all alone in a Kansas storm cellar while a tornado ripped the house overhead to shreds, and she was still terrified of storms. I, on the other hand, was blessed with a mother who looped her arms around my sister and me during a storm and told us stories about the Lonely Little Lightning Bolt.
Now I decided that if Thea wasn’t answering the phone, she must be sleeping through this, and that was good. No need to disturb her. She’d had enough stress for one day.
So I just sat there and rather guiltily enjoyed the tumult of the storm. One close-by hit made the hair on my arms stand upright. Wind lashed the windows like the tail of an angry cat and rattled the old fireplace chimney, long since closed off and bricked up. I ran upstairs to better hear the hail on the roof and remembered Colin’s scared little-boy voice once asking in a storm, “Is God mad about something?” Which was my clue to start passing the Lonely Little Lightning Bolt story on to him.
I was sorry when the storm rumbled off and the hail softened to rain. The lights stopped flickering, and I plugged in the TV again. Newspeople were already out picking up reports about downed trees and power outages and nonworking traffic lights. By the time I had brushed my teeth and got into bed at 10:30, the rain was only a gentle patter.
I wasn’t sleepy. The storm had left me feeling, as I’d once heard Kendra say of her own inability to sleep, “jazzed.” I read three chapters of a Mary Higgins Clark mystery—I always have several books going at once—and then some uplifting verses from the Psalms. I debated writing a letter to the editor about those overturned gravestones out at Country Peace, worried about how much the taxes on the house would go up this year, and wondered how much longer my old refrigerator was going to hold out.
Then I finished the day the same way I have for as long as I can remember, with a final prayer entrusting everything to the Lord.
*
Next morning, I made my way past Effie’s house, where the wind had ripped off more shingles and scattered them like fallen leaves. I knocked at Thea’s back door about 8:30. A branch torn from the big maple tree lay in her front yard, but the Sunday air smelled as if it had been routed through heaven for cleansing. The cantaloupe I held to accompany Thea’s cinnamon rolls also gave off a heavenly fragrance. I had on old jeans and a yard-sale T-shirt that said “God loves you. I’m still working on it.” I’d go home and dress for church after we ate.
No answer to the knock. Surely Thea hadn’t slept late after going to bed so early and sleeping right through the storm. I circled to the front door, though it was seldom used, and rang the bell. No response. The Sunday newspaper still lay like a paper log by the front door, damp from rain that had blown in and puddled on the porch. I picked up the paper, returned to the back door, and knocked again, this time hard enough to rattle the old wood in the doorframe. Nothing.
Panic jumped like loose springs in my stomach. I dumped the cantaloupe and newspaper in a tub of geraniums by the back door, ran home, and yanked the key to Thea’s house off the hook by my own back door.
Kendra was just coming up the basement steps when I got back to Thea’s house.
“Is something wrong?”
“I don’t know. I can’t seem to rouse Thea.”
I unlocked the door and brushed past a hanging spider plant proliferating baby spiders. Kendra fo
llowed. We both stopped short in the kitchen. A cupboard door stood askew. A half-eaten Cup O’ Noodles sat on the old plastic-topped counter. The microwave was open, light shining like a weak beacon. Thea would never leave the microwave like that, not unless …
I ran for the back bedroom, yelling Thea’s name.
The bedroom door was open. I stared at the sheet covering the curled lump on the bed. Thea was not an insubstantial woman. Six inches taller and sixty pounds heavier than I am. But this lump looked so vulnerable and helpless …
Kendra pushed around me. Thea lay on her side, face turned toward the wall. Kendra’s fingers found Thea’s wrist, then moved up to her throat. I didn’t need words to know what she didn’t find.
“I’ll call 911,” I whispered.
“I don’t think—” Kendra broke off. She tucked the sheet protectively around Thea’s throat and nodded. “Yes. Call 911.”
I made the call from the kitchen phone. Thea had never gotten around to having a phone installed in the bedroom. Then I pulled a chair up to the bed and sat there with my hands clasped between my knees to keep them from trembling. I didn’t reach out to touch Thea. I was afraid of what a touch would tell me. A photo of Thea and me stood among the crowd of photos on the nightstand. We were smiling, our arms draped around each other.
“I’ll make coffee,” Kendra said.
Her voice startled me. I’d forgotten she was there. “Oh, that’s okay. You don’t need to stay. I know you have plans for this morning—”
“They can wait.”
Kendra disappeared down the hallway. The sound of the microwave whirred in the kitchen. Thea, who had once prided herself on grinding French roast beans for the freshest coffee, now kept only instant in the house. Kendra brought back a steaming cup and handed it to me.
“Maybe she isn’t dead,” I said. “She has blackout spells, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“So maybe this is just a longer-than-usual blackout,” I said hopefully. “Maybe even a temporary coma. They do all sorts of things to revive people these days.”
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