“Say hello,” said Victor.
“Hello, Victor.”
“Aren’t you dead? So many nights I dreamt I’d killed you, and I went to your funeral. Then I saw you in the film,” he said. “Henning said he didn’t believe it at first, but you know that I always look too long at everything. I saw you in Yellowstone Park, sitting on a bench, and I saw you crossing a street toward me, angry, so entirely yourself. Henning had to agree that it was you, and that you might likely still be in the town where that sorry little grubworm Grover Dewberry filmed a silly parade. His idiot widow made us take the film. A deal’s a deal, said Henning. He’s sorry now; he always did try to protect you.”
Dulcy watched him, her head still pressed into her pillow. Victor leaned back, and the chair creaked. He was bigger than she remembered, with a sharper nose. “So we came here, with a photograph—a bad print—and showed it to the girl at the hotel Mr. Dewberry used. ‘Perhaps Mrs. Nash,’ says the girl, ‘but I’m not sure her figure is that good.’” Victor seemed to enjoy this. “Isn’t envy interesting? At any rate, ‘What’s she like?’ Henning asked. ‘Dull,’ says the girl. ‘Maria likes to garden.’”
Victor laughed, the real laugh. “Dull. Imagine. And a greenhouse, built by a German photographer: there it was with the first interview, no need to ask around, which would anyway be problematic. We checked in, and Henning put in some time with the girl while I sat in the window and watched for you on the very street I’d seen in the film. The girl told him that you had lovers—maybe the German, maybe a man from the newspaper, a little Jew surveyor, a doctor, a police chief. On and on. She is no friend of yours. Have you been having your way with all these men, being a merry widow?”
Dulcy could only assume that Irina hadn’t mentioned Lewis because she wanted to protect him. Or maybe she had, and Victor was waiting to get to the point. “I was alone,” said Dulcy. “For the first time in my life, I was truly alone.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Victor. “If you lied about being dead, why would you tell the truth about any of it? And there’s the matter of this hat, dangling on your bedstead like a flag on an alp.” He held one of Lewis’s bowlers between two fingers. “A good hat, I must say. Not a drunk cowboy’s hat. Maybe the newspaperman, after all, but Henning thinks he’s found the right person.”
Now he twirled it on one finger. Dulcy watched it spin and shut her eyes.
“Let’s leave the scene of your lover’s triumph, why don’t we, and go downstairs.”
She climbed out of bed, tugging at a blanket. She did not show yet, but she was only wearing a shift. Victor’s eyes veered away and he jerked open her wardrobe, found a shawl and threw it at her. She wrapped it around her shoulders before she stopped. He wouldn’t touch her; he didn’t want to touch her. “Why must we go down? What are you going to do?”
“Because we have some things to do, before we get on a train together,” said Victor. “I want my pound of flesh. I mourned you, Dulcy. I sniveled like a baby for months. You were going to make everything better again, and instead you made it much, much worse.” He noticed the open green notebook, forgotten and finally dry by the window, and picked it up and threw it hard enough for flakes of plaster to pop out of the wall. He threw the book again as she ran for the stairs, so that it tumbled down into the kitchen in front of her, and he roared on: he’d had to get on a train to find her, to go to a new place, naked of protection; she knew he hated new places. She had run away, she had chosen to be away from him but not die, she had lied, she seemed perfectly content.
The wall of rage followed her to the bottom of the stairs. A man who looked like Henning stood by the kitchen door holding a mallet. He handed it over as Victor’s hand closed around her wrist, recoiled, took hold again and latched on to her skin in a way he’d never have been able to if the touch were tender. Victor jerked her out the door into the cold dark and dragged her toward the greenhouse, swinging the mallet in his other hand. She looked down at the paint already rubbing off her porch steps, felt the way the ground under the crisping grass was stiff with frost. She was moving too quickly to see anything ahead of them clearly, but as they lurched along she saw flashes of two men watching them approach, only Falks, no Durr, no Samuel, no Lewis.
“Where’s your brother?” said Victor.
“Looking for the man,” said one of the Falks. He looked young and miserable; Ansel, probably. It was one thing to piss in a man’s mouth, another to commit oneself to actual violence.
“There is no man,” screamed Dulcy. She thought the mallet would come around but the brothers watched and Victor froze with the thing in midair, looking like a bad actor.
“Hold her,” he said, but none of them moved. Victor cackled in rage and dragged her along while he smashed the panes of the greenhouse. He didn’t seem to notice that glass was flecking his arms, and her feet were too cold to feel it. When he’d broken every pane he could reach, he hurled the mallet up into the air and splintered the glass in the loft, then let go of her and stood and simply breathed.
It was too windy for anyone to hear up the street, and Brach was in Gerry’s jail. If she wasn’t deaf from blows, Brach’s wife probably thought this was a lover’s waltz.
“Did he build this for you? I’ll gut him with his own glass while you watch, and then I’ll burn him up.”
“I built it for myself,” said Dulcy.
Victor reached back down, his hand quivering again at the effort to take her arm. Back across the lawn; now she felt the glass in her feet, but she focused on the wrist bearing her along, and as they went through the door, she bit him. He pulled her off by her hair and pushed her—fingertips only—into a chair at the table. He looked in the icebox and the pantry and put a bottle of cider on the table, but he didn’t seem to know what to do with it and paced around, opening drawers. “I will have you pack your things. Henning’s finding your lover. He’ll put him in that greenhouse alive, and we’ll burn him to death.”
“I don’t have a lover,” said Dulcy. “I didn’t leave to have a lover.”
The skin tightened on Victor’s face. She ducked just as his arm came at her, so that he only clipped the side of her head. She rocked in the chair but didn’t fall. “That was a mistake,” he said. “Where’s your luggage?”
“No,” said Dulcy.
He hurled the remnant of the green book, and she heard the river pebbles finally break out of the spine, ricochet against the tile. Outside, someone called unhappily in Swedish. “This isn’t me anymore,” said Dulcy. “I’m someone else now. I’d heard you were, too. I’d heard you were getting married.”
“I’d rather not. She doesn’t understand, Dulcy. She isn’t good company, like you were.”
She kept her voice even. “I don’t have the money, and I don’t know what Dad did with it.”
“I’d rather think you ran away because you’d stolen the money than found me unbearable, but I’ll admit you don’t seem to have it. And so I’ll forgive you, and we will begin again. I will have found you, and it will be a love story.” He pulled out a chair and sat down next to her. “Go upstairs to pack. Henning and Carl will be back with the man, soon, and Ansel and Martin will keep watch.”
Henning’s army. In the glow from the kitchen light, Dulcy could see Ansel sitting on her porch swing. He looked nervous. She picked up the bottle of cider. “Are you going to kill me?”
“Of course I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to bring you home.”
“No.”
She swung the bottle of cider against his head and gouged at his face with the jagged stem as he rocked back. Have a scar, she thought. Feel it.
Then she ran in her head; in the real world, she made it two feet closer to the door before he slammed a fist into her skull. She lay on her back in a blurred world and listened to her own breathing and the putt of a car engine on the street. Victor bent over her, dr
ipping blood onto her face. “Pack your things, or go without them.”
“No.” She slashed at his arm with the bottle’s broken neck.
Victor screamed and began to kick at her, howling to the men outside that he was bleeding to death. She curled up and felt cold air flood the kitchen as Henning surged into the room and knocked Victor to his knees, then flat.
“You fucking idiot.”
“I’m dying,” said Victor. He was glassy-eyed, terrified, staring down at his leaking arm; his blood ran across the floor toward Dulcy.
Henning found a rag on the counter and tied a tourniquet. “We’ll find a doctor to stitch you, and get you on the train.” He crouched down, peered at her face, waved his hand, seeing if she really saw him, then stood.
“Don’t speak to me that way,” said Victor.
Henning climbed to his feet, stepping around Victor’s blood. “How should I, then? You said you’d only talk. Why do you ruin yourself?”
“Get her packed,” said Victor.
“She won’t go with you, Victor,” said Henning. “And if you’ve killed her, understand you’ll now have to kill half the town, after the girl at the hotel finishes discussing our visit.”
“I want him dead.”
“He is dead. Go look in the greenhouse. We brought him back in his car. Get to the train with Carl, and Ansel will light the fire. We’ll follow in a few days.”
Victor crawled toward her; she felt his breath on her cheek. “Go,” said Henning.
And they were gone. Dulcy opened her eyes and watched a spider move across her ceiling. But there was Henning again, and for just a moment, before he smiled down at her, she wondered if he was there to kill her. He touched her stomach. “Did he know?”
She shook her head. “Good,” he said; he stroked her cheek. “I’ll have the little boy from the hotel bring a doctor. He liked you, for sure, not like that bitch of a girl. I want you to know, down there in the greenhouse, it’s not him. It’s not your person. All right?”
He held up his bloody hands. “All right,” said Dulcy, starting to love him again.
“It was my person, for my poor brother. And I want you to know that I knew you were alive, I heard from a banker in Butte but said nothing; I wanted you to have a chance. Even after he saw the stupid film, that waste of money, I didn’t think he would do such a thing as this. I will not let him again. What will your friend do?”
“I don’t know,” said Dulcy.
“You ask this man to let it go, to get well.” He bent down and kissed her forehead. “Don’t worry about the fire. It won’t travel.”
And he was gone. She thought about how she would kill Victor when she could move again, just as he’d wanted to kill Walton, just as he would have killed Walton if Walton had only remembered where he’d hidden the money. She’d kill Victor just as soon as her vision cleared and she had her rage back.
She rolled on her side and watched Victor’s blood dry on her pretty white tile, all around the bits of the green book, the pages the river had rinsed and the gravel that had lodged in the spine. To live is to suffer, Martha would say. Have a piece of cake. Have that whiskey, just one glass.
The light in the room had gone orange, and for a moment, before she realized the greenhouse was burning, she thought she was dying. Above the wind she heard more glass break and a popping sound, a gun or the metal ribs snapping. She reached out and rolled a pebble from the green book’s binding in her fingers, held it up to the glow, reached for another. When Irving and Macalester ran through the door she had a handful, and they thought she’d been trying to clean the blood on the floor; she had to tuck the pebbles under the sink when they weren’t looking.
•••
When Lewis arrived early the next morning, her face was a swollen, stitched mess; Macalester wouldn’t let her out of bed for the baby’s sake. Lewis moved around the room, putting fresh clothes in his valise. “Stay.”
“Of course I’ll stay.” But he lied. He meant the rest—that he felt this was his fault, that he should have known—but she could see his eyes planning on leaving even when he was an inch away from her, tears running down his face. He had a kind of a blank I’ll do what I fucking want to do look. The unthinking part of him would fade, she thought, before he had a chance to act.
When he left, Margaret came to stay, with Samuel coming in and out. Dulcy let the official story float up the stairwell, her friends’ overheard conversations with the people who stopped by: Gerald Fenoways, Dulcy’s deranged admirer, had discovered that she’d married Lewis Braudel, and beaten her, and made a pyre for himself in her greenhouse. Gerry had been dining at the Elite, wooing the hotel’s new owners, when he’d received a note and run out to his car. Fenoways’ body had only been half-burned, and he was still holding the gun he’d used to shoot himself in the head as the fire took hold.
On the second day, Margaret hid upstairs with her from a visiting Mrs. Whittlesby, and they listened to Samuel elaborate on this story. Beyond people like Mrs. Whittlesby, no one seemed surprised about the Lewis part of the story, though it gave people something happy to natter about. Of course they’d all guessed, and they were a little offended that the couple hadn’t simply told their friends, but who would have imagined Gerry was capable of any secrecy whatsoever, and what a horrible thing that he’d even dream she’d reciprocate.
Dulcy wondered about the note Henning had sent into the Elite, what the bait had been, how he’d made sure that Gerry was alone, what he’d said and done to Gerry before he killed him, what damage the fire had hidden. But some of the answer was obvious, the longer she heard Samuel’s calm voice rise up the stairwell: who on earth will mourn that man?
On the third day, she put on her clothes and walked downstairs. “Please get Lewis to come back.”
“He’s fine,” said Samuel, bland and cheery. “He had to meet a Century editor in Denver. He telegrammed to check on you this morning.”
Samuel had probably been half in love with Henning, too.
•••
Lewis returned two days later, on the noon train. It was a pretty Indian summer day, and Mrs. Brach had taken to playing her piano, and Dulcy, who noticed she preferred Mozart to church hymns, was listening on the porch when he appeared. He put down his bag and kissed her. “Are you feeling better? Should you be up?”
“Macalester says I’ll be fine.” She watched his arm shake as he took a long sip from her water glass. “But should I ask James to come check on you?”
“Let me rest, let me sleep, and then let’s get out for a bit. I know we thought of staying here for another month or so, but I’d rather go sooner, tomorrow or even later today. Does that make sense?”
He watched her; she nodded. “I’ve been dreaming about the hammock for hours. It’s such a beautiful day.” He reached for the quilt she’d put on the swing and started down to the hammock he’d strung between the new wall and a cottonwood. He ignored the charred pile that had been the greenhouse. “Just an hour or so.”
She watched him climb into the hammock, then went into the kitchen and pulled his clothes from the valise, thinking blankly about washing things, getting a girl in to help if they were really going to leave. She started to toss the dirty clothes into the cellar instead of carrying them down—she would never be Martha—but paused at a stain, wondering how much wine a man could possibly spill, before she understood that the stiff dark blotch on his shirtfront was blood. She reached back into the bag and pulled his father’s gun from the inside sleeve, turning it over in her hands. She dipped a dishrag in her glass of water and wiped away the red-brown smudge, then dried the gun and tucked it into a kitchen drawer. She climbed down to the cellar to salt and soak the shirt and the silk waistcoat, spackled in more blood.
Back upstairs, she pulled his notebook and a folded Denver Post from the valise. He’d saved the Bozeman–Denver
ticket, and he’d scribbled notes about a meeting at the Brown Palace with a fellow reporter, an account of the area’s swelling wealth. He’d saved a receipt for his room, too, and she wondered why he’d even bothered with this ruse, and how much time he’d been forced to kill in a lobby easy chair, surrounded by fancier potted plants than the Elite could manage, far below the balcony where she’d stood so many months earlier.
Dulcy was about to close the valise when she noticed a scrap of pale blue paper, crammed in a crack in the leather lining. She pried it out, and held it for a long time:
The Film Society of Seattle presents
a lecture by Mr. H. Falk , member of the London Society ,
on the Importance of Adapting Shakespeare to the Screen .
Eight o’ clock in the evening , October 26 , 1905 .
She smoothed out the Denver Post . Lewis had left it open to the appropriate article.
Theories on Seattle Death
Businessman Who Leapt from Hotel Window Described as Depressed; An Echo of His Beloved and Her Father
Despite theories that mining magnate Victor Maslingen owed money to the wrong sort of people, and rumors of newspaper unions or a jealous husband, Seattle authorities now assume that his death yesterday was a suicide.
Due to his financial losses suffered a year ago, Mr. Maslingen had sold his interest in the Seattle Intelligencer . He subsequently decided upon selling the Butler Hotel, where he maintained an apartment; he felt little affinity for the city following his partner’s and fiancée’s deaths. Though a buyer had been quickly located, earthquake damage had been found in the foundation during preparations for its sale, and the price of the property was in question.
Immediately following Mr. Maslingen’s leap from his study window on the seventh floor, police located his close associate, Mr. Henning Falk, at the Film Society, where he was in the midst of a lecture. According to Mr. Falk, Mr. Maslingen had increasingly shunned companionship and indulged in black moods and suspicious thoughts; he habitually kept the door to his study locked, and it was so when police arrived. A housekeeper sleeping on the floor above heard no shot, and no visitors were noted in the hotel lobby, or by the elevator operator.
The Widow Nash: A Novel Page 35
