Thinking about Tom Younger speeding down the information highway made me very tired.
I cleared both messages, signed off, turned off the laptop, and sat waiting for the arrival of Sandy and the pizza.
FOURTEEN
The pizza was right on time. Sandy was late.
As I turned on the oven and hunted in the kitchen for a large plate, my hands began to shake, and the attack of nervous terror I had thus far managed to delay finally showed up. Despite the heat in the room, I was instantly cold. I sat down at the kitchen table before my legs gave way under me. My hands supported my head as my legs shook violently under the table.
Had I come close to death on the island?
I sat helpless, waiting for the fear to end. Sweat formed like a thin layer of ice water on my brow. Somewhere in the back of my mind I marveled at the delayed onset of panic, between then and now, between the gunshots fired in the afternoon, and the white kitchen in a big empty house in the early evening hours.
On the island, the bullets had passed close by, but I wasn’t truly terrified. I had lain prone, then crawled to safety. For a moment I had wondered if the time of my death had arrived.
Now I could only sit, shaking uncontrollably, as waves of terror washed over me. All I could do was try to bend my will, push back at the waves, and make it all end soon.
The bike. I focused hard on the bike. The model and the basket and the fact that it was on the island in the first place. Was it the same bike Keith had borrowed from Bridget Cassidy? How could it possibly not be?
There was the sound of gravel under soft footsteps outside the house.
I squeezed my feet hard against the wood floor and told myself that it would just be Sandy coming home.
My fingers knotted together and I bit into my thumb hard, until the sharp pain registered.
Please let it be Sandy coming home.
The groan of the porch floorboards, then the loud retort of the screen door as it slammed open.
I set my face into the semblance of a smile.
Please don’t let her see my fear.
It occurred to me then that if it wasn’t her, I was utterly helpless.
“Honeybunch. I’m home.” It was Sandy coming home. “I smell food. And I smell like a sick dog’s shit. Let me shower fast before we eat.” I heard her gym bag hit the floor, her Reeboks hit the stairs, the bathroom door slam, then the shower water hissing.
I let out a deep breath.
My teeth had drawn a little blood.
But I had finally stopped shaking.
* * *
She drank a diet Pepsi from the can and ate her pizza in large unwieldy slices with her fingers. I was still a little shaky and stuck to iced water. She was barefoot and had changed into black jeans and a cream-colored vest. Her hair was tousled and still wet from the shower.
“How was your day?” she asked.
“I went for a row on the lake,” I said. “Then I had a swim. Then I took a walk.”
She made a face. “That really sucks,” she said. “Some of us had to work.”
I laughed a little wildly and she looked hard at me.
“Are you all right? You look a little weird.”
I managed to smile. “It was very hot out on the lake. I may have overdone it. Rowing the boat. Maybe I got a little too much sun. The kitchen got warm when I turned the oven on,” I concluded rather lamely.
“Hmmm.” She was clearly unconvinced. “The pizza’s good.”
She glanced at my plate. “You’re not very hungry?”
I looked down. She was right. I shook my head. “I guess I’m not.”
“Are you tired?” She sounded concerned.
“I suppose I am. I was foolish and overdid it today. I should probably just go to bed. I’ll feel much better if I just lie down for a while.”
She stood up and took my plate away. I had eaten four bites.
“Oh boy, cold pizza for breakfast. It doesn’t get any better than this.” She cut herself another slice, put the rest back in the box, and the box into the refrigerator.
“Go get some rest,” she said and kissed me on the forehead. I assumed it was clammy. “I must have been too much woman for you last night. I’m going to leave you alone tonight.”
I was too far gone to respond.
As I got up to leave she spoke. “Have you been lying to me?”
“How do you mean? About what?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she spoke playfully. “About your day?”
“No,” I said trying to look her in the eye. “Tennis, rowing, swimming, walking. That was about it.”
I dragged myself upstairs to bed. I was dog-tired. Yet as soon as my head hit the pillow I was suddenly wide awake, and quite unable to fall asleep.
For a while I did wonder if she would come to my room tonight. Was I exhausted or eager? I did catch myself listening for her footsteps on the landing but there was only silence, or the natural creaking, groaning, rumbling noises old houses tend to make.
I wondered if I was perhaps supposed to take charge, to announce my intentions. Should I go to her room this time? This time? Was I being foolish to suppose there would even be another time?
These were not the calculations of a masterful male animal, but they were unlikely to change much, even with a good night’s sleep.
Wide-eyed and jittery, I now thought beyond the reading of Sandy Weller’s love signs to the question of gunshots and perforated rowboats.
It was safe to assume that someone wanted me dead, or at the very least scared away from the island.
Who would that someone be?
But eventually sleep did come, deep, undisturbed, until the long-promised rain tapped hard on the window. But that was in the early hours of the morning, when I woke alert, and newly brave, and ever resourceful.
“I thought I might drive into Paddle Lake this morning,” I said. “Is there anything you need?”
Sandy looked up. “Nope,” she spoke with her mouth full of Rice Krispies. A selection of little cereal boxes littered the kitchen table. The overhead light was on in the kitchen. The windows were closed. It was very wet outside.
“Will you be here for lunch?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Can I cook you anything for breakfast?”
“You’re being very dutiful this morning.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“Ah,” I smiled brightly. “That’s much better.”
“You’re very cheerful. You looked bad last night.”
“I overdid it.”
“Humph,” she said grumpily.
I reached across the table. “I’ll just have one of the little boxes.”
She flashed an evil grin. “I’ve snarfed all the good ones already.”
I looked closely. ”Not true. The Sugar Frosties are still left.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Don’t be retarded. They’re just kiddie shit.”
“I happen to like them,” I said, as I ripped open the small box. “If it clears up, I might go down to the beach later today. I meant to ask. Is it okay for me to be using the beach?”
She nodded. “Of course. You’re paying for it. It’s all part of the service. I belong to the residents’ association. They graciously allowed me to join and pay their yearly fee. So my guests are also extended full beach privileges.”
“Did you know they have closed up the island?”
She looked up then, clearly puzzled. “No. What the hell for?”
“It says for renovations.”
She shrugged. “Hmmm. News to me. It’s possible.” She considered. “I guess.” She was clearly unconvinced and went back to her cereal.
I hadn’t eaten Sugar Frosties in twenty years.
I still liked them.
; Later in the morning, I drove to Paddle Lake. At the drugstore, I bought a newspaper and asked directions to the nearest car rental agency. There was apparently only one in town.
If the affable Rick at Affordable Auto Rental was curious as to why I wanted to leave an expensive German car in his parking lot and drive away in a white late-model Ford Escort, he was much too polite to show it.
As I walked out to the car, I noticed that license plates in this state were only mandatory on the rear of the car. I also located a tiny decal on the windshield that carried Affordable’s name, and thus marked the vehicle as a rental. I hoped it would peel off easily. It did.
I had parked the Mercedes as close to the back of the parking lot as possible so that the car could barely be seen from the street. I had negotiated an open-ended agreement with Rick. He had taken an imprint from my platinum Amex card, which clearly impressed him.
I dimly recalled when that sort of thing had impressed me too.
Back at the Handle, I pulled into the parking lot beside the tennis court, backing in carefully, picking a spot where only the front of the car was visible to the houses. I turned off the engine and sat there.
The rain fell in a shifting pattern of rivers and tributaries, variations on a limited theme, all abruptly ending at the bottom of the windshield, grand designs dashed against the still wipers.
I had no plan beyond simply watching the houses for a while, in as anonymous a fashion as possible. A nondescript, small, inexpensive car parked in a parking lot in torrential rain. No distinguishing marks. No reason to notice.
I opened my newspaper.
I’d forgotten what day of the week it was. An inconceivable lapse for me. The top of the newspaper said Saturday, and I had no reason to doubt it.
I did want a chance to talk to the children of the Handle. It wouldn’t be easy. I was a stranger, and, for a number of very good reasons, children weren’t supposed to talk to strangers anymore.
The fact that it was the weekend meant that the kids might well be at home. The fact that the rain was heavy, and showing no signs of letting up, meant that they’d likely be indoors and therefore all but inaccessible to me.
* * *
In my mind, I played back what I knew so far, my gossamer-thin strands of evidence. The very word “evidence” had a substantive and quite inappropriate air for, in truth, there was next to none.
Rather than there being any kind of crime actually taking place, a foreign, well-weathered, and terminally unlucky drifter was traversing across country in an untidy tangle of emotional and topographic maneuvers. Sad souls like Keith didn’t leave paper trails, credit card receipts or motel reservations. He didn’t jettison wives and partners and careers in his wayward wake. He shambled in and shambled out of other people’s lives, littering with the detritus of dreams and expectations, but offering no resolutions.
His was a truly shambolic trajectory.
But if there wasn’t evidence of what is often drolly referred to as “foul play,” was there not at least some basis for suspicion? There was an abandoned bicycle on an island. There was a timid woman who drank in the morning. There was an inexplicably nervous neighbor with a hair-trigger temper. And there were people on a boat with a gun, who clearly didn’t much care for me puttering about on their island.
And then there were my ethereal, unnamed instincts, uppermost of which was a sense that Connie had lost a friend who, at the very least, would have said goodbye if he could.
From the lives of those who loved him, Keith Pringle had taken a powder many times before. But this time his parents feared the worst for him.
And I did too.
Sitting in the rain, in a rented car, staking out the houses of strangers. There was a sense of liberation, or as much liberation as my hidebound persona could tolerate.
Two lonely women lived in two small towns.
It had been relatively effortless to slip into the rhythm of Sandy Weller’s life, to sleep with her, at her bidding, in a slick, clean, pleasurable act that probably had as little emotional meaning as an aerobic workout, after dark, without the shiny apparatus, or the walls lined by mirrors for the buffed and vain.
And I had wanted to hold tightly to the fragile Bridget Cassidy, in the fading pastel light of her living room, at the twilight of an unseasonably chill summer’s day, and to lure myself into believing that the passions she felt could be somehow appropriated by me, if I only chose to lay siege to her heart.
These were the curious notions of a married man, physically unfaithful for the first time in his ordered life, now scrambling that very same life, like a frequency on a weak radio signal, but then finding himself rather enjoying the resultant static.
As I sat up, a young girl pushed open the front door of the Sanders house and bolted across the front yard. It was Beth Sanders, Will’s daughter, and she was heading for Connie’s place.
The girl was wet through and shivering as she pushed the doorbell. Connie appeared quickly at the window. She smiled and waved at the girl. Then she opened the door, threw a large towel over the girl’s dripping head, and the two of them went inside as the front door gently closed behind them.
I sat and watched for further developments. But the rain continued, and the facades of the houses revealed nothing more to me.
What to do now?
The maneuver of pulling away from the parking lot and driving across the street would doubtless look odd, but I hoped that the rain and the rented car would conspire to mask my identity.
I sensed myself gradually making enemies of the inhabitants of the Handle. The car might hide me from them for a little while longer.
I gunned the engine, parked at the top of Connie’s driveway, jumped out of the car, and ran to her door. Standing there I was invisible, except to anyone out on the lake, and I was fairly sure no one was watching me from there today.
The front door opened and Connie stood there.
“I must assume you haven’t come to make me an irresistible offer on my little domicile,” she said with a slight smile. “And I notice you’ve lamentably moved down market in your choice of automobiles. Tut, tut. The little black Teutonic number had such unmistakable flair.”
“I’m intruding,” I blurted out. “I know. I’m awfully sorry. But I was hoping you might invite me in. I do think it’s important.”
“You really are an incorrigible snoop.”
“I saw the Sanders girl arrive.”
She nodded. “I did mention that we’re old friends. I’m serving some hot chocolate with marshmallows and shavings of dark German chocolate on top. The weather seems to call for it. Would you perhaps care to partake?”
“That would be very nice,” I said, “and I do thank you, Connie.”
“We never did fully uncover your motives, did we? But my intuition tells me that somewhere a sense of honor is to be found within you. But I will warn you, don’t upset my little Beth. She’s my sweet angel, and my only true ally in this cultural morass.”
“I’ll be very good. I promise you.”
“Good. That’s settled. So for goodness’ sake enter. That wretched rain’s from the north, and is surely intent on ruining my patrician posture with lumbago and other odious infirmities reserved exclusively for those of us a little long in the tooth.”
* * *
With that she closed the door firmly behind me.
Claiming a pan of boiling milk to attend to in the kitchen, Connie left us alone. Beth Sanders sat on a high-backed chair, her wet hair dripping on the velvet upholstery, her feet in sodden scuffed sneakers that didn’t quite reach the oriental rugged floor.
“Hi,” she said to me brightly. “We’re going to have some cocoa now. Connie makes the best.”
“Do you think she might make me some?” I asked her.
She looked at me appraisingly then shrugged. “I g
uess so,” she said. “You have to be pretty special though.” She clearly felt that I might not qualify.
“She’s my friend. I have lots of friends my age at school. But Connie is my older friend.”
“What about your parents?”
“Parents are fine but they aren’t really like friends.” She gave me a pitying look. I had clearly blundered.
“Is Tammi Tait your friend?”
Another shrug. “I guess. She’s in the fifth grade. I’m only in the fourth grade. So we aren’t really friends at school. But we do play at home sometimes. But when her school friends come to the beach she pretends she doesn’t know me and I think that’s a really gross thing to do. Don’t you think?”
“Yes I do.” She smiled as I spoke.
“You talk funny. Are you from another country? Is that a rude question?”
“No, it isn’t rude at all. Yes, I am. But it was a long, long time ago. Why do you ask? Have you heard someone else speak just like me?”
“No. I never ever have,” she answered much too abruptly. “They talk funny on television sometimes.”
I laughed at that. “They certainly do. No. I meant someone real. Was there someone real?” Real versus television. I was heading into deep waters.
She hesitated. “I can’t say.” She looked miserable. “And I promised I would never, ever say.”
Connie entered then with three steaming mugs, three spoons, and a plate piled high with chocolate chip cookies that looked suspiciously home-baked. It occurred to me that she may have deceived me on the question of her cooking skills. The marshmallows were already a solid congealed mass on the surface of each mug. Connie set them down. Beth began to slurp noisily at hers. Connie smiled at the girl and ruffled her damp hair with the towel that was draped across her small shoulders.
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