Octavio went ahead of us and unlocked the door of the housekeeper’s cottage. As if from a distance, I saw the five of us disappear through the doorway into the dim interior.
CHAPTER 17
The kitchen had a green lino floor, and there was an oilcloth on the table that was printed with blown roses. The counters were bare. Plasticized curtains over the windows made it too dark. The men talked about what to do with me. There were two bedrooms upstairs. Locks on the doors? No, but there were dead bolts in the garage, Octavio could put one on easily. A man would be posted in the house. Who was she?
They turned and looked at me. I was standing in the corner, with fallen plaster from the ceiling crunching under my feet. Octavio switched on the overhead light, which whined and then popped and went out. He grunted and pushed aside the curtains.
“Someone who wants the Ibarras,” said the big man. “Bad company.” He stepped closer to me. “You’re a friend of theirs, that you’re looking for them?”
“I work for a movie studio,” I said again, knowing that this defense was doomed, that they would want to make calls and corroborate, that the story would fall apart. But it would take a little while.
“That’s what these cards say?” said the man with my purse, peering into the case.
“That’s what they say,” I said.
I remembered being arrested in Baltimore at seventeen, with my mother’s car, which she had reported stolen. I remembered the playacting feel of it and the humiliation and how small I felt, how female. The cataract of loss as I sat in the back seat of their cruiser to drive the couple of miles from my aunt’s house at the edge of Baltimore to the station house. I could not have been more lost at the bottom of the sea. That was what I imagined Félix Ibarra had felt, waking in the gray morning of Sheepshead Bay. I knew what it was to be sent away.
“My producer’s name is Nick Harden,” I said. I had seen it on the luggage tags in his room. “He’s staying at the Hotel la Colonia.”
They chose the upstairs room, the master bedroom. I sat on a stripped mattress and listened to Octavio screw the dead bolt in place on the outside. There was a wicker vanity, host to a crowd of dusty bottles and pots.
The dead bolt was affixed and shot, and I was left alone. I listened to Octavio go back down the stairs to where the policemen waited. I could almost hear what they were saying. I sat on the floor, leaned against the side of the bed. I looked up at the wavering concentric circles that a leak from the roof had left on the ceiling.
The walls were plastered and there were flyspecks around the window. A light fixture in the center of the ceiling had a glass shade, frilled and smoked. A dark mass inside—dead flies. A ceramic lamp on the vanity in the shape of a dancing woman, a painted slipper pointing out beneath a lifted skirt. It was missing its cord. An empty closet. A lightened square on the plaster wall where a chest of drawers had been. A framed print propped against the wall beside the door: The Virgin of the Rocks, the paper wrinkled in the frame. The floor was linoleum here too, sprigged with small flowers, a gash in it near the door, as if something heavy had been dragged away. A single window faced the big house. The evening was coming on. Above the broad tiled roof, glassy streaks of cloud were turning yellow and then orange.
For a long time, no sound from downstairs.
I tried the light switch, but nothing happened. I stood against the wall and watched the room darken. They couldn’t have gone far. Maybe they were watching from the windows of the big house. Maybe they were waiting in the yard. When they came back, I did not want to be on the bed.
And then they were back. Footsteps came up the stairs, and then the bolt slid back and two men came in, the big one and another, perhaps a new one. “Come,” said the big one, and I didn’t move, so he groped in the dark and got my shoulder, and I was pushed through the door and down the stairs, into the blinding light of the kitchen, where the bulb had evidently been changed. A single red chair had been placed at the table.
“Sit down,” he said. He looked older in this light: he had taken off his hat and his hair was gray. I looked at the other one, who slumped whenever he stopped moving, a cringing position, a C shape always opening toward the chief.
“Are you deaf?” said the chief, so I sat down.
“What did you come here for?” he said.
“I work for a movie studio,” I said. “I go out to find locations to shoot.”
“No one believes you.”
“Call the man I told you about,” I said, but it came out more quietly than I had intended. I couldn’t look straight at anything. My mouth was dry.
“We’ve sent a man to call. We’ll see what he has to say when he gets back. Where did you come from?”
“From California.”
“But you’re Dominican.”
“I’m not Dominican.”
“You are Dominican.”
I hadn’t expected that. I looked from one of them to the other. “My cards are in the bag you took. I’m American.”
“How long have you lived in the States?”
“Always. I was born in Washington, DC.”
I tried to focus on his face but the light was just behind him.
“Who is your family? Who sent you?” he said.
“Nobody sent me, and my family is my mother, and I promise you, she is not Dominican.”
“They let too many people out, that’s the problem,” the chief said to the other one, who I decided was a deputy, and the deputy nodded. “They let them run to Miami and then they just come back.”
“You can hear my accent,” I said. “I learned Spanish in school.”
“So did my nephews in New Jersey,” said the chief.
“I don’t know how to tell you—”
“Stop,” he said. “I’m bored with that.” He stepped forward and kicked the legs out from under the chair. The back of my head bounced on the linoleum and the air left my lungs in a huff of pain. I was dazzled by the overhead light. The hem of my dress had come up. The chief and the deputy stood quietly looking down at me, as if at a gravesite. I took a noisy breath, struggling to sit up. I could not control my face.
“Take her back upstairs,” said the chief.
Back upstairs I sat on the bed and shook for a long time. A pain started, a hot throb where my head had hit the floor. My whole body oscillated in the dark like a guitar string. There was no way to mark the time. Eventually I thought: I have to pee. Other demands of the body arose, more faintly than the first. I was hungry and thirsty.
I could die here.
I have to pee.
The two thoughts circled, as if answering each other. The shaking had stopped. I thought, If I pee on the mattress, they might not notice. If I go on the linoleum, it will sit there in a puddle and stink and I think they might kill me for the inconvenience.
But there was a little light around this problem, as if someone had turned on a lamp on the other side of a door. Because it was a demand. I was suddenly possessed of a demand and it couldn’t be helped and they would have to respond. I rapped on the door with both hands and shouted, “I HAVE TO PEE.”
Footsteps back up the stairs, right away.
“The fuck are you yelling for?” said the deputy. The sound of his voice made the back of my head throb harder.
“I have to use the bathroom,” I said.
He said nothing. I pictured him hesitating halfway up the stairs. I wondered if the water was still on in this cottage. Maybe they would have to take me outside, or into the big house. “I can’t hold it,” I called. “I need water, too, please. I’m so thirsty.”
“I don’t know,” he said, not quite to me.
I shuffled my feet on the floor. “I don’t want to make a mess.”
The footsteps moved closer. I guessed the chief had gone somewhere else, or he would have been consulted. I could feel the crackle of the younger man’s anxiety in the unlit hallway.
“All right,” he said, opening the door. My eyes had adjus
ted to the dark of the bedroom, and I could make out his round face. “Come,” he said.
We passed the empty kitchen downstairs and stepped outside. The moon was rising over the big house. Frogs sang in the woods. The dark was manifold, populated. I felt that we were being observed from everywhere by a night full of animals. The other young policeman from before was out there, smoking a cigarette.
“She has to take a piss,” said the deputy.
The other man laughed unpleasantly. “There’s no line,” he said, indicating the broad slope of the lawn in front of us.
My officer took this up, glad to have some suggestion of what to do. “Make yourself comfortable,” he said, smirking.
“I can’t go behind the house?”
“No. Don’t be smart.”
I wondered what he thought I would do if I got back there behind the cottage. It was darker and more hidden on the uphill side, but there was nowhere to run except into the forest. I shifted, uncomfortable.
“Is the water running in the big house?”
“Quiet. Go quickly or I’ll take you back inside now.”
I took a few steps away from him, toward the hedge of overgrown topiary along the back end of the dry swimming pool. “I’m going to go over here.”
“Fine.”
I crouched in the shadow of the bushes. The ground was soft and muddy under my heels, and a homey smell of rotten leaves rose up. The relief made me feel faint. I looked up: the sky was heavy with stars. There were tears in my eyes. The two men were talking. I felt a hard emptiness, as if I were the husk of a cicada. It was hunger and fear but it felt like my vital parts had left the rest of me behind on this mountain. I was a chitinous shell with large, blank eyes. I stood up, adjusted my clothes, ran my hands through the wet grass. I walked back toward the two men.
“All right,” I said.
“Back in,” he said.
I didn’t know whether to hope that they had really called Nick or not. I ran through every scenario, a wealth of imaginary newsreel, sitting on the edge of the bed because I was afraid there might be palmetto bugs abroad on the floor. Nick is at the hotel and comes down when the desk calls him. Nick is not at the hotel. Nick cannot be found. Nick misunderstands the questions put to him and claims no knowledge of me. Nick assents that he knows me, sure, she’s a solo tourist who’s been lying next to the pool at a bargain hotel for days. What movie studio? Nick guesses the answers the chief wants to hear and provides them. Nick guesses the answers that I would want him to give, and gives them. My movie studio, my movie. Every one of these scenes stumbled on one point or another. Deep red spots swam in front of my eyes in the dark. I lay down slowly. I was so tired, but my brain glared and revolved like a lighthouse. The mattress exhaled the smell of mildew. I looked up into the almost perfect black of the ceiling. The moonlight at the window did little but make the shadows deeper.
Better to hope that they hadn’t called him yet. But if they hadn’t, they would in the morning. It was clear already what story was forming in their minds. They thought I was from some exiled dissident family. They thought I was a subversive, or a saboteur. A favorite enemy.
I swam up out of the dark, went to the window, unhooked the casements, pulled them open. A seal of paint broke open. The night was a presence in the room immediately, a smell of flowers. Mosquitoes would come in, but I didn’t care. Below me on the lawn, there was a square of light thrown from the kitchen window, where the officer kept watch. Back to the bed again, weaving on my feet from getting up too quickly. It had been so many hours since I had eaten.
Hunger made my brain into a pressurized, gaseous space. The moon had risen high, and the objects in the room suggested themselves in the dark. They were harder to make out when I looked at them straight on. In my peripheral vision they solidified, then melted as I turned my head.
A headache from thirst. Swollen hands from the heat.
Fortress Ozama, standing at the mouth of the river. Galíndez was already dead at some country estate, but they had taken the American pilot who had flown the plane to the prison fort. Kept him alive for a while. A few days? It had been in the paper, years later, in New York.
The plaster for the walls was mixed with the blood of cattle. The blood of goats or pigs. I had owned a book about Ferdinand and Isabella. Ozama, a yellow Spanish fortress on the Dominican shore, where the river flowed into the sea. The walls were six feet thick, blackbirds roosted in holes, at noon the skies darkened like they did over Golgotha.
They didn’t shoot the pilot. They strangled him with a rope. He was twenty-three and came from Oregon.
A great looking-glass . . . repeated the vacant majesty of the bed and room. . . . I grew by degrees cold as a stone, and then my courage sank. In the red room, with the light moving on the wall.
My mother, putting her earrings on in the front hallway. The old cat we’d had, gone now ten years. I used to wake up and find him sleeping in the crook of my arm.
A fluttering apology: I didn’t mean to. I was stupid, and got lost.
Build it up with silver and gold—silver and gold will be stolen away—stolen away—
Set a man to watch all night.
Suppose the man should fall asleep?
CHAPTER 18
I must have slept, because some time later I was awake and headlights were moving across the ceiling of the cottage. The beams slid from the open and empty closet to the corner above my head and stopped there. The calling of frogs and insects rose to a higher pitch, as if they were offended by the intrusion. My throat was dry, my skin damp and hot, and it took me a moment to catch my breath. In the kitchen below, I heard a cough, a brief conference, and then the front door opening.
I sat up and looked at the pool of light on the wall and ceiling above me. I crossed to the window. Just there, where the driveway curved uphill on its approach to the front of the big house, a car sat idling. I couldn’t see anything of it past the glare of the headlights, attended by flitting moths. The car door opened and shut and a figure moved across the grass.
Another policeman, I thought. Then: He left it running.
The two officers who had been keeping watch in the kitchen emerged now on the lawn below, yelling, “Párese ahí!” The new man, a little way out of the pool of light he had created, raised his hands halfway and called back in gringo Spanish. It was Nick. I dropped below the window sash, rocked back on my heels, rubbed my face, muttered something to myself that turned out to be a solemn thanks to Jesus Christ, tried to get enough air in my lungs. My heartbeat was slippery and violent in my chest. I could hear their voices, threading up through the night, but couldn’t catch the words. Nick walked toward the police and the three of them turned and came back toward the cottage.
It was apparent to me what I had to do, and it was terrible. I expanded with it, like a hot-air balloon. I missed my little gun. I rubbed the mosquito bites on my feet and checked the buckles on my useless sandals. The door opened below and the three voices came up through the floor. A chair scraped on the linoleum in the kitchen.
“She’s here?” Nick said in Spanish, each vowel round and distinct, as if he were practicing for an oral exam.
Some kind of assent.
“But why?” Nick said. “She meant to come straight back.”
From the chief: “Why are you here?”
“Because I received your telephone message at the hotel.”
“It’s a long way to drive at night.”
“Well, when the police call, you come.” His tone shifting, trying to lighten. “Don’t you?”
I stood looking down at the grass below the window. It was probably only ten feet, twelve from the lip of the windowsill, but it looked much farther.
The car idled, orbited by its moths. I thought I saw a movement by the house, wondered if someone had come out to see what the noise was about; but no, it was a shadow. My head and back ached from being thrown on the floor. He could explain himself. It probably wouldn’t be the first ti
me. He would know what to do.
I had risen up on my toes. I was wasting time, as if I could ease into what I was about to do. An immense darkness rested behind me, lapping at the edges of my vision, and I looked straight ahead.
I pushed the casements open, climbed onto the sill, gripped the frame above me for an instant with both hands, and dropped. The air lifted my clothes and hair and the earth knocked my legs out from under me, a tremendous blow to my feet and knees and then my shoulder and the side of my face. I had never learned the right way to fall. The grass was wet and the pain in my head snapped open like a parachute. I jumped up and ran, my feet slippery in the sandals, past the car Nick had driven, which was pouring the heat of its engine into the sticky atmosphere of the driveway, to the police sedan parked twenty feet away.
I crouched beside the police car and scrabbled at the dust cap on the front tire valve. It was a nightmare, working with these tiny pieces in the dark, my hands shaking. I dropped the cap in the gravel but found it again, pried it apart with my thumbnail, trying to keep my breath from rattling my whole body, and loosened the valve. I heard the hiss of air and pitched the cap into the dark behind me.
What would they do to him?
I ran back across the gravel and got into the other car, knowing that the sound of the door shutting would bring them all out of the cottage, shutting it anyway, feeling for the pedals with both feet, wishing I were barefoot, putting the clutch in and finding reverse, the smooth sweep of a three-point turn, the avenue of mahogany trees rising up before me. The cottage door slammed and the policemen’s voices rose in the night. I put the car in first and then second so quickly that it whined at the edge of stalling. A dog ran out of the dark, jubilant, and circled the car. The clutch slipped and caught and I lurched forward, gassed it, hoped desperately that the dog would stay out of the way, and went for third. I could feel the tinniness of the engine. It was a small car, a box, a shell. I heard the police car roar to life behind me and looked in the rearview, but saw only a chaos of lights. The gravel of the driveway turned to the smooth asphalt of the road. The radium glow of the speedometer read fifty kilometers per hour, then sixty, then seventy. The trees rushing past in formation made it seem faster. At a bend, the baleful horse of the Ibarra estate looked out at me from the colonnade of trunks, its huge liquid eyes gleaming yellow-green.
Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery Page 15