by L. R. Wright
She was suddenly tired—her body was throbbing with exhaustion—but she squatted down, her hands pressing on her kneecaps, and peered into the darkness of the bottom of the closet. She smelled the smell of foot sweat down there, and saw huge dust balls.
Yesterday she’d planted another rosebush. She didn’t want any more. Seven was enough. Maybe six had been enough.
Annabelle hauled out sneakers and pumps and sandals, sending them flying one by one with the back of her hand.
She thought, whenever I go out of the house, I hear the animals. They make sounds that are listless and desolate. They have exotic voices, and speak something that isn’t words.
It was the heat, maybe.
“Ma! Ma!”
Annabelle’s heart stopped beating; then it rushed to start again, tripping over itself. She scrambled to her feet and raced out of the bedroom; would there be blood? would she be calm? would she know what to do?
She found them outside, dancing from foot to foot in the dust of the yard, and behind them the animal cages lay in a sullen sprawl.
“What is it?” said Annabelle, breathless. “My heaven, you scared my heart clear out of my chest, I thought one of you was dead.”
Their eyes were large, and Camellia was blinking rapidly. “There’s stuff on the window wall,” she said.
“Paint,” said Rose-Iris, walking backward, her hand stretched out toward Annabelle. “Come and see.”
Annabelle followed them around the corner.
Huge letters, spray-painted in black. They made tears come to her eyes. They hurt her in the chest. “Whore of Babylon,” they spelled. Annabelle glanced around quickly but there was nobody else in the yard, no cars on the gravel road.
“Somebody must have done it in the night,” said Rose-Iris.
“Yuck,” said Camellia, with a shiver. “Will it come off, Ma?”
“Of course it’ll come off,” said Annabelle. “We’ll roll up our sleeves and get ourselves a couple of stepladders and some turpentine and a pile of rags and we’ll get that off there right now, that’s what we’ll do.” She pushed her hair away from her face with trembling fingers. “Come along,” she said, “and be smart about it.” She marched around the corner and toward the shed, her daughters tumbling along in her wake, and they collected what they needed.
Much later, they stood back and looked.
“That glass, it’s never been so clean,” said Annabelle, panting. She dropped to the ground. “I’m spent,” she said. “Thank you for your help, Rose-Iris.”
“That’s okay, Ma,” said Rose-Iris, sitting beside her.
“And me, me,” said Camellia. “For the iced tea.”
“And thank you, too, Camellia,” said Annabelle, “for the iced tea.”
“Ma,” said Rose-Iris, craning her neck to see behind her. “Look. You forgot to take down the sign.”
“Ah yes,” said Annabelle calmly. “I must have done. For there it is, sitting in its hole, pointing right at us.”
The girls began to giggle.
The three of them put away the ladder, and the turpentine, and Annabelle threw the rags in a plastic bag and sealed it with a twist tie. She told the girls to wash up, and asked Rose-Iris to start dinner. Camellia groaned when she was asked to set the table, and stomped around the kitchen for a while, but Annabelle ignored her fussing and went on into the bedroom. Soon things were quiet out there; she heard them talking, and china and cutlery clinking, and heard something sizzling and then she smelled it, too, it was hamburger, Rose-Iris was probably making Hamburger Helper.
Annabelle hung up all of her clothes, smoothing them on their hangers with her hands, which had smudges of black paint on them, and smelled of turpentine. She needed a bath, but she wouldn’t have time before Herman got home. And it would be more practical to have it afterward, anyway.
He made a lot of noise driving up, as she’d known he would.
She looked quickly around the room, as if another exit might reveal itself; she thought about the window; but how undignified that would be; and she’d made her bed, after all.
He yelled something at Arnold, in the yard, and stomped through the kitchen without speaking to the girls. He came into the bedroom and slammed the door behind him.
She looked at him as if she were tranquil, reached for tranquillity somewhere inside her, tried not to flinch when he came near, and didn’t flinch, didn’t feel it, really, not the first blow, and then she found herself on the floor looking at dust, smelling dust, tasting slivers of blood.
I will not make a noise, she thought.
I cannot do this anymore, she thought.
Chapter 34
“I DON’T GET IT,” said Sokolowski, staring at the photographs. “I remember this guy,” he said. “He died. I know Gillingham, too. And Hetty Willis.” He looked up at Alberg. “The cat lady. She can’t have anything to do with this. What could she have to do with it?”
“I don’t know,” said Alberg.
“I also know her,” said Sokolowski, pointing. “The girl getting her neck kissed, there. She works at my bank. Her name’s Wanda.” He peered closely at the picture. “She’s a lot younger here. Maybe this guy’s her husband, who works at the Petro-Can station. Nah. Warren’s got dark hair. Who the hell is this guy, anyway?”
“His name’s Bobby Ransome,” said Alberg.
The sergeant handed back the photographs. “So what’re you going to do?”
“I’m going to see these people. All except the dead guy.”
“Yeah, right,” said the sergeant, smiling despite himself. “We got the description of the camera, by the way. It’s a very, very expensive camera. So I’m putting it out to the pawnshops, et cetera, toot sweet.”
“Good,” said Alberg. “How about phone calls from the Grayson number?”
“Too soon for that. But we got the property owners. Not by noon, though. The guy sent it over, must have been four, five o’clock.”
“Anything interesting?”
“Well I don’t know, do I?” said the sergeant plaintively. “What am I looking for, anyway?”
Alberg was moving paper clips around on his desktop. “Sid. What do you know about this Ransome guy? He got sent up for drugs about ten years ago.”
“Before my time,” said Sokolowski. “Why?”
“He went to school with Grayson. Got out of the slammer about eighteen months ago. He’s been living in Vancouver, but he showed up back here in early June. And Velma Grayson reports this to Steven when he phones her, and Steven immediately decides to come home for a while.”
“Coincidence,” said Sokolowski significantly, “happens more often than people think.”
Alberg got up to open his office door. “Jesus it’s hot,” he muttered. “But she tells me all this, Sid, and I look up Ransome’s sheet, and lo and behold, it turns out it’s Ransome in all those photos.”
“But you said the kid felt responsible for somebody dying,” said the sergeant. “This Ransome thing, it was just a drug bust, wasn’t it?”
“That’s what I want to find out,” said Alberg. “Get somebody to drag the files out of dead storage. Court records, exhibits entered—everything there is.”
“Anything else?” said the sergeant, watching Alberg as he absentmindedly picked up the pile of evaluation forms, tapped the edges against the desktop to even up the stack, and put it down again.
“Yeah. Get a list of Ransome’s friends and relatives, and check it against the property owners. Also, let’s find out exactly where this guy is, and then let’s keep a quiet eye on him.”
Hetty Willis sat on one of the love seats in her sitting room with the scrapbook open on her lap, waiting for her lawyer. But when somebody knocked on her door, it turned out to be the policeman.
“Miss Willis,” he said, with another of his smiles. “I wonder if I could ask you to take a look at a photograph?”
She nodded, curious, and he opened a large envelope and pulled out a picture.
It was a photograph of her and Bobby, and it made her smile to see it, and then her smile faded and she grew puzzled, for wherever had it come from?
“Have you seen it before?” said the policeman; Alberg, his name was.
And Hetty’s heart was pounding as she shook her head. How on earth had this policeman come upon a photograph of her and her nephew?
“Do you remember when it was taken?”
She stared at it, thinking. “Younger.” She thought some more. She nodded, and pointed to Bobby. “Gradation.” She shook her head impatiently, tapping the photo. “Grrradation.” Finally she hurried into the sitting room for her notebook. “Nephew’s graduation,” she wrote, and tore off the paper, and gave it to Alberg.
“Is this your nephew? Bobby Ransome?”
Hetty nodded vigorously.
“Do you know who took the picture?”
She kept her head ducked down, looking hard at the photograph. “Donknow. Dinsee.” She glanced away; her heart was beating very fast. “Where? Wasit?”
“You mean, where did I find it?”
She nodded.
“Well, I think it was taken by a young man named Steven Grayson,” said Alberg. “He died, last Saturday. This was with some other pictures that a friend was keeping for him.”
Hetty’s mouth dried up. She tried several times to speak. The policeman waited politely. Hetty didn’t want to speak, didn’t want to know. But she asked it anyway. “How?”
“I’m afraid somebody killed him,” said Alberg.
Tears filled Hetty’s eyes with the suddenness of pain. She waved off Alberg’s hand, raised instinctively to protect or comfort her. She felt centuries old as she stood and walked uncertainly to the front door. She opened the door and waited with her head bowed until he had passed through onto the porch. She thought he was saying something but she wasn’t sure. She closed the door gently in his face, and hoped he would overlook her discourtesy.
Chapter 35
HERMAN WENT AWAY right afterward.
Then Annabelle called out from the bedroom, lightly, “Go ahead with dinner, girls, call Arnold and go ahead, I want to have a bath before I eat.”
They didn’t argue or protest because there were things they understood, young as they were, and that was awful, but good.
Annabelle slipped quietly into the bathroom and soaked for a long time, holding a cold washcloth against the side of her face. She lay in warm water and pressed coldness against her face; it was an interesting sensation, and seemed likely to completely dispel the pain. She felt a blitheness of spirit growing inside her and it brought tears to her eyes; this was what was called a paradox, but she understood it very well. She lay in the bath in pain, and yet felt happiness grow, or relief; they were the same thing after all, weren’t they? Because Herman would stay away all night, and all the next day. And when he came home for dinner tomorrow he would arrive in the yard quietly, and sit quietly at the table, and speak kindly to the children, and in the night, in the warm moistness of their bed, he would quietly apologize, and he would not insist on having sex. So Annabelle had at least thirty-six hours of happiness to look forward to, and she was grateful for that.
She was also relieved to have learned that Herman hadn’t meant anything specific by the writing on the window wall. If he’d known anything for sure he would have given her a lot worse beating than she’d gotten, and he would have said something, too. So it was as usual. Time had passed since the last time he’d gotten jealous, enough time so that he’d gotten jealous again. He had some weird clock in him, Herman did, and it kept better time than he knew.
Annabelle sat up, wincing, and wet the washcloth again under the cold-water tap. She wrung it out and settled back in the tub, pressing the cloth cautiously against the right side of her face.
After her bath she brushed her hair and put on clean clothes and went out to the kitchen, where Camellia was doing the dishes. And maybe it was that, the sight of her smallest child doing the dishes, or maybe it was Arnold out in the yard feeding and watering the animals, or maybe it was Rose-Iris sitting in a lawn chair in the room with the window wall, staring out through the window at nothing… whatever it was, Annabelle was suddenly bursting with energy.
She started cleaning the house. She cleaned vigorously, without stopping, for three hours. By the time she’d finished, the sun had lowered itself so far in the western sky that the day was teetering on the brink of night.
The children had trailed along after her for a while, whining with dismay, but Annabelle, singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” as she worked, ignored them except to tell them cheerfully to get out of her way or stop bothering her.
She cleaned the bathroom and the kitchen. She cleaned the big bedroom and the girls’ bedroom. She would have cleaned Arnold’s bedroom, too, except that he flung himself past her and stood in front of his door with arms and legs outstretched, barring her passage, and there was a look of frantic pleading on his face, so Annabelle laughed and turned away.
She washed floors and polished windows. She wiped out the fridge and the cupboards, and cleaned the top of the stove, though not the oven, and went around the house with a spray bottle of Mr. Clean rubbing at dirt on walls and window ledges.
She was doing the inside of the window wall, a task that took almost half an hour all by itself, when she said to Rose-Iris, “Heat me up some of that hamburger stuff, will you? And maybe make a pot of tea.”
When she finally finished she was tired and sweaty and filled with satisfaction. I’ll have to have me another bath before I go to bed, she thought, and that reminded her of another chore. She hurried into the bedroom, stripped the bed and remade it with clean sheets.
“Come on, Ma,” said Rose-Iris. “It’s ready.”
Annabelle sat at the kitchen table and ate hungrily. She had a plateful of Hamburger Helper, a mug of sweetened tea and two pieces of white bread. She always bought whole-wheat bread for the rest of the family, because it was good for them, but she got white bread for herself because she preferred it. Annabelle loved real butter, too, but seldom bought it because margarine was cheaper. She had been very happy when for her birthday last March Rose-Iris and Camellia had given her a pound of real butter. It was a joke present, but it was a very good present.
Arnold had gone off into the living room to watch TV and Rose-Iris was in her room, getting ready for bed. Camellia sat at the table, her chin in her hand, watching Annabelle eat. “The house sure is clean,” she said.
Annabelle nodded. “It’s so clean I won’t have a thing to do tomorrow. I can spend hours in my garden.”
And hours with Bobby, she thought.
Camellia pushed some bread crumbs around on the surface of the kitchen table. “What did those words mean, Ma? The ones we took off the window wall.”
Annabelle swallowed what was in her mouth and took a long drink of tea. She stood, and picked up her dishes. “They’re words from the Bible,” she said calmly, putting her plate and mug in the sink. “Somebody’s mind dredged them up from the Bible, and smeared them all over the glass. It’s a good thing they were put on glass, I can tell you,” she said, squirting dish detergent into the sink. “It would have been a darn sight harder to get them off wood, for instance.” She turned on the hot-water tap. “It’s time you were in bed, Camellia. It’s getting late.”
“Tell me a story about when you were a little girl,” said Camellia. “Please?”
Annabelle sighed, and flicked water at her.
Camellia ducked. “Please?”
“Get yourself into bed,” said Annabelle. “Then maybe I’ll tell you a story.”
She was washing her dishes when Arnold wandered into the kitchen.
“Is Dad coming back tonight?” he said.
Annabelle kept her back to him. It was in the presence of her son that she felt most troubled, as though this was where her greatest failure lay. Which was very odd, under the circumstances.
She put her plate in the drain
er and began washing the saucepan in which Rose-Iris had heated her dinner.
“Because if he isn’t,” said Arnold, “I could get up in the night, and check on the animals.”
“I don’t think you need to worry about the animals,” said Annabelle.
“But Dad worries about them,” said Arnold.
She heard chair legs scrape across the floor, heard him sit down. He was probably straddling the chair, like his father liked to do.
Annabelle rinsed out the saucepan and set it in the drainer. She let the water out of the sink, wrung out the dishcloth and wiped the counters, sluiced clean water around in the sink. She folded the dishcloth and then she turned around.
She saw a tiny flinch occur in Arnold’s face when he got a good look at the bruise on her cheek. His eyes slid away from her. She’d have to put makeup on that bruise, tomorrow.
“If I happen to wake up,” he said, “I’ll go out and have a look around.”
Annabelle nodded. She wanted to reach out and touch his face, and pull him close to her for a big hug. But she was afraid that he would draw away from her, out of contempt, the worst kind of contempt, the kind that grew reluctantly out of love.
“You’re a good person, Arnold,” she said.
He shuffled awkwardly to his feet. “I’m gonna go watch TV.”
Camellia called out from the girls’ bedroom.
Annabelle found them both in bed. Rose-Iris was reading a book and Camellia was lying down, the sheet up to her chin, the rest of the covers folded neatly at the bottom of her bed. Annabelle, standing in the doorway, gazing upon her daughters, realized that she was smiling.
“Tell me a story,” said Camellia.
“A story about what?”
“Tell me about Sunday dinners,” said Camellia. She patted the edge of her bed, and Annabelle sat down.