The Tooth of Time

by Sue Henry

  It was no use chasing after the middle of the night visitor, who would, I was sure, have vanished completely before I could reach that bedroom corner. So I stood where I was, clinging to the handle of the screen door, looking out at the carport and surrounding yard in the small amount of pale light that filtered in through the branches of a tree from a streetlight perhaps thirty yards away.

  The house was situated in the rear third of a large rectangular lot, with a bigger, two-story residence between it and the street. That more formidable building faced passing traffic, turning its back on Karen’s rental as if the smaller house were a less acceptable, single-story adopted sister standing a bit too close behind.

  The rain had stopped, leaving only a musical drip or two to disturb the puddles beneath the eaves.

  “Maxie?” Karen’s concerned voice questioned behind me. “Was that someone at the door? What’s going on?”

  She switched on the overhead light in the living room behind me and I turned to see her standing near the hallway, leaning on the one crutch she could awkwardly manage with casts on both her left ankle and forearm, having hobbled that far from her bedroom.

  Half an hour later, with cups of tea I had suggested and made, we were sitting with the dining table between us, she with her back to the kitchen as I explained that it was indeed someone at the door—but evidently not a visitor she would have welcomed—how I had heard the surreptitious sounds of attempted entry, and my blunder in knocking over the stool in the dark that alerted and discouraged whoever it had been.

  “Well,” she said, “the crash was probably a good thing. It might have been dangerous for you to suddenly throw open the door and confront whoever was trying to get in, don’t you think?”

  I stared at her, recalling how disinclined to deal with anything disagreeable I knew Karen had always been. She would rather rationalize trouble away or, if possible, let someone else take responsibility for it.

  She looked back at me with blue eyes innocently wide, permed blond hair in tangles from her pillow, and yawned. She hadn’t changed a bit. A small woman, she looked pretty much as she always had, though there were now lines in her face, darkening circles under her eyes, and, like my own, her jawline had softened under the chin.

  Well, I thought to myself, we’re both showing signs of our senior status.

  So I agreed that opening the door might possibly have been dangerous, but doubted it, considering how fast the intruder had vanished. I wished, though, that I had been able to get more than a fleeting impression that was of no use whatsoever in establishing the identity of the prowler.

  Uneasily I wondered what Karen would have done if she had been alone in the house, disabled as she currently was.

  “Shouldn’t we be calling the police?” I asked her.

  Again she shrugged the idea off. “What good would it do? He—she—didn’t get in and is long gone now. You can’t identify whoever it was, and anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just more harassment from the new owner and landlord. Less than a month after I moved in here, the original landlord sold the place to Mr. Taylor, and he let me know he wanted me out as soon as possible, though I had signed a six-month lease. It’s part of why I decided to move back to Alaska. He’s a horrible man who’s been harassing me constantly—calling to see if I’m still here, showing up at odd hours, using his key to get in without notice. I know he’s been here when I’ve been out because things have been moved, and once the door was unlocked when I came back. So you see, it could have been him. Maybe he’s resorted to trying to scare me away now.”

  “Coming in without your permission isn’t legal. Why haven’t you reported him?”

  “Oh, I’ll be gone soon, and he’d just deny it. It didn’t seem worth the trouble.”

  “Why does he want you out so badly?”

  “I don’t know. He won’t say. I’ve done nothing wrong. Maybe he wants to live here—or has another tenant he wants to move in. The property sits between two office buildings, and that makes me wonder if he intends to tear down both houses and sell the property to some developer. Whatever . . .”

  Heaving a sigh of resignation, she rubbed at her forehead with the back of her uninjured hand as if she had a headache, took a sip of tea, set the cup back in its saucer, and leaned back in her chair to say, “If only he would believe that I want out of here as much—maybe more—than he wants me gone. Why can’t he just back off to let me get on with it as fast as possible? What have I ever done to make him so unreasonable anyway? Nothing. I’ve been hurt! Why can’t he understand and sympathize with that? I was doing okay with the packing until this happened.”

  She lifted her left arm in its cast as example of this. “Oh, Maxie. I can’t tell you how very thankful I am to have you here. It is so good of you to leave home and—well—just come. Thank you.”

  “No thanks necessary. You’d probably do the same for me in like circumstances, so you know I’m glad that I could, Karen,” I told her. And, at that particular moment, I was—mostly.

  I will have to admit, though, that it seemed—with a prowler added to the already complicated mix—to be more than I had bargained for when I had received a beseeching phone call from Karen and left Homer, Alaska, where I live, and caught the first available Hawaiian Airlines flight out of Anchorage to Hilo. But Karen Parker Bailey was an old acquaintance, though I wouldn’t really say friend. She had sounded stressed and frustrated in her request for assistance, and I was without real commitments, except to myself, and free to go. We had known each other for years of sharing somewhat similar lives in the same small town; we’d even gone to high school together. Our husbands had been friends, which kept us in the same circles. They had both been fishermen and hers, like my first husband, Joe, had drowned at sea, but much later in life, not long after retiring.

  As I offered reassurance across the table in those early-morning hours, I took a long look at her that reinforced what I had partly observed and partly suspected on my arrival the afternoon before. Karen seemed suddenly old in a way that I assumed had mostly to do with the accident-induced pressure and the strain she had been experiencing, but which I now thought was more than that. There was something about her—behavior and attitude—that suggested to me that she was not only in retreat from her present circumstances, but, perhaps, from things in general.

  Short and artificially blond, a sugar-and-spice girl with a calculated helpless streak, she had always been one to require personal appreciation, with the assumption that care would, and should, be taken of her. Three years older, Lewis Bailey had been exactly what she required. He had adored her and gone out of his way to take care of her. In a childless marriage, she had been the childish one while he had become very parentlike, somewhat to the amusement of our small community, where everyone knew everyone else. The roles they had adopted, unrealistic or not, had seemed to work well enough for them, though others often viewed the relationship a bit askance, hiding tolerant grins behind their hands.

  When Lewis had died, Karen suddenly had no one to support her and seemed at a loss to know what to do with herself. Abruptly cast adrift, she had gone on grieving much longer than seemed necessary or appropriate. I remember wanting to give her a shake and tell her to get on with it, and perhaps I—or someone—should have done so. But things had seemed to gradually improve, and she took over most of her life alone, if not with total confidence, at least with what had passed to keep herself—as one of my neighbors put it—clean, fed, and out of jail.

  Because she and Lewis had bought a place just outside Hilo on which to build, planning to retire there, against advice she had insisted on following the path of least resistance and had gone ahead with those plans by herself. It’s what Lewis wanted, she asserted. After shipping their household goods, she soon left Homer and moved into a Hilo rental before the house construction even began. It had never seemed to dawn on her that she was leaving the support system of the community in which she had spent her entire life, so it was n
o surprise to me that she found herself less than happy, or capable, in a place where she knew almost no one who would put up with her helpless expectations.

  Now, it seemed, with injury as excuse, she was falling back into as much dependent behavior as she could. So I would evidently have to do one of two things: Either accept responsibility for the job of packing her up and moving her back to Alaska, where she had decided to go, or finally take the bit from between my teeth and tell her exactly what I had wanted to tell her before: Damn it all, Karen! Grow up and get on with it!

  Why, oh why, am I at times such a sucker for someone in trouble? I wondered. How could I have . . . ?

  Ah, lovie, I heard, Daniel, my second husband, laugh quietly in my mind, don’t chuck a fit. She’s always been a silly sheila, but you can at least give it a bash and get it over with. It’ll all come good and you’ll be back home soon to watch your garden grow.

  My dear Daniel, bless him! It had been no easier to bury a second husband after the first—having been lucky enough to love and be loved by them both. Besides scraps of his colorful Aussie slanguage, he left me with an instinctive knowledge of what he would have suggested in response to many situations, as he was dependably level-headed, usually encouraging, and almost always in good humor. He had left me well provided for, but had also known that I was totally capable of taking care of myself.

  Thank you, Daniel.

  So, instead of admonishing Karen, for the moment, I kept my opinions to myself in favor of something else that had been on my mind.

  “Tell me,” I suggested, “exactly how and where you fell.”

  “There.” Karen pointed to an open doorway in the wall behind me, a dark room beyond. “That space used to be a garage, but someone made it into what must have been a family room. It has a cement floor that’s two steps lower than this part of the house. I was using it to sort and pack up, and was moving a box of heavy stuff out there from the kitchen. But I couldn’t see ahead because of the box I was carrying. I felt for the step and missed. My foot came down on the edge of it, which pitched me forward so that I fell sideways on the floor, losing the box as I went down. My left ankle was across the step’s edge when the box fell on it. The rest of me landed hard on this arm.” She once again raised her cast-encased left arm. “I heard the bone snap in my forearm, but didn’t realize I my ankle was broken as well until I tried to get up and it hurt—terribly. I had to crawl back up here to the phone to call for help.”

  “I’m sure it did. And so, because you live alone, they kept you overnight in the hospital.”

  “Yes. But I came home in a taxi the next day just after noon. I hate hospitals.”

  “Then you called me?”

  “Well, not for a couple of days. I thought maybe I could hire someone from the paper to help me finish packing and getting things ready to ship home. But there simply wasn’t anyone reliable, or who was able to do it right.”

  Or who would make decisions for you, I thought, but didn’t say.

  “So then I called you. And you came. I do so apprec—”

  Feeling overthanked already, I cut her off and suggested that we had better plan on a busy day tomorrow—or today, as the clock now indicated—so we should go back to bed for what rest we could salvage, which we did.

  But once again in my bed, I found sleep impossible to come by and lay partly considering how to proceed with the job at hand, but mostly remembering the long road and serendipitous circumstances that had brought me back to Alaska for the summer—and, barely a week after arriving at home, in the right place for Karen to reach with her plea for assistance.

  None of it had been planned or anticipated. The garden I had left in Homer would probably grow to a wild ruin in my absence. But most of all I missed the company of my inveterate travel companion, mini-dachshund Stretch, for, given rabies-free Hawaii’s animal-import regulations, which require strict and lengthy quarantine, I had been forced to leave him behind. So the quicker I finished with the job at hand, the sooner I could go back to retrieve him from a temporary home with my friend Doris, who looked after things for me when I was away.

  Rolling over in frustration and giving my too-fat pillow a thump to flatten it a little, I began to mentally go back over the decisions and events that, mile by mile, had unpredictably brought me to Hawaii for what I foresaw would be no vacation.