The longest wait of all had been in the weeks before she killed Ditmars. She was not trying to concoct the perfect murder, per Walter Huff’s advice to Phyllis in Double Indemnity. She was resigned to not getting away with it, although she did her best. Lord knows, there was no shortage of people who had reason to want Ditmars dead, given the things he had done. Her fear was that she would only maim Ditmars, deal him a crippling injury, and then she would be trapped with him forever, caring for him.
Prison had been easy for a waiting pro such as herself. Unpleasant, cruel, but easy, the affronts predictable and impersonal. Unlike life with Ditmars, it could be managed once she learned the rules and personalities. She assumed she would never get out, so all she was waiting for was one day to end and another to begin.
Then she was released, met Gregg, fucked him, fucked up—fucked up by fucking him—and that was that. She might as well have gone back to prison. Luck, so overdue, finally arrived in the form of a nasal Baltimore voice, shouting at her from the television during an All My Children commercial break. She knew that voice, that guy, that shyster. Irving used to complain about him all the time, but anyone who did business with Irving had to be a little bent. Look at Ditmars. She called the number that promised to change her life. And for once a man’s promise was kept. Then a new wait. She is still waiting. But it’s a waiting she has chosen, so she has power. It’s her decision to wait a little longer. What will she tell Adam six, eight months from now? She’ll figure something out. It’s easy to make people believe in good luck, because who doesn’t want to believe in good luck?
At work that night, Polly lets Cath’s deadline approach, showing no concern. She has no concerns. She tells Mr. C what’s what, and, sure enough, he doesn’t care.
“He hit you, this man?”
Polly nods. “Hit” doesn’t begin to cover what Ditmars did to her, but it’s good enough.
“You did your time, you deserve to be out, it’s nobody’s business,” he says. “If my business falls off and I can keep only one waitress—it will be you. You’re the better one. And you make my cook happy.”
So Mr. C knows about them, too. She and Adam must have been terrible at hiding their relationship. Mr. C is the most oblivious man she’s ever met. Not a bad thing in a man. Her preference, actually.
It’s a busy night, the last Thursday in August, and Polly makes sure she is on top of her game, putting a little extra into her encounters with Max and Ernest, laughing at their stale jokes and observations. She can tell it throws Cath off her stride, seeing Polly happy and calm.
Toward 10 p.m., Cath corners Polly by the ice machine: “What about that thing we talked about?”
Polly waits a beat, as if puzzled, as if it’s so inconsequential as to have slipped her mind. “Oh, that.”
“Do you have my money?”
“No.”
“Tonight is the deadline.”
Polly shrugs. “What can I do? You didn’t give me very much notice.”
“I’m going to tell everyone.”
“Fine.”
“Not just Adam. Everybody.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll have to leave. This is a small town. People won’t want to come here once they know. Casper won’t be able to keep you on.”
She shrugs. “I’ll let him be the one to tell me that, if that’s okay with you.”
Her coolness infuriates Cath. She’s the nervous one now, worried that her bombshell is all fizzle, no pop. She has to make good on her threat, or she’ll look like a fool. She is a fool. She has blackmailed Polly into doing the best thing. No more secrets, from anyone.
Well, almost no secrets. Just the one, and it’s a happy one. Happy secrets are okay.
* * *
That night, Polly doesn’t slip Adam the usual Adam and Eve note signaling that she hopes for a visit from him. He’s puzzled, she can tell, but she needs to be alone and sit in the quiet of this new life. She walks home, finds herself humming. She likes it here, in Belleville. She’s happy to stay. Maybe not forever-forever, but for a good long while.
She’s having a glass of wine at her metal-top table when she hears a slight tap. She smiles. Adam jury-rigged the door this morning, but it doesn’t really lock. She’s had her alone time and now she’s glad he presumed he could drop by.
“Come in,” she calls out. “It’s not like I could lock it now if I tried.”
Only it’s Cath.
“If you’re going to stay, you better give me some money,” she says without preamble, her words a slurry rush. There’s booze on her breath.
“I am staying,” Polly says. “And Casper says if he has to let one of us go, it’s going to be you.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Ask him.”
“Then you damn well better give me some money.”
“I don’t have any money.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
“I can’t be responsible for what you’ve heard. I don’t have any money.” A pause. “Although I guess I’ll have a lot more when I’m the only one waiting tables at the High-Ho.”
“What about your husband?”
“My husband’s dead. As you know. I killed him, and I don’t care who knows anymore. My sentence was commuted. I was defending my own life, in a sense.”
“Not him. The one who came looking for you. I bet he’d pay something for what I know.”
Polly laughs at this. She’s not sure what’s funnier, the idea of Gregg having money or Gregg giving it up. Does Cath think there’s going to be a custody battle over Jani? “Go ask him. Heck, take him, he’s available. Make sure you use a condom, though. His sperm is pretty determined.”
“I bet you got knocked up on purpose.”
Polly sees herself in the bathroom in her apartment four years ago, staring with dismay at a beaming pregnancy stick, so pinkly confident that it was sharing good news. She had killed a man, gone to prison, endured public shame, reinvented herself. But she couldn’t bear the idea of an abortion. At the time, she told herself it was because of being raised Catholic. With her parents dead—there were those who said Polly’s conviction put the final nail in her mother’s coffin—she should have been free of the church. She was already down for one mortal sin, why not another?
Because, in the back of her head, she couldn’t help being curious: What would it be like this time? How hard could it be, compared to what she had already done and endured? She felt guilty even thinking such thoughts, disloyal to Joy. But the truth was, she wanted the experience of being mother to a normal kid. Even if the father was Gregg.
And Jani was a good kid, although Polly loved Joy a little bit more. Mothers aren’t supposed to say that, feel that, but Polly can’t help acknowledging the difference. Jani’s a sweetheart, a natural-born winner. She’d be fine. Joy needed her.
When she answers Cath, it’s with a heat generated by these memories, the losses she has known. The father who dried up like a cornhusk, the mother who followed him too quickly, her heart doubly broken. The two daughters, neither one with Polly now because she has done what is best for them.
“No, I don’t play it that way. But maybe you should. It’s probably the only way you’ll ever get a man to stay, getting knocked up. Good luck with that. Adam says you’re a rotten lay.”
* * *
The dew is heavy, Polly’s feet are drenched by the time she knocks at the door to room 3. The rain that has been threatening all night starts to fall in sheets and there are thunderclaps, full and close, almost loud enough to drown out the sirens in the distance. It’s the last day of August—actually the first day of September—and the first true cold front of the season lies behind this storm. Almost every Labor Day weekend, it seems, the first true cold front arrives.
“Rabbit, rabbit,” she says to the night air. But maybe it only counts after you go to sleep and wake up?
Adam opens his door, sleepy, confused. He’s really handsome. She considered his l
ooks too bland the first time she saw him, but now she thinks he’s the best-looking man she’s ever known.
“What the—? What time is it?”
“I missed you.”
“But—”
“I told Casper today. He doesn’t care. Everyone knows about us now. Everyone who matters. Turns out he knew all along. Guess we’re not the supersleuths we thought we are.”
“I think you mean stealthy,” he says. “Not sleuths.” He looks uneasy.
“Sleuth, stealth. Let me in, college boy. I’m soaked.”
She is on top of him when the second wave of sirens start.
“Whatever’s burning, they must have had to send for another crew,” he says, his hands pressing hard into her shoulder blades. “From Millsboro or wherever. I wonder how anything can burn in this rain.”
“Who cares,” she says, moving faster. “We’re safe.”
She stays all night, into the morning. He’s the one who suggests they go out to breakfast at the diner on Main. She contemplates last night’s dress, still damp from the downpour.
“I can’t go out in that.”
“We’ll swing by your place.”
She and Adam stroll hand in hand toward the center of town, public at last, rooted at last, a couple. No more shadows, no more hiding. The morning feels as if the world is new, bright and crisp and ready for back to school. But an acrid smoke lingers in the breeze, making her nostrils flare with memories of Ditmars. He used to come home smelling like this. A combination of smoke and chemicals, sometimes even a whiff of death, although he always swore the sweetish scorched smell was from insulation, not people. And there was no question that Ditmars knew what people smelled like when they burned.
Yet, for all her knowledge, Polly is not prepared to turn the corner and see rubble where her apartment once stood. Everything—everything—is gone. Smoke is rising from the debris, the volunteer firefighters still bustle about, their long night still not over.
It’s shameful, but she starts to weep for her small array of possessions, the first things she’s been allowed to choose for herself. Her bed, her quilt, her table, her blue glasses. The silk bathrobe. The sundresses from the Purple Heart. Tiny things, material things, objects that can be replaced. But they could have been the building blocks of this new life.
Then she sees the gurney, covered by a sheet. It looks flat, but Polly’s not fooled. She was an arson investigator’s wife. She knows what an explosion can do to a body, how it collapses the internal organs. There’s something—someone—under that sheet.
Everyone stares at Polly as if she’s a ghost. In a sense, she is. Back from the dead, just that quick. Of course everyone would have assumed it was her, the tenant, in the wreckage. Who else could it be? But as she looks around, she realizes that most of the spectators are horrified in a bland, rubbernecking way. Belleville is a small town, yet few here know her. She spots her landlord, talking to one of the firefighters. He, at least, looks upset in a specific, visible way, but then—he’s just lost a significant property. Maybe if Max and Ernest strolled by, they would care that Polly is alive. As it is, only Adam knows this is her former home and he didn’t have to worry for a moment that she had been harmed because he’s holding her hand, sure of her. He knows it’s not her on the gurney.
She wonders when he’ll realize it has to be Cath.
Part Two
Fire
22
Adam stands at the grill, making the usual lunchtime items. He has his own method of frying burgers: He takes a ball of meat—larger than a golf ball but smaller than a tennis ball—then smashes it with great force, using two spatulas one on top of the other. After flipping, he places a thin slice of American cheese on each patty. There is simply no better cheese for burgers, no matter one’s culinary aspirations. He uses two patties per burger, otherwise the customer will feel he’s being shortchanged. Almost everyone values quantity over quality. The patties cook very fast when they are this thin, and he ruins two in a row, mesmerized by the way the flames lunge greedily for the drops of fat.
Cath probably did not die by fire. Almost no one ever does. If smoke inhalation didn’t get her, then it was probably the explosion itself. A horrible way to die, but quite fast. He hopes it was fast. An official ruling is expected soon.
Polly told investigators that morning she had no idea why Cath was in her apartment. The door was unlocked, a custom of small-town living she had come to appreciate. Besides, it couldn’t be locked since Adam kicked it in early Wednesday, although Polly didn’t mention that part to the investigators. She did tell them that she and Cath had a habit of stopping by each other’s places after work.
“You said that?” Adam asked. “That it was a habit?”
“I had been by her place last week, she came to see me two nights ago and apparently returned. That’s enough for a habit, right?”
“You make it sound like you were friends.”
“Just being factual. Lots of people saw me sitting with her at the trailer park last week, having a drink after work. Sure, she probably came by to make trouble for me, but I can’t know that. I did tell them that she was trying to blackmail me. And I told them that she couldn’t, because I had already let you and Mr. C know what she had on me.”
The stove was old, faulty, finicky. You had to turn the handles just so. Adam knew that. Cath couldn’t go more than thirty minutes without a smoke. Everybody knew that. She had probably used the burner to light a cigarette, then failed to turn it all the way off. Lit another and—
“It could have been my fault,” Polly said. “I could have been the one who didn’t turn it all the way off. And you know how I keep that scarf on my bedside lamp—what if it slipped, fell against the bulb? I had closed the windows because I knew rain was coming. And if there was already gas and a little fire started—I kept meaning to tell the landlord about that stove, but the rent was cheap and I didn’t cook much, not in this summer heat.”
Her story makes sense, Adam thinks, tossing the overdone burgers. Some chefs would try to serve them, wait to see if the customers complained, but he would never do that.
He pounds another globe of beef into submission. Story. Why did he think of it as a story?
There was so much confusion at the scene. The first responders were the local volunteers, unused to dealing with a blaze of this magnitude, hampered by the heavy rains, which helped keep the flames from spreading to the other buildings on Main, but made a sodden mess of the wreckage. They thought they were doing the right thing, moving Cath’s body when they found it in the early morning hours, but they compromised the investigation into her death.
They also began to question Polly on the spot, as she stood there holding Adam’s hand. “Where were you?” “Who is this?” She told them she had gone to Adam’s place about midnight, that she had no idea who was in her apartment, but she recognized Cath’s car, parked right there on Main. Later, they found Cath’s key ring, a heavy knob of turquoise, in the wreckage.
When Adam was asked during a more formal interview what time Polly came by his room, he agreed it was about midnight. But the fact is, he doesn’t know. He was asleep. He knows what she said to them. He assumes it’s true.
He’s pretty sure it’s true.
It has been five days since the fire. Cath’s sister came to town Sunday, husband in tow, screaming and crying and hurling accusations. They told the Delaware State Police investigators that Cath had all sorts of dirt on Polly, that the whole thing had to be a setup. But Polly had already owned her past, said she had told Mr. C and Adam what was what, and that Cath was angry because she had no real leverage. Polly begged police not to let word get out, but it was a small town and the gossip skipped and whirled from mouth to mouth, too delicious not to be shared.
Yet when the gossip settled, all anyone really knew was that Polly had a sad, brutal past. Yes, she had killed her husband. Yes, there was skepticism about her exoneration, but what was done was done. No one could
see how Polly, in bed with Adam, could be responsible for an explosion almost a mile away. Maybe Cath had gone there to confront Polly, then decided to lie in wait for her.
“Maybe,” Polly told the state investigators. “I should tell you—she had other reasons to be mad at me. She had a thing for Adam. We tried to keep our relationship quiet, out of respect for her feelings, but that was the real source of her anger, the reason she wanted to run me out of town. Adam chose me over her.”
There is no daily newspaper in Belleville. Cath’s death received a scant mention in the Wilmington paper and was the third story in the second break on the so-called Delmarva stations, out of Salisbury. “Belleville woman dead in explosion.” That’s that. Nothing’s going to happen. Adam doesn’t have to say or do anything more.
“I guess you could call it karma,” Polly said at one point. “She tried to hurt me, and she ended up hurt.”
Karma. That’s a name for it. Coincidence, too. Accident.
A check comes in, he flips it around: Adam and Eve, whiskey down.
“Very funny,” he says. They don’t have to plan their rendezvous anymore.
“It’s the real thing,” Polly calls over her shoulder. “Do we have any rye bread?”
Polly has to cover all the shifts now. Business is still brisk this first week of September. When she’s not working, she sits on his bed in room 3, looking at the classifieds. She’s circling things. Houses. For sale, not rent, and in the best part of town, where the streets are named for flowers and trees.
“You really want to put down roots? Here?”
“I thought that’s what we agreed to.”
Did they? He feels his restlessness kicking in. The fall is when he usually travels. It wasn’t that long ago that he thought he might go to New Zealand this autumn, catch its spring. Or somewhere on the other side of the equator. Flip the seasons, flip your life.
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