“Edgy,” Eve said. “Iconoclastic. Not your mother’s Oldsmobile.”
“Right,” Tilda said, deciding they’d talked enough about her sins. “So does Gwennie seem a little odd to you lately?”
“Gwennie always seems odd to me,” Eve said, sitting up, “which is one of the many reasons I love her. Did I tell you she went to the Eddie Bauer outlet and came back with five sweaters, one for you, one for her, one for Na-dine, one for me, and one for Louise? I said, ‘Gwennie, that’s two for me,’ and she said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, dear, you’d never wear black.’”
“Which is true,” Tilda said. “Although I never thought of Louise as an Eddie Bauer girl.”
“Which is why you need this guy and not Scott,” Eve said. “You need a burglar in the night, not a lawyer in the day. The Louise in you needs him like the Louise in me needs a black sweater.”
“There is no Louise in me.” Tilda felt a little depressed about that. She stood up, handed Eve the last piece of chocolate, and put Steve on the floor.
“There’s a little Louise in every woman.” Eve leaned down the bed and straightened the painting where it rested against the headboard. “Just because yours is nicknamed Vilma doesn’t mean it isn’t really Louise.”
“And I do not need a burglar in the night.” Tilda thought back to her disgraceful behavior, asking him to rescue her. “That guy brings out the worst in me.”
“That’s your inner Louise,” Eve said, approval in her voice. “Set her free. Really, I don’t know what I’d do without Louise. Just about the time I think I’m going to start screaming, it’s Wednesday night and there she is, blowing off all my steam.”
“Right,” Tilda said. “I don’t teach elementary school, I paint murals. It’s very peaceful. I have no steam to blow.”
“Just remember the three rules,” Eve said as if Tilda hadn’t spoken. “She only comes out four nights a week, she never has sex at home, and she never tells anybody she’s you.”
“It’s not too late to get therapy,” Tilda said. “I’m sure your school insurance covers it.”
“Why?” Eve stood up and straightened her pajamas. “I’m happy. And I got two sweaters.”
“Good for you,” Tilda said. “Look, the guy in the closet was not that hot, I was exaggerating.”
“You know,” Eve said. “You keep talking yourself out of all the good stuff, you’re never going to get any.”
“I got some,” Tilda said, annoyed. “Scott and I had great sex. I came every time.” Steve put his paws on her leg and she picked him up. “They should put that man’s name in lights.”
“He was too calm,” Eve said. “Did you ever feel ravished? Did you ever feel as though if you didn’t have him, you’d die?”
“For the last time, I have no inner Louise.” Tilda looked back at the bed. “I don’t even have an inner Scarlet anymore.” She handed the dog to Eve and flipped the dustcover back over the bed, hiding the headboard, the quilt, and the painting. “I have responsibilities. I have to be smart. I have to steal a painting.” She felt a little sick at the thought, but that might have been the chocolate.
“Which is another reason why you shouldn’t have let the burglar go,” Eve said.
“I didn’t let him go. He let go of me.” She forced a smile. “And thank God for that.”
“Yeah,” Eve said. “Because all that good kissing would have gotten old eventually. I think there’s more chocolate upstairs, Vilma.”
Tilda sighed. “Lead me to it, Louise.”
AT NINE the next morning, Gwen poured herself a cup of coffee, punched up a nice Bacharach medley on the jukebox, pulled a pineapple-orange muffin from the bakery bag Andrew had dropped off on his way to jog, and then went out into the gallery to the marble counter and her latest Double-Crostic. To her right, the sun streamed through the cracked glass pane above the display window, and a loose metal ceiling tile bounced silently in the breeze from the central air. Behind her, Jackie DeShannon sang “Come and Get Me,” and Gwen thought, Fat chance. I’m stuck here forever.
The clue for G was “once a popular make of automobile”; that was always “Nash.” Why they never varied that clue was beyond Gwen. It wasn’t as if there weren’t other formerly popular automobiles. That gave her two of four letters for the word in the quote -R, blank, N, blank- which could be “rang,” or “rank,” or “rant,” or “rend,” or “ring,” or “rung,” or “runs”… Kill me now, Gwen thought.
Okay, H. “Nineteen fifty-four Ray Milland movie.” Fourteen spaces. “Damn.”
“Language, Grandma,” Nadine said from behind her, and Gwen turned. Nadine was sporting a black leather jacket, spiky black hair, mime-white makeup with raccoon eyes, Steve in her arms, and her boyfriend du jour, Burton, looking his usual, sullen Goth self, at her side.
“It’s June,” Gwen said to Nadine, deciding to ignore Burton since her day was already irritating. “Maybe not the leather jacket.”
Burton made one of those all-purpose cut-me-a-break sounds, and Gwen ignored him some more. He’d have been such a good-looking boy if it hadn’t been for the sneer.
Ethan came out of the office, eating a muffin, not looking pretty. “I snagged one, Mrs. Goodnight,” he said, his bony face cheerful under his bright red hair. “What do I owe you?”
Gwen’s mood improved slightly. “I’ll spot you the muffin if you can tell me a 1954 Ray Milland movie, fourteen spaces.”
“The Lost Weekend,” Ethan bit into the muffin.
“You’re a good boy, Ethan,” Gwen said and filled in the space.
“That’s what the ‘damn’ was for?” Nadine put the dog down and took a corner from Ethan’s muffin as the gallery door opened. “A 1954 movie? You know you’d have gotten that eventually.”
“Ray Milland makes it harder.” Gwen turned to face whoever was lost enough to come into the gallery and thought, Uh-oh. Six feet, dark hair, horn-rimmed glasses, dusty jacket, and dustier duffel bag, and even with all of that, you paid attention. “Loser,” Burton said under his breath, and Gwen looked into the newcomer’s sharp, dark eyes and thought, No, but trouble just the same.
“Ray Milland, 1954?” he said.
“Yes,” Gwen said, as Steve barked once, a low tremolo that slid up the scale at the end.
“Steve,” Nadine said, delighted. “You’re musical!”
“Dial M for Murder” The newcomer stuck out his hand. “Hi. I’m Davy Dempsey.”
Gwen frowned at him and shook his hand and thought, He’s charming. That can’t be good. She squinted at her book. Dial M for Murder made the word in the fourth line “never” instead of “nevew.”
“That’s a help.”
“Sorry,” Ethan said. “Should I give the muffin back?”
“No,” Gwen said. “You’re sixteen and you came up with a Ray Milland movie. You get muffins for life.”
“So, you want to buy a painting?” Nadine said to Davy, openly appraising him.
He studied the closest Finster, a pale oil of three depressed and evil fishermen closing in on a dyspeptic tuna. “ ‘A foul and depraved-looking lot, Bailiff.’”
“ ‘Those are just the spectators, Your Honor,’” Ethan said, and the two of them grinned at each other.
“What?” Gwen said, not reassured. That smile, that confidence, that glint in his eye. Who does this guy remind me of?
“Movie quotes,” Nadine said, affection in her voice. “Ethan just found another film geek to play with.”
“Losers,” Burton said under his breath.
“So what are you here for?” Nadine said to the stranger, focused as always.
“You have a room to rent?” He nodded toward the sign in the window as Steve crept closer and sniffed his shoes. “I’ll take anything, even the attic.”
“Aunt Tilda has the attic,” Nadine said. “She’s not good with the sharing.”
“Efficiency apartment,” Gwen said. “Furnished, clean, neat, eight hundred dollars, two months’ rent in
advance. Don’t worry about the dog. He doesn’t bite.” We hope.
“You going to stay for two months?” Nadine said, eyeing his duffel with suspicion.
“Probably not,” Davy said, grinning at her. “Basically, I’m on my way to Australia.”
“Support Your Local Sheriff,” Ethan said.
“I don’t know that one,” Nadine said, shoving her hand at Davy. “I’m Nadine and this is my grandmother, Gwennie.” She nodded over her shoulder. “That’s Burton and that’s Ethan, and that’s Steve, sniffing your foot.”
“Hey,” Ethan said, waving his muffin. Burton glowered. Steve sat down and scratched behind his ear.
“Can we go now?” Burton said.
“No,” Nadine said, and Burton shut up.
“Can you give me references?” Gwen said to Davy.
“Not from here,” Davy said. “I can give you several in Florida. Miami.”
Florida, Gwen thought. Sparkling blue water. Cool white beaches. Alcoholic drinks with little umbrellas. She’d kill to be in Florida, even if it was June.
“We gotta go now,” Burton said, slinging his arm around Nadine’s shoulders. Nadine looked annoyed while Ethan munched his muffin, ignoring Burton completely.
“The jacket,” Gwen said to Nadine. “It’s Louise’s. If you sweat in it, there’ll be hell to pay.”
“You’re right.” Nadine shrugged off the jacket and Burton ’s arm at the same time. “Take the hair, too,” she said, and pulled off the black wig, freeing the damp blonde curls matted around her face. “June is not a Goth month.”
Burton was disgusted, but then, he always was, Gwen thought. Clearly Nadine had inherited the Goodnight women’s legendary taste for impossible men. She looked back at Davy again. Perhaps Louise should not meet this one.
“See you later, Australia,” Nadine said, and went out the door, Burton ’s arm around her once again. Ethan ambled behind them both, finishing off his muffin.
Davy leaned on the counter and watched them go. “She does know she’s with the wrong guy?”
“I don’t know,” Gwen said. “Nadine is a very deep child.”
Back in the office, the jukebox started to play “Wishin’ and Hopin’.”
“Dusty,” Davy said, lifting his chin to listen. “Good omen. Am I renting?”
Sixteen hundred dollars. “Yes,” Gwen said.
He nodded. “Now, there’s just one problem.”
I knew it.
“I got my pocket picked in a bar last night,” he was saying. “Dumb of me. I’ve got money coming in later, but I had to cancel all my credit cards, so for right now all I have is a hundred bucks.”
He smiled at her again and her lips quirked automatically. A hundred bucks was a start, and it wasn’t as if there was anything in the apartment worth stealing.
She let her eyes slide sideways to Dorcas’s beautifully painted but depraved fishermen.
Or in the gallery.
“But I can have a friend wire me the rest by tomorrow. Is that all right with you?”
“Yes,” Gwen said, giving up.
He said, “You are a good person,” and handed her five twenties.
Gwen took them. “The room’s on the fourth floor. I’ll get the key and take you up.”
She backed into the office and fished in the desk for the key to 4B, across the hall from Dorcas in 4A. She could have put him in 2B, but that would have put him across from her apartment. Dorcas was always expecting the worst anyway. If he turned out to be an ax murderer, he could reinforce her theory of life. She took the keys out to him.
“Thank you,” he said, taking the key ring. “You won’t regret this.” Then he must have seen something in her eyes because he stopped and added, “Really. It’s okay,” and for a moment she felt that it was, that whatever he was, it would be fine.
Then she realized who he reminded her of. Tony. Right down to the “You won’t regret this,” when he’d proposed and she’d accepted, not knowing much about him except he appeared to be crazy about her and she was starting to appear to be pregnant with Eve.
“Hello?” he said, and she realized she’d been staring at him.
“Right this way,” she said, and steered him out of the gallery before he turned into Tony and sold her a Finster.
DAVY WASN’T SURE what he’d said to make Gwen Goodnight stare at him as if he were the Angel of Death, but she seemed to be dealing with it as she led him up the three flights of stairs to the apartment. The hall could have used some paint, but it was clean and well lit, which was more than Davy could have said for a lot of the places he’d lived in. His landlady didn’t have much money, he deduced, but she was hardworking. Or at least somebody was hardworking. Probably not Nadine.
He grinned a little to himself, thinking of Nadine’s curly hair and pale blue eyes; clearly she was somebody who swam in Betty’s gene pool. And Gwen, too. If you lined them up, all three of them with those weird eyes, they’d look like an outtake from Children of the Damned.
“So I’ve met your granddaughter,” Davy said to Gwen, as they reached the top of the second set of stairs. “When can I meet your daughter?”
“When you’ve had time to rest,” Gwen said without looking back. “My daughters can wear on a person.”
More than one, Davy thought, and almost ran into Gwen, who’d stopped on the stairs above him.
“How’d you know I have daughters?” she asked him.
“Well, Nadine had to come from somewhere.”
“Maybe I had a son.”
“Lucky guess,” Davy said.
Gwen did not look appeased, but she went up the next flight of stairs and gestured to the door on her left. “Four B.”
Davy put the key in the lock and turned it, but before he could go in, the door to 4A opened and a ghost stood in the doorway, arms akimbo.
“Dorcas,” Gwen said, smiling brightly. “This is Davy Dempsey, your new neighbor. Davy, this is Dorcas Finster.”
Dorcas was tall, thin, patrician-looking, and smelled of turpentine and linseed oil, but mostly she was white: short white hair, dead-white skin, huge white artist’s smock. An equally white cat twined around her ankles and then sat down on the landing.
“And Ariadne,” Gwen said, nodding to the cat.
“Nice to meet you, Dorcas,” Davy said, not sure it was.
Dorcas looked him up and down. She did not have pale blue eyes, Davy noticed, which was some relief. She shook her head. “Watch out for Louise,” she said, and shut her door. Ariadne sat on the landing, unperturbed about being stranded.
“Louise?” Davy said to Gwen. “Who’s Louise?”
“Dorcas likes to be colorful,” Gwen said, and Davy looked at her in disbelief. “So there’s your room.”
The apartment held a shabby blue couch, a table painted in blue stripes, two blue chairs, and through an archway, a bed covered in a blue-and-purple crazy quilt with a framed sampler over it. When he opened the door next to the bed, he found a small bathroom with a shower. The place was small, shabby, clean, close to Clea, and even closer to Betty. “Perfect,” Davy told Gwen, who looked around at the room to see what she’d missed.
“You’re easy to please,” Gwen said, heading for the door. “Let me know if you need anything.”
“I certainly will,” Davy said, as she shut the door, thinking, Send up your daughters, I think I met one of them last night. He dropped his bag on the floor and sat on the bed, expecting the rattle of ancient bed springs as he bounced on it and hitting a solid mattress instead. Bless you, Gwennie, he thought and then wondered again what he’d said to her to put her off. The bed quilt distracted him, and he tried to make sense of the pattern, a crazy quilt with lots of yellow lopsided diamonds lined with sharp white triangles that looked like teeth. Which meant that either he was deeply disturbed or the quilt maker was.
He got up to unpack his bag and glanced at the sampler. It was worked in blues and greens, neat rows of alphabets and numbers and a scene of a ho
use flanked by two trees. Davy looked closer at the lettering:
“Gwen Goodnight. Her Work. 1979.”
He looked at the blues and the purples in the quilt and then back to the blues and greens in the sampler. There was something around the base of the trees in the sampler, and he leaned in again to see it.
Wolves. Little purple wolves with tiny, sharp white triangle teeth.
Gwen was definitely Betty’s mother.
He unpacked his duffel and went out to reconnoiter Clea’s basement windows, eat lunch, and call Simon, who was suspiciously absent. By the time Davy got back to the gallery, it was afternoon, and he stretched out on the bed to consider his situation and fell asleep. He woke up when someone knocked on the door.
When he opened it, Betty stood there, holding out a stack of towels. “Gwennie thought you-” she said, and then her eyes widened, and he yanked her into the room.
She tripped and lurched into him, and he stumbled backward and caught her as she lost her balance. She said, “Ouch!” and he slapped his hand over her mouth and pulled her with him onto the bed.
“Okay, we’ve been here before,” he said to her, keeping his hand over her mouth as he pinned her to the quilt. “Unless you want everybody in this place to know you’re a burglar, keep your voice down.” She glared at him over his hand, and he said in a more conversational tone, “No kicking. No biting. And don’t have an asthma attack.”
She brought her knee up and he rolled to avoid her, and caught sight of Dorcas through the open door, watching them, as unperturbed as Ariadne. Tilda shoved him away and herself off the bed with one motion, and stood out of arm’s reach, looking frantic. “How did you get here? How did you find me? What are you doing here?”
“Renting a room?” Davy said.
“No you’re not,” she said and shot out the door. He went after her, but she was fast on her feet, and Ariadne got in his way, so he didn’t catch her until they were on the ground floor.
“This,” Betty said, as she fell through a door with him right behind her, “is the guy from last night.”
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