“Kyle?”
“Yeah.”
Jack can hear the whooshing of a match being lit and the sudden intake of air as Kyle inhales.
“How are you?”
“Fine,” Kyle says, and he exhales. “I’m fine. So you said something about my teacher?”
“Yeah. Right. What’s her name?”
“Celia Steinhauser. Mrs. S, we called her.”
“Huh. Thought I remembered that.”
“She’s dead.”
“Right. I’m working on her case. I was wondering . . . did you notice anything different in the days before she died? Anything unusual?”
“No.” On the other end of the phone, Kyle exhales.
“How about the guy in the hall the night I came down to see you? The guy on the cell? Shiny shoes? Nice suit?”
“Yeah,” Kyle says. “I do remember that guy. He came to meet Mrs. S a few times. But that was a while back. He just . . . stopped coming.”
“Huh.”
“So is that it?”
“I guess so. Thanks. Son?”
A lighter snaps open. He hears the flame catch. “Yeah?”
“Call me,” he says. Kyle grunts something he can’t quite make out, and Jack ends the call, leaves his son to lie down on a mattress stretched out across a floor, to stare at a dingy ceiling and share or not share with his girlfriend whatever it is he knows about this teacher found dying in her own living room. And Jack’s gut tells him Kyle knows something. From the way the kid sounded on the phone, Jack would say he knows a lot.
CHAPTER 14
Sometimes Dana thinks she’s channeling the dead—her friend from college, defeated by uterine cancer at forty-one, her favorite aunt, her twelfth-grade English teacher. Sometimes she can hear her mother’s voice as clearly as if she were standing in the room next to her. It comes through as a thought, and she is always far more pleasant than she was when she was alive. “Good job,” she might say when Dana completes a crossword puzzle on a Friday when they’re harder than usual. Or, “Do you still have that old recipe for lemon cakes that Aunt Julia used to make?” when Dana can’t decide what to fix for a potluck. Their relationship has improved greatly since her mother’s death, but her father is a different story. Her father rarely enters her mind. Neither his voice nor his memory is welcome. It isn’t so much who he was, it’s the madness he’s already poured into her ear, transmitted to the marrow of her bones, the illness from his own despotic father, his depressed, midwestern mother. And if he steals inside her dreams, they’re never good ones. They never walk together through the park, her small pink hand in his large tan one; they never feed the ducks at the pond at the end of the street where she grew up. In her dreams her father is always angry.
The circumstances of his death disturb her, the sudden, shocking way his car was hit by a train crossing to New York from Philadelphia. There was nothing left of him, her mother wailed into the phone to anyone who would listen. “We’ll have a closed casket.” Dana wondered at the time why they needed a casket at all if there was nothing left of him. Would it be for the collection of old black-and-white photographs he kept in the bottom drawer of his dresser, or for his wedding band, or the poetry he wrote, sitting at the desk in the living room, a small lamp illuminating the words he scrawled in a frenzy and then ripped up the next day, tossing the tiny pieces high into the air to rain down on the rug? She wondered if the casket would be buried with the bottles of gin he kept hidden under the front seat of his car and in the kitchen cabinet behind the brown sugar or with his anger that exploded sometimes on Sundays if she took too long getting ready for Mass. She wondered if the casket would be filled with love he saved up all those years and didn’t have the chance to give.
Dana thinks these things work backward from the way they should, these things of death. Had they been close, had they enjoyed the father-daughter chats, the hiking trips and Little League, she would have missed him more when he was gone. But she would at least have these things to pluck out and remember, these sweet moments to sprinkle like a trail of bread crumbs through her life. Instead she has always felt regret about her father, a great, vast emptiness in place of love. If she could go back in time, she’d do things differently. She’d understand his urgency, his speed; she’d see that he was trying to outrun the great gray cloud that made him sit vacant as a broken doll, his restless hands still and folded, at the kitchen table. His absence didn’t have a starting place. Her father is a gust of wind.
Lately he slips inside her brain, her father on the railroad tracks in his old Pontiac. He’s trying to tell her something. She can see it in his face, in the way he bends forward toward the still-unshattered glass of the windshield. In the seconds before his death, he’s trying to warn her. It isn’t the first time. Before her illness really gets a grip, Dana always sees her father’s face. She sees the Pontiac, and sometimes, in the distance, she can hear the train whistle, but only faintly. She never sees him die.
And if it was not an accident, her father’s blue car panting on the railroad tracks at the edge of town hours after he was expected home, if, as a witness said, it was as though he were waiting for the train to come, if the anger and the alcohol inside him finally dragged him there to die, Dana doesn’t want to know.
She pours a drink for Peter and tamps down her desire to take a few swallows. It’s his favorite, a martini straight up with two olives from a jar at the back of the fridge, a little old but still the green ones he prefers. She sits at the dining-room table, afraid of what he’ll say, afraid Detective Moss has told him what she said about the cell-phone picture. She glances at the kitchen clock and sees he’s nearly two hours late. She hears the garage door open, and she stands up, taking several deep breaths and stirring the vodka with her pinkie. She sticks some fish under the broiler and pops a bag of half-frozen broccoli into a pan of water as Peter stumbles through the screen door; sweat drips from his forehead and down along his jaw.
“Martini?”
“Thanks.” He takes the drink and gulps it down as if it’s water, as if he doesn’t realize it won’t quench his thirst.
“Another?” she says, and he nods. Dana walks back to the kitchen and roots around inside the slimy plastic carton of olives for a green one. “So how was your meeting with Detective Moss?”
“Okay.”
“What did he want?” She keeps her voice light as she walks into the dining room with the martini and sets it down. She concentrates on the wood grain in the tabletop, avoiding Peter’s eyes.
“To find Celia’s killer.” He takes a gulp of his martini. His face is red, his perfect hair damp and limp.
“Are you all right?”
He looks at her, and she looks away. She looks at the peeling paint on the ceiling where water once leaked in around the skylight. Her heart lurches in her chest.
“Why’d you do it?” he says, and Dana looks over his shoulder at the window in the living room.
“Do what?”
“Tell Jack Moss I was connected to that woman down the street?”
Dana doesn’t answer. She picks up Peter’s empty glass and fills it for the third time, making it a little stronger than before. The olive falls through the liquid like a stone, and she thinks of Virginia Woolf stuffing rocks inside her pockets and wandering into the river. She has always thought Virginia Woolf was a hero, simply walking off the way she did, in such a gracious, graceful way.
“Why’d you tell him Celia had a photo of me in her phone?”
“That isn’t what I said.”
“But close enough, right? Close enough for him to have me on the fucking hot seat this afternoon!”
“I just told him that was why I was over there that day. I told him she wanted to show me a picture she’d taken. I said I couldn’t tell if it was you or not, it was so bad.”
“Why would you say something like that?”
“Because,” Dana says, “it was the truth.” She says this with a thread of self-righteousness, ignoring the doubt
she now feels, the slight regret, an inkling that she said it out of anger—out of the pain of having been deceived.
“Celia had a picture? Of me?”
“She had a picture.” Dana isn’t sure where she wants to go with this. “I don’t know if it was you or not.”
“So why would you tell him something like that?” Peter polishes off his martini and looks up. His eyebrows are furrowed. He looks hurt.
Dana turns back to the kitchen where water boils and broccoli bobs along the waves. She closes her eyes. Celia’s voice roars in her left ear. Peter looked at me like he’d slit my throat. . . . Dana sees now what her neighbor meant. He’s used to having his way, Dana thinks. He’s used to winning, so when something goes awry, he’s at a total loss.
“What’s wrong with you anyhow?” Peter snarls from the dining room. He probes around the bottom of the glass for the olive. He pops it into his mouth and sits staring toward the kitchen. “You need to go see Dr. Sing. In fact, I’ll—” He stops. He shifts on his chair and stares down at his shoes as if he’s never seen them before. “You’re not sleeping,” he says. “When I wake up, you’re never in bed.”
Dana chews on her cuticle, tearing it slightly, surprised that her husband even notices she isn’t there beside him on the bed, that he’s observed her absence while he wheezes and snorts and thrashes in the sweaty sheets.
“And now telling the chief detective on a murder case that I’m involved in a mur—”
“That’s not what I said.” She stares at him, at his bleary, rheumy eyes, and wonders if that wasn’t exactly what she said, by implication if not precisely in those words.
Peter looks at her. He chews on an olive.
“I had to . . . you know, have an actual reason for being there.”
“So you invented this stuff about a picture?”
Dana doesn’t answer. Now that Peter knows she’s seen the photo that Celia took, he also knows she knows about the Tart. She wonders if he’ll offer an explanation, and then she realizes he can’t, not without admitting there was a photo. She wills the martinis to knock him off his game, to muddle his thoughts, to make him talk. Do your job, she thinks, staring at the now-empty glass, at an olive stretched out flat against its bottom.
Peter snorts. His head weaves slightly.
“I’ll check on the fish.” She gets up, moving quickly back to the broiler, where the halibut is black and curling at the edges. “So what’d you tell the detective about the photo? That I was lying?” As an afterthought she mixes yet another martini and deposits it along with the food on the dining-room table.
Peter grunts. His shoulders are sloped, his head bowed, his eyes barely open. She’s clearly overshot. His fork dips here and there on the plate, stabbing bits of food, the uncooked broccoli, the burned fish. After a few minutes, she stands up and sweeps away their nearly untouched food. She scrapes the remains into the compost bag that she will later empty in the backyard on the heap of lush and fecund rot. She will scrape and dig and cover up the fish bones, the bright green of the broccoli heads with her hands, tucking them under a collection of plant debris, and she will think of Celia being buried deep inside the earth or of her ashes flying from the hands of people standing on a mound of sand on Martha’s Vineyard.
“Coffee?”
“Naw,” Peter says, and his voice is thick, dripping onto the table. He pushes up from his chair and shuffles to the couch.
“Wait.” She doesn’t want him there with his slitty eyes staring up at the ceiling. She doesn’t want him draped across the middle of her night. “Why don’t I help you?” she says, and she moves toward where he lies face up on the sofa, like a playing card. “Let’s get you to bed, and you can take a little nap. You’ll get a second wind,” she says, and hopes she’s lying. She helps him to his feet, tugging him down the hallway to the bedroom. He sags onto the edge of the bed, and she undresses him, plumps the pillow, and gently sets his head down, feathers melting beneath the weight, and then she reaches into his pocket for his cell. He glances up at her, and there’s something in his eyes—an accusation, she thinks, but he turns to face the wall, and in a matter of seconds he’s snoring; small breathy puffs of vodka sing out through his nostrils into the clammy, stale air of the bedroom.
She sits on the sofa. She looks outside the window, where the sweltering afternoon has edged into another rainy night, and thinks about what Peter said, that she’s been acting crazy, that she hasn’t been sleeping, and she can’t argue with that. Time is running out for her. If she didn’t know before this afternoon, the vision of her father on the railroad tracks has sealed the deal.
The rain picks up, a colossal summer storm, beating on the windows and the skylight, tapping on the door, and she shivers, thinking of Jack Moss, his eyes so like the Poet’s. Her foot taps against the wooden floor; her heart races and runs, stopping from time to time, missing a beat and rushing to catch it up, a ragged thing, her heart. Now. Lightning flashes on the street, illuminating a figure in a slick, dark jacket before it’s swallowed by the night. She slumps down on the couch cushion below the bay window, out of sight. Is he back, this monster, stealing what little sanity she has left? For a few seconds, she wavers between running to wake up Peter and calling the police, but in the end she does neither. In the end she walks across to the kitchen and pours herself a glass of vodka, nearly the last of the bottle, and she stares at it, knowing that it will calm her down, steady her nerves.
She sets the glass on the coffee table as the wind whistles through the trees, catches in something loose, a shingle or a gutter, making creaks and tremors, and she knows that these sounds, these squeaks and groans and murmurs, are only the storm, but suddenly she isn’t sure. Everything scares her now, everything is a threat. She reaches again for the glass, but she doesn’t pick it up. She won’t drink the vodka. She will never touch the stuff again, she tells herself, until she knows for certain what she did or didn’t do the last time she drank it.
She grabs Peter’s phone and scrolls to his call log, thumbing down the list of names and numbers, searching for the ones from Celia—the steady stream of missed calls from “C,” but there is nothing there. She feels dread, like a band tightening across her forehead. Confused, she flips back through, but the calls from Celia are no longer there, snuffed out as surely as Celia herself. Or were they ever there? Did she only imagine them? She feels panic, an icy hand at the back of her neck. She glances at the vodka on the counter, only slightly out of reach, but she looks away, scrolls through Peter’s list of contacts. She finds the “C” and breathes a sigh of relief, pushing her thumb down on the letter and listening to the reassuring ring of Celia’s phone. She wonders if Ronald’s changed the message. She wonders why he hasn’t disconnected it, whether he’s using it himself or if one of Celia’s boys on Martha’s Vineyard will someday take it over, all the records wiped clean, all the photos intact, except the one of Peter and the Tart.
“Catlin and McCaffey Law,” a male voice says. “Please leave a message at the beep, and we’ll return your call as soon as possible.”
She tells herself it’s only a mistake. She thumbs back to the contact list; she pushes “C,” but once again a man’s voice tells her she’s reached Catlin and McCaffey Law. He must know, she thinks. Peter has to know she’s checked his phone. Or at least it’s crossed his mind she might at some point check it. Or that the police will. Now that the detective knows about the photo, he could easily request Peter’s phone, his call log, all of it. Of course he’d cover up this obvious link to the dead woman—the dead married woman. Or did she only imagine Celia’s number in her husband’s phone, Celia’s ghostly voice reaching through the fog of death to haunt her?
She turns off the cell. The rain is winding down. It’s still falling, but the wind has nearly stopped. She concentrates on slowing her breathing. The backs of her hands rest on her knees. “It’s raining cats and dogs,” her mother used to say, and she repeats the phrase inside her head. It’s rain
ing cats and dogs. When she was a child, it gave her nightmares, that expression, the ensuing images of her beloved cat, their dead dog, her neighbor’s litter of puppies, all of them falling from the sky and landing—smashing—on the ground. She has never fathomed what sort of madman, what sort of sadist, would think up such a twisted, haunting image. She reaches behind her, opens the window wide, lets the rain fall nearer to her, trying to lose herself in the sound of it, the gentle, soothing patter.
Lightning darts across the sky, and again a figure lurks there in the street. It stares up at her front porch, at the living-room window, and this time it doesn’t scare her. This time Dana feels anger surging through her—anger for the lost, baffled way she’s lived her life; for the father who deserted her; for her enigmatic, cheating husband; for the cruel, disabling illness wrestling with her mind. This time Dana’s on her feet and out the front door. The screen bangs back in place and flies out again on a drift of wind, but she is off the porch and halfway down the lawn before it slips back into place, before the sky has even shifted back to black.
CHAPTER 15
She reaches the street in a few quick strides. The figure is moving in the direction of the Steinhausers’, crossing the thin side yards, the coiffed lawns, moving toward Ronald’s untrimmed bushes, his front yard strewn with unpicked roses. It moves through the wet night like a vapor. “Wait!” she yells, but thunder roars and rumbles, slices off her voice. The form continues, walking more quickly now, his jacket flapping out at the edges.
“Stop!” Anger propels her forward, and she runs along the street, intent on exposing the hooded figure intent on proving it’s real.
The mystery figure turns around, and they stare toward each other in the blackness of a cloudy, moonless night.
“Dana?”
“Yes.” She slows down, but she doesn’t stop. She continues moving toward the figure dripping in the rain.
“What you are doing?”
The Pocket Wife Page 10