When it was over, they were laughing and out of breath, and around them people were clapping—for them. “That was so much fun,” Krystal said, pressing her palm to her chest. “But now I’m dying.”
“Don’t worry, the place is lousy with defibrillators.” He was joking, of course, but with his usual straight face. Something in the combination set her off—she fell apart laughing. And he felt loose and silly, and more at ease with her than he’d have thought possible. She’d lost a barrette while they were dancing; he found it for her under a table, then had the pleasure of watching her put it back in, bright hair pulled up in both hands, her laughing eyes still on his.
Then Charlie came over and separated them. Physically. Unapologetically moved her away, so he could speak to her in private. Oliver stared in disbelief, then stalked off to watch a bunch of old men play bocce ball on the grass.
What the hell was going on? Who was this woman? Krystal Smith-Jones—he could barely say her name without an incredulous sneer. What was she, a physical therapist, or an old man’s paid last fling? The latter, every instinct assured him she was the latter, and yet—
Nothing. Just because she didn’t look the part today didn’t mean anything. She’d certainly looked it the day they’d met. Like a streetwalker, practically, in a plunging halter top and garish jewelry, hair teased out to here. She’d dressed down for Cartamack Day, that was all. She wasn’t stupid.
For the rest of the afternoon, they ricocheted off each other. When it was time to eat, he, she, and Charlie shared a table with an elderly couple and their visiting son, so the conversation stayed correct and impersonal. Krystal charmed them with a way she had of asking questions that required thoughtful answers, not just yes or no, and Oliver was as beguiled as any of them. But then Charlie, who kept craning his neck at something or someone behind them, would hijack her attention by moving in till he and Krystal were almost nose-to-nose, then speak to her in urgent whispers, sometimes covering his mouth with his hand. It was beyond rude; it was ridiculous.
Worst was having to watch them dance with each other. Unlike Oliver, Charlie didn’t just shuffle around when he slowdanced ; he was old-school, he knew how to fox-trot to “My Blue Heaven” and “Sentimental Journey.” And Krystal followed him perfectly, thanks to the masterful arm he pressed her whole body to his with. “Fred and Ginger,” one of their tablemates said admiringly, and Oliver thought sourly, Yeah, if Ginger had been a half century younger than Fred.
I’m jealous of my grandfather.
The realization was so humiliating, he decided to leave. How satisfying to just abandon them, leave them on the dance floor wondering what had become of him. But then he reminded himself he wasn’t in middle school anymore. “Have to go,” he told them during a break in their Arthur Murray performance. “I brought your quarterly tax statements, Grandfather. Just sign them, put them in the stamped envelope, and mail them.”
“Got it.”
Oliver turned to Krystal. “Nice to see you again,” was all he could come up with.
“Yes,” was the best she could do.
“Well,” he said after another awkward minute. “ ’Bye.”
The tax papers were still in his car. He retrieved them, jogged the short distance to Charlie’s condo building, let himself in the apartment, and dropped the papers on the hall table. That was when he noticed the missing horses. Five Mustangs Running—Charlie’s showpiece.
Krystal.
By the time he got back to the community center, she was gone. Charlie was sitting by himself on the stone ledge, staring out across the darkening golf course. He looked so forlorn, Oliver changed what he was going to say—some version of “Where is she? That thief!”—to a simple inquiry. “I noticed the big bronze isn’t in its spot, Grandfather. Any idea where it went?”
“Hm?”
He repeated himself.
“Hm?”
A sure sign of evasion. Were Charlie and Krystal in this together?
“Oh, the mustangs,” Charlie said eventually, eyes darting from side to side. “Guy in the building, he admired it, so I lent it to ’im.”
“Lent it to him?”
“Yeah. Guy in the building, horse nut.”
“You lent it to a guy in the building because he likes horses.”
“That’s it.”
He was covering for her. Had to be. Oliver let it go, because he had no choice. But Charlie hadn’t heard the last of this. Neither had Krystal.
Speak of the devil—he almost backed into her in the parking lot when she passed behind him in some boatlike American car with a sputtering muffler. She didn’t see him. At the main exit from The Lakes at Cartamack, she turned left on Georgia Avenue. He was going that way himself. He didn’t set out to follow her; it just happened.
She veered right onto Connecticut Avenue at Aspen Hill, but then she sailed right through Kensington, where she supposedly lived. Another lie. Twenty minutes later, they were in the District. He almost lost her at Dupont Circle. She took a sudden right on P Street, then zigzagged around O and Twentyfirst until she found a parking place on a block-long side street near the park. Snazzy neighborhood. Sixty feet away, Oliver double-parked and turned his lights out.
He’d liked watching her legs when she’d danced with Charlie. Now he liked watching them slide out of the car, knees together, ankles trim above her high-heeled sandals. Beautiful rear end, too; he enjoyed watching it poke out the backseat door while she leaned in to get something. The bowling bag? No, a white plastic bag, not especially heavy-looking, so not the horses.
While she was locking her car, her cell phone must’ve rung. She fumbled it out of her purse, and talked into it as she crossed the street to the far sidewalk, went down a ways, and turned in at the brick walk of a handsome, three-story town house, white with black shutters. What would a place like that cost? In this neighborhood, well over a million. Not bad for a physical therapist.
Juggling phone, purse, and plastic bag, she found the house key and unlocked the front door. High-pitched barking began before she got it open halfway. She sidled in crabwise, presumably to keep the dog from rushing out. Beveled sidelights lit up.
Oliver got out of his car, closing the door gently, and walked to where Krystal had parked hers. Glancing around to make sure no one was watching, he bent down and peered in first the front, then the rear windows. There—on the floor behind the driver’s side: the bowling bag. It had taken on an inimical unwholesomeness in his mind, a repository for something unsavory, either his grandfather’s horses or the tricks, so to speak, of Krystal’s “physical therapist” trade. Either way, the bag was evil.
Or it might contain a bowling ball. Anything was possible.
What to do? Nothing. He wasn’t a thief, even if she was. (And he could see the headline: Prominent Capitol Hill Lobbyist Caught Breaking into Call Girl’s Car, Stealing Sex Toys.) At least now he knew what he knew.
But he had to revise that on the five-minute drive to his house in Georgetown. Now he knew what he didn’t know.
NINE
“What? Wait, Charlie, I can’t hear you, the dog’s barking. Hold on.”
Molly put down everything but the phone, dropped to her knees, and let ecstatic Harpo jump up and lick her on the face. “Sweet boy, was I gone that long? No, the dog. The Nathansons’ poodle, Charlie, I told you I’m house-sitting—Hang on two more seconds, okay?” She got Harpo under one arm, carried him down the hall past the gated-off living room, the gated-off dining room, and into the kitchen.
“Good boy!” No messes, and he hadn’t even chewed the rug or knocked over his bowl. “No, Charlie, the dog. Okay, tell me again—what was the matter with her?”
Charlie was in high indignation mode, but under his bluster Molly thought she heard true disappointment. “Well, for one thing, she wasn’t even looking at me, never mind—”
“Yes, she was,” Molly had to interrupt, “I saw her. She was staring, she was definitely—”
“She
’s got macular degeneration!”
“What?”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
“What is it?”
“It blocks your central vision, you can only see what you’re looking at on the side.”
“Oh. So you mean—”
“She was looking at the band!”
“Oh. Well, but after you introduced yourself and started talking—”
“Oh, that was fine, fine, like talking to my sister. There was nothing wrong with her, but hell, Molly, I thought—I thought—”
“I know. Gosh, I’m sorry, Charlie, it’s my fault. I could’ve sworn I saw something.”
“Yeah, well. So it’s all—do you think maybe you’re just . . . no offense, Moll, but—”
“No. No. I would tell you if I thought that, but honestly, I think she’s out there, this special person who’s—it’s not just that she’s got you on her mind, it’s that she’s right for you. I feel it.” She did. Amazing.
“Okay, I believe you,” Charlie said, as if that settled it. “So you’ll keep looking in the ball?”
“I will if you want me to.” Her psychic line rang. “Charlie, I’ve got—”
“And I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”
“Okay.” Her one full day to study for Monday’s exam. “But I have to go now, I’ve got a—”
“Go! Uh . . .”
“What?”
“Thanks for coming tonight.”
“You’re welcome. Thank you for inviting me.”
“Did you have a nice time?”
“Oh yes.” Her psychic line stopped ringing. “Except . . .”
“What?”
“Nothing.” She wanted him to bring up Oliver first. That seemed important for some reason.
“No, what?”
“No, really. Nothing.” Her psychic line started ringing again. “Gotta go, Charlie—”
“Go. G’bye.”
It rang steadily for the next two hours, backed-up calls from people who’d phoned earlier and gotten Madame Romanescu’s message that she would be unavailable from three until eight— most unusual for her on a Saturday, her biggest call day. Luckily she could walk Harpo in this safe, quiet neighborhood and talk at the same time. She couldn’t play Harpo’s favorite game, though: soccer in the downstairs hall, her kicking the ball, him making “goals” by head-butting it into the front door. He got too excited and barked, and then callers would ask, “Is that a dog?” offended by the thought that Madame Romanescu wasn’t focusing one hundred percent on their problems. So she sat in the Nathansons’ lush living room with a cup of tea, Harpo at her feet, and gave her whole mind over to whether Tina should have it out with her mother-in-law, if Carla should get her eyebrows tattooed, if Venus in retrograde meant Walter should ask for a raise now or next month.
Usually she loved these questions, or if not them, at least the people who asked them. The concept of a “trivial” problem didn’t exist, not if one person, just one, desperately cared about it. Molly had decided a long time ago that her singular talent was simply putting herself in the other person’s place. Empathy. That’s all it took. Oh, and a little common sense, so she could feel confident about giving advice that didn’t put anybody in danger. That’s why the answer to “Should I light my husband on fire while he’s sleeping?” was almost always “No.”
Tonight she was distracted, though; not sufficiently involved. Other people’s earth-shattering dilemmas seemed almost . . . frivolous. Almost. She wanted to tell Donette, the lady who called every other night to ask if her husband was cheating, which he obviously was, to stop wasting time and throw the bum out. She didn’t; she repeated her marriage counseling mantra, but it was a close call.
“I’m just in a bad mood,” she told Harpo, who followed her from room to room as she watered the hanging plants, the ficus tree. Sadie Nathanson was one of the girls she’d counseled at Stone Creek Academy a year ago, and now she was feeding Sadie’s turtle while the Nanthansons were seeing plays in New York. “How the mighty have fallen.”
That wasn’t it, though—she enjoyed house-sitting, and she’d never been mighty. It was everything else. Everything was piling up on her, exams, papers, debts, all her part-time jobs. Not to mention losing her house.
And something else, a brand-new burden, was weighing her down tonight. “That jerk Oliver,” she muttered to Harpo, unwrapping the new tug-of-war toy she’d brought him. “Who does he think he is? You should’ve seen him—he never stopped glaring.”
Except when he did, and then she’d felt a flip in her stomach, as if she’d been upside down and Oliver had righted her. So stupid. Cheap physical attraction, the most untrustworthy emotion in the book. “ At least I’ll probably never see him again, so that’s good.” And yet, the thought didn’t cheer her up.
The Nathansons’ guest room was as tasteful and comfortable as the rest of the house, but she still missed her own room, missed being at home. Missed Merlin, whom the neighbor was feeding. Free of charge—to pay somebody to housesit her house while she house-sat somebody else’s would’ve been too silly, even for her. And she’d done some pretty silly things to make a little money. Telephone psychic came to mind....
Only for fifteen more minutes tonight, though: At 10:30, Madame Romanescu was off the clock. A woman called while she was brushing her teeth. Two women, and then it turned out they were girls, not women; teenagers on Daddy’s credit card. She got rid of them quickly. She wasn’t so hard up yet that she took advantage of children.
Harpo had his own bed, but he would only sleep in it if it was next to hers. Fine with Molly; she liked the company. She got her covers just so, aimed the reading lamp just right. As soon as she opened her class notebook, the phone rang. Of course. It had been that kind of a day. Why wouldn’t the phone ring at 10:28?
“Evenin’, ma’am.”
“Oh, it’s you,” she said, no hesitation. She’d know that lazy Western drawl anywhere. Everything relaxed; everything went slack. “I am so glad you called, Shorty.”
“Sure? It’s not too late for you?”
“Not at all. Not at all.” She felt as if she’d strained a lot of muscles today and she was about to get a massage. “How are you?”
“Better now,” he said, which made her smile in sympathy. “It’s been a day.”
“It certainly has. Fortunately, it’s almost over.”
“Amen to that.”
“ Are you out on the range? With the dogies?”
“No, ma’am, we finished that drive. I’m here in the bunkhouse, sippin’ a cuppa Arbuckles’.”
“ A cup of . . .”
“Cowboy talk for coffee.”
She pictured a big room full of bunks and sprawling cowboys, stuffed buffalo heads on the walls, everything made of pine. He’d be at a big round table with his feet up, drinking Arbuckles’ and playing poker. With his boots on.
“Doing some paperwork in my office,” he said, and she amended the picture. He was a modern cowboy; he probably had a computer, knew how to do spreadsheets. But he still had his boots on.
“I didn’t call for any special reason,” he said.
A lot of her callers started out saying that. “I remember, when last we spoke, you were thinking about perhaps changing jobs.”
“Still workin’ that over in my mind.”
“Good. I don’t think there is any hurry, and you want to be sure.”
“I’m with you there.”
“Something else I remember,” she said after a moment. “You were going to tell me all about your love life.”
She liked his laugh, low and sleepy. “Yes, ma’am. I also said that wouldn’t be a very long conversation.”
Shorter than me, was the way he’d put it. She wondered if they called him Shorty because he was short or because he was tall....
“Okay. There’s this woman.”
“I am not surprised.”
“And she’s . . . somethin’ else. Damned if I
know what, though. She gets to me, I won’t lie, but here’s the thing—I don’t even like her. Can you feature that?”
“Yes. Yes, I can.”
“It’s crazy.”
“I know. You feel—ridiculous.”
“I feel like a sheep north o’ the ears, and there’s nothin’ dumber than a sheep. When I’m with her, she takes up . . . she just sorta completely ... Hell, it’s hard to describe.”
“When you’re with her, you can’t think of anyone but her. She blots out your good judgment.”
“Bingo.”
“Much of it is physical.”
“All of it’s physical. No, not all.”
“Not all. There is something . . . something strange, a feeling of helplessness, because you are afraid. . . .”
“Yeah. Afraid . . .”
“Afraid that it is . . .”
“That it’s . . .”
“Meant to be,” Molly said, dejected.
“Oh Christ, that’s it. Meant to be.”
They shared a moment of mutual horror.
“But I don’t like her,” Shorty repeated. “I wanna just—tell you the truth, ma’am—I just wanna shack up one time and be done with her.”
“Ah, but you wouldn’t do that.”
“I mighta, but now—You know what? I think she might be a thief to boot.”
“A thief.”
“Maybe. I’m not a hundred percent sure. She’s some kinda chiseler, though, and I don’t trust her.”
“Trust is everything. But if you’re wrong,” Molly said, thinking out loud, “if you have misjudged, then . . . it is too bad, yes?”
“Yyyeah . . .”
“Yes. It is very painful to be the one who has been found unworthy. Without cause.”
“So you’re sayin’ . . . What are you sayin’?”
The Unquiet Page 22