Death's Savage Passion (12 page)

“Unwed mothers?” I said.

“I think we ought to risk it,” Phoebe said. “This is getting worse by the minute.”

I started pulling out money.

Nothing about Sarah English was as I’d expected it to be. Instead of an apartment, she had one side of a vertically divided two-family house that was three years past “needing paint.” I got out of the cab and stood in the unpaved road looking at it. There was nothing neat about it, nothing loving or well cared for or hopeful. Shutters that had once been green hung from single hinges at the upstairs windows. The mailbox swung rusted and dented from a single loose nail pounded into a splintering wooden post. The door, once red, looked fire-blistered.

I looked at Phoebe and said, “Nobody who ever lived in this house ever wrote a book.”

“I know what you mean,” Phoebe said. She peered into the mailbox. It was empty. “She took her mail. She has to have been home.”

“If she ever gets any mail.”

“Sears ads,” Phoebe said. “And stuff from the Franklin Mint.”

I let that pass. Somebody who lived in this house
had
written a book. For some reason I was never going to be able to pin down, Sarah had been the exception. She had smelled of failure and not failed.

I walked back and forth in front of the mailbox, kicking the rubber soles of my Adidases in the crack in the first cement sidewalk step. Sarah’s situation had been worse than I’d imagined, needier. Looking at that house was an object lesson in the mechanics of entrenched despair. But Sarah had written a book and got it accepted for publication and come to New York. She had not been entrenched in anything.

I muttered something about “candidates for the gene pool” and started climbing the stairs to the walk, Phoebe trailing behind me. Somebody
was
home in 321, the other half of the two-family. Maybe Cassie, whoever she was, knew something about Sarah.

Phoebe chugged up beside me. “It wasn’t so different in Union City,” she said. “Not even different enough to notice.”

“I’ve been to your mother’s house,” I said. “She’s got clean curtains on the windows. She’s got fresh paint if she has to paint herself. It’s not the same.”

“Not for her,” Phoebe said. “You ever look around the rest of our neighborhood?”

“The rest of your neighborhood isn’t the point.”

“Keep things in perspective,” Phoebe said. “She was an unusual person, making something out of herself starting in a place like this. Granted. Still, it can be done. I did it. Nick did it. It’s not the equivalent of walking on water.”

“I didn’t say it was.” I did, however, think it was. One of the drawbacks of growing up in “comfortable” circumstances is the tendency to be mystified at how anyone lives outside them. Another is the tendency to be overly impressed by people who not only do but make an escape besides.

I rang the bell at 323, listened to the silence on the other side of the door, then crossed the porch.

“Nobody home,” I said.

“He told us that,” Phoebe said. “She could be at work.”

I said “Maybe,” but without the sarcasm I would have used back in New York. Phoebe no longer sounded so sure of finding Sarah; She kept looking over her shoulder, off the porch and across the road to the river. That river looked lethal. It gleamed rainbow slick in the weak sunlight. It moved like something congealed.

On the other side of the door to 321, a child was crying. A woman’s voice called out, asking Johnny to be quiet. Johnny didn’t oblige.

The door opened on a chain, showing me a single unpainted eye and an unlikely tuft of pale brown hair.

“I haven’t got it today,” the woman said. “Come back Friday.”

I was wearing olive drab fatigues and a “None of the Above” T-shirt I’d had made for the Carter-Reagan race and resurrected for Reagan-Mondale. Either bill collectors in Holbrook were an unusual lot, or the woman was blind.

“I’m looking for Sarah English,” I said.

The pale brown hair quivered. “Not home,” she said. “Out of town.”

Phoebe pushed to the front. “We got a call from her,” she said. “She said she was
back.”

“Sarah called
you?”

“That’s right,” Phoebe said.

Silence on the other side of the door. Labored breathing. The woman was a worse chain smoker than I. She took a long time thinking things through. She squinted the single eye at Phoebe and said, “You’re from New York.”

“That’s right,” Phoebe said.

“One of you someone named Caroline Dooley?”

I could see the will to lie rising like a balloon in Phoebe’s head. She beat it back. “No,” she said. “I’m Phoebe Damereaux and this is—”

“Phoebe
Damereaux?”

The door slammed shut. The chain rattled in the groove. The door swung wide, revealing a short, gone-to-seed woman in a blue plaid flannel housecoat and half-teased hair, biting the butt of a cigarette. She advanced to the porch, staring at Phoebe’s face, her mouth and nose and eyes twisted into an attempt to look too tough to be fooled.

“You’re not wearing one of those
things,”
the woman said.

“Oh,” Phoebe said. “Well. They’re not very good for running around in.”

The woman squinted and twisted again, letting us know she was thinking it over. Then she gave us a curt nod and an incongruously sickly sweet smile.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’d have known you anywhere. I saw your picture in
People
magazine.”

After a comment like that, Phoebe usually says something about how she hopes the person has also read the new Phoebe Damereaux. This time she didn’t.

The woman was holding the door open for us, making ushering motions with her hands and the hanging flesh of her upper arms.

“Right this way,” she said. “I had no idea Sarah knew so many famous people in New York. I mean, I guess she’ll meet all the famous people now, won’t she? Becoming a famous writer herself. Probably moving out of here and going to live in the city first thing, like she always wanted to. Not that I blame her for moving out of here.”

We followed the hand and arm movements into a small living room. There was a tin wastebasket in one corner, a foot high and six inches across, filled to overflowing with cigarette butts and Ring Ding wrappers and used Pampers crumpled into brown streaked balls. There was a television set on an orange crate with a stack of yellowing newspapers beside it. There was a pile of empty Burger King wrappers on the couch. A listless baby sat in the middle of them, crying.

“I’m Cassie Arbeth,” the woman said, hurrying over to the couch to pick up the baby. She held him sideways, like a sack of raw potatoes she was having trouble carrying home from the store. “I’ve been taking care of things while Sarah’s in New York. Only the thing is, I can’t watch everything every minute of the day, you know, and with my five and Sarah’s Adrienne—”

“Adrienne?” The bottom of my stomach departed for Middle Earth.

Cassie nodded vigorously. “Adrienne’s no more trouble than any of the others, she’s only seven but she stays out of trouble, that one, but with Adrienne and my five to look after I don’t have no time to be hanging around the porch, and with the noise they make and all—”

“Adrienne is Sarah’s daughter,” I said.

Something about the way I said it must have sounded odd. Cassie smirked. “Yeah,” she said. “Adrienne. Told Sarah it was something else in a name, least ’round here, but Sarah was always reading
books.”
She sounded amazed that anyone would read books. “Sarah is a lot older than me,” she said. She meant it as an explanation.

I looked at her more closely. Sarah had been in her late thirties. Cassie Arbeth looked fifty-eight.

“I’m twenty-four,” Cassie Arbeth said. She rushed to the built-in bookcases under the stairway and extracted the only books there, four Holbrook High School yearbooks, each bound in imitation red leather with a raised plastic shield on the front. I looked at the dates and subtracted. She was only twenty-four. At most, twenty-five.

“Sarah isn’t in any of these,” she said. “Sarah was class of ’65. God, that seems ancient to me. Not that Sarah showed her age so much.”

Next to Cassie Arbeth, Hermione Gingold didn’t show her age much.

“Wait a minute,” Cassie said. She ran out to the porch and yelled “Adrienne!” at the top of her lungs. The word echoed down the empty street, finally drowning in the river. “The thing is,” she said, coming back, “did you come from this Caroline Dooley or did you come about Adrienne?”

Phoebe was about to say something. I glared her into keeping silent. Cassie didn’t remember what we’d said on the porch about looking for Sarah. I was beginning to think it was just as well.

“What did Caroline Dooley call about?” I asked.

“Well, it’s like I was saying. I got a lot to do and I can’t be watching everything every minute. I must’ve been out back sometime or else it was when I was asleep, you can get robbed on this street night or day, you know, but it could have been night, I told this Caroline Dooley that—”

“You had a robbery?”

“Sarah had a robbery. That’s what I’ve been telling you. Sarah had a robbery and a bunch of stuff probably got taken, but I can’t tell what. I called this number she gave me, but nobody’s ever home—”

“Probably my number,” I said. “I really haven’t been home.”

“Yeah, well,” Cassie said. “I don’t know what this Caroline Dooley wanted, but I told her I wasn’t going to find it for her. Things are so messed up in there I’m never going to find anything. Not that things aren’t messed up in here, you know what I mean, but it’s different.”

“Right,” I said.

A small girl, pale blond and plain, appeared in the front doorway. Her hair was brushed sleekly back and caught with an elastic at the nape of her neck. Her dress was starched and pressed and clean. She looked like a Christmas angel come to roost at the town dump. She was very, very tense.

“Adrienne,” Cassie said. “These are friends of your mother’s.”

Adrienne and I regarded each other. Usually, children take to Phoebe and avoid me. My height frightens them. My diffidence puts them off. With Adrienne English it was different. We each knew what the other was thinking. Better, we each knew what the other was thinking
about Cassie.

I put out my hand. “I’m Pay McKenna,” I said.

“How do you do,” Adrienne said. She turned to Phoebe and waited politely.

“Phoebe Damereaux,” Phoebe said. She sounded breathless. The sound of Adrienne’s voice had been unexpected. Phoebe was concentrating on
me.

Adrienne, too, was concentrating on me. “Is my mother going to be back soon?”

I thought of Sarah on Dana’s reception-room floor, Adrienne in Cassie Arbeth’s house. Somewhere there would be a juvenile authority and a list of foster homes, people who took children in for the money. Somewhere there would be a string of third-rate schools and a lot of subtle pressure to skip the college courses for something more “practical.”

I thought of Sarah arriving in New York, eyes shining, the vicious circle broken. Finally.

“Actually,” I said, “we’re going to take you into New York with us.”

Cassie said, “Oh, good.”

Phoebe almost started smoking.

“Your mother is staying in my apartment. You can have a room of your own if you want.”

“In New York City?”

“Right.”

Adrienne regarded me. She was not so much solemn as cautious. Her eyes were very wide and very brown and very intelligent—intelligent enough to know from my manner that something was wrong, and that I had a reason, for now, for not telling her what it was. She made her decision on available facts, available prejudices: me and New York (unknown, but with possibilities), Cassie and Holbrook (known, but unbearable).

“All right,” she said.

“Oh, good,” Cassie said again.

“Dear Jesus,” Phoebe said.

“Do you know how to make braids?” Adrienne said.

I got a hairbrush from my bag and undid the elastic at the nape of Adrienne’s neck. I ignored Phoebe. Phoebe knew as well as I that Sarah had not come back to Holbrook without rescuing Adrienne from Cassie Arbeth—which meant she hadn’t come back to Holbrook at all. If she hadn’t come back to Holbrook, someone else had probably made the call saying she had. Which meant I was right all along. Sarah was dead.

“In front of your ears or behind?” I asked Adrienne.

“Behind, thank you,” Adrienne said. “It’s so much
neater.”

I waved my hand in Phoebe’s direction. “Go call the cab man back. I’ll be done in a minute.”

“We’ll have to get some of Adrienne’s things,” Phoebe said. She looked murderous.

“We’ll go next door and get them,” I said.

Cassie Arbeth was on her feet. “I’ll call the cab,” she said. “I got something I want you to take to Sarah anyway.”

She came back with a photocopy of Sarah’s manuscript. She had spilled ketchup on the title page.

T
HE INSIDE OF 323 WAS
the first thing in Holbrook that reminded me of Sarah as I had known her. Toppled furniture and emptied drawers could not hide the essential neatness of that room, the shine of newly polished windows and freshly waxed floors, the precision of carefully hand-framed prints on the walls, the books (alphabetical by author) in orderly rows in a floor-to-ceiling plywood bookcase she must have had built or built herself. What she had not spent on the outside of the house she had spent on the inside. Walking through the door, you thought you’d entered an alternative universe.

Whoever had tossed that room had been bored before he started. The damage was minimal. The search, if there had been one, had been superficial. The desk was overturned and denuded of its drawers. The highboy, with its rows of birthday angels and ornamental plates commemorating childhood Christmases, was untouched. There had been no vandalism. Sarah’s slipcovers, hand-sewn with a mediocre touch from cheap cotton calico, were new and clean and unripped.

Adrienne’s room, one of the three small bedrooms on the second floor, was pristine. We left her there to pack dolls and pajamas and “good” dresses for the trip into the city, looked once into Sarah’s bedroom (drawers pulled out in the imitation captain’s chest, red cardboard jewelry box apparently untouched) and once into the third bedroom (sewing machines, sewing materials). Then we went downstairs.