Night Shift (29 page)

“Ed?” she said tentatively, half convinced that this was some grief-induced hallucination. “Is that really—”

“Yes, it's me.”

“How—”

“I've been working at the Lakewood Theater in Skowhegan. I ran into your roommate . . . Alice, is that her name?”

“Yes.”

“She told me what happened. I came right away. Poor Beth.” He moved his head, only a degree or so, but the sun glare slid off his glasses and she saw nothing wolfish, nothing predatory, but only a calm, warm sympathy.

She began to weep again, and staggered a little with the unexpected force of it. Then he was holding her and then it was all right.

They had dinner at the Silent Woman in Waterville, which was twenty-five miles away; maybe exactly the distance she needed. They went in Ed's car, a new Corvette, and he drove well—neither showily nor fussily, as she guessed he might. She didn't want to talk and she didn't want to be cheered up. He seemed to know it, and played quiet music on the radio.

And he ordered without consulting her—seafood. She thought she wasn't hungry, but when the food came she fell to ravenously.

When she looked up again her plate was empty and she laughed nervously. Ed was smoking a cigarette and watching her.

“The grieving damsel ate a hearty meal,” she said. “You must think I'm awful.”

“No,” he said. “You've been through a lot and you need to get your strength back. It's like being sick, isn't it?”

“Yes. Just like that.”

He took her hand across the table, squeezed it briefly, then let it go. “But now it's recuperation time, Beth.”

“Is it? Is it really?”

“Yes,” he said. “So tell me. What are your plans?”

“I'm going home tomorrow. After that, I don't know.”

“You're going back to school, aren't you?”

“I just don't know. After this, it seems so . . . so trivial. A lot of the purpose seems to have gone out of it. And all the fun.”

“It'll come back. That's hard for you to believe now, but it's true. Try it for six weeks and see. You've got nothing better to do.” The last seemed a question.

“That's true, I guess. But . . . Can I have a cigarette?”

“Sure. They're menthol, though. Sorry.”

She took one. “How did you know I didn't like menthol cigarettes?”

He shrugged. “You just don't look like one of those, I guess.”

She smiled. “You're funny, do you know that?”

He smiled neutrally.

“No, really. For you of all people to turn up . . . I thought I didn't want to see anyone. But I'm really glad it was you, Ed.”

“Sometimes it's nice to be with someone you're not involved with.”

“That's it, I guess.” She paused. “Who are you, Ed, besides my fairy godfather? Who are you really?” It was suddenly important to her that she know.

He shrugged. “Nobody much. Just one of the sort of funny-looking guys you see creeping around campus with a load of books under one arm—”

“Ed, you're not funny-looking.”

“Sure I am,” he said, and smiled. “Never grew all the way out of my high-school acne, never got rushed by a big frat, never made any kind of splash in the social whirl. Just a dorm rat making grades, that's all. When the big corporations interview on campus next spring, I'll probably sign on with one of them and Ed Hamner will disappear forever.”

“That would be a great shame,” she said softly.

He smiled, and it was a very peculiar smile. Almost bitter.

“What about your folks?” she asked. “Where you live, what you like to do—”

“Another time,” he said. “I want to get you back. You've got a long plane ride tomorrow, and a lot of hassles.”

The evening left her relaxed for the first time since Tony's death, without that feeling that somewhere inside a mainspring was being wound and wound to the breaking point. She thought sleep would come easily, but it did not.

Little questions nagged.

Alice told me
. . .
poor Beth.

But Alice was summering in Kittery, eighty miles from Skowhegan. She must have been at Lakewood for a play.

The Corvette, this year's model. Expensive. A backstage job at Lakewood hadn't paid for that. Were his parents rich?

He had ordered just what she would have ordered herself. Maybe the only thing on the menu she would have eaten enough of to discover that she was hungry.

The menthol cigarettes, the way he had kissed her good night, exactly as she had wanted to be kissed. And—

You've got a long plane ride tomorrow.

He knew she was going home because she had told him. But how had he known she was going by plane? Or that it was a long ride?

It bothered her. It bothered her because she was halfway to being in love with Ed Hamner.

I
know what you need.

Like the voice of a submarine captain tolling off fathoms, the words he had greeted her with followed her down to sleep.

He didn't come to the tiny Augusta airport to see her off, and waiting for the plane, she was surprised by her own disappointment. She was thinking about how quietly you could grow to depend on a person, almost like a junkie with a habit. The hype fools himself that he can take this stuff or leave it, when really—

“Elizabeth Rogan,” the PA blared. “Please pick up the white courtesy phone.”

She hurried to it. And Ed's voice said, “Beth?”

“Ed! It's good to hear you. I thought maybe . . .”

“That I'd meet you?” He laughed. “You don't need me for that. You're a big strong girl. Beautiful, too. You can handle this. Will I see you at school?”

“I . . . yes, I think so.”

“Good.” There was a moment of silence. Then he said, “Because I love you. I have from the first time I saw you.”

Her tongue was locked. She couldn't speak. A thousand thoughts whirled through her mind.

He laughed again, gently. “No, don't say anything. Not now. I'll see you. There'll be time then. All the time in the world. Good trip, Beth. Goodbye.”

And he was gone, leaving her with a white phone in her hand and her own chaotic thoughts and questions.

September.

Elizabeth picked up the old pattern of school and classes like a woman who has been interrupted at knitting. She was rooming with Alice again, of course; they had been roomies since freshman year, when they had been thrown together by the housing-department computer. They had always gotten along well, despite differing interests and personalities. Alice was the studious one, a chemistry major with a 3.6 average. Elizabeth was more social, less bookish, with a split major in education and math.

They still got on well, but a faint coolness seemed to have grown up between them over the summer. Elizabeth chalked it up to the difference of opinion over the sociology final, and didn't mention it.

The events of the summer began to seem dreamlike. In a funny way it sometimes seemed that Tony might have been a boy she had known in high school. It still hurt to think about him, and she avoided the subject with Alice, but the hurt was an old-bruise throb and not the bright pain of an open wound.

What hurt more was Ed Hamner's failure to call.

A week passed, then two, then it was October. She got a student directory from the Union and looked up his name. It was no help; after his name were only the words “Mill St.” And Mill was a very long street indeed. And so she waited, and when she was called for dates—which was often—she turned them down. Alice raised her eyebrows but said nothing; she was buried alive in a six-week biochem project and spent most of her evenings at the library. Elizabeth noticed the long white envelopes that her roommate was receiving once or twice a week in the mail—since she was usually back from class first but thought nothing of them. The private detective agency was discreet; it did not print its return address on its envelopes.

When the intercom buzzed, Alice was studying. “You get it, Liz. Probably for you anyway.”

Elizabeth went to the intercom. “Yes?”

“Gentleman door-caller, Liz.”

Oh, Lord.

“Who is it?” she asked, annoyed, and ran through her tattered stack of excuses. Migraine headache. She hadn't used that one this week.

The desk girl said, amused, “His name is Edward Jackson Hamner.
Junior,
no less.” Her voice lowered. “His socks don't match.”

Elizabeth's hand flew to the collar of her robe. “Oh, God. Tell him I'll be right down. No, tell him it will be just a minute. No, a couple of minutes, okay?”

“Sure,” the voice said dubiously. “Don't have a hemorrhage.”

Elizabeth took a pair of slacks out of her closet. Took out a short denim skirt. Felt the curlers in her hair and groaned. Began to yank them out.

Alice watched all this calmly, without speaking, but she looked speculatively at the door for a long time after Elizabeth had left.

He looked just the same; he hadn't changed at all. He was wearing his green fatigue jacket, and it still looked at least two sizes too big. One of the bows of his horn-rimmed glasses had been mended with electrician's tape. His jeans looked new and stiff, miles from the soft and faded “in” look that Tony had achieved effortlessly. He was wearing one green sock, one brown sock.

And she knew she loved him.

“Why didn't you call before?” she asked, going to him.

He stuck his hands in the pockets of his jacket and grinned shyly. “I thought I'd give you some time to date around. Meet some guys. Figure out what you want.”

“I think I know that.”

“Good. Would you like to go to a movie?”

“Anything,” she said. “Anything at all.”

As the days passed it occurred to her that she had never met anyone, male or female, that seemed to understand her moods and needs so completely or so wordlessly. Their tastes coincided. While Tony had enjoyed violent movies of the
Godfather
type, Ed seemed more into comedy or nonviolent dramas. He took her to the circus one night when she was feeling low and they had a hilariously wonderful time. Study dates were real study dates, not just an excuse to grope on the third floor of the Union. He took her to dances and seemed especially good at the old ones, which she loved. They won a fifties Stroll trophy at a Homecoming Nostalgia Dance. More important, he seemed to understand when she wanted to be passionate. He didn't force her or hurry her; she never got the feeling that she had with some of the other boys she had gone out with—that there was an inner timetable for sex, beginning with a kiss good night on Date 1 and ending with a night in some friend's borrowed apartment on Date 10. The Mill Street apartment was Ed's exclusively, a third-floor walk-up. They went there often, and Elizabeth went without the feeling that she was walking into some minor-league Don Juan's passion pit. He didn't push. He honestly seemed to want what she wanted, when she wanted it. And things progressed.

When school reconvened following the semester break, Alice seemed strangely preoccupied. Several times that afternoon before Ed came to pick her up—they were going out to dinner—Elizabeth looked up to see her roommate frowning down at a large manila envelope on her desk. Once Elizabeth almost asked about it, then decided not to. Some new project probably.

•                           •                           •

It was snowing hard when Ed brought her back to the dorm.

“Tomorrow?” he asked. “My place?”

“Sure. I'll make some popcorn.”

“Great,” he said, and kissed her. “I love you, Beth.”

“Love you, too.”

“Would you like to stay over?” Ed asked evenly. “Tomorrow night?”

“All right, Ed.” She looked into his eyes. “Whatever you want.”

“Good,” he said quietly. “Sleep well, kid.”

“You, too.”

She expected that Alice would be asleep and entered the room quietly, but Alice was up and sitting at her desk.

“Alice, are you okay?”

“I have to talk to you, Liz. About Ed.”

“What about him?”

Alice said carefully, “I think that when I finish talking to you we're not going to be friends anymore. For me, that's giving up a lot. So I want you to listen carefully.”

“Then maybe you better not say anything.”

“I have to try.”

Elizabeth felt her initial curiosity kindle into anger. “Have you been snooping around Ed?”

Alice only looked at her.

“Were you jealous of us?”

“No. If I'd been jealous of you and your dates, I would have moved out two years ago.”

Elizabeth looked at her, perplexed. She knew what Alice said was the truth. And she suddenly felt afraid.

“Two things made me wonder about Ed Hamner,” Alice said. “First, you wrote me about Tony's death and said how lucky it was that I'd seen Ed at the Lakewood Theater . . . how he came right over to Boothbay and really helped you out. But I never saw him, Liz. I was never near the Lakewood Theater last summer.”

“But . . .”

“But how did he know Tony was dead? I have no idea. I only know he didn't get it from me. The other thing was that eidetic-memory business. My God, Liz, he can't even remember which socks he's got on!”

“That's a different thing altogether,” Liz said stiffly. “It—”

“Ed Hamner was in Las Vegas last summer,” Alice said softly. “He came back in mid-July and took a motel room in Pemaquid. That's just across the Boothbay Harbor town line. Almost as if he were waiting for you to need him.”

“That's crazy! And how would you know Ed was in Las Vegas?”

“I ran into Shirley D'Antonio just before school started. She worked in the Pines Restaurant, which is just across from the playhouse. She said she never saw anybody who looked like Ed Hamner. So I've known he's been lying to you about several things. And so I went to my father and laid it out and he gave me the go-ahead.”