The Last Family (16 page)

“A car with two men in it at the school. And when I got off the bus, it stopped in front of Alice’s house. Isn’t that weird?”

Weird?
“What did the men look like?”

“I dunno. Just one was kinda white-headed. Sunglasses and a cap. The other was older, I think.”

“Was it the same man? The plumber and the man in the red car?”

“I don’t know. Couldn’t see inside the van on account of the dark windows.”

“Would you know the man if you saw him again?”

“If he was in that car. I didn’t really see him face-to-face.”

Laura stared at Reb. Reb stared back. It had been years since she had considered her family vulnerable to danger from the sort of people … 
What sort of people?
“Erin, watch the spaghetti for a minute,” Laura said. “Off the phone. Now.” The sudden authority in her mother’s voice shocked Erin and she sat up.

Erin said good-bye to the person on the line and
crossed to the counter. “What?” she said, obviously irritated.

“When Reb’s watch goes off, remove the pasta from the heat and pour it into the colander. Then turn the stove off and serve your plates, okay?”

“Sure, why?”

“Because I have to take Wolf out for a few minutes.”

Erin frowned and tilted her head. “How about I do that and you drain the noodles and stuff?” Erin leaned on the counter beside Reb. “I mean, it’s just so Little Betty Homemaker, I could hurl.”

“Women have to know how to cook, Erin,” Reb said. He stepped to the cage in the corner of the nook and put the bird inside. Then he washed his hands in the sink.

“Women lawyers don’t. I’m going to eat every meal at really fine restaurants. Except when I’m in court dazzling the jury.”

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Laura said. She picked up Wolf’s red nylon lead from the sideboard. Seeing his leash, Wolf started spinning in place and stopped only so she could clip it onto his collar. “Erin, have you noticed any strange men around lately?”

“What man isn’t strange?”

“No, like strangers. Hanging around. Following you.” Laura tried to seem casual, but the question registered some concern in Erin’s eyes.

“You mean like winos? Sure, they’re everywhere.”

“She means like plumbers,” Reb said. “And men in cars watching buses.”

“Plumbers!” Erin said, laughing away the seriousness that had existed a split second before. “Oh, like I run around watching for plumbers.”

Laura went out the front door, followed the dog down the walkway, and paused at the front gate. She looked through the wrought-iron bars toward Alice Walters’s house, which was across the street at an angle. Alice was in the Bahamas for two months. There was no red car on the street and no plumbing van. Not that she had expected there would be. But, still, Reb wasn’t given to an overactive imagination. Laura opened the gate and
followed Wolf down the street. As she passed the house, she cut her eyes toward the bedroom on the second floor and thought she saw—no, “saw” was the wrong word, for she didn’t see anything—she felt as though eyes were following her. She stopped and looked up. Then she stared at Alice’s front door where the blinking red light showed that the alarm system was armed. While she watched the house, Wolf saluted the wisteria bush at the edge of Laura’s wall.

Alice Walters, although she was sixty, was a friend of Laura’s and visited once a week or so. She was the possessor of strong opinions on everything, but these opinions were carefully thought out and then mixed with emotion and served piping hot. Laura got a kick out of her. She hadn’t asked Laura to keep an eye on her house, but Laura was afraid that Alice’s art, furniture, and other valuables might draw burglars. Alice had never married and was fond of Reb and Erin, giving them presents on Christmas and allowing them to stay at her house when Laura had to go out of town.

Laura stared up at the second-floor windows and then followed Wolf back to the house. As she was about to open her gate, a red Volvo sedan with two men in the front seat turned the corner and slowed as if they planned to pull over. But the driver didn’t stop. In fact, the car gathered speed, and as it passed Laura, she thought the passenger turned his head to avoid her stare. The car kept going and turned a few blocks away without using the blinker.

Laura thought about Allen White, a police homicide detective, who lived down the street. He was Reb’s little-league baseball coach. He had said, “If there’s ever anything I can do, call me.” Maybe there was and maybe she would.

12

E
VE
F
LETCHER STOOD LIKE A WARDEN AT HER FRONT DOOR WATCHING
the spot of a dog on her lawn through the storm door’s dingy safety glass. The animal, which was being bathed in the early-morning North Carolina sunshine, was an ancient, gray-faced Chihuahua, hardly larger than a hood ornament. He was possessed of a forehead shaped like a tennis ball, batlike ears, and bulging eyes filled with the milk of blindness. The animal was arching its backbone and trembling like a cheap vibrator. She cracked the door so he could hear her.

“Hurry, Mr. Puzzle,” Eve said. “Toodatoo for Mommy. Yessireesir, it’s a good boy that does his little toodatoo.” Her voice had the quality of a hacksaw against mutton bone.

The dog turned its head toward the door, and as if by his mistress’s command something that resembled a burned-up chili pepper issued forth, swung as if at the
end of a string, and then fell into the tall grass. This accomplished, Mr. Puzzle shook himself, took a feeble shot at kicking grass over the refuse, and headed for the door, following his earlier scent or his mistress’s voice. As he reached the stoop, Eve opened the door, waltzed down the three steps, and scooped him to her bosom, kissing him on the domed head. She was rewarded with a wet sneeze and a weakly wagging twig of a tail that might have been sectioned from a rat.

Eve shuffled toward the den on her stovepipe legs with the animal clutched to her chest like a treasure. Eve was almost six feet tall, a wide-shouldered woman of sixty-eight. She had large hands with thick wrists and huge breasts that hung from her chest like water balloons tied together and draped over a clothesline. Heavy prescription reading glasses balanced precariously on the tip of her wide nose.

The entire den was hardly more than a nest. It was littered with a confusion of accumulated clutter, including boxes in a wide range of sizes and states of disgorgement. There was an open sewing basket, a pink Easter basket filled with balls of yarn, stacks upon stacks of
National Geographic
, paperbacks,
Soap Opera Digest
, and other magazines. There were bundles of mail tied with string, paper grocery bags with newspapers tightly packed inside. There were also little black ruins of dog flop where the animal had sneaked a crap when Eve Fletcher wasn’t paying attention.

Eve had smoked Pall Malls at the rate of two cartons a week for most of her adult life. As a consequence her teeth looked like kernels of corn. Her world, the interior rooms of the small house, had yellowed as well over the years. A beanbag with a green aluminum bowl of ashtray was perched like a sleeping pigeon on the arm of her BarcaLounger. When each cigarette was no more than one-half its original length, she would crush and fold the butt unmercifully and, once certain it was dead, pour the contents into the ash can beside the chair, wiping the ashtray out with a facial tissue.
It’s the last half of a cigarette has almost all the tar in it
, she always told herself.
Then she would replace the cleaned ashtray on the chair’s arm, where it would wait to receive the next offering. There was seldom much of a wait. She held her cigarettes between the wrong side of her middle finger and the next to last, so that if she fell asleep with one active, it would burn her awake and not fall to the bed or chair to smolder and ignite.

The walls in the den were papered in a nicotine-dulled floral and spotted with her favorite art. There was a textured reproduction of Van Gogh’s
Sunflowers
, a painted-by-numbers
Last Supper
, and hanging over the television set, a large photograph of a thin-necked, bleak-eyed boy in his graduation cap. The color photograph had faded to a light-blue whisper, and noncritical sections of it had bubbled and adhered to the glass. A framed photograph of the same boy, though beefier, in Marine Corps dress blues, was perched on top of the television set beside a pot of orange plastic flowers held aloft by impossibly green stems.

Eve had seen herself as a beauty before she’d been married and forever lost her snappy figure to her sole pregnancy. During the Second World War she had worked in a factory making eyeglasses for soldiers and sailors. That was where she had met Martin’s father, a quiet man sidelined from the army due to flat feet. Milton Fletcher had passed away in 1954.

Eve shifted her legs, the stubble catching against the pink sheeny polyfibered nightgown, and studied the
TV Guide
carefully. She stared at the Big Ben clock on the tray.

“Nine thirty-three! They promised me the cable would be back on before my stories start. Can’t trust anybody.”

She closed the housecoat over her knees and rubbed the dog’s neck somewhat vigorously. After she’d located the remote control on the dinner tray and switched on the television, she watched the static for a few seconds, a deep frown embedded in her face.

“God-dangit, where the hell’s those TV people?” she wondered aloud. “I bet I’ll just deduct these hours from
the bill if they don’t get a move on!” she told the dog. She did the applicable math in her head but had a pencil in her hand just in case she needed to figure on paper. It was a talent she had. “Cable’s thirty-two a month. Kill the extra dollar and, say, a dollar a day, and at twenty-four hours a dollar that’s four cents an hour. Now. From seven-thirty to …”

She heard a car door close, then another, and the dog began growling. She scratched under her wig, which sat on her head like a gray turban, with the eraser end of the pencil. Then she stood and carried the barking dog toward the door. The buzzer sounded just as she got there. She had the pencil in her hand in case she needed a weapon.
You never know
, she thought.
Martin says anything can be a weapon
.

“Yes?” she said loudly so the people on the porch might hear her through the storm door.

“Cable trouble, Miss Fletcher?”

She opened the door a crack and looked at the people in matching coveralls standing on the porch and at the white pickup truck with
CABLE VISION
painted on the door. Mr. Puzzle, who could hear the voices, began having a conniption fit. Eve tried to quiet him by gripping his muzzle, and he bit her so hard it broke the skin above the ragged pink nail on her thick trigger finger. The closest one was a woman with her thumbs hooked into her tool belt. Behind her was a thin younger man with round-lensed, gold-frame glasses. There was a cigarette dangling from the girl’s lips. Eve managed to get a grip on the dog’s mouth and clamp it, whereupon the dog’s cheeks inflated. He sounded like a motorboat.

“Pocket hound,” the girl said cheerily. “My mama has one of them handheld attack dogs. Gotta get in close to use ’em.” She laughed. Eve stared at her, her drawn face announcing that she was not a woman easily amused.

“Miss Fletcher?” the man said.

“Mizzus Fletcher,” she corrected. “I’m a widow.”

“You reported your cable out?”

“I most certainly did. Last night at eight twenty-one
on that answering machine, and this morning first thing they opened, to the lady that answered. I didn’t think you would get to it before my stories. I have to keep up every day. It’s Monday, and they leave you in the lurch on Fridays. If you miss Monday, you’re just swimmy-headed about what’s happening the rest of the week. I hope my bill will show an adjustment for the inconvenience. The money I pay for this is criminal!”

“That so?” the cable woman said, taking over from the man. “Never watch it. We’ll need to come in. The trouble is most likely inside. Must be an old hookup.”

“Well, I’ve had cable since seventy-seven. Don’t ever watch the first story or you’ll be hooked. I like that HBO sometimes, too.” Mrs. Fletcher opened the door wide so they could enter. “Go about your business. TV’s in the den.”

“We’ll need to get in the attic,” the man said.

“They didn’t need to get in the attic when they installed it,” she said suspiciously.

“They probably snaked it in from the eaves, but we’ll have to look at running new cable. The early cable was coaxial three, and it gets brittle with age. I’ll probably have to replace it with this new finer gauge.” He held up a piece of fiber-optic line for her inspection. “This stuff lasts forever and doubles your reception quality.”

“I can’t see the picture too good. But there’s nothing wrong with my ears. Door to the attic is in the hallway. Just pull the chain and the stairs come down. Do you adjust color?”

Eve watched as the two checked the cable box on her set, and then the man went out in the hallway and climbed up into the attic with the roll of cable and a silver toolbox. The woman looked at the picture on the wall.

“He’s a looker,” she said.

“That’s my boy, Martin,” she said.

“Nice looking,” the woman said. “Married?”

“Goodness no!” Eve said. “Hasn’t found the right girl.”

“What does he do?”

Eve shifted closer and confided, “He was in law enforcement. He’s a police consultant to governments and such. He knows lots of very important individuals like you see on the news.”

“Where is he these days?”

“How long is this going to take?” Eve asked nervously. She didn’t want to discuss her son, what with the communists always trying to get revenge on him and doing things like framing him up and all that.

“Not long. What’s the dog’s name?”

“Puzzle. I call him Mr. Puzzle.”

“Cute.”

“Martin named him. He said it was a puzzle how come the breed even survived.” She laughed out loud, and her foul breath staggered Sierra. “Why the rattlesnakes and Mexicans didn’t eat them all up, he says, is man’s greatest puzzle. Martin has a well-developed sense of humor. Gets his personality from my side. We moved in here in fifty-four, and first thing you know Milton’s gone across the river. Well, I—”