WIDOW (9 page)

Well fuck them and their backhanded compliments. She never really believed she could dance the better clubs anyway. She might not look thirty, but she didn't look eighteen either. She'd had a choice to make—continue working for Severenson Maid Service and running into families with children where she had to control her wild urges to attack the fathers, or take a job dancing. Wherever they would let her. There was no choice. Not unless she wanted to go to prison for murdering an absolute stranger just because he might accidentally drop his son or knock him aside when rushing out the door for work.

Charlene told her she could do it. Charlene believed in her when no one else did. “You've gotten yourself all dolled up,” she said. “I don't think I've ever seen anyone so pretty.”

Before Charlene came from Marion, Kay was able to buy the Toyota, and move from the boarding house. A girl she met at the exercise gym told her about a place that needed a house-sitter. The girl worked as an apartment-locating representative, and this place had come up, but no one wanted to take it because of the house's reputation. Kay asked what reputation was that, maybe she'd be interested. She needed something cheap.

“How's free sound? That cheap enough?” The girl brushed streaked-blonde hair from her eyes, reached over and gripped a couple of weights, her biceps popping and straining.

“Free? Like no rent?”

“It's free because the owner can't get anyone to stay in it. He just wants someone to be there while he's out of the country—off in Spain somewhere . . . Lisbon? . . . anyway, he's afraid the place is going to get trashed. Vandals, drug dealers, squatters, all that. It's already happened twice and cost him an arm and a leg to redo the place. He doesn't want any money out of it, the guy's rolling in dough, he just wants house-sitters. Think you might do it? I get a commission anyway, the guy's paying us to find someone.”

“Depends. What kind of reputation are you talking about? What kind of house and where is it?”

“Well, the reputation, see, is that the former owner was killed in it.”

A flash of gunshot and blood crossed Shadow's vision momentarily. She swallowed, tried to concentrate.

“He was a queer, some kid killed him. But there aren't ghosts or anything, right? It's a mansion, a real mansion, honest. Big as a hotel. You could throw parties in there like you wouldn't believe.”

Shadow wasn't interested in parties. She was interested in free rent, though. “So where is it?”

“Out in Seabrook. Near the water.”

“God. That's way out. I'd have to drive forever.”

The girl shrugged and put down the weights. When she bent over, cleavage showed from the rim of her silver Spandex top. The blond surfer walked by, head cranked in her direction until Shadow gave him a look.

“Yeah, that's out of town, but it's a neat place. You ought to go check it out. I can't take it, I have a lease, but it's a real deal. All you have to do is keep it clean, don't break anything, and pay the electric bill.”

“I can go look, I guess. When's the owner coming back?”

“Not for a year at least, maybe longer.”

Shadow toured the house, loved it, and moved in the next weekend. She had a place for Charlene, and she didn't have to spend a bundle of money getting it. She didn't even have to lay out money for furniture.

There was just one problem. The mansion spooked Charlene. She thought it was cold and gloomy. It had too many rooms and echoed every time she walked through it. She mentioned voices, but Shadow tried to turn the conversation away from that.

She told her to look at the funny side of it. “What's funny about this mausoleum?” Charlene wanted to know.

“Well, we don't have much money, we're driving a ten-year-old Toyota with rusty rocker panels, but we get to live in a mansion big enough for ten families, and rich enough to please a millionaire.”

Charlene made a humphing sound, but she soon settled in and stopped complaining. It was better than nothing, she admitted. It was lots better than being locked up in Marion.

Living fifty miles out from the center of Houston, Shadow had to give up the exercise club. Instead she ran every day (around and around the mansion), and did sit-ups until she was soaked with sweat and blistering the walls with profanity at how much it hurt. She bought weights, an exercise table, and a stationary bicycle.

She hated driving the long distance in to the club, and the job was, to say the least, not one hell of a lot better than cleaning people's toilets for a living.

“Exotic dancing,” Charlene said one day. “It pays great and you don't have to diddle with the guys if you don't want to.”

“It’s not as much fun as you think.”

Charlene's eyes grew misty and she took on a faraway look. “Just about any kind of job has some fun in it. I wish I knew how to dance. I can't even follow the rhythm for a two-step. I always stepped on Louise's toes in the rec room. She hated being my partner.”

“Dancing's dancing. It's no big deal. I'll teach you how to do the two-step one day.”

Charlene brought her gaze back to Shadow's face. “You will?”

“Sure. Why not. Then you can go out to some shit-kicking country-dance place and get some big ole cowboy with a ring of keys dangling from his back pocket to waltz you around the floor.”

“Now you're kidding me.”

“Not about those cowboys. They really do carry big ugly goddamn key rings.”

Charlene laughed.

Shadow settled for five hundred a week to start out at the Hot Spot. She was told tips from couch and table dancing were all hers, but she couldn't trust herself to get that close to the patrons. She didn't want them touching her, or even trying to. All the moves came back to her after a couple of nights, but she was still a little stiff and shy. No one except Scott had seen her bare breasts for ten years. It was difficult to parade around undressed again after leading a normal life for so long.

The thought brought her up sharply. Normal life. How normal could it have really been when her husband carried the seeds of madness and destruction around in his brain like a cancer waiting to spread? Still. For a while, she had been deceived into believing she was living a normal life. Maybe that was the shame of it; it was surely why the shock was so complete.

Bertram said she'd have to do longer sets, but for right now she was on trial. She knew she'd get the extra fifty a week she had asked of him. And if she danced more than once, she'd up it another hundred, maybe two.

“Sky's the limit, hon,” Charlene told her. “You make them money, they pay to keep you.”

On the way home to Seabrook, she picked up some Chinese-to-go from a Hunan restaurant. It was eleven-thirty when she walked into the mansion. She breathed in the scent of industrial-strength pine cleaner. It reminded her of the maid's job. She never thought she'd be able to look at a toilet again without thinking about cleaning under the rim.

She wrinkled her nose and went searching for Charlene. She found her in one of the four bathrooms, down on her knees scrubbing tiles. Shadow suspected that's how she spent all her waking hours—cleaning. It was Charlene who would have been a good maid. Here she had a big place to keep up. She'd stay busy. She might not start talking to unseen beings and hearing voices in her head if she had something to keep her occupied.

“Chinese! I love Chinese take-out. Did you bring chopsticks? I can eat with chopsticks, you know, and fortune cookies. Did you get fortune cookies? Honey, I tell you, this is turning into a sweet deal. I almost believe I won't have to go back to Marion for a while, what with all this luck.”

They camped around the big glass coffee table in the cold, cavernous living room, and ate from the white cartons.

“They like you, don't they?” Charlene asked. “I told you they would. It's this sexy look you got. And that cut you got for your hair, it's perfect. You tried table dancing yet?”

“I don't want to do that.” She stabbed an egg noodle with her fork and, holding her head back, inelegantly dropped it into her open mouth.

“Why not? They ain't allowed to touch you. They touch you, the management throws their asses out the door.”

“I don't want to get that close. They're all a bunch of slime buckets and horny assholes. They wouldn't be in places like that if they weren't.”

“You're there. And you ain't no slime bucket.”

“I might be.” The image of a bucket of slime flashed in her mind and it amused her so much she thought everything about their conversation funny as hell. She took a bite of an egg roll and grinned big so Charlene could see the cabbage leaves dangling from her bared teeth.

“You are not. You are the sweetest, kindest, best. . .”

“I'm a slut of the sluttiest kind.” She tore off a piece of egg roll and slapped it to her forehead where it would stay stuck if she tilted backwards just a bit. She stared at Charlene innocently, egg roll on her head.

“You are not. You're just the prettiest little . . .”

“I am the Whore of Babylon.” She grabbed up some of the red sweet-and-sour sauce from the chicken entree and smeared it onto her lips and cheeks.

Charlene couldn't help it, she couldn't be serious any longer. She burst out with a laugh that echoed overhead against the two-story ceiling and bounced off the yards and yards of white-marble tile floor.

Shadow pretended to ignore the mess she had dripping from her face while she took up a fortune cookie and cracked it open to delicately retrieve the little slip of paper inside. Charlene fell back onto her elbows, she was laughing so hard.

Shadow arched her neck to keep the clot of egg roll from sliding past her eyebrow into her eye. She read aloud her fortune, “You will dance naked for money and men will leave slobber trails on your feet.”

Now Charlene lost it completely and rolled between the coffee table and the white leather sofa. “Stop it, oh God, stop it, you're killing me . . .”

Shadow swiped a trail of red sauce from her cheekbone and licked her finger. “You are a bonafide crazy person,” she said.

Charlene's laughter turned into howls and she had to hold onto her stomach, it ached so much. “I know! That's what they've been telling me for years,” she screamed. “And I'm going to piss myself too!”

“That's what I said. You're a bonafide pissy-panted crazy person. I always knew that.”

 

Eight

 

At home Son lived a sedentary and withdrawn existence. When his mother insisted, he might sit with her and talk a while, but she knew he wasn't comfortable with idle chitchat so she asked this of him less often as her health failed. Nevertheless, now that she was confined most of the time to bed, she needed his company more—this was something he understood—but he possessed no road map to show him the way through the quagmire of what he thought of as her petty, daily concerns.

He went over this particular resentment now as he sat, like a prisoner held fast by invisible chains, in an overstuffed easy chair across from her bed.

“How is the new book progressing?” she asked.

She fancied herself his source of encouragement and alleged to take great pride in his creative achievements. But the problem remained. He had nothing to say to her really—nothing that he hadn't already said a hundred times before—and his fund of patience grew leaner the longer he felt obligated to sit in the chair, bound by her infirmity. “It's progressing slowly.”

“Where are you sending Eddie Lapin this time?”

“Maybe to England.”

She clasped together her spindly hands. “To England! London, you mean, like Sherlock Holmes?”

“No, Mother, to the moors. Off to the bleak, forbidding moors where heather grows and neighbors kill neighbors.”

Well, that's still delightful. I'm sure your editor will love it, Son. It sounds like a perfectly grisly place for your detective to solve a murder.”

“I suppose so.” He counted the open crocheted flower petals in a doily spread over the chair arm. Five in each flower. Why hadn't she chosen six or four, why five? Why any at all? What was the purpose of a doily anyway? It was positively Victorian to have them draped over chair arms and backs, spreading like creeping lichens over table tops and shelves. When she died he would . . .

The curious thought made him blink back sudden tears. He didn't hate her. He didn't want her to die. Not his own mother. He loved his mother. She was in all ways perfect and she had been good to him. How could he be such a shit and go about thinking of what he'd do when she died? Look how she cared about his livelihood and his interests.

Look how much time he was spending counting crocheted flower petals and wishing to be anywhere, anywhere at all, but here with her.

“I don't have it all worked out yet.” He cleared his throat, and swept the idea of what life would be like without her from his thoughts completely. “I don't know who the murderer is.” I haven't gotten that far into the book I'm copying.

“Who are the suspects?” She had taken a fat pillow from her back and plumped it to press just behind her bony hips. He thought her color was good today. She wasn't as pale as usual.

“There's a mine worker and a handyman carpenter. There's the maid at the rectory. And there's a woman who is visiting from London, hoping to marry the local barrister.”

“Why does she want to do that?”

He waved the question off with a hand. “I don't think it's her. She's too obvious. I expect it will have to be the rectory maid. She's incredibly jealous of the dead man's relationship with her Catholic priest. That's how she thinks of him—as belonging to her.”

“She's in love with him then? Oh, that's so sad.”

“Did you love my father?” He hadn't known he was going to ask that. He had heard over and over again from her that she had loved his father at one time. ‘At one time' never satisfied him. What happened to make her stop loving him, why didn't she ever tell him that? He deserved to know the details. The man was dead for all he knew, and he had never had the opportunity to meet him. He deserved all the details of their life together because he had been so cheated.