immune.'
'You grew up around here?'
'In the general area. Here and there. We moved around a lot. Steaks ready, Bid? Time for one more drink, then, Trav. Let me fix it for you. Maurie, darling, you are supposed to be tossing the salad, not sampling it.'
She hunched herself. 'I didn't mean... I wasn't--'
'It's all right, darling.'
At one point while we were eating, one scene, like a frozen frame, like a color still, underlined the strange flavor of the relationships, of the m ‚nage. Maurie and I were on the same bench on one side of the picnic table, r
Maurie on my left. Biddy was across from me. Maurie was eating very politely and properly, and I glanced over and saw the two of them watching her. Husband and kid sister, looking at the wife with the same intent, nervous approval, as a couple might watch their only child plodding through a simple piano solo for visiting relatives. Then the frozen frame moved once again as Biddy lifted the poised fork to her lips and as Tom Pike began chewing again.
Later, as Biddy was saying something to me, Tom's low voice in a sound of warning, saying merely 'Darling!' made Biddy stop abruptly and look quickly at Maureen. I turned and looked at her and saw that she had hunched herself over her plate, head low, had picked up her steak in a greedy fist, and was tearing and gobbling at it. She dropped it back onto her plate and sat, eyes downcast, while under the shelter of the edge of the table she wiped her greasy fingers on the top of her bare thigh, leaving streaks of sheen across the firm brown.
'You forgot again, dear,' Tom said in a gentle voice.
Maurie began to tremble visibly.
'Don't get upset, honey,' Biddy said.
But suddenly she wrenched herself up and away, striking the edge of the table so solidly with her hip that drinks and coffee slopped out of the glasses and cups. She ran toward the house, sobbing audibly in her blundering, hopeless flight. Tom called sharply to her, but she did not look back or slow down. Biddy got up quickly and hurried after her.
'Sorry,' Tom said. 'I guess you can see why we don't... Biddy will get her settled down and...' He pushed his plate away and said, 'Ah, the hell with it!' and got up and walked down toward the lake shore.
He was still there when Biddy came walking back out. She sat opposite me. 'She's resting now. In a little while she won't remember what happened. I want to have Tom look at her and see if he thinks she needs a shot. Is... is he all right?'
'He acted upset.'
'It's because she was doing so well.'
She stared down toward the silent figure by the lake shore. I was at an angle to her that gave me a chance to see more than she would have wanted me to see. Her face had a soft and brooding look, lips parted. It was adoration, worship, hopeless helpless yearning love. I knew why she had started to go to pieces in the cocktail lounge. It was a situation nicely calculated to fray her to the breaking point, to have been for a year in this house with the deteriorating wife, the concerned and suffering husband. Loyalty to the big sister. And a humble self- sacrificing love for the husband.
After a little while we all went inside. Tom went up and looked at her and came back and said she was sleeping. He sat for a moment, glancing at his watch.
'Nice to meet you, Travis. Just... sorry that it had to be... to be...' His voice thickened and his mouth twisted, and he suddenly buried his face in his hands. Biddy hurried to him and shyly, hesitantly, put her hand on his shoulder.
'Tom. Please, Tom. It will work out.'
He sighed and straightened up and dug in his pocket for a handkerchief. His eyes still streaming, he said in a husky voice, 'Sure, honey. It will all be peachy dandy by and by.' He mopped his eyes and blew his nose. 'I apologize for myself too. See you around.' She followed him out and I heard him saying something about getting home late. The car door slammed. He drove out. She came back into the two-level living room. Her eyes looked moist.
'He's... quite a guy, Travis.'
'Little tough to go back to the office and sell stocks and bonds, I guess.'
'What? Oh, he hasn't done that in a long time now. Over two years. He started his own company.'
'Doing what?'
'It's called Development Unlimited. It's sort of a promotion company. They do a lot of land-syndication things. I don't really know how it works, but it's supposed to be a wonderful idea for people in high tax brackets, like doctors and so on. They pay a lot of interest in advance when they buy the land, and then they sell it later for capital gains. Tom is very clever at things like that. And they set up shares in apartment houses and do something very clever about depreciation and losses and cash flow and all that. He tried to explain it to me, but I have no head for that kind of thing. I guess he's doing well because he has to go out of town a lot and arrange deals in other places too. To have Maurie the way she is makes... his success so kind of hollow. He is really a marvelous human being.'
'He seems to be.'
She wanted to show me her studio and her paintings. But she was making too obvious an effort to entertain me. The shine had gone out of her day. I said I should be getting along. I wrote out my address for her and told her to send me the name of the man who had bought the Likely Lady when she went through her mother's papers.
We stood out by my car and told each other we hoped we'd see each other again someday. Maybe we did hope so. Hard to say.
I got back to the Wahini Lodge at three. I stretched out on the bed and told myself that it had to be the end of the obligation, if there was any. I had taken a good look. It was a sorry little situation. Prognosis bad. When you can't identify the disease, the prognosis is always bad. And two nice people, Tom Pike and Bridget Pearson, were stuck with it. Maybe if Maurie could knock herself off in such a way that Tom wouldn't blame Biddy and she wouldn't blame him or herself, they might be able to make a life. A lot of widowers have married kid sisters and enjoyed it.
The restlessness was back in full force. I didn't want to go home to Lauderdale. I didn't want to stay where I was. And I couldn't think of anywhere to go. I felt like a bored kid on a rainy day. Maurie kept sliding into my mind and I kept pushing her out. Go away, woman. Have a nice sleep.
I went into the bathroom. I glanced at my toilet-article kit atop the pale yellow formica of the countertop, and my random restless thoughts were gone in an instant, and I was totally focused, the back of my neck feeling prickly and cool.
Caution is like the seat belt habit. If you are going to -use seat belts, then you'd better make it automatic by latching your belt every single time you get into the car. Then you stop thinking about the seat belt and you do not have to make any decisions about seat belts because you are always strapped in.
I have a lot of little rituals that are completely automatic. They are the habits of caution. A lot of these habits are seemingly casual and accidental arrangements of things. When I leave the toilet kit open, the last thing I usually replace in it is the toothbrush. I am a brush-last type. I lay it, bristles-up, across the other items in such a way that it is fairly stable and is on a perfect diagonal, aimed from corner to corner out of the case. When I reach into the case in the morning to take the stuff out, I am not consciously aware of the precise placement of the toothbrush. I am suddenly very aware, however, if it is not in its proper place and alignment.
I reconstructed the morning. By the time I came back from breakfast, the maid had done the room. I had been in the bathroom, and had the brush been in the wrong place, I would have noticed it. I studied the new position of it. No passing truck, no sonic boom, could have moved it so far from its proper position.
All right. So somebody had been messing with my stuff, poking around. Petty thief with a passkey. Very easy to prove. All I had to do to prove it was lift the soap dish. (Only masochists use those sorry little slivers of lilac that motels call soap.) Two twenties, folded twice. I unfolded them. There were still two. A dumb thief would take them both. A slightly less stupid thief would take one.
If you are in a line of work where people can get very emotional about the fact you are still walking around and breathing, a forty-dollar decoy is a cheap method of identifying the visitor. Had the money been gone, it would not have been absolute assurance that it had been a visit by a sneak thief. A professional of enough experience and astuteness would take it anyway, knowing that if I had left any little trap around the place, the missing money would be a false trail.
I went back to the bed, sat on the edge of it and glowered at the carpeting. I had brought nothing with me that could possibly clue anybody about anything.. My temporary address was known to Biddy, Tom Pike, the car rental girl, and whoever they might have told or who might have questioned them.
Biddy and Tom knew that I would be away from the motel at lunchtime. Tom would have had time to come to the motel before going home. Looking for what? Helena's letter? Work on that assumption and stay with it until it breaks down. But why? What could be in the letter? Unless Biddy was one hell of an actress, she hadn't known there was a letter until I told her. Seemed doubtful that Helena would mention having written me a letter. It was too highly personal a letter, for one thing. D. Wintin Hardahee had known for sure. And maybe a nurse had known. Forget the why of it, at least for now. Start at a known point or with a known angle, which is the basis of all
