He slid his arms around her, and she turned with great sudden grace inside his embrace. And then she began crying. Sobbing.
“I’d like to go up to Mary’s room,” I said to the pale man impersonating Bill Travers.
He nodded. By the time I reached the narrow staircase, he was leading his wife carefully to the couch.
Time travel.
I remembered the day. Who didn’t? Very-Just Day. End of the long and murderous war. Dad coming home. Six hundred thousand dads coming home.
There were Mary and I in the army caps our fathers had sent us, tiny American flags in our mitts, grinning at the camera. We had our arms over each other’s shoulders.
There were other photos of the two of us: dances, bonfires, horseback rides, hot afternoons at the public swimming pool; later on, hot afternoons at the sandpits, high school beer cans glinting off the sunlight.
And Mary evolved in each one. More and more beautiful and graceful. A cutup, to be sure -clowning in a sport coat of her father’s as a ten-year-old me watched; smoking a cigarette at her thirteenth birthday party (a very sophisticated lady until, as Miriam had predicted, she rushed to the john and threw up), me looking gawky and dumb in the background, shorter even than most of the girls; Mary in a talent contest lip-synching (as I recall) to “Music! Music! Music!” by Teresa
Brewer, dressed up in a tux and top hat-and yet always with those wise and sober blue eyes. The Knolls and its despair and its violence had taught her, as it had taught too many of us, things we shouldn’t have known at such tender ages, things that marked us forever.
Time travel.
I sat on the bedspread in the pink room, looking at the pennants and dolls and silly carnival gifts she collected over the years, at the desk where she’d done her straight-A work at the bookcase jammed both with classics and the occasional John D. MacDonald or Peter Rabe I’d given her. The room was scented with sachet and sunshine and memories. The autumn leaves brushed the open window. I could reach out and pluck one, like taking a plume of fire. I walked over to the desk and started going through the drawers.
I found it under a stack of papers: an envelope from the Dearborn County Courthouse, Dearborn, Iowa. It was a number-ten white business envelope with a window. The window was empty. I had no idea to whom it had originally been addressed. The postmark read December 2, 1955. Nearly two years ago. I turned it over. I recognized Mary’s handwriting immediately. She had learned the Palmer Method well.
328-6382
Susan
I stayed a few more minutes, found nothing more.
I stood in the doorway, overwhelmed with her, no thoughts of anybody but her.
I went downstairs.
“I put Bill back to bed. He shouldn’t have gotten up in the first place. It was my fault for carrying on the way I did. I’m sorry.”
Miriam sat on the edge of the couch. I sat down next to her. Slid my arm around her.
“You ever see this before?” I showed her the envelope.
“No. Where’d you find it?”
“Mary’s room. She ever tell you about writing the Dearborn Courthouse for anything?”
“Not that I remember.”
I put it back in my pocket.
“You think it means something?”
“Probably not. But it’s the only thing I found I couldn’t explain.”
She gave me a kiss on the cheek. “You’re such a good boy, Sam.”
“And you’re a good woman, Miriam.”
“If anybody can find her, I know it’ll be you.”
“Oh, I’ll find her all right, Miriam,”
I said.
“I’ll just keep saying prayers. I want to light some candles as soon as I can.”
I gave her a squeeze and stood up. She started to stand too. “No need. I’ll be fine.”
I walked to the door. “I saw that Very-Just Day photo up there.”
She smiled. “You kids were so cute.”
“That was a happy day.”
“I still think of it,” she said, “whenever I need a little cheering up.” Then: “But we were so na@ive back then. I remember your mom and I talking about how all our troubles were over. You know, after the war, nothing would ever seem like much trouble at all.”
Then: “I didn’t figure on Bud being killed.”
It was a sad, defeated house now. I needed to get out of there.
Thirteen
I spent an hour and a half in my office the next morning calling every friend of Mary’s I could remember. Then I spoke to the two women she worked with at Rexall. No help whatsoever.
In an effort to calm myself, I took the lie detector out of its box, dragged a small coffee table over by my desk, and set it up.
Or tried to. I spent a full hour working with it. I got the On button to glow red. That was about it. You know how in the movies that metal arm is always making jagged lines on the printout paper? The damned thing wouldn’t budge for me.
What I was doing was killing time. Waiting for the magic hour of 11ccde A.M. I’d made a call earlier and asked what time the boss man went to lunch.
The Rollins Building is what passes for a skyscraper here. Four stories, ornate 1920’s facing, right down to gargoyles perched on the corners of every floor.
Squires came out walking fast. There was always that briskness about him. Dapper as usual.
Another dark blue suit, this one with pinstripes, gold collar pin, seawater-blue necktie, gray hair perfectly combed.
A sweet time for walking, so sunny, so filled with the pretty women of Black River Falls doing their shopping or pushing their strollers in the small stores that make up the downtown.
I fell into step next to him. “Hello, counselor.”
“I’ve been waiting to hear from you.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Oh? I hope that means you’ve come up with something.”
“I sure have.”
“Good. Let’s hear it.”
Other than his first unhappy glance at me, he’d stared straight ahead. It would be a pleasure to snap his head around and see his startled eyes.
“The news is that you killed your wife and you’re trying to frame Mike Chalmers for it.”
His head not only snapped around, he stopped walking. “What the hell’re you talking about?”
He spoke in a loud whisper.
“I was a little skeptical when you showed up at my place that night. A man like you could afford any investigator in the state. Why me? You told me the truth about one thing: because I know the territory. So I’d hear plenty of gossip.
Hear if anything would get in the way of setting up Chalmers. Like a witness who saw you at the murder scene. I was like a mine-sweeper. And now you think you’re in the clear. Thanks to all the crap you’ve been feeding Cliffie, he’s more convinced than ever that Chalmers is his man. And he’s going to arrest him very soon.”
“Chalmers is his man.”
