perched on the mailbox, cocked its head at the signs and flew away. He wasn’t buying.
Marlon Rhodes had wanted to tag along and though I could’ve used the company, I decided to part ways with him and my money back in Cincinnati. Showing up on Mary White’s doorstep with Marlon in tow would have been tough to explain away. Never mind Marlon, I couldn’t think of what the hell I was going to tell her about my being there. I guess I needn’t have worried.
There was no answer when I knocked or pressed the front doorbell. I called her number on my cell. The phone rang and rang and… That was funny. I knew she had an answering machine. I’d left messages on it. I could hear her old fashioned phone ringing out in the street. My belly tied itself in knots. I remembered what happened the last time I listened to an unanswered telephone. I walked around the house, cupping my hands against side and back windows. I knocked on the rear door. Mary White was gone. Coming back around the front of the house, a young, chubby-faced woman with dull brown hair and a lazy eye called to me from the adjoining yard.
“She ain’t around,” Lazy Eye said, a little boy crying from inside her house.
“I can see that.”
“You interested in the house?”
“Might be,” I lied. “Do you know where the owner is?”
“Traveling.”
“Traveling?”
“Yup, that’s-” She was interrupted by the boy’s crying. “Shut up! I’ll be right in. Eat your cereal.”
“Do you know where she went?”
“Nah. My neighbor and me, we don’t get along so well. But you can try the real estate agent. He’s nice. Name’s Stan Herbstreet. Sold me and Larry our house. Stan’s office number’s on the sign. You a family man?” she asked, with a suspicious twist of her mouth.
“Sure am. Got a grown daughter and a little boy about three from my second marriage,” I lied some more. “Gonna do some work at the Air Force base.”
She stepped toward me and whispered conspiratorially, “Please take the house. The old lady’s a nasty bitch who hates my kid.” On cue, the kid wailed. She turned over her shoulder. “Shut up! Mommy’s talking to the nice man who’s going to buy Mary’s house.”
“Well,” I said, “I guess I’ll make that call to the real estate agent. Thanks for-”
“Listen, if you are really interested…” Lazy Eye stepped even closer, looking this way and that. “I know how you can have a peek around inside without bothering Stan. The old biddy keeps a key in the wood planter on the patio. This way when you call Stan, you’ll have a better idea of what you should offer.”
“Gee, thanks a ton…” I offered her my hand.
She took it. “Roweena. Roweena with a double-e.”
“Thanks, Roweena double-e. I hope I like the house.”
“For our sake, I hope so too.”
The key was right where she said it would be. I smiled and waved that I had found it. I walked very slowly to the back door, praying Roweena would go attend to her screaming kid. She did, finally. The key slid into the cranky old lock and turned with a little help. Stepping in, I held my breath. Finding the kid dead affected me more than I was willing to let on… even to myself. When, at last, I inhaled, there was a bit of mustiness in the air, but nothing more.
The museum piece house was as neat and clean as I remembered it. All of it except for Mary’s bedroom. Understandably, this room hadn’t been part of the original tour. It smelled of camphor, cloves and orange peel; of lilacs and roses; of dried flowers from a dried-up life tied in a sack and tucked away in a corner somewhere amongst her unrealized dreams. Mary had packed in a hurry. Her ancient dresser drawers were all open and askew, the closet door ajar. Empty hangers were strewn about the room: on the bed, on the floor, at the foot of the full- length mirror. Her jewelry box was empty too, dumped upside down on the bed on a pile of hangers.
I searched the dresser drawers, remembering how my dad had grown odd at the end, obsessed with making lists of the inconsequential aspects of his life. He wrote reams and reams of lists on foolscap. When he died, we knew where his hankies and t-shirts, his pens and broken watches, his rings and school yearbooks could be found, but we could never find where his happiness had got to. We wondered if he had ever truly been happy at all. There are some things it’s better for kids not to wonder about their parents.
There wasn’t anything to be found in the dresser drawers or in the closet or beneath the bed, but in the nightstand drawer were old letters from Jack, all with New York postmarks. Behind the family Bible and photo albums on the nightstand shelf were twenty neatly stacked cassette boxes. Each box was labeled with Jack’s name, an event, and or a corresponding date. Jack, Christmas 1976. There were tapes in nineteen of the twenty boxes. It did not take me long to figure out where that missing tape had gone. Questions filled my head. How had Ray Martello gotten to Mary White? What could he have told her? How much could he have paid her? What had Katy or I ever done to her except treat her with respect?
I shook my head, thinking Mary mustn’t have understood what was going on. But in my bones I knew that was wrong. Not only had Mary White known, she was an active participant. Now I understood Mary’s discomfort around me, her strange affect on the phone, the weirdness in the cemetery. There were never any roses on her brother’s grave or, if there had been, Mary White placed them there herself. No one painted on Jack’s headstone. Mary simply scrubbed the stone for my benefit: the missing dirt from where she’d washed it had been enough to convince me of the vandalism.
I slid a few of the cassettes into my pocket and headed toward the back door, but decided to take a second, more careful look around. In the kitchen, I found some flight information, two phone numbers, and an address in Kentucky scribbled onto a pad. Next to the address was the notation, #12. I ripped off the sheet and tucked it into my pocket with the cassettes. There was nothing else to see. I tiptoed out the back, replacing the key in the planter. Unfortunately, Roweena-double e, one lazy eye-had been keeping watch.
“Well?”
“Nice,” I said, “but a bit claustrophobic.”
She didn’t look pleased. I fairly ran to my rental car. Her kid was still crying.
Locating the cemetery proved more challenging than expected. With some help from a trucker, I found my way. Once through the gates, I was confident I’d be able to find Jack’s resting place. Wrong. I thought I retraced the route Mary had taken-around the huge stone crucifix, two lefts, straight ahead twelve rows, a right and a left- but I just couldn’t find the small chunk of stone adorning Jack’s grave. I tried it three more times with some minor variations before admitting defeat and heading into the administrative offices.
The woman at the desk checked the book.
“You weren’t wrong, sir. Mr. White is indeed interred there, but your confusion is understandable.” She made a sour face. “The headstone has been recently replaced.”
Had it ever. No wonder I hadn’t recognized the site. In place of the tasteful block of beveled granite which had stood vigil at the head of Jack White’s grave was a massive black tombstone vaguely reminiscent of the monolith in 2001. I couldn’t quite believe the scale of it: a sequoia among the shrubbery. Carved into the rich black stone were prayerful hands, crosses, scrolls, angels, and a rendering of Jack’s face. There was a bible quotation, lines from a favorite poem. With all that, there was still enough empty space on the stone to have added the entire text of War and Peace or to list the names of America’s war dead. All of them, ever. A mourners’ bench had been added as well. It was constructed of the same black stone, tasteful only by comparison to the monolith. I suppose Mary could have tried to buy Cleopatra’s Needle or Stonehenge, but she’d done okay on her own. Looking past the hideousness of the new monuments, I realized just how much they must have set Mary back. Ray Martello had paid her a pretty penny for her betrayal.
Without his sister around to scowl at me, I considered placing a rock atop Jack’s new headstone. Unfortunately, Mary hadn’t thought to include an elevator or build steps into the side of the headstone. I placed a pebble at the base of the black giant and walked away. Poor Jack. If anything ever cried out for a sledgehammer, it was that thing in my rearview mirror.
NOT UNEXPECTEDLY, THE address in Kentucky was a cheap motel near the airport. One of the phone numbers Mary had scribbled down was traceable back to room twelve at that same motel. The desk clerk, a Pakistani kid, was happy to help. The fifty bucks I slipped him was more of an incentive than the bullshit story I laid
