“Yeah, but I didn’t know what he was talking about. He wouldn’t go away, though, wouldn’t leave me alone. I’d go to town and see him watching from a car. Then he started bothering us on the telephone. At night he’d call, play music. Just a few notes, but we knew it was him.”
“He was stalking Eleanor too.”
She expelled a shivery breath.
“Listen, did you get a letter from Eleanor in yesterday’s mail? It would’ve probably been on Hilton Hotel stationery.”
“It never came here.”
“It may come tomorrow. What time is your mail delivered?”
“Whenever he gets here. Early afternoon as often as any.”
“I’ll try to call then.”
“What’s in the letter?”
“That’s what I need to find out. It might be her laundry bill. For our purposes, think of it as some dark secret she’d rather not tell the world. Is there anybody else she might send something like that to?”
“Amy Harper,” she said immediately. “Nobody but Amy.”
I remembered the name. “Eleanor mentioned her once. Said she’d gone to see Amy but Amy wasn’t there.”
“Amy moved into Seattle, I coulda told her that. Her life out here’d turned to hell the last six months, especially after her mom died. I worry about that child, don’t know what’s gonna become of her. She’s made some wrong choices in the last few years. But really a sweet kid. She and Ellie were like sisters all through school.”
“I seem to remember there was some kind of rift between them.”
“They had a falling-out over Coleman Willis. That’s the fool Amy let knock her up when she was still at Mt. Si High. Then she made it worse: married the fool and quit school and had a second kid the next year. The trouble between them was simple. Ellie had no use for Coleman Willis, couldn’t be in the same room with the man. Amy was still trying to make it work. You can see what happened.”
“Sure.”
“But Amy’s no fool. There came a time when even she’d had enough of Coleman and his bullshit, and she took her kids and left him. She and Ellie got together once or twice after that. I really think they’d fixed things up between ‘em, I think they were good as new.”
“Is there a phone number for Amy?”
“God, Amy can’t afford a telephone, she’s lucky she’s got a roof over her head. I’ve got an address if you want it…it’s a rooming house on Wall Street. Are you familiar with the section they call Belltown?”
I wasn’t.
“It’s easy, right off downtown. Just a minute, I’ll get it for you.”
34
It was just fifteen blocks from the Hilton, about as far as Oz is from Kansas. It made me remember myself as a kid, bouncing around for a year of my life in places not much better than this. Now I go through these neighborhoods and the memory of rank and scummy beds hits me like a shot of bad whiskey. It’s a chilly reminder of what life hands out to those who slip and can’t climb up again. The young seem unbothered by the lack of elegance: time, they believe, will see them through it, and time when you’re twenty is a thing you’ll never run out of. You can sleep anywhere when you’re running on your rims, and you don’t give too much thought to the dripping tap or the cracked and faded walls or the mice that come tearing across your landscape. The young endure and hope, until suddenly they’re forty and time isn’t what it once was. The old suffer and save their hopes for the real things in life—a high, dry present and a quiet place to die.
On the second floor of this environment, at the end of a long, dim corridor, lived Amy Harper. The floor creaked with every step and the walls were thin. I could hear people talking—in one room shouting— as I walked past the doors and stopped at 218.
Be there, I thought, and I knocked.
She was: I could hear her move inside. Soft footsteps came at me and a soft voice asked who I was. I said I was a friend of Eleanor’s.
She opened the door and looked at me through a narrow crack. I could see a chain looped across the crack, a little piece of false security she had probably bought and installed herself. A man like me could break it with one kick, long before she had time to get the door closed.
“I’m sorry, who are you?”
“My name’s Janeway, I’m a friend of Eleanor’s.”
For a moment she didn’t know what to do. I got the feeling she’d have opened the door if she’d been there alone. But I could hear a baby crying and I knew she was thinking about her children.
“Crystal gave me your address,” I said, and at that she decided to let me in.
It was just what I’d expected—a one-room crib with a battered couch that pulled out and became a bed; a table so scarred by old wars and sweating bottles that you couldn’t tell what color it had been; two pallets for the children;
