while outside the adult world moved freely about.
'How was it last night?' I said. I was drinking a cup of coffee as I drove, something I prided myself on doing with the cover off and never a drop spilled. Paul drank his out of a hole he'd torn in the cover. A boy still, with things to learn.
'She's good,' Paul said, 'very interesting. Essentially it's just a one-woman show, like, ah, whosis, Lily Tomlin, except a lot more angry and foulmouthed.'
'I never heard of her,' I said.
'I know her from New York,' Paul said. 'She's just a regular downtown performer, like me, trying to find performance space someplace in the East
Village, except that she was lucky enough to be denied an NEA grant. Now she's making big money. And playing high-visibility theaters. And getting written up in Time.'
'Have you thought of applying?'
'The tricky part is to make a grant application good enough to get approved by the peer review panel, and still exotic enough to be officially re jected.'
'Maybe I should take Susan,' I said.
Paul laughed. 'She might like it,' he said. 'You'd hate it.'
We pulled off into Lexington. The traffic was at a crawl, stuck behind a school bus that stopped every few blocks and took on children.
'Do you know your mother's new boyfriend?' I said.
Paul shook his head. 'Never met him. His name is Rich something or other.'
'What's he do?'
'My mother says he's a consultant.'
'Self-employed?'
Paul shook his head. 'I don't know. She seemed a little vague about what he did. She never wants to talk much about any of her boyfriends. Like I said, she's always embarrassed about them.'
We went through the middle of Lexington, past the Battle Green, with the
Minuteman statue at the near end of it and the restored colonial buildings across the street. Paul was staring around at the town as if it were a
Martian landscape.
'Every Patriots Day there was a big parade in town,' Paul said. 'It was always exciting. Every April 19, I'd wake up excited, and my mother and father and I would come down and get a good spot and watch for the parade, and afterwards we'd go home and there'd be nothing to do and I'd feel let down, and the next day would be school.'
I turned into Emerson Road.
'Parade was usually good, though,' Paul said.
Patty Giacomin's house was as I remembered it, set back a bit from the road, among trees. The trees were probably fuller than they had been ten years ago when I'd come out here before. But they looked the same and so did the dense spread of pachysandra that did service as lawn around her house.
The house itself was angular, and shingled; mod 29
ern looking without violating either the site or the colonial town in which it stood.
I parked next to a Honda Prelude in the driveway. We rolled the windows half down and left Pearl in the car. I went and opened the trunk and took out a gym bag with tools in it. As we walked toward the house I automatically felt the hood of the Prelude. It was cold.
There was no answer when we rang the bell. The house had that stillness that Paul had mentioned. In the interests of not looking like a jerk, I tried the doorknob. It was locked.
'I already did that,' Paul said.
'It's a Dick Tracy crime stopper,' I said. 'Always try the door before jimmying it.'
'Great working with a pro,' Paul said.
There was no sign of flies on the inside of the windows, which was encouraging. I looked at the door. There was a keyhole in the handle. No other lock, so it was probably a spring lock, though it didn't have to be.
It could be a combination spring and deadbolt, but at least there was no separate keyhole which there would be most certainly for a deadbolt. There was a strip of molding down along the lock side of the door to prevent someone from slipping a flat blade like a putty knife in there and springing the lock. I looked at the molding closely. The house was stained rather than painted, which made it easier to see the line where the molding butted up to the doorjamb. While I was examining it, I took a deep inhale.
I smelled nothing dead, which was even more encouraging.
'Okay,' I said. 'I'll open this thing unless you have a better thought.'
Paul shook his head. His face looked tight. I took a flat chisel from the bag, and a hammer, and gently loosened the molding along the door strip. No point trashing the house.
'I'll get this off intact,' I said. 'We can put it back on when we get through.'
Paul nodded. I pried the molding away, a little at a time, all along its length, and then got a flat bar under it at the nail holes and pried it carefully loose so that it came off nails still sticking through it. I handed it to Paul and he
