leaned it against a tree. I put the flat bar and the chisel and the hammer away and got out a putty knife with an inch and a half blade and slid it into the door crack at the latch and felt for the lock tongue. I found it and pressed and felt the tongue give and the blade of the putty knife push in. I held the putty knife in place with my right hand, and with the flat of my left, pushed the door open. There was no smell.
'We're not going to find anything bad,' I said to Paul. 'Promise.'
'That's good,' he said. His voice was a little hoarse.
We were in a small entry hall, with a polished flagstone floor, then up a couple of steps to the living room, the kitchen to the right, a view of the woods straight ahead through the big picture window across the back. Off the kitchen, constituting a short L to the living room, was a dining area where once Patty Giacomin had served me dinner and propositioned me. It hadn't been me, really, just the need to validate herself with a man, and there I was. I had declined, but I remembered it well. I always thought about the ones I'd missed, and speculated about how they'd have been, even though wisdom and experience would suggest that they'd have been much like the ones I hadn't missed. The thing was, though, that I always thought about the ones I hadn't missed, too.
The house was still and close, and neat. We walked around, checked the bedrooms. Patty's big, pink, puffy bed was made, her bathroom was orderly, though it didn't look like it had been put in order by someone who was leaving. Around the mirror were postcards with amusing pictures.
'I sent her those,' Paul said, 'from wherever I was performing. She kept them.'
The other bedroom, where Paul had slept, was perfectly neat, with a high school picture of Paul still in its cardboard frame set up on the dresser.
The picture had been taken the year he'd graduated from prep school, three years after I'd met him, and already the aimlessness had disappeared from his face. He was still very young there, but it was a face that knew more than most eighteen-year-old faces knew.
Paul looked at the picture. 'Three years of therapy,' he said.
'And more to come,' I said.
'For sure,' he said.
There was a neat green corduroy spread over the single bed, with a plaid blanket folded neatly at thefoot. There was a student desk with a reading lamp on it and a green blotter that matched the spread.
We went back downstairs. On the coffee table in the living room was a green imitation leather scrapbook. I picked it up and opened it. Carefully pasted in were clippings: reviews of Paul's dance concerts, listings from the newspaper of performances to come. There were ticket stubs and program covers and the program pages listing Paul's name, or Paige's or both. There were pictures of Paul, often with Paige, sometimes with other dancers, taken in places domestic and foreign, where they had danced. I handed the album to him without comment and he took it and looked at it and sat down slowly on the couch and leafed slowly through it.
'I used to think,' he said, 'that because she was so needy of my father, and after she lost him, so needy for other men, that she didn't care about me.' He turned the pages in the album slowly, as he talked. He'd seen them already. He wasn't looking at them. It was merely something the hands did.
'Sort of an either-or situation. Me or them. It took me a long time to see that it was both. That she cared about me, too.'
'As best she could,' I said.
'Her best wasn't enough,' Paul said.
'No. It's why we separated you.'
'And we were right,' Paul said.
'Yeah.'
Paul closed the album and put it back on the coffee table.
'If she'd gotten some help, maybe if she would have seen somebody…'
I shrugged.
'You don't think so.'
'No,' I said. 'I don't think she's smart enough. I don't think she's got enough will.'
Paul nodded slowly. He looked down at the scrapbook on the coffee table.
'She is what she is,' he said.
CHAPTER 5
PAUL, went out to the car and brought Pearl in. She raced around the house with her nose to the ground for about fifteen minutes before she was able to slow down and follow me around while I searched the house.
The refrigerator was on, but nearly empty, and there was nothing perishable in it. There was no fruit in the bowl on the table. The strainer was out of the drain in the kitchen sink. There was no suitcase to be found in the house, which meant either that she had packed it and taken it with her or that she didn't have one. Paul didn't know if she had one, and he couldn't tell if any of her clothes were missing. There were very few cosmetics in the bathroom. There were eleven messages on her answering machine, three from Paul. I copied down the names and phone numbers that had been left.
Mostly they were first names only, and Paul didn't know who they were. But the phone numbers could lead to something. I couldn't find an address book.
'Did she have one?' I said.
'Yes. I know she did. She carried it around with her and she was always afraid of losing it.'
'She work?'
