Muriel Keyes rose, went over to her husband’s chair, sat on its broad arm and absently began to massage his neck with one hand. “If the mystery man tops your bid of seven hundred and fifty thousand, he’ll probably go to eight hundred, right?”
“Probably.”
“I think we can afford to increase the White House bid with a personal contribution of, say, two hundred and fifty thousand.”
He turned to stare up at her with a look that was part wonder and part admiration. “Making it a preemptive one million.”
“Yes.”
“I see no reason to mention your generosity to the White House.”
“Why would you?” she said. “After all, they have no real need to know.”
Tinker Burns found Letitia Melon’s house just before dark. It was a huge 201-year-old fieldstone place, three stories high, with a pair of newer two-story wings that were 143 and 96 years old respectively. The old house sat on the crest of a rise a quarter of a mile from the county blacktop. It was surrounded by tall pines whose branches were bowed under their burdens of snow and ice. A narrow concrete drive, only forty-four years old and clear of snow, ran from the county blacktop up to the house. At the top of the drive was a small green John Deere tractor that Burns assumed had done the snowplowing.
He turned the Jeep Wagoneer into the drive, stopped and studied the house and the snow-covered roof of the long low horse barn which could be seen just beyond the crest of the rise. Burns looked for signs of life but found none. The last of the sun’s rays were turning the stonework of the house into old gold but Burns ignored the pretty-picture effect and instead examined the six chimneys for smoke. There wasn’t any.
He drove up to the house and parked in front of its entrance on jigsaw slabs of black slate. Once out of the station wagon, he scanned the windows for chinks of light. Finding none, he went back to the station wagon and blew its horn five times. Somewhere, close by, a dog barked. Thus encouraged, Burns mounted the six steps and rang the doorbell. He rang it six times before trying the big brass knob only to find the door locked. Burns stubbornly jammed his right thumb against the doorbell and hammered the door itself with his left fist.
He was still ringing and hammering away when a woman’s voice from behind him said, “Get the fuck off my property, Tinker.”
Chapter 28
Without turning, Tinker Burns stuck cold bare hands into his topcoat pockets and said, “How you doing, Letty?”
“Get off my property. Now.”
“We’ve gotta talk.”
“No, we don’t.”
“Mind if I turn around?”
“You have to turn around to get off my property.”
Burns turned slowly to his left and, when all the way around, smiled at Letty Melon and the pump shotgun she was aiming at his chest.
“You look cold, Letty. Have a long wait?”
“Go, Tinker. Now.”
“I figured Howard Mott’d let you know I was coming. That’s why I didn’t call myself.”
“You’ve got ten seconds to get in your car.”
“Look. You know you’re not gonna shoot me and I know I’m not gonna leave till we talk. Now, we could stand out here all night freezing our butts off, but that’s sort of dumb. So why not go inside where it’s nice and warm and have a taste and a talk? After that, I’ll be on my way. I even brought a jug of Turkey along. You still drink Turkey, Letty?”
Letty Melon said nothing. She wore a buttoned-up shearling coat and had tied a gray cashmere scarf over her head. The rest of her outfit consisted of blue jeans, boots and the pump shotgun. She raised the shotgun with her left hand, letting its barrel rest on her left shoulder. Her right hand dug a key out of her jeans pocket. She moved around Burns, went up to the front door, unlocked it and went inside. Burns turned and followed.
They sat in front of an enormous fireplace where four oak logs blazed. They held tumblers half full of 101-proof Wild Turkey bourbon whiskey, the good stuff, undiluted by either ice or water. After a sip of whiskey, Letty Melon lit an unfiltered Camel. Tinker Burns swallowed a third of his drink and looked around the fifty-foot-long living room with obvious appreciation.
“I never got invited here,” he said. “I got invited to that little place over by, what’s its name, Berryville, a couple of times when you and Steady were still married, but never here.”
“We couldn’t stand each other’s friends,” she said. “I invited mine here; he invited his there. I reckon we couldn’t stand them because his friends were mostly women and mine were mostly men.”
“Well, that’s how it goes sometimes.”
“What’s really on your mind, Tinker?”
“That fire,” he said. “We come in here and it’s all dark and kind of cold, but you turn on a gas jet, put a match to it, throw on some logs, and a couple of minutes later we got ourselves a real nice fire going. Now, some people’d claim that’s no way to build a fire—that you oughta do it with kindling and—”
“Is this some kind of allegory?” she said.
