thief – a hell of a lousy epitaph, if you think about it.’
Buddy grew thoughtful. ‘I didn’t get that from the book.’
‘That’s good, because I didn’t put it in.’
‘Maybe you should have. If that’s the truth.’
‘I wrote another book about that. It’s up in a box in my closet.’
Buddy grinned, getting the point. ‘The one that’s true?’
‘Truth,’ I answered, ‘is a highly overrated virtue.’
Buddy Elder smiled at me as if he had found a kindred soul. ‘You think?’
‘We better get back to the party,’ I said. ‘And Buddy, if you’re thinking about coming out for a ride sometime… think again. It could be a real problem between you and me.’
‘I knew that, Dave.’
I gave him a wink and patted him on the shoulder.
‘Just so we understand one another.’
‘Did you make an ass out of yourself?’
Molly and I were standing in the pasture watching Dean Lintz wipe out a stretch of white board fence as he crashed through a shallow ditch. The party was still going, but it was winding down now. Only a few more drunken administrators to kick out and we were home free.
‘Nothing too serious,’ I answered. ‘Did Buddy make a pass?’
She had a private smile. ‘Not that you’d notice.’
‘I was afraid of that.’
‘Where did they find him, anyway?’
I shook my head. ‘I have no idea.’
‘You ought to write whoever sent him and ask for a dozen more. He’s… genuine.’
‘What did you two talk about… so intently?’
‘Horses… Lucy… restoring old houses. He’s run some rooftops. Did you know that?’
‘Barb Beery kicked Walt out,’ I answered. I was tired of the subject of Buddy Elder, irritated at Molly’s unrepentant affection for him.
Molly’s face twitched. ‘I heard. Quite a few times, actually.’
‘You hear why?’
‘Fooling around. Last straw. A stripper or something. Very… Walt , if you know what I mean?’
‘He tells me he quit drinking three days ago. Wants to go talk to her after a week and show her he can change.’
‘He can change brands, but that’s about all.’
I shook my head, marshalling a defence for my hapless friend. ‘He seemed pretty dedicated to the idea.’
‘David, a half hour ago I saw him out in the pasture with Randy Winston drinking vodka straight out of the bottle.’
‘That’s pathetic.’
‘I’d say it’s desperate. Pathetic is tiptoeing to the barn and spying on your wife.’
Chapter 3
Lucy and her friend Kathy Jones showed up in Kathy’s red Mustang convertible late that evening.
The top was down, and Lucy looked a good deal older than seventeen. It had been a good summer for her.
She had worked with Molly and me finishing up the house, and had got serious about her competition in barrel racing, sometimes pulling Jezebel to two or three races a week. In the course of the summer she had turned a trim, athletic body into hard ropey muscle.
About all that was left of her adolescence was a pony-tail. Physically, Lucy had her mother’s shoulders and legs and long sinewy back, but her face was round and sweetly intense, as only seventeen can be. Most people said otherwise. They said Lucy looked just like her mother, but it wasn’t so. Lucy had a beauty all her own. They looked alike because they shared the same mannerisms, the same stubbornness, the same passions. Lucy needed another decade or so before she could claim the kind of grace and confidence and beauty her mother possessed.
I cannot say I actually looked for Buddy Elder or consciously thought about him when Lucy showed up.
I only know he was there, standing in the shadows of the trees that surrounded our house.
‘How was the party?’ Lucy called out to us.
Molly said it was still going on.
‘Any food left?’
‘Plenty of caviar,’ I told her, very proud of myself for not skimping on the essentials.
Lucy’s pretty face screwed up into pure teen.
‘Anything good?’
I let her mother answer this and looked back in Buddy’s direction, but he was already gone.
Molly and I caught Kathy Jones before she could drive out of the circle and down the hill. I leaned against the door at about eye-level with the girl. Kathy was a new friend and not our favourite. She was pretty and popular and perfectly spoiled. She had dark hair in contrast to Lucy’s pale blonde locks, and she was built solidly with round cheeks and round buttocks and firm, thick thighs. She would be a senior in a week or so, like Lucy, but I guessed she was probably three years ahead by experience. That summer Kathy had been among the girls I had terrified with my casual narrative of a perfectly normal middle-aged man who had lived here when the place was cut apart into apartments and who, one night, had killed every soul in the house with an axe. It was a complete fiction, of course, but ever since then Kathy had trouble looking at me without wondering if I might be the next to come under the spell of the old house.
That wasn’t the reason for her nervousness tonight, however. Have a nice time? I asked her. Okay. Kathy looked like she wanted to pop the clutch. Find any parties as nice as this one? A few. Perfect evening for a drive with the top down, wasn’t it? It was okay.
I thanked her for bringing Lucy home safely and asked how her parents were doing. They were fine.
Was she looking forward to school? Not really. Kathy made short work of me, but Molly was a different story. Molly had learned her interrogation technique from the master, her mother Olga McBride. She wanted to know what they had done and nothing didn’t cut it. Every answer got a lawyerly follow up, all with a smile of course, leaning in close and friendly, just as I had done it.
When Kathy drove off, I looked at Molly and we both said at the same time, ‘Grass.’
‘You say something,’ Molly told me that night as we lay together in bed. We had finished the business we started in the pantry, had worn ourselves out in our happiness, but were still wide awake. ‘She won’t listen to me about anything,’ Molly explained.
‘I’ll say something,’ I answered, ‘but I doubt it will do any good.’
‘What are you going to tell her? You can’t preach.
She knows we’ve both done it.’
‘I’ll think of something.’
The next afternoon, long before the cleanup was finished, I suggested to Lucy that we take a ride. This was something we usually did once or twice a month, so it was nothing out of the ordinary, and at just that point it made a pleasant break from the work at hand.
Like her mother, I had found Lucy’s adolescence difficult to handle. Unlike her mother I hadn’t resorted to confrontation, interrogation, mental torture techniques or general prohibitions. I could defend myself by claiming the delicate position of a stepfather’s status, but the truth was I had grown up under the thumb of a manipulative sweet-talker. Tubs could tell me how good it felt to punch someone’s face in, then describe an even finer pleasure: breaking a man’s spirit with my words. That was how he handled my first fistfight, age six. When I got a speeding ticket at the age of sixteen there was a story about a kid my age in a wheelchair because he liked to run his cars a little fast.
Then, the night I lost my virginity, as if he knew exactly where I had been and with whom, I got the story of a
