Lullaby Town

the apartment. She just sat there, a young girl like that. Then she moved out.'

'She tell you where she was going?'

'She didn't say nothing when she moved out. She just up and left, owing me three months' back rent.'

She leaned forward again to look out the door. This time when she looked, I looked with her. It was catching. I said, 'You seem to like her.'

'I do.'

'Even though she stiffed you on the rent.'

She waved the cigarette at me. 'She paid it back. Couple of years later I got a letter. There was a U.S. postal money order in it for every nickel and the interest, too. How many people you know would do that?'

'A couple.'

'Then all right. There was a little note in there apologizing and saying she hoped I wouldn't think bad of her for what she did but it couldn't be helped.'

'You like her a lot.'

Another nod. More of the Kent.

'You keep the letter?'

She said, 'Oh, Lord, I got so much stuff scattered around.'

'Maybe you could take a look.'

She squinted out past the drapes to the street. 'I go digging around in the back, I can't see the front.'

'I'll watch the front for you.'

'That little sonofabitch is looking to steal something, mark my words. They're coming back.'

'I'll watch. I'm good at watching.' I tapped my cheek under my right eye. Watchful.

She nodded and bustled over to a little secretary that was against the wall near where the living room L'd into the dining room. Three small drawers were fit across the top of the secretary, and she opened them one by one, looking through pens and pencils and note cards and small envelopes and photographs and a crushed flower and newspaper clippings that looked, from across the room, like obituary columns, and things that might've been forty years old. Precious things. She rustled around in it for a while, talking to me but really talking to herself, saying how she'd have to clean the place up, saving that she started to last week but then someone named Edna called and that had been that, no one ever calls until you're about to do something. She went through the drawers and she came up with a small white envelope that had been torn along the top edge. It had been in the little drawer for so long that the ragged tears were crushed flat and smooth and the paper was dingy. She took out a single sheet of folded yellow notepaper and read it and then showed it to me. It was exactly as Miriam Dichester had said it was, Karen apologizing for leaving while still owing money, saying she hoped Miriam hadn't experienced a hardship because of it, saying a check had been enclosed to pay Miriam back in full, including 6?% interest, and that she appreciated the kindness and friendship that Miriam had shown her and her son while they had lived with her. There was no return address and no hotel letterhead and no mention of where Karen was or where she was going. The envelope was postmarked Chelam, CT.

Miriam said, 'Does it help?'

I nodded. 'It's more than I had before.'

She said, 'You find them, you do right by them, hear?'

'That's my intention.'

'Well, you know what they say about that, don't you?'

'No. What do they say?'

'The road to hell is paved with good intentions.'

When we were in the door the tall white man and the shorter Hispanic man were walking down the street in the other direction. She said, 'You see. I told you they'd be back.'

'Maybe they live down the hill. Maybe they're just out for a walk.'

'My dying ass.' She was a pleasant old gal. 'Mark my words, that little sonofabitch is out to steal something.'

I thanked her and gave her one of my cards in case she remembered anything else, and then I went out to the Corvette. A hundred yards down the street, the white guy and the Hispanic guy were using a two-foot steel shim to pop the door on a white 1991 Toyota Supra.

I yelled and ran after them, but by the time I got there they were gone.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Two hours and ten minutes later I was on a United Airlines L-1011 as it punched its way up through the haze layer and climbed out over the Pacific. The air was slick and clear and, below us, the red of the mountains and the desert and the gray of the ocean looked clean and warm. It was your basic outstanding Southern California afternoon. The people around me were relaxed and pleasant, and the flight attendant had a deep tan and when her smile was wide enough she dimpled. She was from Long Beach. Outstanding.

Five and one half hours later we landed at Kennedy airport beneath an overcast layer so thick and so dark that it looked like casket lining. Unseasonable cold snap, the papers had said. Arctic air down through Canada, they'd said. First snow of the season. I had brought a brown leather Navy G-2 jacket and a couple of sweaters and a pair of black leather gloves. It wasn't enough, even for standing around in the terminal.

While I waited for my suitcase at the baggage carousel, three different guys asked if they could borrow cab fare and another wanted to know if I'd found Jesus. An airport security cop arrested a pickpocket. The air smelled like burning rubber. A woman with a baby told me she didn't have enough money to feed her child. I gave her fifty cents and felt like I'd been taken. Maybe I looked like a tourist I frowned and looked sullen and tried to make like a native. That seemed to work. I got a couple of road maps and a metallic-blue Taurus from Hertz and drove over to the Kennedy Hilton and took a room for the night. Dining-room service was slow and the food was bad and the hostess in the bar had an attitude. A guy on the radio said that the cold air was going to keep pushing down from Canada and that maybe we'd get some more snow. The room cost two hundred a night and nobody had deep tans and dimples. This was my fourth time visiting New York in eleven years. Nothing much had changed. I ¦ NY.

The next morning I checked out of the Hilton and took the Van Wyck Expressway north to Connecticut. Through most of Queens and the Bronx everything looked dirty and gray and old, but farther along the building density diminished until, as I approached White Plains, stretches of empty land appeared, bordered by stands of trees, and, just north of White Plains, there were lakes. The empty land became fields and the woods grew deeper, and though some of the trees were dark and bare, most were still locked in their explosions of yellow and red and purple, and the sight and the smell of them made me think of squash and wild turkeys and neighborhoods where children yelled 'Trick or Treat!' Maybe the Northeast wasn't so bad after all.

Four miles east of Rockwood Lake, there was a Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge and a green exit sign that said CHELAM next right. I got off and followed a state road for a mile and a half through woods and farmland and there it was, a little place of clapboard and brick buildings around a town square, maybe two blocks on a side. There were plenty of trees and lawns, and the streets were narrow and without curbs and looked more like they were made for velocipedes than for automobiles. The overcast and the cold gave a barren quality to the town, but there was still enough green in the lawns and color in the leaves to let you know that, come spring, Chelam would look like one of those quaint little upstate hamlets that are always pictured on the postcards your cousin Flo sends.

I let the Taurus roll down the main street past a Texaco station and a White Castle hamburger stand and the First Chelam National Bank and a barbershop with an honest-to-God barber's pole. A whitewashed gazebo sat on the town square across from a courthouse that was big and old, with a second-floor balcony ideal for mayoral speeches on the Fourth of July. Several big elms dotted the square, their dead leaves a fragile brown carpet over the lawn. Two young women in down jackets stood in the leaves, talking. An old man in a bright orange hunter's parka sat on the gazebo steps, smoking. Next to the courthouse there was a mobile home permanently mounted on cement footings. A big gold star was painted on the side of the mobile home along with the words CHELAM POLICE. Across the square there was a little building just about the size of a pay toilet that said U.S. Post Office. Eight years ago Karen Nelsen had gone in there and mailed the letter to Miriam