“Whoo-ee,” Darcy said, sticking his hands in his own jean pockets as if he didn’t know what to do with them. His heavy coat bulged up in semicircles around his tucked hands.
Cleve glanced from me to Jack and back again, and said, “Reckon ole Jared got lucky.”
Immediately the tension eased. Jack slowly looped his arm around me. His fingers bit into my shoulder.
“Well, you were being a gentleman,” Darcy said approvingly.
“Now you got your question answered, can I get in my apartment?” Jack said, making an effort to sound amiable. But I could hear the anger pulsing in his voice.
“Sure, man. We’re going this very minute,” said Darcy, a broad grin on his face that I wanted to wipe right off. I promised myself I would if I got half a chance.
Jack stepped between Darcy and Cleve, put his key in the lock, and turned it as they started down the stairs. He automatically stood back to let me enter first, then shut the door behind us. Jack relocked it and went over to the window to see if his “friends” really left.
Then he swung around to face me, his anger open now and misdirected at me.
“We talked about this,” he began. “No one was going to connect us.”
“Okay, I’m gone,” I said shortly, and started for the door.
“Talk to me,” he demanded.
I sighed. “How else could you have gotten out of that?” I asked.
“Well, I… could have told them I’d driven to Little Rock to see my girlfriend.”
“And when they said, ‘Then why was your car parked here all night?’ ”
Frustrated, Jack brought his fist down on a little desk by the window. “Dammit, I won’t have it!”
I shrugged. No point in all this now. If he was going to act like a jerk, I’d go downstairs and get my mop. I had to work.
When I was on the top stair, he caught me. His good hand clamped down on my shoulder like iron. I stopped dead. I turned very slowly and said to him in my sincerest voice, “How about saying, ‘Thanks, Lily, for bailing me out, even though you had to stand there and be leered at for the second time in twelve hours’?”
Jack turned whiter around the mouth than he had been, and his hand dropped from my shoulder.
“And don’t you ever, ever restrain me again,” I told him, my eyes staring directly into his.
I turned, and with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, I went down the stairs. When I came up with the mop, I stood on the landing for a second, listening. His apartment was silent. I went into Deedra’s to work.
So much drama, so early in the morning, left me exhausted. I scarcely registered the unusual order in Deedra’s apartment; it was as if she was trying to show she’d changed her social habits by keeping her apartment neater. As I put away her clean underwear, I noted the absence of the pile of naughty pictures of herself she had kept underneath her bras. I expected to feel good about Deedra’s changed lifestyle, but instead, I could barely manage to finish my cleaning.
As I dumped the last waste can into a plastic bag, I admitted to myself that even more than tired, I felt sad. It would have been a pleasant treat to have had a morning to think of Jack in the relaxed warmth of good sex, in the glow of-what could I call it? Happiness. But, thanks to his pride-as I saw it-we’d ended on a sour note.
There was a pile of pierced earrings on Deedra’s dresser, and I decided to just sit there and pair them up. For a minute or two that was simple and satisfying; after all, they match or they don’t. But my restless mind began wandering again.
A pretend robbery during a mysterious meeting at Winthrop Sporting Goods, in the middle of a most inclement night. The blue flyers that had caused so much trouble. The long, heavy black bags that the Winthrop house had been burgled to get-where were they now? The three unsolved murders in tiny Shakespeare. The out-of-place Mookie Preston. The bombing. I couldn’t make sense of all the pieces at one time, but the shape of it was wrong. This was no group of fanatics with a coherent manifesto at work; it all seemed very sloppy. For the first time, I considered what Carrie had said about the timing of the bombing. If the goal had been to kill lots of black people, the explosion had come too late. If the goal had been to “merely” terrorize the black community, the explosion had come too early. The deaths in the church had enraged the African-American people of Shakespeare. Whoever had planted the bomb did not represent white supremacy, but white stupidity.
As I locked Deedra’s apartment-scorning to even cross the landing and listen at Jack’s door-and descended the stairs to drive to Mookie Preston’s modest rental, I thought about the unexpected, normally concealed aspects of the people around me, the part I was seeing the past few days. It was like seeing their skeleton beneath their outer flesh.
Bluff, hearty good ole boy Darcy Orchard, for example: I’d worked out with Darcy for years, and seen only the good-natured sportsman. But last night I’d seen him tracking a man, at the head of a pack of hunters. Beneath his yard-dog exterior, Darcy was a wolf.
I’d always known that about Tom David Meicklejohn. He was naturally cruel and sly, naturally an able and remorseless hunter. He was reliable in what he undertook, whether good or bad. But Darcy had kept this facet of his character buried, and something or someone had unearthed it and used it.
For the first time, I allowed myself to imagine what would have happened if the pack had caught Jack.
And I found myself almost sure they would have killed him.
I began work at Mookie’s house in a grim mood. Of course her place couldn’t be as dirty as it had been the first time I’d cleaned it, but every week she did a grand job of retrashing it. I scrubbed the bathroom in silence, trying to ignore the little questions and comments she tossed to me as she passed by the open door.
Mookie showed me her cuts from the bombing. They’d been caused by flying splinters, and they were healing well. She inquired after my leg. Would the woman never shut up and settle down to her work?
Once I got the bathroom decent again, I moved into the bedroom. This old house had big rooms and high ceilings, and Mookie’s low modern bed and chest of drawers looked out of place. The bare wooden floors made a bit of an echo, footsteps clacking unnaturally loud. Maybe she liked the noise, maybe it kept her company.
“You know,” Mookie said, making one of her abrupt appearances, “they haven’t got a clue who planted that bomb.” She’d been reading the papers. I hadn’t.
“Is that right?” I asked. I really didn’t want to talk.
“The device that started the explosion was a wristwatch, like the one you’ve got on,” Mookie said. She was very angry, very intense. I’d had enough angry and intense already today. “All the chemicals in the bomb were things you could order from any chemical supply house. All you’d have to do is not order everything from one place, so they won’t get suspicious.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said pointedly.
“It’s in books you can check out of the library here!” she said, her hands flying up in a gesture of complete exasperation. “It’s in books you can buy at the bookstore in Montrose!”
“So it’s probably almost as easy to make a bomb as it is to buy a rifle,” I said, my voice calm and even.
The rifle was not under her bed any longer.
“A rifle’s legal.”
“Sure.” I was careful not to turn and look her in the eyes. I didn’t want any kind of confrontation. That, too, I’d had enough of already today.
After I changed the sheets and dusted the bedroom, I looked around for an empty bag to dump the contents of the plastic garbage pail, which was full of soiled tissues, balls of hair, and gum wrappers. There, next to a Reebok shoe box, was a dark red plastic bag, and it bore the distinctive logo of Winthrop Sporting Goods.
I tried to persuade myself that there was nothing odd about this. People did mostly buy their sports shoes at Winthrop’s, because the store carried a great selection and would special-order what they didn’t have in stock.
But I’d seen another red plastic bag the week before. And I remembered seeing yet another crammed into the kitchen garbage. Mookie was going to Winthrops’ very frequently.
Slowly I dumped the garbage pail into the bag and went to the bathroom to empty another one. Mookie barely glanced at me as I cleared the one by her desk. Her coarse reddish hair was braided today, and she was wearing wind-suit pants and a turtleneck. She was tapping computer keys with great energy. The same charts were taped to the wall behind her.
There was a pile of library books on the desk, studded with slips of paper marking pages she wanted to refer to.
“How does a genealogist work?” I asked.
