own, from a rather slow, silent girl with cornrowed hair and baby fat to a slim, streamlined, fashionable babe who’d become the office computer expert. In the process, Debbie had gained a lot of artifice, and shed some of her natural charm. She’d also acquired confidence and lost her diffidence around older people.
As I entered, she gave me an “I see you but I’m in the middle of this” smile and waggle of magenta fingernails, the phone clamped between ear and shoulder, her fingers busy separating computer sheets, collating and stapling them.
“Uh-huh. Yes, Mrs. Kaplan, she’ll be there at three. No, ma’am, you don’t need to do anything special. She’ll just look over the house and tell you what she’d recommend you ask for it… no, ma’am, that doesn’t obligate… no, ma’am, you can call in as many as you like, but we hope you’ll list your house with us… right, three o’clock.” Debbie blew a breath out after she’d hung up.
“Difficult?” I asked.
“Girl, you know it,” Debbie said, shaking her head. “I half hope that woman doesn’t decide to list with us. Dealing with her is almost more trouble than it’s worth. Your mom is showing a house now, so if you wanted to see her, you may have quite a wait.”
“Heck,” I said. I wondered whether I should leave a note. “Debbie, do you know Beverly Rillington?” I asked out of the blue.
“Oh, isn’t that terrible, what happened to her?” Debbie stapled the last batch of papers together and tossed the result into Eileen Norris’s basket, which was half full of phone message slips already. Debbie followed my glance. “Eileen can’t get used to coming out here every time she comes back in the building,” Debbie said. “So her stuff kind of piles up. I don’t really know Beverly that well, she goes to a different church,” she added. “But Beverly has always been a real tough individual, a real loner. She had a baby, you know, when she was just fourteen… and then, when that baby was about a year old, it choked on a marble or something and died. Beverly hasn’t had it easy.”
I tried to imagine being pregnant at fourteen. I tried to imagine my baby dying.
I found I didn’t want to imagine that.
“I guess I’ll just leave Mother a note,” I told her, and started down the hall to Mother’s office. It was the biggest one, of course, and Mother had decorated it in cool, elegant gray, with a slash of deep red here and there for eye relief. Her desk was absolutely orderly, though covered with the paperwork on various projects, and I knew the notepads would be in the top right drawer-and they were-and that all Mother’s pencils would be sharp… and that I would snap off the point of the first one since it was so sharp and I pressed so hard. Having gone through that little ritual, all I had to do was compose a message to let her know I was going to be at the police station at a detective’s request, without propelling her out the office door with her flags flying.
Maybe such a composition wasn’t possible, I decided after sitting for several blank seconds with the (now blunt) pencil actually resting on the paper.
After a false start or two, I settled on: “Mom, I’m going to the police station to tell them about working with Beverly Rillington at the library. She got hurt last night. Call me at home at four o’clock. Love, Roe.”
That should do it. I knew if I wasn’t at home at four she’d storm the bastions and get me released.
The car by which I parked at the police station/small claims court/county sheriff’s office/jail (known locally as “Spacolec” for Sperling County Law.Enforcement Complex) seemed very familiar, and after a second I recognized Angel’s car, the one Jack Burns had ticketed. Then I recalled Angel telling me she was going to the funeral because they’d worked out together; the two stories seemed mutually exclusive.
I mulled it over for a minute as I trudged through the hot parking lot to the glass double doors leading into Spacolec.
It was still making no sense when I saw Arthur Smith waiting for me right in front of the wall-to-wall admissions desk. Arthur had changed little in the three years he’d been married to Lynn. Marriage had not put a gut on him or lined his face; fatherhood hadn’t grayed his tightly curled hair, though it was such a pale blond that the gray, when it did appear, would be enviably hard to detect.
Perhaps he’d changed in the way he held himself, his basic attitude; he seemed tougher, angrier, more impatient, and that was so apparent that I wondered I hadn’t noticed it before.
Arthur, who’d been chatting with the duty officer, turned at the hissing sound of the pneumatic doors. He looked at me, and his face changed.
I felt acutely uncomfortable. I was unused to being the object of unrequited desire. Now, Angel (whom I now saw coming toward me out of the set of swinging wooden doors to the left of the reception desk) must have encountered panting men from adolescence onward. I would have to ask her how it made her feel. Right now she looked washed out, and her stride did not have its usual assurance.
“Are you okay?” I asked anxiously.
She nodded, but not as if she meant it. “I’m just going to go home and lie down,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired in my life. And I’m hungry. Really, really hungry.”
“Need help?”
“Nah. Shelby’ll be home in an hour.” She hadn’t spoken to Arthur directly, but her next words were aimed at him. “If you’re not home by then, I’ll call Bubba.”
Bubba Sewell was my lawyer.
“See you later,” I said, and she was out the glass doors and into the parking lot. I watched her reach her car, unlock it, stretch her arms up and rotate her shoulders to relax, each movement economical and controlled despite her weariness.
“Come this way, Roe,” Arthur said, snapping me back to the unwelcome present. He was holding open the wooden doors, nodding at the woman in uniform on duty at the desk behind bullet-proof glass, gesturing me forward. As I went through the doors, he put his hand on my back to steer me, a controlling gesture I particularly dislike. I don’t much care for being touched casually. I stiffened a little, but put up with it.
When I realized I was only tolerating his touching me because he had once been my lover, I stepped away a little quicker, leaving his hand behind, and his arm dropped to his side.
Arthur waved a hand at his own little cubicle to usher me in. He indicated the only other chair besides the one behind the desk, and murmured something about being back in a minute. Then he vanished, leaving me nothing to do but examine his “office.” It was a bit like being at a car dealership where each salesman has to usher you into a little area partitioned off at neck level, and there present you with pages of scrawled figures. I could tell Arthur worked there; there was a picture of little Lorna, though none of Lynn. But there wasn’t clutter, there wasn’t even much office material on the desk: no Rolodex, no blotter, no stapler. There were stacked in and out trays, and a chipped Christmas coffee mug holding some pens and pencils. That was it. I’d exhausted the possibilities of Arthur’s office.
Then I observed that though the partition walls were made of beige metal and padded with what looked like carpet, each panel contained a Plexiglas window. I could see down the row of similar cubicles. Lynn was two squares away, bent over some paperwork on her desk. She looked up as I was still gazing curiously in her direction. She gave me an unreadable stare and then looked down at her desk pointedly.
From being mildly uneasy at being here, I escalated instantly into very uncomfortable. Had I been brought here as some ploy in Lynn and Arthur’s marital wars?
Arthur reappeared just as I was thinking of leaving. He was holding two unmatched mugs of coffee, one with cream and sugar and one black. He put the black in front of me. “I remembered that was the way you like it,” he said.
I could read nothing in his tone. I thanked him and tried a sip. It was awful. I put it down carefully.
“Why am I here, Arthur?”
“Because you had a very public quarrel with Beverly Rillington yesterday. Because she was attacked and her purse stolen last night. When I heard Mrs. Youngblood had been present during the quarrel, I called her in too. Faron Henske just finished questioning her.”
So that’s why a robbery detective was handling the case. They were treating the attack on Beverly as a robbery gone berserk. “Why couldn’t you just ask me about it at my house, or over the phone, or at the library?”
“Because this was the best place,” he said, very male tough policeman.
I raised my eyebrows slightly. I pushed my gold glasses back up on my nose. “Then ask your questions.”
So we went through the miserable scene at the library again; the rising rage of Beverly, the arrival of Angel, Angel’s exchange with Beverly, the gradual defusing of the crisis.
