Cramer pressed his head against the rough bark. He could imagine a voice at the other end of the line pleading with her, desperate.
“Listen, I’ll tell you why I haven’t phoned, if you want to know.”
But, apparently, Lazar didn’t want to know. And when Cramer looked again, Mimi was holding the phone away from her face, staring at it with her mouth hanging open. Then she brought the receiver back to her ear.
“Enough, already!” she shouted, stamping her foot on the sandy ground. “You say you can’t get over me. But that’s not it at all. What you can’t get over is yourself. ”
There was silence then. The music at the house stopped pounding, the snye stopped gurgling, the birds stopped singing, the insects stopped buzzing. All Cramer could hear was the pulse in his head. Peering out again from his hiding place, he saw Mimi shake her head back and forth. When she finally spoke again, there was no passion left in her voice, only what sounded to Cramer like resignation.
“I tried to do it right,” she said. “I really tried.”
She listened, rolled her eyes, sighed, and then nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Yes. Yes.” There was another pause and then she said “yes” one last time before closing the phone without a good-bye.
She stood, her shoulders drooping, staring down toward the snye. She looked so little and so weary. Cramer was west of her, downwind, and he could almost- almost — smell her. He wanted so much to walk over to her now and take her in his arms. He wouldn’t have to say anything-he wouldn’t need any clever speech. He would hold her, and she would realize that he meant her no harm, that he would look after her, that she was loved. The idea took hold of him. It was as if this was meant to happen, he told himself. He was a neighbor, after all. He could pretend he had just arrived there and seen her in distress. Was it so farfetched?
But then he heard the back door open and shut, and Iris appeared and headed down the lawn toward Mimi, who turned to greet her, though she said nothing.
“Nice dodge on doing the dishes,” said Iris.
Mimi laughed. “Yeah, well, I’d rather have been doing dishes.”
Iris touched her arm. “Did you do the deed?”
Mimi shrugged. “Sort of. He says he needs closure. So I said why don’t you closure yourself in a mine somewhere.”
“Really?”
“No.” Mimi sniffed. “I said he could call again.”
“Ah.” Iris looked disappointed. “So it’s not quite over.”
Then Mimi smiled devilishly. “I said he could call again. However, I’m getting a new SIM card today. ”
“You are so bad, girl.”
Mimi nodded, but her smile slipped. “I needed to know, Iris. Where he was at. Whether he was dealing with this.”
“And he isn’t?”
Mimi shook her head. “I don’t know how I never saw it, but the man is a total wack job.” Her voice broke a little as she spoke.
And Iris took Mimi in her arms and rocked her back and forth. “You still want to come with us?”
“Uh-huh,” said Mimi, pulling away from the embrace at last. “How soon can we go? Like how about an hour ago?”
“Fine with me. It looks to me like you need a megadose of lying on a raft, soaking up the sun.”
Mimi laughed. “Well, a megadose of something.”
She laughed and the two of them headed back toward the house.
Twenty minutes later, they left, the three of them. Mimi was carrying a backpack. It looked to Cramer as if they were going to be gone for quite a while. They drove off in the Camry, and as soon as the car was out of sight, Cramer headed toward the house. He hadn’t gone but a few feet when he heard a loud snap behind him. He spun around and looked toward the snye. His eyes scanned the underbrush. Someone was there. He walked slowly down to the stream, his ears peeled. Nothing. A deer maybe. A rotten branch falling? He waited a full ten minutes before he headed up to the house.
CHAPTER TWENTY
They had gone to Iris’s cottage on Saturday. Mimi had tried to beg off initially, but Iris had insisted.
“Are you sure?” Mimi looked from one to the other, but her gaze ended up on Jay. He could tell she wanted his blessing-he could see it in her eyes. He nodded and was quick about it. She was sharp and any delay would give him away. She would think he didn’t want her along and she’d be wrong.
“Hey, if I want you to buzz off, I’ll give you a quarter,” he said.
“It’ll cost more than that, bud.”
The bantering didn’t quite fool him, and soon enough she changed her mind. “You know, on second thought, I’m really on a roll with this new scene I’m writing. I think I’ll pass.”
So Jay got down on his knees and wrapped his long arms around her legs and pleaded until she just about fell over and agreed to come. Everyone was laughing. The happy trio. But she looked at him funny, all the same, as if she knew there was something up. She was right, but he wasn’t sure himself what was up. He and Iris didn’t desperately need to be alone. They wouldn’t be, anyway, at her parents’ cottage. It was Mimi alone that he was worried about. The house at the snye was secure; he had to believe that. It was Mimi he was worried about. She had been alone a lot lately. Maybe too much.
Jay had seen a movie about the composer Gustav Mahler. The opening shot was of a lake in the mountains somewhere: a dock, a boathouse, and early morning mist swirling on the water. Quiet. The camera dollied in on the boathouse, and suddenly the whole place exploded. He found himself thinking about that as he and Mimi waded back across the snye bright and early Monday morning. They’d had a good time, but halfway through the weekend, he had started worrying about the house. The girls had called him on it.
“First you want me to come along because you’re worried about leaving me alone,” said Mimi. “Then you wish you’d left me there because you’re worried about the house.”
“Jackson is just a worrier,” said Iris.
“Yeah, well, worry about this,” said Mimi, and handed him her fishing rod, which was all snarled. They had been sitting in the middle of the lake with fishing rods as an excuse for doing nothing. So he had picked away at the knots and tangles and kept his worrying to himself for the rest of the weekend.
They’d left Iris at the lawyer’s office in Ladybank where she had a summer job. Jay was driving the Camry. He was going to drop Mimi off and make sure everything was okay before heading back into town. And everything did look okay. Pretty as a picture, with the tall grass and wildflowers nodding in a light breeze. But Jay watched the house carefully, waiting for the whole thing to blow up.
Mimi babbled on about a scene she was going to rewrite, but he hardly heard her. They had arrived at the shed by then, and he stopped in his tracks.
“What?” she said.
He pointed.
The back door was ajar.
Jay ran for the stairs, Mimi to her desk. “Oh, thank you, God, thank you, thank you,” he heard her say as he charged upstairs, two steps at a time. Presumably her computer was still there. His computer was still there, too, and he breathed a long sigh of relief, leaning on his knees to catch his breath. Mimi joined him and gasped.
He looked up, and his gaze, so narrowly fixed when he first got there, now saw what he had missed. Two of his guitar stands were empty.
The cops took almost an hour. By then Jay and Mimi had discovered that the back door had not been forced but opened from inside; the window in Mimi’s bedroom had been smashed. Glass lay everywhere on her bed, in her open suitcase-everywhere!
But that wasn’t the last of the surprises. Jay had gone down to the snye to lay a two-by-ten plank across the broken bridge for the cops, figuring they wouldn’t want to wade over, when suddenly Mimi came running down to
