“Ha, ha. You’re so not funny.”
I leaned closer to her. “Even when you look like hell, Jeri, you look good.” And I meant it, but I wasn’t sure why I said it. Maybe I was trying to make her feel better.
She almost smiled. “Go fly a kite, buster.”
Buster paid the tab and we went outside into a downpour that turned the whole world gray and misty. Visibility was a quarter mile. Jeri drove. She wanted to do something. I didn’t object since she was steady on her feet. I wanted to get a look at the country, what little of it could be seen from inside the unruly fringe of a tropical storm.
We went west on Highway 501, past 17 and the Intracoastal Waterway, past tobacco fields, half a dozen misty golf courses, the Myrtle Beach Speedway, shaggy waterlogged cypress, tupelo and palmetto, creeks full of brown water. Rain slanted down, unending buckets of it that turned the highway into a quarter-inch-deep sheet of gray water and oily bubbles. Jeri had to keep the speed down to avoid hydroplaning.
We turned onto Business Route 501. Houses outside Conway came into view. Watery neon signs glowed in the dimness beneath a turbulent sky. Conway was a town of about twelve thousand people, a bucolic place of modest but generally well-kept Victorian, Georgian and Federal houses, Colonial, some recent nameless junk. It looked like the kind of place a person named Jewel Holmquist would live. Spanish moss swayed in the limbs of live oaks, dripping water. Water raced down gutters and flooded street corners in dirty swirling pools, clogged with leaves.
We stopped at a small market on a corner. The place had two gas pumps and an empty bench out front, RC Cola signs, the ghost of a fading Nehi ad painted on a brick wall. A traffic light danced on a wire strung across the intersection.
We dashed inside. A morbidly obese woman in a blue housedress was behind a counter smoking a cigarette, watching a tabloid show on a small television, something about pregnant teenage hookers who’d returned home with AIDS. Educational and uplifting. Who could ask for more at ten in the morning? Jeri asked for directions while I tried to look interested in a selection of flavored potato chips, extra crunchy Cheetos, and spicy pork rinds.
Back in the Mustang, we dripped water on the seats and grinned at each other.
“Wow,” she said, wiping water from her face.
“Watch out. That shirt’s going see-through. The bra, too,” I added unnecessarily, but included it for the sake of completeness and accuracy.
“If it bothers you, don’t look.”
“Doesn’t bother me.”
“What’d you mention it for?”
“Just so you’d know.”
“Yeah, well, I know. Not much I can do about it, is there? If it bothers you, don’t look.” She gave me a look.
I shrugged. “Doesn’t bother me in the least.”
“So we’re all good here, huh?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Great.” She backed out and took off. We went down a main street with a few traffic lights, turned left, then left again, cruising slowly through a neighborhood of older homes, mostly two-story houses with gables and clapboard, deep porches, old oaks bearded with moss in the front yards.
Jeri slowed the car, pointed. “There it is. Six eighty-eight.”
It was half the size of Sjorgen House in Reno, but similar: white clapboard, a turret, gingerbread trim, two red brick chimneys, one at either end of the house. The windows were dark. Its gutters were overflowing with rainwater, and a For Sale sign was in the front yard, shuddering in the wind.
“C’mon,” Jeri said, opening her door.
We ran to the porch. I rang the bell, water leaking down my back from my hair.
The house looked empty, felt empty.
I rang the bell again. Jeri cupped her hands and peered in through a window. She looked at me and shook her head.
I turned, looked back at the street. “Now what?”
She rang the bell eight or ten times, then knocked, hard, tried the handle. It was locked. Finally she gave up. “Now we go talk to the neighbors.”
We dashed across the street to a Georgian house with a hipped roof and columns, red brick, splashing through what seemed like one continuous puddle.
A spindly woman opened the door, hair done up in a bun, eyes dark. “Yes?”
“Do you know the people who used to live over there?” Jeri asked, pointing across the street.
The woman’s face went stony. She shut the door without a word. Jeri looked at me, shrugged.
“Not what you’d call a good sign, huh?” I said.
“Not very, but it’s a sign, Mort. Let it register. C’mon.”
We ran down to the next house, arriving under a porch overhang as soaked as if we’d stepped out of a shower. Jeri’s shirt was all but transparent.
“You better hope a guy answers,” I told her.
“You ring, okay?”
I did. A man in his seventies opened the door and looked out at us. “Hep you?” He looked past me to Jeri. He had a twenty-pound cat in his arms that might have been dead, except that it was purring like a moped with a bad muffler, peering at me with one yellow eye.
Jeri edged around me. “We were wondering if you know the folks in that house.” She pointed.
“What’d you want to know?”
“Well, where they are, for one thing.”
He looked at her for a moment, then at me. “Better come on in, huh? Wet out there.”
We trailed him into a parlor that had been decorated by a woman, which I recognize as a sexist remark and not necessarily true, but the room was full of flowered sofas and chairs, lace curtains and doilies, a red velvet loveseat, ceramic and jade figurines, a few dolls in satin dresses. But whoever had decorated the room was long gone, or so I thought by the film of dust covering everything, and the brown plants in pots by the windows, as dry and dead as cornstalks in December. Jeri and I stood in the room, looking around.
“Holmquist,” the
