I knew what I wanted to ask next, but I couldn’t figure out how to ask it. Finally I said, “When we were on that train, you wanted to know what my uncle had done that got him sent where he was. Or anyhow, you wanted to find out if I knew. Do you know, yourself?”
“He killed his wife,” Blue said.
I think I hung up the phone, but I’m not completely sure. The next thing I really remember is walking up the street, about half a block away from the booth. Somebody in my head (I don’t know what you call her, except that it isn’t Conscience—maybe she’s Conscience’s sister) was saying, “Okay, Holly, this is it. You know what he looks like, and you know you have to be careful when some other woman wouldn’t suspect a thing. Maybe you can con him into going back, and if you can’t, you can at least blow the whistle. You’ve been as cocky as a cat on a cattleboat ever since you were born. Now put up or shut up.”
So I stuck the dumb paper rose in my hair—Hey, look at me, I’m Carmen—and went into the Yankeedooodle- Burger joint.
There were lots of people there, but no Uncle Herbert. I was just going to have a Coke and go home, but who did I see in a booth but Megan and Les with Megan’s brother Larry, and of course they yelled at me to come over.
“We’ve got a question,” Larry told me. “It’s about horses, and you’re our horse expert.”
Larry was one of the handsomest guys I had ever met; when he looked at me like that I wanted to do whatever he asked me to—even though I knew he was setting me up. So I said, “Les has two, but I know a lot more than she does.”
Les giggled. “He won’t take my word on this stuff, Holly. It’s up to you to straighten him out.”
Megan said, “My smart brother just happened to mention the well-known scientific fact that horses fly south in the winter.”
Larry rapped the table. “Let’s get this straight. I did not say
Naturally they jumped on that. “Bats fly,” Les told him. And Megan put in, “What about a hind-footed animal?”
“—merely stated that horses migrate, and I don’t intend to be put off by dragged-in references to a dumb animal that spends its time in dugouts.”
I figured it was my turn, so I said, “Horses don’t migrate, Larry. They gallop, they walk, they trot, they canter, and one or two will even pace—on a good day, with a full moon. But not migrate or swim under water—that’s ducks.”
“Certainly they do. You, Holly, are shut up in the winter, and so you don’t get to observe as I do. But let me tell you a plain, unvarnished fact. I hardly ever see a horse all winter.”
“I see one every couple of days,” I said, thinking of all the fancy, varnished hours I’d spent mucking out Sidi’s stall.
Les added, “And if you’d really looked, right after the big storm in January, you’d have seen the inimitable Hopkins Family Sleigh, drawn by our own dear Big Red.”
“Sled horses are scouts,” Larry told her, “and it’s not at all surprising, Holly, that you saw your horse. He was cooped up, not free to migrate the way Nature intended. Ducks migrate, as you said yourself. When a farmer goes into his poultry house and sees his ducks sitting there, does that prove horses don’t migrate?”
Megan corrected him. “You mean ducks, Larry. Ducks don’t migrate.” That was when I caught onto the fact that Larry was a little high. Okay, I’m slow.
“Certainly they do, sis. Everybody knows that. They can fly, too, some of them.”
“Listen,” I said, “much as I enjoy all this horsing around, I’d like a Coke and a cheeseburger. ’Scuse me a minute?”
“Me too,” Megan said. “But I haven’t got any money. How about it, Larry?”
“Okay, but don’t let Molly find out I bought three gorgeous women dinner.”
What I had really wanted was an excuse that would get me on the other side of the booth, where my back would be to the wall, and for once everything worked out great. We all got up, Larry bought Coke and burgers for Megan and me, a Dr Pepper for Les, and coffee and fries for himself; and when we sat down again, I was in the back corner where I’d be hard to get at, with Larry between me and the table area. I figured that a guy who’d jump out of a helicopter into the jungle with a knife between his teeth should be able to take care of any screwy old uncle, high or not. So that was just fine.
What wasn’t fine was that his crack about not letting Molly find out had reminded me of that time I’d come home and seen his truck in front of the house. He and Elaine had split, and where had they split to and how had they done it? I’d looked over the whole house.
Except, come to think of it, I hadn’t. I hadn’t looked in the shop down in the basement; and besides about a million bucks worth of tools and his lock collection, my father had a nice big couch down there. Sometimes he even slept there—when he didn’t want to disturb Elaine, he said, but I think it was really when they’d been fighting and the bedroom was off limits. That day, Elaine might have been afraid Mrs. Maas would come upstairs to make the bed, or she just might not have wanted to take Larry to a messed-up bedroom. The shop would have been perfect, because if they were caught, he could have said he was showing her how he’d open Pandora’s Box; and anyway they probably wouldn’t have been caught because Mrs. Maas hardly ever went down there, and anybody (such as my father and me) who did go down had to open a door at the top of the steps first, then switch on the little stairway light, and then come down the steps, which were steep and noisy. It would’ve given them plenty of time to beat it out the door and up the other steps, the concrete ones that went up to the backyard.
So here I was now, sitting close enough to Larry to touch his leg with mine while he kidded away with Megan and Les, and thinking about how he and Elaine must’ve listened to me walking around upstairs looking for them, and breathed a big sigh when I’d finally gone outside and they could go up the steps and out the front door. Had they gotten back to it, I wondered, parked someplace in Larry’s van? But who knows, maybe they were just holding hands. That would’ve been like Elaine.
