“No.”
“Are you sure?”
I nodded. “I’m sorry. It was just something that reminded me of …” I couldn’t keep back the words. “… of my father.”
It was hours later, nearing dawn, and we were in bed in her apartment on MacDougal Street before I finally got the whole story out. I cried and cried, and so she held me through all that sleepless, gorgeous night.
And twenty years later, she’d walked out of our bedroom and down the stairs, and neither of us had thought to say goodbye.
I’d been at my desk for no more than an hour when the phone rang.
“Mr. Farris?”
“Yes.”
“Rebecca Soltero. I was wondering if you might be able to meet me for lunch today.”
“Well, it would have to be a short lunch,” I said. “And near the office.”
“That would be fine,” Rebecca said. “I’d just like to get a few biographical details before we do the other type of interview.”
She meant the kind, of course, that would return me to my father.
“All right,” I said. “There’s a small cafe on Linden, just down the block from my office. It’s called Plimpton’s.”
“Yes, I saw it yesterday,” Rebecca said. “What time?”
“I can meet you at twelve-thirty,” I told her.
She was already waiting for me when I arrived an hour or so later. She was wearing a long dark skirt with matching jacket and a white blouse. Her earrings were plain gold hoops. She wore no other jewelry.
I nodded crisply as I sat down. “I wasn’t expecting to hear from you quite so soon,” I said cautiously.
She nodded. “I know,” she said, “but I’m at that point where I need a little background information.” She took a small notebook from her jacket pocket. “Information about you, I mean,” she added. “Biographical details, that sort of thing.”
“And the other interviews,” I said, “they’ll be focused on my father?”
“Along with your family,” Rebecca said. “I’d like to have portraits of each of them.”
“How many interviews do you expect to need?”
“It depends on how much you remember,” Rebecca answered.
“Well, how long are you planning to stay in Old Salsbury?”
She looked at me very determinedly. “I live in Boston,” she said, “but I’ll stay here as long as I need to.” Her eyes returned to the notebook. “I know that you lived with your aunt in Somerset for a while after the murders,” she began. “How long?”
“Two months.”
“And that’s when your uncle came to get you?”
“Yes.”
As I spoke, I remembered the morning Quentin arrived at Aunt Edna’s house, the old truck shuddering to a stop in her gravel driveway. I’d been stacking dominoes on the carpet in the living room, and when I looked up I saw Aunt Edna part the translucent blue curtains which hung over her large picture window, release a weary sigh, and shake her head, as if the sight of him alone was enough to exasperate her.
He entered the house seconds later, a large man with a round belly and thick legs. He was wearing rubber boots which rose almost to his thighs, and a gray, broad-billed cap that looked like the type worn by locomotive engineers.
He hardly noticed Aunt Edna, but strode powerfully over to me, jerked me into his arms, and said, “Well, Stevie, ready to live a man’s life now, are you?”
From the corner of my eye, I could see Aunt Edna looking at both of us crossly, her arms folded over her chest. “Put him down, Quentin,” she said sternly, “and come on into the kitchen. We have things to talk about.”
They’d talked about me, as I told Rebecca over lunch that day, a conversation I’d heard from just behind the closed door:
“As I said on the phone, it’s not working out here, Quentin,” Aunt Edna said. “That’s the long and the short of it.”
“I told you I’d take him, Edna,” Quentin told her. “I know you don’t want him.”
“Well, it’s not exactly that I don’t …”
“Besides,” Uncle Quentin interrupted, “he’s better off with a man.”
There was a brief silence after that, but finally I heard my aunt say, “All right, take him.”
And he had, the two of us rattling for hours along well-traveled roads before turning onto the more deserted one that led out to Quentin’s house by the sea.
“He was an older man, wasn’t he?” Rebecca asked.
“Late fifties.”
