from her, and which was so different from the general gloominess and withdrawal which characterized my mother.
I nodded. “Maybe,” I admitted.
My father kept a small army-surplus cot in the back of the store, and for an instant I saw him lying upon it, wrapped in Nellie’s somewhat flabby arms, his old gray work clothes stripped away and bundled sloppily in a pile beneath the creaking springs of the old metal cot. It was not a vision I could sustain, however.
I shook my head. “I can’t give you any particular reason, Rebecca, but I just don’t think my father would have been attracted to Nellie Grimes.”
“Do you know what happened to her?” Rebecca asked. “There’s no indication in the investigation that she was thought of in connection with the murders.”
“Well, she wasn’t working at the store when it all happened,” I explained. “She’d stopped working for my father by then.”
“When did she stop?”
I tried to recall the time exactly, but found that I could come up with only a general approximation. “Toward the end of the summer,” I said. “Sometime in the middle of August, I think.”
“Do you know why she left?”
“No.”
“Do you know where she went?”
“I don’t know that either,” I said. “But I do remember the last time I saw her.”
It had been in the railway station downtown. My father had driven her and May, who was six years old by then, to the train late one summer afternoon, and I had come along with them, May and I bouncing about in the back of the van, along with a varied array of battered old suitcases, while my father and Nellie sat up front, talking quietly.
My father had been dressed in his usual work clothes that day, but Nellie had dolled herself a bit in a black polka-dot dress to which she’d added a round, pillbox hat with a short black net that hung from her forehead to just beneath her upper lip, and which, though long out of style, had given her an unmistakable air of mystery.
Once at the station, my father had lugged the suitcases to the appropriate ramp, then we had all waited for Nellie’s train. It had not been long in coming, and during that short interval, my father and Nellie had smoked cigarettes and talked quietly while May and I darted here and there among the other passengers. I caught none of the conversation that passed between them except, at the very end, as the train was already pulling into the station, its cloud of billowing steam pouring over them, I saw my father take a plain white envelope and press it into Nellie’s hand. He said nothing at all, but the look which passed between them at that instant was very beautiful and grave, deeper than a casual farewell.
For a moment, I labored to bring back those two lost faces. I saw my father peering down at Nellie, his large, sad eyes settling delicately upon her as he placed the envelope in her hand, then gently folded her fingers around it. She was staring up at him, pressing her face closer to him as if reaching for his lips. She seemed to strain toward him unconsciously for a moment, then to pull back, instantly aware that he would not bend toward her, not so much as a single, tender inch.
Then she stepped away, bent down to me, lifted the black net from her face, and kissed me softly on the cheek. “Bye, Skipper,” she said. She looked at me a moment, then smiled brokenly, and added, “Maybe someday.” After that, she quickly grabbed May’s hand, and the two of them disappeared into the train. My father and I hoisted the bags on after her, but she was not there to take them from us, and I had the strangest sense that she was just inside the first car, standing with her back pressed against its cold metal wall, crying.
“There might have been something between them,” I told Rebecca, “but only on her side, not his.”
“So you don’t think that second ticket to Mexico could have been for Nellie?”
Because there seemed no other, more likely, candidate, I let myself consider the thought once again, probing at it almost academically, using little bits of logic and deduction to piece together my father’s phantom love affair.
Then a chilling thought occurred to me.
If it was true that the two tickets to Mexico had been for my father and Nellie, then what had they planned to do with May?
For an instant, I saw her exactly as I’d seen her that day in the train station, a little girl in a burgundy dress, disappearing into the gloomy, rattling depths of the railway car. A few months later had she died as my mother, Laura, and Jamie had died? In some distant city, perhaps even at the same time, had Nellie Grimes done to her daughter what my father had done to Laura?
From the grim notion of such a murder, it was easy for me to imagine it in all its awesome detail.
I could see May in her room, playing with her doll, a record on the little dark red plastic music box she had carried with her onto the train that day. She was humming along with its scratchy tune while she dressed a pink, rubbery doll whose heavy lids closed each time the head was tilted back. Alone, sitting Indian-style on the checkered quilt that covered her bed, humming to herself while her fingers tugged softly at the doll’s little wool dress, she barely looked up as the door to her room crept open and Nellie Grimes stepped into it as if from a cloud of thick gray smoke.
I sat back in my seat, startled by the vividness of my own imagination, by the way it had driven me toward a firm and uncompromising denial.
“No, that second ticket couldn’t have been for Nellie,” I said with absolute certainty, “because two tickets would mean that they’d have had to kill May, and I don’t believe my father would have had anything to do with such a murder.”
Rebecca looked at me cautiously. “You don’t think he would have had anything to do with the murder of May Grimes even though he had been willing to kill …”
“The rest of us, yes,” I said. I shook my head at the absurdity of my own reasoning, but I couldn’t rid myself of the notion that, for all he’d done to my mother, Laura, and Jamie, my father would not have brought May Grimes
