Ladder of Years (15 page)

“Yes, thanks.”

“And I don’t suppose you’ll have guests,” Belle said. She gave Delia a sudden appraising look. “Men guests, that is.”

“Oh! No, I won’t.”

“Your private life is your private life, but that forty-two dollars covers utilities for one. Sheets and towels for one, too.”

“I don’t even know anybody to invite,” Delia assured her.

“You’re not a local girl, huh?”

“Well, no.”

“Me neither. Till I came here with a fella, I never heard of Bay Borough,” Belle said cheerfully. “The fella didn’t work out, but I stayed on anyhow.”

Delia knew she should volunteer some information in exchange, but all she said was, “I guess I’ll wash up before I go get my things.”

“Help yourself,” Belle said with a wave. And she went clomping down the stairs.

Delia waited a polite half second before stepping into the bathroom. She hadn’t peed since ten o’clock that morning.

The bathroom wallpaper—seahorses breathing silver bubbles—curled at the seams, and the fixtures were old and rust-stained, but everything looked clean. First Delia used the toilet, and then she patted her face with cool water and let it air-dry. (The one towel belonged to the other boarder, she assumed.) She avoided her face in the mirror; she preferred to hang on to the image she’d seen in the changing booth. She did glance down at her dress, though, checking it for neatness, for secretarial properness. And just before walking out, she slipped her wedding ring off her finger and dropped it into her tote.

Then she made a brief return trip to her room. She didn’t go inside but merely stood in the doorway, claiming it—reveling in its starkness, now that she had it completely to herself.

Clop-clop back up the street, eyes front, as if she knew where she was headed. Well, she did, more or less. Already the little town held pockets of familiar sights: the faded red soft-drink machine outside the Gobble-Up Grocery, the chipped Fiesta ware in Bob’s Antiques, the stacked bags of kibble for overweight dogs in Pet Heaven. She took a right at the corner, and the green square in the distance seemed as comfortable, as well known and faintly boring, as if she had spent her childhood at the foot of Mr. Bay’s fringed chair.

Ezekiel Pomfret still had his shade pulled down, but when Delia tried the door it yielded. A steep flight of stairs climbed straight ahead. A ground-floor door to the right bore, on its cloudy, pebbled glass, Ezekiel Pomfret’s name once again and WILLS & ESTATES—DOMESTIC-CRIMINAL LAW. That door, too, opened when Delia tried it. She stepped into a walnut-lined room with a reception desk in the center. No one sat at the desk, she was pleased to see. No one was visible anywhere, but behind another door, this one ornately paneled, she heard a man’s voice. It
stopped and started, interspersed by silence, so she knew he must be talking on the phone.

She crossed to the desk, which was bare except for a telephone and a typewriter. She lifted a corner of the typewriter’s gray rubber hood. Manual; not even electric. (She had worried she would find a computer.) She gave a small, testing spin to the swivel chair behind it.

Good afternoon
, she would say.
I’m here to ask if
…

No, not
ask. Ask
was too tentative.

She reached up to pat her hair, which felt as crumbly as dry sand on the beach. (The beach! No: shoo that thought away.) She smoothed her skirt around her hips and made sure that the trim on her tote—a flashy pink bow, ridiculous—was hidden beneath her arm.

It just seemed so fateful, Mr. Pomfret, it seemed almost like a direct command, that I should learn about poor Miss Percy exactly at the moment when
…

The voice behind the door gathered energy and volume. Mr. Pomfret must be winding up his conversation.

Like having something accidentally break my fall, does that make any sense? Like I’ve been falling, falling all day and then was snagged by a random hook, or caught by an outjutting ledge, and this is where I happened to land, so I was wondering whether
…

Slam of receiver, squeak of caster wheels, heavy tread on carpet. The paneled door swung open, and a big-bellied middle-aged man in a seersucker suit surveyed her over his half-glasses. “I
thought
I heard someone,” he said.

“Mr. Pomfret, I’m Delia Grinstead,” she told him. “I’ve come to be your secretary.”

At four-fifteen she returned to the dime store and bought one cotton nightgown, white, and two pairs of nylon panty hose. At four twenty-five she crossed the square to Bassett Bros. Shoe Store and bought a large black leather handbag. The bag cost fifty-seven dollars. When she first saw the price she considered settling for vinyl, but then she decided that only genuine leather would pass muster with Miss Grinstead.

Miss Grinstead was Delia—the new Delia; for after one grimacing, acidic “Ms.,” that was how Mr. Pomfret had addressed her throughout their interview. It seemed apt that she should accept this compromise—the unmarried title, the married surname. Certainly the aproned, complacent
sound of “Mrs.” no longer applied, and yet she couldn’t go back to being giggly young Miss Felson. Besides, her Social Security card said Grinstead. She had drawn it from her wallet and read off the number to Mr. Pomfret (not having had enough use of it, all these years, to know it by heart). She had told him she was relocating after burying her mother. A whole unspoken history insinuated itself in the air between them: the puttery female household, the daughter’s nunnish devotion. She said she had worked in a doctor’s office her entire adult life. “Twenty-two years,” she told Mr. Pomfret, “and I felt so sad to leave, but I simply couldn’t stay on in Baltimore with all those memories.” She seemed to have been infected with Miss Grinstead’s manner of speaking. She would never herself have used “simply” in casual conversation, and the word “memories” in that context had a certain mealymouthed tone that was unlike her.

If references had been called for, she was prepared to say that her employer had recently died as well. (She was killing off people right and left today.) But Mr. Pomfret didn’t mention references. His sole concern was the nature of her past duties. Had she typed, had she filed, taken shorthand? She answered truthfully, but it felt like lies. “I typed all the bills and correspondence and the doctor’s charts,” she said. Sam’s worn face rose up before her, along with his mended white coat and the paisley tie that he called his “paramecium tie.” She sat straighter in her chair. “I filed and manned the phone and kept the appointment book, but unfortunately I do not take shorthand.”

“Well, no matter,” Mr. Pomfret said. “Neither did Miss Percy or Miss What’s-her-name. I’ve always dreamed of having a secretary with shorthand, but I guess it’s not meant to be.”

There was an uncomfortable moment when he asked for her address, since she had no idea what it was. But when she mentioned Belle Flint he said, “Oh, yes, on George Street.” He added, as he made a notation, “Belle’s a real fun gal.” That was the advantage to a small town, Delia supposed. Or the disadvantage, depending on how you looked at it.

He said she should start tomorrow; her hours were nine to five. Sorry the pay was just minimum wage, he said (sliding his eyes over subtly to gauge her reaction). Also, she was expected to brew the coffee; he hoped that wasn’t a problem.

Of course it wasn’t, Delia said brusquely, and she rose and terminated the interview. Her impression of Mr. Pomfret was that he was a man without any grain to him, someone benign but not especially interesting,
and that was fine with her. In fact, she didn’t much like him, and that was fine too. For the impersonal new life she seemed to be manufacturing for herself, Mr. Pomfret was ideal.

Her watch said twenty minutes till five, and she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Before heading back to her room, therefore, she walked to the café that Belle had recommended. It turned out to be not directly across from Belle’s but a few doors farther west, next to a hardware. Still, she could see the boardinghouse from the window; so she sat in the booth that offered the best view and kept watch against Belle’s return. Maybe she should have purchased a suitcase, just so she could move in openly. But it was foolish to spend money on appearances. Already her five hundred dollars had dwindled to … what? Mentally she tallied it up and then winced. When the waitress arrived, she confined her order to a bowl of vegetable soup and a glass of milk.

Rick-Rack’s was the kind of place where she might have eaten in high school—a diner, basically, linoleum floored and tile walled, with six or eight booths and a row of stools along a Formica counter. One little redhead served the whole room, and a blue-black young man, gigantically muscled and shaven skulled, did the cooking. He was grilling a cheese sandwich for the only other customer, a boy about Ramsay’s age. The smell of fried food gave Delia hunger pangs even as she was spooning her soup, but she reminded herself that soup provided more vitamins for the money, and she declined the homemade pie for dessert. She paid at the register. The cook, after wiping his hands on his apron, rang up her total without comment. Next time she’d bring something to read, she decided. She had felt awkward, munching her saltines and staring fixedly out the window.

No sign of Belle back at the house. Delia unlatched the front door and felt a thin, bare silence all around her. She climbed the stairs, thinking,
Here comes the executive secretary, returning from her lone meal to the solitude of her room.
It wasn’t a complaint, though. It was a boast. An exultation.

When she opened her own door the hornet’s-nest smell seemed stronger, perhaps because of the afternoon heat that had penetrated the eaves. She set her belongings on the bureau and went to raise both windows. The rear window offered a view of the tiny backyard and an alley. The front window showed the porch overhang and the buildings across the street. Delia leaned her forehead against the screen and picked out the café (B. J. “RICK” RACKLEY, PROP.) and the hardware store and a
brown shingled house with the bars of a crib or a playpen visible in one upstairs window. The only sounds were soothing sounds—occasional cars swishing past and footsteps on the sidewalk.

Belle had left an old-fashioned, spindly key on the bureau, and Delia fitted it into the door and turned the lock. Then she took the tags off her new handbag, dropped her wallet inside, and hung the bag from a hook in the closet. She stowed her other purchases in the bureau. (The drawers stuck and slid out crookedly; they were cheaply made, like the house itself.) She hung Sam’s beach robe on a hanger. She placed her cosmetic kit in a drawer. Her tote, with its remaining litter of sun lotions and swimsuit and rubber bands and such, she boosted onto the closet shelf. Then she closed the closet door and went over to the cot and sat down.

So.

She was settled.

She could look around the room and detect not the slightest hint that anybody lived here.

It was twilight before Belle returned. Delia heard the clunk of a car door out front, then loud heels on the porch. But neither woman called out a greeting. In fact, Delia, who had been staring into space for who knows how long, rose from the cot as soundlessly as possible, and tiptoed when she went over to collect some things from the bureau, and took care not to creak any floorboards when she crossed the hall to the bathroom.

While she waited for the shower to run warm, she brushed her teeth and undressed, putting her underwear to soak in the sink. A second towel and washcloth now hung on the other towel bar, she saw. She took the washcloth with her and stepped behind the shower curtain, which was crackly with age and slightly mildewed.

Grime and sweat and sunblock streamed off her, uncovering a whole new layer of skin. The soles of her feet, which felt ironed flat from all that walking, seemed to be drinking up water. She lifted her face to the spray and let her hair get wet. Finally, regretfully, she shut off the faucets and stepped out to towel herself dry. The new nightgown drifted airily over her scorched shoulders.

She chose not to leave her toothbrush in the holder above the sink. Instead, she returned it to her cosmetic kit and carried everything back to her room. Her wrung-out underclothes she draped on one of the
hangers in the closet. This meant she would have to keep the closet door open during the night—a blot on the room’s sterility. Better that, though, than letting her laundry clutter the bathroom. She approved of Belle’s house rules; she did not intend to “spill over.”

She turned the bedcovers back and lay down, drawing up just the top sheet. The breeze from the window chilled her damp head, but not so much that she needed a blanket.

Outside, children were playing. It wasn’t even completely dark yet. She lay on her back with her eyes open, keeping her mind as blank as the ceiling above her. Once, though, perhaps hours later, a single thought did present itself.
Oh, God
, she thought,
how am I going to get out of this?
But immediately afterward she closed her eyes, and that was how she fell asleep.

7

Baltimore Woman Disappears
, Delia read, and she felt a sudden thud in her stomach, as if she’d been punched.
Baltimore Woman Disappears During Family Vacation.

She had been checking the Baltimore newspapers daily, morning and evening. There was nothing in either paper Tuesday, nothing Wednesday, nothing Thursday morning. But the Thursday evening edition, which arrived in the vending box near the square in time for Delia’s lunch hour, carried a notice in the Metro section.
Delaware State Police announced early today
…

She folded the paper open to the article, glancing around as she did so. On the park bench opposite hers, a young woman was handing her toddler bits of something to feed the pigeons, piece by piece. On the bench to her right, a very old man was leafing through a magazine. No one seemed aware of Delia’s presence.

Mrs. Grinstead was last seen around noon this past Monday, walking south along the stretch of sand between
…