Mr. X (42 page)

“How did you know where they were?”

He walked up to me, laid his forearms across my knees, and
stared into my eyes, asking himself if I were really that dumb or just pretending. “Because,” he said, “one is very, very, very
red
. And the big one is very, very, very
blue
.”

“Naturally,” I said.

“
Very, very
blue. Now can we have the funny Frank Sinatra song?”

“Just what we need,” I said.

He charged back to the player, inserted the CD of
Come Dance with Me
, and called up a crisp drum roll and Billy May’s brass figures. Cobbie sank to the floor and crossed his legs, listening to Sinatra’s perfectly timed entrance on “Something’s Gotta Give” with the same concentration he had brought to Monteverdi and Debussy. He twinkled at me at the beginning of the bridge and smiled at Sinatra’s stretching out of the rhythm after the instrumental break. Because I was listening partially through Cobbie’s ears, what I heard gleamed with a loose, confident power. But for some reason, a part of me shrank away—Sinatra’s “Something’s Gotta Give” was the last thing I wanted to hear. The track ended with a swaggering downward phrase and an exultant
Come on, let’s tear it up
that made Cobbie laugh out loud.

He fastened his eyes on mine. “Again?”

“Ring-a-ding-ding,” I said.

The jazzy call to arms from the drummer; urgent shouts from the trumpets and trombones; the saxophone section unfurling a carpet-smooth lead-in; at the exact center of the exact center of the first beat of the first bar of the first chorus, a lean baritone voice took off in a racing start. Fear slid up my spine, and goose pimples bristled on my arms.

When the song ended, Posy Fairbrother appeared at the entrance of the room. “Let’s tear up some wild, knocked-out, koo-koo spaghetti, what do you say?”

Cobbie plunged toward her. At the corner leading to the kitchen, he looked back at me. “Ned! We’re having knocked-out, koo-koo spaghetti!”

“You and I are having spaghetti, Frank,” Posy told him. “You can say good night to Ned afterward, and then he’s going to have dinner with your mommy.”

Laurie moved around them, holding a wineglass in each hand. “You and Posy go in the kitchen. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Cobbie put his hand into Posy’s and vanished around the
corner. For what seemed an absurdly long time, Laurie and I walked toward each other. When we stood face to face, she leaned forward to kiss me. The kiss lasted longer than I had expected.

“What did you think? What
do
you think?”

“He’s incredible, that’s what I think. I think he should skip grade school and go straight to Juilliard.”

Laurie put her forehead on my shoulder. “Now what do I do?”

“You should probably start him on piano lessons with a good teacher. Five years later, get him a great teacher and hire a lawyer whose nickname is Jaws.”

She straightened up and stared at me, almost exactly as Cobbie had done while explaining that E and B were colored red and blue.

“What impresses me most is that he’s such a good kid. I think he’s going to need as much protection as encouragement. Apart from that, just stand back and enjoy the show. But, hell, I’m just making this stuff up, I don’t know anything.”

Laurie moved against me once more, put an arm around my back, and then broke apart and held out a slip of paper. “Posy found a listing for a Donald Messmer in Mountry. While I spend a little time with Cobbie, would you like to see what he has to say?”

I took the paper from her.

The fireplace came through into a kind of television room or den with track lighting aimed down at half-empty shelves. Toy trucks and children’s books were scattered across the carpet. I sat on the sofa and picked up the telephone, but the first person I called was Nettie.

“Your Mountry trash came around this morning,” she said. “I told that sorry excuse for a man he needed more than a big mouth and a baseball bat to scare
me
. Sent them away with their tails between their legs. You don’t happen to have a piece, do you?”

I laughed. “No, I don’t have a gun.”

“Get one. Show iron to fools like that, they get out of your face lickety-split.”

Rinehart’s book dug into my side, and I took it out of my pocket before dialing the other number.

Posy’s CD-ROM had located the right Donald Messmer, but it took me a couple of minutes to get him talking.

“You saw my name on the marriage license, and you got curious about me, huh? Guess I can’t blame you for that.”

I thanked him and called him Mr. Messmer.

“Star let you know I wasn’t your dad, I hope?”

We spoke a little more. Messmer said, “I’m real sorry about your mom. If you don’t mind my saying so, I was nuts about her. I would have done anything for Star Dunstan.”

It was the reason he had married her. Two months after getting pregnant and moving in with Rinehart, Star’s infatuation had curdled into fear. When she had confided to Messmer that she thought Rinehart intended to injure her, the child, or both of them, Messmer helped her escape from Buxton Place. They were married by a justice of the peace and fled across Ohio and into Kentucky, where Messmer had family. When his relatives proved hostile to Star, the couple went to Cleveland. They took jobs in restaurants and lived together in reasonable happiness. A month later, Star went for a medical checkup, and everything changed.

“I was this stupid kid,” he said. “If something was more than five minutes ahead of me, I couldn’t think about it. The idea of having a child was almost more than I could handle, so I just tried to forget it, figuring it would work itself out. When she came back from the doctor and said it was twins, it was like, Sorry, Don, you’re spending the next twenty years in slavery.”

“And the twins weren’t yours,” I said.

“I’m glad you can understand that. A week later, I was shaving in front of the mirror, and this corpse looked back at me. I packed my stuff and took off. I should have been a better guy, but I did what I did. Does that make sense to you?”

“You did her a favor by getting her away from Rinehart.”

“That’s a nice thing to say. The truth is, we wouldn’t have stayed together anyhow.”

After arriving in Mountry, he tended bar until he had saved enough money to buy his own place, which he still ran. His wife had died three years ago, and he had two daughters and six grandchildren. When Messmer looked back at the young man who had run away from Edgerton with Star Dunstan, he saw a person he could scarcely recognize.

“Do you know a man named Joe Staggers?”

“Everybody in Mountry knows Joe Staggers. Most wish they didn’t. Why, you run into him somewhere?”

“It’s all a mistake, but Staggers thinks he has a grudge against me.”

“The asshole’s whole life is a mistake.” I could hear him wondering how far he wanted to go. “This grudge, was a guy named Minor Keyes involved in that?”

“So I hear,” I said.

“If you’re going to be around more than a couple days, you might see can you borrow a weapon from someone. Staggers is a mean son of a bitch.”

Cobbie was polishing off his spaghetti at a table in a windowed alcove next to the kitchen door. Laurie asked, “How did it go?”

“He’s a nice guy. Have you ever been to Mountry?”

She shook her head. “Why?”

“Let’s promise never to go there.”

Cobbie chanted, “Somewhere, somehow, someone’s
gotta
be kissed.”

Posy sprang from her chair. “Bedtime for the Rat Pack.” She wiped the red smears from Cobbie’s face. “All right. Upstairs.”

“Do I have to?”

She put her hands on her hips. “Would I lie to you?”

“Have to have to?”

She looked at me. “Cobbie wondered if you could make out a list of CDs he would like.”

“I’ll try to hold it down to the top one hundred.”

“Maybe we can get Ned to say good night to you once you’re in bed.”

Cobbie looked at me with a blast of anticipatory joy. I would have bet anything that Stewart never tucked him in or read to him at night.

“And I’ll read you a book,” I said, “but it has to be a short one.”

“Goodnight Moon,”
he said. I felt an inexplicable chill of resistance.

“Goodnight Moon?”
Posy said.

Laurie said, “Isn’t that a little babyish for you?”

He shook his head.
“Goodnight Moon.”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s about the perfect way to go to sleep.” The same part of me that had resisted “Something’s Gotta Give” was saying
no no no
to Cobbie’s chosen book. I knew it came from the same place, wherever that was.

“You’re a lucky kid,” Posy said.

Laurie smiled at me and told Cobbie, “Just once.”

He kissed her and flew out of the kitchen, Posy behind him.

Laurie drank the last of the wine in her glass without taking her eyes from my face. “I don’t suppose you have three or four children you play with every afternoon and read to every night, one after the other.”

“Six,” I said. “Plus the twins in Boulder.”

My mouth went dry. I had intended to say “San Diego,” but
Boulder
had come out as if a wizard had put a spell on my tongue. For the third time, a powerful and irrational unease spread its wings. Boulder?

Laurie stood up to get the bottle. “You know, Stewart never read to Cobbie at bedtime, not once. What happened to your glass?”

“I left it in the other room,” I said. “Hold on, I’ll find the dog sled.” When I returned, I sat down next to her and put
From Beyond
on the table.

Laurie flipped through random pages. Something made her snicker, and I said, “What?”

She grinned. “
‘Mr. Waterstone,’ creaked the old librarian from the musty darkness of his sinister lair, ‘the means by which you acquired that ancient text are of no interest to me.’
In books, I don’t think people should
creak
or anything else like that. They should just say things.”

“Edward Rinehart may not be the author for you, he surmised.”

She closed the book. “Tell me about Donald Messmer.”

I condensed Messmer’s tale without mentioning what he had said about Joe Staggers. “It’s funny. I thought there’d be more. I’m almost disappointed there isn’t.”

“It’s amazing, how much you got done in one day. Now you can think about the rest of your life.”

Posy Fairbrother swung around the entrance to the kitchen and came as far as the central island. “Your admirer awaits you. He hasn’t looked at
Goodnight Moon
for so long it took me ages to find it, but he promised to go to sleep after one reading. Laurie, what can I do while Ned is being wonderful?”

“Help me with the hollandaise for the artichokes, and if you put a salad together, I’ll handle the rest.”

“Do you want me to clean up afterwards?”

“One of us will.” Laurie pushed her chair back and stood up in a single gesture. The glowing shield of her face revolved toward me. “Ready to be wonderful all over again?”

56

Separated by expanses of ocher wall, doors stained to look like rosewood marched toward a floor-to-ceiling window with an arched fanlight. The second door on the right stood partially open.