Mr. X (61 page)

I almost drove into a parked car.

“Did I startle you? Please accept my apologies. I trust that our documents are now in Toby Kraft’s safe.”

“Go to hell. Yes, they’re in Toby’s safe.”

“Do we have plans for the evening?”

“I’m having dinner with Nettie and May.”

“Do you know, I have never enjoyed a meal in the company of our great-aunts?”

“You wouldn’t like it,” I said. “Their conversation tends to be repetitious.”

“Let me relieve you of the tedium. I’ll take your place.”

“No.”

“After the tedious dinner, were you thinking of driving to Ellendale?”

“Stay away from Laurie Hatch,” I said.

“If you insist. For the time being, anyhow.”

“Robert,” I said, but I was talking to an empty seat.

86

From her station in the window, Aunt Joy pointed at Nettie’s house, then herself, telling me that I was to come over after dinner. I nodded. Joy and I had a lot to talk about.

The aunts smiled up from the sofa as I came into the living room. Clark granted me the indulgent sneer of a man fresh from an appearance at the Speedway Lounge. He was arrayed in pearl-gray trousers, the jacket of a purple suit, and a wide necktie with yellow polka dots on a red background. “I guess you got a vehicle now.”

“Just a rental,” I said. I kissed my aunts, and May handed me a brown paper bag.

“I hope I got the sizes right.”

In the bag were two three-packs of Calvin Klein briefs, size 34, and six pairs of black over-the-calf wool socks, size 10–12. After the aunts had divided up the loot from the ICU, I had jokingly asked May to get me underwear and socks, and she had taken me at my word. “The sizes are perfect,” I said. “I don’t really approve of this, but thanks, Aunt May. I can use them.”

“Is that blazer your only coat, Neddie? I can get you a new one from Lyall’s. They have some beautiful coats in their men’s department.”

“No, no,” I said hurriedly, “I have all the jackets I need.”

“Have any this color?” Clark asked, almost belligerently.

“No, but it’s very pretty.”

“What would you call this particular color?”

“Purple?”

“I hate to see a young man make a fool of himself.”

“Midnight purple?”

“The true name for this shade is aubergine. Now you don’t have to walk around in ignorance.”

“Good,” I said. “I’ve been walking around in ignorance most of my life.”

Nettie said, “I think we had better get into the kitchen. Do you still like fried chicken, Ned?”

“Do I ever.”

The table had been set with bowls of mashed potatoes and string beans and a pitcher of iced tea. Nettie peeled aluminum foil off the top of a platter of fried chicken. May hobbled up to distribute the chicken onto our plates. Uncle Clark lowered himself into a chair, and I poured him a glass of iced tea. “How’s your friend Cassie?”

He took in just enough liquid to extinguish a match. “The girl didn’t show up for work today. Bruce McMicken was rough around the edges.”

May settled into the chair across from me while Nettie brought out gravy and biscuits. I poured iced tea into the other three glasses. Nettie thanked me, formally. In silence, we helped ourselves to the potatoes and beans.

“This is a wonderful dinner, Aunt Nettie,” I said.

“When you were a child, you were fond of fried chicken.”

“Nobody makes it better than you,” I said.

Silence descended again. My remark about being raised in ignorance had spoiled the fun.

Nettie, for whom even a pointed silence was an unendurable challenge, said, “What have you been doing all this time? Touring the town in your new car?”

“Or playing cards?” May asked. “Mountry trash is on the lookout for you. And one of them is dead. That is no great loss to the world.”

Nettie sent me one of her thousand-pound glances. “I guess the police didn’t give you much trouble.” She paused. “Unless you’re not saying.”

“They let me go right away,” I said. “It’s a strange thing, but there’s a man in town who looks a lot like me.”

“So that’s your story,” Clark said, maneuvering a tiny portion of mashed potato into the gravy.

“It’s not a story,” I said. “Yesterday, when I was coming out of
City Hall, he was standing at the far end of Town Square. I tried to follow him, but he got away.”

Clark fixed me with a disapproving glare. “City Hall gets locked up on Sundays. What business would you have there, anyhow?”

“A friend of Laurie Hatch’s volunteers at City Hall on the weekends. He’s been giving me some help.”

“Mrs. Hatch introduces you to her friends?” Nettie asked.

I explained about meeting Laurie at Le Madrigal. “I wanted to get some information about Edward Rinehart, and she introduced me to Hugh Coventry, her friend who helps out at City Hall.”

“Hugh Coventry?” Nettie asked. “He’s the man who lost our pictures. If Mrs. Hatch is such a good friend of yours, she could help us get them back.”

“There’s no need to trouble Mrs. Hatch with our affairs.”

“You already involved Mrs. Hatch in our personal affairs,” Nettie said.

“In mine, yes,” I said. “If it makes you feel better, I didn’t learn much about Rinehart at City Hall. He bought two little alleyway houses in College Park. And he was a criminal. Supposedly, he died in prison.”

“Then stop rooting in the dirt,” Nettie said.

Rooting in the dirt. I saw myself kneeling on the carpet of grass behind Howard Dunstan’s ruined house—I remembered falling through a trap door and hearing a theatrical phantom say,
Once your father had been created, I decided to amuse myself by driving him mad…. Perhaps you will destroy him instead. The outcome of the game no longer matters to me
.

Sudden, stupendous understanding took my breath away.

All three of them were looking at me as if they had seen my understanding come into being, but they really had seen no more than the expression on my face at the moment of comprehension. Howard had told me what I most needed to know. Telling me what I needed to know helped to keep him amused.

“But Edward Rinehart didn’t die at Greenhaven,” I said. “He’s living in Edgerton. From what I hear, he sounds a lot like a Dunstan.”

Nettie’s chin sank to her chest, and May found a need to gaze at the stove. Clark dissected a string bean.

“Never in all my life,” Nettie finally said.

“A lot of things about our family were hidden from me.”

Nettie glared. “You’ve been listening to gossip.”

“If you wanted me to think that the Dunstans were a normal family, you should have kept me away from Aunt Joy,” I said.

“Joy lives in a world of her own,” Nettie said. “Put it out of your mind.”

“You want me to forget the way she waggled a finger at Uncle Clarence and floated him through the air?”

“Joy was never a happy person like you and me, Nettie,” May said. “She blamed Daddy for her troubles.”

“We’re not talking about her troubles,” Nettie growled. “We’re talking about what she
did
.”

“We’re talking about the Dunstans,” I said. “Aunt Nettie, you’re not all that different from Joy, are you?”

She cast me another thunder-and-lightning glare. “I’m a
Dunstan
, if that’s what you mean. Would you like to see proof of that?”

Before I could answer, Nettie tucked her hands into her armpits and frowned at the table. The pitcher of tea rose up and wafted down the table to refill my glass. It coasted to May, who said, “No, thank you, I’ve had enough.” The pitcher landed with a tinkling of ice cubes.

Nettie turned her head to Clark. An alarmed look crossed his face. “No! I don’t—”

He ascended three feet above his chair and sailed toward the stove like a man on a magic carpet. “Put me down, Nettie!”

She spun him around and brought him back to his chair. Clark put his hands on his chest and took a couple of noisy breaths. “You know I don’t like it when you do that.”

“You married me,” Nettie said.

“
I
like it,” May chirped. “I
always
liked it.”

Nettie wiped her forehead and stared at her sister. Giggling, May shot out of her chair, made a circuit of the table, and came to rest.

Nettie looked angrily at me. “You want some, too?”

What came out of my mouth was “Yes.”

She beetled her brows, gazing not so much at me as at my position in the room. A drop of sweat rolled out of her hairline. The tingle that predicted my “attacks” bloomed in my chest. I felt my being grasped up and held within a firmly accommodating restraint precisely like Mr. X’s confinement. With the same sense
of powerlessness before an irresistible pressure, I lifted off my chair. A great wall of wind pushed me into the living room. The wind shifted on its axis, hurtled me back into the kitchen, and tumbled me head over heels a moment before I struck the wall. A shout of glee burst from my throat. I floated to the table and saw Nettie gazing at nothing, her eyebrows contracted and her face damp with sweat. I moved over my chair, swayed right-left, then left-right, and, like a helicopter, settled back on earth.

“You like that more than I do,” Clark said.

“Ned’s a
Dunstan
.” Nettie wiped her face with a napkin. “You get old, your batteries run down.”

“Nettie,” I said, “I drove out to your old house yesterday. Something happened to me there. I can’t explain it, but I can tell you what it was. I got dizzy, and pretty soon I was standing in a room with a stuffed fox next to a brass clock on the mantelpiece.”

My eyes on Nettie, I only dimly saw May lean forward and clasp her hands before her chest. Nettie touched the napkin to her temple.

“Your father was in that room,” I said. “He was wearing a velvet smoking jacket, and he had a cigar in one hand.”

“How did our father look?” May asked me.

“Tired. But like he was acting, too.”

“I don’t recognize that description,” May said. “My father was all too energetic.”

“I recognize it,” Nettie said. “Joy would, too.”

“He spoke to me,” I said.

“Joy used to say Daddy talked to her, out at our old house.” May looked warmly at me. “It seems your Dunstan share came out strong late in life, to make up for lost time.”

“What did he say when he spoke to you?” Nettie demanded.

“That he created my father. I think his son called himself Edward Rinehart when he came back to Edgerton from wherever he was in the meantime. What I’m wondering is, who was his mother?”

“You’re looking for a woman who might have fooled around with Howard?” Clark said. “There is no shortage of candidates.”

“Our mother used to say, some of those fine ladies are not what they pretend to be,” May said. “Daddy told her, None of them are.”

“Fine ladies,” I said.

“Those people sent their sons to boarding schools,” Nettie said. “To make the right connections. And you know, May, we seldom got into town when we were little girls. Out tutors came to us.”

“There were many things our daddy did not wish us to encounter.”

I said, “He didn’t protect you from whatever made you blow out windshields and power lines up and down Wagon Road.”

May stiffened in her chair. “I got mad. That’s all that happened. Our father was very angry, but I couldn’t help what I did, I just
did
it.”

“You saw two girls making fun of you?”

“Mainly, I remember Daddy shouting at me in his big, loud voice. I cried all the way home.”

“Let’s talk about something pleasant, for a change,” Nettie said. “Our grandnephew’s birthday is the day after our niece’s funeral. Would you like to have a party on your birthday, Ned? I could make a sweet-potato pie.”

“That’s very generous,” I said. “But you know what happens on my birthdays. I wouldn’t want to spoil all the fun.”

“Your fits?” May asked. “We’ve seen
that
before.”

Nettie said, “We’ll have the party early in the day. If you feel your trouble coming on, go to your mother’s old room until it passes. You know how to handle it after all this time, don’t you?”

“I guess I do,” I said. “Sure, let’s celebrate everything we can.”

I escorted May down the steps. “Is that your car, Neddie? Did it cost a lot of money?”