Mr. X (85 page)

“Is Cobbie all right?”

“I told him you helped calm his father down.” She moved through the doorway, sighed, and rested her head on my shoulder. “The poor kid should fall asleep in about a minute and a half.”

“I hope so,” I said. “Cobbie didn’t need that.” I kissed the top of her head, and she clung to me a moment longer.

“I really
am
grateful, Ned.” She looked up at me and smiled. “Did you get my message?”

“Yes. Thanks.”

“You didn’t tell me it was your birthday! I had to find out from Nettie.”

“I didn’t want you to go to any trouble,” I said.

She raised her mouth for a kiss. “Until you got here, was it a nice birthday?”

I laughed. “You could say that.”

“What did you do?”

“My aunts had a party for me. I’ve kind of been on the run ever since.”

“They must have had a barbecue. Your jacket smells like smoke.” She leaned back with her arms still around me and smiled beautifully up. “It’s a very
suburban
sort of jacket.”

“May magpied it for me,” I said. “Do you like it?”

“Of course. After the way you handled Stewart, I want to keep you in a good mood. You look gorgeous in pink. You should always wear pink pants, pink shirts, and pink suits with little sailboats and nautical flags.”

Her ability to reduce the ugly scene into a shared joke pulled me into her private aura. I felt the deep tug of having whatever troubled me being met with this same teasing, dissolving irony. Then the thought came to me that seeing it in this way meant that I had already separated myself from it.

“I’m sorry if I frightened you.”

“
Stewart
frightened me. You impressed me.”

“You knew you were going to take care of things, in the end. Maybe I made it worse.”

“Hardly.” She kissed me again. “After demolishing my china cabinet, I think he was going to move on to the glasses. Will you help me clean up the wreckage?” She glanced at the folders under my arm. “What’s that?”

“I’ll show you later.” I put the folders on the coffee table, and we went into the kitchen and started sweeping up broken plates. Shards and sections of china lay in archipelagos down the floor and made irregular islands on the counters. Shaken, Posy came in and began picking up the mess beside the butcher block. “Cobbie finally went to sleep, but I practically had to read every book he owns. Is everything all right?”

“Ned was heroic,” Laurie said. “You should have seen him. Stewart pulled a knife.”

“A paring knife,” I said. “Even he was embarrassed.”

When we had bagged all the broken china, Posy asked if she could do anything else.

“No, we’re fine,” Laurie said.

“I’m glad Ned came along to drive out the wild beast.”

I bowed, and she blew me a kiss and left the kitchen. Her soft footsteps went up the stairs.

“Wouldn’t you say we deserve a drink?” Laurie asked.

“I don’t think we can catch up with Stewart,” I said, “but I’m willing to give it a try. I’m going to have a whopper of a bruise on the side of my head, and my hand hurts. No wonder boxers wear gloves.”

Laurie took a glass from the shelf and another from beside the sink, pressed them against the ice lever in the refrigerator door, and brought out a liter of the late Tobias Kraft’s favorite liquor. She poured whiskey over the ice until the glasses were three-fourths full.

“You were having a drink when Stewart showed up,” I said.

“Was I?” I could not tell if she had forgotten, or was pretending to have forgotten. Then I saw that she was presenting me with a mild challenge. “Oh, yes. I gave you a clean glass, but I took this one from the counter. Ah, I see. Whilst enumerating my flaws, Stewart included heavy drinking.”

“He skipped that one. People who drink as much as Stewart don’t think it’s a flaw.”

“Good point,” Laurie said. “God, let’s sit down.” She put an arm around me, and we moved into the living room.

We settled on the long sofa in front of the coffee table. The big room seemed as vibrantly empty as an abandoned airline terminal.

“I’m sorry about yelling,” Laurie said. “Vastly to my surprise, I discovered that I felt sorry for Stewart.”

I took a slug of Scotch.

She let her head roll back on the cushion. “What do you think is going to happen to him? Is he going to be all right?”

“You want to know what’s going to happen to good old Stewart?” I said. “Let me tell you. After a year in prison, Stewart will have a personal encounter with Jesus and become a born-again Christian. For the rest of his sentence, he’ll lead prayer groups and Bible study classes. When he gets out, he’ll get ordained by some third-rate Bible college and devote a few years to a prison ministry. He’ll send out press releases, and a lot of articles will be written about him. Let’s face it, it’s a great story—civic leader and heir to private fortune falls into crime, finds salvation in jail, devotes himself to good works. The guy can’t miss. In three years, he’ll have his own church and a good-sized staff. When he describes his past, Ellendale will sound like Sodom and Gomorrah. Rare steaks, fancy cars, expensive suits, chains, leather, and whips. His congregation will quadruple, and he’ll
buy a new building with a television facility. Then he’ll write a book and get on talk shows.”

The bit about chains and leather popped out while I was rolling along. That so much anger still boiled away within me came as a surprise.

She was clear-eyed and amused. “I bet you’re right. Where did you get the stuff about chains and whips? He’s too normal for S and M.”

“I threw it in for the sake of a better conversion story. Once Stewart’s locked up, I should write him that fiction is way more effective than reality.”

Laurie looked at me with the same contemplative speculation I had seen from over the roof of my car. “You said you were sick of Hatches coming at you with knives.”

“Heat of the moment.”

“You threw that in, too? How many Hatches are there, after all?”

Oh, no
, I thought.

Her eyes underwent a subtle change. “What? I don’t get it.”

I swallowed another mouthful of whiskey, preparing myself. I did not want to prepare myself.

“Ned?”

“You’re right,” I said. “I have to explore something with you.”

“You were going to show me those folders.” Her crisp voice rose wonderfully to the challenge. Laurie sounded like an army poised at the top of a hill, pennants flying and weapons at the ready. I felt nothing but admiration.

“First you have to hear about the past two days. I owe that to you. You introduced me to Hugh Coventry, and you helped me learn about Edward Rinehart.”

“That’s what you want to explore?” The pennants rippled beautifully in the wind.

“That’s what we have to explore,” I said.

123

I began with Buxton Place and Earl Sawyer. After leaving the cottages, I said, I had come to Blueberry Lane and seen the caretaker’s name in Posy’s Lovecraft collection.

“That’s why you got so strange?” Laurie said. “Posy and I couldn’t understand what happened to you.”

“I know, I’m sorry. I had to get away and think.”

“Well, thank God, you came back. What then?”

“At Toby’s funeral, someone implied that Stewart owned my aunts’ block on Cherry Street. It didn’t make sense. All along, I never understood why they pretended not to know anything about my father.”

“Me, neither,” she said. “But I don’t see the connection.”

“I did something I shouldn’t have. I looked through Nettie’s closet. That’s where I found one of those folders. The other one came from Stewart’s house.”

“You broke into
Stewart’s
house?”

“I didn’t have to break in. I took the folder, but he stole it first. I was reclaiming it.”

“He had your aunts’ pictures?”

“He wanted to keep them out of the exhibition.”

“The other ones were at Nettie’s? Well, at least you got that settled. They were holding them for ransom. Nettie and May, they’re not stupid.”

“Nettie and May know how to get what they want.” I grinned. “The question is, what did they want?”

Laurie gazed imperturbably back. “They must cherish those photos.”

“Let me show you some of them.”

“I can hardly wait.” She set down her glass and leaned toward the coffee table.

I slid the photograph of Omar and Sylvan out of the folder. “Remember these faces.” Next came the photograph of Howard Dunstan I had put before Cordwainer.

“He looks like you.” She turned to me with a shining smile and looked back down at the picture. “In a way. You don’t have those heebie-jeebie eyes.”

“That’s Howard Dunstan. Nettie and May were his daughters.”

“Complicated so and so, wasn’t he? What’s this?” She took another photograph from the pile. Under the eye of a squat foreman in a derby hat, two men pushed wheelbarrows toward a lattice of scaffolding and girders rising from a muddy lot. From the right side of the frame, two others carried an armload of two-by-fours across Commercial Avenue. A Model T Ford and a slat-sided truck were parked a little way down from the site. A well-upholstered onlooker in a seersucker suit and a boater like the one worn by the young Carpenter Hatch took in the excitement from a few feet behind the supervisor in the derby. The angles of their hats and their postures matched with the neatness of a rhyme.

“That’s Merchants Hotel, under construction in 1929. Hugh Coventry liked this picture.”

“It’s good, isn’t it? There’s a lot of movement in it, and the two guys in hats are like a joke.”

“Here we have baby me.” I put down the photograph from my third birthday.

“God, what a beautiful child.” Pleasure and humor shone from her eyes. “I mean, of course you were a great-looking kid, but you were a
really
great-looking kid. You should have been on billboards.”

“My mother would have agreed with you. Now, here are some from the Hatch folder.” I showed her the photographs of Carpenter showing off his new car and Ellen’s graduation.

“Who are these people? Stewart’s grandparents?”

“Right.”

“She was a nice-looking girl, wasn’t she? On the other hand, he looks like an excellent source of ham steaks. Look at those soon-to-be ponderous thighs.”

I pulled out the image of bow-tied Cordwainer Hatch peering from beneath his bangs.

Laurie bent forward. She took a swallow from her nearly empty glass and looked back at me. “Is that you? It can’t be. You weren’t even born when this was taken.”

“This is the black sheep of the Hatch family,” I said. “Stewart’s Uncle Cordwainer.”

“He looked like you.”

“I look like him. Laurie, back when the first submissions were coming in, did you see any of these pictures?”

Her lower lip tucked under her front teeth. “I honestly don’t remember.”

“Rachel Milton did. She told me to look for them.”

“I don’t understand.” Her eyes showed nothing but innocent confusion. “Did Rachel say that I had seen them?”

“No. Just that you could have.”

“Maybe I did. I wouldn’t have paid much attention. I didn’t even know you then.”

“Stewart knew who I was the second he saw me. Cordwainer was supposed to have died before Stewart was born, and I don’t imagine he ever saw any pictures of his disgraced uncle while he was growing up, so he didn’t even know what Cordwainer looked like until he collected the family pictures for the exhibition. He couldn’t have missed the resemblance between his uncle and Howard Dunstan.”

Laurie shook her head. Her hair sifted over her cheek, and she brushed it back. “I have to say …” She shook her head again. “I think I need another drink. How about you?”

I propped my head against the cushion. I felt completely uncertain. A voice in my mind said:
I want to be uncertain
.

Laurie circled back into the room and moved around the table rather than sliding in over my legs. She sat down about a yard away and took a swallow from her amber, ice-filled glass. “I’m trying to figure out what’s going on with all these pictures. Your aunts took Stewart’s pictures as ransom, but why would Stewart hide theirs?” She moved Cordwainer in his bangs and bow tie next to me in my striped T-shirt. “Oh. Because the black sheep uncle was your father?”