Mrs. Million (20 page)

Art Dobbleman’s desk sat near the center of the carpeted area facing the foyer and front entrance of Cold Rock Savings & Loan. Sally Krone, who handled mortgages, home equity loans, and answering the phones, sat at an identical desk six feet to his left, and Buzz Nagler, the boss’s twenty-six-year-old son, flanked him on the right. Nathan Nagler himself occupied the spacious glass-fronted office behind them, looking out over his “team.”

Art would have preferred an office of his own. The teller cages were only twenty feet away, and on a busy Friday the line of customers sometimes spilled over from the marble foyer to intrude upon the carpeted apron in front of his desk. He had spent too many afternoons staring at the rear ends of Cold Rock’s citizens. Once, Hermie Goss had actually propped a gelatinous hip on the corner of Art’s desk. Art had given him a jab with a sharpened pencil, sending the severely obese Hermie hopping. Sally had nearly choked trying not to laugh, but Art had felt so bad he’d immediately apologized to Hermie and had even given him a pen and pencil set engraved with the bank logo, which were only supposed to go to commercial loan customers since they cost eight dollars each. Hermie had been pleased.

Most of the time Art blocked out his surroundings, erecting imaginary dividers, and did his work. But this morning he focused his attentions on the foyer, and on the glass doorway beyond.

Barbaraannette entered the bank at 9:12
A.M.
She paused just inside the doors and took in her surroundings. Art stood up, saw her eyes find him, and remained standing until she crossed the foyer and sat down in front of his desk.

“Would you care for a cup of coffee?” he asked.

Barbaraannette shook her head. Her irises seemed bluer than usual—almost the color of the turquoise studs in her earlobes—but the whites were bloodshot, and the flesh around her eyes had a dusky, bruised look. Art thought she looked quite beautiful.

He said, “Barbaraannette, I’ve been thinking a lot the past few hours.”

She nodded. Her pupils seemed small.

“Are you still planning to pay out all that money?”

She nodded again, still not having said a word.

“Are you okay?” Art asked.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I just want to sign the papers and when Bobby comes I’m going to give his friend a check. Is there a problem?”

Art pressed his hands to his desk blotter. He had reached the point of no return. He said, “Barbaraannette, we’ve known each other for a long time. I feel as though I am your friend, and as your friend I have to say something.”

Barbaraannette drew back in her chair and lowered her chin. “I don’t really want to discuss it, Art.”

Art said, “Look, Barbaraannette, I don’t want to see you get hurt. Even if you get him back he won’t stay.”

Barbaraannette said, her voice a whisper, “He will. If I want him to.”

“Even if he did stay, you’d be miserable. But I can’t prove any of that to you, and I don’t expect you to believe me. Barbaraannette, I was up all night trying to figure out what I could say that will convince you to give up this craziness and the more I thought about it the more sure I was that nothing I could say would change you. So I started thinking about me. And the one thing I kept coming up against was that if you wind up back with Bobby instead of with someone who deserves a woman as beautiful and intelligent as you, I really don’t want to have any part of it. I can’t make you do anything, but that doesn’t mean I have to be a party to it. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“You aren’t going to loan me the money?” She sounded surprised, but not angry.

Art took a breath, ready to tell her that no—even though it might lose him his job—he would not, when Sally leaned their way and said, “Mrs. Quinn? I have a call for you.” She smiled apologetically and said to Art, “Line two.”

This is what it would feel like to have someone call time on the second bounce of a high dive, Art thought. A surge of anger and relief and a lot of adrenaline rushing around with no place to go. Art handed Barbaraannette his phone and pressed the illuminated button, watched her say “Hello,” then listen calmly, a faint frown on her lips. She said, “I see.” She touched a hand to her breast. “All right. I’ll see what I can do. But I won’t give you a dime unless I see him. You’re going to have to show him to me.” She listened some more, then said, “I understand,” and put her hand over the mouthpiece.

“Things have changed,” she said, her face neutral.

Art waited.

Barbaraannette said, “He wants to know how long will it take to get the money in cash.”

“It is to become the outlaw after all, to forever stand outside society’s bounds. To become a pariah. No, not a pariah—an
immoraliste.
Yes!” André leaned in close to the mirror, traced a line through his beard with a forefinger. “I am cast out, out damned spot! Out I say!” Waving the beard trimmer, switching it on. “And for what? For wealth? No! For freedom!” He applied the trimmer to his cheek and cut a swath through his beard from the edge of his right nostril down past the corner of his mouth and over his jawline. “The die is cast,” he muttered, beginning another cut at his ear, seeing it as an unveiling, a metamorphosis. Slowly, André watched himself emerge.

Back at the bridge he had seen himself perform remarkable feats. When the traitorous cowboy ran, André had acted quickly and decisively. Two well-placed blows to the head had foiled his flight, as had André’s foresight in pocketing the car keys. André had then rushed back onto the bridge, his body buzzing with adrenaline, and single-handedly lifted Jayjay, cat litter and all, up over the railing and into the black water. He had never felt more alive. It reminded him of the day he had seen the first bound copy of his book.

He washed and toweled his face, then went down into the cellar.

Bobby awakened from one nightmare to find himself in a worse one. He was beginning to think that all was not as it seemed, that this entire episode had been engineered by Barbaraannette. She was capable of it. Maybe she had never won the lottery and her appearance on the TV had been a faked videotape, and maybe Phlox was in on it, too, and André was an actor working for them, and all because he’d left her to try to make a better life for himself. He’d meant to send for her once he got settled. He really had. But then he’d met Denver Dora, and then Juanita up in Casa Grande, and finally Phlox, who’d dealt him pocket aces the first time he sat down at her seven-stud table at the Desert Diamond Casino. Things had got complicated. He’d planned to pay Hugh and Rodney back their money, too. And he would’ve if he’d had it. Like if he’d won the lottery.

Any second now the basement wall would open. André and Barbaraannette would be sitting there laughing at him and the next thing he knew he’d be on the funny home video show with his forehead cut open and one eye swollen shut and his skin raw from that goddamn duct tape and people clapping.

The light came on and footsteps sounded on the stairs. Bobby didn’t look up. He recognized the soft sound of André’s Hush Puppies.

“Well? What do you think?” André asked.

Bobby did not respond.

André moved closer, squatted down and put his face right in front of Bobby’s.

“Do you like it?” he asked.

There was nothing Bobby liked. He was cold and scared and angry and hungry and his head hurt and his right eye was swollen shut, and he was more than half certain that this weird little man intended to kill him.

“Well?”

Bobby said, “Well what?”

“Do you like it?” He turned his head, giving Bobby a look at his profile.

Bobby could now see that André’s cheeks were smooth and white. He had shaved off most of his facial hair and now wore only a mustache and a goatee.

“I love it,” Bobby said.

André stood up, pleased, crossing his arms and inflating his chest. “Thank you!” he said.

Bobby decided that this had to be real. This was no
Candid Camera
routine. There was no way Barbaraannette could have invented André—the guy was way too weird to be anything other than real.

“What are you going to do?” Bobby asked.

André raised a hand, lightly touching his bare cheek with two fingers, his lips pursed, one eyebrow elevated. He said, “Hmmm.”

“Did you talk to her?” Bobby asked.

“Yes I did. She asked about you.”

“What did you tell her?”

André smirked and gave a theatrical shrug. “I told her that I would require payment in cash.”

“I mean about me.”

“I told her the truth. That you were alive and well.” He crossed the room and picked up the chair leg he had used to kill troll-boy, grimaced at the dried blood.

Bobby waited.

“I should clean this,” André said.

Bobby relaxed. “What are we going to do if she doesn’t pay?”

André gave him a quizzical smile. “We?”

Bobby nodded.

André shook his head and carried the chair leg back upstairs, hitting the light switch as he reached the top.

“B
ARBARAANNETTE—
”

“Just get me the money, Art.”

“If you’d just give me a minute…”

“I don’t want to hear it, Art. Now, are you going to take care of me, or do I have to talk to Nate?”

Barbaraannette experienced the drive home in slow motion, watching familiar landmarks. Sundstrom’s drugstore, now displaying a Going Out of Business sign because the new Wal-Mart had taken all their customers. Mel Groth’s ’57 Chevy, which he’d planted in his front yard nearly a decade ago, declaring it to be a potting shed in order to thwart local zoning regulations. The old elm, called Spooky Tree by the neighborhood children, leaned aggressively put over Western Avenue. She had her window open. Ten o’clock and it was already up in the sixties, the gutters running with water, the last of the snow melting. The air held a rich organic odor, heavy with the promise of spring.

She felt bad about the way she’d snapped at Art. She knew what he’d been trying to do. Trying to help her make the right decision. But damn it all he should know better than to tell her—try to tell any woman not to act like a fool when she knows very well what she’s acting like and the last thing she wants is to be reminded of it. He should know, just like she knew not to cut a man off at the knees while he was striking a macho pose. Sometimes people just have to do what they’re going to and anyone who tries to tell them otherwise might just as well try and talk a tornado out of twisting. Had she cut Art off at the knees? No, she’d just knocked him back a step, and in any case she’d had no choice. Right now she didn’t need a dose of facts and logic. But that was just Art, which was probably why he’d waited so long to get married and why his marriage hadn’t lasted—although, to be fair, his marriage had outlasted hers. No, that wasn’t right. She was still married, technically. If Bobby was still alive, that is. Was he? Barbaraannette shuddered, recalling what the man on the phone had told her, that if she didn’t come up with the cash money he would send her an ear. She did not want to open a package and find Bobby’s ear.

This whole brouhaha with Bobby was getting out of control—not that it had ever really been in control. Art was making things more complicated for her and that was too bad because she liked the way he looked at her. But she didn’t want him in the middle of this thing, not Art, not the cops, not anyone who would tell her what she could or could not do. When it came right down to it, the buck stopped with her. She had to see it through to the end.

Barbaraannette turned down Third Street. Gert Pfleuger, her two-doors-down neighbor, was walking her basset hounds. Barbaraannette slowed to avoid splashing them. She pulled into her driveway, then noticed the long gray car parked by the curb. Barbaraannette muttered, “Damn you Mary Beth,” but her words lacked malice and she realized that she was glad that Mary Beth was there. A time like this, she needed her family around her, no matter who they happened to be.

Toagie, Hilde, and Mary Beth were sitting in her kitchen eating Wheat Thins and pickled herring and drinking her apple cider. They stopped chewing and looked at Barbaraannette as she entered, then looked past her.

Mary Beth said, “Well? Do you have him?”

Barbaraannette dropped her purse on the counter. “No.” She eyed the herring. “Did you save any for me?”

“There’s a few chunks left,” said Toagie, peering into the open jar.

“Tell us what happened, dear,” said Mary Beth.

Barbaraannette put three crackers on a plate and topped each one with a slice of herring. Between bites, she talked.

What surprised her most was that Mary Beth let her get through the whole story from beginning to end without interrupting once, or even raising her formidable eyebrows. And when Barbaraannette had finished talking, all Mary Beth said was, “What do you want to do, hon?”

Barbaraannette said, “I want to finish it.”

“Are you going to give him the money?”

Barbaraannette didn’t answer right away. She looked from Mary Beth to Toagie, both of them sitting across from her, elbows on the Formica tabletop, looking as different as two sisters could while looking like sisters all the same.

“If I have to pay the money to get Bobby—to save his life—then that’s what I’ll do. Art says that they can have the cash here by morning, and I just want to be done with the whole stinking mess. I won’t be responsible for Bobby getting hurt. I don’t want his ear to get cut off.”

“That’s a lot of money for an ear,” Hilde said.

Startled, Barbaraannette looked carefully at her mother. Did she know what she’d said?

“I’ve got plenty of money, Hilde.”

Hilde raised her chin. “If you can get it for free, you ought to hold on to it.”

Toagie said, “Mom, would you like something to drink? Some juice?”

“You should look around before you go spending that kind of money,” Hilde said, one hand on Barbaraannette’s forearm, squeezing.

Barbaraannette capped her mother’s hand with her own. “It’s okay, Hilde. We’re just talking.”

“You girls don’t know the value of a dollar.”

Mary Beth said, “Maybe she’s got a point, hon. He has to be someplace nearby, and this isn’t exactly New York City. If he’s being held against his will, chances are it’s somebody we know. Someone who knows Bobby. Maybe we should think about that before you give away that kind of money.”