Open Water (29 page)

Rennie said,
“Every kiss and every hug—seem to act like a drug—”

Holly recognized the song.

Then Rennie started coughing. Her lungs sounded soggy as a sponge.

Munro’s wife whispered, in her own defense, “It
does
get into the brain. It metastasizes. It hits the brain.”

“Will you shut up,” Holly told Carole. But it was upsetting to see Rennie come back alive and talking. It might have been easier if she had remained cocooned in her unconscious symptoms. Holly saw that Rennie’s sheets were stained with bile-colored circles. Her gastrointestinal condition had worsened; all her systems were failing.

Munro was waiting in the doorway. He talked to his mother, but she responded with the same indecipherable and blowzy “A, E, I, O, U.” Rennie decided for herself when she wanted to make the effort or not.

Rennie was going to be removed, no matter what. Holly decided to help them take Rennie to the car outside. Munro lifted Rennie from the bed. Holly arranged her gown.

Munro told Holly, “Look, we can handle it. Is that all right with you?”

Rennie had only one arm inserted in her sweater and Holly folded the loose half over Rennie’s shoulder, tucking it in. The innocent gesture was almost an enshrouding, and it so disturbed Holly that she pulled the sweater sleeve off, letting it trail. She opened the storm door for Munro and he carefully chose his footing going down the front porch steps. At the car, Holly didn’t know what else she could do. She kissed Rennie’s cheek and Munro tucked his mother into the backseat. His wife sat in the backseat with Rennie to keep her propped up.

“Wait,” Rennie said with some difficulty. “I would like the Fresnel.”

“What is she saying?” Munro said.

“The Fresnel lens,” Holly told him, “from the lighthouse. I’ll get it.” She started up the porch steps.

Munro called after her. “Don’t bother. She can’t take that thing over there. Where are they going to put it?” Munro drove the car away. Holly watched the silver cloud of Rennie’s wild unbraided hair in the rear window of the car.

Holly dialed Narragansett WASTEC, but she knew Willis wouldn’t have left Rennie at a crucial time like this. He was probably down at the Almacs buying soda crackers or something that would rest easily on Rennie’s stomach. Willis had told Holly that it was awful to watch Rennie suffer a full round of vomiting after he had just made an offering of cream of chicken soup.

Holly went next door to alert Nicole. The children answered the bell. Fritz’s Chihuahua puppy was asleep inside a boot beside the door. She looked twice at the boot, the little dog curled inside its leather cuff. It was the kind of thing she might see on a picture calendar.

Nicole looked at Holly. “Don’t worry, Willis will get her out of that place.”

“Can he do that?”

“I bet he can with a lot of fanfare.”

Nicole left the room to take a shower and get her day going. Then the phone was ringing. Holly picked it up. A man wanted an appointment for a massage.

Holly said, “Nicole can’t make it. She’s got her afternoon lined up.” She hung up the telephone.

She went over to her side of the duplex. She sat at the table and fingered the tiny book. Its mystery added a discomfiting flavor to everything else that was happening. Holly started to find the percussive sound of the clamshell driveway increasingly unnerving. Living in a place surrounded by calcified chips and shards, Holly couldn’t ignore the traffic outside her windows. The prowlers and intruders began to stack up in an audible progression. Again
a car drove up. It
sounded
like Rennie’s car, the same wheel-base churning the crushed shells. When Holly walked outside, she saw a police vehicle lined up beside the duplex. An officer got out from behind the wheel.

She was surprised to see the police officer. In her nervousness, she stole a glance at the morning vista, a green sea with doily-white chop from the approaching storm; the tall ship was a speck on the horizon. She greeted the uniformed man. The officer shaded his eyes with the palm of his hand. His leather jacket and accessories squeaked as he adjusted his position before her. He was squinting. Holly moved a quarter-turn so the man wouldn’t have to look directly into the hard, white eastern light when he spoke to her.

“Are you Holly Temple?”

“I was yesterday.”

“Well, that’s real good.” The officer wasn’t any too thrilled. He pulled a tiny notebook from his back pocket and flipped the pages until he found what he wanted.

Holly waited.

“Miss Temple, you need to speak to Detective Downey. That will be downtown. I can drive you over right now, or you can follow me in your own car.”

“I need to follow you? To the police station?” Holly felt her stomach wall rise snugly into her diaphragm.

“They want to see you at the station. You know where that is? It’s right on Broadway and Collins—”

“I think I know.”

“We’re right across the street from the Store 24.”

“Across from the Store 24? That place with the quart-size coffees?”

“Yeah, that’s where we get it. We just about keep that place in business, I guess,” he said.

Holly couldn’t wait any longer. She said, “What is this all about?”

“I’m not at liberty to discuss it with you,” the officer said.

“Oh, give me a break. Are you kidding? Don’t you have to explain why you’re standing here on my porch—”

“At this point in time, we are just asking you to come downtown. They can’t hold you longer than two hours.”

“Two hours?”

“Two hours without a warrant, that’s the law. We’ll drive you back here. Or, you can follow me in your own car. Is that your Toyota?”

There were plenty of reasons she might be questioned. She was still on probation for a recent conviction of malicious burning. Perhaps her name was already on a list of possible suspects for whatever action had happened around town. Then, the truth was, she was standing there with full knowledge of stolen property. Some of that booty had been alive one minute and dead the next. Irretrievable goods worth several thousand dollars. Just one hundred feet from where she was standing, a stolen vehicle was concealed, a truck which she had helped vandalize with a Polish paintbrush.

Holly chewed her lip. She faced the officer and felt her secret whip its tail. She was a fraction away from blurting out all the facts with complete annotations. She realized she shouldn’t bite her lip in front of the officer, it would make her look fishy.

“I don’t like what you’re saying,” she said.

“You don’t have to love it,” he said.

Holly crossed her arms and adjusted her weight on one leg, so her hip protruded at a slight, defiant angle.

“Miss Temple. You were a tenant at 67 Spring Street? You had an apartment there until the sinkhole?”

“That’s right. Number six.”

“That whole place went up yesterday.”

“It went up?”

“Systematically torched.” The officer looked past Holly to give her a minute to think, but his head was tilted, as if he was listening for termites in the door frame. “They want some information from you. Either you come with me or they’ll have to get you there with a lot of music.”

She didn’t like hearing his slang. “What does it have to do with me?”

He looked at her. “I can tell you this much. They’ve established reasonable grounds. They’re just waiting on the affidavit and arrest warrant to come back.”

Holly looked out at the water. She couldn’t see anything. Her eyes felt like duds, solid glass spheres. Of course, it was a mistake, but the mistake blazed before them like an irrefutable vision. A burning bush. A visit from the Virgin.

The officer told her, “They have reasonable grounds to charge you. A witness has you
at the scene.
If I was you, Miss Temple, I’d come right now. It shows some good faith—that would help you later on.”

She remembered the first time Willis fucked her—his hair brushed her cheek, its scent of milled lavender soap, and then the bright red fire from the linseed paint tore across the windowsill. She almost said to the officer, “Look here, we put that fire out,” but she stopped herself. That happened weeks ago.

The officer said, “You’ve had an impromptu visit with the Fire Marshal before, isn’t that right?”

The officer couldn’t erase his easy smile. She had been arrested for setting fire to her husband’s bed. Her probation officer, Dr. Kline, had said it was like shooting a horse while she was still mounted.

“Are you telling me that my old apartment house burned down?” she finally said, as if she had just adjusted the reception on her set.

“You can take your own car,” he told her, “or come with me.”

Suddenly, she wasn’t sure if she could perform simple physical tasks such as depressing the clutch or moving the stick shift through its temperamental H-pattern.

Holly got into the police car. She sat in front with the officer. She settled back in the upholstered seat and stared out the windshield of the cruiser. The officer rolled it around and headed out the drive. Holly’s big toe started throbbing where the nail was ripped. The pain was remote but insistent. Its small, self-contained protests opened a switch track. Tears started to roll down her cheeks in unstoppable glassy strings.

Munro had come back to the house and was standing on the porch with two bright leather valises. He saw Holly sitting in the cruiser. He looked at her and smiled; his smile wasn’t in the least ironic. It was as if he had known, all along, that Holly would end up riding out of that driveway on her way to the slammer.

M
unro was in the front parlor when Willis entered with his grocery bags from Almacs. He dropped the bags to the floor. Some tiny cans of Ensure rolled in all directions. A quart jar had smashed, leaking Tropicana juice. Munro didn’t look up from his work, thumbing through Rennie’s insurance papers. A single cup of tea was balanced on the bamboo table. This one serving, still steaming, appeared to have usurped all of Willis’s domestic privileges. Willis turned on his heel and went upstairs to Rennie’s bedroom. He returned to the parlor and stood there facing his stepbrother.

“Look who’s here. Roar of the jungle,” Munro said. He swiped his hand through the air in a limp-wristed lion’s paw. “What’d I tell you? Rennie’s safe and sound in a nice place. Away from this opium den. Just how long have you been getting high with Rennie’s prescription medication?”

“Fuck you, Munro.”

“Are you in pain now?” Munro said. “Did you run out of Bangkok Ex-Lax?”

“She won’t get the bed warm. I’m going over there.”

“Hold on a minute. First, maybe you should find your girlfriend. She’s been kidnapped.”

“How’s that?”

“Some fancy dude drove her out of here. Nice car. Holly didn’t look too happy about it. She was a regular Tiny Tears.”

Willis’s afternoon itinerary was beginning to look unmanageable. He had to spring Rennie and find Holly, as if to reclaim the two women he needed to travel between opposite cusps of the quarter moon. Willis was certain that Munro had described Jensen when he said that a flashy car had pulled away with Holly.

Willis drove over to Sycamore House and parked in the tenant lot. Some girls were sitting on the verandah wearing their silky business-wear, even in the spring chill. The cigarette smoke was making a screen. He asked them about their new landlord. The girls didn’t know where he was. They were told to smoke outside while welders used a torch. Construction had started at the back of the house; a demolition trailer was parked under the eaves. A chute was running from a second-story window into the open bin. Big sheets of rotten tar paper littered the yard. Willis called up to a worker, “Seen your boss?”

“He’s at the Carvel,” the man called down before shooting an asphalt shingle past Willis.

Willis was getting back in the car when Sarojini walked out. She was wearing a sari. The thin gauze dress was expertly tucked around her slender figure like a length of sunlit cloud.

“What do you want?” Sarojini said.

Willis said, “Is Jensen at his store? Did he have Holly along?”