Open Water (32 page)

“Holly might spend her first night in jail.” Willis was genuinely disturbed by the idea of it.

“Everybody has to,” Fritz said.

H
olly’s buttocks felt numb from sitting so long in a hard plastic banana chair at the Newport Police Station. She answered questions from Detective Downey and a rotating entourage. Her probation officer, Dr. Kline, was taking notes. Holly watched her write down her statements, but she wondered how they were paraphrased.

Detective Downey said, “How many candles are we talking about?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe six.”

“Those Hanukkah ones, or what?”

Holly said, “Hurricane candles. What’s the difference? Wax is wax. They sell them at Marine Specialties.”

The detective was concerned with every specific. She told him she had witnessed two small fires—Jensen’s bed and the momentary blaze that scorched the window. Each was a tiny golden seed and never a torrid harvest. She would have liked to watch both fires bloom beyond their initial stages into total fruition but she didn’t say so.

An hour into it, Detective Downey told her she might need to arrange bail. Holly wanted to make a phone call. They told her she could make as many phone calls as she wanted. She couldn’t get Willis. Holly tried Robin. The
line kept ringing. She called Jensen at Carvel. She started crying. A detective handed her a quart-size coffee with double sugars from Store 24. She took a gulp and regained her composure. She hung up on Jensen.

She had started by telling them about her personal life in order to buffer what she couldn’t reveal about the stolen parrot and the truck. She told the detective how many times she had made love to Willis Pratt; it wasn’t an impressive number of times. Detective Downey didn’t question her about drugs and she didn’t have to betray the embarrassing details about Willis and Miss Emma’s back-door visits. Still, Detective Downey gave her the impression he was waiting for a detail that would clinch his suspicions. He lifted his eyebrows when she described her first time with Willis—missionary position. Telling it made her feel cheap. It wasn’t any of his business, but she told him every detail of their first night together: their visits to Sheila Boyd’s Cape-style house, to Babyland and Neptune’s. She told Detective Downey that they ended up in her old apartment on impulse. They had a little fire from candle wax. It wasn’t a copycat fire, as the police were suggesting. Willis put the fire out.

The detective remained skeptical and she started to doubt herself. For the past hour she had suffered from an audiotape loop in her head, a schoolyard chant and childhood admonition:
Liar, liar, pants on fire!
The more questions she answered, the faster and faster the rhyme came. She hesitated, then she told them about driving home and finding the two silver words.

“ ‘Size queen’?”

“That’s right,” she said.

“Size queen.” The detective was interested. His interest made his eyes look swimmy. He seemed less curious
about the vandalism to her duplex and more interested in the realm of desire that the words described.

“You know what they say,” Detective Downey told her, “it’s not the meat, it’s the motion.”

“Well, that’s a golden oldie,” she said. Holly guessed he had an itsy wiener of his own.

“It’s not the meat. It’s the motion,” he told her again, as if he really needed to convince her.

“Oh, yeah? How would you know?” She had lost her temper. “Right about now I’m thinking of calling a lawyer. This is starting to smell like that Clarence Thomas thing.”

The detective didn’t have a point of reference. He wrote the name on his notes, then crossed it off when he finally remembered. For the fourth time, the detective asked her to describe the morning she had set fire to her husband’s bed. The questions seemed to shift from one alleged crime to the other. Yes, she had started that earlier fire in Jensen’s apartment.

That’s the one they wanted to hear about.

When she started her narration, the circle of officers leaned back, ready to enjoy the familiar details she offered. Smiles wormed over their faces. Detective Downey asked her if she wanted to burn other items belonging to her lovers. Did she want to burn clothing?
Playboy
magazines? Did she ever want to set fire to an automobile or any other high-ticket item?

Holly clamped her mouth shut. Yes. She saw them all: Detective Downey in his cheap wool suit, stretched at the knees and elbows, baggy as a camel, the officers in dark blue uniforms, her probation officer in Liz Claiborne separates from a Cranston discount outlet. Holly imagined all of them turned to char, like the creosote victims of Pompeii, entombed figures standing around the stationhouse holding quart-size coffees.

T
he nor’easter was churning inland; dense veils of moisture advanced on the horizon like heavy green army blankets moving across on a clothesline pulley. When Willis drove into Easton Way, Holly ran out to greet him. He crammed the brake. Fritz banged into the dash. Willis turned to his friend. “Shit. You okay? I’m sorry.”

Fritz rubbed his shoulder where it had slammed the dashboard. Holly yanked the door open and wriggled into Willis’s arms.

Willis said, “They let you go?”

“For now.”

“You’re off the hook?”

“I don’t know. Those assholes. I’m suing for harassment. They had me there for three hours. That extra hour will cost them.”

“They didn’t bring charges?”

“Of course they couldn’t bring charges. I didn’t start that fire.” She glared at Willis, then melted against him again.

He patted her. “Shit, I thought you were in a big mix-up.”

“Turns out, it was a heat gun. Painters were stripping the clapboards with a heat gun and that old linseed paint caught. It smoldered until long after quitting time.”

“A heat gun?”

“You know, an acetylene torch. So what do they do? They bring me in. For a chat. They can’t forget about me. I’m getting a lawyer.”

Fritz pushed her shoulder. “Did you know Willis almost took a blind date with an eye doctor to buy your walking papers?”

Holly said, “Excuse me?” She put her face in front of Fritz. “I’m out of there without papers, aren’t I? So, what’s it to you?”

“You just aren’t worth all this trouble,” Fritz said.

“Shut up,” Willis told Fritz. “It’s not anybody’s fault.” He smiled back and forth, trying to lasso them in. “I couldn’t have done it with Showalter anyway.”

“That’s right, the trouser snake is hibernating,” Fritz said.

Holly said, “Willis, what if I was in jail and needed that cash? You wouldn’t do it with that guy? Even for me?”

Willis looked between Fritz and Holly, stunned by their duet. He had not seen it coming. He walked into the house. His skin was flushed. It prickled in inextinguishable blotches. It was his junkie itch. Next, his headache drilled his forehead like a nailgun. He had a long evening ahead, getting Rennie wouldn’t be a walk in the park.

He went upstairs to his bedroom but his drugs were missing. He had finally depleted his supply. He went into the bathroom. His spine felt cold and achy. He found a tower of little color-coded boxes behind the old beach towels in the linen closet. Rennie had made a run to the CVS two weeks prior to her weak spell. Green boxes were twenty milligrams. Willis felt immediately grateful for Rennie’s foresight. Each individual box had foil cards with twelve suppositories. He made a quick addition in his head, but the math seemed too difficult in his frazzled condition. He
tried again. He made an exact calculation. Two hundred and forty footballs.

He took a carton and peeled off its cellophane seal like a shoelace of red licorice. He inserted a deuce. Two was maintenance, three still took him off. He didn’t want to cloud up when he had serious planning to do. On the other hand, he was shaky and wired; he figured he might as well tuck a third.

Holly came up to him as he was buttoning his pants with one hand. She grabbed the waistband of his jeans and pressed the rivet through its hole. She kissed his lips, which tasted slightly salty.

“Cold cuts,” he told her.

“Cold cuts?”

“I went through a chow line at the mini-book society.”

Holly tried to follow him. “Mini-book? Hey, do you know anything about some little books? I found one of those little books this morning on my kitchen table. Did you put it there?”

Willis was walking down the stairs.

“Well, did you put it there? Willis, I’m asking a question—did you put it there?”

Fritz was at the landing. “If you can’t tell where he puts it, you’re in trouble, girl.”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” she told him.

Willis was in the parlor. Munro’s teacup was still where it was.

A piece of Fleet Bank stationery was secured to the sideboard. It was a letter from Munro scratched out in black ballpoint.

Willis held the sheet of paper by one corner and walked into the kitchen. “Look at this,” he mocked. “I’m scared.”

Holly had a circle of linguica sausage frying. Its spicy scent overtook the empty house. It didn’t feel right to have Holly at the stove instead of Rennie and he tried not to let it bother him.

“I’m not hungry for that tube steak,” he told her. “We ate a lot of free food an hour ago.”

“You can’t eat this?”

“Can’t,” he told her.

“Oh, nice.”

“You have it,” he told her.

Holly looked at the fat rope of sausage in the black cast-iron pan. She hated to ask Fritz, but she turned around. “Ichabod, do you want some of this?”

“No sale,” Fritz said.

Holly stabbed the meat with a fork and took it over to the enamel waste can. She pressed the lever with her toe and dropped the greasy coil in the garbage.