Small World (25 page)

Musing on that, she opened the right-hand door of the wardrobe and peeked into the empty darkness. She hesitated, then threw open the left-hand door. Red and white gleamed at her, throwing the light back to her in brilliant clarity. She reached out instinctively to caress the material, silk the color of blood, a satin that was as blindingly white as a snowfield at high noon.

She chose red. Examining the dress, she reveled in its elegance, its complete simplicity. There was a line of hooks hidden under a discreet seam in the back. It took some time to unhook them all. How she was going to hook them again was a problem she would defer to the future.

The dress settled over her shoulders and slipped down the length of her body, caressing her now with its texture. She shifted from one foot to the other in an ages-old female motion, the first -lance step, and it shook out, falling in the flawless lines of its design.

The mirror in the door of the wardrobe reflected her, the dress blazing against her bleached skin. It was sleeveless and the neckline formed a gently squared U. The perfect frame, she thought, to show off her sickly face and prominent collar bone. A step back confirmed what she had sensed. The dress was too short. It was without ornament or trim, depending on its cut, color, and texture for effect. Falling without a break in its clean hnes to the hip, the material was there gathered on the left hip, from which it flowed in a spray of folds to the hemline. The hemline itself had been softly gathered.

Obviously post-World War I, she thought, and meant to fall to the ankles, which would be clad in real silk stockings in satin slippers. On her it stopped six inches too soon, a ludicrous effect. The dress wouldn’t do; she’d have to try the other and hope it was a better fit.

At least she didn’t have to try to hook herself into and out of the silly rag. It came to her suddenly that ladies of the era of this dress had had maids and button hooks to do the job, anachronisms, or perhaps the tools and skills of a more civilized way of life, now forever lost. She shook it off her shoulders and it slipped right to the floor. Skinny broad, she reflected wryly, and that dress had been made for a slim woman. She stepped out of the pool of red silk and reached for the white.

In the light, it was transparently obvious that the white dress wouldn’t do either. It was a very small woman’s dress, almost childish in its proportions, and a real piece of period costuming. She had to grin over the ruffles on the short sleeves, the extravagant off-the-shoulder collar that plunged in a vee, repeated in the waistline, from which yards of material fell to form the bell of the skirt. It wanted petticoats and long gloves and some sort of headdress, perhaps with feathers, to look right. On whomever it had belonged to, not her. It would never look right on her, thank God for little favors. She put it back in the wardrobe, for a moment very grateful to have been born in this particular period of history, when women wore comfortable clothing, by and large. Bar the occasional spike heel or crotch-cutting jean. Good-bye Queen Victoria.

That was it, the connection. The dress looked like something that antique monarch might have worn, and most probably when she was young. Pre-war, only pre-Civil war, maybe pre-Mexican War. A nice little museum piece.

She hung up the red dress thoughtfully. Odd things to turn out of anybody’s closet. She was troubled with a sense of the familiar, and dismissed it. It was a syndrome with her. Too much information to be absorbed and after a while nothing much
was
absorbed. Sensory overload. She knew others in her profession who were plagued with that constant sense of deja vu. It was the basis, she thought, of paranoia of the grandest kind.

Thinking about that she ignored one of the details that was obvious about the pair of dresses. The styles were unquestionably antique. But the dresses weren’t. The material was crisp, clean smelling, and taut; the seams were tight and clean. The dresses were newly made.

She gathered up her quilt and crawled back into bed, suddenly tired out. Nakedness was her lot, she decided. Unless the drawers of the serpentine front dresser contained something, and that would have to wait. She needed a nap. Something would present itself when she woke again. It was comforting to know she would wake again.

'She’s asleep,’ Dolly informed Roger.

‘Good,’ he grunted.

Roger was sitting on the floor, watching the Carousel go round and round. He had provided a passenger, the little Gretel from the Gingerbread Dollhouse, who rode in one of the chariots. She could not be imagined to be enjoying the ride, for her face was forever fixed in the expression of cornered terror appropriate to the witch’s hearth. She still wore the dog collar, glinting like a wedding ring, around her neck; Roger had slipped the chain but found the collar glued to her bisque skin.

But Roger was enjoying the ride, if she wasn’t. He listened to the turn-of-the-century music that tinkled from the tiny speakers and the counterpoint of the mechanical grinding and rubbing of the merry-go-round itself. It was a nice bit of work.

The dresses didn't fit,’ Dolly said, bringing him back to the real world.

'What about her own things, the jogging clothes?’

‘I washed them and put them away.’

'Leave them out for her. It’s better than nothing.’

'She would be difficult,’ Dolly sniffed.

'She kept down her broth?’

'Ummm.’ Dolly was searching for a cigarette.

He interpreted that as affirmatory. ‘I figured she had. I didn’t hear you pissing and screaming.’

Dolly laughed. ‘I never liked sick kids. Harrison was always sick. Just pigging, mostly. One of those children that refused to eat anything but junk, you know? And then, after marrying Lucy, he converted to health foods and was obnoxiously virtuous about it.'

Roger did know about that kind of kid. He had been one himself, though blessed with a digestive system apparently vjperior to Dolly’s dead son. And he hadn’t given it up, not until he met Dolly.

He sat back on his heels. Dolly rarely talked about her family. He couldn’t help knowing things about her in a vague way, absorbed as if by osmosis from the media. It was like meeting a neighbor everyone talked about but that one didn’t, well, neighbor with.

Of the few family pictures in the apartment only the Sartoris portrait of Dolly’s mother was accorded any prominence. It had given Roger the creeps until he figured out why ; it was perfectly life-size, just like looking at someone else’s face, at least as far as the scale was concerned. Hinting around about it, he realized, too, that Dolly was not aware of it.

Beyond that, the near-total absence of family portraits didn’t require a degree in psychology to understand. Dolly didn’t want to be reminded that the late husband, or late Dad, had ever existed. Just Mom, the late son, and the grandkiddies, and the last three in discreet silver frames in equally discreet corners.

‘Hey,’ he said, trying to be light about a potentially dangerous subject, ‘I thought rich people had maids clean up after their brats.’

Dolly grimaced from within a halo of smoke. ‘The little darling always managed to do it on nanny’s night off.'

‘Rough," Roger observed insincerely, turning back to the Carousel.

‘What do we do next?’

‘What?’

‘What do we do next? About
her'}

‘Feed her up. Try to get her healthy. That means keeping her warm and giving her something to do.’

‘Like what?’

‘She’s used to strenuous exercise. She ought to be getting it again, as soon as she can. She should make her own meals, read books, listen to music, walk in the garden. Take up knitting. Shit, I don’t know. Anything to stimulate her. So she won’t deteriorate and go crazy.’

‘Basket-weaving?’

‘Call it what you want. She’s people, not a pet or a prisoner. She needs to be occupied.’

That word
occupied
had unpleasant connotations to Roger. It was what the Germans did to the French and the Poles and half of Europe, what the Americans did to the Japanese, the Russians to the East Germans. What the victors did to the losers. But that wasn't what he meant. It just felt like something walking on his grave. He didn’t like it; it had just slipped out.

‘This is more complicated than I thought it would be, Roger. It really is,’ Dolly complained.

‘That’s what makes it interesting,’ he grinned, though he didn’t feel it. ‘Hey, maybe she could make her own clothes.’ ’She may have to. I can’t very well go out and buy clothes for someone a foot taller than myself for you to minimize, not when the FBI and half the world is looking for her. Maybe later. But not in the immediate future.’

The thought of the world looking for Leyna Shaw made Roger feel funny. He and Dolly, they were outlaws.

‘When the heat dies down,’ he said.

He wished he had a white fedora and a pinstripe suit. Dolly would make a great moll.
Dot
he would call her, and she’d wear a red dress with white polka dots on it and a scalloped collar, and those strappy heels that were so sexy. He realized that she was smiling at him.

'What were you thinking about? You had such a funny look on

■ our face,’ she said. The tip of her tongue crept out and touched her upper lip.

'My mug,’ he told her. ‘Mug’s the word.’

She leaned back against the closet door. Her eyes were alive with speculation.

Mug,’ she repeated, and Roger knew she knew all about mugs.

The room
was dark when she woke. Feigning sleep in case the Giants were watching, she lay quiet, listening. The depth of silence convinced her at length that she was truly alone.

Ignoring her ravenous hunger, she took a long bath, drawing it out until the water became tepid. The one light in the bathroom, an old-fashioned lotus-shape fixture, spread a feeble, rather romantic cocoon of light over the tub. She was surprised to feel some faint heat from it.

Quickly chilled, probably because she was down to skin and bones, she abandoned the bathtub. She could see the fading glory of her bruises, at least down the front of her. Despite the fact she was ready to kill for food, she appeared to be healing.

She examined herself in the mirror of the wardrobe door. Her backside was decidedly dappled with the ghostly motley of healing bruises. Her hipbones stuck out like the edge of a child’s sandpail half buried in the beachsand. She dismissed the examination with an internal
ugh
and proceeded to pull the bed apart so that she could drape a sheet around herself.

This time she devised a tied-on, draped costume. She looked, in the mirror, quite a lot like a walking pillow slip, after knotting the sheet at the shoulders, wrists, and ankles. It made her giggle. Rolling a real pillow slip, she tied it around her waist as a belt.

‘Good-bye best-dressed list,’ she muttered.

The draping at least covered those awful bones.

Opening the door to the hall, she stepped out of her bedroom for the first time. She stood in the doorway at the end of the hallway, a curious scarecrow backlit by the light from her room. The light glinted off the fixtures on the walls of the passageway, on the glass of framed pictures, and in her eyes, curious and feral as some predator. Turning on lights as she went, she padded slowly down the hall. At the end, she turned and looked back. Now the hall was smaller, shorter than it had seemed in the half-dark. It was simply furnished with a marble-topped pier table and a pair of delicate armchairs with white brocade seats. Automatically, she

typed them: Duncan Phyfe.

She arrived at a choice of two doors. One of them, at the very end of the corridor, promised to lead to another hall or stairway. The door on her left was either a bedroom, bathroom, or closet door. Opening, she peeked into complete darkness. The door itself blunted the light from the hall. Moving sideways into the room, she tried to guess where the light switch might be. After a panicky moment of blundering and groping, she located a lamp. She saw immediately if she had moved left instead of right, she would have found the wall switch immediately.

Once illuminated, the room turned out to be another tastefully decorated bedroom that she recognized, to her amusement, as a close but not exact copy of the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House. Whoever had done it had at least had the good sense to chuck the cabbage rose carpet that had always produced nausea in Leyna. It must have cost a mint to assemble the right pieces, but there was plenty of money spent on odder things, and it was beautifully done. Finding the right furniture would be sticky but not impossible. The Lincolns had been very much people of their time and class; the taste that had furnished their original bedroom was probably duplicated in the tens of thousands, if not millions.

She sat down familiarly on the white crocheted bedspread. Mrs. Coolidge’s? She couldn't remember. She would much rather have stumbled into the kitchen than this mid-Victorian museum bedroom, but it would do for a rest before pushing on. The springs creaked abominably and she was glad, feeling the lumpy mattress, that she was in the other bedroom. The windows, in this room and her own, showed her only the dark of night.

She thought about the rooms she had seen and lived in the last few days. They were all the information she had about where she was, her real location. She could say to herself,
I am here
in this bedroom, this hall, this bathroom, wherever. Beyond that, they ought to tell where they were.