Amy shot him a narrow, dark stare, then looked back at Ted. ‘Would you? This might be a little easier . . .’
‘Sure,’ he said. He kissed her high on her cheekbone, and Mort had another dolorous revelation: the man cared for her. He might not always care for her, but right now he did. Mort realized he had come halfway to thinking Amy was just a toy that had captivated Ted for a little while, a toy of which he would tire soon enough. But that didn’t jibe with what he knew of Amy, either. She had better instincts about people than that … and more respect for herself.
Ted got up and left. Amy looked at Mort reproachfully. ‘Are you satisfied?’
‘I suppose,’ he said. ‘Look, Amy – I probably didn’t handle that as well as I could have, but my motives are honorable enough. We shared a lot over the years. I guess this is the last thing, and I think it belongs between the two of us. Okay?’
Strick looked uncomfortable. Fred Evans did not; he looked from Mort to Amy and then back to Mort again with the bright interest of a man watching a really good tennis match.
‘Okay,’ Amy said in a low voice. He touched her hand lightly, and she gave him a smile. It was strained, but better than no smile at all, he reckoned.
He pulled his chair closer to hers and they bent over the list, heads close together, like kids studying for a test. It didn’t take Mort long to understand why Evans had warned them. He thought he had grasped the size of the loss. He had been wrong.
Looking at the columns of cold computer type, Mort thought he could not have been more dismayed if someone had taken everything in the house at 92 Kansas Street and strewn it along the block for the whole world to stare at. He couldn’t believe all the things he had forgotten, all the things that were gone.
Seven major appliances. Four TVs, one with a videotape editing hook-up. The Spode china, and the authentic Early American furniture which Amy had bought a piece at a time. The value of the antique armoire which had stood in their bedroom was listed at $14,000. They had not been serious art-collectors, but they had been appreciators, and they had lost twelve pieces of original art. Their value was listed at $22,000, but Mort didn’t care about the dollar value; he was thinking about the N. C. Wyeth fine-drawing of two boys putting to sea in a small boat. It was raining in the picture; the boys were wearing slickers and galoshes and big grins. Mort had loved that picture, and now it was gone. The Waterford glassware. The sports equipment stored in the garage – skis, ten-speed bikes, and the Old Town canoe. Amy’s three furs were listed. He saw her make tiny check marks beside the beaver and the mink – still in storage, apparently
– but she passed the short fox jacket without checking it off. It had been hanging in the closet, warm and stylish outerware for fall, when the fire happened. He remembered giving her that coat for her birthday six or seven years ago. Gone now. His Celestron telescope. Gone. The big puzzle quilt Amy’s mother had given them when they were married. Amy’s mother was dead and the quilt was now so much ash in the wind.
The worst, at least for Mort, was halfway down the second column, and again it wasn’t the dollar value that hurt. 124 BOTS. WINE, the item read. VALUE $4,900. Wine was something they had both liked. They weren’t rabid about it, but they had built the little wine room in the cellar together, stocked it together, and had drunk the occasional bottle together.
‘Even the wine,’ he said to Evans. ‘Even that.’
Evans gave him an odd look that Mort couldn’t interpret, then nodded. ‘The wine room itself didn’t burn, because you had very little fuel oil in the cellar tank and there was no explosion. But it got very hot inside, and most of the bottles burst. The few that didn’t … Well, I don’t know much about wine, but I doubt if it would be good to drink. Perhaps I’m wrong.’
‘You’re not,’ Amy said. A single tear rolled down her cheek and she wiped it absently away.
Evans offered her his handkerchief. She shook her head and bent over the fist with Mort again.
Ten minutes later it was finished. They signed on the correct lines and Strick witnessed their signatures.
Ted Milner showed up only instants later, as if he had been watching the whole thing on some private viewscreen.
‘Is there anything else?’ Mort asked Evans.
‘Not now. There may be. Is your number down in Tashmore unlisted, Mr Rainey?’
‘Yes.’ He wrote it down for Evans. ‘Please get in touch if I can help.’
‘I will.’ He rose, hand outstretched. ‘This is always a nasty business. I’m sorry you two had to go through it.’
They shook hands all around and left Strick and Evans to write reports. It was well past one, and Ted asked Mort if he’d like to have some lunch with him and Amy. Mort shook his head.
‘I want to get back. Do some work and see if I can’t forget all this for awhile.’ And he felt as if maybe he really could write. That was not surprising. In tough times – up until the divorce, anyway, which seemed to be an exception to the general rule – he had always found it easy to write. Necessary, even. It was good to have those make-believe worlds to fall back on when the real one had hurt you.
He half-expected Amy to ask him to change his mind, but she didn’t. ‘Drive safe,’ she said, and planted a chaste kiss on the corner of his mouth. ‘Thanks for coming, and for being so … so reasonable about everything.’
‘Can I do anything for you, Amy?’
She shook her head, smiling a little, and took Ted’s hand. If he had been looking for a message, this one was much too clear to miss.
They walked slowly toward Mort’s Buick.
‘You keepin well enough down there?’ Ted asked. ‘Anything you need?’
For the third time he was struck by the man’s Southern accent – just one more coincidence.
‘Can’t think of anything,’ he said, opening the Buick’s door and fishing the car keys out of his pocket.
‘Where do you come from originally, Ted? You or Amy must have told me sometime, but I’ll be damned if I can remember. Was it Mississippi?’
Ted laughed heartily. ‘A long way from there, Mort. I grew up in Tennessee. A little town called Shooter’s Knob, Tennessee.’
22
Mort drove back to Tashmore Lake with his hands clamped to the steering wheel, his spine as straight as a ruler, and his eyes fixed firmly on the road. He played the radio loud and concentrated ferociously on the music each time he sensed telltale signs of mental activity behind the center of his forehead. Before he had made forty miles, he felt a pressing sensation in his bladder. He welcomed this development and did not
even consider stopping at a wayside comfort-station. The need to take a whizz was another excellent distraction.
He arrived at the house around four-thirty and parked the Buick in its accustomed place around the side of the house. Eric Clapton was throttled in the middle of a full-tilt-boogie guitar solo when Mort shut off the motor, and quiet crashed down like a load of stones encased in foam rubber. There wasn’t a single boat on the lake, not a single bug in the grass.
Pissing and thinking have a lot in common, he thought, climbing out of the car and unzipping his fly. You can put them both off… but not forever.
Mort Rainey stood there urinating and thought about secret windows and secret gardens; he thought about those who might own the latter and those who might look through the former. He thought about the fact that the magazine he needed to prove a certain fellow was either a lunatic or a con man had just happened to bum up on the very evening he had tried to get his hands on it. He thought about the fact that his ex-wife’s lover, a man he cordially detested, had come from a town called Shooter’s Knob and that Shooter happened to be the pseudonym of the aforementioned loony-or-con-man who had come into Mort Rainey’s life at the exact time when the aforementioned Mort Rainey was beginning to grasp his divorce not just as an academic concept but as a simple fact of his life forever after. He even thought about the fact that ‘John Shooter’ claimed to have discovered Mort Rainey’s act of plagiarism at about the same time Mort Rainey had separated from his wife.