I watched carefully, trying to understand what was going on. Was there really something she was too frightened to talk about? “Was Emily the one who married Arthur James?”
“There was always some story . . . always some explanation.” She waved a hand vaguely, her tone resigned.
“Was this in Santa Teresa? Maybe I could help you if I understood.”
“Santa came over special and gave us all a stockingful of goodies. I let her have mine.”
“Who, Emily?”
“Don’t talk about Emily. Don’t tell. It was the earthquake. Everyone said so.” She extracted her hand and a veil of cunning dropped over her eyes. “My arthritis is in my shoulder and knee. My shoulder has been broken two times. The doctor didn’t even touch it, just X-rayed. I had two cataract operations at least, but I never had to have a tooth filled. You can see for yourself.” She opened her mouth.
Sure enough, no fillings, which is not that big a deal when you have no teeth.
“You look like you’re in pretty good shape for someone your age,” I said gamely. The subject was careening around like conversational pinball.
“Lottie was the other one. She was a simpleton, but she always had a big smile on her face. She didn’t have the brains God gave a billy goat. She’d go out the back door and then she’d forget how to get back in. She’d sit on the porch steps and howl like a pup until someone let her in. Then she’d howl to get back out again. She was the first. She died of influenza. I forget when Mother went. She had that stroke, you know, after Father died. He wanted to keep the house and Emily wouldn’t hear of it. I was the last one and I didn’t argue. I wasn’t really sure until Sheila and then I knew. That’s when I left.”
I said, “Unh-hunh,” and then tried another tack. “Is it the trip that worries you?”
She shook her head. “The smell when it’s damp,” she said. “Never seemed to bother anyone else.”
“Would you prefer to have Irene fly down and travel back with you?”
“I worked cleaning houses. That’s how I supported Irene all those years. I watched Tilda and I knew how it was done. Of course, she was dismissed. He saw to that. No financial records. No banks. She was the only casualty. It was the only time her name was ever in the papers.”
“Whose name?”
“You know,” she said. Her look now was secretive.
“Emily?” I asked.
“Time wounds all heels, you know.”
“Is this your father you’re talking about?”
“Oh dear, no. He was long gone. It would be in the footing if you knew where to look.”
“What footing?”
Her face went blank. “Are you talking to me?”
“Well, yes,” I said. “We’ve been talking about Emily, the one who died when the chimney fell.”
She made a motion as if to lock her lips and throw away the key. “I did it all to save her. My lips are sealed. For Irene’s sake.”
“Why is that, Agnes? What is it you’re not supposed to tell?”
She focused a quizzical look on me. I was suddenly aware that the real Agnes Grey was in the room with me. She sounded perfectly rational. “Well, I’m sure you’re very nice, dear, but I don’t know who you are.”
“I’m Kinsey,” I said. “I to a friend of your daughter’s. She was worried when she didn’t hear from you and she asked me to come down and find out what was going on.”
I could see her expression shift and off she went again. “Well, no one knew that. No one even guessed.”
“Uh, Agnes? Do you have any idea where you are?”
“No. Do you?”
I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. After a moment, she began to laugh, too, the sound as delicate as a cat sneezing. Next thing I knew, she’d drifted off to sleep again.
7
I did not sleep well. I found myself thinking about Agnes, whose fears were contagious and seemed to set off worries of my own. The reality of the death threat had finally filtered down into my psyche, where it was beginning to accumulate an energy of its own. I was sensitive to every noise, to changes in room temperature as the night wore on, to shifting patterns of light on Venetian blinds. At 1:00 a.m., a car pulled into a parking slot near my room and I found myself instantly on my feet, peering through the slats as a couple emerged from a late-model Cadillac. Even in heavy shadow, I could tell they were drunk, clinging to one another in a hip-grinding embrace. I moved away from the window, my senses heightened by anxiety as the two of them fumbled their way into the room next to mine. Surely, if they were killers they wouldn’t postpone my demise for the noisy grappling that started up the minute the bolt shot home. The bedframe began to thump relentlessly against the adjoining wall like a kid drumming his heels. There were occasional lulls while the woman offered up suggestions to her hapless companion. “Hop on up here like a puppy dog,” she would say. Or “Get that old bald-headed thing over here.”
On my side of the wall, the picture of the moose would start to rattle out another little tap dance. I had to reach up and hold it, lest the frame jounce right off the hook and smack me in the face. She was a screamer, sounding more like a woman in labor than one in love. The tempo picked up. Finally, she uttered a little yelp of astonishment, but I couldn’t tell if she came or fell off the bed. After a moment, the smell of cigarette smoke wafted through the walls and I could hear their murmured postmortem. Twelve minutes later, they were at it again. I got up and took the picture off the wall, stuffed a sock in each cup of my bra and tied it across my head like earmuffs, with the ends knotted under my chin. Didn’t help much. I lay there, a cone over each ear like an alien, wondering at the peculiarities of human sex practices. I would have much to report when I returned to my planet.
At 4:45,I gave up any hope of getting back to sleep. I took a shower and washed my hair, returning to the room wrapped in a motel towel the size of a place mat. As I pulled on my clothes, she was beginning to yodel and he was yipping like a fox. I had never heard so many variations on the word oh. I locked the door behind me and headed out across the parking lot on foot.
The smell of desert air was intense: sweet and cold. The sky was still an inky black with strands of dark red cutting through the low clouds at the horizon. I was nearly giddy from lack of sleep, but I felt no sense of endangerment. If someone were waiting in the bushes with an Uzi, I would leave this world in a state of sublime innocence.
The lights in the cafe” were just blinking on, vibrant green neon spelling out the word cafe in one convoluted loop, like a squeeze of tooth gel. I could see a waitress in a pale pink uniform scratch at her backside at the height of a yawn. The highway was empty and I crossed at a casual place. I needed coffee, bacon, pancakes, juice, and I wasn’t sure what else, but something reminiscent of childhood. I sat at the far end of the counter, my back against the wall, still mindful of the plate-glass window and the gray wash of dawn light outside. The waitress, whose name turned out to be Frances, was probably my age, with a country accent and a long tale to tell about some guy named Arliss who was systematically unfaithful, most recently with her girlfriend, Charlene.
“He has really tore himself with me this time,” she said, as she plunked down a bowl of steaming oatmeal in front of me.
By the time I finished eating, I knew everything there was to know about Arliss and she knew a lot about Jonah Robb.
“If it was me, I’d hang on to him,” she said, “but now not at the expense of meeting this doctor fella your friend Vera wants to fix you up with. I’d jump right on that. He sounds real cute to me, though personally I’ve made it a practice not to date a man knows more about my insides than I do. I went out with this doctor once? Actually he’s a medical student, if the truth be known. First time we kissed, he told me the name of some condition arises when you get a pubic hair caught down in your throat. Tacky? Lord God. What kind of person did he think I was?” She leaned on the counter idly swiping it with a damp rag so she’d look like she was busy if the boss stopped in.