“Stop it! Stop it or I’m going to get angry, Natalie. You had to have somebody to come to. And I’m concerned. I’m not pretending. What kind of a monster do you think I am? Do you think I’m so all wound up in my own problems there isn’t any room to try to help anybody else?”
“But I should have remembered!”
“You just did. Now shut up about it, please. I think I asked you a question. I have to tell Tom Jennings something.”
“Tell him the whole thing.”
“Now you are being a silly little girl.”
“I know. Righteous defiance. I’m sorry. My trouble is I’m old for my years, but not as old as I think I am, I guess. I’m about seventy percent adult. The thirty percent keeps making me feel foolish. I guess you’ll have to hint.”
“I wish you knew who could have seen you. Was your car parked where anybody could see it?”
“It was way around in the back both times. The first time we went there was a week and a half ago. When we were driving out, a boy Jigger knows was driving in, but we were both sure he didn’t recognize Jigger. Both times I registered there was nobody there but the desk clerk. I’ve got Michigan plates, you know. And I certainly didn’t meech around acting furtive about anything. I got over all that kind of maidenly shyness last year. The only thing I can think of, Kat, is what my father said about the bay fill being in the planning stage for a long time. So they could have been following me ever since I got down here, just for luck, for the chance of something to use. But I haven’t felt as if I was being followed.”
“It’s so strange. All of a sudden it doesn’t seem as if it’s the same town. Do you think Dial will really go away?”
“Oh, yes. He’s got his pack-the-bags expression. Very bustly and fussy and efficient. Poor Claire hates traveling.” Natalie stood up. “Now I’m a little bit high, and very very tired, and very grateful to you.”
“I haven’t done anything.”
“You could have made me feel like a degenerate.”
Kat walked her to the front door and went out into the night with her. Natalie turned quickly and kissed Kat on the cheek, made a small snuffling noise, and strode off down the road.
Kat went in and phoned Tom Jennings. It was quarter of midnight.
“It’s late to phone you, Tom.”
“I wasn’t going to be able to sleep until I heard from you. What did he say?”
“Tom, honestly, I don’t think there’s the slightest chance of his changing his mind. In fact, he’s going to go away for a while. He’s taking Claire and the twins.”
“That’s... very disappointing. But what happened? He was so determined to help us...”
“Tom, somebody went to a great deal of trouble, somebody very sly and smart, and they dug up the names and dates and places, and phoned Di and said they would make a big juicy scandal of what they’d found out if he didn’t resign from Save Our Bays.”
“Claire? Is it something that Claire...”
“I can’t say any more than I’ve said already, Tom. Maybe Di is reacting a little more violently than he should. I don’t know. I’m sort of disappointed in him. You’d think it would make him mad enough to fight harder. But he’s getting out. It would make very choice gossip. And it would probably do us harm if he stayed on the team and it did get circulated. But it wouldn’t do us as much harm that way as this way. I’m going to try to talk to him tomorrow after he’s had a chance to sleep on it, but I don’t think it will do any good.” She waited a moment and then said, “Tom?”
She heard him sigh. “We’ll all have to work just that much harder. I can put in a little bit more money than I promised, but I promised just about all I can afford to begin with.”
“I can’t help out, I guess you know.”
“I know that, Katherine dear, of course. I was just thinking. Once we know the timing of the thing, when the date will be set for the public hearing, maybe we can arrange some kind of a rally and raise money that way. I have a feeling our regular membership is going to be... somewhat disappointing. I’ve been making a small telephone survey, sampling the membership list. It seems as bad as the report I got from Jackie. It looks as if we can expect a fifty percent mortality in our old list. We’ll have to go after a lot of new members. Well, it’s a little late to be discussing organizational problems. And you have to work tomorrow. Thanks for what you’ve done, Katherine. I really appreciate it. It’s alarming, isn’t it, to realize they’d stoop so low.”
“Yes, it is.”
“We may have further losses. Depressing thought. Odd that our own neighbors should be so much more ruthless than those Lauderdale men were.”
As Kat went to bed she thought the sunburn and the worry combined would make sleep impossible. But she felt herself falling away as soon as the light was out.
Thirteen
On that Sunday, Borklund put a heavy load on Brian Haas, and hovered so close Jimmy Wing could not help him with it. Whenever Jimmy tried to take a piece of it, J.J. would appear and put him onto something else. At two-thirty, when Jimmy went out to lunch, he phoned the newsroom and got hold of Brian.
“How are you doing, Bri?”
“Oh, it’s you,” he said, keeping his voice low. “The points are dirty and there’s water in the gas. I keep cutting out, and the son of a bitch keeps running me uphill. I’d say he’s got a strong suspicion.”
“Will you make it?”
“I’m not even going to think about guessing. I’m taking the day in ten-minute chunks, and getting through one at a time. Thanks for what you’ve been trying to do.”
“I’ll be back in a little while to try some more.”
“Bring me a big coffee, black.”
“You should eat.”
“I better not try. A quart container if you can manage it.”
“Two pints if I can’t. Okay.”
As soon as Wing returned with the coffee, Borklund sent him to cover a call on a drowning. It had just come in. The photographer was there when he got there. The resuscitator people had just given up, and the young mother had been given a shot but it hadn’t taken effect yet. The crowd could hear her shrieking in the small house. Wing got the facts from the neighbors. It seemed slightly grotesque to use a whole ambulance for such a small body.
On his way back into town from Lakeview Village he thought how this could be simplified by the use of a mimeographed form. “The (two-, three-, four-) year-old child was playing in the back yard of (his, her) home and apparently wandered away from (his, her) (mother, father, sister, brother, playmates) and fell unnoticed into a nearby (drainage ditch, pond, lake, stream, swimming pool) and was discovered approximately — minutes later, floating face down. Efforts to revive the child were not successful and (he, she) was pronounced dead at — o’clock by Dr.—”
The purposeless death of a child is a horrible thing, he thought. If I unlock the little box labeled Empathy, I can even manage to squeeze a little water out of my eyes. But I have to work at it. We run about eight a year, and I have covered a lot of them, and somehow it has come to be the same child being drowned over and over, and I keep the little box closed. We could take one master picture, and always run it. When the small bodies are covered, they always look alike. It is always the same stricken mother, the same ambulance, the same pointless horror. Grief for a child is always mixed up with speculation about what it might have become. Yet, according to the odds, its life would most probably have been dull, discontented and unsung. Once it is dead, nothing can be proven. All glorious speculation is valid. Had I drowned at age two, Sister Laura might sometimes look at the ruin of her own life and think of the small brother, thirty years gone, and say, “If he had only lived, life might have been different for all of us.” But I lived and nothing is different, and nothing is proven or disproven.