“Must you?” I asked her. “I’m trying to eat, here.”
“What’d I say? Breast milk? Big deal.”
“That whole business puts me off,” I told her. “I don’t see how women stand it. Leaky breasts, labor pains …”
“Well, aren’t you sensitive,” Martine said. She was drifting behind a slow-moving cement truck. In her place, I would have switched lanes. “Hey,” she said. “I’ll let you in on a secret. There’s no such thing as labor pains.”
“Say what?”
“It’s all a bunch of propaganda that’s been spread around by women. In fact, they don’t feel so much as a twinge.”
“They don’t?” I asked.
“They have this hormone that’s an anesthetic, see, that the body releases during labor. Kind of like natural Novocain.”
I laughed. For a moment, she’d had me believing her.
She glanced over at me with a glint in her eye, but her face stayed all straight lines. “Don’t tell anyone else,” she said. “Women have been keeping it from men for millions of years. They like for men to feel guilty.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” I said. Maybe too emphatically, because she sent me another, keener glance.
We were traveling up North Charles Street now, past huge houses where electric candles lit the windows even in the daytime — pale, weak white prickles of light that struck me as depressing. I wrapped the rest of my fruitcake in my napkin. I said, “Like Sophia, for instance.”
“Oh, well,” Martine said. “Sophia.”
She hadn’t said a word against Sophia since she first found out we were dating, but I could guess what she thought of her. Or I imagined I could guess. What did she think of her? I studied Martine’s profile. On her head was a boy’s leather cap with big fleece earflaps that reminded me of mutton-chop whiskers. I said, “Like Sophia’s flour-bin money, for instance.”
“Flour bin?”
“The money she put in Mrs. Glynn’s flour bin when I was accused of stealing.”
Martine slowed for a traffic light. She said, “Sophia put money in Mrs. Glynn’s flour bin.”
“Right.”
“Before she learned Mrs. Glynn had changed her hiding place.”
“Right.”
Martine was silent.
“Two thousand, nine hundred and sixty dollars,” I said, as if prompting her.
Martine said, “What: is she out of her mind?”
I had this sudden feeling of relief. I almost said, “Ah,” although I didn’t.
“She thought you really did steal it!” she said. “She actually thought you stole it!”
“Looks that way,” I agreed.
“And so then she goes and … Is she out of her mind?”
“And the thing of it is, it’s still there,” I said.
“What’s still where?”
“The money is still in the flour bin.”
“So?”
“It’s, like, hanging over my head,” I said. “She keeps reminding me of it. Every time she wants to buy something, it’s, oh, no, she can’t, because she gave up all her savings for my sake; everything she owns is sitting in the flour bin.”
“Well, that’s her problem,” Martine said.
But I rode on over her words. It was all pouring out of me now. “Talk about guilt!” I said. “That money is just … weighing on me! But I know she could get it back if she really wanted. Anytime she visits her aunt, she has the run of the house after all. Or if she worries she’ll get caught, she could go on Tuesday, her aunt’s podiatrist day. Take her own key and go Tuesday, or some Friday afternoon when her aunt is having her hair done.”
“What time does she have her hair done?”
“I don’t know; maybe four or so, because she always used to be home again before I got there.”
The light changed to green, and Martine took a violent left turn. I had to grab my door handle. I said, “Mr. Shank’s house, Martine. Straight ahead.”
“We’re not going to Mr. Shank’s,” Martine told me.
“Where are we going?”
But I knew the answer to that, even before she took a right, and another left, and came to a jerky stop in front of the Rent-a-Back office.
“Back in a jiff,” she said.
I sat quiet while she was gone. I looked out my side window, watched two squirrels chase each other across the remnants of snow, listened to the ticking of the engine as it cooled. Then Martine was hopping into the truck again. “Ready?” she asked, and she gave me a foxy, sharp-toothed grin and held up her left hand. Nestled in her palm was a house key, attached to one of Rent-a-Back’s oval tags. #191, the tag read. I didn’t have to be told that #191 was Grace Glynn.
When we pressed the doorbell, checking to make sure she wasn’t home, I had this flash of déjà vu. In the old days, I used to check by phone. I’d phone my prospective victims and listen through a dozen rings or more. (Answering machines were not so common back then.) The feeling now was the same — that strung-up feeling where you’re braced for them to be there, and then the surge of energy and purpose when you find out they’re away. We lounged nonchalantly on Mrs. Glynn’s front porch, in case anybody was watching, but the only sound was the dog barking. So finally Martine stepped forward and fitted the key in the lock.
It was clear from Tatters’s frantic little frenzy that you could just ignore him, which we did. We walked straight through to the rear of the house while he scuttled around our ankles, making busybody sounds with his toenails.
The house had a bitter smell, as if Mrs. Glynn had recently burned some toast. On the drainboard next to the sink, a clean china cup and saucer sat upside down on a dish towel. Everything else was tidied away. I opened a cabinet: glassware. I closed it and opened another. Four white canisters in graduated sizes read TEA, COFFEE, SUGAR, FLOUR. I reached for the flour canister, and it rattled. Inside I found a pale-green mug and the handle that had broken off from it; nothing more. Martine let out a small breath next to my shoulder. Tatters sniffed my sneakers.
What if Sophia had made this whole thing up? What if she had merely claimed she’d stowed her money here, in order to seem noble? The thought made me instantly angry. Then I reminded myself that Sophia was not the type to lie. Even so, the anger hung on a moment, like the white spot that stays in your vision after you have looked at a too bright light.
“That’s not a bin,” Martine said. “It’s a canister.”
I said, “Okay, where’s the bin, then?”
She opened a lower cabinet. Saucepans. The one next to it held cookie sheets, muffin tins, and pie plates. Not a bin in sight. I felt personally thwarted, as if Mrs. Glynn were taunting me. “I could kill that woman,” I told Martine.
“Forget about it,” Martine said, closing the second door. “She didn’t mean any harm.”
“No harm! I practically lost my job!”
“Oh, you did not,” Martine said. She was checking the shelf under the sink, but that held only a trash bucket. She said, “You honestly believe Mrs. Dibble would fire you? She’d have to shut down the company. You saw how all our clients backed you up.”
“Well,” I said. “Yes.”
I walked into the pantry. There was a bin at the head of the basement stairs — a tall metal cylinder — but that contained dry dog food. I said, “I wonder how they heard.”