Nineteen
As the crow flies, Lucy Vesuvius’s place was no more than two or three miles from the store in Clarinda. But if the crow used Betsy’s paper-bag map, following the same twisting, rutted dirt and stone roads that I did, it might still be hopping on its tiny, clawed feet. The squiggly lines Betsy had drawn on the map were accurate enough, but she’d used no street names, because there weren’t any. Instead, she’d noted landmarks at intersections, like “Red Barn, Part of Roof Missing,” or “Fallen, Rotted Tree.” It must have been years since she’d been back up in those hills. The red barn had collapsed; I drove past the rubble twice before I thought to get out of the car to check the heap of boards for flecks of red paint. The fallen, rotted tree was gone, too-dinner, most likely, for a previous generation of termites.
The little cottage was so densely nestled in the woods that I drove past it three times before I spotted the painted plaque nailed to a tree. It had a picture of a volcano erupting, with READINGS lettered underneath a mountain. Vesuvius. Cute.
I parked as far as I could get off the narrow, one-lane dirt road and walked through the trees. The tiny house wasn’t much morethan a shack. It had been painted lavender, with darker purple and red trim, but now most of the paint was off, and black mildew covered much of the exposed gray wood. Spindly trees grew right up to the cracked cinder-block foundation. The front door had moss on it and looked to be swelled shut from moisture. I knocked anyway, several times, but there was no answer.
I walked around to the back. There was a small, sunlit clearing behind the house, planted with irregular rows of a hodgepodge of different plants and bushes. I recognized tomatoes, a row of something low to the ground that could have been strawberries, and, in the center of the plot, several tall pointy plants that might have been destined to be smoked rather than eaten. At the opposite end of the clearing, a woman in a faded pink sundress and a tattered straw hat, unraveling at the brim, was bent down, tending a row.
“Hello,” I called.
She looked up. Her mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear her. I walked closer.
“Hello,” I said again.
The freckled face under the unraveling hat was in its late fifties or early sixties, wrinkled and worn by the sun, but she had a child’s smile, wide-eyed and full of innocent delight.
“Lucy Vesuvius?”
“That’s me,” she said, straightening up. She stuck out a dirty hand. I shook it. It was calloused and rough. “Forgive me, I forgot I had an appointment.”
“We haven’t. I just took the chance you’d be home.”
“You from the welfare?”
“No, ma’am.”
Her eyes got narrower. “I didn’t figure you were. It’s been years since I applied. What brings you here, then?”
“I brought your mail,” I said, handing her the small bundle with the letter to Nadine Reynolds on top. I watched her face.
“I don’t know why Betsy down at the store bothers,” she said, holding out the packet far enough to see without reading glasses. “All I ever get is catalogs for stuff I don’t-”
She stopped suddenly, and her fingers tightened on the white envelope with the Chicago postmark. She slipped it out of the packet, slit it open with a grimy fingernail, and pulled out a sheet of folded white typing paper. A twenty-dollar bill fluttered to the ground, but she didn’t seem to notice. She was too intent on the white sheet of paper. She held it up against the sun and turned it over, looking for writing. The paper was blank. I had the feeling she no longer knew I was there.
I bent down to pick up the twenty-dollar bill and held it out to her. “I wonder if you can help me.”
Slowly, she lowered the blank piece of paper. Her eyes were unfocused, like her mind was a million miles away. Then she smiled and took the twenty. “I get so little mail. Come inside and we’ll have peppermint tea. It’s the least I can do for you driving up my mail.”
I followed her to the back step of her fading lavender cottage. “Please remove your shoes,” she said, pausing to kick off her sandals. “Keeps the karma in balance.” She dropped the blank sheet of paper and the envelope into a plastic tub filled with old catalogs and opened the back door.
Lucy’s tiny kitchen was a war zone of clutter. Pots, pans, and metal utensils, some rusted, lay nestled on the shallow counter beneath sagging chipped-enamel cabinets.
She moved to an indoor hand pump set into the counter, next to the sink. “Just take a minute,” she said, working the pump until water came out. She filled a dented copper teapot and set it on a narrow two-burner propane stove that could have been scavenged from an old house trailer. She scratched a wood match against the underside of the counter, held it to the burner until a flame caught, and set the kettle on to boil.
“Take a seat,” she said, waving the match. She came over to thetwo scratched white-painted wood chairs by the stained oak table and pushed aside a few red clay pots so we’d have room for our tea. We sat down.
“You didn’t tell me what brings you all the way up here.” She smiled at me across the corner of the tiny table, smoothing the wrinkles on the lap of her sundress.
“Nadine Reynolds.”
Her mouth held the shape of the smile, but the life went out of it. It was like a switch had been closed, shutting off the animation to her face. She looked at me with frozen eyes.
“Obviously, you know Nadine Reynolds.” I gestured toward the backyard. “That was her mail you opened out there.”
The teakettle started to whistle. She didn’t move; she continued to sit, paralyzed, oblivious to the shrieking steam for several more seconds until, at last, the sound got through. She pushed herself up from the chair like she had arthritis and shuffled the three steps to the stove. Slowly, she filled two silver tea balls with dried leaves from a mason jar, dropped them into white china mugs, and added boiling water from the kettle. She brought them back to the table and sat down with a sigh.
“I grow my own tea,” she said in a faraway voice. “Peppermint’s my favorite.”
“Nadine Reynolds?”
She looked down and pulled at the little chain holding the tea ball in her cup. “You from the police?” she asked without looking up.
“No, ma’am.”
“You’d have to tell me if you were law enforcement, right?” she said. Her eyes were still down.
“I suppose I would, but I’m not.”
She raised her head then and looked at me. “Nadine Reynolds has not been here for a long, long time.”
“She still gets mail here. Money.”
“Nadine Reynolds was a confused young woman, a girl really,filled with love and uncertainties about her fellow man. Nadine could not live as she had.”
She stopped.
I waited.
“Drink your tea,” Lucy Vesuvius said after another minute. She took a small sip. Some of the life was coming back into her face. “Peppermint’s at its most exhilarating when it’s hot.”
I took a sip. She was right; it was exhilarating. Of course, after one slice of dry wheat toast and two granola hotcakes topped with an orphaned organic raspberry, beef broth could have sent me to the stars in ecstasy.
“Nadine Reynolds,” I said again.
“What do you want with her after all these years?”
“I’m not looking for her. I’m looking for someone she knew. Michael Jaynes.”
“Michael?” All the dullness was gone from her voice now. “Has he sent you?”
“Do you know where Michael is?”
“Have you seen Michael?” She leaned forward in her chair.
I shook my head. “I’m trying to find him.”
“Why?”
“Something about insurance on an electrical contracting job he worked on a long time ago. Do you know where he is?”
She looked down as her fingers strayed to her dress pocket to touch the twenty-dollar bill. Then her eyes moved up to my face.