“Your daddy home?” Wade asked.
The boy studied Wade’s face and said nothing.
“Is your daddy here, son? I got to talk with your daddy.”
As if dismissing him, the boy turned away and let go of the storm door, and the breeze off the lake shoved it closed in Wade’s face. He could see into the living room, for the child had left the inner door wide open. Wade watched him trot to a television set in the far corner, where he plopped down on the carpeted floor and resumed watching cartoons and began to spoon the pastel-colored cereal into his mouth.
The living room was huge, open to the eaves, with a head-high stone fireplace at either end. A staircase led up to a deck, where several closed doors indicated bedrooms. Downstairs, there was a grand piano in a bay window, which instantly impressed Wade: he had never seen a grand piano inside a house before. When he thought about it, he realized that he had never seen a grand piano anywhere. Not in person.
He knocked on the glass again, but the boy continued to eat cereal and stare at cartoons as if Wade were not there. Finally, Wade drew the door open and stepped inside and closed the inner door behind him. “C’mon, son,” he said. “Go and get your daddy for me.”
“Sh-h-h!” the boy said, without looking at him. Then Wade saw that there was a second, smaller boy lying flat on the floor a few feet beyond him, his head propped up on tiny fists. He was blonder than his brother and wore underpants and a tee shirt and seemed to be shivering from the cold. He peeked over his brother’s shoulder and scowled at Wade and said, “Sh-h-h, will ya?”
“Jesus H. Christ,” Wade murmured, and he started to leave, when he heard a woman’s voice above and behind him.
“Who are you?” It was a light tentative voice, the opposite of the boys’ voices and the snarls emitted by the bare-chested muscular characters on the television screen; Wade turned and looked up and saw a thin silvery-blond woman standing just beyond the balustrade of the deck above him; he felt for a second that he was in a play, like Romeo and Juliet, and the next line was his and he did not know what it was.
He felt his face redden, and he took off his watch cap and held it in front of his crotch with both hands. The woman’s face was long and bony but very delicate-looking, as if the bones underneath were fragile and her pale skin exceedingly thin. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and her shoulder-length blond hair was uncombed. She wore no makeup but was wrapped in a dark-green velour robe that made her face and thin hands and wrists seem to be covered with white powder. Wade had seen her numerous times before, of course, but she had always been tanned, wearing jeans and fancy sweaters, and in winter she wore ski togs. Usually he had observed her at a distance, in town or at the post office. When Twombley was building the house and Wade was out here drilling the wells, she had come up from Massachusetts twice with her husband and sons, but they had strolled through the half-constructed buildings and down by the lake without stopping to speak to him. This was the first time he had seen her up close, and it seemed to him that he was seeing her under disarmingly intimate circumstances.
He stammered, “I was … I’m Wade Whitehouse. I was wondering, is your husband here? I was wondering that.”
“He’s asleep. We were up very late,” she said, as if she wished that she, too, were asleep.
“Well, yes, I’m … I want to say that I’m real sorry about your father, Mrs. Twombley.”
“Gordon,” she corrected him. “Thank you.”
“Gordon. Sorry. Mrs. Gordon. Jesus, I’m sorry about that. Mrs. Gordon, right.”
She gripped the rail as if for balance and said, “Do you think you could come back later on, when he’ll be up?”
“Well, yeah, I suppose so. Sure. I mean, I don’t want to intrude, you know, at a time like this and all. I just had a little business to settle with Mr. Gordon. I’m the local police officer, and there was something I wanted to speak with him about.”
“Something concerning my father?” She took several steps along the deck toward the stairs.
“Oh, no, nothing about that. Jeez, no. It’s a … it’s a traffic thing,” he said. “No big deal.”
“Can’t it wait, then?”
Wade thought, Yes, yes, it can wait, of course it can wait. It could wait until another morning, when she would be freshly wakened once again and this terrible thing concerning her father would have passed by; he could drive over here and talk with this fair woman at her breakfast table, while her husband and her children drove farther and farther north into the mountains, leaving her behind so that Wade could comfort her, take care of her, provide strength for her to draw upon in her time of affliction and grief, this intelligent beautiful sad needy woman who was unlike all the other women Wade had known and loved, he was sure.
He backed toward the door, gazing up at her, concentrating so narrowly on her pale form that he did not see the man emerge from a room at the far end of the balcony — Mel Gordon, dark-eyed, unshaven, short black hair pressed to his narrow skull. He was wearing a wool plaid robe, forest green and blue, the Gordon tartan. He crossed his arms over his chest and studied Wade for a second, and as Wade reached behind him for the doorknob, Gordon said, “Whitehouse. Next time, phone ahead.”
“How’s that?”
“I said, ’Next time, phone ahead.’ ”
The older of the two boys cut a look at his father and said, “Daddy, be quiet, will you?”
Wade smiled and looked down at his feet and shook his head slightly. “Jesus Christ,” he murmured. Then he said, “Mr. Gordon, when I come all the way out to serve somebody a summons, I don’t call ahead for an appointment.”
Gordon’s face knotted, and he moved quickly past his wife to the stairs. He said, “What the hell are you talking about?” He hurried down the stairs, as if to close a window against a storm, and when he reached the landing at the bottom, a few feet from where Wade stood by the door, he said, "C’mon, Whitehouse, let’s see it, this summons.” He held out his hand and glared at Wade. “Let’s see it.”
“I got to write it out.” Wade reached into his back pocket and drew out his fat pad of tickets and plucked a Bic ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket.
“What the hell are you talking about, Whitehouse?”
“I’m issuing you a ticket, Mr. Gordon. Moving violation.” He pursed his lips and started to write.
“Moving violation! I just got out of bed, for Christ’s sake, and you’re telling me you’re giving me a goddamn speeding ticket?” He barked a laugh. “Are you nuts? Is that it, White-house? You’re nuts? I think you’re nuts.”
Wade went on writing. “Yesterday morning, you passed a stopped school bus, which was flashing its lights, and then you passed a traffic officer holding traffic for pedestrians at a crosswalk,” Wade said without looking up. “Looked to me like you was speeding too. That’s a thirty-five-mile-per-hour zone. But I’ll let that one go by this time.”
Above them, the pale woman in the dark-green velour robe turned and retreated to one of the bedrooms. Wade glanced up and saw her disappear. The two men would duel down here below, and when only one of them remained, he would mount the stairs to her tower, where he would enter her darkened room. She would not know which of the two men in her life was crossing the room toward her.
Mel Gordon reached out and grabbed Wade’s writing hand, startling him. “Hold on!” Gordon said.
Wade wrenched his hand free. “Don’t ever put your hands on me, Mr. Gordon,” he said.