Remembering Miss Brownell made me think of my second valid source of information. When ancient Miss Brownell had finally retired, I asked Hilderman to recommend someone from the stenographic pool, someone I could take into my office on trial. Hilderman had sent Joan Perrit to me, and I wondered if he had suddenly acquired holes in the head. She was nineteen, and gawky and nervous, and she plunged around the office with such a reckless desire to please that I was in constant fear she would fracture herself on the furniture or fall out the window. She was painfully shy. But she could make a typewriter sound like small boys running and holding sticks against a picket fence. And she could take down and transcribe every mumble and grunt in a ten-man conference where everybody interrupted everybody else.
Technical excellence was just part of her arsenal of talents. Inside of a month she knew my style of expressing myself so perfectly that I couldn’t tell which letters I had dictated and which ones I had told her to handle. And she managed to fend off the pests, even those who would have gotten by Miss Brownell, without ever offending anybody, and without ever shooing away anyone that I wanted to see. She had schedules and timetables and appointments neatly filed away in her pretty head, and each morning when I came into the office there would be a typed notation on my desk, placed with geometric exactness atop the mail I should see. That notation would tell me not only the fixed appointments, but what was likely to come up.
She was a sweet kid, with dark red hair and a look of virginal freshness. She was so loyal it was embarrassing. On the morning I dictated my letter of resignation, she had to leave the office. She was gone a full ten minutes, and when she came back her eyes were reddened and swollen, but her voice was level and calm again as she read back to me the last sentence I had dictated.
I got her on the phone and her voice was just the same as on that last day. “I heard you were in town, Mr. Dean.”
I wondered how much four years had changed her. “I wonder if I could talk to you, Miss Perrit.”
“Of course, Mr. Dean. When?”
“Say this evening. After dinner sometime.”
“Will nine o’clock at the corner of Martin and Lamont be all right? In front of the leather shop.” I agreed. Though her voice had not changed, I knew she undersrtood I wanted information. Thus the quickness of her response was an indication she felt there was information to be given. I trusted her judgment.
After lunch I looked up car rental agencies in the phone book and found one quite close to the hotel. I rented a new Chevrolet sedan. I drove by the house where I was born, and headed south out of the city. At The Pig and It I found that Lita Genelli was off duty. I drove through the countryside for a time, parked near a place where we had always had family picnics. But they had changed everything. The elms and willows were gone. The area had been graded and filled. The pool where I caught the six-pound brown trout was gone. They had straightened and widened the highway, and there was a big drive-in movie where Ken and I used to play at being Indian scouts, trying to wiggle through the sun-hot grass until we were close enough to yell and leap out. I remembered the way the grass used to smell, and the way the picnic potato salad tasted, and the time Ken had tied the braids of a female cousin to a tree limb, and the way the line had hissed in the water when the brownie had taken the worm.
Now there was a stink of fast traffic, and a disheveled blonde on the drive-in ads, and a roadside place where they sold cement animals painted in bright colors.
And I kept glancing at my watch and thinking about Niki. A bitter excitement kept lumping in my throat. I drove slowly, and it was exactly four-thirty when I drove through the gateposts of the house Ken had built for Niki in the Lime Ridge section. The driveway was asphalt, and it was wide and satiny and curving. It led up the slope toward the house, to a turn-around and a parking area near the side entrance.
It was the house I would have wanted to build for her. A long, low white frame house, in an L shape, with a wide chimney painted white, with black shutters, with deep eaves. The spring grass was clipped to putting green perfection. High cedar hedges isolated the property from the neighbors. The three-car garage was separated from one wing of the house by a glassed-in breezeway, and beyond the garage was an apartment affair which I imagined belonged to the help. The house sat quiet and content in the spring sun, and it looked like a house people could be happy in.
There were two cars parked near the garage. One was a big fin-tailed job in cruiser gray, and the other was a baby blue Jag convertible with the top down. Both cars had local licenses, and I guessed the big one had been Ken’s and now both of them were Niki’s. And the house was Niki’s, and all the manicured grounds, and all the cedar hedges. A very fine take for the lass who had stood in the rain with her eyes ablaze on that December afternoon. Such thoughts helped still my nervousness.
I pressed the bell at the side door and a pretty little Negro maid in a white uniform let me in and took my hat, murmuring that I should go straight ahead into the living-room and she would tell Mrs. Dean I was here. It was a big room, and quiet. Low blond furniture upholstered in nubbly chocolate; lime yellow draperies framing a ten-foot picture window that looked down the quiet expanse of the lawn. A small bar had been wheeled to a convenient corner. There were fresh flowers, built-in shelves of books in bright dust jackets, wall-to-wall neutral rug. I lit a cigarette and tossed the match behind the birch logs in the fireplace. I looked at book titles. I looked out the window. The room was empty and silent, and I could hear no sound in the house. I felt the jitters coming back. I looked out the big window and wondered if they had stood there in the evening, his hand on her waist, her head on his shoulder, before going to their bed. And had they read any of the books aloud? And had he gotten up to poke at the fire while she sat in uxorial contentment...
“Gevan!” she said. She had come into the room behind me and I had not heard her. I turned, my mind foolishly blank, staring at her as she walked tall toward me, her hands outstretched, smiling.
Four years had changed Niki. The years had softened the young tautness of her figure. Her waist was as slim as ever, but under the strapless dress of some bright fabric, there was a new warm abundance of breast and hip. Her cheeks were the familiar flat ovals and her mouth was the same as it had been, deeply arched, sensuous and imperious.
She moved in the same gliding walk like the pace of some splendid animal. She walked toward me for an endless time while, with all senses sharpened, I heard the slither and whip of the hem of the heavy skirt and scented her familiar perfume.
“You’ve changed your hair,” I said inanely.
“Oh, Gevan, what a sparkling greeting!” When she said my name I saw the remembered way she said the v, white teeth biting at her underlip, holding the consonant sound just a bit longer than anyone else ever did.
I tried to take one of her hands and shake it in polite formality, but her other hand found my wrist, long warm fingers wrapping tightly around it, and she stood like that, smiling at me, tall and rounded, that black hair sheening like spilled ink.
“It’s nice to see you, Niki.” My voice was husky.
She closed her eyes for a moment. “It’s been a bit too long,” she said as she released my hand and turned away with an uncharacteristic awkwardness. I saw she shared my nervousness. It made her more plausible, made her more believable as the girl who had said she would marry me so long ago. She had betrayed me, and in her manner was awareness of that. Somehow, I had fallen into the habit of attributing to her a perfect poise, a bland denial of any guilt. To see her now, unsure of herself, uncertain of her ground, even perhaps a bit afraid of me, destroyed that false image of her. It was right she should feel guilt. In some obscure way she had destroyed Ken. She was the evil luck of the Dean brothers. And the warmth I felt for a few moments faded.