“Despair, I suppose.”
“And you’re a minister?”
“Yes.”
“How odd.” She poured the rest of the bottle of scotch into the plastic tumbler. “One doesn’t expect ministers to suffer from despair. After all, they have a nice safe forever in store for them.”
“Do they?”
“If they don’t, who does?”
“That’s a question I can’t answer.”
She didn’t say, “How odd,” again but she looked as if she were thinking it. “I’m disappointed. I always thought if I managed to get through this life, something better was waiting for me. If there’s not, then this is all, this is it?”
“Perhaps.”
“What a dreadful prospect.”
“Sorry.”
“In fact I find the whole conversation extremely depressing.”
“Sorry about that too.”
“Ministers should say encouraging things like how everybody will get their reward in heaven. Don’t you believe that?”
“No.”
“You must have believed it once or you wouldn’t have become a minister.”
“I believed it once.”
“What happened?”
“A little girl died.”
“Is that all?”
“There were other things as well but that was the main one.”
The liquor was already having its effect. Mrs. Cunningham’s face seemed to be coming apart, melting like gelatin and held together only by the thick crust of makeup. One of her eyes had gone slightly out of focus, making her look a little like Annamay’s doll, Marietta, with her permanent strabismus.
“There must be a heaven,” she said. “There must be. Otherwise how could I endure all this… all this—”
She stared around the room with a kind of desperation, and Michael wondered what it was she couldn’t endure: the house? the furnishings? Peter’s mistakes on the piano?
“All this what, Mrs. Cunningham?”
“Sometimes it’s not nice living here,” she said vaguely. “But I have no other place to go. Peter says I wouldn’t be tolerated anywhere else. So he lets me stay here and he has promised never to leave me because then I would be alone. I couldn’t bear being alone. So like it or not, I must put up with his friends, smile at their stupid antics, pretend not to mind when they leave their smelly clothes all over the house, yes, sometimes even draped on my piano, my beloved piano.”
“It’s an antique, I see.”
“It belonged to my grandfather. He gave it to me when I was in my teens and studying music quite seriously. I don’t play anymore except at Christmas a few carols when I think no one is listening. ‘Silent Night,’ ‘Come, All Ye Faithful,’ ‘Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.’ ” She reached out suddenly and grabbed his coat sleeve. “There must be angels. Surely there must be angels.”
“If you want to believe—”
“No no. Tell me. Tell me there are angels.”
“All right,” he said heavily. “There are angels.”
“Who are looking out for me.”
“Who are looking out for you.”
“I can’t live without angels.”
She sat down on the piano bench and played the opening bars of “The First Noel,” singing the words in a thin sweet soprano. Listening to her Michael thought, She’s right, of course. There must be angels. People had to have them.
She played badly and she knew it. “I’ve lost my touch. Grandfather would be disappointed at hearing such sounds coming from his cherished piano. Thank God he can’t hear the way Peter’s friends bang on it. ‘Chopsticks.’ Isn’t it funny, children are still playing ‘Chopsticks’ the way they did in my youth.”
“You speak of Peter’s friends as children,” Michael said. “How old are they?”
“I don’t ask. In this house nobody dares to refer to age. Peter can’t stand the idea of growing old. When he started getting bald at an early age I often heard him sobbing in his room at night. You look surprised. Didn’t you know he is bald?”
“No.”
“Bald as an egg. All that lovely silvery hair, not a strand of it is real. He began buying wigs before he was thirty, brown at first, then each succeeding one a little grayer until they were entirely gray like those he wears now. He kept every one of them. They’re on wig stands in his bedroom. It’s spooky, all those rows of heads staring at you without eyes. Poor Peter, he likes to think his little friends don’t know he wears a wig. How silly. It’s almost impossible to fool a child. Don’t you agree?”
“Yes,” Michael said.
Yet someone had fooled Annamay. She and Dru had left the Hyatt house together and gone down to the creek in search of polliwogs. When they didn’t find any, Dru lost interest and went on home. What then? Where were the dogs?
“We left them at home,” Dru had told the coroner’s jury, “because they always waded in the water and scared creatures away.”
If the dogs had been present, what creatures might they have scared away? A con man with a tambourine? A mad old madam on one of her escapades? A chicken hawk looking for one of his chickens? Someone nobody had even thought of?
“Peter’s friends,” Michael said, “Who are they?”
“Nobody. Riffraff. He picks them up off the street and after they’ve eaten our food and drunk our booze and stolen whatever they can get their hands on, they return to the street.”
“Are any of them girls?”
“Girls?” She stood up, swaying slightly as if the floor had begun crumbling under her feet. “Of course not. Peter isn’t interested in girls. He promised me when he was in his early teens that he would never marry, never leave me alone.”
“I meant little girls.” He wondered how far he could go without pushing her over the brink. “Like Annamay Hyatt.”
“Are you implying—? Yes, I see you are. Well, you couldn’t be more mistaken. Peter hadn’t the faintest interest in little girls, especially the Hyatt child.”
“Why especially, Mrs. Cunningham?”
“She was a sneaky devil, always creeping up on him and spying. She and that friend of hers spied on nearly everyone in the neighborhood, peering over walls and through fences.” She had begun swaying again, rhythmically, like a distraught mother rocking a sick child. “My son was not interested in girls. Any girls, of any age. He promised me he would never get married and leave me here alone.”
“I’m sure he never will.”
“I— You’re very kind.” She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. They were as tearless as the wig stands in Peter’s bedroom. “Oh, I’m glad Peter isn’t here. He hates me to become emotional like this.”
“Where is he, Mrs. Cunningham?”
“San Francisco. He took Randy along to look after his clothes and things.”
“Randy is his special friend?”
“Oh no. He’s our houseboy. He’s an Indian. From India, I mean. He meditates.”
“The servants of all the families in the neighborhood were questioned by the police. No one by the name of Randy appears in the files.”
“His real name is Maharandhi Rau. He was questioned by the police several times but of course he didn’t know anything. On the afternoon the Hyatt girl disappeared Randy was down in the citrus grove meditating, and when he meditates he can’t see or hear anything at all. He’s on a different plane, in another dimension.” She sounded wistful, as if other places, other times were more appealing than here and now. “I wonder if meditation would do me any good.”
“It wouldn’t hurt to try it.”
“I suppose one has to select a subject to meditate about.”
“Probably.”
“Very well, I choose angels.”
“That’s an interesting choice.”