“Okay, sure,” I said, anxious to hear whatever other incriminating facts she wanted to tell me about Eddie Shaw.
Kendall looked left down the hallway, then right, then she leaned forward until I could smell the Chanel. “My husband,” she whispered, “is fast asleep.”
And then she bit my ear.
3. Marcia Funebre
When I was alone in my room again, I laid the painting on a tottering old dresser, having successfully avoided laying Kendall Shaw, and once more took my pants off and fell into bed. She had been particularly ardent, Kendall had, which would have been flattering had she not been so obviously hopped up with her diet pills and suffering from some sort of amphetamine psychosis. Upon biting my ear, she performed a talented lunge, kicking the door closed with a practiced side swipe at the same time she threw her arms round my neck, but I fought her off. It wasn’t that I wasn’t attracted – I was actually, I have a thing for women just like Kendall, hyperactive and thin with sharp Waspish features and outdoorsy hair – it was just that it was all so sudden and wrong that I didn’t have time to let my baser instincts kick in before I pulled her off and sent her on her way. I sort of regretted it too, afterward, as I lay in bed alone and waited for my erection to subside. It had been a profitable visit in any event. I had learned Eddie’s whereabouts the night of Jackie’s death, I had gotten a motel-quality painting, and I finally knew exactly who that Harrington was whom I had run into at the First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line. He was Caroline’s fiancé and knowing that made Caroline even more attractive to me in the deep envious reaches of my petty mind, which meant it took longer for me to relax enough to even try once more to sleep. So I lay in the bed, staring at the ceiling, letting the blood flow back to my brain and trying to sort it all out in my mind, when I heard still another knock on the door.
“Oh, Mr. Carl,” said Selma Shaw, Caroline’s mother, through the wooden door. “I have something for you.”
I bet you do, I thought, as I slipped out of bed and grappled again with my pants. I opened the door a crack and saw her standing there with a covered plate in her hand.
“I noticed you didn’t eat much of the dinner,” she said, her voice slipping raw and thick out of a throat scarred by too much of something. “I thought you might still be hungry.”
I looked at her smile and then at the plate and then back at her smile and realized that I actually was hungry so I let her in. Selma Shaw was a tall, falsely blonde woman, so thin her joints bulged. Her face was as smooth and as stretched as if she were perpetually in one of those G-force centrifuges they use to train astronauts, and her smile was a strange and wondrous thing, a tight, surgically sharp rictus. She stepped to the bureau to put down the plate and noticed the painting there.
“So Kendall’s been here already,” said Selma, her smile gone.
“She wanted to show me one of her paintings.”
“I assume that was not all. I wish Kendall would be more concerned with taking care of her husband than rushing to the third floor to show visiting artists her trashy little pictures. But,” she said, her voice suddenly brightening, “enough of that dervish.” She spun around almost gaily and smiled once more. “I assumed you were being too polite to eat, worried about the strange surroundings, so I had Consuelo make you up a sandwich.”
“Thank you,” I said, truly grateful. I hadn’t eaten much at dinner, Selma was right about that, but it wasn’t out of politeness. We had eaten in the dark, cavernous dining room of Veritas, stared at by stern brown portraits on the walls, the only bit of color the blue-and-white marble of the fireplace that looked to be carved from blue cheese aged too long. The food that Consuelo had served in the dark room had fallen to the far side of vile. A spiky artichoke, a bitter greasy salad, overcooked asparagus, undercooked potatoes, fatty knuckles of mutton with thick stringy veins snapping through the meat like rubber bands. There had been pickles of course, a platter of pickles fresh from the factory, and Dr. Graves, on my right, had advised me that pickles were always served at Veritas. The only light in the dining room had come from candelabras on the table, which, blessedly, were dim enough to make it difficult to see what the muck it was we were eating, but I saw enough to turn my appetite. I tried to look at least interested in the food, pushing it around on my plate, actually swallowing a small spoonful here and there, but when something in the bread pudding crunched between my teeth like a sharp piece of bone I figured I had had enough, spitting my mouthful into my napkin and dropping the napkin over my silver dessert plate in resignation.
“I hope you don’t mind me putting you all the way up here on the third floor,” said Selma Shaw, “but we weren’t expecting so many people to be forced to stay over because of the flood. There are not so many rooms available to visitors anymore. We’ve closed down the east wing to guests because my husband is a troubled sleeper and he finds it difficult to rest with anybody in close proximity to him during the night. Me included.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t get to meet him.”
“Don’t be. I love him dearly, of course, he’s my husband, but he can be a very difficult man. Childhood trauma will do that.”
“What kind of trauma?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s a terribly sad story,” said Selma. “Too depressing for a rainy night like this. Do you really want to hear it?”
“Yes, actually.”
“Well, make yourself comfortable at least,” she said, almost pushing me onto the bed and sitting right beside me. The bed creaked beneath us.
She crossed her legs and put her left arm behind her so that her upper body was turned toward me. She was wearing a clinging black dress that sparkled in the dim light and the sharp points of her breasts gently wiggled at me from beneath the fabric.
“I won’t bore you with the details, but in a horrible mistake Kingsley, my husband, shot his father to death on the back patio of this very house on a dark, rainy night much like this one.”
Her brown eyes were looking straight into mine, as if in warning. I blinked twice, thinking that what Caroline had successfully avoided talking of during the ride to Veritas her mother had blurted to me with nary an excuse, and then I shifted away from her as politely as I could.
“Needless to say,” she continued, “it has scarred my husband terribly. This house used to be so grand a place, I am told, a marvelous place for parties. But that was when Mr. Reddman was still alive. He knew how to run a house. My husband has let the house go. I’ve done what I could to maintain it but it is so difficult, almost as if it has become what it was always meant to be, as if its essential character is becoming exposed with all the leaks and warped floors and the browning wallpaper. Is it any wonder, then, that I spend much of my time away? Would you spend all your life here if you had a choice, Mr. Carl?”
“No,” I said, shifting away from her a little more.
“Of course not, and still they carp. But enough talk of Kendall and my husband’s sad past, both subjects are entirely too morbid. Tell me about you and Caroline. She said you are lovers.”
“So she did.”
“You know of course that she is engaged,” said Selma and on the final syllable her right hand, which had been floating in the air as if held high by a marionette’s string, dropped lightly onto my knee.
“Yes, I do, Mrs. Shaw,” I said, looking at her hand. While her face was stretched taut and young, her hand had the look of a turkey foot about it, bone-thin, covered with hard red wrinkles, tipped by claws. I tried to deftly brush her hand off as if it had fallen there by mistake, but as I performed my gentle brush her fingers tightened on my knee and stayed put.
“Caroline has known Franklin Harrington for years and years,” said Selma Shaw, not in any way acknowledging the ongoing battle over my bended knee, “ever since Mother Shaw brought him to this house as a boy. They took to each other so quickly we had always assumed their marriage. Caroline, of course, has dallied and so, I am told, has Franklin in his way, but they will be married despite what any of us would prefer. You should be aware of that as an unalterable fact. Destiny, in this family at least, must always have its way with us. Even love must yield. No one knows better than I.”