There was an owl on the night suddenly, and it sounded just as isolated as she felt. She listened to it for a long moment, one lonely being recognizing another, and then she went inside.
'How long has she been in there?'
'A little over two hours.'
'Did she have any dinner?'
The maid shook her head. 'I tried.'
'I'm sure you did, Martha.'
'Those films, you know. The old ones.' Martha was sixty, stout, gray-haired, gray-uniformed. She was always touching the small silver cross at her neck. Perhaps there were vampires in this house that needed warding off.
'You want me to try her again with some dinner, miss?'
'No thanks, Martha. I'll try her myself.'
'Yes, miss. Good luck.'
This was a house of high ceilings, two sweeping staircases, spectacular decorative moldings, carved mantels and arched windows. It was also a house of vast and intricate echoes; as Martha walked away in her sensible brown oxfords, the high hollow echoes of her passage filled the air.
Doris knocked on the double mahogany doors leading to the den. From inside, she could hear her mother crying softly as the videotape unspooled.
Doris went inside, stood in silhouette in the doorway.
'Hello, Mother.'
Evelyn looked up, daubing tears with a lace handkerchief. 'Remember this?'
Peter was not quite ten when this footage was taken of them in the family swimming pool on a hot July day. The remembered smell of chlorine filled Doris' nostrils. And then the smell of scorching sunlight.
On screen were Doris and Peter, both skinny, somewhat gangly, both grinning into the camera. There was a fairy-tale aura about thisa better time in a far land where fathers lived for ever and sweet little boys did not grow up to become killers.
For a moment, Doris felt the same kind of suffocating melancholy her mother must experience whenever she watched these old films. But instead of letting it smother her, Doris escaped from it, came back to the present.
'Martha told me you didn't eat any supper.'
'I'm not hungry, dear. It's nothing to worry about.'
'Well, you're wrong, Mother. It is something to worry about. You didn't eat lunch, either, as I recall.'
On screen now, Peter was riding his bike down the sweeping driveway, sunlight dappling through the summer trees.
'He was so handsome.'
'Yes, he was, Mother.'
'This is all her fault. I know you don't like me to say that, but it's true. If he'd never met her, Peter would be living in this house with you and me today.'
Doris didn't want to argue. All she said was, 'I'm going to have Martha make you a turkey sandwich and a salad.'
But Evelyn was off in one of her reveries. Staring at the screenthe image was now that of Peter playing basketball on the outdoor court his mother had had built for his twelfth birthdayshe said, 'But she's finally going to get her come-uppance. Don't think she isn't.'
'And how is that going to happen, Mother?'
Evelyn looked up at her. The crone look was on her again. Beady, shining, crazed eyes. Thin, bitter mouth. 'I've arranged for her to be dealt with in a very fitting way. And that's all I'm going to say about it.'
Doris felt her stomach knot. Her mother was telling the truth, not merely bluffing. Evelyn Daye Tappley never bluffed. Powerful people like her didn't have to.
Doris stared at her mother for a long moment, not knowing what to say, and then finally: 'I'll have Martha get your sandwich.'
But her mother was already watching the screen again, lost in the perfect memories of her perfect little boy.
CHAPTER 26
After leaving the Loop via the Dan Ryan Expressway, Cini took an exit different from her own and pulled up to a 7-Eleven store whose lights she had seen from a distance.
She knew there was only one way she could cope with what she'd seen just a while ago in Eric Brooks' office. Some people would have picked up a glass of whisky; others would have engaged in sex. For Cini there was only one salvation. Junk food.
She surprised the Pakistani clerk by picking up one of the red plastic hand carriers. Virtually nobody ever used the hand carriers in here.
She wanted something from every basic food grouppastry, candy, potato chips, ice cream.
She didn't even try to stop herself, didn't even try to say, You're going on a binge again, Cini, and you're going to destroy that beautiful thin body of yours.
God, Cini, stop before it's too late.
But she was in the throes of a desire that she could no longer control. Did not want to control.
She started at the pastry section, picking up a box of Hostess powder donuts then a box of Little Debbie filled oatmeal cookies then grabbing a half dozen Colonial bear claws in cellophane wrappers that were gorgeously sticky inside from all the gooey sugar frosting.
The candy section came next. Cini specialized in chocolate. She selected a quarter pound Hershey bar with almonds, a King Size Baby Ruth, a bag of mini-Mounds, a bag of mini-Almond Joys, a Milky-Way King Size, two boxes of Boston baked beans, three boxes of Good n' Plentys and two long dealies of Switzer's red licorice.
At the ice-cream counter, she filled up her entire red plastic hand carrier with six quarts of Haagen Dazs of different flavors and then a vast box of Drumsticks. She really liked the nuts they sprinkled on the top.
There was a black customer at the counter when Cini got up there. She was nervous; she couldn't help it. Black people who weren't dressed in suits and ties (male) or nice dresses (female) scared her. She'd seen a black hatemonger on TV a year ago and he'd convinced her that in every black heart was a yearning to kill white people. Cini knew that this wasn't true, that most black people were decent citizens and not really all that much different from herself, but the trouble was, how did you tell the occasional hater from your good ordinary person? They didn't wear little tags that said HATER. Only too late did you find that they had guns or knives and were in the process of killing anything that moved and was white. You saw it on TV all the time.
The black customer, who was probably fifty, shook his head when he took his lottery ticket from the Pakistani clerk and checked the number. He smiled at Cini. He had a great smilewry, intelligent and friendly. 'And here I was gettin' ready to retire, too,' he said, nodded goodnight to Cini and the clerk and left.
Cini put the hand carrier on the counter.
The Pakistani laughed. 'Such a slim girl. Such a big appetite.'
'I'm having a little party tonight,' she lied. 'Some friends are coming over.'
Yeah, she thought. They don't like beer or bourbon or marijuana. They're Switzer's licorice junkies. Life in the fast lane.
She was already back to her Whale days. Always lying to clerks about why she was buying so much junk food. Ashamed of herself but unable to stop.
The clerk started ringing everything up.
He needed one of the big bags to get everything in.
The total came to $44.39.
My God!
That was another thing about being a Whale. You were always broke from buying junk food. No joke. Linda, another one of the Whales, once spent more than $200 in a single weekend on pastries alone. She estimated she had consumed more than 50,000 calories that weekend. She forced herself to vomit, as usual, but she began vomiting so violently that she actually puked up blood. She called Cini in absolute terror. Cini met her at the Emergency Room. She had done no permanent damage but the young female intern did convince Linda to try the Eating Disorder Clinic. Linda lasted seven weeks there and then started bingeing again. Last time Cini saw her, Linda weighed more than 220 pounds and was doping herself up constantly on tranquilizers. Being obese was a great big joke to people who didn't suffer from it. But for those who did…