It was the sort of house that would have a burglar alarm installed, and there was a decal to that effect, along with metallic tape on the ground-floor windows. But the alarm had not been engaged when the maid opened the door to him, and he didn’t believe for a moment she’d have taken the time to set it before fleeing a house she’d never be likely to see again. If the Walmsleys had ever taken the trouble to teach her how to use it in the first place.
No alarm, then. The front door was locked, probably because it locked of its own accord when you pulled it shut. Keller could have forced it but didn’t, nor did he force the door leading to the garage. He went around to the rear of the house, took one of the windows off its track, and let himself in.
The maid wouldn’t be coming back. The house was a large one, and Keller went through it room by room, and it was easy to tell the maid’s room, because it was the smallest room in the house, tucked in under the back stairs and alongside the kitchen. There was a wooden crucifix hanging from a nail on one wall, and there was a week-old copy of El Diário, and that was pretty much all there was aside from the bed and dresser. She’d thrown everything else in a suitcase and now she was gone, and she wouldn’t be coming back.
The crucifix, he decided, had been a parting gift from her mother in El Salvador. That was the name of the country, while the capital city was San Salvador, but she probably came from somewhere else. Cutuco, he decided. Puerto Cutuco was the only other city he knew in El Salvador, and he knew it because one of the stamps of the 1935 series pictured the wharf at Cutuco. Another stamp in the same series showed a volcano, and he knew its name, but couldn’t remember it.
As if it mattered. Her mother in Cutuco had given her the crucifix, he continued, telling her to keep it with her forever and it would always protect her, and she’d dutifully mounted it on the wall, and in her haste she’d forgotten it. Terrified of the faceless Immigration and Naturalization Service (except it wasn’t so faceless now, it had Keller’s face on it) she’d abandoned the one thing she owned that tied her to her home and family. She wouldn’t come back for it, she didn’t dare, but its loss would always bother her, and—
Jesus, get over it, he told himself. She could let go of the crucifix a lot easier than he could relinquish the fantasy he was spinning, complete with a hometown from a stamp in his collection.
It bothered him, though. That he’d scared her the way he did. Still, what else was he supposed to do? He couldn’t snap her neck just because she was in the way. She was tiny, she’d have to stand on a box to be five feet tall. It would be like killing a little kid, and that was something Keller had never done. Once or twice someone had offered a contract on a child, and he and Dot had been entirely in accord on the subject. You had to draw a line, and that was where you had to draw it.
But that was a matter of age, not size. The woman — and he found himself wishing he knew her name, now that he’d played such a role in her life — was certainly over twenty-one. Old enough to vote, old enough to drink... and old enough to kill? Was he being politically incorrect by giving her a pass on the basis of her height? Was he being... well, he wasn’t sure the word existed, but was he being a sizeist? A heightist? Was he altitudinally prejudiced?
What he was being, he told himself, was severely neurotic, and that was the occasional consequence of breaking into an empty house with nothing to do but wait for someone to appear. He’d done this sort of thing before, but that was in an earlier life. Now he had a wife and a daughter, now he lived in a big old house in New Orleans and had a business repairing and renovating other people’s houses, and the new life suited him, and what was he doing here, anyway?
He looked at his watch, and every ten minutes or so he looked at it again.
Keller had read somewhere that all of man’s difficulties stemmed from his inability to sit alone in a room. The line stayed with him, and awhile ago he’d Googled his way to its source. Someone named Pascal had made the observation, Blaise Pascal, and it turned out he’d said a lot of other interesting things as well, but all but the first one had slipped Keller’s mind. He thought of it now as he forced himself to sit alone in the maid’s room, waiting for Portia Walmsley to come home.
And pictured the woman. When he was living in New York, he’d have taken the train to White Plains, where Dot would have given him the woman’s photograph, which someone would have sent to her by FedEx, in the same package with the first installment of his fee. Instead, he’d booted up his computer, clicked on Google Images, typed in Portia Walmsley, and clicked again, whereupon Google served up a banquet of pictures of the oh-so-social Mrs. Walmsley, sometimes alone, sometimes with others, but all of them showing a big-haired, full-figured blonde with what Keller had once heard called a Pepsodent smile. Or was it an Ipana smile? Keller couldn’t remember, and decided he didn’t care.
Sitting alone in a room, with only one’s own mind and an abandoned crucifix for company, wasn’t the most fun Keller had ever had in his life. There was nothing in the room to read, in Spanish or in English, and nothing to look at but suffering Jesus, and that was the last place Keller wanted to aim his eyes.
Which, no matter where he pointed them, he was finding it increasingly difficult to keep open. They kept closing of their own accord. He kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the bed, just for comfort, not because he intended to sleep, and—
And the next thing he knew he was in an auction room, with one lot after another hammered down before he could get his hand in the air to bid. And a man and a woman were sitting on either side of him, talking furiously in a language he couldn’t understand, and making it impossible for him to focus on the auction. And—
“Where is that damn girl? For what I pay her you’d think she could do what she’s supposed to. Margarita!”
“Maybe she’s in her room.”
“At this hour?”
His eyes snapped open. A man and a woman, but now they were speaking English, and he could hear them on the stairs. He sprang from the bed, crossed to the door, worked the bolt. No sooner had it slid home than they had reached the door, and the woman was calling the maid’s name — Margarita, evidently — at the top of a brassy voice.
“Give it up,” the man said. “Ain’t nobody home.”
A hand took hold of the doorknob, turned, pushed. The bolt held.
“She’s in there. The lazy bitch is sleeping.”
“Oh, come on, Portsie.” Portsie? “Couldn’t nobody sleep through the racket you’re making.”
“Then why’s the door locked?”
“Maybe she don’t want you rummaging through her underwear.”
“As if,” Portia said, and rattled the doorknob. “This is something new, locking the door. I don’t think you can lock it, except from inside. You slide a bolt and it goes through a little loop, but how can you do that from outside?”
“Maybe she’s in there with a boyfriend.”
“My God, maybe she is. Margarita! God damn you, open the door or I’ll call the INS on you.” There was a pause, and then Keller heard them moving around, and some heavy breathing.