“Miss Edmond? Miss Lang? Whoever you are today, are you home?” He flicked on a light. The cat pointed its nose tentatively at a bowl near the door, where a can-shaped glob of food was slowly diminishing under a swarm of ants. Enough food for a week, he thought. “Eat up, cat. Protein.” The cat, which Shephard noted was cross-eyed, moaned again.
He stepped over it and stood in the middle of the small living room. The suite was airless and nearly dark from the drawn curtains. He turned on a lamp and discovered that he was standing amidst thirty years of Surfside history, framed and dusty, hanging from the walls. Quite a social director, he thought; pictures of everything. Here was the cast that had become so familiar to him over the last week: Joe and Helene on the courts with Wade and Colleen; Burton and Hope Creeley at rest in the Surfside Lounge, martinis raised.
A home with nobody in it sounds like a door with nobody to open it, he thought. He raised his voice once more to confirm her absence, and it echoed briefly, unanswered. Gone for the weekend, and enough food for the cat. He noted that the litter box in the corner was well used. Outside, the wind buffeted the windows and the living room drapes lilted. When he opened the window, a gust of dry wind blew in. The cat moaned again.
Shephard leaned up close to a large photograph of Helene Lang and Joe Datilla sitting in a car. The car was a red convertible Cadillac. For a man who had “tried hard not to know her,” his attentive smile, relaxed expression, and the comforting arm he’d wrapped around Helene looked like not much of a try at all. Why had he even bothered to lie, Shephard wondered. It must be common knowledge.
The same car that was stolen last week. The same car now at the disposal of the Fire Killer. In spite of the heat, Shephard felt a chill register down his back. To the left of the picture was a smaller one, vintage black and white, of Wade and Colleen Shephard standing on A Dock. Wade was on the left with his arm around her. Colleen was smiling at the camera, a broad and delighted smile. Wade was looking at her, or perhaps at the other man who stood to her right, also with his arm wrapped around Colleen. His face was lost in shadow, but somehow familiar to Shephard. He searched his memory for an earlier encounter with the man, but found none.
The hallway of Helene Lang’s suite was covered with more pictures, dozens of them. As Shephard stopped to study them he noticed that her collection began in the living room and continued chronologically down the hallway. The last photograph before the closed bedroom door was of a group of people he had never seen, the new wave of Surfside members. Their dress was extravagant and obvious. Mid-sixties bellbottoms and miniskirts, too much jewelry, long hair.
When he pushed open the bedroom door and saw Helene lying comfortably in her bed, he knew that something wasn’t right.
“Helene, wake up,” he commanded. Moving across the bedroom in the dank half-light, he saw her peaceful face; the empty bottle of gin on the nightstand; the prescription bottle beside it, empty too; and now the cat, which had silently entered behind him and leaped onto the bed, purring and rubbing its head against the woman’s face. When Shephard reached down to shoo the cat away he looked into the half-open eyes of Helene Lang and knew that she had been dead for several hours.
The cat slunk to her face for another rub and Shephard slapped it away. He found her carotid and pressed it, uselessly. His ears were ringing, and he felt a bloated thumping in his chest.
Shephard saw that Helene had left an envelope resting on her chest. To Joseph was written on the outside in a calm and lovely script. He stood for a moment and tried to quiet his pounding heart, but the attempt was as futile as trying to find life in Helene Lang’s quiet artery. With a silent nod to his own ungodliness, Shephard took the envelope, shut the door behind him, and returned to the stale kitchen. He sat down, and heard Helene Lang’s whiskey voice as he read:
My Dear Joseph,
It was only a few days ago that I realized how long I’ve been waiting for this. Strangely, I am at peace now. I leave with much bitterness and regret, but I bargained for them both, as you well know. The real sadness about life is all the time it gives us to do what we can never undo. If I spent my time too close to the shadows I have no one to blame except myself. And what is it about those shadows that draws some of us, like moths to light? I suppose there is a sunny world somewhere, but it never much interested us, did it, Joe? For what we did to Burton I should burn twice in hell, and would do it gladly if it could bring him back and make things right. But that is childish, and we have been anything but children. Regret is a luxury that even I have outgrown. The one good thing I did on earth was love you, but Jesus, why does He give us the hands to do what we imagine? Finally, I will hurt you too, but the confession I made was for myself, and believe me I needed it badly. Even after all we have done I cannot be a part of what you do now. I have made arrangements to bring the proper people to the proper places, and should they fail and you succeed, no one will be wronged more than they have been wronged already.
I love you, Joe, but I wish I’d never been born to do it.
Peace to you someday, too,
The cat jumped onto Shephard’s lap and rubbed its nose against the corner of the letter. His nerves jolted and he pushed the animal back to the floor. The wind outside assaulted the windows and the glass shivered so vehemently that Shephard wondered if it might break and bring the whole storm into the suite. He smoked a cigarette and flushed the butt down the kitchen sink, then smoked another. If Helene Lang was just a crazy liar, she had played it right down to the end, he thought. A lot farther, it seemed, than anyone would have asked her to.
For the next hour, Shephard went through her suite. He again studied the photographs in the living room and hall. He carefully rifled the kitchen drawers. In the second room off the hallway, guest quarters, he inspected the closet and found it nearly empty, but lingered over a collection of personal papers and snapshots that were pushed far into the recesses of a dresser. Letters from Joe, innocent lover’s notes; a dried and ancient boutonniere with pin still intact; a baby picture unmistakably of Joe Datilla.
Back in the bedroom, which now seemed to smell of death, he worked his way through the large walk-in closet. Helene Lang’s wardrobe befitted the social animaclass="underline" cocktail dresses, dinner dresses, business suits, all bunched along one wall, gay colors and fine fabrics. The clothes were pressed together without regard for wrinkles or freshness, some of the slinkier gowns having slid to an end of their hangers, which now dipped helter-skelter from the weight. Another wall was dedicated to sport clothes and sweaters. The floor of the closet looked like a sale bin in a discount store: it was littered with dozens of shoes, which formed a small hill of mismatched colors and shapes. A group of bathing suits lay in one corner, the top one still damp from a recent swim. The suits below lay in a heap that smelled of chlorine and mildew.
The bathroom was roomy but dominated by crud. Black mold stained the bottom of the shower door, the linoleum cracked and peeled upward in one corner, and a furry orange rug was wadded around the toilet base, either to stop a leak or warm the feet.
Helene Lang must have done her entertaining at the lounge, Shephard thought, if she did any entertaining at all. The sink dripped, and the mirror above was so smudged that it offered only a translucent approximation when he looked into it. He wondered if an approximation was all Helene had wanted.