He folded his arms on the table in front of him, and, weeping silently, laid his head down against it.
He did not know how much time had passed. He knew everything, however. That the library door had not opened, and that Mona must still be asleep, and that his servants knew what he’d done, or else they would have been hovering around him. That twilight had come. That the house was waiting for something, or witnessing something.
Finally he sat back and saw that the light outside was that shining white of spring evenings, making all the leaves distinct, and that the golden light of the lamp gave a little cheer to the vast room with its old paintings.
A tiny voice reached his ears, singing, thin, distant. And gradually as he sat very still, he realized it was Violetta’s song, on the gramophone. This meant his nymph had waked; she was about, winding the old toy. He must rouse himself. He must talk to her about these mortal sins.
He stood up and made his way slowly through the shadowy room, and to the library. The music came strongly through the door, the happy song of Violetta from La Traviata. The waltz they’d played when Violetta was strong and gay, before she began to die so wondrously in operatic fashion. Light came from beneath the door, golden and soft.
She sat on the floor, half risen more or less, resting back on her hands, naked as before, her breasts loose but high placed and the color of baby skin. The nipples the pink of baby’s nipples.
There was no music. Had it been some trick of noise? She was staring at the window to the cast-iron porch outside. And Michael saw that it was open. It was what they called a pocket window, and the sash had been thrown up all the way to make a doorway out of it. The shutters, which he had kept closed all the time himself, rather liking to see slats of afternoon sun, were open, too. A loud noise sounded in the street, but it was only a passing car, jetting too fast through the narrow shadowy intersection.
She was startled; her hair was mussed, her face still smooth with lingering sleep.
“What is this?” he said. “Someone came in that window?”
“Tried to come,” she said. Her voice was foggy with sleep.
“Do you smell that smell?” She turned and looked at him, and before he could make an answer, she started to dress.
Michael went to the window and cranked shut the green blinds immediately. The corner beyond stood deserted or so dark beneath the oaks that it might as well have been. The mercury street lamp was like a moon face snared in the branches above. Michael brought down the sash, and turned the lock. Should have been locked all the time! He was furious.
“Do you smell it?” she said. She was dressed when he turned around. The room was all shadows now that he had shut out the corner light. She came to him and turned her back for him to tie her cotton sash.
“Goddamnit, who was it?” The stiff starched cotton felt good to his fingers. He tied the sash as best he could, having never done this for a little girl before, trying to make the bow pretty when he was finished with it. She turned around, staring past him at the window.
“You don’t catch that scent, do you?” She went past him and peered through the glass, through the slats. Then she shook her head.
“You didn’t see who it was, did you?” He had half a mind to go out there, charging through the garden, and around the block, to accost whatever strangers he might find, to search up Chestnut Street and down First until he found some suspicious person. “My hammer, I need it,” he said.
“Your hammer?”
“I don’t use a gun, honey. My hammer’s always been good enough.” He went to the hall closet.
“Michael, the person’s long gone. He was gone when I woke up. I heard him running away. I don’t think…I don’t know that he knew there was anyone in here.”
He came back. Something white was shining on the dark carpet. Her ribbon. He picked it up and absently she took it from him and fixed it in her hair with no need of a mirror.
“I’ve got to go,” she said. “I gotta go see my mother, CeeCee, I should have gone before now. She’s probably scared to death that she’s in a hospital.”
“You didn’t see anything at all?” he said.
He followed her out and down the hall.
“I caught that scent,” she said. “I think it was the scent that woke me up, and then I heard the noise of the window.”
How calm she was. He was in a blaze of protective fury.
He opened the front door, and went out first, to the edge of the porch. Anyone could have hidden anywhere out there, behind the oaks, across the street behind a wall, even low down among the big elephant ears and palms that crowded his own garden. My own garden.
“I’m going, Michael, I’ll call you later,” she said.
“You must be nuts, you think I’m going to let you walk off home like this in the dark? Are you crazy?”
She stopped on the steps. She had been about to protest, but then she too cast a wary eye on the shadows that surrounded them. She looked thoughtfully up into the branches and at the dark shadows of Chestnut Street. “I’ve got an idea. You follow me. Then when he springs out, whoever he is, you kill him with your hammer. You have your hammer?”
“That’s ridiculous. I’ll drive you home,” he said. He pulled her in and shut the door.
Henri was in the kitchen, just as he ought to have been, in white shirt and suspenders and drinking his whiskey from a white china cup so no one would know it. He put down the newspaper, and stood up. He would take the child home, of course. Or to the hospital? Certainly. Whatever Miss Mona wanted. He reached for his coat, which was ever ready on the chair behind him.
Michael walked out with them to the drive, distrustful of the darkness, and saw them safely to the car. Mona waved, a smear of red hair at the window. He felt an ache for her as they drove away, that he had let her go without a parting embrace, and then he was ashamed of it.
He went back inside, locking the kitchen door behind him.
He went back to the hall closet. His old tool chest was here, on the first floor under the stairs. This house was so big you had to have a tool chest for every floor of it. But these were his old tools, his favorites, and this was the claw hammer with the chewed-up old wooden handle, the one he had owned all his years in San Francisco.
A strange awareness came over him and he clutched it tight, and went to peer through the library window again. This had been his dad’s hammer. He’d taken it out to San Francisco when he was a boy, with all his dad’s tools. Nice to have something of his dad’s amid all the great carefully inventoried Mayfair wealth, just one simple tool or two. He lifted the hammer. Love to bash it through the burglar’s skull, he thought. As if we don’t have enough trouble in this house, and some bastard tries to break in the library window!
Unless…
He switched on the light nearest the corner and examined the little gramophone. Covered with dust. No one had touched it. He didn’t know whether or not he could touch it. He knelt down, put his fingers on the soft felt turntable. The records of La Traviata were in their thick old faded album. The crank lay beside the thing. It looked impossibly old. Who had made the waltz play twice now in this house, when this thing itself lay inert and dust-covered?
There was a sound in the house, a creaking as if someone was walking. Perhaps Eugenia. Or perhaps not.
“Goddamnit,” he said. “Son of a bitch is in this place?”
He set out at once to make a search. He covered the whole first floor room by room, listening, watching, studying the tiny lights in the control boxes of the alarm which told him if anything was moving in rooms beyond him. Then he went upstairs, and covered the second floor as well, poking into closets and bathrooms that he had not entered in all this time, and even into the front bedroom, where the bed was all made and a vase of yellow roses stood on the mantel.