Then, quite suddenly, I thought of someone.
“Well,” I said hesitantly, not wanting to emphasize the point, “there was this one woman who worked for my father.”
Rebecca’s eyes bored into me. “Who?”
“Her name was Nellie Grimes,” I said. “I didn’t know her very well.”
“Was she a neighbor?”
“No. She just worked for my father.”
A divorcee, with a three-year-old daughter, Nellie had begun to work in the hardware store in the fall of 1956. My father had needed someone to straighten out the store’s tangled bookkeeping system, but after doing that, Nellie had stayed on to handle the part of the business my father despised, the dismal mountain of paperwork involved in keeping the store stocked, billing credit customers, even paying the store’s own bills. He’d never liked any of the minutiae of running his own small business, and after Nellie came on, he’d turned all of it over to her. Thorough and highly organized, Nellie had quickly become indispensable to my father, a woman, as I’d once heard him describe her, “of many talents.”
“‘Of many talents,’” Rebecca repeated as she wrote the phrase in her book. “Who did he say that to?”
My own answer surprised me. “My mother.”
“So your mother knew about Nellie Grimes?”
I labored to dismiss the disquieting notion that there might have been an edge of cruelty in my father’s description of Nellie, as if he were bent upon making the contrast between “poor Dottie” and a woman of “many talents” as painful as he could.
“Well, she knew who Nellie was,” I answered casually. “All of us knew who she was, that she was this woman who worked for my father.” I shrugged. “But I don’t think it occurred to any of us that there might have been something going on between them.”
I thought of all the times I’d seen my father and Nellie together, simply standing in one of the store’s cluttered aisles, or hunched over Nellie’s desk in the back, the two of them trying to straighten out some incongruity in the books. Everything had always looked perfectly normal between them. Neither had ever exhibited the slightest sense of a clandestine relationship, of secret hideaways or kisses stolen behind a potted palm.
“It always seemed like an ordinary, professional relationship,” I said.
Rebecca gave me a penetrating look. “Then why did you bring her up?”
“Just as a possibility,” I answered, dismissing it at the same time. “Nothing more than that.”
But it was more than that.
I knew that it was more because of the force with which Nellie had suddenly returned to me. I hadn’t thought of her in years, and yet I saw her exactly as she’d appeared during the time she’d worked for my father.
She was a short, compact woman with curly light-brown hair, always neatly dressed, her lips painted a bright, glossy red. She had called me Skipper for some reason, and at the little birthday party my mother threw for me three months before her murder, Nellie gave me a blue captain’s cap with a large golden anchor stitched across the front. Her daughter was named May, and at the party she’d stood, looking a bit confused, in a lacy white dress, a small, willowy child with long, blond hair and a vacant look in her light green eyes.
“Why did this woman in particular come to mind, Steve?”
“Opportunity, I suppose,” I said. “I mean, they were alone in the store a good deal. It would have been easy for him.”
“Would that have been enough for your father to have an affair?” Rebecca asked. “Just that it would have been convenient?”
The world “affair” struck me as an inappropriate one to use in terms of any relationship my father might have had with Nellie. It seemed too worldly and sophisticated a word for either one of them. Had the “affair” existed at all, it would have been carried out in cheap motel rooms off noisy, commercial roads. Or, perhaps, even worse, just a quick, sweaty tumble in the back of the hardware store. As such, it didn’t strike me as the sort of thing my father would have done.
“No, I don’t think so,” I told Rebecca. “Besides, he never struck me as being driven in that way. Toward sex, I mean, just for itself.” I thought a moment longer, my father’s face returning to me, clothed in the curling smoke that had always seemed to surround him. “Love might have attracted him, though.”
“Could your father have gotten that from Nellie Grimes?” Rebecca asked.
I considered Nellie carefully once again, recalling the round face and hazel eyes, the somewhat large and rolling hips, but more important, the buoyancy of her manner, the uncomplicated happiness and jollity that seemed to pour from her, and which was so different from the general gloominess and withdrawal which characterized my mother.
I nodded. “Maybe,” I admitted.
My father kept a small army-surplus cot in the back of the store, and for an instant I saw him lying upon it, wrapped in Nellie’s somewhat flabby arms, his old gray work clothes stripped away and bundled sloppily in a pile beneath the creaking springs of the old metal cot. It was not a vision I could sustain, however.
I shook my head. “I can’t give you any particular reason, Rebecca, but I just don’t think my father would have been attracted to Nellie Grimes.”
“Do you know what happened to her?” Rebecca asked. “There’s no indication in the investigation that she was thought of in connection with the murders.”
“Well, she wasn’t working at the store when it all happened,” I explained. “She’d stopped working for my father by then.”
“When did she stop?”
I tried to recall the time exactly, but found that I could come up with only a general approximation. “Toward the end of the summer,” I said. “Sometime in the middle of August, I think.”
“Do you know why she left?”
“No.”
“Do you know where she went?”
“I don’t know that either,” I said. “But I do remember the last time I saw her.”
It had been in the railway station downtown. My father had driven her and May, who was six years old by then, to the train late one summer afternoon, and I had come along with them, May and I bouncing about in the back of the van, along with a varied array of battered old suitcases, while my father and Nellie sat up front, talking quietly.
My father had been dressed in his usual work clothes that day, but Nellie had dolled herself a bit in a black polka-dot dress to which she’d added a round, pillbox hat with a short black net that hung from her forehead to just beneath her upper lip, and which, though long out of style, had given her an unmistakable air of mystery.
Once at the station, my father had lugged the suitcases to the appropriate ramp, then we had all waited for Nellie’s train. It had not been long in coming, and during that short interval, my father and Nellie had smoked cigarettes and talked quietly while May and I darted here and there among the other passengers. I caught none of the conversation that passed between them except, at the very end, as the train was already pulling into the station, its cloud of billowing steam pouring over them, I saw my father take a plain white envelope and press it into Nellie’s hand. He said nothing at all, but the look which passed between them at that instant was very beautiful and grave, deeper than a casual farewell.
For a moment, I labored to bring back those two lost faces. I saw my father peering down at Nellie, his large, sad eyes settling delicately upon her as he placed the envelope in her hand, then gently folded her fingers around it. She was staring up at him, pressing her face closer to him as if reaching for his lips. She seemed to strain toward him unconsciously for a moment, then to pull back, instantly aware that he would not bend toward her, not so much as a single, tender inch.