“What the hell does he want?” Brian asked. He was suddenly at her arm, squeezing it, priming her maybe for a mad dash to the car.
The man slid open the window. It broke and cracked away from the nails that held it down to the rotted sill. The man leaned out as if he were serving them from a drive thru window. “Afternoon,” he said.
Mary felt his hot breath on her face. She tasted him-his breath was dirty, as if he had been eating soil. His teeth were ruined, and little wisps of oily hair splayed out on both sides of his head. But there was something attractive about the man, something Mary couldn’t identify. He had been someone’s lover once, a long time ago.
“You the folks here about Polly?” he asked.
Mary nodded. She was still locked in place, immobile.
“Sharon called me from the diner. That’s my girl. Said there were some kids down from DeLane looking into the Deanna Ward thing. Anyway. Said I might know something about that. I said, ‘Yes ma’am, I certainly do. Or I know someone who does.’”
“Who would that be?” Dennis asked.
“He’s at the Wobble Inn. That’s down on Rattlesnake Ridge, out there by I-64. You just take Upper Stretch all the way to its end and take a right on Hopper Road. You’ll be on the ridge then. Follow the signs toward the interstate. The inn is up on the right-hand side, just a mile off the freeway. You can hear the rumble of the semitrucks from there.”
“Who are we supposed to see at the inn?” Brian this time.
“You’ll know him. Tends bar there nights. You tell him Marco sent you, and he’ll tell you everything he knows. Which is a lot, let me tell you. The boy is like a goddamned encyclopedia on Deanna Ward. Some folks said he might have been involved in it, but that ain’t the truth. He’s just curious, you know, like you all.”
The man smiled his ruined smile again. “I don’t want you all thinking I’m some crazy,” he said.
“No.” Dennis again, assuring the man. “Not at all.”
“It ain’t like I live here or nothin’. This is just…temporary. Just until I get on my feet and Sharon gets her own place. Look, I got it nice in here. Hot plate. Cell phone. I’m twenty-first century, baby.” Mary saw that he was trying to convince himself more than them. The man did an odd little bow then and leaned back into the shadows of the trailer. Slowly, as if favoring a hurt leg, he returned to that corner, where he curled up among his rags and old quilts.
Then the sky opened up and the rain came flat across the wind into their eyes and faces. “Run!” Dennis said, and they all dashed for the Lexus. Inside, the rain crashed against the windshield and their breath steamed every surface, making it impossible to see. For a few minutes they sat in the car without speaking. The inn is just a mile off the freeway, Mary thought. There was something to that statement but she didn’t know what. She decided to let it be until she could articulate it; she had found in the last six weeks that there were “private” thoughts, such as her curiosity about Summer McCoy in the Mike photograph and the call from the campus police, and there were more shared thoughts, possible facts that she needed someone to check. Confusing the two, she knew, would only get her into trouble.
“Are we ready?” Dennis asked when the rain had slacked a bit.
“I guess,” Mary said, too soft for anyone to hear.
They set off down Upper Stretch Road, toward the Wobble Inn.
32
The bartender was a member of MENSA. He was telling them about his many failed attempts to get a degree, how the “establishment” had robbed him every time. When Dennis asked what his interests were, he said, “How much time do you have?” He began to list them: seventeenth-century poetry, fluid mechanics, string theory, game theory, chaos theory. He looked at them squarely, gauging their level of intimidation. Brian sipped his Diet Coke. “Anyway,” the man said, wiping down a glass with the long towel he had draped over his shoulder, “none of it is applicable to the real world. I guess that’s why I’m here.” He spread his arms so they could behold it, this dark little dive off to the side of a rarely traveled stretch of two-lane highway. There were four or five people there, all men, and they were huddled in a back corner playing Texas Hold ’Em. Mary wondered if the man on Upper Stretch Road had somehow led them astray.
They were trying to bide their time with the bartender, disarm him somehow so they could ask about Polly. He was going on now about one of his theories-the one where there were multiple galaxies “pancaked,” as he explained it, on top of one another. “It’s a certainty that there is extraterrestrial life in this model,” he said, his tone deftly serious. And then he leaned closer to them, his finger pointed toward Dennis’s chest. “An absolute certainty.”
Brian was getting anxious. His foot was tapping below the bar, and he was down to the water in his Coke. The men in the back fell into sudden laughter, the sound like a shot in the close acoustics of the tavern. “Did you know Polly?” he finally asked.
The man stared at them. He wiped out another glass and placed it on a high shelf, his eyes never leaving Brian’s. “Sure,” he said, his voice calm now and searing. “Everybody did.”
“Did she come in here?” Dennis went on.
“She was just a kid when she left Bell City. Nineteen or twenty. This wasn’t her kind of place.”
“Where did you know her from?” asked Dennis.
“I knew her aunt and uncle. They lived out on Upper Stretch Road.”
The bartender was being difficult. He was stubbing up, closing them out of some information that Mary could see he had. He was leery of them, she knew, suspicious of these questions. Just the name, the word itself-Polly-must have sent a charge through the residents of Bell City.
“What kind of girl was she?” Dennis tried.
“Nice,” the man said. “Sweet girl. Got involved in some stuff, you know. We all did. Made mistakes. Regretted them. Lived to see another day. It happens. Otherwise, she was just an average teenager.”
“Stuff?” asked Brian.
He was still looking at them, his gaze almost hot. He shook his head, then; laughed a little. The lights behind the bar were severe, probably on a mandate from the county because bad light led to fake identification scandals that a place like the Wobble Inn surely couldn’t afford. The man’s face was lit harshly in the glow.
He knows something, Mary thought. It’s right there. If I could just get him to open up. If I could just-