“All this to get Dennison distracted from the election.”
Virginia’s pale eyes took on the clarity of anger. “All this to save the city I live in.”
Weir knew better than to argue. He stood, glanced down at the picture of Becky Flynn on the pamphlets, then went to the window and looked out at the descending evening. “Who’s the cop you’re so friendly with?”
“Sgt. Dale Blodgett.”
Jim considered this, let the implications roll around inside his head, let them come to rest with as little interference as he could allow. There was the obvious. “Did he know Ann? Blodgett, I mean.”
Virginia tracked his movement back toward the table. “We made a few sample runs together. The three of us spent some time patrolling the bay in his boat. Why?”
“I’m just curious, Mom. That’s all.”
Virginia’s silence accused him. Weir let it wash off him, as he had done so many times in his life. The thing about his mother was that she was losing people to care about, and replacing them with people to hate. Poon had always been such a goofball, he thought: How did they ever stand each other? It seemed important now to get back on track.
“I wonder why she didn’t tell Raymond — about being followed.”
Virginia shook her head, clueless, then sighed very deeply. “I don’t think that she and Ray had been talking much, Jim. Annie was far too private to confide something like that to me, but I think there may have been some... strain. This is interesting: I saw a light on at Ann’s Kids one night when I couldn’t sleep. This was back in early April. It was midnight — after Annie was done with work but before Ray would be home. So I walked over to the school, and there was Ann in her office, writing in this book. It was a leather-bound journal, good paper, blank pages. She seemed embarrassed, asked me not to tell Ray she was spending precious time keeping a diary. And I remember thinking, What business is it of Ray’s what my daughter writes?”
Jim remembered no diary in Ann’s house, nothing on the impound list to account for it in Evidence. Check with Innelman he thought, and check the office of Ann’s Kids.
“Of course,” said Virginia, “Ann always did like to write things down.”
“Yeah, I remember that.” Jim remembered a favorite Ann writing, a short story called “The Fists of Muhammad,” in which a teenage girl dreams of having hands like Muhammad Ali’s in order to beat up on her obnoxious younger — but stronger — brother. She’d typed it up on Virginia’s old Royal and left it tacked to the door of his room. Ann. “Becky told me that Ann didn’t seem right lately.”
Virginia took a deep breath and looked down at her big rough hands. “Jim, I really don’t know if she was happy anymore. This was a bad winter, but you wouldn’t know because you were gone. Cold enough to freeze my hot-water pipes — the old ones that run over the roof — wind all day, just couldn’t thaw out. You know how Annie and Ray’s house is — just a shell with carpet inside. I got them a good electric blanket and one of those electric heaters that cost a thousand dollars a day to run. Anyway, Ann was down, withdrawn, smiling all the time when she didn’t mean it. You know Annie — she was tough to read, but if you knew the way she was, you could see the falseness in her. Then, the end of April, she was coming out of it. We got freak weather then — eighty degrees, dry and clear. I thought maybe she was just thawing out with the sun. She was okay for about a week. She looked great, put on a little weight, rosy in the face. Pregnant, right? Just absolutely alive with promise. Then, second or third week of April, she went back down, worse than before. And she tried to hide it even harder... pure Weir. It lasted until about a week ago. She went up again, like nothing was ever wrong.”
Virginia was quiet for a while. As the silence stretched on, Weir could feel the ghosts of Poon and Jake and now Ann lurking about them, easing around the air, trying to get through and mutter the truth to them. The curtains swayed, and a shadow did or did not pass across the reflective surface of the sliding glass door. “Did you see her that day, Mom? Before you went to the Whale for wine?”
Virginia nodded. “I went by the preschool at two, to help with the milk and snacks. Scotty handles the café when I’m out. She wasn’t all the way there, Jim. Little things, like she gave milk to Danny, but Danny’s allergic to milk and always has orange juice. She caught herself, but I thought she was going to break into tears over it. She dropped a plate of crackers and almost cried. Something was wrong, but she wouldn’t say what. She said hormones. Damn.”
“Did you go into her office?”
“Yes.”
“That’s when you saw the roses on her desk?”
Virginia nodded. “Purple ones. Lovely. Come clean with the roses, Jim. What’s the connection?”
“There were eleven roses... at the scene. On Annie’s body.”
“Oh, Christ.”
Jim tried to graph Ann’s ups and downs over the last months, the months he was away. So much of the picture was missing. “When Annie was having a bad time this winter, did you ask her about it?”
“Of course I did. She admitted to me that things were getting to her. You have to understand how hard she and Ray worked. Look at Annie’s life: up at seven to get breakfast for Ray, then be off for the preschool. Home at four to do the house, do her errands, then off at six-thirty for the cocktail rush at the Whale. Back home again at eleven to get something ready for Ray to eat when he came home. Wait up for him, go to sleep at midnight or one, unless Ray was studying for an hour or so, which he usually did. Look at Ray’s life. Up at seven, study a while, drive up to morning class, home early afternoon for a nap, then go to work at five. He doesn’t get home before midnight, sometimes one in the morning. I never saw two people work harder in my whole life. I think they got so used to the treadmill, they wouldn’t know what to do if they got off it. Sometimes when I looked at them, I had the feeling that the only thing holding them together was the struggle. Like if they slowed down to smell the roses — there are those roses again — they’d just blow away in the breeze.”
“Is that what Annie told you?”
“That’s what she said. I waited around the Whale one night to walk her home. Terrible rainstorm, cold, arctic air. We went into her place for some tea, and we huddled in our coats and waited for those dumb wall furnaces to kick in. We stayed up a while and talked. She told me the whole thing might be worth it if she had a family around her. She wanted a child so badly, but the uterus... and she told me she wished she could point to one thing and say, ‘It’s all worth it because of this.’ She just looked so lost, wrapped in that big parka of hers. Thirty-nine years old and working two jobs to provide for a family she thought she’d never have. I don’t want to cry again.”
“Mom, do you think she’d see another man?”
Virginia looked at him a little vehemently, shaking her head. “She might. There was enough Poon in her. Do you?”
Jim thought for a moment, though he’d been wondering about this question since Raymond’s first call that night, saying that Ann wasn’t home. The truth of the matter, he thought, was that Ann would never tell him if she was. Not just because of Ray, but because of Ann herself. How well had he really known her? There had always been an unspoken agreement between them not to drag each other through every pit. That would be demeaning. There was the unspoken assumption that they didn’t mess each other up with things that were beneath a certain level of dignity neither had defined but each recognized. There was always the formality of borders, of belief in the idea that good fences make good siblings. Weir thought now: What shit.