“She said!” Lou spat. “She said the painting was here! She saw it!”
Rebecca. His spy all along. I let this sit on my thoughts for a moment, as if seeing how long I could hold an ember.
The sergeant looked beat. He shook his head at Lou. Then his face brightened. “Mr. Hamlin, where is your niece?”
“She doesn’t have it,” he said. “She made this happen!”
Oh, treacherous Rebecca! But her note was coming into focus. She’d duped me good, but she’d gone to great lengths to dupe her uncle too, and leave me protected.
The sergeant peered at me. “Where is Rebecca? Does she have the painting?”
I said nothing.
That’s when I heard John: “Rose. I smell rose.”
Suddenly, I could smell it too, as if it had exploded in my pocket; it was all over me, all over the bed and the walls and the safe. I looked away from John.
“Mr. Vance,” the sergeant continued, “if you can help us, it’ll be good for you.”
John leveled his gaze at me. “The perfume is here. I smell it. I smell the rose perfume!”
The sergeant patted me down and found the vial. He took a disinterested sniff, handed it to John, and turned back to me.
“Now there’s this,” he said, like a tired parent. “We could forget this altogether if you cooperate.”
I looked at the sergeant and at Lou and I savored it, my chance to turn the tables on her, to beat her at her own game. And then I let it go. “Sergeant,” I said, “Mr. Hamlin. Respectfully, I don’t know where Rebecca is and I have no idea what painting you’re talking about.”
“Arrest him,” Lou barked, sandwiched between officers. “Arrest him for the perfume!”
And they might have. But there was John again, the vial in his hand. “This isn’t it.”
“What?” I shouted, unable to stop myself.
John held up the vial and pointed to an unblemished lip. “No chip,” he said. “Anyway, smell it. Putrid!” He placed the vial on a cabinet and made sure I saw the great disappointment in his eyes.
I was berated for another hour by the officers. What kind of game are you playing with us? Do you think you’ve gotten away with it? Don’t you know it’s just a matter of time? Do you really think this is going to end here, tonight? I just stared into a corner, hardly listening. I was thinking of Rebecca on westbound 64, driving fast with my car into the night. The questions weren’t for me; they were for her. And when I found her, I would make sure she heard them.
When I was at last alone, I found the forged bottle where John had set it. Rebecca must’ve made the switch during our final night together. The vial rolled around on my palm. I was so disappointed that she’d forgotten to add the chip, I didn’t have the heart to remove the cork and smell the candy spray she’d put inside.
Homework
by David L. Robbins
East End
He waited until the game ended. He did not know the score. He watched parents greet their sons leaving the playing field. Some fathers tousled their boys’ heads, others made the choice to have a teaching moment about a missed fly ball, a swing at a bad pitch. By these reactions, he guessed which team won. Mothers ended chats with other women to fetch their kids to the cinder-block refreshment stand for snow cones. Very few kids were loaded into cars and driven off; most had walked here. This was a beauty of the place, close-knit and small, that had not changed in the ten years he’d been gone.
More things were unaltered. Airplanes still droned low overhead, approaching or departing the airport a mile west. For thirty years, his granddad had worked in the tower there, been among the first ex-soldiers in the 1940s to read the electric green sweep of a radar screen. His father labored at the airport too, but the radar-man’s son was not so clever — these things are known to skip generations — and for twenty-five years he flung down people’s luggage hard enough to give himself heart failure. For six decades the airport bore the name Byrd Field, after the Arctic aviator Richard Byrd. Now the complex was Richmond International, a jumped-up title long ignored by the folks of Sandston.
At his back, behind the bleachers, ran Union Street. Two blocks down, past the elementary school, stood the saltbox house where he grew up. He didn’t need to look to know it was there. Everything in Sandston lasted, another genius of the place. While the airport had been updated enough to get a new address, the little burg itself was designed to be timeless. Sandston existed in baseball fields and playground, VFW, dentist and barber, tack shop, elementary school, and several hundred houses too simple and affordable to ever be without some humble resident or other. All stood along roads with monikers that centuries would surely not pry away, named after the generals blue and gray who in 1862 struggled for this land, wooded then, during the Seven Days Battle. Jackson, Sedgwick, Magruder, Pickett, Garland, Finley, Naglee, Mc-Clellan, every street sign a banner to everlasting honor But he’d left Sandston.
He wore no hat. The sun made him wince. He sweated and bore the unstinted summer and hot metal bleachers, no money for a soda, no care for the families of Sandston.
The afternoon aged, pinking toward dusk without cooling. Someone on the sidewalk behind the stands spoke his name, in a question, recognizing him without certainty. “Carl?” He did not turn to look. The inquiry died.
He stayed in the bleachers past the time when the field emptied, the snow cone stand shuttered, and the game and crowd were echoes in his head. The midsummer sun vanished but took another hour to pull dusk down behind it. A block away, the last tennis players quit from the dark. Once the pulses of their game stilled and the streets were vacant, Carl came down.
He rummaged through a big trash can for bottles of water, soda cans with flat remnants in the bottom, cups with water from melted ice still in them. He drank what he could find, but would not eat thrown-away food. He did not parse himself for hypocrisy. Some things were beneath him, some were not.
He moved away from the trash can and the flies drawn to it, returning to the bleachers. He did not climb up but sat under them, cross-legged like a Buddha with candy wrappers and napkins. Overhead, the bleacher seats blocked the stars like drawn blinds.
Carl stared only at the home across the street.
He had nothing. This suited him, because he wanted nothing.
No, there was one thing he had. It, itself, was multifaceted. He had hunger, but he was accustomed to it so it felt separate from him, like an item in his pocket. He had pain; this was diffuse, also familiar, and would go away soon, tonight. He had returning memories of the little ball field, these hot stands, his name called not cautiously but loudly so he could hear it out on the field, running hard to catch a ball or score. Lots of people cheering. The memories had no shelf or cubby inside him where he could tuck them away to wait until he was better. The images continued to rise, going the opposite direction of the sun. Tiny desks inside the elementary school, the tennis courts behind the VFW, parents wearing caps of their sons’ teams, lawn chairs, chain-link fences separating small backyards in the Sandston neighborhood behind him. He tried closing his eyes against the old scenes. Instead, the emptiness beneath his lids made a canvas for the hunger and pain, both patient, so he opened his eyes and submitted to the memories. They were the thing he had.
Then, to balance and return to zero, there was one thing he wanted. Tonight.
He’d been in that house once. He did some quick math to figure out how long ago, nineteen years. Nothing had changed about it: the clipped hedge on both sides of the flagstone sidewalk still led to concrete steps, the house was scaled with weathered gray siding, the window mullions painted white, the door scarlet, a plastic wreath hung around the pineapple brass knocker. Inside, he recalled doilies. Hook rugs, flowery fabrics, a cool checkerboard of black-and-white linoleum on the kitchen floor. When he was nine, it was an old lady’s house.