“Hurt?”
“Um? No.”
“Good. So, you decided how to handle it?”
I had never talked to anyone about my methods before. Julia had never had the chance to see me work.
“They live in an isolated house in the middle of Nowhere, Arkansas,” I said. “Which is good, in the sense that I should be able to snoop about unseen because there’ll be hardly anyone around. But it’s bad because if there is anyone about, I’ll stick out like a sore thumb. But the best thing is, they’re big-time churchgoers.”
“Sunday,” she said, nodding. “The whole family.” Smarter than she looked. “All day. All that preaching and singing. Hours and hours to get into their house and take a look around.” She grinned at me, then remembered and turned away.
I turned on my laptop and while it warmed up Tammy pulled on a sweatshirt and went outside. I hooked up my cell phone, got online and started searching the web. After a few minutes, I heard the chunk-and-scatter of wood being chopped into kindling. For the next hour, I clicked my way through web pages, and Tammy got a real rhythm going with the hatchet; she had peeled down to her T-shirt and the wood was piling up. We didn’t need it. I watched for a while, then picked up the phone book and turned to electronics suppliers.
Tammy came back in just as I finished organizing my notes. The exercise had done her good; she looked bigger, stronger, more relaxed.
“Tea?”
“Thank you,” she said, and smiled tentatively. “It’s great out there, real fresh and clean-smelling.” I smiled back, then got up to fill the kettle. Tammy looked at my neat pile of notes. “You look all set.”
“I’ve worked out a beginning. But there’s nothing I can do for a while.” In New York both knees had been whole, and I’d still had my throat slit by a scarecrow with a razor.
A house is more likely to be inhabitable in the long term if you approach it as a spaceship. Think of the walls and roof and windows as hull integrity; electrical, heating, and sewage systems as life support; floors and interior walls as decorated bulkheads. I had walls and a roof but would need to get the windows glazed before there was perfect hull integrity. I’d dug and installed the septic system months ago, but still needed to install toilet, bath, sinks, and shower. The electrical system could wait. Heating couldn’t. I needed glass, I needed a wood-burning stove, and I needed to check and repoint the chimney and flue. We would have to go to town for the glass and the stove, which for now left the chimney and flue.
The cabin smelled of cold stone and raw wood, and my breath steamed. I stood in the middle of the unfinished floor and studied the massive fieldstone fireplace.
“How are you with heights?” I asked Tammy.
“Depends,” she said warily. “What did you have in mind?”
It seemed that Tammy could climb a ladder up to the roof and the chimney, but not let go of it once she was there, which made the whole exercise rather pointless. I would have to wait a few days before I could get up a ladder and do the chimney repairs myself. Meanwhile, I took a look at the flue and inside stonework. Apart from a few minor repairs, the flue looked solid and well designed, and we didn’t need ladders for the first stage of interior pointwork.
Under my direction, Tammy carried the bags of cement and buckets of water and mixed the two in the right proportions until I was satisfied. Then I showed her how to slap the mortar between the stone with an upward stroke, slice the excess off with the downstroke, and shape what was left with a fast right-to-left horizontal swipe.
“The trick is to not get mortar all over the face of the stone because then you have to chip it off bit by bit when it’s dry, which is tedious and time-consuming.”
Slap, chop, scrape. Slap, chop, scrape. Stretch, bend, sigh. Mindless rhythm of stone and mortar and steel, dusty scent of mortar and wet mixing board. It was probably not much over fifty degrees outside, and a breeze blew through the open door, but Tammy’s face grew lightly sheened with sweat, and my knee ached.
I woke in the early hours. I took the phone outside and called Eddie’s number at the Journal-Constitution. I had to leave a message.
“It’s me. I need follow-up on that George Karp story, whatever comes over the wires: new leads, witness statements, police activity, Karp’s condition. I’m particularly interested in what evidence the police think they have. You’ve got my number.”
The first two days, we worked only until lunch because I was still too tired to do a full day. When my knee got strong enough to lighten the strapping, and limber enough to climb cautiously up the ladder to repoint the chimney, I spent an hour every afternoon in the woods. There wouldn’t be many of these days left, and it gave me time to think about Karp and what might happen if he woke up and gave the police a good description; what might happen if the police took that description to the local cafés, talked to the waitress in the second café, where I’d left the book. I tried to think about moving money to a Swiss account and how I could build a new identity, but each time found myself wondering instead how I could make sure nothing went wrong in Arkansas, or contemplating what still had to be done at the cabin.
Tammy and I didn’t speak much during the day, but at night, over food and coffee, we talked of this and that. I told her about Dree, the hairdresser, about Asheville, what I could remember of the history of the place. She told me of her undergraduate years at the University of Georgia, the friends she had lost touch with. We didn’t drink. We didn’t read. We would climb into our respective beds and sleep like stones, or at least Tammy did. I woke up suddenly, at all hours, thinking of Karp—I should have killed him, should have made sure; I shouldn’t have hurt him in the first place—wondering what was wrong with me, why I wasn’t already running, and where a nine-year-old girl might go to hide, if she could.
One morning I woke before dawn. The air was still and cool and humid, the way it gets in an airtight metal box, no matter how nicely you disguise the interior with leather upholstery and good carpets, and I wanted to walk. I dressed quietly and crept out into the clearing. My breath bloomed before me like the thought balloon of an empty-headed cartoon character. There were no tracks in the hoarfrost. The predawn sky was like lead, with barely enough light to see. I was glad of my thick jacket.
Amid the trees, leaves fell, gray and silent, like something filmed in the early days of cinema. The air was crisp enough to slice at the warm mucus membranes of my nose and throat, and smelled of iron. Autumn. This is where new life begins, with the seed falling on hard ground, being buried by dead leaves. The old life had to die first.
Tammy was dressed and on what looked like her third cup of coffee by the time I got back. The bright interior of the trailer seemed garish after the cold clarity of the woods.
“I was trying not to get worried,” she said.
“I woke up this morning and it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen or heard a groundhog in days, that they’ve begun to hibernate, and I went out into the woods and saw the first gouged tree of the season—from deer, rubbing the velvet off their new antlers—and I realized it’s November.”
“Okay. Let’s pretend I don’t understand what you’re talking about and need a few hints.”
“Today is the second of November. My birthday.”
“Your birth—”
“And I was thinking, there are a few things we need, and I should return that Neon.”