Lucy drives to the church without seeing a thing. She just had lunch with Emma Keilbacher that day, and Emma didn’t mention any plans to go out that evening, did she? So hard to remember at a time like this. And she just worked with Lillian yesterday—
She forbids herself to think along those lines, and collects herself before going in to the church offices. Helena is already there, bless her. The vicar, pale and red-eyed, slows them for a prayer that Lucy has no patience for. They’ve got to find Emma and Martin.
So they get into Lucy’s car, and she drives to the Keilbachers’ house. Still no one home.
“I suppose they could have gone out to eat when Martin came home.…”
“They usually just go to Marie Callendar’s during the week.”
“Yeah, that’s right.” Between them Lucy and Helena know every restaurant that Emma and Martin might frequent. So Lucy drives them to Marie Callendar’s, but they’re not there.
“Where next?”
They try the El Torito on Chapman. No luck there. They track to Three Crowns, and then Charlie’s; the Keilbachers are nowhere to be seen.
They return to the house. No luck. It’s really very frustrating.
After that it’s a matter of friends they might be visiting. Vicar Sebastian feels telephoning around is a bad idea, so there follows a nightmarish interval of visits to all the friends of the Keilbachers they know: finding they aren’t there, pausing to give the friends the news, driving on.
Lucy begins to feel more and more strongly that they should find them, it strikes her as terrible, somehow, that so many people should know and Emma and Martin still be unaware. They’re all getting frustrated, vexed, upset; it’s hard to agree on what to try next.
“Do you suppose they already heard from the police?” Sebastian asks.
Lucy shakes her head. “Abe came straight to me, there wouldn’t have been time, I don’t think.”
They track all the way to Seal Beach where the Jansens moved, then into Irvine, back to the house, over to the church, then to the Cinema 12 theaters down in Tustin.… No luck, they just aren’t to be found.
“Where are they?” Lucy demands angrily. Helena and the vicar, cowed by Lucy’s determination to find them, are out of ideas.
Defeated, Lucy can only drive back to their house, frustrated and mystified. Where in the world are they?
She parks on the street in front of the Keilbachers’ duplex. The three of them sit in the car and wait.
There isn’t much to say. The whole neighborhood is still. The streetlight overhead flickers. Street, gutter, curb, grass, sidewalk, grass, driveways, houses, they’re all flickering too, leeched of color by the mercury vapor’s blue glow: a gray world, flickering a little. It’s strange: like holding watch for some mysterious organization, or performing a new ritual that they don’t fully understand. So strange, Lucy thinks, the things life leads you into doing.
Headlights appear at the bottom of the street, and Lucy’s heart jumps in her, like a small child trapped inside, trying to escape. The car approaches slowly. Turns into the Keilbachers’ driveway.
“Oh, my God,” says Helena, and begins to cry.
The vicar begins to cry.
“Now wait a minute,” Lucy says harshly as she opens the door and begins to get out of the car. “We’re doing God’s work here—we’re his messengers, and it’s God speaking now, not us,” and sure enough it must be true, because here’s Lucy McPherson crossing the lawn toward the surprised Keilbachers, Lucy who gets teary if she’s told the story of someone’s suffering or sacrifice, Lucy who waters up if you look at her sideways—here she is just as calm as can be, as she stands before Emma and Martin and gives them the news—as steady as a doctor, as they help Emma off the lawn and inside. And all through that long horrible night, as Emma is racked with hysterical grief, and Martin sits on the back porch staring at little handprints in the concrete, at nothing, it’s Lucy that they turn to to make coffee, to fix soup, to hold Emma, to deal with the police, and with the mortuary, and with all the business that the others cannot face, shaken as they are; it’s Lucy they turn to.
60
When Dennis arrives home from Washington, very late that night, exhausted and depressed, he finds an empty house. And no note. At first he’s angry, then worried; and he can’t think what to do about it. It’s completely unlike Lucy, he can’t think of a possible explanation where she could be at three in the morning. Has she left him, like Dan Houston’s wife? A moment of panic spikes into him at the thought; then he shakes his head, clearing it of such nonsense. Lucy wouldn’t do it.
Has something happened to her? An hour passes and the fear grows in him, then almost two hours pass, and it’s just occurred to him that he could call the reverend, rather than the police, when she pulls into the driveway. He hurries out to greet her, relieved and angry.
“Where have you been!”
She tells him.
“Ah,” he says stiffly, and puts his arms around her. Holds her.
He’s too tired for this, he thinks. Too tired.
They stand there. He’s awfully tired. He remembers a game he played with his brother when they were boys, during the marathon driving tours his parents took them on. At night in the motel rooms they took a deck of cards and divided it, and made card houses on the floor, in opposite corners of the room. Card fortresses would be a better name for them. Then they took a plastic spoon from McDonald’s, and used it as a projectile—bent it back like a catapult arm with their thumbs and fingers, and let fly. The spoon took the most hilarious knuckleball flights across the room, and mostly missed. They laughed.…
And when the spoon hit the card houses, it was so interesting; it didn’t matter whose was hit, it was just fun to see what happened. They noted that the card houses acted in one of two ways when struck by a direct hit. Thwap! They either collapsed instantly, the cards scattering, or else they resisted, settled down a little, and somehow in the hunkering down lost little or none of their structural integrity, their ability to hold up. Perhaps curiosity about that made Dennis an engineer.
Random images, in the exhausted mind. Where did that come from, he thinks. Ah. We’re the card house now. There’s never a situation where one card is threatened, the others left in peace; they’re all threatened together and at once. All in a permanent crisis. How long has it been going on? Spoons flying from every direction. And the house of cards either holds or flies apart.
He’s too tired for this, too depressed; there’s no comfort in him to give. Lucy begins to sob in earnest. He tries to remember the Keilbacher girl; he only saw her a few times, flitting in and out. Blond hair. A lively kid. Nice. Easier to imagine Martin and Emma. Ach. Bad luck. Terrible luck. Worse by far than having Judge Andrew Tobiason turn down a protest despite the evidence; worse than anything possible in all that world of corruption and graft. Ach, it’s bad everywhere. Spoons from every direction. He’ll have to check out Jim’s car, make sure it’s all right. He doesn’t know what to say. Lucy always wants something said, words, words, but he doesn’t have any. Are there any words for this? No. Some strange stubbornness, of an interlocking placement, holds certain card houses up, under a fluky barrage of blows.… He hugs her harder, holds them up.