I looked around for the waitress, and John said, "I already paid." He looked a little smug about it.
We stood up from the table and, with the awkwardness and hesitancies of a party of four, moved toward the door.
When I pulled back out of the lot, I found Theresa's eyes in the rearview mirror again. "You said Bandolier sent Fee away. Do you know where he sent him?"
"Yes," she said. "I asked him. He said that Fee went to live with Anna's sister Judy in some little town in Iowa, or somewhere like that."
"Can you remember the name of the town?"
"Is that of any importance, at this point?" David asked.
We drove around the pretty little pond. A boy barely old enough to walk clapped his hands at a foot-high sailboat. We followed the meandering curves of Bayberry Lane. "I don't think it was Iowa," she said. "Give me a minute, I'll remember it."
"This woman remembers everything," said David. "She is a phenomenon of memory."
From this end of Bayberry Lane, their house looked like a photograph from London after the blitz. A long length of glinting rubble led into a room without an exterior wall. Both of the Sunchanas fell silent as soon as it came into view, and they did not speak until I pulled up behind the station wagon. David opened the door on his side, and Theresa leaned forward and patted my shoulder. "I knew I'd remember. It was Ohio—Azure, Ohio. And the name of Anna's sister was Judy Leatherwood."
"Theresa, you amaze me."
"Who could forget a name like Leatherwood?" She got out of the car and waved at us as David put his fingers in his wiry hair and walked toward what was left of his house.
11
"Bob Bandolier?" John said. "That asshole, Bob Bandolier?"
"Exactly," I said. "That asshole, Bob Bandolier."
"I met him a couple of times when I was a little boy. The guy was completely phony. You know how when you're a kid you can sometimes see things really clearly? I was in my father's office, and a guy with a waxy little mustache and slicked-down hair comes in. Meet the most important man in this hotel, my father says to me. I just do my job, young man, he says to me— and I can see that he does think he's the most important man in the hotel. He thinks my father's a fool."
"All killers can't be as congenial as Walter Dragonette."
"That guy," John said again. "Anyhow, you were brilliant, coming up with that sister."
"I was telling them the truth. He murdered my sister first."
"And you never told me?"
"John, it just never—"
He muttered something and moved away from me to lean against the door, indications that he was about to descend into the same wrathful silence of the journey out to the suburbs.
"Why should you be upset?" I asked. "I came here from New York to help you with a problem—"
"No. You came here to help yourself. You can't concentrate on the problems of another person for longer than five seconds, unless you have some personal interest in the matter. What you're doing has nothing to do with me. It's all about that book you're writing."
I waited until my impatience with him died down. "I suppose I should have told you about my sister when you first called. I wasn't hiding it from you, John. Even I couldn't really be sure that the man who had killed her had done the other murders."
"And now you know."
"Now I know," I said, and felt a return of that enormous relief, the satisfaction of being able to put down a weight I had carried for four decades.
"So you're done, and you might as well go back home."
He flicked his eyes in my direction before looking expressionlessly out the car window again.
"I want to know who killed your wife. And I think it might be safer if I stay with you for a while."
He shrugged. "What are you going to do, be my bodyguard?"
"I don't think anybody is going to try to take me to the Green Woman and tie me up in a chair. I can protect myself from Bob Bandolier. I know what he looks like, remember?"
"I'd like to see what else I can turn up," I said.
"I guess you're pretty much free to do whatever you want."
"Then I'd like to use your car this evening."
"For what? A date with that gray-haired crumpet?"
"I ought to talk to Glenroy Breakstone again."
"You sure don't mind wasting your time," he said, and that was how we left it for the rest of the drive back to Ely Place.
John pulled the Colt out from under the seat and took it into the house with him.
12
I made a right turn at the next corner, went past Alan's house, and saw him walking up the path to his front door beside Eliza Morgan. It was getting a little cooler by now, and she must have taken him for a walk around the block. He was waving one arm in big circles, describing something, and I could hear the boom of his voice without being able to distinguish the words. They never noticed the Pontiac going down the street behind them. I turned right again at the next corner and went back
to Berlin Avenue to go back downtown to the east-west expressway.
Before I saw Glenroy I wanted to fulfill an obligation I had remembered in the midst of the quarrel with John.
At the time I had spoken to Byron Dorian, my motive for suggesting a meeting had been no more than my sense that he needed to talk; now I actively wanted to talk to him. The scale of what April Ransom had been trying to do in The Bridge Project had given me a jolt. She was discovering her subject, watching it unfold, as she rode out farther and farther on her instincts. She was really writing, and that the conditions of her life meant that she had to do this virtually in secret, like a Millhaven Emily Dickinson, made the effort all the more moving. I wanted to honor that effort—to honor the woman sitting at the table with her papers and her fountain pen.
Alan Brookner had been so frustrated by his inability to read April's manuscript that he had tried to flush thirty or forty pages down the toilet, but what was left was enough to justify a trip to Varney Street.
13
I had been relying on my memory to get me there, but once I turned off the expressway, I realized that I had only a general idea of its location, which was past Pine Knoll Cemetery, south of the stadium. I drove past the empty stadium and then the cemetery gates, checking the names on the street signs. One Saturday a year or two after my sister's death, my father had taken me out to Varney Street to buy a metal detector he had seen advertised in the Ledger—he was between jobs, still drinking heavily, and he thought that if he swept a metal detector over the east side beaches, he could find a fortune. Rich people didn't bother picking up the quarters and half dollars that dropped out of their pockets. It was all lying there to be picked up by a clever entrepreneur like Al Underhill. He had steered his car to Varney Street unhesitatingly—we had gone past Pine Knoll, made a turn, perhaps another. I remembered a block of shops with signs in a foreign language and overweight women dressed in black.
Varney Street itself I remembered as one of the few Millhaven neighborhoods a step down from Pigtown, a stretch of shabby houses with flat wooden fronts and narrow attached garages. My father had left me in the car, entered one of the houses, and come out twenty minutes later, gloating over the worthless machine.
I turned a corner at random, drove three blocks while checking the street signs, and found myself in the same neighborhood of little shops I had first seen with my father. Now all the signs were in English. Spools of thread in pyramids and scissors suspended on lengths of string filled the dusty window of a shop called Lulu's Notions. The only people in sight were on a bench in the laundromat beside it. I pulled into an empty place behind a pickup truck, put a quarter in the meter, and went into the laundromat. A young woman in cutoff shorts and a Banana Republic T-shirt went up to the plate-glass window and pointed through houses at the next street down.