"I'll get dressed and go fetch today's paper," Marrity said, pushing his chair back.
The sun in the east was throwing shadows across the gravel driveway from the lemon and peach trees, and the sky to the south was a deep, cold blue. Tiny white flakes of ash glittered as they fell silently through the sunlit air, for the northern sky over the mountains was a white haze of smoke.
The newspaper was lying on the gravel just inside the gate, but Marrity had seen the green Rambler now and he slowly walked past the newspaper and unhooked the padlock from the chain, not taking his eyes off the car. Behind the wheel, staring back at him, was the same gray-haired man who had driven the car into their driveway yesterday afternoon, and had then reversed out and driven away.
Marrity pulled the gate back enough to step through, and then walked out into the street to approach the driver's-side window. It was rolled down.
Before Marrity could speak, the man in the car said, "She called me yesterday, early. She said I could have her car."
Marrity stared at the lined, slack face under the combed gray hair, wondering where he'd seen it before. "So you broke her kitchen window to get the keys," he said. "Who are you? Why are you here?"
"I'm here because—" The old man appeared to try the door handle, and then give up on getting out. He leaned back in the seat. "There's no easy way to say this." His voice was rough, as if from decades of cigarettes and liquor. "I'm Derek Marrity."
Marrity was dizzy, and his stomach was suddenly cold. He took a step back to catch his balance, but he made his voice steady when he said, "You're my father?"
"That's right. Your grandmother — my mother — listen, youngster — she said I should — she said it would be best for everybody if I just went away. Back in '55. Now that she's dead she can't blackmail me anymore. I could have killed her, and stayed — maybe I should have-but how can you kill your own mother?"
"You killed my mother."
The man exhaled through clenched teeth. "Goddammit, boy, I didn't know that. I sent money to your grandmother, to give to Veronica. And letters too. I guess your grandmother just kept the money and trashed the letters. Typical."
"You left your children with her."
"Would you rather have been in a foster home? Was Grammar a bad parent to you? Remember, she didn't know Veronica would kill herself."
Marrity wanted to tell the old man about Veronica's drunken, hopeless last days, before the car-crash suicide — and he wanted to hear, very much wanted to hear the old man's replies— but he didn't want to do it out here on the street.
"Who was Grammar's father?" he asked instead. "What was Prospero's actual name?"
The gray-haired man shook his head. "No concern of yours, boy. Prosper 0. will do fine."
"Albert Einstein," said Daphne from the shadows behind the half-opened gate.
"Daph—" snapped Marrity in alarm, stepping toward her, "you shouldn't be out here. This man is—"
"Your father," Daphne finished for him. She was still in her pajamas, and barefoot on the gravel. "That was Albert Einstein you were picturing, wasn't it, Dad? The crazy-haired old scientist?" She stepped through the gate into the chilly, slanting sunlight and walked up to Marrity and took hold of his hand. "Why was Grammar blackmailing you?" she asked the man in the car.
"Daph," said Marrity desperately, "we don't know who this man is. Go wait for me inside."
"Okay. But he must be your father — he looks just like you." Daphne let go of his hand and scampered back through the gate and up the driveway.
Marrity couldn't help glancing at the man in the car, though the glance must clearly have shown that he had found Daphne's statement unflattering.
But his father's eyes were tightly shut, and he was frowning, as if with sudden indigestion.
"Are you okay?" asked Marrity.
The old man opened his eyes and blotted them on the sleeve of his nylon jacket. He took a deep breath and let it out. "I hope to be, I hope to be. What did she say?"
"She said you look like me."
"The Marrity jaw," said his father, smiling now, a little sourly. "And I think there's something about the eyes and the bridge of the nose. Look at some photos of Einstein, back when he was in his thirties."
"I thought — we were Irish."
"My father might have been, whoever was Ferdinand to my mother's Miranda. His name wasn't Marrity, though — that was your grandmother's maiden name, with an extra R added to make it look Irish. It's Serbian, originally, by way of Hungary. I guess fathers tend to be delinquent, in our family. Though I had — I really believe I had — no choice." He opened his mouth and closed it, then said, "But I'm sorry — sorrier than I can say."
Marrity gave him a brittle smile. "Maybe you are. No help at this point, of course."
After a pause, his father shook his head. "I suppose it isn't. Can I come in?"
Marrity blinked at him. "Of course not! We can meet sometime — give me your phone number — in fact, when you leave here, you, you'd better walk — I've got the license number of that car now, and I'm going to report it as stolen."
"Can I come in?" the man repeated. "My mother — your grandmother — died yesterday."
Marrity frowned. He wouldn't be able to ask his father about unpleasant things around Daphne; but maybe they shouldn't start with the unpleasant things anyway. And if he sent the old man away right now, he might never reappear, and that would be intolerable, again.
Marrity sighed heavily. "Of course you can come in. But — you have to promise to leave with no scene as soon as I say it's time for you to go."
"Fair enough."
Bert Malk was leaning in under the open hood of a rented Ford LTD on the opposite side of the street half a block away, and he didn't dare straighten up to peer after Marrity and the old man who had been sitting in the station wagon, though he noticed that the old man limped; but it was a fair guess that they were going into Marrity's house. Malk had seen the little girl come out in pajamas and say something to them before going back in.
Malk had laid an open toolbox on the radiator and was pretending to assemble or disassemble the clamp on the positive battery terminal. He had been standing here for ten minutes now, alternately bending over the engine and sitting behind the wheel as if trying to start the car, and he would have to leave soon.
This neighborhood was in an unincorporated area outside the San Bernardino city limits, and there were no streetlights or sidewalks; Malk was standing on a patch of grass flattened and rutted by tires. The house he was parked in front of had plywood bolted over the windows and doors, and a brown steel Dumpster nearly as big as the house sat in the driveway.
At the east end of the street a blue BMW appeared, and drove slowly toward him. He bent over the battery, as if looking very closely for any corrosion on the terminal.
The BMW passed him, and the brake lights flashed briefly as it passed the Marrity house, and then it had gone on past, its rear window a featureless block of sun glare. It paused at the stop sign at the west end of the block, then made a right turn.
Malk's face was cold, and he began tossing the tools back into the box. Get out now, he thought.
The woman sitting beside the driver had also been in the passenger seat of a Honda Prelude that had passed him here four minutes ago, also driving slowly east to west. He made mental notes: shoulder-length dark hair, slim, thirtyish, with sunglasses; blue short-sleeve blouse. A real pzaza, he thought, a dark-haired beauty. In both passes she had appeared to be looking straight ahead, not toward the Marrity house, and she might just be a local resident; but she had passed the house twice in different cars, and the cars had had different drivers.