Face on the Wall (22 page)

Homer's dejection deepened. “Don't pin your hopes on it, honey child.”

Jerry Neville did not lighten Homer's gloom. He listened politely to Homer's account of Annie's troubles, then made a noise of harsh discouragement. “Impossible case. She can't win. And those sharks, Pouch, Heaviside and Sprocket, they'll gouge and gouge, and leave her with nothing. And I mean nothing.”

“Oh, Lord. Poor Annie.”

“Her only hope is to settle out of court. Tell you what, Homer, I'll do my best. Maybe we can save something.”

“Oh, God, Jerry, thank you. In the meantime I'll see if I can find out anything that might help. Annie swears she locked her doors, to keep the kid from getting in. She's absolutely sure.”

“Well, fine. Do what you can.”

“Listen, Jerry, Annie's got insurance, Paul Revere personal-injury insurance. Won't they pay up?”

Neville uttered a cynical snort. “If she hires an expensive lawyer and sues the company, maybe they'd pay a few thousand.”

Chapter 34

Oh! John, John, John, the grey goose is gone,

And the fox is off to his den O!

Mother Goose rhyme

N
ext morning, when the phone rang, Annie had another shock. It was her old boyfriend Burgess the stockbroker, the whiz kid, the boy wonder. “Listen, Annie,” said Burgess, “don't worry about a thing.”

“Worry? Why should I worry?”

“Oh, I thought you might be following the Dow Jones.”

“The Dow Jones! You mean it's gone down? That computer stock you said I should buy? It's gone down?”

“Way down. Way, way down. But it's bottomed out, Annie. I've got inside information. Hang in there. You'll soon be sitting pretty, I swear.”

“Oh, Burgess, my God.”

“Trust me.”

It was springtime around Annie's house. But the season was rushing by too fast. Why didn't it show a little thrift? Why didn't it save some of its blossoms and bring them on one kind at a time? No, it was behaving as if there were no tomorrow, spending all its flowers at once—magnolias and forsythia, daffodils and bleeding heart, lily of the valley and the sweet-smelling daphne she had transplanted beside her front door.

Trying to cheer herself up, Annie wandered down the hill into the wilderness at the bottom of the lawn. From the house she had seen white clouds of shadblow flowering among the weedy oak saplings and sprawling honeysuckle. Struggling among the briars, she lifted a blossoming twig to her nose. There was no fragrance, only the freshness of a thousand expanding leaves.

It didn't help. She was still too sickened by Eddy's death and too fearful about her own financial peril. What if her invested capital disappeared altogether? And what if she lost the suit and had to pay Bob and Roberta Gast all that money? She would lose the house and the hillside and the vegetable garden and the thorny wilderness and every tree and bush and flower. And her wall! She would lose her painted wall.

Annie went back up the hill, picked up the phone, found the number for the central offices of the Paul Revere Mutual Insurance Company, and worked her way through the electronic labyrinth in search of Jack.

When she found him at last he was delighted to talk to her. “Oh, hi there, Annie. What's the matter, you want to upgrade your policy? Listen, I thought at the time you ought to add a little something to cover all that valuable furniture.”

“No, no, Jack, it's not that. Oh, Jack, I'm in awful trouble.” Quickly Annie explained what had happened to young Eddy Gast in her new house. “They think it's my fault. They think I left the door open so Eddy could come in when I wasn't there. But I didn't, Jack, I didn't. I locked it. Anyway, his parents are suing me for two million dollars. But you sold me that big personal-liability policy. Oh, thank you, Jack. I'm so grateful. Paul Revere will cover it, won't they, Jack? The whole two million?”

Jack hemmed and hawed. “Now, hold it, Annie. Just a minute. Let me look into it. I'll call you right back.”

Instead of calling, Jack turned up in person. When Annie came home from a trip to the library and the post office and the supermarket, she found him napping on the sofa.

She dumped a bag of groceries on the counter and stood over him angrily. “Jack, how the hell did you get in?”

Jack woke up, looked at her lazily, closed his eyes again, and muttered, “Stole a key last time I was here.”

“You stole one of my keys?” Annie was flabbergasted. “How?”

“Nothing to it. It was in your pocketbook. Right there on your pocketbook hook.” Drunkenly Jack began to sing, “You got a hook for your hat and a hook for your coat and a hook, hook, hook for your pocketbook.” Groggily he tried to sit up. “Hey, gimme a hand.”

Annie made a pot of strong coffee. She needed an insurance agent with a clear head. “Okay, Jack, now tell me. Will Paul Revere deliver on its promise?”

“Promise?” said Jack evasively. “There wasn't any promise, Annie.”

“Of course there was a promise.” Annie banged her cup down on the coffee table. “What's the
point
of having an insurance policy if you pay premium after premium and then, when you need help, the company doesn't deliver?”

“Well, of course, decisions about claims aren't really my department. It'll be up to an adjuster. Oh, the company will help, of course they'll help. But you can't expect—Listen, Annie,
you
left the door open. You knew the child was a half-wit. It was your fault.”

“It wasn't, it wasn't.” Annie stared at him, outraged. “And it doesn't matter anyway if it was my fault. Personal-injury insurance is supposed to cover cases like that, isn't it? Isn't it? What's it for, if it doesn't pay when somebody breaks a leg by slipping on your front step?”

“For Christ's sake, Annie, don't get so upset.”

“Upset? Upset? They're suing me for two million dollars, and I shouldn't get upset?”

It was clear that Jack would be no help. The Paul Revere Mutual Insurance Company would try to wriggle out of it.

Annie called Uncle Homer, and he said he'd look into it. “But there's no point in talking to Jack. It's not in his interest for Paul Revere to lose a couple of million on a policy he sold you. And how do you think they got so rich in the first place? They've got a whole floor of crafty lawyers diddling people out of their rightful settlements. Every time one of them saves the company a million dollars he gets a bonus.” Homer said he was sorry. Annie thanked him and said goodbye.

She got back to work, trying not to think about her plummeting software stock, or about the suit against her. But she couldn't forget about Eddy, the only member of the family who had appreciated her wall.

Come on, now. Concentrate.
There was still so much to finish. The last two sections of her arcaded gallery were entirely blank, and the center section only half done. She had been saving a space for Tom Sawyer, lost in the cave with Becky Thatcher, but she didn't feel like painting a terrifying labyrinth, not today. It was too much like the dark tangle of her own life. Instead she'd get to work on Sam Clemens himself, leaning against a pillar in his white suit.

Annie climbed the ladder. Her hands were shaking. It took nerve to climb out on the scaffolding again, even though she had put all the boards back in place and locked the wheels.

Flimnap was gone again. He had said nothing about leaving, but on the day after Eddy's death he had taken off. The detective sergeant wanted to know where he was. Was it not Flimnap O'Dougherty who had put the rolling scaffolding together in the first place, who knew how to lock and unlock the wheels? Maybe the whole thing was his fault.

Mary Kelly was working overtime as Historian in Residence at Weston Country Day. She made a batch of slides, using a camera stand to photograph pictures in books—the temple of Poseidon at Paestum, the Parthenon, the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. It was a lot of work, especially tricky because Homer had cluttered up the floor. He was putting together a documentary history of the town of Concord, and his papers were distributed in a hundred piles all over the rug, one for each year of the nineteenth century. Mary had to tiptoe around the edges, and watch her step as she handled the camera.

When the slides were ready, she arranged them in the right order and carried her projector into the classroom, dropping a book on the way in, stooping to pick it up, dropping another book.

“Sssh,” said Mrs. Rutledge, looking up from the story she was reading aloud to the class,
The Flying Family.
In her opinion it was a great classic. Mary had heard some of the chapters before. The family in the story had discovered a magical tree in their front yard. When they jumped off its branches they could fly.

“Joan stood on the highest branch of the enchanted tree,” read Mrs. Rutledge. “She wasn't afraid, and when she jumped off, she turned a somersault in the air, just to show Jim her new trick. ‘Isn't this fun?' she called to Mom and Dad, who were smiling up at her from the lawn. Then Jim jumped too, and turned a double somersault. Mom and Dad laughed and clapped their hands.”