Flowering Judas (41 page)

Somewhere on the other end of the room, women were gathering around a computer. Darvelle paid no attention to them. They were looking at The Daily Kitten site, probably, or at one of those “lolcats” pictures. The women in this office were always looking at pictures of cats.

Darvelle picked up the phone again. She put it down again. She pushed it away from her. She didn't know what she was doing. She didn't know what she wanted to do. What could she say to Charlene that she hadn't already said?

Margie Cardiff looked up from the computer where all the women were and said, “Darvelle. Have you seen this? Did you know about this?”

Darvelle looked down at her own computer. It was almost two o'clock in the afternoon. She had come in well before noon. She had no idea what she'd been doing all this time.

“Is it a cat?” she asked.

“No, it's not a cat,” Margie said. “It's us. Go to Channel 8. Or come over here. We've got it up.”

Darvelle did not want to go over there. She wanted to go home—or, maybe, not home, but out to lunch, or shopping, or something. She wanted to find some way to not be anywhere at all. She wiped the Solitaire game off her computer and typed in the URL for Channel 8.

It was up there, right in front of everything, as soon as the page loaded. “Breaking News,” it read, in big red letters. Then there was a picture of the dam and next to it a big black pickup truck that she was sure she recognized.

She pushed her chair back. It moved on wheels. She hated chairs that moved on wheels. She pulled the chair closer again and tried to read.

“What is that?” she said after a while.

“Two people shot dead out by the dam,” Margie Cardiff said. “It doesn't say who it was, but everybody knows. People have been calling for an hour. It was that terrible Michaelman woman, do you remember her? We had her daughter working here for awhile, and then she came in—the mother, not the daughter; the daughter was a lamb—anyway, the mother came in and she was drunk beyond belief and she chased away two clients, and then we had to let her go. The daughter, I mean. Oh, for God's sake. You know what I mean. It's those people over at the trailer park. Two of them, this Michaelman woman and somebody else, shot right through the head in a black pickup truck parked out by the dam.”

Margie was hanging over the desk now, looking at Darvelle's screen. “There it is,” she said. “You can see it.”

Darvelle felt as if the skin of her lips had dried out and cracked. It hurt to touch them with her tongue.

“Who was the other person?” she said. “Was it the daughter, the one who used to work here?”

“No, of course not,” Margie said. “It was some man. Isn't that something else? A woman like that, and she's always got a man hanging around somewhere. Half the decent women you know can't find a man to go out with, and women like that always have somebody. She's dead now. They're both dead. Isn't that incredible.”

“What I want to know about is that truck,” Brenda Malloy said, calling out from the other side of the room. “Where did people like that get a truck like that? Do you know what something like that costs? You might as well buy a Mercedes.”

“It's probably got orders of repossession out on it right now,” Margie said. “Or maybe it isn't their truck. Maybe it's the murderer's truck. Maybe they were murdered over a drug deal, and the truck belonged to their connection. Drug dealers make enough money to buy a truck.”

“Some drug dealers do,” Brenda said, “but some drug dealers use up their product, and they're just as broke as everybody else. Besides, who would do that? You don't mess up a vehicle like that? It must have been their truck. You know what people like that are like. They buy everything on credit and then they can't pay for it. The finance company is going to be livid. If the seats had cloth covers they're never going to get the blood out, and if they had leather covers they're going to be shot full of bullet holes. God, can you imagine?”

“Excuse me,” Darvelle said.

She got up and walked to the back, past the other women at the other computer, into the little hall. She went into the bathroom and locked the door behind her. She lifted the toilet seat cover and then the toilet seat. She stared down into the water and thought about the truck. Her head was full of helium. Every pore of her body was pumping out sweat.

She leaned over the toilet bowl and threw up.

3

It took her most of the morning to admit it, but Penny London found this whole thing—the motel room of her own; the open account to get anything she wanted from the restaurant—to be really something wonderful. It had been months since she'd been able to settle into an indoor space for more than a single night, and months since she could take as many showers and baths as she wanted just because she wanted to. That was how she spent her time between talking to the boys and noon. She took a shower. She took a bath that lasted an hour and a half. She took another shower. Then she went down to the restaurant and had another of those enormous meals. For some reason, she had to have fried food and butter and a big gooey dessert. Had she been starving herself, all this time living in the car? She didn't think so. She hadn't been absolutely destitute. Money had been automatically deposited to her bank account every other week in term time, and outside of term time there was always at least a little left, and there was tutoring. Still, she was hungry. She couldn't believe how hungry she was. And she wasn't eating like herself. She didn't seem to be able to look a vegetable in the face.

She had told George or Graham or both of them—she couldn't remember—that she had to teach, but she didn't really, not until this evening. After lunch, she went back up to the room and sat on the bed and tried to think. Then she tried to read. Then she tried to watch television. She was too restless. The stories about Althy Michaelman and her man friend—“Slaughter at the Stephenson Dam!” was how Channel 8 put it—came and went. Penny couldn't seem to make them make sense.

She had a book of crossword puzzles. She tried that, but that didn't work, either. That was when it occurred to her that she could get something done. She could do laundry, if nothing else. The laundromat would be open. She could sit there and wait for her clothes to finish going around and around in the dryer.

She got to the laundromat just in time for the noon rush. The washers and dryers all seemed to be in use, except for the two in the back, which were not open to the public. Penny looked around. There was a sign on the wall. The laundromat staff would do your laundry for you, at the price of one dollar a pound, with a minimum of ten pounds. Penny looked at the bag of laundry in her hands. It was really a black plastic garbage bag. That sign had been up there as long as she could remember. She had read it every time she had come into the place. She had read it, but she hadn't taken it in. She complained that her students didn't understand how to read, that they read things and just didn't take them in, and here she was.

She went to the back and looked in at the door where the administrator stayed during the day. Maybe the word shouldn't have been “administrator.” Maybe it should have been something like “attendant.” There was something she'd never thought of before.

The attendant was a small girl with hair pulled back in a ponytail. She had bright red pimples along the edge of her jaw. She was chewing gum. Penny cleared her throat.

“Could I ask you what the policy is for getting laundry done?” she asked. “I mean, would I have to bring it in in the morning, or—”

The girl looked down at Penny's half-full garbage bag. “Two hours,” she said.

“What?” Penny said.

“Two hours,” the girl said. “Leave it here and come back in two hours. I can't be any faster than that.”

“Oh,” Penny said. “Yes.” She fingered the plastic of the bag. Could she really do this? It felt extravagant in a bad way, paying somebody else to do your laundry. On the other hand, she hated doing laundry. She hated even more sitting in the laundromat waiting for the laundry to be done. The girl was just standing there, chewing gum. Penny had to do something.

“All right,” she said. “I'll be back in two hours.”

The girl handed her a plain slip of paper and a ballpoint pen. “Put your name and number on this,” she said. “That's just in case I have to call you. I've never had to call anybody all the time I've been here, but that's what I'm supposed to do. Get you to write your name and number.”

Penny wrote down her name and number. She passed the little slip of paper back to the girl. Then she just wanted to be out of there. She left the laundromat and went back across the parking lot to her car. She didn't like this parking lot, and she didn't like this shopping center. Too many of the stores were out of business.

Penny turned the car's engine on. She turned the air conditioning on. She turned the radio on. She needed to get up and get out of there, but she had no idea where to go. Usually, when she felt like this, she went in to school. Today, she didn't want to be there.

She had just about decided that she was going crazy in some novel and definitely peculiar way when the radio station she was listening to went to the news, and she was faced with Althy Michaelman yet again.

“Sources that cannot be named inside the Mattatuck Police Department,” the announcer said, “tell us that police are proceeding on the assumption that the two deaths discovered this morning are linked to the disappearance and death of Chester Morton, a local man who…”

Penny sat up straight in the driver's seat. That didn't make sense, did it? How could those two deaths be related to Chester Morton? How could anything be related to Chester Morton?

Penny looked out the windshield into the parking lot. It was empty. It really was. Two crazed yabbos from the trailer park or the welfare office weren't going to come running in to mug her if she got out of the car.

She got out of the car, went around to the trunk, and opened it. She was still carrying most of her stuff. She hadn't thought to unpack it just because she finally had a room she could count on.

She rummaged through the files of papers she kept in the back of the trunk space—really, all her “stuff” was paperwork from teaching; she owned practically nothing she wouldn't be able to throw out if she ever decided to give it all up to join the roller derby.

She asked herself what had made her think of the roller derby, and then she found it, the file she kept on Haydee Michaelman. Penny kept files on all her students. It was the only way she could keep track of whether or not they were making progress.

She found the first of the papers Haydee had written, the personal narrative, and looked through it. It was all about her mother getting pregnant at sixteen. Penny looked some more and found the copy of the journal entry where Haydee had written about being taken into foster care. She had been six at the time. Penny read through it. Then she took the two papers, closed the trunk, and got back into the driver's seat of the car.

She put the papers out across the dashboard. She leaned forward and read the journal entry.

For me, the really hard thing about the way I grew up isn't the stuff that happened so much. It's that I never seem to feel the way people expect me to feel. When the social workers came and took me away, it was traumatic. I cried for days. But it's not what I really remember. It's not what scared me the most. That was a couple of days earlier, when the social workers took my baby brother away. They took him first, and then they came back for me. And I knew they were going to come back. I knew when they took him that I was going to be next, and for that whole week I hid in my closet at night because I was afraid I was going to wake up and be snatched.

Penny rubbed the side of her nose with her finger. Althy Michaelman was sixteen when she had her first child, but she must have been thirty-four when she had Haydee, and forty or close to it when she had this baby brother. And there was something else, too, in some of the other journal entries, something about older brothers Haydee didn't know because she'd never met them.

And there was the skeleton of a baby that nobody talked about.

And there were two people dead by the dam.

Penny got out her cell phone, found Gregor Demarkian's number in her address book, and dialed.

 

FIVE

1

Gregor Demarkian took the call from Penny London while he was sitting in Howard Androcoelho's office. After he had heard her out, he asked her to repeat everything so that he could write it down. Then he asked her if she could bring the copies of the essays, or make copies and bring those, or something. He was thinking that it might be possible to send Tony Bolero to wherever she was to get what he needed, but it turned out not to be necessary.

“I'm not far from you at all,” she said. “I'm at this awful shopping center with all these empty stores—”

“Out near the trailer park? I know where that is.”

“Yes, well, I'm there. And I've got my car. And because of you, I've got my own room at the Howard Johnson and two absolutely furious sons, who are apparently getting on a plane tonight. How did you do that?”

“I waited until you were asleep and then I went in and took your phone. I put it back when I was through with it.”

“I know that,” Penny London said. “I didn't miss it. How did you know they were my sons?”

“They were California area codes,” Gregor said, “and the only ones on the phone. You told me you had grown sons. You told me they lived in California. It wasn't that hard.”

“Yes, well. It appears they're coming out here to take charge of my life.”

“From what I've seen, somebody has to.”

“
Ahem.
I do have a doctorate. I mean, I managed to get through graduate school. I'm not a complete idiot.”