Glancing around her, inside the bus, she felt out of place. The other passengers tended to be much older, mostly women toting home various packages. None of them looked particularly friendly, either. She knew she looked out of place. She wondered if they suspected who she was, what she'd been doing with her life the past eleven months. Going with the men still embarrassed her. No matter how she tried to rationalize it, the word was always the same: whore.
That's the word other people put upon her anyway. She could not quite bring the word upon herself.
The bus driver had told her he'd tell her where she should get off. Sure enough, he kept his word. He turned around and said, "This is it, hon," and pulled up to a dark corner. She took a moment to note how he'd called her "hon." Actually, it made her feel good. She knew it was foolish. To put too much on somebody's calling her an affectionate name. But it made her feel good anyway.
She nodded her thanks and got off the bus, standing on the corner until it pulled away in an invisible cloud of diesel fuel.
She looked around. She felt as if she'd just been dropped off at the last outpost of civilization. Despite all the big houses, she still felt isolated. Hunching down into her coat, she crossed the street and began looking for the address that was on the wallet card.
It took her nearly twenty minutes to find it. The place was large, angular, and set in a copse of elm trees up on a shelf of a hill. The place was also dark. Completely. It stood out in contrast to all the well-lighted homes on either side of it.
The first thing she did was check out the garage. She walked along the snow-encrusted side of the attached garage and looked to see if there were any cars. Pressing her nose up to the window, she peered inside. Empty. Without knowing why, she felt relief. She also felt cold. The temperature had to be nearing zero. Her nostrils felt glued to the bone in her nose. Her cheeks were already numb.
Having no skills whatsoever as a burglar (actually, a few months back, there'd been a street kid who had a crush on her who'd wanted to teach her about such things), she decided the only thing she could try was smashing a window in the back and climbing inside. She might have no skills as a burglar, but she had the appetites. Maybe the guy had stuff worth stealing. Portable stuff that could be easdy sold in pawnshops.
Pale moonlight gave the snow on the hill in back an eerie flat gold colour. She could see occasional dog turds and yellow snow. Either the guy had a dog, or neighbourhood dogs had elected his yard the communal toilet. Dogs scared her. She looked with new fear at the dark windows facing her on the back of the house. What if she got in all right, only to be jumped on and tom about by some pit bull lying in wait? She'd seen a 60 Minutes report on pit bulls that had made her forever petrified of the animals.
She stood there for a time saying an odd prayer or two for good luck and then realized that this was about the worst thing you could do-ask God to help you become a good thief.
She went up to a window to the right of the door, made a fist of her gloved hand, and then smashed her hand through the glass.
She held her breath, waiting for a burglar alarm to sound. She heard a car hissing by on the street out front, a big aeroplane lost somewhere in the rolling silver clouds above, a lonely dog yipping and yapping in the far distance, and an even more distant train roaring through the white mid-western night.
But she did not hear a pit bull, and she did not hear a burglar alarm.
Even though she knew she was being sacnlegious, she offered a silent prayer of thanks.
Then she set about trying to get into the house.
The first thing she realized was that she was too short to reach the hook inside that locked the window. She had to go into the oil-smelling garage and get a plastic milk case and bring it back to the window and stand on it to give herself enough height. The second thing she realized was that she had to break yet another window and fiddle with yet another hook to actually get inside. So, she had to go through all the terror again-waiting for the sound of a pit bull, waiting for the sound of an alarm.
In all it took her seventeen minutes to get inside. She stood in a large and largely empty dining room. The whole place-from what she could see from there-sort of looked like that… curiously empty. Oh, everything looked nice and expensive, what there was of it, but it appeared that the guy didn't have the money (or something) to finish the job of furnishing the place.
Still leery of a pit bull springing on her from nowhere, she set about searching the house. Once, just as she was standing in the centre of the living room, headlights splashed through the curtains and across the wall. She stopped, frozen, heart pounding, a glaze of sweat covering most of her body.
The man was home.
What was she going to do?
But then, miraculously, the headlights withdrew, a transmission whined in reverse, and the car was going back down the street.
Just turning around. Nothing more.
Her next stop was the basement. She'd found a flashlight sitting on a kitchen counter, and she used it then, easing her way down the basement stairs. A furnace blasted on when she got about halfway down, startling her. The flashlight picked out a large family room that, like the upstairs, gave the impression of crying out for furniture. Instead of curtains, for instance, the windows were covered with sheets and pillow cases.
In other parts of the basement she found a bathroom complete with shower, a formidable workshop area, and a large freezer.
For some reason she was curious about the freezer and was ready to open it when the phone started ringing upstairs. Suddenly she heard a male voice filling the darkness above her. An answering machine telling people that he wasn't home. She let her hands slide from the lid of the freezer. She decided to go back upstairs, to the bedrooms. Most people kept cash on hand somewhere in the house. Thus far she hadn't found any, true, but the bedrooms were probably a more likely place to hide cash anyway.
On her way through the living room to the staircase, she thought again of sitcom families. Just a little more furniture, and this place would be a palace. How nice it would be to live there instead of a cramped, five-room farmhouse, where every night she'd had to listen to… She thought of her older sister Janice. How Janice had looked that last time in the hospital.
But there was no time for that. She wanted to find some cash… She went up the stairs.
There were three bedrooms on the upper floor. In the beam of the flashlight, the upstairs looked even more desolate than the rooms downstairs. In one she found clothes that still were packed in boxes, along with odds and ends such as hairbrushes and cuff links and shoe trees. In another, she found boxes of books. Here was a man who obviously liked to read. She pulled up one of the books and looked at it, an expensive hardcover entitled The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. She had seen the movie version of this with Robert Redford and hadn't liked it.
In the third bedroom she found a double bed askew with twisted sheets and covers. The electric blanket was still on, its controls still glowing orange in the darkness. The windows were rimmed with frost; she wanted to climb into the bed and get under the covers and luxuriate in long hours of uninterrupted sleep.
In a four-drawer dresser in the west corner of the bedroom she found a small red box that had once contained chequebooks. It now contained cash. More than two hundred dollars. She put the money in her coat pocket and started downstairs.
When she got halfway down, the phone rang again. The sounds were loud, almost eerie, in the big, dark, empty house.
She heard the man's voice say he wasn't home but would call back as soon as possible, and then she heard another voice, the live one, describe how badly he wanted to talk to the man who lived there. The caller said that he knew the man could take his messages off this machine from a long ways away, so would the man please come over to the caller's house ASAP. Then the caller hung up.
Standing in the pooled shadows at the bottom of the stairs, streetlight and frost turning the white curtains to silver, Denise searched her mind for what ASAP meant. Then she remembered; it was an expression her mother had used frequently when Denise was younger. You clean that room up ASAP, young lady; you get your bike into the bam where it won't be rained on, and I mean ASAP.
As soon as possible.
In the echoes of the caller's voice, she could hear desperation and trouble. The caller wanted the man to come to his place right away. Which is probably what the man would do instead of coming back home, especially if he had one of those deals where you could snag your phone messages with one of those little black jobbies.
Which meant that if Denise wanted to confront the man, and tell him how much money she wanted to keep quiet, she was going to have to do it at the caller's address. If, that is, she could find the caller's name and address in the phone book.
At first she thought of the incredible hassle it would be to get back on a bus and be taken to God knew where. It could literally be another three hours. But then she remembered the cash in her coat. She didn't have to rely on a bus. She could call a cab. She had plenty of money.
Keeping the caller's name fresh in her mind by repeating it over and over to herself, she took the flashlight and started looking for a phone directory. After a ten-minute search, she spotted one in a kitchen drawer. By then she'd repeated the caller's name so many times, it was gibberish, the way you could say the word spoon or clock so many times, it ceased to have all meaning.
She found the caller's name and address with no problem, writing them down on a paper napkin she found in the same drawer.
Putting the flashlight back where she'd found it, she drifted toward the back door. In the moonlight the shards of broken glass looked terrible, spoiling the nice, if empty, look of the place.
Shrugging, feeling guilty about making such a mess, she rummaged around in the kitchen closet till she found a broom. Having no luck finding a dustpan, she went over to the green plastic garbage receptacle and fished out a TV dinner cover. She folded the cover in half and went over and swept all the glass up into the fold. It made a fine dustpan.
In ten minutes she had all the glass swept up. All that bothered her then were the holes in the window; bone-chilling night air flowed through them. Ultimately the wind would make the whole house cold.
She realized how weird it was, of course, feeling driven to patch up the same place she'd broken into, but she couldn't help it. Her mother had always taught her to lend a hand when a hand was needed, and one was certainly needed there.
She found some heavy tape in a drawer and then dug out a carton container from the garbage, fashioning two pieces of material that would cover both holes. When she was finished, she stood back and assessed her handiwork. All in all the patches didn't look so bad. The trouble was, they wouldn't last too long. Cold air would freeze the adhesive surface of the tape, and soon enough the patches would fall off.
But at least she had tried.
Going to the back door, she took the receiver from the wall phone and dialled a cab number. She was pretty familiar with cabs. Sometimes johns would pay the cab fare to bring you to different places to meet them. And she liked cabs. You felt kind of regal or special-or at least a country girl did-riding around in the backseat of what was really a chauffeur-driven vehicle. Or at least that was how she imagined it.
The guy at the cab company sounded kind of grouchy. He said that with this weather, all kinds of cars weren't starting, and so it would be a while. She said okay.
While she waited, she looked in the refrigerator for something to eat. It was a huge new fridge, and all the guy had in it was a dried-out apple, some cottage cheese that was already three weeks beyond the fresh date and smelled like it, and one lone egg that sat pathetically in the back, like a deserted child.
Disappointed, she closed the door and started searching the cupboards. Unless she planned to dine on salt and sugar, she was out of luck.
Then she remembered the freezer in the basement, the long white chest model, like the one her father had always been promising to buy her mother.
Maybe in the freezer she'd find something she could pop into the microwave oven. Something that would fortify her for what would probably be a long night ahead.
She went over to the door leading to the lower level and started descending the stairs, the flashlight chasing away shadows the way a cat would chase away mice caught in a bam.
All she could think about was the freezer and the great stuff that might be inside. Maybe he'd have a few of those burger-and-fries deals that took just four minutes (the way they were advertised on TV) before they sat, steamy and succulent, before you on the table.
She headed straight for the freezer, ready to throw back the lid.
17
FOR DINNER GREG WAGNER FIXED HIMSELF a cheeseburger, cut himself a piece of pumpkin pie, and poured himself a glass of skim milk. As if the skim milk would compensate for the pie and the cheeseburger.
But for once he wasn't worrying about his weight. He was too excited over what he'd found that afternoon on one of Emma's computer directories, one he'd never seen before. He hated to think about it, but maybe Emma hadn't been quite the "intimate" friend he'd always imagined. After he read this directory, it was obvious that Emma had kept secrets from him. Important secrets.
Just before eating, he'd called Brolan-twice, in fact-both times leaving anxious messages.