"Did anyone sit her down and talk to her?" Zack wanted to know.
"Not one on one. There was too much chaos for that. Really, I don't remember any of it clearly—except the look in her eyes when she saw Jim come out of the house. I couldn't forget that," Wendy said, obviously upset.
"So Jim had never seen her before in his life," Zack said in a flat voice.
"No. But the odd thing is, when I first saw her in the garden, I had the sense that I knew her. It was only much later, in the middle of the night to be exact, that I realized she was the spitting image of Jim's mother."
Zack did a double take. "You knew his mother?"
"Well
... no; but why would you be surprised if I did?"
"I had the sense that his people weren't from around here," Zack managed to say.
"Jim's mother died when he was in high school," Wendy explained, "and all of his photos of her got lost in his moves between foster homes. But he's described her to me, and she sounds like Zina. On the other hand, Jim didn't mention noticing any resemblance, so maybe I'm the one with an overactive imagination."
"You don't know anything about this Zina, then?"
"Just that her name is
Hayward
and that she lives near
Worcester
up north. My brother got that much out of her before she—"
The phone rang and Wendy cringed. "That has to be my mother, tracking me down for the post-mortem. I'll let the machine pick up," she muttered, and she added, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to go on and on, Zack; yesterday was just so
... unnerving, that's all. Don't let me keep you..
.
."
By then the answering message had played through and it was the caller's turn to talk.
It definitely wasn't Gracie Ferro.
A deep, bellowy voice said, "Jim? You there?" and then waited to find out. When no one picked up the phone, the voice tried again. "Jimmy? Yoo-hoo. It's me. You there?"
And then a click.
Zack's reaction was,
What a du
f
us,
but Wendy reacted with real alarm.
"Oh, God
... it's that caller," she said in a shaking voice. "He won't go away." She put her mug down so hard that coffee slopped over the rim.
She hurried to the answering machine to replay the message. "Listen. It's that same guy. I know it is." She seemed to be talking more to herself than to Zack.
She hit a button and played the message again. Again, Zack heard a dufus.
She said, "Hear it? The sounds in the background? Voices."
"But not voices conversing," Zack said, listening with interest.
"No. They're having sex. It's a porn tape," she said angrily.
She was absolutely right—either that, or the guy was phoning from a whorehouse. Still, Zack wasn't sure whether he should or should not know the sound of porn, so he settled for quipping, "Are you sure it's a tape? It could be DVD."
Wendy was not, of course, amused, and Zack felt instant remorse.
"You have caller ID," he noted. "
He's blocking his number, of course.
"
"Naturally," she answered with a sharp little sigh.
Concerned by the level of her distress more than by the caller, Zack said, "You've had calls from him before?"
"Yes, but this is the first time I've heard his creepy voice," she said with a shiver of disgust.
Zack didn't think the voice sounded creepy so much as untutored. The guy was a lowlife, and it surprised Zack not a whit that Jimmy Hayward had pals who were lowlifes. It would take a while for newly wealthy James Hodene to shake the leeches from the cuffs of his Ralph Lauren khakis.
"My guess, and it's a no-brainer, is that the guy's after money," Zack said bluntly.
Her head came up. "You mean, like from a loan?"
Zack hadn't spelled that out, but it was obvious that Wendy had had her suspicions.
He said cautiously, "It wouldn't surprise me to hear that your caller knows his way around a track, say."
"Who told you that Jim's a gambler?"
Again Zack shrugged. "People who play the lotteries have been known to play the ponies."
"He has," she acknowledged, deflated. "He used to. He doesn't anymore."
Yeah, right. And it never snows in January.
"Well, then, maybe I'm wrong; maybe the caller is just someone soliciting contributions for war-torn
Afghanistan
," Zack said dryly.
"You don't have to be snotty," she shot back. "Jim knows he has a problem."
Dumb. Zack had managed to put her in the position of defending the son of a bitch. He had no trouble sounding
sorry as he said, "I didn't mean to presume. But you wanted my input."
"I'm overreacting, I know," she admitted, going back to retrieve her coffee. "It's not exactly against the law to watch porn, is it? We'd all be in jail if it were," she added with an interestingly wry smile. "I'm just on edge after yesterday, I guess."
"How did Jim take the appearance of your unexpected guest, by the way?" he added, taking advantage of the opening she was handing him.
"He was more philosophical about the whole thing than I was. He assumes that the woman is delusional. 'A wacko,' he's convinced. He felt sorry for her, if anything."
"He did, did he?"
Again her head came up. "Why do you sound so surprised? Jim can be very sensitive."
Zack couldn't keep the sneer out of his voice as he said, "Yes; I suppose that's how he was able to spot a wacko so easily in the first place."
She winced at the jab. "All right, granted, 'wacko' wasn't
his
best choice of a word. But he was anxious to reassure me."
"And he succeeded."
Zack meant to flush an answer out of her, and he got it: in the uncertainty that he saw in her hazel eyes
.
Visibly embarrassed to be caught out, she looked away, saw the phone, and got thrown back to the other gatecrasher, the one who'd invaded the sanctity of her kitchen.
Scowling, she said, "Monday I am calling the phone company about these calls. They have to be able to do
something."
"You mean, if Jim doesn't recognize the caller's voice
before then
," Zack reminded her.
"Of course," she said quickly.
She wasn't nearly as confident about Jim as she was trying to seem. How could she be, when she was being rocked with uncertainties from all sides at once?
Zack himself was walking a fine line between relief that she hadn't yet found out who he was, and a burning desire to tell her and get it the hell over with. He knew that he was living on borrowed time; but he wanted to savor being in her confidence for just a few minutes more.
****
Minutes turned into hours.
A steady drizzle kept Zack working inside, methodically removing a thick wall of horsehair-filled plaster that clung stubbornly to a framework of rough-hewn lath. It was messy, mindless, throat-clogging work, the kind of job you handed off to the less experienced men in the crew. But Wendy had arranged to reschedule her meeting with Pete for later that morning, and Zack was grateful for every minute that he was able to spend working near her: he was all too aware that it might be his last.
She did seem more at ease as the morning wore on. It was almost as if she had decided to take refuge from uncertainty in the slowly shaping dream of her house. She swept up after Zack and she chided him for not wearing a dust mask, then ran out (without telling him why) and came back with half a dozen masks after she learned that he didn't have any in his possession.
He put one over his nose and mouth as a courtesy to her, then pulled it off at the first opportunity and shoved it on top of his head: he couldn't stand the things, and besides, she seemed reluctant to talk to him when his answers came out muffled.
Zack couldn't abide her silence; he was too hungry for the sound of her voice. When she smiled, when she joked, when she spoke to him in such a normal way about such a normal hang-up as how to squeeze more room out of a renovation—she seemed endearingly genuine. That had to be the real Wendy, not the one who had stood in the kitchen earlier exhausted and filled with doubts.
Ah, hell.
He broke the last strip of lath over his knee and jammed it into the overflowing trash barrel that sat next to the wall he had taken down, then walked to the top of the stairs and stood there, afraid—knowing—that Wendy was bound to discover his role in the sorry saga. He wanted her to find that out from him and no one else.
He stared down the scratched and beat-up treads, thirteen easy steps to full disclosure, but he couldn't make himself take the first one. The stakes were too high. He saw it so clearly now: he had a profound dread of alienating her.
That was news to him, and it hit him hard. He'd been aware all along that Wendy was very possibly going to get hurt. Before he met her, he had hoped that the lottery money would be compensation enough for the pain. Now that he knew her, he realized how willfully cynical he'd been.
It was clear, so far, that he'd dodged a bullet. He found that he still had options—too many of them. He could walk away, he could stay, he could exercise a number of combinations. He was sick to realize that not a single choice was acceptable to him.
Wendy appeared at the foot of the stairs just then, material confirmation of his worst fear: that he was becoming emotionally involved.
"Oops," she said, looking up at him. "Are you coming down?"
He shook his head. "Just
... trying to remember what I'm doing here, that's all."
Her smile seemed poignant as she said, "I know the feeling."
She came up the stairs, and he was able to watch the poetry of her motion. Even now, she had a bounce. She couldn't not bounce, just as Zina couldn't not float. Wendy was as earthy as Zina was ethereal, and for the life of him, Zack couldn't understand why he was more concerned about hurting the robust woman before him than the fragile one back home.
Unless it was that he had become emotionally involved.
She squeezed past him with an apologetic smile and took a peek around the corner. "Oh, wow; the wall's down. What a difference!"
She paused to look around, then headed into her bedroom; instinctively, Zack returned to empty the last full barrel, just to be near her. Caught in a trance of indecision and longing, he watched as
she began pulling off the drop-
cloths that covered the bed, the chest, the dresser under the window.
Why was she doing it? Was it possible that she was planning to move out of the beach house and come back, after all? His heart soared at the possibility, then dove when she saw him watching her and cheerfully explained, "These are all filthy with demolition dust. I bought new ones to replace them."
"Good thinking," he said, disappointed.
She folded the covers carefully onto themselves and came out, carrying the lot, and stopped again where her wall used to be. "It's amazing. Look at the light pouring in, even on a gray day like this. I can hardly wait to see it all finished."
"The beach house doesn't cut it for you, then?" he ventured.
"Oh, it's wonderful, but—too many people are there at the moment," she said with a quick little scrunch of her features. "I'm in hiding, at least until Pete comes. I'll go back in time to make lunch for everyone."
She was so close. A pea-sized lump of plaster was caught in the strands of her chestnut hair; Zack wanted to lift it away but didn't dare. Odd, how she was able to trust him with confidences that she was keeping from her family—but he didn't feel at liberty to brush a dumb little speck from her hair.
Bewildered by the rush of emotions he was feeling, he lifted the full barrel to haul it outside. It was heavier than he thought; he braced it with his thigh and let out an instinctive
mph.
"Let me get the door for yo
u," she said, setting the drop-
cloths on the floor.
She hurried down the stairs ahead of him and held the screen door open as Zack muscled the barrel through the narrow doorway. In the process, he brushed against her breasts with his bare arm and felt her instinctively back away from the contact; he was more disheartened than bemused by her response, and like everything else that involved her that morning, the realization shook him.
He emptied the barrel into the Dumpster alongside the house, scaring up a cloud of dust as he pondered his next move. Wendy had wanted to talk, and he was the one that she'd seized on to listen. He could see why: he wasn't family. But he
was
family, that was the hell of it, and the sooner she found that out, the less she might end up despising him.
Now,
he decided. It was way beyond the time.
He left the barrel outside and climbed the front steps to the sound of a ringing phone. It was Pete; he was cancelling out altogether, Wendy said after she hung up.