Set This House in Order (51 page)

“Myself?”

“You're an attractive young lady. Are you married?”

I'd begun to get used to him referring to me as “Andrea,” but being called an “attractive young lady” threw me—all the more so because he wasn't just being kind, but actually seemed to mean it.

“I-I…no,” I said. “I'm not married.”

He smiled. “But with prospects, surely.”

“No, not even that. I mean there was one person who I…but sh—they didn't feel the same way about me.”

“That can be hard,” Chief Bradley said. He glanced up at the photo array. Then he asked: “Did you ever get that program I sent you?”

“What program?”

“From your mother's funeral. I know you said you didn't want it, but I thought you should have it.”

“Oh,” I said. “That was from you?…I mean yes, we got it.” I started to add a perfunctory “thank you,” but just then my mouth went dry. Without
thinking, I raised the bottle—the bottle that was, after all and somehow, in my hand—and took a swallow of beer.

“I'm only sorry you couldn't attend the ceremony,” Chief Bradley said. “It was sad, but it was beautiful…she was a good woman, your mother…”

“If you say so,” I muttered. I took another swallow of beer, and another. The bottle was nearly empty by the time I noticed what I was doing—and by then, it was already too late.

“…so the two kids are living with her husband now, in Seattle,” Maledicta says. “Which is where we were visiting just before we came here.”

“So Sam and her husband,” says Officer Cahill, “her husband…”

“Dennis,” Maledicta says, and has to pinch the inside of her wrist to keep from laughing. She's been doing this almost constantly, but it's becoming less effective—the more she drinks, the less she can feel the pinches. She's on her seventh vodka now.

“Dennis, right—they're separated?”

“Not legally. And don't get your fucking hopes up. It's just fucking temporary—he'll come to his fucking senses one of these days, move down to Santa Fe to be with her. No fucking doubt about it.”

Officer Cahill sips his own vodka as if it were castor oil or some other foul-tasting medicine. It's his third glass, though, and that as much as anything tells Maledicta that he's buying her story. Officer Cahill is still on duty, and meant to limit himself to one drink—he said as much earlier—but when Maledicta told him that Sam had kids (twins!), that limit went out the fucking window.

“So if all this is going on with her husband,” he wants to know next, “what's Sam doing back in Seven Lakes? And what the heck was that about this morning, with Sam saying she thought she might have killed Horace?”

“Oh that.” Maledicta waves a hand and sways a little on her barstool. “Well, you know, a lot of Sam's problems, like with her fucking husband and all, that all goes back to, to what her fucking stepfather did to her.
You
know.”

“No, I don't. What—”

“Oh give me a fucking break. You're the fucking ex, the guy she was going to fucking run away with. Don't tell me you didn't fucking know about it.”

“I know Sam and Horace didn't get on well—”

With a snort: “‘Didn't get on well.'”

“All right, Sam hated him. But—”

“She hated him because he was
fucking
her, asshole!” At the other end of the bar, one of the geezer-clones twitches, and Maledicta feels a flash of embarrassment. She'd meant to tell only lies here, and now she's gone and blurted out the truth.

Well, fuck it.

“He was
what?
” Officer Cahill says. “Excuse me?”

“You fucking heard me.” Maledicta raps her shot glass on the bar to signal for another refill, but Officer Cahill grabs her arm. “Hey!” Maledicta objects. “What the fuck?”

“Is this a
joke?
” Officer Cahill demands. “Are you making this up to, to I don't know what…”

“No, it's not a fucking joke! Fuck you! You don't believe me, go ask your fucking boss.”

“Chief Bradley knows about this?”

“Yeah, he fucking knows about it. A day late, but…” She jerks her arm free and draws back, pissed off but curious. “You really didn't know? Sam never told you?”

“No! No, Sam never said any—” He stops suddenly, and Maledicta can almost hear the memory falling into place, like a dropped brick. “No, that couldn't have been what she meant…”

“Right,” says Maledicta. “So she did fucking tell you—you just didn't fucking get it. Par for the fucking course.”

“Oh God. Oh Sam…”

“Oh please. Fucking spare me.” Maledicta knocks a cigarette loose from the pack in front of her and lights it.

“So Chief Bradley knew about it?” Officer Cahill says. “He found out?”

“Not in time to do any fucking good, but yeah.”

“God. That must have nearly killed him.”

“Oh yeah,” says Maledicta. “He was really fucking dying when we talked to him.”

The officer looks at her coldly. “I'm sure Chief Bradley was mortified when he found out about that. God, and not just for Sam's sake—for himself, too.”

“For himself? Why? Because he fucked up?”

“For not stopping it, sure. And also…”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit, nothing. Why else would he feel bad for himself?”

Now it's Officer Cahill who looks embarrassed, like he's the one about to reveal a confidence. But Maledicta stares at him until he tells her.

“It's just,” he says, “that it must be bad enough to lose out to a good man, let alone one who's…like that.”

“What do you mean, lose out? Lose out at what?” A light goes on: “Oh, fuck.”

“Sam's mother,” Officer Cahill says. “The chief and Sam's father—her real father, Silas—both courted the same woman. Silas won: he married her. But then not long afterwards he died, and Chief Bradley—”

“Oh fucking nice,” says Maledicta. “What'd he do, propose to her at the fucking funeral?”

Officer Cahill gives her another frosty look. “I'm sure it wasn't like that. But Althea was fond of him, and she had a new baby to think of, and I guess she gave indications that she might be interested—but then before anything really happened, she turned around and took up with Horace.”

“And how the fuck do you know about this? You must have been a fucking baby yourself at the time, right?”

“Chief Bradley told me.” Officer Cahill taps a finger against the rim of his shot glass. “We were drinking up at the cottage one time about a year ago—”

“What, is that your private fucking clubhouse now?”

“No, but—the chief, you know, he's been trying to keep the place in shape since Althea died. One evening I found him up there, not doing any work, just sitting in the kitchen with a bottle. So I sat down with him, and he started talking about how he'd been in love all those years…

“So that would have been hard enough,” the officer concludes, “feeling that way and being rejected, not just once but twice. But to find out on top of that that you'd lost out to a, a child molester…I can't imagine.” He adds hastily: “Not that that compares to what Sam went through, of course…”

Maledicta would like to hit Officer Cahill now, but instead she looks at the bartender—who's hovering right on top of them, pretending not to listen—and holds up her empty glass. “One more for the road.”

“Don't you think you've had enough?” Officer Cahill says.

“Don't you think you should mind your own fucking business?” Maledicta retorts.

Officer Cahill sighs. “All right,” he says, “it's your liver—it's my
tab,
but it's your liver.” He pulls out his wallet and checks to make sure he actually has the money to pay for all these drinks. “Just tell me one last thing. When
you said Sam was on her way home to Santa Fe already, that wasn't true, was it? She's still here in town.”

“Only for as long as it takes me to crawl back to the fucking car,” Maledicta says. “But…”—her glass is full again; she tosses it back—“A-a-aah!…you're
not
going to fucking bother her anymore. And you're definitely not going to tell her what I fucking told you about her stepfather.”

“No, of course not, I wouldn't…at least not unless she…but I
would
like to talk to her one more time before you go. Not to bother her, just…hey, are you all right?”

“Fucking fine,” Maledicta says, but she's not. The last shot of vodka hits her brainstem hard—she drops the glass, and has to grab the edge of the bar to steady herself.

“You don't look fine,” Officer Cahill observes. “You look green.”

Maledicta doesn't answer; her stomach's rolling over.

 

“…ten thousand dollars,” Chief Bradley was saying, his voice slightly muffled by the closed door between us. “I know that may not sound like much, but you understand, the cottage is almost surely a loss. I would love to save it if I could, if there were some way to fix the foundation, but my sense is I'm going to have to tear the whole place down and build new. And there's also the matter of the maintenance work I've done over the past two years—I know you didn't ask for that, but I did pay for it out of my own pocket and I believe it deserves some consideration…So what are your thoughts, Andrea?”

“I think it sounds…fair.” I kept my head raised as I spoke, so he'd be able to hear me. “It's just, I'm still not really ready to make a decision about this.”

“Well, and I don't want to rush you,” Chief Bradley said, “but from what you've told me it sounds like you're pretty set against staying on in Seven Lakes yourself.”

“That's true. But—”

“Right, and I don't imagine you'd be visiting much either…”

“That's true, too.”

“Right! So there you go—it seems like a waste to leave a perfectly good property abandoned, if you have no intention of using it yourself. And you know…”

But the rest of his words were lost as another wave of nausea gripped me, and I bent my head once more to the bowl.

I was tempted to blame my current distress on Chief Bradley's chili: a mostly bland hamburger stew spiked here and there with chunks of incredibly hot pepper. But I'd eaten very little of it—I could see, gazing into the toilet, that I'd eaten very little of it—maybe five or six spoonfuls in all.

The beer was a more likely culprit. I wasn't sure how much I'd drunk. I'd only become aware that I was drinking at all when we were about to sit down at the table, and Chief Bradley, pointing to the bottle in my hand, asked if I wanted another. Startled, I told him no, and yet only moments later, as I hurried to wash down a bite of chili, I found myself tipping up a fresh Budweiser, still cold from the fridge. And then a little while after that, when a sliver of jalapeño got stuck on the way down and started spot-welding the back of my throat, I reached coughing for what I thought was a water glass, only to taste still more beer as I swallowed.

That was when I'd started to feel ill. The jalapeño, though safely extinguished, left an after-impression that was like a finger pressing down on my gag reflex. As the feeling rapidly grew worse, I stood up and asked where the bathroom was. I barely made it in time.

At least Chief Bradley didn't seem offended that I'd lost his lunch. Indeed, he hardly seemed to have noticed at all.

“…and if you'd like to get a better sense of the local property values before you make up your mind, of course I understand. I want you to be comfortable about this, Andrea. But what I think you'll find…”

My nausea seemed to have run its course. I waited another minute just to be sure, then got up to use the sink. I was dizzy from being hunched over so long, so after rinsing my mouth out, I plugged the drain and let the basin fill with water. As I splashed my cheeks and forehead, I heard a creak of hinges and felt someone come up behind me. “I'm OK, Chief Bradley,” I said, but when I looked up into the mirror the bathroom door was still closed, and the face peering over my shoulder wasn't the chief's.

“Hello again, figment,” Gideon said.

A plastic cup on the back corner of the sink held a toothbrush and a steel-pointed dental pick. I made a grab for the pick, but my left hand got there first and knocked the cup away. Then the hand was at my throat, and the bathroom walls faded into open sky as I was dragged from the body. I looked down and saw the lake far below me, its dark waters swirling around the gray dot of Coventry.

“Andrea?” Chief Bradley called, his voice echoing with distance. “What just fell?…Andrea, are you all right in there?”

“I'm fine,” Gideon replied. “I'll be right out.”

 

There's a soda machine outside the grocery store on Main Street. Mouse is hoping it's the kind of soda machine that offers bottled spring water as a selection—that's what she really needs right now, fresh water—but this is Seven Lakes, not Seattle, and the machine is stocked only with pop. She could go into the store to buy water, but the idea of waiting in a long checkout line, trying not to pass out or faint from shame as the cashier and the other customers catch a whiff of her, is more than she thinks she can stand.

Soda pop it is. She puts coins in the machine and punches the button for ginger ale. The can comes out of the machine warm, and the ginger ale tastes like something you'd clean dentures with, but Mouse forces herself to drink it anyway. She needs the fluid.

She looks across the street to where the Centurion is parked. Andrew has still not reappeared. Mouse tells herself that she can't blame him for wandering off, but the truth is she does blame him. He should have waited. He should have come after her. All right, no, he shouldn't have come after her—Maledicta was being abusive, and if he'd followed her to the bar it would have just made a bad situation worse—but he
should
have waited.