The Uninvited (19 page)

“Oh, I’ll stop, all right,” she said. “I
have
stopped, thanks to you. You want some ordinary mommy who drives into work at the Wal-Mart. Is that it? Is this your way of making me pay?”

“Shut up!” he said.

And the force of his voice stopped her, frightened her. It frightened him, too. He’d never yelled at her.

“I do have a plan,” he said. “
I have a plan.
It’s hard to do anything while I’m working, but I’ve…” How was he supposed to put it? “I’ve talked to someone,” he said.

“Someone?” she said. “Is she the one who stinks like a whorehouse?”

Cramer’s hands curled involuntarily into fists at his side. And his face must have looked fierce, because Mavis backed off, lowered her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “I … I didn’t mean…”

She walked over to the easy chair and sat on the arm, her back to him, looking out at the sunshine. Very slowly, he regained his composure, but his voice was shaky now.

“I’ll get your money. I don’t want to discuss it till I know more. Okay?”

She could have given him something then: a thankful smile, a little slack. She could have acknowledged what he said in some small way. Was it so much to ask for? But there was nothing. When she looked at him, her eyes got kind of lost, as if she wasn’t seeing straight.

“I should … find out in the next few days,” he said. “Believe me, you’ll be the first to know.”

Her eyes found his, but there was nothing in her gaze but disappointment. No. It was worse than that. There was nothing in her eyes but disenchantment.

He turned to go. Stopped when he heard her clear her throat but didn’t turn around.

“You’ve changed,” she said. “Yelling at your mother like that. I don’t hardly know you anymore.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

M
IMI SLEPT IN LATE.
It was eleven before she stumbled into the kitchen, where Jay and Iris were sitting with the remains of toast and orange juice and a school yearbook open in front of them.

“Iris is trying to find my stalker,” said Jay.

Mimi leaned over Iris’s shoulder as she flipped the pages. She got to the end with no luck.

“Told you,” said Jay. “He was a figment of your imagination.”

Iris shook her head. “No, it’s what I said last night. He wasn’t remarkable in any way. I thought maybe the yearbook would jog my memory.”

Mimi helped herself to coffee, which was all she could face. She had a headache, a serious one. She didn’t drink much normally, and last night had not been good for her. She wandered out to the screened-in porch and stared out at a gentle rain, felt the cool of it on her face. It helped a little.

Rain without exhaust fumes. Strange.

What was she supposed to do? She needed to get Ms. Cooper—that much was certain. But then what? Her laptop was out at the snye. Clean clothes were out at the snye. She would have to go and yet she didn’t want to. She leaned her head lightly against the screen. She didn’t want to do anything. She heard Iris giggle about something Jay has said. She wanted to go home. No. Yes. Hell.

Der ungebetene Dritte,
thought Mimi. That’s what I am. It was something her German grandmother used to say: the uninvited third.

Then Jay came out on the porch. “You okay?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” she said.

“Do you want me to rescue the car?”

“I guess,” said Mimi. “We don’t want Bob the traffic guy to have a conniption fit.”

Jay chuckled. He had a good-sounding chuckle. He seemed more relaxed.
Self-satisfied,
she thought.
Lucky man.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll drive you.”

She turned to go, then stopped and shook her head. “You know, a walk might do me good.”

So she walked into town in the rain, with a borrowed black raincoat of Jo’s and a very large black umbrella. It took half an hour, and by the time she got there, the rain had stopped. The sky was moving again; clouds were scudding—wasn’t that the word for it?

Ms. Cooper looked shiny and new, as if maybe Bob had taken her to the car wash. The note, however, was still on the windshield, bleeding ink, indecipherable.

By the time she had driven home, there were even blips of sunshine, which helped to revive her spirits. But when she pulled into the driveway, Jay and Iris were on their way out. Iris was just about to phone her. They were going over to somebody’s—did she want to come? But she didn’t feel like it. It would probably be someone else who was happy, and she wasn’t sure she could take that.

When they were gone, she realized that she didn’t feel like hanging out at the big house, either, or driving forty minutes to the snye. So she decided to take the kayak and head upstream. That would clear her head, she thought. And even though the wind was high, it wasn’t cold and looked to be going her way, even if the current wasn’t. Battling the elements seemed a good choice for the afternoon. It would take her mind off her headache, if not her mind-ache.

She didn’t want to take her purse in case she flipped the kayak. She was halfway up the river before she remembered her precious canister of mace.

The trip upstream wasn’t bad, under the circumstances. She hugged the southern shore and took her time. Soon enough she reached the reedy place just beyond which there was the slightest hint of a bay, though you’d never know there was a sly small stream at its mouth. Tentatively, she nosed her craft into the tall weeds. And they parted before her.

“I’m the New Age Moses,” she muttered. “In a flashy Kevlar basket.”

She ducked, felt the soft willow tendrils trail across her back. Then she was in the open again, and there was a channel here, deep enough to navigate, as long as she stayed in the very center. It
was
magical, even with a hangover. She stopped to look down, saw tiny fish darting in the dappled light. She sat up again and glided on the still green water. Trees dripped on her. She looked up and felt tiny cold splashes on her face.

There was no wind back here, only a distant whisper of the weather out there in the real world. She had passed over into a dream of stillness, of filtered, green light, glossy with a night’s worth of rain.

She rounded a bend and sniffed. There was a stench in the air. She remembered it from before, but it was worse this time, possibly because of the rain. And now she remembered what Jay had told her. All along the shore were tangled thickets of carrion flower. Thorny, green-stemmed, with heart-shaped leaves and beautiful blue berries. The stink attracted flies, apparently, which acted as pollinators.

Just what perfume’s supposed to do,
she thought.

She dug her paddle in deep and scooted through the thicket. Rounding the next bend, she saw the bridge up ahead; there was a black half-ton parked right in front of it.

She dug the blade of her paddle into the sand and stopped her forward progress. She held her breath.

She saw no one around.

Quietly she pulled herself back until the kayak was invisible from the bridge. She hoped. She hid behind a veil of willow, listening and waiting.

A man appeared on the house side of the bridge. He was maybe in his fifties, but tall and wiry in shapeless farmer’s pants tucked into tall rubber boots that shone with water from fording the snye. He wore a faded shirt with the sleeves rolled up, revealing formidable forearms. His nose was hooked, under a craggy forehead, bristling with a healthy mat of gray eyebrows. His hair was thin, a gray sheen over the sun-dried dome of his skull. He had his hands in his pockets, and he was looking around, as if he had heard something.

With her hand grasping a thin branch of willow, Mimi inched her way back farther still, wishing the damn kayak wasn’t so damn bright.

Then suddenly there was a rustling in the thick bush beside her, and from out of nowhere a dog appeared and started barking at her like crazy, its whole body shaking with excitement.

“Clooney?” shouted the old man. “What is it, girl?”

And Clooney, a hound of some kind, took those words as command enough to splash through the stream to Mimi’s side, barking even louder.

Leaning away from the dog, Mimi lost hold of the branch and then of her balance, and before she knew it, the kayak flipped. She screamed and went under.

“Come!” shouted the man, who was splashing toward her, right down the middle of the snye. “Come here, girl!”

Clooney obediently abandoned her catch and bounded through the water toward her master, while Mimi struggled to get her legs out of the kayak.

“Jesus H. Christ!” she shouted.

“Lordy, Lordy, what have we here?” said the man as he reached down to offer her a hand. She clambered to her feet without him, soaked and swearing a blue streak, which only made the dog bark all the louder and dance around on the shore.

“Lordy, Lordy,” said the man again. There was a hint of laughter in his voice, which only made Mimi angrier.

“What the fuck are you doing here!” she shouted. Then she slipped on a rock and ended up once more in the drink.

“Whoa, hold on, lass, hold on,” the old fellow said, reaching out again to give her a hand. She slapped his hand away and was content, for the minute, to just sit there up to her chest in the snye.

His hand was huge and gnarled and strong. He wouldn’t budge, so she took it, reluctantly. Soon enough she was on her feet, sopping, undamaged, but seething mad.

She had swallowed some water and started coughing. The man, who was still holding her arm for support, now smacked her on the back, until she was able to free herself from him and stumble a few feet away to the bank.

Meanwhile, the man had grabbed the dog by the collar. Clooney was wagging her tail and looked anything but dangerous. She was a hunting dog, Mimi suspected, the color of a kindergarten kid’s paint palette, muddy gray-brown, and with splotches that looked like they had been finger-painted onto her pelt.

Clooney barked at her.

“I’m not a duck!” shouted Mimi.

Clooney barked again.

“You all right?” said the man. His voice reminded Mimi of a gate that needed greasing.

“I’m fine,” she snapped. She was rooting around in the snye for her running shoes. She had taken them off and they had fallen into the water, which was so stirred up she couldn’t see a thing.

“Clooney has a habit of sneaking up on her quarry,” said the man. “Don’t you, girl?”

Clooney barked and licked his face.

If this genial display was meant to endear the dog to Mimi, it failed. She had found her shoes, which she chucked into the long grass on the bank. She struggled out of her flotation device.

There.

She sniffed and wiped her hair back off her face, rubbed the water out of her eyes, and tried to stand up straight. When she looked at the stranger, he was ogling her chest. She crossed her arms, shivering from the chill.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

“The name’s Peters,” he said. “Stooley Peters, from up the road. Just came by to see the lad. Got him my bill for the snowplowing.”

“Snowplowing?”

The man nodded. “From last winter, eh? I done his drive for him.”

Right. Peters, the keeper of Paradise. What a laugh! She’d noticed the name on his mailbox when she was out jogging.

“I’m not much at the paperwork side of things,” he said. “Takes me a good long while, you know, to get around to it. What with the seeding and chores and such.”

“Jay’s on his way,” she said. “He should be here pretty soon.”

He nodded. “Good, then we can just wait and get to know one another.”

She couldn’t help but laugh. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Why don’t you just leave your bill in the mailbox.”

He scratched his chin. “If that’s the way you want it,” he said.

She maneuvered her way around the kayak, grabbing the towline in her fist, and splashed toward the bridge.

“Your shoes,” he said. He was behind her now and held her sopping running shoes in one meaty hand.

She reached out to get them and he handed them to her, though he didn’t let go right away, so that she had to tug to release them from his grip.
Having a good old time,
she thought.

Peters stepped onto the bank, dragging the dog with him. Clooney barked.