“Hi, Eddie. Is your Mom at home?” This threw him.
“Uh, yeah. Yes. She is.”
“Do you think I could talk to her, please?”
“Sure. I guess. Let me check.” He backed away from the door and only just managed to keep from closing it in my face. Eddie was normally very polite. It was one of the things I really liked about him. Something was definitely up.
“Mom!” I heard him yell. He hadn’t moved far away from the door and was calling over his shoulder. “It’s Miss Deacon, Mom.”
“Ms.” I said, out of habit. I heard a distant garbled murmur and then Eddie returned, opening the door wide enough for me to enter and casting a furtive glance past me out into the front yard.
“Come on in,” he said.
As I moved past him into the hallway, he was still peering out into the road. I tapped him on the shoulder. “Eddie,” I said. He jumped.
“Huh?”
“When the police come, let your mother answer the door, okay? You’re an open book.”
“A what? How’d you know? Are they coming now?”
“They’ll be a little while yet. Show me where Francy and your mother are.”
Silent, he led me towards the kitchen.
Six
And every time the wind blows, she shatters.
–Shepherd’s Pie
The interior of the Schreier home was, as Aunt Susan would say, “roped off by Sears”. A spindly-legged hall table held a vase full of fake flowers whose buds matched the wallpaper. Above it hung a gilt mirror. Throw pillows and bowls of pot-pourri multiplied all over the place like Tribbles. There was God-stuff everywhere—embroidered Bible verses on the walls, stacks of tracts on every flat surface and an actual plaster Jesus bust, like a watchdog near the door. Francy’s pram stood out like a beat-up Chrysler in the middle of a china shop.
A stack of sticky-looking squares on a decorative plate held pride of place in the centre of the kitchen table, and there were pretty napkins set out, as if company were expected. A silver coffee pot and rose-patterned cups and saucers stood at the ready.
Carla rose as I entered the kitchen. She was wearing a crisp, blue, Barbara Billingsley dress, and she smiled in welcome.
“Oh, Pauline, what a nice surprise,” she said.
Francy was huddled at one end of the table, Beth in a snuggly-carrier against her chest. She held her coffee cup in both hands, as if the warmth of it were desperately important. She looked terrible.
Her skin, pale at the best of times, was almost blue-white, the scarred side of her face was livid, and she had been crying, lots. Her right eye was swollen almost shut and there was a cut on her cheek. I didn’t have to ask who had hurt her. She looked at me once, as I came in, and then went back to staring into her cup. Her glance scared me. It was totally devoid of emotion—she had looked through me, not at me. The lights were on, as they say, but nobody was home. I felt the back of my neck prickle.
“Francy,” I said, “good on you for getting out of there. You okay?”
“She won’t tell you,” Carla said, in a hushed, we’re-at-a-funeral voice that made me want to smack her. “She’s been like this ever since Eddie brought her in last night. She hasn’t said a word.”
“Oh, boy. She seen a doctor?”
“I tried to call one last night, but she went—well, she was quite upset. Pulled the phone cord right out of the wall.” Carla gestured to a telephone on the counter near the back kitchen door. The phone cord dangled. Exhibit A.
I walked around to the end of the table and crouched next to Francy’s chair. I put my hand on her arm, an experiment, and she didn’t flinch, so I put my arms around her thin shoulders and hugged, hard. I could feel her vibrating like a small, cold animal, but she didn’t make a sound.
“Is Beth okay?” I said. She nodded, still not looking at me.
Carla had poured me a cup of coffee and handed it to me, eagerly passing the plate of squares as she did so. Amazing, really, that kind of hostess training. Maybe it was so firmly ingrained in her psyche that she did it without thinking. I took a square, to be polite, and placed it on the delicate saucer next to my cup. What Carla Schreier would make of a tea party at my place, I didn’t like to think. Mugs sluiced hurriedly in the water bucket, wood shavings and leather scraps swept from the guest chair, a bowl of pistachios plunked in the middle of the table, if you were lucky. Goat milk from a jar.
“Do you know what happened, Carla?” I said. “Was Eddie involved? When did he bring her over here?”
“I sent Eddie next door around six last evening to return a book Francy had given him,” Carla said. “He didn’t want to go. I insisted.” What did that have to do with it? Carla was waiting for me to ask, so I did.
“Why didn’t he want to go?”
“Well, the book, Pauline. I mean. I don’t know if you’ve read it—you probably have—but I didn’t think it was appropriate for a sixteen-year-old boy to read. Not at all. When I saw the cover I almost had a heart attack.”
“What was it? That thing by Madonna?”
“Madonna? Oh, no, nothing like that. I don’t have a problem with Catholics, although I don’t hold with their practices. No, this was a book called Lady’s Lover, or something. I’ve heard that it’s absolutely disgusting, and I didn’t want my son reading it.”
“Lady’s Lover? You mean Lady Chatterley’s Lover? By D.H. Lawrence?” I said.
“Yes, that’s the one.”
I fought the urge to giggle and let my eyes flicker over to Francy to see if she got the joke, but she had not looked up. She wasn’t even listening. Too bad. I would have given anything to see some light in those clouded eyes.
“Lady Chatterley’s not really that bad, Carla. It was written a long time ago. People’s perceptions have changed since then.”
“Smut is smut. I must say that I didn’t appreciate Francy giving Eddie that kind of thing to read. He’s young for his age. And she must have warned him that I wouldn’t like it, because he hid it under his mattress. I found it when I was cleaning his room.”
I wanted to ask her how often she turned her son’s mattress in the course of cleaning house, but I smiled instead.
“So, you found the book and asked Eddie to return it.”
“She’s loaned him books in the past, you know. I didn’t mind that. We don’t have a lot of books in the house, and I’m glad that he likes to read, but I feel they went behind my back, here.” She darted a swallow-like, but resentful glance at Francy, and then back at me, waiting for my agreement.
I pictured Detective Becker on the porch of the Travers’s place, wondering where I had got to. I didn’t have much time, and this was neither the time nor the place to be getting into a heavy literary discussion, so I steered Carla back on track.
“And he went over there at six, you say.”
“Yes. Well, he can tell you himself,” she said. “EDDIE!” Her call was sudden and shrill, and I must have jumped about a foot in the air. Francy jumped too, and spilled her coffee. Beth began to whimper.
Eddie appeared almost immediately, and I guessed that he had been standing in the hallway, just out of sight. Carla looked pleased and surprised that he had come so soon. Perhaps her son normally made sure he was well out of earshot.
“Yes, Ma?”