“Shut up, Johnny. Nothing about us is changed. Nothing about you and me is different in any way.”
Two days later she drove north into the hills once again, up into the country on a hot, bright July day, through the shady villages and along the lakes.
The Mannix place was down a dirt road a little distance south of the Mountaineer. It was a narrow, two-story frame building with small windows and a steep pitch of roof. Siding, weathered gray, had been applied to about half the house, and the rest was tar paper mended in a few places with rusting squares of sheet metal.
As she walked from the car toward the small front porch a face looked at her from one of the narrow windows, and then a fat, gray-faced woman in a faded print dress came out on the porch and stared down at her.
“There’s nobody to home,” the woman said.
“I wondered if Mr. Mannix was here.”
“I said he wasn’t. He’s off with a woods crew away north of Cary Lake. Won’t be back for two weeks anyhow. I’m just minding the place for him, miss. I’m second cousin to him. I can give him word somebody was here, you tell me what you want.”
“I was going to ask him about... Mrs. Mannix.”
“The judgment of the Lord come down on that woman better than two weeks back, miss.” She stopped suddenly and her eyes widened. “I heard the wife of the man that killed her was prying around asking questions. You her?”
“I’m not at all sure that my husband—”
The woman’s voice rose to a high, curious sound, a kind of whining bellow, and her gray face turned red. “Want nobody sneaking around here trying to mix things up so Ross won’t get what’s coming to him. There’s a motherless boy and a widower man, and their loss and grief has got to be paid for. Your man took that poor girl out onto the night roads in his big car and he kilt her dead and that’s all there is to it. Now you get off this property and don’t you come back here trying to save your man’s money by making people say bad things about Shirley...”
Jane Ann fled. As she backed out and drove away she could still hear the sustained, bawling voice of the big woman. She parked near the main road, shaken by such a display of venom. She got out of the car and sat on a big, gray, sun-warmed boulder. This was the emotional climate Shirley Mannix knew — savage and bitter and very direct.
Once she had stopped trembling she was willing to concede that perhaps such ugly directness was, in its own way, a little more honest than the way some of her acquaintances had reacted in the past two weeks. Good friends had been loyal. But the others came around with the silky and soothing little words of comfort, prying in subtle ways, their mouths set in configurations of righteous satisfaction that bawdy disaster had befallen a man who had been doing so very well — up to that point. How terrible for you, my dear! How shocking! Had he been seeing the woman very long? Will he be on a sort of leave of absence, dear? And you have such darling children.
Their venom was bittersweet and more deadly, a poison secreted by lives barren of any real satisfaction, deprived of warmth, jealous of those who had good relationships, delighted to see others pulled down to their own shoddy level.
Seeing that angry woman and the place where Mrs. Mannix had lived gave Jane Ann evidence that no lawyer could have understood. It confirmed one suspicion she’d had about the entire matter, a judgment entirely aside from any speculation about whether Johnny could be an unfaithful husband. Had he been a bachelor, had he been a permanent resident of Hartsville, had Shirley Man-mix been after him for years, it would still be unreasonable to suppose that he would have had anything to do with her.
Johnny was just too fastidious for that. There was nothing unmanly about him. He was demonstrably, even roisterously, male, but he had an almost feline tidiness in his standards regarding the desirability of women. Though he accepted women as flesh-and-blood creatures, not idealized symbols, he felt it was the social and emotional responsibility of a woman to understate herself. Obviousness, crudity, aggression, in a woman repelled him. A bellowing laugh, a clatter of junk jewelry, a florid clash of colors, a tangle of hair, too much ungirdled abundance — all these things put him off.
And so that was part of the error of the assumption the world made about John Foley and Shirley Mannix. People assumed that merely because he was a man away from home and she was a random, careless, available girl, he would want her. But, all loyalties aside, he could not want a Shirley Mannix. It was not that he was better than other men. It was just that certain characteristics offended him, and from what Jane Ann had heard, the Mannix woman had had most of those characteristics in full measure.
She arose from her rock and squared her shoulders. She knew that she had to look at every piece of the puzzle. The next part of it was the Marlow brothers. People who were not emotionally involved had put the pieces of the puzzle together, had forced the pieces into position and said they fitted perfectly. But the imperfect fit created tension, and she felt that if she could dislodge one piece, all the rest of it would explode and then have to be fitted back together in a way consistent with the heart and the spirit of the man she knew.
T. J. Arlington was friendly and perfectly willing to help her. She found him in his office in the village. After she told him what she wanted, he made several phone calls, rambling and indirect, talking of unrelated matters, putting his questions in casually, winking reassuringly at her a few times as he talked.
“Strange as it may seem,” he said finally, “both those boys are working at the same time. Lew signed on with the County Road Department, and he’s in a work crew chopping brush along the Blind Rock Lake Road. Chick is up north of here someplace, maybe at Twin Creek, they think, working for some kind of a bait and boat-rental outfit.”
“Do they live here?”
“No permanent place, Mrs. Foley. They were using Tyler’s old cabin for most of the winter and spring, but he’s got it rented now to summer folks. Twin Creek is too far for Chick to be coming back and forth. I can see if I can find out where Lew is staying these days, but I think if you want to talk to him, the best way would be to drive on out the Blind Rock Lake Road and look for the crew. There will be a man named Winkler in charge, and you can tell him it would be a favor to me if he lets you talk to Lew Marlow. But you won’t like it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Both those men are mean, Mrs. Foley. Mean, dirty mouths on them. Neither of them would throw water on a man on fire, believe me. I can’t remember them helping anybody in any way unless they were paid to do it. Or beaten into it.”
“All I can do is try.”
T. J. coughed and looked uncomfortable. “All he’ll do is try to agitate you. You’re a pretty woman, Mrs. Foley. I don’t know what he’ll say to you, but you won’t like it.”
“It doesn’t matter how he acts or what he says to me. I just want him to tell me what happened that night. He and his brother were talking to Shirley Mannix about my husband. I want to know what they said. That’s all.”
“You said Johnny can remember a little more now.”
“Yes. But not really enough to help. Not yet.”
About four miles from Hartsville she came upon the two county trucks and the road crew. Winkler was a cheerful, freckled, toothless little man. “Now, you pull farther off the road, lady, and I’ll send him on back to talk to you. Is this something about welfare?”
“No, it’s a personal matter, Mr. Winkler.”
Lew Marlow came sauntering back to the car. He was older than she had expected, a powerful man in sweaty T shirt and ragged jeans. He had thinning red hair, pale blue eyes, a face so reddened by sunburn that his nose and forehead were blistered and peeling. His belly bulged over the waistband of the jeans. He looked at her through the open car window, his stare lazy, appraising and totally insolent.