"You know, he always cried." Her tone was matter-of-fact, as if describing her former husband's preference for string beans. "After, I mean. He cried and said he still loved me. When we separated, he was the one who never wanted to make it official, because he loved me so much he didn't want to get a divorce. At least, he loved me until he met her, and then he didn't care about me anymore."
"But you had something on him, something concrete," Tess prompted. "Ambulance bills he didn't pay, or insurance papers detailing exactly what had happened. You kept them, and when he decided he wanted to remarry, you used them to get the support order increased."
"Yes. Yes I did." Linda almost seemed to be in a trance before the mirror, eyes locked on her own reflection.
"May I see them? Could I see what you used to"-she didn't want to use the term blackmail-"to convince Wink?"
"So Bertie knew all along, huh? She tell anybody else?"
"With Wink dead, I don't think anyone will be coming around to ask her."
Linda gathered up the long, shaggy skirt of her ballgown and swept out of Jones amp; Jones in her stocking feet. Tara the salesgirl, wiser than Marianna at Octavia, simply watched her leave, allowing a tiny whistle of a sigh to escape.
"If she doesn't come back in twenty minutes," the older saleswoman said, "we'll wrap up what she left and send it to the apartment, along with a bill for the dress. It won't be the first time."
Tess followed Linda out of the store, assuming she was headed for her apartment, just straight ahead, not even 100 yards away. Instead, she turned right and led Tess to the branch bank in the shopping center.
"I keep all my important papers in a safe deposit box at the bank here in Cross Keys." Linda was strangely manic, as if she had wanted to tell someone this story long ago but had never dared-first because she was scared, then because she was paid. "That's the wonderful thing about Cross Keys, everything is right here. It's so convenient."
Linda pushed through the bank's double set of glass doors. No one raised an eyebrow at her ballgown and stocking feet; the bank employees must know her as well as the salesgirls. Soon, she was unlocking her safe deposit box on the counter just beyond the security gate, Tess at her side.
"You know, for a long time, it didn't even occur to me I had anything to tell," she said, as Tess's hands closed greedily on the photocopies, folded into careful fourths so long ago that the creases had turned gray. "Then, when that stupid story came out, I hated everyone thinking-but $20,000 a month. Well, it makes up for a lot."
Tess skimmed the hospital forms, with their coded comments on the various injuries treated. A broken collarbone. Lacerations. A concussion. A broken nose. Oh, Jesus, this must have been the night the ambulance was called. First-degree burns from hot grease, and the spleen so badly injured the doctors had almost removed it. And yet the hospital didn't even have the decency to grant Linda her own name on the forms. They just listed her as Gerard S. Wynkowski. His property. His chattel. His to do with as he pleased. Gerard S. Wynkowski. Not even a "Mrs." You would think Wink had been the patient.
"I can't believe they kept getting the name wrong, as many times as you went in there."
"Hell, no one can spell Wynkowski. Took me years." Linda looked over Tess's shoulder. "No, no, that's right. Gerard S. Wynkowski. The S is for Stanislaus. He hated it, how the hospital would call him Gerard instead of Wink, and use his middle name. He said that was the worst part of going, hearing them call out his full name in the emergency room."
"Call out his name? Why would they call out his name?"
"When the doctor was ready to see him. Haven't you ever been in an emergency room?"
"But they call out the patient's name-" And finally Tess understood.
"But you said you knew," whined Linda Stolley Wynkowski, pushing Tess against the bank of metal boxes. It was a child's petulant, impetuous shove, the opening salvo in a full-fledged tantrum. But unlike a child's shove, it was really hard: Tess's shoulders smacked the wall with enough force to leave a bruise, and she remembered the frightened salesgirl at Octavia, how Linda had ground her heel into her foot. "You said Bertie told. Bertie told!"
Tess sat in the parking lot of Eddie's on Charles Street, eating her way through a half-pound of Eddie's peanut clusters, her lunch for the day. She had been yearning for chocolate-covered nuts since Tommy had held his picked-over box of candy out to her, and she was a great believer in yielding to temptation. To her way of thinking, the one part of her body that actually knew what it wanted deserved to get it.
After leaving Linda Wynkowski, she had driven straight to the gourmet grocery store, her car homing in on the nearest source of peanut clusters as if it had a microchip designed just for that purpose. Eight ounces gave you about a dozen pieces. Between bites, she took huge draughts from a twenty-ounce Coca-Cola. But all the sweetness she forced down her throat couldn't wash away the sour taste of the story Linda Wynkowski had told when her fury had passed. It had passed pretty quickly, too, for Tess had done the one thing Wink apparently had never dared-slapped Linda square across the face and grabbed her shoulders, shaking her until she calmed down.
The first time, we had been married about six weeks and he went out drinking with his buddies, that greaseball Paul Tucci. And he didn't get home until four A.M., and he didn't call, and I was hysterical, asking where had he been, why hadn't he called. I was scared to go out by myself, and I was scared to be there alone. He just shrugged, you know, the way men do when they're saying you're just some little bug they can't be troubled listening to, so I picked up this ashtray-we smoked then, both of us-and threw it at him. My aim wasn't very good, but it caught part of his cheek and left a good bruise.
Put it to music and it could have been a country song. Substitute Wil E. Coyote and the Road Runner for Wink and Linda, you had a Warner Brothers cartoon. Rig up a puppet show and it was Punch 'n' Judy time.
Wink just wouldn't hit back. I don't know why. Maybe because I was a woman, maybe because he couldn't ever forget what had happened to that old guy. He wouldn't even run away, just go limp. It made me so mad, the way he wouldn't fight; I'd go wild, I'd hurt him more and more, trying to get some reaction out of him, but I never could. Finally, he said we had to live apart, he thought I might kill him the next time. He paid me support and I really couldn't complain. But then he got rich and he wanted to marry again. So I told him: you give me what I want financially, or I'll tell everybody Wink Wynkowski, Mr. Tough Guy, is a little wimp who let his wife beat up on him. He gave me what I wanted then, and I moved here. Nothing goes wrong here.
How surreal it had been, standing in the alcove of safe deposit boxes with prom queen Linda as she'd told her story. A story, not incidentally, that happened to be the complete opposite of what the Beacon-Light had reported. When did you stop beating your wife, Mr. Wynkowski? Actually, she beat me. Oh sure, Mr. Wynkowski. Even the bit about Linda's agoraphobia had been made up. The only reason she never left Cross Keys was because she was a lazy eccentric without any friends.
As a dead man, Wink couldn't be libeled, not in this state. Yet he hadn't been dead when the story had first run. Maybe the widow Wynkowski had a wrongful death suit on those grounds. Unfortunately, Tess did not work for the widow Wynkowski, she worked for the Beacon-Light, and all her information belonged to them, even information that had nothing to do with how a certain story got into the paper, and everything to do with how screwed up it was once it got there.