Two walnut nightstands, apparently part of the same set as the dressing table, stood at either side of a white, wrought-iron bedstead. The one nearest him was bare of anything but an alarm clock. The one on the other side, nearest Kaylie, held a skewed pile of women’s magazines. On top of the magazines was a familiar-looking volume. Their high school yearbook.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her hands folded in her lap, looking out the window. She hadn’t turned toward him, and now, looking at her profile, he saw not Kaylie Darren but Kaylie Lindstrom, the girl he had known in high school. She wore no make-up, no earrings, no perfume. This room was more her room than any other, and the fact that she had shared the bed she sat on with a man as cold and empty as that other nightstand seemed grossly unfair to Jim Lawrence.
She turned toward him, looked at him and smiled a quick little smile and said, “Am I in your way? Did you need to look around in here?”
He couldn’t make himself ask her what he needed to ask her, at least not yet. So instead he said, “Why don’t you use the air conditioner?”
“It’s broken,” she said with resignation.
“Let me take a look at it,” he said, striding toward the window.
“It’s broken,” she said again.
“Broken things can be fixed,” he said firmly. He bent down to take a look at it, pushing the switches and buttons on the side panel. Nothing.
“Can they?” she was saying. “Surely not all of them. That thing has been broken for years.”
He turned back to her, inexplicably irritated by her lack of faith.
“Did Professor Joseph Darren ever even try to fix this thing?”
Her eyes widened a little, and she smiled again. “No, he just went out and paid someone to put in this ceiling fan. He thought the air conditioner was too noisy anyway.”
“That ceiling fan doesn’t do much to cool it off in here,” he said, reaching into his pocket for his Swiss Army Knife.
“No, it doesn’t. But it was cool enough for Joseph,” she replied, watching him open the knife to a screwdriver implement and start to remove the panel.
I’ll just bet it was cool enough for him. The professor apparently had ice in his veins. But was it cool enough for you, Kaylie? His thoughts were brought up short when he pulled the panel away. The problem with the air conditioner wasn’t difficult to find. The power cord had been disconnected from the on/off switch terminals. Deliberately.
That son of a bitch.
“Jim?”
He was too angry to reply. He followed the cord back toward the bed.
“What are you doing?”
He looked at her, hearing the alarm in her voice. He must have frightened her somehow. He realized he was scowling and headed right toward her. Did Joseph Darren stalk toward her like this in anger, hurt her? He took a breath.
“I’m just going to unplug it. Your-” He stopped himself. He needed to get a grip. He had just been about to tell her of Joseph Darren’s deception, and here she was, not a widow for one full night yet. “-your air conditioner is going to be easy to fix. I’ll need for you to get up for a moment and let me move the bed away from the wall. The outlet is behind the bedstead.”
She was looking up at him again, in that way she had looked at him several times this evening. What are you looking for, Kaylie? Tell me. Her lips parted, almost as if she had heard him, and she clutched at the sheets beneath her.
He waited.
“Jim-” she said, but then looked down, away from his eyes. She stood up and walked away from the bed.
“Kaylie?”
She shook her head, still not looking at him.
He shrugged and reached for the bedstead, and heaved it away from the wall. He bent to unplug the air conditioner, and stopped short. There were footprints on the wall behind the bed.
Two footprints, to be exact. From the soles of a woman’s athletic shoes. A little garden dirt, perhaps. Two feet, toes pointing up, slightly apart.
He looked at Kaylie, then back at the footprints. He bent down. While the wooden floor under her side of the bed was dusty, something had slid along the floor under his side. He looked more closely, and saw white paint chips missing off one slightly bent rung of the bedstead. The paint chips were on the floor, in the area between and beneath the footprints. He gripped the top of the bedstead, thinking of the single wineglass, picturing her beneath the bed, bracing her feet against the wall, straightening her legs as she pulled…the way the direction of the rope marks on the neck would match up with a suicide-by-hanging. He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, it was all still there before him. He slowly straightened.
“He came home one day about twenty years ago and announced that he was going to get a vasectomy,” he heard Kaylie say behind him. He couldn’t bring himself to look at her. He bent down again and unplugged the air conditioner cord, then walked back to the window.
“He had decided that I wasn’t going to have any children. He had his child. Lillian. Did you know that child hated me? Not so much anymore, but it was awful when she was growing up. I don’t think she would have hated me so much if Joseph hadn’t told her that I was the reason he didn’t marry her mother. He lied. To me and to Lillian and to God knows how many other women. He lied all the time.”
“Yes, I know he did,” Jim said wearily, and knelt to begin replacing the wiring Joseph Darren had undone.
“Today he told Lillian that she should get rid of the baby.”
The screwdriver stopped for a moment, then went on.
He finished replacing the panel and got to his feet, looking out the window at the smoke, which had turned the moon blood red.
Without looking back at her, he knew she hadn’t moved. She stood there, silent now.
“Kaylie, I’m an officer of the law.” For the first time, his chest felt tight as he said that.
“Yes,” he heard her say.
He walked over to the outlet, plugged the air conditioner in, listened as it hummed to life, giving off a dusty smell of disuse.
“You fixed it!”
He looked over at her, at the way her face was lit up in approval and admiration.
“Yes,” he said, and moved the bed back against the wall.
He walked back to the air conditioner, adjusted its settings. He closed his eyes and bent his face to it, letting the cool air blow against him; felt it flattening his eyelashes and buffeting his hot skin.
“Kaylie.”
“Yes?”
“Go turn the clothes dryer off.”
She hesitated, but then he heard her leave the room, heard her going out into the garage. He looked out the window and saw the headlights of other cars coming toward the house. He stood up straight, lifting his fingers to his badge, feeling the now-chilled metal beneath them.
Fifteen years as a deputy sheriff, only to come to this.
Why tonight, he wondered.
The Mouse
At one time or another, everyone has carried a dead mouse around in his or her pocket.
I didn’t know that when I was in the fifth grade, or even in the seventh grade. I didn’t know it until fairly recently, when I confessed one of the greater shames of my childhood to Peggy, a friend at work.
Peggy and I are friends who work together; we don’t socialize outside of work very often. I don’t know why she was the one I confessed to, except that maybe sometimes when you’re around someone for eight hours a day and you’re comfortable with them, you start to tell them things about yourself, find yourself blurting out stuff that might end up making it impossible for them to be comfortable with you again. That was how big that mouse was by then.
I told Peggy that I’m not sure now whose fault it was that the mouse died. Maybe it was my fault, and not remembering is just a way of fleeing some of the guilt I felt when it died. I was ten years old, and so much was going wrong when I was ten, the death of the mouse seemed almost like a sign from God. Looking back, perhaps it was.