Rialto. That was it. And the number?
He tried to concentrate. He was curious to see the place that she had fled. He supposed her ex-husband still lived there.
403. It was the last three digits of his matriculation number at the University of Colorado, where he had collected a degree in mechanical engineering when he wasn’t spending his time on the ski slopes.
He slowed the car through the old town, which lay tiredly under a pale sun. This was the place she said had been her home for so many years. He turned on Rialto and drifted down it until he found the number.
It was a street of large old houses that had once reflected the pride and prosperity of their owners. No longer. Paint was peeling, porches were sagging. Some windows were boarded.
403 Rialto did look more prosperous than the rest. The paint was good, the yard was neat. There was a sign in the window: Rooms by the month or by the week.
There was a woman in the yard, bundled up against the cold, frowning at some plants with plastic sacks over them. She stared at him when he rolled down the window to get a better look.
“Help you?” she asked.
He switched off the engine, got out of the car, and stretched. It seemed as cold as Colorado with the wind blowing as hard as it was, though there was no snow whitening the stiff grass.
“I think I must be mistaken. I thought someone I know used to live here. Maggie Detweiler?”
“Might have lived here. She do something she shouldn’t?”
He saw now that the woman’s face wore its lines with borderline hostility, her cheeks blotched pink with the cold.
“Not that I know of. She’s just gone to work for me in Boulder. She said she used to live here. I’m on my way to Austin. I thought I’d stop by.”
She nodded as though that were a perfectly normal thing for him to do. She spoke as if she were used to giving references. “Did live here. For almost two months. Nice woman. Glad she found work. Seemed real respectable. Very quiet.”
The woman shivered against the bitter wind. She said she didn’t think Mrs. Detweiler could find work in San Angelo. Things were really tight there since the oil bust. One day she just picked up her mail, packed up, and left. Didn’t owe any rent though. No, she had no idea where she was from. Mrs. Detweiler didn’t talk about herself.
The woman seemed to want to talk to him further, but a gust of frigid air drove her scuttling back to the warmth of the house, and he gratefully slipped back behind the wheel.
He was puzzled and a little angry. Margaret Detweiler had lied on her application for employment. She had listed no address previous to the one in San Angelo. He’d have to talk to Mac about her when he got back.
A week later he was sitting across from her.
“And I’m telling you I don’t feel so good these days, Paul, and I doubt you’ve got time to replace Maggie.”
“Oh, come on, Mac. She lied. For all you know she’s a serial killer, a felon wanted in three states.”
“Or maybe her ex-husband is harassing her,” Mac said. “There are all kinds of reasons why she might not want to be entirely candid. She did use the same name—”
“I don’t believe this,” he said irritably. “Just look at the way she dresses. That was a cashmere sweater she had on this morning. Those clothes are expensive.”
“So they are, but they’re not new.”
“They were new once! She’s hardly your average office worker.”
“Well, neither am I. It seems to me she’s just someone fallen on hard times, and hasn’t given you the satisfaction of complaining about them. I like the woman, apart from the fact that she drinks more coffee than all the rest of us put together, and I’m not having you roar back in here with a burr under your blanket and run her off!”
“Burr under—”
“Oh, it’s the unwholesome influence of working around a Texan. You know what I mean. There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation. Why don’t you just ask her when she comes back from making the deposit instead of being sulky?”
“I intend to.”
“Do it by yourself then. I’ve got a doctor’s appointment this afternoon, and I’ve got to get out of here. But I don’t want to come in tomorrow morning and find this desk empty. You be nice!”
Mac then left, less because she wanted to be early for her appointment, he decided, than to avoid being in on the interview with Margaret Detweiler. Which was not like Mac, who usually thrived on confrontation.
The drivers and loaders had also departed. The afternoon was snowy and further work could be put off until tomorrow when it was supposed to be sunny and mild.
He asked Maggie to come in and sit in the chair across the desk from him.
He told her about going through San Angelo on his trip to Texas. She said nothing, gazing with her wonderful eyes out the window at the empty yard in which new snow was being whirled about in a gusty wind.
When she continued to say nothing as he went over the importance of a work history, or failing that, a personal history, he became irritated. “So you admit you lied? You hadn’t lived in San Angelo forever—”
She looked at him then. “Who lives anywhere forever?”
“I mean, where did you live before?” He felt he was losing his concentration and control of the conversation.
“That is not relevant to my working here,” she said softly. “I am no criminal. I am fleeing no bench warrant.”
He felt helpless in the face of her implacability.
Then she looked unhappy and seemed to regret his distress. She rose and came around the desk. She looked down at him and took his hand as though he were the one at a disadvantage, the one who needed comfort.
“You have been very kind to me,” she said and held the back of his rough hand against the softness of her sweater.
After a moment he got to his feet, pulled down the shade, and locked the door.
Later, after she had gone, he realized that he had done one of the monumentally stupid things in his life, and he thought he surely was going to be made to regret it.
Though he dreaded seeing her the next morning at work, she was as collected and impersonal as ever. And Mac was delighted with him on finding that she was still there.
He left work that afternoon thinking he had gotten away with one and was very pleased with himself. He fed Willie, fielded a couple of messages from Sandy that said she would be in touch, turned on the television, and then felt very much alone. He felt his loneliness as though it was so much empty space stretching away on all sides of him. It made him unhappy and restless.
He drove by the house in which Margaret Detweiler said she had taken a room, then stopped and asked her to dinner. Afterwards he took her back to his house, where he ignored other messages from Sandy. Maggie said she had paid for her room until the end of the month, but seemed pleased that he had asked her to stay with him. She said that she thought there would be fewer complications if she did not.
He had to leave the Porsche off for servicing after his trip to Texas and asked her to give him a ride to and from work the next day. Mac wouldn’t be coming in again. She said she was due at any moment, and even the short ride out of town to the plant, she asserted, could be hazardous to herself and her incipient offspring. Maggie was now in charge, although Mac’s help was only a telephone call away.
Maggie picked him up at the service center in her old car, which was very clean inside and uncluttered except for a cheap plastic holder for cups which straddled the hump of the transmission. She confessed that she drank coffee constantly, continually, as much and as often as she could afford. Free coffee at work was a substantial benefit as far as she was concerned, though it didn’t obviate the need for making a pot as soon as she got up.