He said, “My plane was late. I barely got to the funeral in time.”
“I wanted to go,” Jan said. “I mean, we lived just across the street, and I’d known him since high school, though I don’t suppose we even said hello more than twice a year.” She set out cups and saucers while he took a seat in the breakfast nook. “But I couldn’t. Otherwise we’d have met earlier. I’d have recognized you at once. You’ve hardly changed.”
“You have. You’re not wearing jeans.” He grinned. “You’re in control. You’ve lost that air of adventure.”
“Adventure,” she said dismissively. “Who needs it? What are you doing these days?”
“I took a master’s in library science. I’m assistant librarian at John Muir Junior College in San Diego.”
“That’s no surprise. Books don’t talk back.”
Again the briefest smile. The kettle had been growling and now began to bubble. She switched it off, poured water onto the coffee in the filter section. “I saw your little car in the driveway but I’d no idea whose it was. I thought maybe John Lowndes, your granddad’s lawyer, or maybe a service man of some sort. And then those two showed up, the neighborhood’s resident semi-delinquents. I didn’t want to tackle them myself. So I called the police.”
“I’m very glad you did. What had they been doing?”
“Prowling, looking furtive, looking into windows, trying to get into the crawl space under the house.”
“They told the cops they thought someone had broken in.”
“Then they should’ve called the cops themselves. I’m afraid they haven’t got too much going for them. Virg does what he can, but there’s not much work for unskilled labor around here except in summer, when the cannery’s open. He was a suspect in a couple of robberies a few months back but nothing was ever proved.”
“How long have they been neighbors?”
“They arrived with their mother from God knows where and rented the MacDonald house about eighteen months ago. Old Mac died and Mrs. Mac’s in a home but apparently quite competent. She has an agent rent the place for her and handle the upkeep. Either she’s tight with the upkeep money or he’s a bandit. I guess the rent’s pretty low; Rosie Howard can’t make much. She’s a freelance domestic, scrubbing floors and bathrooms and doing vacuuming and laundry for university faculty members. Who say she’s painfully honest. She works awfully hard for those kids.”
“Did my grandfather ever mention a lockbox to you?”
“Goodness, no. I was hardly a friend. But I read that lockbox story in the paper. His mind could’ve been a thousand miles and seventy years away when he spoke of it. A fall, severe head trauma... and he was eighty-seven.”
He nodded. The coffee had filtered through by now. Jan took the top section off and set it down in the sink over the drain, put the regular lid on the pot, and brought it to the dinette table.
“Do you take cream and sugar these days?”
“No indeed. Same old me.”
“A lot of brandy to keep out the Oregon chill?”
He smiled evenly. “Nice idea!” But his mind pounced. A friendly gesture to someone from a warmer climate — or a confession? Did being a faculty wife lead to boredom and boozing? Maybe being a faculty wife explained those little smiling digs about no entangling alliances and books not talking back. A readiness with those might serve to remind amorous undergraduates that a faculty wife was utterly unavailable; to anyone else they were simply irritating. And just how unavailable was she?
She reached into a tall cupboard and produced a small flat bottle, then sat across from him, filling two coffee cups. One she set in front of him with the brandy bottle. He spiked his cup, slid the bottle back. She recapped it. Okay: One point to her.
“I’d almost forgotten how cold it gets up here.” He inhaled the fragrance rising with the steam from his cup. “The old house was like a meat locker. But the weird thing was how little anything’d changed, as though I’d been away for the weekend, not five years. No feeling of homecoming, or of much else either, until I went down into the basement to light the furnace. Just a cold place of angles and shadows — but a lot friendlier than anywhere upstairs.”
Bingo.
Her cup hit the rim of the saucer. For a long moment she concentrated on not spilling coffee, then raised the cup to chin level, balancing it with the fingertips of the other hand. Wide dark eyes looked at him without changing expression. Two points to me. At least. Don’t play games with me, kid.
The outer corners of her eyes lifted fractionally.
“We accomplished a few nice breaks in routine down there. I’m flattered you remember them.”
“Oh, sure. You were my first.”
“You were mine, too.” She tried her coffee. Still too hot. “My hormones had been doing weird things to me for a couple of years, and I was impossibly romantic. You made quite an impression on me. You were so fiercely alone. Took me awhile to realize you were simply alienated. Still are, aren’t you?”
“I’ll have to ask a shrink.” But feint-and-parry wasn’t the way to get this Jan out of these clothes. Abruptly he shifted gears, smiled and said mildly, “Is there something in the rules that says we have to snipe at each other? We were friends once.”
“Goodness! Is that Dave North asking for quarter?”
“I didn’t think it was, but okay.”
He tried his coffee now. He liked it hot. It reached his stomach with an explosion of benevolent warmth. He’d have to be careful. He didn’t want to lose his edge. She made a small nod, as though graciously accepting his surrender though unconvinced it was real. He went on, in the same easy tone, “I suppose I ought to talk to Virg and Kathy’s mom sometime today.”
Not that he had anything to say to her — he’d just said that as a conversational filler. But it might not be a bad idea. Dotting the last i and crossing the final t had always meant the security of completion. The unturned stone could always hide the guffaw of derision, the unanswerable question, the fatal booby trap.
Jan asked, “You’ll be staying on at the house?”
“For a day or two. I inherit the whole thing but I guess I can only do so much until the formalities are completed. Then I’ll turn it over to Mr. Lowndes for sale. There’s nothing for me up here.”
For a moment she looked relieved. Then she put her cup down. Too deliberately. Minutes ago he had admired her poised calm but now he began to feel that there was something too controlled about it, almost rigid, and it had been there from the moment she had opened the front door. She was afraid. But what of?
He had to calm that fear if he was ever going to get her out of these clothes. Maybe reminding her of their basement frolics of sixteen years ago had been mistimed. Well, all the more challenge.
He grinned and said, “So you’ll have me for a neighbor for a few days, but don’t worry, I’m quite tame.”
He reached across the table and touched her hand. He wasn’t ready for what happened.
Her eyes widened and her mouth fell open. She snatched her hand away with a force that sent her coffee cup flying, kicking over her chair and stumbling backwards over it into the kitchen. Her knees sagged and she fumbled in her skirt pocket while her throat strained on a hardly human noise. Her hand came out of her pocket and swept up toward him, holding a small canister. The noise from her throat cut off abruptly but her mouth stayed open. She stood half-crouched, graceless and uncoordinated, like a terrified child.