The prospect of ever sharing space with another person, or persons, had seemed so remote I saw no reason to hang on to it.
Which made me, now, think of Lucy and her daughter, Crystal.
I was a long way from considering anything serious with Lucy. And yet, she was the first woman, since I’d lost Donna, I could even imagine settling down with. Perhaps that was the intoxicating quality of sex. I hadn’t been sure, for the longest time, whether I could allow myself that pleasure again. It had seemed wrong, somehow. Disloyal. So the previous night had been something of a milestone. It had, somehow, allowed me to consider a future that was not just about grieving.
I liked Lucy. I knew I wanted to see her again.
But first things first.
I opened a dresser drawer, took out some underwear and socks, brought them up to my nose. The smoke smell wasn’t just coming from the room around me. It was in the clothes. If it had permeated into the dresser, I was sure all the items I had hanging in the closet — including a couple of suits — would be even worse.
There was a box of garbage bags in the cabinet under the kitchen sink. I grabbed three and began stuffing clothes into them. The suits and dress shirts I’d drop off at the dry cleaner’s. Everything else I could deal with at the Laundromat.
There wasn’t anything to be saved from the fridge. Given that the power had been off since the night before, nothing was still cold. I poured milk and cream down the sink. Filled a garbage bag with just about everything else. Packaged items in the cupboard — cereal, sugar, peanut butter — struck me as too much to bother with for now, so I left them there.
It took four trips to get everything I was taking with me down to the car. The stuff I’d be taking to a new home I put in the trunk; the bags of clothes went into the backseat.
I went back to the apartment for one last thing.
I kept my gun in a locked box in the top of the closet. I brought it down, opened it.
I didn’t like the idea of leaving a firearm in the car, even in a locked box. Someone could steal it, bust it open later.
So I took the gun out of the box, put it into a holster that fixed to my belt at my side. I had a carry permit, and my sport jacket obscured most views of it.
Time to go.
I parked illegally out front of the dry cleaner’s first, left the flashers going. I took in my suits and dress shirts, grabbed a ticket, then got back into the car and drove the rest of the way to the Laundromat. I found a spot on the street and lugged the three bags in, in one trip.
“Hey,” said Sam, who was going from washer to washer, unlocking the coin box, dumping quarters into her small canvas bag with the leather drawstring.
“How are you?” I asked. I apologized to her again for not being able to get to the school in time the day before to help her. “But that other guy, David. He came through.”
Sam smiled. “He did, didn’t he?”
“Still, if you’re ever in a jam again, and want to give me another try, feel free to call,” I told her. “Although I hope you never need anyone’s help like that again.”
“Appreciate that.”
“Did they get the guy?”
She set the bag of coins on a washer lid. They landed with a heavy thunk. “They’re looking. And not just for him, but for my ex-husband’s parents, too, who most likely put him up to it.”
“I think I can see why you wanted out of that family,” I said.
“He — Garnet, my former father-in-law — is almost a decent human being. Almost. But Yolanda, his wife, I swear, there’s something wrong with her. Things aren’t wired right in her head. She really thinks she can just grab Carl and raise him herself, that there aren’t going to be repercussions for that. It’s like normal rules of society don’t apply to her. She’s a dangerous woman.”
“Are you concerned for your safety today?”
Sam hesitated. “I don’t think so. And I got Carl to school okay, and everyone there knows that he doesn’t go anywhere with anyone except me. I’m going to pick him up today and every day for a while, until they find Ed. I mean, they’d have to be totally insane to try anything today after what happened yesterday.”
“Let’s hope so,” I said.
She scanned my bags of laundry. “No matter how much shit happens in the world, we still have to stop and clean our clothes, right?”
I nodded. “Good thing there’s no one else here. I may use up every machine in the place.”
“Why so much stuff?”
I told her about the fire.
“Jesus,” Sam said, hoisting the bag of coins, looping the drawstring around her wrist. “Is this town going to hell or what?”
I’d made no attempt to sort the clothes by color before jamming them into the garbage bags, and now found myself trying to organize things.
Sam said, “Nothing even looks dirty.” She picked up a T-shirt at random, put it to her nose, made a face. “I can smell the smoke.”
“Yeah,” I said, shaking my head.
She loosened the drawstring, reached into the bag, and put at least a dozen quarters in my hand. “On the house.”
“That’s okay,” I said.
Sam rolled her eyes. “You were there for me yesterday. This is the least I can do.” She drew the string tight, looped it around her wrist.
“Thanks,” I said.
Sam continued to empty money out of the other machines while I stuffed clothes into half a dozen of them, poured in soap, loaded the quarters, then drove them home. I was going to sit down, open up a browser on my phone, start looking for apartments for rent in Promise Falls, when I realized I hadn’t locked my car.
“Nuts,” I said.
“What?” Sam asked.
“Left the car unlocked.”
I went out to the curb, intending to lock the car from a distance with the remote, but noticed the front passenger window was down halfway. I walked over to the car, dropped my butt into the driver’s seat, one foot still on the pavement, and slid in the key far enough for auxiliary power to raise the window.
That was when I noticed Crystal’s comic book adventures on the seat next to me. Sorry, graphic novel.
And her lunch.
“Shit,” I said to myself. I looked at my watch. There was still time to get my laundry done before Crystal would be expecting her lunch. Maybe, by then, I’d also have had a chance to look at her book and let her know what I thought of it.
I grabbed the stapled pages, locked up the car, and went back into the Laundromat. Sam wasn’t around. The door to the office at the back was closed. In there, I guessed.
I dropped my butt into a molded plastic chair, shifting the holstered gun at my side slightly so it wasn’t digging into me, and set Crystal’s book in my lap.
The title page, adorned with bold, two-inch-high letters, read: “Noises in the Night by Crystal Brighton.”
With a black marker, she’d covered over the entire page, just leaving the letters in white.
I flipped over to page one, careful not to rip the cover from the single staple in the upper left corner. The drawing featured a small girl in her bedroom, late at night, moonlight filtering through the curtained window, covers pulled up to her nose. The girl’s eyes were open, and she looked frightened.
The artwork was especially good. The kid, odd though she might be, had real talent.
I flipped over to the second page. Glancing through the coming pages, I saw that Crystal had used all kinds of paper indiscriminately. There were plenty of standard sheets of printer paper, but I guessed when she’d run short, she went to whatever was at hand. The back side of a pale green flyer for Cutter Landscaping, a pink sheet for a maid service. No doubt to her mother’s chagrin, she’d drawn all over the back side of a page that detailed school board enrollment projections.