Ray talked to her about the job he’d had when he was in college, working on a moving van. He found that for the first whole summer the money almost didn’t matter because of his intense curiosity about the hoards of things that people owned. He specialized in the seemingly tedious task of packing delicate or valuable items in boxes, just so he could see them and learn what he could about their owners’ lives and histories. He had pretended that he hated the chore, partly so the other moving men didn’t think he was odd, and shouldn’t keep doing it. But by the second summer he had learned the contents of homes so thoroughly that there were no more surprises. Everybody’s house was full of the same things, with the variations so minor that they revealed little except differences in income. Emily loved the way he laughed at his own curiosity.
They talked for long periods, and then were silent for stretches, and the silence built a kind of intimacy, too, because as they worked together, they were thinking about each other, each of them thinking about what the other had said.
There were times when one of them would stop in the act of moving some item-once, an old suitcase left in the guest-bedroom closet-and they would realize simultaneously that this could be itthe hiding place-and search it together.
When either of them took a book from a shelf, the next move would be to shake it, turn it over and riffle the pages. Each time something fluttered from between the pages to the floor they would both stop, feeling the same excitement at the same instant, then release the held breath in disappointment.
The things in her house-nearly all of them by now-were hers, not Phil’s. When Phil had been dead a few days, she had gone through his clothes. She had decided it was the right thing to do because good clothes should not go to waste. But she had known she could not simply take clothes off hangers and give them away. Phil was perfectly capable of sewing something inside a piece of clothing. When he was in the marines, he had sometimes gone on leave with money sewn into a jacket. So Emily had gone through all of the clothes, felt the seams of the garments, folded them carefully, and taken them to Goodwill.
At ten thirty at night, after they had been working together for fourteen hours, they loaded what Ray referred to as Emily’s “valuables” into the truck Billy had rented. She found that there were things of hers that she had kept for years simply because she expected always to live in this house, but which she didn’t feel as though she wanted to move or pay to store. They ended up taking surprisingly little-her good clothes, a dozen photo albums, a few paintings and prints, and a few things she kept only because she couldn’t give them away-Phil’s guns and ammunition, a collection of gold coins he’d had for years, a small lacquer box of inexpensive jewelry, a couple of clocks, two radios, and two television sets. Ray filled the rest of the bay of the truck with a few favorite pieces of furniture. They drove the truck to the storage building and unloaded it, then drove to Ray’s house.
IT WAS LATE Now, after three, and she was lying in Ray Hall’s bedone of his beds, anyway. It was her second night in his guest bedroom, and she noted that she had begun to have a new relationship with the room. On the first night it felt alien and empty and cold, as guest rooms often did. There wasn’t much furniture. The sheets and bedspread had a subtle smell of detergent that wasn’t the same as hers, and she could tell that nobody had ever slept on the mattress.
On the first night, she had kept her suitcase on a chair, opened it to take out things that she needed, and then closed it again. That changed tonight. Now she had clothes hanging in the closet so the wrinkles would hang out, and the bathroom counter was crowded with bottles of her shampoo and makeup containers and toothbrush and hairbrushes.
When she and Ray had come in this evening, she had been exhausted and dirty. They ate at a diner on the boulevard near Ray’s neighborhood, where the waitress knew Ray’s name and looked at him with a bit too much interest while she leaned close to him to get his order exactly right.
Emily had taken a hot bath and gone to bed, then slept deeply. But now she was awake. Since Phil’s death, she had been unable to sleep past the first few hours, the sort of sleep that was simple collapse. Once she had used up that sleep, insistent problems came back into her mind. She thought for hours about the single simple problem of where Phil could have hidden the evidence about the nameless powerful man. So far the theories and guesses that had kept tumbling out of Emily’s brain were all clever, all just like Phil, and all wrong.
Before long she found herself thinking once again about Dewey Burns. There was a great deal to think about, and she had been putting the topic off for a whole day and most of the night. Dewey was Phil’s son. Dewey had a mother. How and when had Phil Kramer met her? How could Phil have gotten a young black woman pregnant when he had just married Emily?
She tried to remember what must have been happening between her and Phil twentytwo years ago, or twenty-one years ago, but she was having a terrible time bringing back the feeling. She remembered, intellectually, that they had fought sometimes when they were very young. In later years, she had learned that it was better not to point out every single thing that wasn’t as she wanted it to be. Could that have been the problem? Could they have had a fight, and Phil had gone out and decided to get quiet revenge, or maybe gone to another woman for solace? That thought hurt too much. Maybe he had been out celebrating some case that he had solved. He had gotten drunk in some nightspot and met a pretty girl. Emily could tell by looking at Dewey that his mother must have been pretty. Those big light-brown eyes and high cheekbones had not come from Phil.
What bothered Emily the most was that something should have been happening at that time between her and Phil. She should have noticed that something was wrong, but nothing had made an impression on her. It should have, but it hadn’t.
She thought at first that the sound of footsteps in the hallway was part of a dream and that she had slipped into a nightmare repetition of the way she had been awakened only one night ago. Then she recognized that the sounds were real. She sat up and watched the door open. “Emily?”
“What, Ray?”
“More trouble.”
“What is it?”
“It’s your house again. Apparently there’s a fire.”
“I’ll be out in a minute.” She threw the covers aside, slid off the bed, and walked toward the bathroom, then realized that she had stood up wearing only a T-shirt, and that she had already walked too far to retreat. She told herself it didn’t matter. It was dark in the room; he was probably already turning away before she had moved; they were both adults; it was an emergency. Then she hit on the truth: She didn’t care if Ray saw her that way.
Her house. She tugged on some clean clothes, then sat on the bed to tie her running shoes. Her house. That man must have been back, trying to find exactly the same thing she had spent the day looking for. She felt afraid, but at the same time she felt urgency. She wanted to get there and see.
She met Ray at the upstairs landing. This time she took her purse because it had Phil’s gun in it. She knew it was illegal for her to carry a gun, but she didn’t care. She followed Ray down the stairs and saw that he had his gun tonight. He must be thinking what she was thinking: Anything could be a ploy, a trick to get her out in the open. She got into Ray’s car and he drove toward her neighborhood, but neither of them spoke at first.
When they were near Emily’s street, it was hardly necessary to say anything. The sky had an orange glow, and pieces of black ash floated upward against it, swirling in the hot updraft. Emily could see a big sycamore silhouetted against the orange luminescence. Beyond it the sky seemed to brighten as rolling sheets of flame came up off the siding on the second floor, flickering around the fireproof shingles of the roof. The windows were all shattered and black smoke streamed out, but the rooms inside were bright with fire. There was a hot wall of fire beyond every window frame, as though everything had gone up at once.