"I'll try," Don said. "You almost died. They just got the highway open in time for the ambulance to bring you up here. If you hadn't pulled through, I'd have had to take your wife to France this spring."
"Don't tell that to Stella. She'll run in here and pull my tubes out." He smiled wryly. "She's so eager to get to France she'd even go with a pup like you."
"How long will you have to stay in here?"
"Two more weeks. Apart from the way I feel, it's not too bad. Stella has managed to terrify all the nurses, so they take excellent care of me. Thank you for the flowers, by the way."
"I missed you," Don said. "Peter misses you too."
"Yes," Ricky said simply.
"It's a funny thing about this whole affair. I feel closer to you and Peter-and Sears, I guess I have to say-than anyone since Alma Mobley."
"Well, you know my thoughts about that. I blurted them all out when that young doctor doped me to the gills. The Chowder Society is dead, long live the Chowder Society. Sears once said to me that he wished he wasn't so old. I was a bit taken aback at the time, but I agree with him now. I wish I could see Peter Barnes grow up-I wish I could help him. You'll have to do that for me. We owe him our lives, you know."
"I know. Whatever we don't owe to your cold."
"I was completely befuddled, back in that room."
"So was I."
"Well, thank God for Peter. I'm glad you didn't tell him."
"Agreed. He's been through enough. But there is still a lynx to be shot."
Don nodded.
"Because," Ricky continued, "otherwise she'll just come back again. And keep on coming back until all of us and most of our relatives are dead. I've supported my children for too long to want to see them go that way. And as much as I hate to say it, it looks like it's your job."
"In every way," Don said. "It was really you who destroyed both Gregory and Fenny. And Peter killed their boss. I have to take care of the remaining business."
"I don't envy you the job. But I do have confidence in you. You have the knife?"
"I picked it up off the floor."
"Good. I'd hate to think of it being lost. You know, back in that terrible room I think I saw the answer to one of the puzzles Sears and I and the others used to talk about. I think we saw the reason for your uncle's heart attack."
"I think so too," Don said. "Just for a second. I didn't know that you saw it too."
"Poor Edward. He must have walked into John's spare bedroom, expecting at the worst to find his actress in bed with Freddy Robinson. And instead she- what? Threw off the mask."
Ricky was now very tired, and Don stood up to go. He put a stack of paperback books and a bag of oranges on the table beside Ricky's bed.
"Don?" Even the old man's voice was grainy with exhaustion.
"Yes?"
"Forget about pampering me. Just shoot me a lynx."
21
Three weeks later, when Ricky was at last released from the hospital, the storms had wholly vanished, and Milburn, no longer under siege, convalesced and healed as surely as the old lawyer. Supplies reached the grocery stores and supermarkets: Rhoda Flagler saw Bitsy Underwood at the Bay Tree Market, turned red as a radish and rushed over to apologize for pulling out her hair. "Oh, those were terrible days," Bitsy said. "I probably would have clobbered you if you'd got to that damned pumpkin first."
The schools reopened; businessmen and bankers went back to work, taking down their shutters and facing the mounds of paperwork that had accumulated on their desks; slowly, the joggers and walkers began to appear on Milburn's streets again. Annie and Anni, Humphrey Stalladge's two good-looking barmaids, grieved for Lewis Benedikt and married the men they were living with; they conceived within a week of one another. If they had boys, they'd name them Lewis.
Some businesses never did open up again: a few men had gone bankrupt-you have to pay rent and property taxes on a shop, even if it is buried under a snowdrift. Others closed for more somber reasons. Leota Mulligan thought about running the Rialto by herself, but sold the site to a franchise chain and married Clark's brother six months later: Larry was less a dreamer than Clark had been, but he was a dependable man and good company and he liked her cooking. Ricky Hawthorne quietly closed down the law office, but a young attorney in town persuaded him to sell him the firm's name and goodwill. The new man took back Florence Quast and had new nameplates made for the door and the front of the building. Hawthorne, James was now Hawthorne, James and Whittacker. "Pity his name isn't Poe," Ricky said, but Stella didn't think that was funny.
During all this time, Don waited. When he saw Ricky and Stella, they talked about the travel brochures that now covered the enormous coffee table; when he saw Peter Barnes, they talked about Cornell, about the writers the boy was reading, about how his father was adjusting to life without Christina. Twice Don and Ricky drove to Pleasant Hill and placed flowers on all the graves which had come into being since John Jaffrey's funeral. Buried together in a straight line were Lewis, Sears, Clark Mulligan, Freddy Robinson, Harlan Bautz, Penny Draeger, Jim Hardie-so many new graves, separate piles of earth, still lumpy. In time, when the earth had settled, they would have their headstones. Christina Barnes was buried farther off beneath another heap of raw earth, on half of the double plot Walter Barnes had bought. Elmer Scales's family had been buried closer to the top of the hill, in the Scales family plot first purchased by Elmer's grandfather: a weatherworn stone angel guarded over them. There too they put flowers.
"No sign of a lynx yet," Ricky said as they drove back to town.
"No lynx," Don answered. Both of them knew that when it came, it would not be a lynx; and that the waiting might take months, years.
Don read, looked forward to his dinners with Ricky and Stella, watched entire sequences of movies on television (Clark Gable in a bush jacket turning into Dar Duryea in a gangster's nipped-in suit turning into graceful, winning Fred Astaire in a Chowder Society tuxedo), found he could not write; waited. Often he woke himself up in the middle of the night, weeping. He too had to heal.
In mid-March on a black wintry day just like those he and the Chowder Society had endured, a mail truck delivered a heavy package from a film rental company in New York. It had taken them two months to find a copy of China Pearl.
He threaded his uncle's projector and set up the screen and discovered that his hands were trembling so badly that it would have taken him three tries to light a cigarette. Just the sequence of setting up Eva Galli's only movie brought back the apparition of Gregory Bate in the Rialto, where all of them could have died. And he found that he feared that Eva Galli would have Alma Mobley's face.
He had attached the speakers in case someone had added a musical sound track: made in 1925, China Pearl was a silent film. When he switched the projector on and sat back to watch, holding a drink to help his nerves, he discovered that the print had been altered by the distribution company. It was not just China Pearl, it was number thirty-eight in a series called "Classics of the Silent Screen"; besides a soundtrack, a commentary had been added. That meant, Don knew, that the film had been heavily edited.
"One of the greatest stars of the silent era was Richard Barthelmess," said the announcer's colorless voice, and the screen showed the actor walking down a mock-up of a street in Singapore. He was surrounded by Hollywood Filipinos and Japanese dressed as Malays-they were supposed to be Chinese. The announcer went on to describe Barthelmess's career, and then summarized a story about a will, a stolen pearl, a false accusation of murder: the first third of the film had been cut. Barthelmess was in Singapore looking for the true murderer, who had stolen "the famous Pearl of the Orient." He was aided by Vilma Banky, who owned a bar "frequented by waterfront scum" but "as a Boston girl, has a heart the size of Cape Cod…"