"Yes," Alvah said. "He cried and screamed and said he'd got the Lord. It didn't do him a bit of good; he got convicted. But he'll get out, less someone kills him in prison, which is what I pray for, though the Lord may damn me for it. They say that other prisoners don't like rapists or child molesters. Maybe someone will kill him some night."
I recognized the tone, the words. I had to fight panic hard for a second. I was grateful for Alvah's absorption in her own troubles. My hand went up to my chest, touched the light yellow of my T-shirt, felt the ridges of the scars underneath it.
"Alvah, all I can do is clean," I said.
"Well, let's do that," Alvah said shakily. "We might as well."
For three hours, we worked in the small apartment, cleaning things that had never been dirty and straightening things that had never been messy. Alvah likes her life streamlined—she would live well on a boat, I've always thought. Everything superfluous was thrown away ruthlessly; everything else was arranged logically and compactly. I admire this, having tendencies that way myself, though I'm not as extreme as Alvah. For one thing, I reflected as I wiped the cabinets in the bathroom, Alvah has such limited interests that cleaning is one of her few outlets for self-expression. Alvah does a little embroidery of an uninspired kind, but she doesn't read or sew and is not particularly interested in cooking or television. So she cleans.
Alvah is a warning to me.
"What about the camper?" I asked when I thought we were almost through with the apartment.
"What?" Alvah said.
"We usually do the camper, too," I reminded her. The Yorks have a camper they pull behind their pickup truck, and when they visit their daughter, they park in her driveway and live in the camper. They can make their own coffee in the morning, go to bed when they feel like it, they've often told me. I'd been remembering while I worked how may times the Yorks had mentioned their granddaughter Sarah; youngest of their daughter's children, Sarah had been spoiled and had just last year made a bad marriage to a boy as young as she. But the Yorks have always doted on Sarah.
"You remember all the arguments Pardon gave us about that camper?" Alvah asked unexpectedly.
I did indeed. At each end of the residents' parking garage is a space about car width between the wall of the garage and the surrounding fence. The Yorks had asked permission to park their camper in the north space, and initially Pardon had agreed. But later, he'd reneged, insisting it stuck out and inconvenienced the other residents.
It had never been my business, so I'd paid little attention to the whole brouhaha. But I'd heard the Yorks carry on about it, and I'd seen Pardon standing out in the parking area, shaking his head at the camper as if it were a difficult child, puttering around it with a yardstick. Pardon Albee had been a fusser, a man apparently unable to let anything be.
He would never let a sleeping dog lie.
Now Alvah was weeping again. "You'd better go, Lily," she said. "This whole thing has just got me where I don't know if I'm going or coming. These past few days, when we were there for the trial, they have just been like hell. I'll do better next week."
"Sure, Alvah," I said. "Call me when you want to get your curtains back up, or if you want to clean the camper."
"I'll call you," Alvah promised. I didn't remind her that I hadn't been paid; that was an indicator, too, since Alvah is always scrupulous about paying me on the dot.
I can always drop back by tomorrow, I thought. By then, perhaps some of the shock of Murrell's trial would have worn off.
Of course, Sarah's suffering would continue, for weeks and months and years... .
I realized it for sure wasn't my day as I was leaving the building. Deedra Dean came in the front door before I could get out of it.
I can't stand Deedra, especially since our conversation last week. We'd been standing right inside Deedra's upstairs apartment door. Deedra had come home for lunch and was ready to return to Shakespeare City Hall, where she almost earns a living as an office clerk.
"Hi, housekeeper!" Deedra had said chirpily. "Listen, I been meaning to tell you... last week I think you forgot to lock the door behind you when you left."
"No," I had said very firmly. Reliability is very important in my work, maybe even more important than doing an impeccable cleaning job. "I never forget. Maybe you did, but I didn't."
"But last Friday, when I came home, my door was unlocked," Deedra had insisted.
"I locked it as I left," I'd insisted right back. "Though," I'd added, struck by a sudden recollection, "Pardon was on his way up the stairs as I was coming down, and of course he has a master key."
"Why would he go into my apartment?" Deedra had asked, but not as if the idea was so ridiculous. As it sunk in even further, Deedra'd looked... well, a strange combination of angry and uneasy. I'd been intrigued by the sight of thought processes echoing through Deedra's empty head.
Deedra Dean, Deedra of the shiny blond hair, voluptuous figure, and a face completely undermined by its lack of chin. Deedra is always brightly made up and maniacally animated to distract the eye from that damning absence. Deedra moved into the apartment building three years ago and had screwed every male who had ever lived in the building except (maybe) Pardon Albee and (almost certainly) T. L. York. Deedra's fond mother, a sweet, well-to-do widow who recently remarried, subsidizes Deedra heavily. Lacey Dean Knopp is apparently under the impression that Deedra is dating around until she finds Mr. Right. To Deedra, every man is apparently Mr. Right, for a night or two, anyway.
I've told myself often that it isn't any of my business, and I've wondered why Deedra's habits infuriate me. Gradually, I've come to the conclusion that Deedra's total lack of self-respect dismays me, Deedra's risk taking frightens me, and the ease with which Deedra has sex makes me envious.
But as long as I get paid on time by Deedra's mama, I keep reminding myself every ten minutes that Deedra is an adult, nominally at least, who can arrange her life as she chooses.
"Well, just don't let it happen again," Deedra had lectured me last week, with a lame attempt at sternness, after she'd accused me of leaving the door unlocked. Even Deedra's feeble brain had finally registered my anger. "Oh, gotta run! I had to come back to get my insurance card. I've got to get my car inspected on my lunch hour and get that tag renewal notice in the mail."
I'd wanted to say something to Deedra about her lifestyle, something that would make a difference, but I knew nothing I could say would make an impression. And it was truly none of my business; Deedra was supposed to be grown up. I'd watched out the window as Deedra hurried from the front door to her red sports car, left idling at the curb. Deedra's mother had made the down payment on that unreliable but flashy car; Deedra'd told me that quite casually.
"Did you ever find out if Pardon had been in your apartment?" I asked today. There was no one else in the ground-floor hall, and I kept my voice low. I had been following my own train of thought so intently, I'd forgotten that Deedra might be thinking of something quite different, and she looked at me now as if I was a very peculiar person.
"No," she said fiercely. I raised my eyebrows and waited. "And you better not tell the police you talked to me about that, either!"
"Oh?"
"You won't get any work in Shakespeare ever again," Deedra threatened. "I don't want to be involved in that old bastard getting killed."
"Do you seriously think," I said, one side of my mouth curling up in a very dry smile, "that anyone in this town would give up an excellent and reliable maid like me to protect your hide?"
Deedra's blue eyes widened in shock. A door opened on the second floor, and down the stairs came the Garden Apartments' only black tenant, Marcus Jefferson. Marcus, a handsome man in his late twenties, gave us a startled look, muttered a greeting, and pushed past us to the front door, which gave its heavy groan as it inched shut behind him.