“What about the baby?” Longarm asked. “Where is the baby?”
Dawn chuckled, but there was no hint of mirth in the sound. “That’s a real pisser, mister. Turns out she wasn’t knocked up after all. It was just a false alarm. Isn’t that just about the funniest damn thing you ever did hear?”
“Yeah,” he said in a dry, sad voice. “Damn well hilarious.”
Chapter 20
Longarm walked to the window and peered unfocused into an unseen distance. He could not actually have looked out through the glass had he wanted to. It was frosted over a quarter-inch thick or more, and he could feel the chill seeping through his clothes to find vulnerable flesh when he stood near the frozen glass. He stood there for several minutes, smoking, thinking about the dead girl-child Nancy. Then he tossed the butt of his cheroot into a rusting can that served as a makeshift spittoon and went back to sit again on the side of the bed next to Dawn.
Who, he could not help but notice, had not made any attempt to cover herself. She was still naked. And getting prettier as the minutes passed.
“Tell me about last Sunday morning,” he said.
Dawn turned her face away and seemed to collect her thoughts. Finally she spoke. “I guess that’s why I feel so extra bad about what happened to Nancy,” she said.
“How’s that?”
“Saturday nights are always real busy, but Nancy, she never was one to sleep in late. She had the habit of rising early no matter what. Me, I’ll sleep till way past noon if I can get away with it.” She tried for a small smile and almost managed one. “That’s one of the advantages of my line of work, if you see what I mean.”
“Sure.”
“Last Sunday, though, I was awake early for some reason. I wasn’t sick or nothing like that. Just awake. Nancy came by, oh, about ten o’clock I think it was. She didn’t knock. Prob’ly she didn’t want to wake me if I was still asleep. She just opened the door and peeped in. I saw her and said good morning, and she slipped inside and sat on the edge of the bed. Right there where you are now, ‘cept in the other place instead of here. She sat right down and reached over and took my hand. Her hand was cold, I remember. I suppose she’d been out to the backhouse already, then come back inside to get ready to go out. Anyway, her hand was cold. I remember that so plain. I can as good as still feel it. You know?”
He nodded, encouraging Dawn to continue but not wanting to interrupt the flow of her thoughts.
“She held my hand in both of hers and said, ‘Dawn, why don’t you come out with me. It’s such a beautiful morning. Come walk with me.’ Nancy loved to get up, sometimes real early, and go walking. Not to any place in particular. She just liked to walk in the mornings. She said the air was clean and sweet then and the walking made her feel good. She asked me to come along any number of times, and I always thought that one of these days I would do it. But the way it turns out, I never did and I never will.
“But I wanted to. Really I did. But I’d worked awful hard the night before and the bed felt so soft and warm and it was cold outside. Had been for a couple weeks already. There wasn’t no snow yet. Not but a few little flurries every now and then, but there wasn’t no snow sticking on the ground yet. That was still to come.
“And anyway, Nancy wanted me to come out with her and in a way I wanted to, but in the end I decided to stay under the covers and let Nancy go on alone.” Dawn gave Longarm a haunted, stricken look. “If I’d got my ass out of bed that morning and gone with her …”
“If you’d done that,” Longarm said, “then more than likely you both would be dead today. It wouldn’t have done Nancy the least bit of good.” Not that he believed that. The truth was that if there had been two girls strolling together, then today they almost certainly would both be alive. But that was not what Dawn needed to hear right now.
“Do you remember what she was wearing?” he asked.
“Every stitch,” Dawn said. And she proceeded to describe to perfection the women’s clothes Longarm had found at the Travis cabin.
“Was she carrying a handbag that day, can you recall?” he asked next.
Again Dawn gave the question thought before she answered. “I’m sure she was. I think … yes, she put it down beside her. On the far side of her. I remember seeing the handle of it visible beside her thigh.”
“The handle. Could you describe the bag for me?” There was no handbag at the cabin. Longarm was certain of that.
“It’s an old bag. Nancy never said, but I think maybe it was her mama’s bag or somebody special to her like that. She was real fond of it. I remember a couple weeks ago we were shopping. We’re allowed to shop on Wednesday afternoons, you see. The decent women don’t come into the shops on Wednesdays between three and five. They stay home cooking and getting ready for prayer meetings or quilting bees or whatever, and us whores are allowed to conduct our business then when we won’t contaminate any of the fine ladies or be seen by them. Nancy and me were shopping, and she bought herself some new shoes. Her old ones were falling to pieces. She’d tried sewing them with twine I don’t know how many times, but they’d gotten too bad even for her to put up with. Anyhow, she bought herself some new shoes—God, Nancy was so tight with a penny you’d think she intended to breed them or something—and I saw this pretty little handbag that would’ve looked so awful nice with those shoes, and I told her she ought to get that too, but she wouldn’t. She said her old bag had done for many and many a year, and she expected it would keep right on doing. And of course Nancy herself wasn’t old enough to’ve carried a handbag for years, so it pretty much had to have had sentimental value because of somebody else.”
“That sounds right,” Longarm agreed. “Do you remember what it looked like?”
“Of course. It had a pair of curved wicker handles and was about this big”—she indicated with her hands—“pretty good-sized really, and it was made out of a thick tapestry material, mostly black with a green and yellow and white pattern embroidered all over. The pattern was birds in the middle, surrounded by leaves and flowers.”
Longarm didn’t bother to ask if Dawn was sure. He was positive that she was.
But he damn sure hadn’t seen any bag of that nature at Darby Travis’s place.
“Do you know if Nancy intended to meet anyone that morning?” he asked.
“Who would a whore go off to meet?”
“A customer maybe?” Longarm suggested.
“Not Nancy. She’d had her belly full—in more ways than one—when it came to men. She’d fuck one for pay, but she hadn’t any more interest in men than she did in cows. Either one was just something you might see alongside the road.”
“You’re sure that-“
“Look, mister, I’m being honest with you, okay? I mean, I really want you to find whoever it was did that to Nancy. She was a sweet girl. But I can absolutely, positively guarantee you that she didn’t go off to see no man that morning. And she didn’t need to go anywhere if she wanted to see a woman. You know what I’m telling you? Norma, she’s as bad as the men who run most houses. A girl always has to sleep with the boss free for nothing. Over across town it’s Norma that the girls have to sleep with. And Nancy, she took to that real well. I mean, I suppose it isn’t speaking ill of the dead if it’s the simple truth, is it?”
“No, of course not.”
“Well, the truth is that Nancy would fuck a man for business, but for fun she wanted to be with a woman. She asked me more than once. But that isn’t what I like. You know? I mean, I’ve done it. I had to when I worked for Norma, just like all the other girls there. But it was something I did to get it over with and get on with other things. Nancy liked it. So if she was going to take a lover, mister, it wouldn’t have been some client. It would have been one of the other girls.”