“She wasn’t cleaning windows at midnight,” Mr. Castevet said.
“Why not?” Mrs. Castevet said angrily. “Maybe she was!”
The policeman held out the pale yellow paper, having taken it from his pad holder.
Mrs. Castevet hesitated, then took it and turned it around and read it. Mr. Castevet tipped his head in over her arm and read it too, his thin vivid lips moving.
“Is that her handwriting?” the policeman asked.
Mrs. Castevet nodded. Mr. Castevet said, “Definitely. Absolutely.”
The policeman held out his hand and Mrs. Castevet gave him the paper. He said, “Thank you. I’ll see you get it back when we’re done with it.”
She took off her glasses, dropped them on their neckchain, and covered both her eyes with white-gloved fingertips. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “I just don’t believe it. She was so happy. All her troubles were in the past.” Mr. Castevet put his hand on her shoulder and looked at the ground and shook his head.
“Do you know the name of her next-of-kin?” the policeman asked.
“She didn’t have any,” Mrs. Castevet said. “She was all alone. She didn’t have anyone, only us.”
“Didn’t she have a brother?” Rosemary asked.
Mrs. Castevet put on her glasses and looked at her. Mr. Castevet looked up from the ground, his deep-socketed eyes glinting under his hat brim.
“Did she?” the policeman asked.
“She said she did,” Rosemary said. “In the Navy.”
The policeman looked to the Castevets.
“It’s news to me,” Mrs. Castevet said, and Mr. Castevet said, “To both of us.”
The policeman asked Rosemary, “Do you know his rank or where he’s stationed?”
“No, I don’t,” she said, and to the Castevets: “She mentioned him to me the other day, in the laundry room. I’m Rosemary Woodhouse.”
Guy said, “We’re in seven E.”
“I feel just the way you do, Mrs. Castevet,” Rosemary said. “She seemed so happy and full of-of good feelings about the future. She said wonderful things about you and your husband; how grateful she was to both of you for all the help you were giving her.”
“Thank you,” Mrs. Castevet said, and Mr. Castevet said, “It’s nice of you to tell us that. It makes it a little easier.”
The policeman said, “You don’t know anything else about this brother except that he’s in the Navy?”
“That’s all,” Rosemary said. “I don’t think she liked him very much.”
“It should be easy to find him,” Mr. Castevet said, “with an uncommon name like Gionoffrio.”
Guy put his hand on Rosemary’s back again and they withdrew toward the house. “I’m so stunned and so sorry,” Rosemary said to the Castevets, and Guy said, “It’s such a pity. It’s-“
Mrs. Castevet said, “Thank you,” and Mr. Castevet said something long and sibilant of which only the phrase “her last days” was understandable.
They rode upstairs (“Oh, my!” the night elevator man Diego said; “Oh, my! Oh, my!”), looked ruefully at the now-haunted door of 7A, and walked through the branching hallway to their own apartment. Mr. Kellogg in 7G peered out from behind his chained door and asked what was going on downstairs. They told him.
They sat on the edge of their bed for a few minutes, speculating about Terry’s reason for killing herself. Only if the Castevets told them some day what was in the note, they agreed, would they ever learn for certain what had driven her to the violent death they had nearly witnessed. And even knowing what was in the note, Guy pointed out, they might still not know the full answer, for part of it had probably been beyond Terry’s own understanding. Something had led her to drugs and something had led her to death; what that something was, it was too late now for anyone to know.
“Remember what Hutch said?” Rosemary asked. “About there being more suicides here than in other buildings?”
“Ah, Ro,” Guy said, “that’s crap, honey, that ‘danger zone’ business.”
“Hutch believes it.”
“Well, it’s still crap.”
“I can imagine what he’s going to say when he hears about this.”
“Don’t tell him,” Guy said. “He sure as hell won’t read about it in the papers.” A strike against the New York newspapers had begun that morning, and there were rumors that it might continue a month or longer.
They undressed, showered, resumed a stopped game of Scrabble, stopped it, made love, and found milk and a dish of cold spaghetti in the refrigerator. Just before they put the lights out at two-thirty, Guy remembered to check the answering service and found that he had got a part in a radio commercial for Cresta Blanca wines.
Soon he was asleep, but Rosemary lay awake beside him, seeing Terry’s pulped face and her one eye watching the sky. After a while, though, she was at Our Lady. Sister Agnes was shaking her fist at her, ousting her from leadership of the second-floor monitors. “Sometimes I wonder how come you’re the leader of anything!” she said. A bump on the other side of the wall woke Rosemary, and Mrs. Castevet said, “And please don’t tell me what Laura-Louise said because I’m not interested!” Rosemary turned over and burrowed into her pillow.
Sister Agnes was furious. Her piggy-eyes were squeezed to slits and her nostrils were bubbling the way they always did at such moments. Thanks to Rosemary it had been necessary to brick up all the windows, and now Our Lady had been taken out of the beautiful-school competition being run by the World-Herald. “If you’d listened to me, we wouldn’t have had to do it!” Sister Agnes cried in a hoarse midwestern bray. “We’d have been all set to go now instead of starting all over from scratch!” Uncle Mike tried to hush her. He was the principal of Our Lady, which was connected by passageways to his body shop in South Omaha. “I told you not to tell her anything in advance,” Sister Agnes continued lower, piggy-eyes glinting hatefully at Rosemary. “I told you she wouldn’t be open-minded. Time enough later to let her in on it.” (Rosemary had told Sister Veronica about the windows being bricked up and
Sister Veronica had withdrawn the school from the competition; otherwise no one would have noticed and they would have won. It had been right to tell, though, Sister Agnes notwithstanding. A Catholic school shouldn’t win by trickery.) “Anybody! Anybody!” Sister Agnes said. “All she has to be is young, healthy, and not a virgin. She doesn’t have to be a no-good drug-addict whore out of the gutter. Didn’t I say that in the beginning? Anybody. As long as she’s young and healthy and not a virgin.” Which didn’t make sense at all, not even to Uncle Mike; so Rosemary turned over and it was Saturday afternoon, and she and Brian and Eddie and Jean were at the candy counter in the Orpheum, going in to see Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal in The Fountainhead, only it
was live, not a movie..
On the following Monday morning Rosemary was putting away the last of a double armload of groceries when the doorbell rang; and the peephole showed Mrs. Castevet, white hair in curlers under a blue-and-white kerchief, looking solemnly straight ahead as if waiting for the click of a passport photographer’s camera.
Rosemary opened the door and said, “Hello. How are you?”
Mrs. Castevet smiled bleakly. “Fine,” she said. “May I come in for a minute?”
“Yes, of course; please do.” Rosemary stood back against the wall and held the door wide open. A faint bitter smell brushed across her as Mrs. Castevet came in, the smell of Terry’s silver good luck charm filled with spongy greenish-brown. Mrs. Castevet was wearing toreador pants and shouldn’t have been; her hips and thighs were massive, dabbed with wide bands of fat. The pants were lime green under a blue blouse; the blade of a screwdriver poked from her hip pocket. Stopping between the doorways of the den and kitchen, she turned and put on her neckchained glasses and smiled at Rosemary. A dream Rosemary had had a night or two earlier sparked in her mind-something about Sister Agnes bawling her out for bricking up windows-and she shook it away and smiled attentively, ready to hear what Mrs. Castevet was about to say.