Claire had to buy some film. She was reluctant to go all the way into the city to the lab. It would take too much time and she wanted to be back for Michaelaen when her parents returned from their bowling at four. She liked Michaelaen. He reminded her a little bit of … oh, well, he was himself. She liked him for himself. There was a camera store up on Lefferts where she could go. Twice the price, but that couldn’t be helped. Tomorrow she’d take the train and pick up the chemicals she’d need for her lab. All morning she’d been clearing away years of junk from one corner of the cellar, unburying equipment that was dusty but almost certainly still good. This way her mother couldn’t say, “Of course you can have a corner in the basement for your lab. One day, when we get around to clearing away all that stuff.…” Now it was done and there was nothing Mom could do about it. Heh heh.
Claire helped herself to a clean, fluffy towel and went into the shower. You couldn’t beat hot-and cold-running water. Claire arched her brown back and met the needling shower spray head on. It was like music, strong, steady music, and she gave herself up to it, flooded in steam, pouring baby shampoo all over her body, turning this way and that till the stretching coiled backward and forth in some dance of her own graceful rhythm. No. Claire stopped herself from reaching. It would do no good. Not really. Tales of blindness hadn’t sprung from vision itself but from something deeper … more spiritual in its sightlessness. She’d come too far to go back to that, no matter how much it seemed to want to leap out of her. Her dreams would quake inside of her and wake her up but she wouldn’t return to that solitary loneliness she’d used to substitute for fulfillment all during her last relationship.
She left the shower dripping, wiped the fogged-up mirror with the heel of her hand, and looked into her eyes. Yes, it was true. There was a power there that came from overstepping weakness. She winked at her image and busied herself with the hair dryer, now wondering what sort of consciousness the murderer of that small boy must live in. Did he know what he had done? Did he remember? Did he justify his rage? What on earth had made him that way? She remembered the lumbering weight of that rusty gold Plymouth this morning. Could the murderer have been in there, sated and wary? Oh, for goodness sakes, no, she shuddered and laughed to herself. Life was good. She was home. And she mustn’t let her imagination run away with her.
Claire put on a pair of her gauzy white pantaloons from Jaipur and a matching long shirt. In the fall she would have to buy herself some western clothes. The Indians had the right idea about clothes in this weather, though. Too see-through for the neighborhood, she covered herself with a brocaded ivory vest from Kashmir. Claire didn’t put on any makeup, just lined her blue eyes automatically with kajal, not bothering to look in the mirror.
She put her small silk purse across her shoulder, locked the door, and walked down the steps, engulfed all at once by the hot afternoon air. Claire stopped. She had the eerie feeling of being watched. Quickly she looked toward the von Lillienfeld house but no one was there, just a heavy Siamese calmly licking his paws. The murder had her unreasonably jumpy. Halfway down the block she turned again and noticed the Mayor following her. She threw back her fine head of dark hair and laughed. “All right, your honor. I suppose you can take care of yourself in traffic if anybody can. And probably me, too, hmm? Are you coming along to look after me?”
Of course he was coming along to look after her, the Mayor snorted to himself. Why else did she think he’d hung around the house? And this the fish store’s biggest day.
Together they made their long way up the hill. Claire grudgingly kept to the opposite side of the street on Park Lane South. She would have liked to take the woods path but she didn’t dare. She didn’t know which she feared more: the murderer (who was most likely long gone) or Zinnie’s fiery wrath, should she find out, and so she stayed on the other side which was actually very pleasant, lined with mansions from another era and walled in luxurious privet hedging, thick with the unfenceable scents of late wisteria and roses.
Claire told the Mayor all about India as she walked, her memory jogged from the broad yellow heat and the smells and the comfortable shade of the trees. Her sandals made small cushy sounds on the slate and the Mayor’s long nails scratched along. She told him things she’d never tell the others. They would just laugh or shake their heads or not believe her anyway.