He spoke casually, as if reminding them of a departing ferry. In the stillness that followed, Dexter heard a rapid, flickering pulse, like a clock run amok. His own pulse, he supposed.
The old man slapped his hands on the table and rose. Lunch was concluded. The room was foggy with smoke. The men shook hands and dispersed into the din of femininity and childhood.
The conversation left Dexter full of unease and a corresponding wish to speed along empty roads toward his home. A light supper of soup and toast, then Crime Drama, which they listened to all together, a Sunday ritual. And then sleep: a long, deep, annihilating sleep to compensate for the little he got all week.
He was hunting for Harriet when her younger sister, Bitsy, bolted from the library and flung the door shut, nearly colliding with Dexter as she ran past. Harriet and Regina emerged a moment later, looking shaken.
“She needs to be taken in hand,” Regina said. “Poor Henry can’t do it.”
“She’s volunteered to have dates with servicemen,” Harriet told Dexter.
“What?”
“You know, show them around town,” Regina said. “The sort of thing certain kinds of girls are doing at twenty. Not Westchester wives with four children!”
“We must find a way to stop her,” Harriet said.
It was strange to hear his wife clucking with her bossy older sister when, for so long, Harriet had been the one clucked about. She looked almost prim in her high-collared dress. It was not a thought he was accustomed to have about his wife.
“To the car,” he said.
Tabby, knitting wanly with Olive and Edith, leaped to her feet in eagerness to go. That left the twins, whom no one had seen for hours. Grandchildren joined in a search, tumbling through the house, prying open splotchy-mirrored armoires and peering under beds. “Phillip . . . John-Mar-tin . . .” It was entirely possible they were hiding, and Dexter half looked forward to the spanking he would give them if this proved to be the case.
On the top floor, he glanced out a back window at a tanker plying its way south from the Long Island Sound. Again he heard that nervous patter, like a panicked heartbeat. He hadn’t imagined it; it was a real sound. Dexter followed it to the front of the house and peered down through a round window at York Avenue.
There were the twins, faces vacant with concentration as they walloped small red balls attached to paddles.
Pat-a-pat-a-pat-a-pat-a-pat-a-pat-a-pat-a-pat-a . . .
They’d been jai-alai-ing all this time.
Despite himself, Dexter smiled.
CHAPTER EIGHT
* * *
As he drove toward his own house, the last and largest on a cul-de-sac ending at the sea, Dexter passed a worn-out Dodge coupe, dove gray, parked at the curb. A lone man sat at the wheel. It was not a car he knew.
He didn’t so much as turn his head or glance in the rearview mirror, but some part of Dexter recoiled instantly, tense and alert. Strange cars didn’t park on this block. Children didn’t play on this block. And no man visited Dexter’s home without bringing his family.
“What is it?” Harriet asked.
“Not a thing.”
Her reply was a single raised eyebrow. She didn’t turn, either.
Inside, Dexter went straight to his dressing room, unlocked the cabinet where he kept his gat, slipped it into his ankle holster, and secured the holster to his calf. Then he went back upstairs. The front door-pull would sound shortly, and he wanted to assemble a tableau of familial absorption to illustrate to the caller that this was neither the time nor the place for whatever business he’d brought.
The twins were building with Lincoln Logs on the parlor floor. Dexter settled hastily into an easy chair with the Journal-American and its fat sheaf of Sunday comics. “Boys, come here,” he said. “I’ll read you the funnies.”
They approached looking perplexed, and Dexter realized, as they loomed above his chair, that it had been quite a while since he’d read them funnies—possibly over a year. In that time they’d grown much larger, John-Martin especially. Well, it was only until the bell rang. Dexter pulled the boys onto him, and they toppled heavily against his chest, briefly depriving him of breath. It was difficult to hold both boys and the Journal-American; impossible to see the funnies once he’d managed it. But Dexter persisted, squinting at Prince Valiant through a keyhole between their necks. They began to squirm and snicker, the closed circuit of their hilarity irritating Dexter, as always. He ordered them quiet, then strained for a lively funnies-reading voice for Bringing Up Father. The twins went sullen, suffering him and no more. Dexter glanced at the front door, his ire at this interloper for encroaching upon his Sunday compounded by impatience at how long the man was taking to show.
At last the bell rang and Harriet answered, her timing and tone flawless. Dexter had the small satisfaction of presenting exactly the picture he’d wished to. It hardly mattered; even from the threshold, the man’s blinkered affect was manifest. The scene of paternal absorption was lost on him.
Dexter released his sons, who dispersed with relief, and went to greet his guest. The man was gaunt, almost skeletal, with an odd stretched-looking face that might have seemed more at home in clown makeup: a wide mouth and crescent-shaped eyes. Dexter placed him instantly.
“What an unfathomable surprise, Mr. Mackey,” he said in a tone that anyone who knew him would recognize as a reprimand and a warning. He shook Hugh Mackey’s heavy hand. “What could possibly have induced you to come without your wife?”
“She’s visiting her mother,” Mackey said with effort.
“We’ll be having our Sunday supper soon,” Dexter said coldly. “I don’t suppose you’d like to join us.”
Mackey gave him a strained, haunted glance—the look of a man whose desperation had trumped his ability to play along. He was still wearing his hat. “No, no, I can’t stay,” he said. “I just need a word. I tried to see you in the Manhattan club last week, but they stopped me at the door.”
Dexter’s only thought was of getting Mackey out of his house. The man’s very presence was a defilement—he might as well have been pissing on the parlor floor. “Say, I’ve promised my daughter a walk on the beach,” Dexter managed. “Why don’t you join us?”
Mackey regarded him balefully. His mournful rejection of the sleight of hand whereby the shadow world blended with the one everyone could see infuriated Dexter. Maintaining an appearance mattered as much—more—than what was underneath. The deeper things could come and go, but what broke the surface would be lodged in everyone’s memory.