At dusk on December 8, Dr. Myron Stober was walking home through the streets of Emporia. It was cold. At first there were people here and there, but as he passed out of the commercial district, he became one of just two people on the street, himself and, ten yards or so before him, a small brown-haired woman in a green scarf. The woman kept glancing back with a worried look. He nodded and tried to smile, and he slowed down, but it aggrieved him that she kept throwing nervous looks over her shoulder. It was cold and he was losing light. He decided to cross the street, speed up, and get home.
But when he reached his own door and set the key to the lock, he heard footsteps, and there she was, standing on the sidewalk behind him: the woman in the green scarf.
“Good evening,” the woman said, a little abashed. “I see we were going the same place after all!”
“My office is closed for the day,” he said.
“It’s okay. I was headed back there,” she explained, pointing to where Sonia Odekirk lived.
He nodded without interest, but, instead of proceeding to Sonia Odekirk’s, the girl lingered.
“You must be Dr. Stober,” she said.
He nodded.
“I’m Glynis Walsh.”
Again he nodded, then, pushing open his door, felt the first wave of warmth from within.
“I think my friend Aldine was working for you,” the woman added. “I was just going to tell her good-bye.”
Dr. Stober abruptly turned around. “Friend of hers, are you?” He stood facing her, and fingered the soft folds of the handkerchief that lay unused in his coat pocket. In the left pocket he kept the last handkerchief his wife, Lucy, had washed and ironed. In his right he kept the ones he actually used.
“Yes,” she said, but she looked a little strange when she said it, as if he might try to disprove it. She stood still in the gray evening air, rubbing the dead grass with one shoe, each breath a small, shapeless cloud. “Do you know if she had her baby?”
“No,” Dr. Stober said, and heard the coldness in his voice, so he added, “I’m afraid I don’t.” They were perhaps ten feet apart, and he wanted to learn whatever it was this girl could tell him about Aldine. In the days following the theft, the doctor had begun to feel that the arrangement he’d made with Mrs. Odekirk would never satisfy him. He could never enjoy the car that she’d promised to buy him (if in fact she could afford a Phaeton) and could never stop wondering what had happened to his own. He’d begun to think of himself as one of Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Ops—Dick Foley, maybe, or Mickey Linehan. He gathered information. He waited. He trusted in the general weakness and corruption of others.
Dr. Stober took a step closer to the girl. He did his best to smile. “I’ve been worried about her, in fact. She was due a few days back, and I was supposed to deliver the baby, but she’s run off.”
Glynis looked genuinely surprised. “Run off?”
“I have a feeling the father showed up.”
Glynis tugged at her scarf like it scratched her chin. He wished he could see her face better. It had grown darker and she stood beyond the illumination of the streetlamp. “I wanted to tell her I finally got transferred to La Casta?eda,” the girl said.
“I’ve been there,” Dr. Stober said. In one of the Hammett books, The Glass Key or The Dain Curse, the Continental Op was talking gently to someone he wanted information from and the author used the word crooned to describe his way of speaking. Stober had liked that. It made him understand that the op’s coaxing way of talking was like serenading. “La Casta?eda,” he said, doing his best, “it’s quite grand, magnificent really, an absolute jewel.”
“That’s what I hear, too,” the girl said. “And outdoor tubs with natural hot springs right next door.”
“Yes,” the doctor said with luxurious emphasis, though he didn’t remember any hot springs. He hadn’t stepped foot in the hotel. Lucy had wanted to go in, but he’d been in no mood for it. “A tub of piping hot mineral water,” he said to the girl, “now that would be the place to soak one’s feet after a long day.”
The girl laughed out loud. It was so easy, being pleasant; he wondered at the general veneration of it. “We’ll tell Aldine of your good fortune when we see her,” he said.
“Will you? Well, thank you very much.”
“It might help . . .” He acted as if this was just occurring to him. “You wouldn’t know who the father is, do you?”
“The baby’s, you mean?”
“Yes, the baby’s.”
It was impossible to see Glynis’s eyes clearly. Her face was so pale it seemed in the darkness almost white. He kept his hands in his pockets, rubbing his thumb back and forth on the soft, clean handkerchief, balling the dirty one with his other hand. “I’d like to know that she’s safe,” he said. “Mrs. Odekirk and I have been worried like you wouldn’t believe.”
Glynis, who had pressed the back of one hand to her lips for a long moment, took the hand away. “I think he did show up,” she said. “He came into the restaurant looking for her.”
He waited. Sometimes the Continental Op stopped asking and just waited.
“It was a name I’d never heard before. The man’s name was Ansel.”
Dr. Stober raised his chin slightly to show he was expecting a bit more.
“Price,” she said. “Ansel Price.”
He spelled it aloud and she said, “Yes, that’s right. I saw it on his letters to her.”
In Aldine’s note she had said she was taking the car to help a friend. “This Ansel Price,” he said, “did he come from around here?”
“Yes. Aldine lived with him and his family when she was a teacher in Dorland.”
That was enough, Stober thought. More than enough. “Thank you, my girl,” Stober said, his voice suddenly brusque. He stepped past the girl and strode toward the rear cottage.
“You’ll tell Aldine, though, when you see her, where I’ll be?” the girl called after him, but he didn’t answer. He was already pounding on Sonia Odekirk’s door.
98
Ellie had not expected her father to come to Charlotte’s wedding. She’d even bet Ida five cents that he wouldn’t. But here he was on the eve of the day, walking in while she and Ida put the finishing touches to the kitchen after a long day of baking. Herr Hoffman looked prosperous as ever, but smaller, his back no longer straight, his neck more deeply descended into the cavern of his chest. His blue eyes were as aloof as she remembered, though, when he presented himself in the door of the café, looked from Ellie to Ida, and said, “So this is California.”
They both had their hair in rollers and scarves, which made hugging awkward. Tears ran down Ida’s cheeks, as if she had missed him, but Ellie’s eyes were dry as stones. For a fleeting moment she braced herself for the cold formality between her father and Ansel, but that dread was at once displaced with another: the fact that Ansel wasn’t here for his daughter’s wedding.
Her father was looking approvingly here and there in the kitchen. The pies stood in a neat row alongside the canisters of cookies, and everything gleamed in the kitchen. It was her mother who had taught her that, never to leave a kitchen with anything unclean or undone, but perhaps it had been her father who had demanded it. “Everything sparkling,” he said, nodding to himself, and she was surprised how a compliment as mild as this could suffuse her with prideful pleasure.