Inside he felt like a giant in a doll’s house. The place was only one floor, the ceilings low and the furniture close to the ground. There was a fireplace with a fire going in it, a pile of wood in a basket, a worn-out sofa and two chairs, a rolltop desk and a card table in the corner.
“You know what we’re here for,” said Jove. “Why don’t you get it for us, and there won’t be any more trouble.”
Talbot’s wife didn’t answer. She kept her sleeve pressed to her nose. She walked past both the men and their guns and into the kitchen, which was just off the living room, opened the freezer and took out a bag of peas and leaned her face into it. With her other hand she picked up a teakettle. She filled it with water from the sink and then she set it on the stove and lit the burner. Her nose was already swelling up, blood smeared across her chin. “He’ll be home soon. You can ask him where it is.”
It was Hawley’s experience that retrievals like this usually went one of two ways: people put up a fight for the goods they were holding, or they got scared, in which case they went straight to bargaining or fell down crying. But Talbot’s wife was taking out a tablecloth and dishes. She spread the cloth over the rickety card table and set knives and forks and spoons, as if the men were expected guests coming over for dinner.
Jove took a chair at the table but Hawley stayed in the doorway. When the woman returned to the kitchen the men exchanged a look and then exchanged their guns. Jove watched the woman with the rifle, and Hawley slipped away with the .45 to start searching the house.
He checked the bathroom first. Inside was a tub with no curtain around it, a toilet and a sink made of pink porcelain, with a stained plastic cup and two toothbrushes on the edge. The towels on the rack were damp. The toilet was running. Hawley pulled out the vanity drawers and emptied them out onto the tile floor. Cotton balls, Band-Aids, razors, a hair dryer. He opened the medicine cabinet and sent the bottles of pills and ointments crashing into the sink.
Next he went through the bedroom. Hawley looked behind the rumpled mattress and then he went for the jewelry box, emptying it onto the blankets. Nothing but some old turquoise necklaces, hollow silver bracelets and painted earrings. He rummaged through the bureau, tossing clothes onto the floor as he searched, knocking a line of paperback mysteries from an old bookcase, turning shoes upside down.
When he’d looked everyplace he could think of, Hawley went across the hall. There was one more door, shut tight. Next to it was a framed photograph of a skeleton, holding a scythe in one hand and a set of scales in the other. Both the scythe and the scales were made with pieces of bone—vertebrae and scapula. On the mat surrounding the picture was handwritten: Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini, Rome. Hawley waited a moment, listening. He looked at the picture. Then he grabbed the handle of the closet door, pulled it open and threw himself forward. He was met with a tumble of cardboard boxes falling down from above, knocking him to the floor.
“What the hell is going on out there?” Jove shouted from the living room.
“He opened the closet,” Hawley heard the woman say.
And that’s what it was: a closet so jammed full of stuff that it had collapsed as Hawley stepped inside. Now he was surrounded by mountains of old shoes, rolls of wrapping paper and unopened mail, a rusted tool chest, some kind of ancient vacuum, the broken pieces of a chair, an old dog collar, a pile of Mexican blankets, boxes filled with yellowed photographs and files of papers, overturned. It would take weeks to go through it all.
Hawley glanced over the papers. There were tax forms, a pile of handwritten letters and some pencil-and-ink sketches of nudes that looked like Talbot’s wife. In the drawings she was younger, her hair still vibrant, her body trim, her violet eye shyly gazing. The lines followed the curve of her back and shoulders, her arms and breasts. Hawley put the papers down and backed away. He left everything where it had fallen and returned to the living room.
Jove had pulled the card table over to the sofa. Talbot’s wife sat opposite, in one of the chairs, her neck stiff. In one hand she held the bag of frozen peas and in the other a wad of bloodied tissues, applying them both in turn to her face. There was an empty mug with a tea bag in front of Jove and another mug in front of the woman. Hawley took the other seat.
“Thought you were wrestling a bear out there,” said Jove.
“Felt like it,” said Hawley.
“I keep meaning to clean it out,” said Talbot’s wife, “but there’s nowhere else to put anything.” She shifted the peas across the bridge of her nose.
Hawley thought of the nudes and wondered if Talbot had drawn them. If maybe that’s how they’d met. If she’d been some kind of model, and what happened between them was strong enough and important enough that she’d stuck with Talbot through all the troubles that followed.
Jove looked around the room. “This is quite the hideaway.”
“It belonged to my father,” said Talbot’s wife. Her milky eye strayed to the window. It caught the light and clouded further, as if a shade had been pulled across the iris.
“Feels like the edge of the world,” said Jove. “I bet you thought that no one would ever find you.”
All three of them sat still for a while, Jove tapping the mug in front of him and Talbot’s wife swapping the peas for the bloody tissues. Hawley was thirsty but he didn’t want to ask the woman for anything. Then Jove stopped tapping and Hawley knew he was going to give the speech.
“You know what they call us?” said Jove. “The Takers. That’s what we do. We take things. And if we don’t get what we want we take something else. Anything that matters. Anything that you care about.” He wiped his fingers on the tablecloth, then sat back against the couch. “We’ll take your husband, if he doesn’t give us what we want.”
The way Jove said it was final, and the room, which was already charged with their coming, got tighter. Jove was good at this, at squeezing a place so there was hardly any air left.
“He didn’t mean to cross anyone,” she said.
“But he did,” said Jove.
Talbot’s wife took the frozen peas off her face. The skin underneath was red, a dark bruise starting from the bridge of her nose to the corner of her clouded eye. Something hit the window, a tiny thud, a small bird or a giant bee. They all turned to look, but there wasn’t anything there, just clouds and the rippling water and rows of firs and pines. Talbot’s wife put down the peas and the tissues. Her nose was nearly twice the size it had been when she opened the door. She began to unbutton the cuffs of her flannel shirt and roll up the sleeves. She did it slowly, like she was getting ready to clean the house.
The kettle started whistling on the stove. Talbot’s wife went into the kitchen and Hawley followed her. He stood in the doorway with the gun and watched her turn off the burner, his mind going to the drawings in the closet. Her beauty was still there, behind the swollen nose, haunting the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, the sloping of her waist and shoulders.
She looked up at him. “What?”