???
She paid for the house with a portion of the cash and deposited the rest, rattling on to the man at the bank about the need to keep an extra thousand for furnishings and repairs. She wasn’t sure if he hated or envied her or both, but she had her first sense, watching the black-suited men eye her in the bank lobby, of what it meant to be a young widow. She tucked some cash into the satchel in her room, but she rethought hiding places—Irina searched well and constantly. Fluttery bits of paper Dulcy had left in the closet door and the bureau drawers were dislodged when she checked, and though she was sure the barricaded pile with the journals hadn’t been touched, she added another layer, with a note midway:
If you read this, Irina, then I know you’re in my things. I am private, and I am not worth your time.
The moth wing on the green journal at the top of the pile stayed in place, but she moved the cash and diamond to the hem of the gray shearling coat, and tied intricate knots with silk ribbons around the satchel and each of the notebooks inside.
She was back at the window, back to watching Lewis Braudel come and go. She didn’t know what to do, what to worry about, how to react to his presence or his apparent disinterest. She fretted about the talk he was scheduled to give the club, but tried to believe in the idea that everything in life really was coincidence: she wasn’t living in Walton’s world, anymore.
Dulcy resorted again to a corner of the library, Braudel having destroyed the refuge of the Elite lobby. She read every magazine, and tracked the misfortunes of the world and the statewide travels of her doppelganger body, who was due to visit Livingston in the next few days. She’d gradually worked through most of the titles on its half-dozen shiny shelves, and today she ended up with a fat volume on Chinese customs. She hoped to find an answer to how long the town’s Chinese restaurant would be shuttered. There was a sign on the door of Ah Loy—closed for a funeral—and Eugenia, enemy of all good food, had claimed that the owners of the restaurant had gone all the way back to China with their body. Margaret said nonsense—families immigrated with a little bit of soil, and would tuck it in the cemetery up Fleshman Creek.
A shadow fell across the page. “Was your husband Chinese?” asked Samuel.
She laughed and blushed, and when she saw Braudel standing next to Samuel, she faded to a mottled white. But she managed, “How are you?”
“I’m well, thank you,” Samuel said. “My friend is at loose ends, and needed something to write about, and I suggested he had his choice of horrible things from the last few months’ papers. A perfect sport for March. Have you met Lewis Braudel? Lewis, this is the shy Mrs. Nash.”
“We have,” said Braudel, tipping his head. “The night of the stabbing. And before, I think, but I may be wrong. Were we on train, when we met?”
“I can’t remember,” said Dulcy. “I’ve certainly taken enough of them in the last few months.”
“You had a sister.”
“A friend, helping after my husband died.”
“Ah.” He looked confused.
“Maybe it would be easier to look at it from the other point of view,” said Dulcy. “I went from Seattle to Chicago with my friend in January. What were you writing about then?”
She was proud of herself: she’d lied with near panache, though her hands shook, and she felt wet under her arms, and anyone who knew her would have heard the squeak in her voice. But no one knew her.
“You may have remembered my hand,” said Braudel. “I would have remembered your face.”
“He’s like that,” said Samuel. “A flirt. So what shall we look for? Suicidal businessmen, girls who jump out of train windows, girls who lie on the tracks?”
“I don’t want to write about dead people,” said Lewis Braudel. “You’re in the mood—you write about them.” He met Dulcy’s eyes. “What should I write about?”
“Live people,” she said. Her voice creaked.
“You’ll be at the talk tonight?”
Dulcy had intended to plead illness or sadness or some other dread ness to avoid this Sacajawea Club event. She wasn’t proficient with excuses; Walton had been such a good one for a decade. “I’m not sure,” she said.
“You should come,” said Lewis. “You can be my heckler, so that we have no deadly silences.”
???
Frances Woolley had made money on California land, and she had the largest house in town, an ugly paste-colored pile of bricks at the corner of Yellowstone and Clark. Her parties were filled with cosmopolitan flourishes: Japanese lanterns and cocktails, the novelty of a long-playing phonograph, a lack of ruffly elements in architecture or clothing or behavior. Mrs. Woolley traveled with three servants: an English housekeeper, a French lady’s maid, and a gaunt man named Simms who handled Mrs. Woolley’s accounts and drove her automobile, this year a cream Hammer Tonneau with red seats which would remain in the carriage house until the snow stayed away. Dulcy had spent a portion of her life in houses where a housemaid could spend an hour a day dusting aspidistras, and after listening to Samuel, she could guess at Mrs. Woolley’s relatives—a distant cousin who had gone to university with Victor, an aunt who had a middling house on Union Square. Dulcy knew that Mrs. Woolley was a medium-sized fish enjoying a small pond.
Still, she made the pond comfortable. Rex Woolley offered drinks with gin and currant syrup, whiskey and rhubarb syrup, rum and lemonade—the Woolley pantry was a sticky place. Dulcy asked for a rye old-fashioned and tried not to guzzle. Mrs. Woolley claimed she hadn’t seen Lewis for ten years, since he and Samuel were at Columbia and Rex was still in shorts. She petted his arm. “I was here most of last year,” Lewis said mildly. “Just away in the summer.”
“And it was the only season I felt brave enough to try. But this year I was much bolder.”
She looked like she’d suck him off the top of a drink, like the fizz on her good champagne. Her cloud of hair tilted toward him. She asked Durr to take their photograph.
“Mother collects trophies,” said Rex. He was not quite as bland and fretful as he seemed; maybe it was a family trait, because Samuel also changed to suit an audience: with the town’s pillars, he was flat, earnest, admiring; with women, he teased. But now she understood why Samuel called Rex the Kinglet: as he mixed drinks, she heard him telling the people at that end of the room that his family tree traced back to William the Conqueror.
“Rex’s having a mood,” Samuel told Lewis. “He negotiated to buy a touring company in Yellowstone Park without telling us. Carriages and tents and guides. He’s arranged for Grover Dewberry to visit and film a trip down. He wants to rent a train car and take the town.”