Bother. All right, thought Dulcy. Simmer in your own snot, you cow. A second later she heard Martha’s lecture—life wasn’t a series of rewards, godly or otherwise—and had a dizzy memory of standing above the lobby of the Brown Palace, balancing a drop.
Still, having offered, she was offended to be rejected, and she closed her door with emphasis. She thought of the wine bottle but managed some strength of character and filled her empty glass with water. She resumed the chair, the notebook, the window, and saw that the theater cast had emerged, still half-costumed, smoking after the second performance. They had a bottle of champagne, and a board of what looked like cheese and bread rested on the ledge by the cellar stairs. Dulcy was hungry again; maybe she’d have Irving bring up a tray like that, just cheddar and bread. She flipped to a fresh page.
To do (cont’d):
Check electrical, gas, water. Coal dealer?
More shelves? Books!
A man passed through the alley, and Dulcy thought of Henning: it was something about the way he walked, a kind of strut she’d once enjoyed. Another man approached the alley crowd from the west. He took off his hat for a half-bow, and an actress danced over and kissed him on the cheek. She was the pretty lead from the play—Margaret had pointed her out—wrapped in a shawl but still in hoops for the Pimpernel dress, and she tucked herself into the crook of his arm. Lewis Braudel let her, and brushed a soft, fat snowflake from her powdered forehead.
Dulcy looked down at her notebook and tossed it onto the floor. It landed open, and she stared down at Walton’s shaky hand:
Boil me. Burn me.
All my love.
Only the green journal had these last three words, added on Walton’s last morning. Dulcy, who had let her brothers bury him, instead, felt her good mood once again trickle away. She climbed into bed and pulled the covers over her head; she thought of the Westfield cemetery, Walton and Philomela, Martha and Elam stuck together eternally, dotting a hillside facing Lake Erie. It was probably still snowing there, too.
She turned out the light and tried to fit her mind into a different world. But on still nights, in sudden absences of wind, she could hear everything. That weekend the Elite was hosting a stockman’s convention, and the ranchers’ bellows mixed with an argument down the alley, geese flying overhead, dogs yipping, a late train. Across the hall, Miss Randall still emitted pigeony coos, and now the same drunk who’d sung about birds and bushes during the stabbing began his nightly warble.
I long for her peaches, I yearn for your apples, but Bella’s plums bake up best...
Dulcy walked to the bathroom and stopped at the window on her way back. Lewis and his actress were gone, but everything else had an echo: snow would begin to fall, someone new would run down the street with a knife. Durr was working, his glowing glass roof blotting out the stars. A figure approached from the alley, and she thought of Henning again, and wondered if this was a headache coming on, if she’d soon smell dead mice or spices or metal. Maybe she’d only be trapped in sound: a stockman in the lobby howled about fucking Holsteins and that cow, and a zither-like instrument wailed and blended with the drumbeat sound of a guest dragging a suitcase down the hall.
The radiator hissed, and she stripped off the top blanket before she climbed back in. Miss Randall fussed if the climate was less than tropical, and Eugenia was the sort of proprietress who listened to the loudest complaint. The heat didn’t seem to make Miss Randall any happier: her moans had once again evolved into yips, and Dulcy’s always tentative love of humanity eroded. She was prone to what Walton called shit-fits of rage, and when the drunk began singing about cherry pie, Dulcy lunged out of bed and hiked the window, hissing like a goose.
The singer was directly below, momentarily silent as another man lit his cigar. They both looked up at the sound of the window, and the man with the match met her eyes and turned back to the drunk.
“Quiet, you,” he said.
It couldn’t be Henning, but it was so much like him that the no came too late to save her from the shock, electric fear. Dulcy stepped back without closing the window, then dropped to her knees on the floor, out of sight but with her forehead pressed to the frame. She kept her eyes shut for a few seconds, then looked again, but only made out the top of the man’s hat, a dismissive gesture of his hand, and a movement to the right, at the alley: Lewis Braudel rounding the corner, alert but unsteady, Samuel trailing behind. They nodded to the Henning man as if they’d met before—familiar, but without warmth—then disappeared into the lobby, and the man finally turned his face toward the streetlight again.
Not Henning Falk, but she was sure one of his brothers had arrived from Seattle.
She wouldn’t have slept that night anyway, but Gerry Fenoways began roaring in the hallways an hour later, pounding on Eugenia’s door, pounding on every door. My mother is dead you fucking cunts get up and mourn her or I’ll burn you up . Dulcy didn’t have to go out to the hall to follow the police chief’s progress—he stripped his clothes off and flung himself about while Eugenia implored him (Calm yourself, ducky) in a keening voice. The Henning doppelganger had been given the room next to hers, and she heard him complain when Deputy Bixby arrived with Dr. Macalester. How could this be a policeman?
It’s hard to be sane when you’re alone; it’s harder to be sane when you’re alone and drinking and have good reason to worry. After stabbings and fingerless men, a Falk brother was too much to fathom. Part of her brain—her pit brain, Walton had called it—screamed they’re all in league; while her rational brain had been so frittered by every coincidence since the dawn of time (thanks to Walton, again) that some fragment simply refused this new ludicrous assault. She floated between what she thought she’d seen and what was vaguely reasonable, but there was no one to tell her how she’d drifted. A brave woman, a person who could think clearly about odds and the future, might take a train to Seattle and find the right quiet time to kill her enemy, and for a half hour she calmed herself with scenarios, thoughts of knives and poison and sharp rocks. Imagining it was easy, almost soothing, until she thought of Henning.
???
In the morning, Irving knocked, bearing her morning roll and coffee and newspaper. He eyed the bureau that had blocked his entry. “Did Chief Fenoways bother you?”
“I think Gerry has other doors to knock on,” said Dulcy, who’d woken up crosswise on the bed.
“We don’t all wet the hallways when our mothers die, do we?”
“No,” she said, watching his black eyebrows wiggle, wondering about Irving’s mother. “Did other guests complain?”
“Of course,” he said. “But they could see he was batty, and it wasn’t our fault.”
“Where did he end up?”