“But who is he looking for?” managed Dulcy. “Did he give you a name?”
“Ramsay, I think. So much like Randall.” Irina leaned forward again. Her blouse was low, and Dulcy, blood slowly returning to her brain, wondered if Irina would tilt like this for the man from Seattle. If he was like Henning after all, it should do wonders for his attention. “‘Do we have a Miss Ramsay,’ he asks, ‘name of Lena?’ ‘No,’ I say. ‘Do we have a brunette girl,’ he asks, ‘who is new to the town and all strange and lonely?’ ‘Well, only Miss Randall, of course,’ I say. ‘And me,’ I joke.”
Irina’s English was inexact, but evocative. Bereaved Maria Nash, who’d hinted at a long marriage, was not a girl. Miss Randall was taller, and ungainly—Samuel Peake said she looked like a flute with mildewed pads—but still nominally a medium-sized brunette maiden. “Lena Ramsay?”
“Something like that,” said Irina. “I did not want to ask him to repeat. He does not have a sense of humor, or so much more English than myself. He has said he goes from town to town looking for this girl, and perhaps he is tired.”
“Perhaps,” said Dulcy. “Does he mean to stay long?”
“No, but look at me, look at you. It happens,” said Irina.
“Look at Miss Randall,” said Dulcy. It was a foul thing to do, but she was desperate.
“Of course, maybe he will see the body and be satisfied.” Irina leaned closer. “But I think he thinks not. I think he thinks Miss Randall is his runaway. Why else follow a girl so plain?”
Irina’s stunning vanity often rendered her stunningly stupid, but it sometimes lent clarity. Part of Dulcy wanted to smack her, and a small fragment wanted to protect Leonora Randall, but the largest piece of her heart was ready to run again. She’d thought that she was good at it. “Can’t he just view Mr. Durr’s photographs of the body?”
“I don’t know,” said Irina. “Perhaps he has been told to look for something to do with this dead girl’s teeth. Perhaps he’s been told to look for a mole or a broken bone. Last night before Chief Fenoways drank so much he told me”—Irina leaned forward again, looked sideways, whispered—“told me, just me, that they will look at this dead girl for such things, and bring down one of Dr. Macalester’s machines.”
This dead girl: Dulcy imagined herself on a metal table, the leg she’d broken when she was little now rotten and stretched out into the green maw of an X-ray. She’d fallen climbing for the first peach after years of bad weather, weather Walton, naturally, blamed on a volcano. The Boys had been there, and they’d known how bad the break had been—the bone had come right through her skin; they could have told Victor about this one identifying mark. But if Lennart Falk was studying a woman like Miss Randall, it meant Victor thought she really might be alive.
Before Walton had jumped out a window, Dulcy had the capacity to think through each act and reaction. She hadn’t been a great chess player, but she could at least see three or four moves in the future, even if she couldn’t manage her own temper. Now she’d been waylaid by her own poorly thought-out novella, built on panic and wishful thinking, and she made for her room, rabbit to the bolt-hole. Having the trunk sent had been a mistake, going to Butte had been a mistake, not killing herself had been a mistake. She wept—she didn’t want to leave this place. She opened drawers and squinted at underwear, forgetting the eyeglasses on the collapsing bun on her head. When she bent for a slip, they fell, and one lens popped out.
It slowed her down. She found the chair by the window, fixed the lens, brushed out her hair, and attempted thought. This man had never seen her in the flesh; this man had looked right through her, which meant that she didn’t quite match whatever he’d been told to find: a dark-haired nervous case, young and wandering. If he had a photograph, it might only be the old one from the paper, hair down, no rounding to her body. He was looking for an idea, not a face, and something put her out of contention—the believable tale of widowhood, the expensive black mourning dress with the high neck, the flat, practical boots she wore for walks. Her hair was up, and she’d lost weight, and it must all have conspired to make her invisible.
She shouldn’t run or hide, she did not want to be mysterious in her absence, but she needed to do something about the notebooks, the one piece of irrefutable evidence that could reveal her identity. She studied the space behind the radiator, the ledges above windows, the plumbing alcove behind the water closet. She considered the mattress, and she thought of taping a notebook to the back of each awkward botanical print on the walls. She finally settled on the shearling coat, hanging in the closet, already protecting her cash and the diamond. She made a larger rip in the lining and lowered the notebooks in, maneuvering them around the hem until the coat regained some balance but still felt soft at the waist, where someone might put their hand if they pawed through the closet. The pink book was the last to go in, and she flipped it open to an early page, wondering if she should just burn the thing:
The earthquake came, and rocked the quivering wall,
And men and nature reeled as with wine.
Whom did I seek around the tottering hall? For thee.
Whose safety first provide for? Thine.
Walton’s first instinct had never been to save anyone, even himself. She smiled down at the flourish after thine and touched the corner of her glasses to feel that the right lens was secure. She finally understood: she’d always been too vain in front of Victor and Henning to wear her glasses, even playing tennis, even at the theater.
???
She dressed for shopping and sailed back down to the lobby, manic and free of fear. Miss Randall was still placidly concentrating on her big loopy handwriting, and Lennart Falk was back in place, looking strained and pale. He had a copy of Butte’s Tidende og Skandinav on his lap and didn’t give a glance as she passed through the lobby. He had eyes only for the wallflower, despite the fact that Irina swayed like a debutante as she delivered tea. By now he seemed like a poor shade of Henning, and he certainly didn’t have his brother’s subtlety: he marched between the newspaper and the wire office and the train station on the far side of Park Street, smoking and staring blatantly at Miss Randall through the window. She didn’t notice his existence.