“Oh, I think we both know who the gander is.” She pushes her way in.
“At least I didn’t come empty-handed when I dropped in on you,” Polly says, but her voice is mild, as if she’s teasing an old friend. As if. Polly opens her fridge, pulls a bottle of vodka out of the freezer. The fridge is ancient, looks like something from the 1950s, with its rounded top and single door, the freezer a metal compartment with ice trays and a buildup of frost. The oven is old, too, one of those white enamel jobs. Metal table with one wood chair, not much else. Cath glimpses an iron bed in the next room, a quilt neatly folded at the foot. Polly won’t be here long enough to need that quilt, Cath will see to that. Everything is so old-fashioned, not to Cath’s taste at all. Adam probably thinks Polly’s quirky, special. She’s special all right. Cath studies the magnetic strip above the stove where three knives hang.
“So I did what you suggested. Kinda.”
“Yeah?” The glasses are that thick Mexican blue glass. More quirk. Polly has certainly made herself at home here. But because there’s only one chair, she has to lean against the counter while Cath sits.
“I didn’t go to the DMV, though. I didn’t have to. My brother-in-law is a Delaware state trooper.”
“Oh?” Surprised, but trying not to show it.
“Nothing much came back on Adam. His driver’s license goes to a place in North Baltimore. Big apartment building.”
“That was a bum suggestion on my part,” Polly says cheerfully. “I was silly to waste your time.”
Cath, looking at her, knowing what she knows about her—she just doesn’t get it. How did she wrap Adam around her little finger? Her figure’s pretty good, but her face has that narrow, foxy look common to redheads. People are always going on about how women pick the bad boys, but men have similar weaknesses. Is Polly better in bed than Cath is? What really makes a woman good in bed? Cath has a pretty high opinion of herself as a lover. She’s enthusiastic, up for almost anything, although she’s keeping a few things back for when she’s engaged, proper.
“Oh, no, it was a good suggestion. Because he told me some stuff about you.”
“Yeah?”
Waiting, not even that curious. What kind of person doesn’t get nervous in this situation?
A person who knows exactly what she’s done.
“This is a small town. When word gets out—”
“Isn’t it already?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m guessing you went straight to Adam, told him everything you know.”
“No, I did not.” Happy to play the high-road card here, no need to explain her thinking behind it. “I came to you first. I think it would be better for everyone concerned if you left town.”
“Really?” She’s not getting rattled. She doesn’t seem to respect the fact that Cath’s in charge here.
“Really. Leave town and—” This is the harder part. “Leave town and maybe pay me a little money.”
“Pay you? For what?”
“Not to tell people what I know. About you and your ex. And how you pretended it was all for your kid, but you didn’t hesitate to cash in when you could.”
“Now I really don’t know what you’re talking about. Are you drunk? You seem a little drunk, Cath. You should leave your car on Main Street, walk home.”
“You have money. There was an insurance policy.”
“Right.” Polly rolls her eyes, looks around the room where they’re sitting. “I’m clearly loaded.”
Cath is a little buzzed and caught off guard by how differently the conversation is playing out, now that she’s having it. She had imagined Polly weeping, begging her to keep quiet, offering up money. Gossip, her brother-in-law said. A lot of this stuff isn’t written down anywhere. There’s a newspaper article naming Polly as one of the women whose sentence shouldn’t have been commuted, but the stuff about the money—it was never proven that Polly planned to steal it, Jim says. And would anyone with money live here? Not just in this apartment, but in Belleville. If Cath had a lot of money, she’d blow this town so fast. How much money does Polly have? Cath’s decided she’ll settle for $10,000, enough for a down payment on one of the new town houses they’re building on the little swampy section south of town that they’ve started calling a lake. Belle’s Landing. The cattails are pretty in the sunset. She imagines herself on the deck, having a drink with a nice man, watching the sun go down over the marsh.
“I mean it,” Cath says. “I’ll give you”—she pauses, then realizes that in pausing she has erred badly—“two days. Then I’m going to tell everyone at the bar about you.”
“Everyone? Isn’t Adam the only person who matters to you?”
“This isn’t about Adam.”
“That’s good. Because you’ll never have him. You could tell him I’m a man, like in that movie everybody was talking about last year. It still won’t make him want you. Nothing could.”
That hurts. Cath twitches, remembers what it was like, lunging at that girl when she was seventeen, the crack of the railing, then another crack, more of a snap. The girl ended up a quadriplegic, but it was the railing’s fault, not Cath’s. Attractive nuisance was the legal term. The guy who owned the old driving range was the one who had to pay the family, not Cath’s mother and father. Besides, the girl had baited her, prodded Cath into losing her temper.
“Two days,” she says, rising to her feet. She wishes her hip didn’t sway and bump the table, sloshing the vodka from her untouched glass. Her tipsiness undercuts her power.
She drives home at fifteen miles per hour, trying to figure out when the two days begin. She guesses she has to give Polly forty-eight hours, which takes them to midnight Thursday, so it will be Friday before she gets around to telling anyone.
She realizes she really wants to tell everybody. Wants it more than the money, maybe. She wants to embarrass Polly, to vanquish her. She hates Polly in a way she has almost forgotten she could hate. Who is she to come to town, steal a desirable man, act so holier than thou?
Cath decides she’s going to take whatever money Polly scratches together and still tell everyone. Hasta la vista, baby.
19
Polly locks the door behind Cath. Adam is planning to visit later, but too bad for him. Let him steal up the stairs, try the door, be surprised when he discovers it is locked. Will he knock? Call out her name in the street below? She has told him over and over again that they must not draw attention to themselves. Even in this block, a ghost town after five, someone might hear.
If he does knock, will she let him in? She’s not sure. She needs to think.
It’s clear that Cath doesn’t know much. She can fish all she wants, but the only thing she has, solid, is that Polly served time for killing her husband and some people think she lied about the abuse. Interesting that the old money gossip follows her. At least, she’s pretty sure it’s the old gossip, about the old money. When those reporters looked into the commutations, they wrote, semiaccurately, that Ditmars took out life insurance a few months before she killed him. But that policy was in Joy’s name and Joy became a ward of the state after Polly was sentenced.
Could someone be gossiping about the other stuff? There’s only one possible source to these rumors, and he’s bound by law not to tell anyone. Which doesn’t mean he hasn’t. Lie down with dogs, as they say. He didn’t have the best reputation. But then—that’s exactly why she chose him. Polly can’t afford men with good reputations.