“Still don’t know what you’re talking about—and neither do you, Pauline. So be careful. That’s my friendly advice. Don’t go around talking about these things. Because some people might wonder how deep you were in it.”
“So,” Pauline says, rising to her feet. “I’m sorry I deceived you. We okay now?”
“I’m not sure. You hurt my business there for a while. That agent never worked with me again.”
“But you’re doing okay?” She glances around at his less-than-impressive surroundings and he feels an instinct, quite foreign to him, to justify himself.
“I’m fine,” he says. “A rich man by anyone’s measure. What about you?”
“Poor as a church mouse, whatever that means. Working as a waitress. It’s hard, starting over.”
“That why you got a drinking problem?”
“Who says I have a drinking problem?”
“You said you were in a twelve-step program.”
“But I didn’t say it was for drinking. And, you know, we’re supposed to be anonymous. In fact, I can’t figure that part out. How can I be anonymous and make amends to those I’ve wronged?”
“Where you living these days?” As if he didn’t know.
She smiles, doesn’t answer. She was always shrewd, this one.
He walks up front with her, stops to confer with Susie while he watches Pauline head out into the parking lot. Plenty of spaces in front, but she turns to the right and is quickly out of sight. Did Adam drive her here? What was her real agenda? The one thing Irving is sure of is that it’s not a twelve-step program, because they don’t have those for lying nafkehs.
33
Halloween falls on a Tuesday this year, which means a long buildup to the holiday, starting with a bonfire on Friday night. Bonfires are a big deal in Belleville. Polly finds this charming, but Adam says it’s just proof what a hick town it is. The site is still smoldering when they drive by late that night, after work. They get out and inspect the remains, enjoying the heat in the cool October air.
Polly, holding her hands toward the embers, tells him: “There was a movie I saw once—I think it was set in Paris. A man kills a woman. It’s not exactly an accident, but it’s also not exactly his fault. He’s going mad. Anyway, it’s the night of a big bonfire, in which people bring anything they want and throw it on the pile. He wraps up the body in a carpet and throws it on the fire, then runs away. But he still gets caught. Something to do with an earring. I think.”
Adam doesn’t seem particularly interested, but she finds she can’t stop herself.
“It was on Picture for a Sunday Afternoon. Oh, I forgot—you didn’t grow up in Baltimore. That was a local thing. Picture for a Sunday Afternoon. Which sounds kind of churchy and nice, but it was amazing the movies they showed sometimes. Horror movies. The Leech Woman was a big favorite of mine. She stayed youthful forever by killing men and drinking their blood, but then she killed a woman and the spell reversed itself. They also showed women-in-prison movies.” She laughs. “Go figure, those weren’t exactly factual.”
Polly waits to see if Adam will offer a corresponding story about his childhood. But he doesn’t. It’s rare for either of them to talk about the past. It’s not something they agreed on, merely a pattern that emerged. Once all the secrets—well, most of the secrets—were out in the open, there was no reason to talk about the past. What does she know about Adam? He went to college in Ohio, then attended some famous cooking school in New York, although he didn’t graduate. Went from there to working on a yacht, first as a deckhand, ended up as the chef. He grew up in the Bay Area. His parents are dead. He liked them a lot, especially his mother.
What does he know about her? Not as much as he thinks he does. Suddenly, it is important to her to let him know that she had a nice childhood, too, warm and safe as his. Her parents were good people, much too nice to prepare their daughter for a world of people like Ditmars and Irving and that guy they worked with.
“On Sunday afternoons, my mom ironed in front of the television in her bedroom. It smelled so good. You know that smell—scorchy and warm. She had a bottle that she filled with water, for the things that needed to be ironed on the steam setting. She put some kind of scent in it. I don’t think it was made to be a sprinkle bottle for ironing—there was a tiny picture of a woman on it, but it was starting to flake off. If I could have one thing of my mom’s, it would be that bottle. I don’t know what happened to it when she moved to Florida.”
Better not to mention that Polly was in prison at the time, that her mother died in Florida of a broken heart.
All Adam says is, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you iron.”
“If I had her sprinkle bottle, I think I would. I wish I had her sprinkle bottle and this one bracelet she had, with these flat glass beads with pieces of peacock feathers set inside. My mother loved Halloween. She liked scary movies, too. She would let me watch anything. But then—it’s not like anything really scary came on TV back then. I remember House of Wax. And She—remember She?”
“Who?”
“The movie She. There’s a beautiful woman who’s hundreds of years old. She invites a man to bathe in this fire that makes you immortal. But it turns out that if you go into the fire twice, the spell reverses and you age to your real age. She turns into a skeleton, dies, reaching for him. So he’s immortal now, but he’s betrayed everyone and she’s gone. He’s going to live forever, but alone.”
Adam puts an arm around her, hugs her closer. “I think Halloween is making you morbid. Let’s go home.”
On Tuesday night, actual Halloween, Polly dresses all in black, in a 1950s cocktail dress unearthed at the church rummage sale a few weeks ago. She has bags and bags of candy—miniature Hershey bars, Reese’s cups, small boxes of Dots, because there’s always some weird kid who doesn’t like chocolate. But the trick-or-treaters don’t seem to realize that someone lives in the garage apartment, and they skip her door.
She hopes that’s the reason the kids skip her door.
“Adam,” she says, the wooden bowl of candy in her lap, “do you think people gossip about us? About me?”
“What do you mean?”
“About my life, what I did before I moved here.” A beat. “How Cath died.”
“If they do, there’s nothing you can do about it, so it’s best not to think about it.”
“Do you ever think about it?”
“What?”
In her black dress, black gloves, and retro heels, she looks like Joan Crawford or Bette Davis. She feels like them, too. Tough, yet brittle. That’s the thing about being really hard. When you do break, you shatter.
“Not even ten years ago, I fed my husband one of his favorite dinners. Turkey and scalloped potatoes, lots of beer. A pie. He didn’t like the pie because I didn’t have any ice cream, only whipped cream. Fresh whipped cream, whipped by hand. I knew the turkey would make him sleepy, but I couldn’t trust it to do the entire job. So I crushed up some sleeping pills, added them to the cheese sauce on the potatoes, to make sure he would be drowsy. Then, when he was asleep, lying on his back, I stood next to the bed—”
“I know all this,” Adam says. He’s not meeting her eyes. “You told me. Maybe not in such detail—”
“I stabbed him through his heart, Adam. Through his heart. I studied for weeks, making sure I knew where to aim. I had one chance. One chance to save myself and my kid. He was going to kill me. When he did, I knew there was no one who would care for Joy.”
“What’s got into you tonight?”
“I was looking forward to the kids coming to the door. We didn’t get many trick-or-treaters on Kentucky, back in the day.” She waits to see if he will ask her about this. He doesn’t. “Do you think people think I killed Cath?”