A Dark Matter (29 page)

I made the usual self-deprecating noises.

“And Don, you are in good health, now that you no longer have to eat institutional food? You’ve been staying with Mr. Harwell?”

“He’s been amazingly good to me.”

“How very nice for you, Donald. Would the two of you care for a drink of some kind? Scotch, vodka, martini, gin and tonic? Coffee or tea, perhaps? Vardis will be happy to prepare anything you might want. I’m going to ask him to bring me some water.”

She looked brightly from face to face. We both said water would be fine for us, too. Meredith Walsh turned sideways to punch a button on an elaborate telephone that had come into existence at the moment she extended her hand.

Without picking up the receiver, she said, “Vardis.”

In seconds, her creature slid in through the door by which he had exited. Head bent low, hands steepled before him, he listened to the orders and pronounced the words “Three waters, yes.” Again, he opened the door without looking at it and backed out.

By this time I had recovered a portion of my sanity and could look at the woman before me with sufficient clarity to see that she had undoubtedly had facial surgery, probably several times. The skin over her cheekbones seemed too taut by an infinitesimal degree, and there were no lines on her forehead or at the sides of her eyes. She was maybe twice the age she seemed to be, I thought, and three or fours years older than me. Everything about her belied these facts.

“You knew each other in high school,” she said, and gave us the benefit of her extraordinary eyes. “In fact, as I understand it, Mr. Harwell—Lee, if I might—you were part of that lovely group I met one day in a little coffee shop on State Street. And you’re interested in that disastrous evening Spencer Mallon orchestrated out in a meadow.”

“That’s exactly right,” I said. “I avoided this subject for years and years, and after all this time it became something I finally had to work out. Then all of this information about Keith Hayward dropped into my lap, and I began to learn more and more about Mallon and the meadow.”

I waited for Meredith Walsh to respond, but she merely looked back at me with the suggestion of a smile.

“I guess my interest in all this is more personal than professional.”

She smiled more broadly. “So I gathered. Obviously, I invited you here to help you, as far as I can, satisfy your personal interest in all of us back then. I promised Donald, who has always been extremely discreet about our contacts, to give you an hour when my husband was scheduled to be elsewhere. Right now, he is or shortly will be speaking at a rally for a local member of his party, and after that he will meet and greet at a cocktail reception.”

A hint of sadness and regret deepened her beautiful smile.
Here it comes
, I thought, preparing myself to be dismissed.

“My husband is an important and ambitious man whom I am going to assist in his quest for the presidency. He knows nothing at all about that curious incident in 1966 or my brief relationship with Spencer Mallon. He never can know anything about that, and the same is true of the press. We went into the meadow, and before we could get out, a young man was murdered there. Hideously, I might add. And equally unfortunately, the whole event smacks of magic, of the occult, witchcraft, elements that can never be associated with someone in my position.”

“You’re telling me that whatever you say to me cannot be used in anything I write.”

“No, I am not. I don’t want to hinder you in the writing of this book of yours. You are a well-known author. If this book adds to your fame, you might be able to give a public endorsement of my husband’s candidacy. All I ask is that you conceal my identity and keep it secret for as long as anyone is interested in your story.”

“I could probably do that.” I was a little taken aback by this cold-blooded swap. “You could have another name, you could be a brunette, a freshman instead of a sophomore, or whatever you were.”

“A junior,” she said. “But I wasn’t a junior there for long. That evening scared me right out of school. Without even bothering to pack more than a very small bag, I dropped out of school and went back home to Fayetteville.”

Her luminous eyes called to me, then summoned me in. Apparently, she could do that whenever she liked. “The Arkansas Fayetteville.”

“Oh,” I said, as if knew all about the Arkansas Fayetteville. “Yes.”

“I made enough money from local modeling jobs to move to New York, and in two weeks I was working with the Ford Agency. Never did go back to college, which I regret. There are a lot of great books I’ll probably never read—there are probably a lot of great books I’ve never even heard of.”

“I’ll send you lists,” I said. “We can have our own book club.”

She smiled at me.

“Lee, I’m a little puzzled by something. Can I ask you about it?”

“Of course.”

“When I talked to Donald this morning …”

The door on the right side of the room opened, admitting Vardis Fleck, hunched over a silver tray that contained a silver ice bucket, three small bottles of Evian, and three sparkling glasses.

“And you took a long time, too, Vardis,” Meredith Bright said, putting a sharp edge on her voice. “Everybody’s operating on some sort of delay this morning.”

“I had to attend to some duties,” said Fleck.

“Duties? Surely …” She caught herself. “We’ll discuss your duties later.”

“Yess.” Fleck used silver tongs to drop ice cubes into each glass, then unscrewed the plastic caps and poured a careful half of each bottle into the glasses. He set the glasses down on red paper napkins he must have pulled from his sleeve and made a quick exit.

“Please let me apologize for my tone,” she said, speaking only to me. “Vardis should have remembered that our first obligation is always to our guests.”

“Believe me, we hardly feel overlooked,” I said.

“But if you take the poor guy’s head off,” Olson chimed in, “make sure you sew it back on at that same angle.”

“Please, Donald. Anyhow, gentlemen. When I spoke to you this morning, Donald, we arranged that you and your friend were going to take a plane from Madison, rent a car at the airport, and arrive here very shortly after the time when I was
led to believe
that the senator would be leaving for his engagement. Now, the senator had
misled
me, and he left almost an hour later than I thought he would, so it all worked out in the end, but still I’m wondering … why didn’t you get here when you said you would?”

“You haven’t been listening to the news, have you?” Olson asked.

“I never listen to the news, Donald,” she said. “I hear more than enough about current events at the dinner table. Why, though? What happened?”

He explained they had been warned against taking the flight, which had subsequently crashed, killing everyone on board.

“Isn’t that amazing?” she said. “Imagine, all those poor people. You were rescued from a tragedy! Really, the whole thing is just staggering.”

Meredith Walsh did not appear to have been staggered, however, and she did not look as though she were responding to news of a tragedy. Instead, she seemed for a moment nearly to be suppressing an upwelling of mirth. Her eyes glittered; her skin acquired a delicious, peachlike flush; she brought her hand to her mouth, as if to conceal a smile. Then the moment passed, and the mingled wonder and sorrow in her eyes and face made it seem an illusion, a cruel misinterpretation of her mood.

“Do you ever listen to Joe Ruddler on the local NBC affiliate?”

“I heard him on our last visit here. The man is a dolt, but he tries to tell the truth.”

“We heard about the crash from Ruddler. He already knew that two people had booked the flight and changed their minds at the last minute. He made a big point of saying that those two people were saved for some kind of purpose.” Although I did not believe Ruddler’s ideas had any validity, speaking them made me feel as if a golden light surrounded me.

“How silly,” Meredith said.

“According to him, our lives now have a meaning.”

“Meaning like that doesn’t exist. If you want to be totally self-centered, fine, be self-centered, but don’t pretend that the universe agrees with you.”

As she spoke, my sense of being wrapped in a warm golden light dwindled and vanished. I also noticed that the signs of her cosmetic surgery were not as subtle as I had first thought. Nor was she as flawlessly beautiful as she had at first appeared to be—I could detect traces of bitterness in her face. Bitterness was fatal to beauty.

“What
is
interesting about your story,” she went on, “is that you were warned off taking the flight. Who warned you?”

“I never even saw the guy,” Don said. “He came up to Lee when I was on the other side of the terminal.”

Meredith Walsh’s powers had not deserted her. Again, the wondrous deep warm playful eyes took me up and swallowed me whole.

“Tell me about it, Lee.”

She had created a private game, with only two players.

“He was a distinguished-looking guy. Dressed all in black. Lots of long white hair, chiseled face. I thought he could either be an orchestra conductor or a fabulous con man. He marched up and said he liked my books. He apologized for being rude. Then he said he’d had a premonition that I shouldn’t take my flight. If I got on the plane, I’d be risking everything, and would
lose
everything. I asked for his name, and he said, ‘Rasputin.’ Then he turned around and walked away.”

Smiling, Meredith Walsh brought her hands together in a silent clap. “Maybe he was from the future, sent back to save your life! Maybe he was your as-yet-unborn child!”

“Not very likely,” I said.

“No, come to think of it, to have a future child you’d have to get a new wife. Lee Truax, the sweet little thing everyone called the Eel, would be well past childbearing age. You did marry the Eel, didn’t you, Lee?”

“I did.”

“So you share a first name, and if she had changed her last, you’d both be Lee Harwell, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, not happy with her tone.

“Is she well, the Eel?”

I suddenly took in that for some reason Meredith Walsh detested Lee Truax.

“Yes,” I said.

“I—and I should say
we
, to include Spencer Mallon, the man we all loved—we did love him, didn’t we, Donald?”

“Did we ever,” Olson said.

“
We
never saw you, we never met you, though we did hear just a little bit about you. You and the Eel looked so much alike that you were called ‘the Twin,’ weren’t you?”

“I was ‘Twin,’” I admitted.

“You must have been adorable. Did the two of you really look so much alike?”

“It seems we did.”

“Would you say you’re a narcissistic person, Lee?”

“I have no idea,” I said.

Meredith’s arms and neck were stringy, and her hands had begun to shrivel. In a decade they would resemble monkeys’ paws.

“You have to have a healthy narcissism to take care of yourself, to keep on looking good. But you’d also think that a person whose partner resembles him would have to be a little on the cautious side. How long has your wife been blind? Donald didn’t really know the answer to that.”

I glanced at Don, who shrugged and looked down at the buttery lace-ups I had given him on our first day together.

“Completely blind? Since about 1995, somewhere around there. It’s been a long time now. She began gradually losing her sight in her thirties, so she says she had plenty of time to practice. Lee gets out and about, she travels by herself all the time.”

“Don’t you worry about her?”

“A little,” I said.

“You give her a lot of freedom. If I were you, I might be uncomfortable with that.”

“I’m uncomfortable about everything.” I smiled. “It’s my magic secret.”

“Maybe you’re not uncomfortable enough,” she said.

Her eyes were bright but not luminous, her forehead was unlined but not youthful, her smile lovely but not at all genuine. Under Meredith Walsh’s regard, detached and cruel and curious, I saw that during the first seconds after she came into the room, I had briefly but thoroughly lost my mind.

“What an odd thing to say, Mrs. Walsh.”

“Such a beautiful little girl, with that funny tomboy appeal.” Having flashed her claws, she indulged her curiosity again. “The other beautiful child among you was Hootie. Honestly, Hootie was practically edible. A little blue-eyed china doll! How is he doing, after all this time?”

“Hootie was very sick for a long time, but in the past few days he has made amazing progress. He was living in a mental hospital, but now there’s some hope he will be able to move into a halfway house.”

“He had a real, honest-to-God breakthrough,” Don said. “Ever since that day out in the meadow, Hootie could only communicate by quoting from
The Scarlet Letter
. Later on, he added another book or two, but he only used his
own
words when his doctor tried to throw us out.”

“Well, well,” said Meredith, only superficially engaged. “He wanted you to stay with him, I gather.”

“It’s actually a wonderful compromise,” I said. “Hootie realized that he remembered every word of every book he’d ever read, which meant that everything he could ever want to say was covered! He could pull it all up, too. In seconds, he could identify where everything came from.”

“A lovely story,” Meredith said. “Lee, don’t you ever wish you had joined in, come along?”

“Not really,” I said. “I wouldn’t want my version of what happened to get between everyone else and theirs.”

“If you had been there, you could have kept an eye on your girlfriend.”

“Meaning what?”

Meredith Walsh broke eye contact. The way she moved her head and the expression on her face returned to me the vivid image of a harsh and pitiless old woman I had several times encountered in a Turkish street market. She had tried to soften her appearance with a lot of rouge and kohl, and sat half crouched behind a table strewn with bracelets and earrings: a street peddler, a bargainer for advantage.

“I don’t mind throwing things away,” she said. “I don’t mind discarding things, destroying things. That’s about choice, it’s a way to express your passions. Jewelry, houses, expensive cars, the people who call themselves your friends, the people who happen to be your lovers—I’ve thrown it all away, at one time or another. Without a trace of regret. But do you know what I hate? I hate to
lose
things. Losing is an insult, it’s a kind of wound. A woman like me should never lose anything.”