Mulch (16 page)

“Yes, there
is.
But it isn’t my Bill, although they acted as if it might be for a few days there. They’ve kept questioning him, as if this woman were someone
he
might have been involved with. And of course Bill has his own priorities … he’s very busy at work … and Janie, but you probably see Janie just as much as I do.”

Why was she running on like this? What was there about this woman, whose presence was uncomfortable one moment, and then so comfortable the next that she began to tell her everything? To defend herself against more words, she picked up the teapot on the table in front of her and asked Nora, “May I pour you another cup?”

Nora merely nodded and continued to smoke and look at Louise. She stretched forward. “You’ve got to be fierce, you know. They’ll drive you away from what you want to do.”

“Who?” asked Louise, pausing with the teapot in midair.

“Your family, my dear.” The gray eyes were persistent. “Your loved ones. You are so good, so giving. They will use you all up, and ten years from now, when the children are gone and Bill is thinking about the next phase of his career, you will be looking at that career you thought about and never developed—that book you started and never finished.” She stared at a point beyond Louise and inhaled again, then slowly exhaled, while Louise remained silent. “Janie is fine. I see her every day, at least out the window. My Chris loves her, you
know. So does Melanie. A wonderful person. Don’t worry about her. Now, let’s talk about your husband. Bill is very attractive.” She glanced over at Louise. “What do you think your husband wants of you, really?”

Louise’s heart increased its tempo. Who did this woman think she was, always asking her the cosmic question? She shook her head a little as if to shake Nora’s words away. “But I can’t just ignore what’s going on. A
woman
has been
murdered
and somehow I’ve dragged her remains into our life. I mean, I can’t just go into a cocoon; I have to keep the family on an even keel; I have to be sure Janie hasn’t been affected….” Her voice was plaintive; to herself she sounded whiny.

Nora just looked at her and sipped her tea.

“I sound so whiny.”

“Women are liable to sound whiny when they’re looking for excuses not to do things for themselves.”

“Oh, God,” said Louise, capitulating. “I’ve done that my entire married life.”

“I can imagine you have. You’re in good company. There are hundreds of women who live for their families. I used to until a few years ago, but I don’t any more—I leave plenty of time for myself. I’ve worked at my career very hard, and now I have part of what I want. I’m published, I do quite a few readings on the East Coast, and I’m well connected with the writing community.”

Did she detect a little self-satisfaction in the woman’s cool voice?

“And, of course, I teach, and surely, teaching is the best part of it—I
love
the young people. So no one except my Ron would call me a raging success, but at least I’ve developed a
fulfilling life. I’ve given myself a voice. I think you would be happier if you did that, too.”

Louise searched her mind for a way to tell her neighbor how bad things really were with her. Finally she decided to tell her something that she had not even told her husband, for fear he would worry. “Nora, it’s not only the police and the press that are distracting. It’s that woman herself, the woman in the leaf bags. She appears to me in my
dreams.”

Louise was unprepared for the effect of these words. Nora swayed forward and with a trembling hand tamped out her cigarette in the ashtray. Then she moved warily back into the sofa pillows, as if trying to evade a ghostly presence hovering about the room. Louise realized that the calm-appearing Nora was just as much on edge as she was herself. But now all the pretenses were gone.

“I
sensed
it,” said Nora, her pained eyes on Louise’s. “I sensed that the woman haunts you, too. I was trying desperately not to talk about it, to talk about anything
but
it. But now that I hear that you’re having nightmares like me …”

“Almost every night.”

“Oh, Louise, the plight of that woman
horrifies
me. I feel as if I have entered her consciousness—her, and all the women victims that I read about in the news each day. Beaten. Sometimes slaughtered. Left like dross.”

Her voice dropped even lower, so that Louise had to lean toward her to hear her. “This woman’s murder has invaded my psyche, to the point that I sit in this house day after day, writing about it. Can you imagine what happened to her that night, or
was
it night? What kind of betrayal took place? How did he trap her to kill her? Was there a chase, and then he
caught her? Or did he even have to pursue her: perhaps she simply tumbled willingly into his arms. And the saw: did he use a saw?”

The eyes pleaded with Louise for understanding. “You see, don’t you, that I am obsessed?”

Then abruptly she released Louise’s arm and shrank back into the cushions.

Louise’s mouth was agape, her breathing unsteady. Nora was a tormented woman. And she had just opened a Pandora’s box of appalling images that Louise herself had kept carefully locked away.

Yes, she fretted almost daily about the unsolved murder and dreamed about it at night. But with great effort, she had forbidden herself to humanize the murdered woman; being newly-moved to a new place, and unsettled in every other aspect of her life, it would have been the last straw. It would have reduced her to the state of the distraught woman sitting beside her on the couch. She looked over at Nora. Had she invited her here simply to spill out her own agony?

Nora sat forward again, recovering a little, as if remembering she was the hostess for tea. “Forgive me, Louise. I see you don’t want to talk about it, and I can fully understand that. But you should be terribly cautious.”

“And I am….”

The poet shook her head slowly. “Oh no. I’m sure you think you are taking care, but there is something different about this murder. I feel it, rather than know it….” For a long moment, she stared out the big front windows. Louise, following her gaze, saw her own yard across the cul-de-sac, the house and studio obscured by the leafless trees, but still
faintly visible. “It’s not
all
in my head: There are strange things going on about your house, didn’t you know? I am up late often and I’ve seen a figure about your place.” The slim hand came out again and clutched Louise’s hand, and the gray eyes locked on hers. “Oh, my dear, please tell Bill to take good care of you.”

“But it could have just been a reporter hanging around—they are pests. When did you see this person?”

“That’s it. I think it was even before the—the leaf bags were even opened. I would have called you, but it was so furtive—so fleeting…. Once, Sam Rosen even turned the lights on when I thought I saw him.” Nora rose restlessly from the couch and lit up another cigarette.

Louise sat there, trying to remember that time period. She was fairly certain Sam, too, had seen or heard something. She shivered, though the room was warm.

Nora suddenly looked tired and drawn, standing there like a figure out of a Greek tragedy. “I’m so, so sorry, Louise. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I shouldn’t have shared my private nightmares with you.” Her gaze dropped modestly, as if she were ashamed to reveal what she next was going to say. “I … have always had this terrible talent, or curse—some kind of ESP—that gives me forebodings of danger….” She stared at Louise.

“Danger for whom?”

Nora continued to look at her without answering, and Louise felt almost suffocated in the atmosphere of near-terror that filled the room. She felt her temperature suddenly rise, and a desperate need to flee. She put a hand on either side of her body, ready to heave herself out of the couch. Then she
changed her mind, sat back, and smoothed her hands against the plush cushions. She forced her body to stay very still, waiting for this moment to end.

She and Nora exchanged a long look. Then she took a deep, measured breath.

Nora had terrified her, but only for a few moments. She had called on her strengths—her sanguine nature and her Midwestern common sense—to override what she now decided were Nora’s honest but neurotic fears about the strange death.

A death that probably would have no further impact on any of their lives except for the residual nightmares.

Nora watched Louise’s face closely. Then she lifted her chin a little. “I see you have no fear. You are probably right: You mustn’t pay attention to my wanderings. As Ron tells me, they’re the product of a fevered poetic imagination. Everything I’ve said mustn’t stop you. That poor woman is dead and gone, and you are alive. In the end, the very worst thing that can happen to you is centering your energies on all this, and not centering them on your work. You have something to say, and you must get back to work.”

Louise left soon after, embracing Nora before she went. Worrying a little about this sensitive new friend, who spent each day across the street from her, brooding and writing on the subject of victimized women. With brow furrowed, she walked through the front yard, trying to leave the memory of the conversation behind her.

Almost immediately, she was distracted by the fall outfits of Nora’s plants—the silken seed pods of the anemone, the spiky pods of the e
ryngium
, and, since there had been no hard freeze yet, the still-blooming masses of some marigold species, with
their spidery foliage, and inch-wide, single white blossoms with black button eyes, straying gracefully down a hilly garden that faced south. Nora’s psyche may have been haunted by dark fears, but she had a garden of pure delight.

Once at the street, Louise started to hurry. She was practically running by the time she reached her own yard. She paused uncertainly at the front door. Yes, dinner could wait! She turned into the hut instead, where she flicked on the electric heat unit. Why bother with a wood fire?

Nora was right about one thing: Time was precious. She sat, turned on the computer, and went to work.

But her neighbor’s nightmares had made their imprint. She went back to the door and carefully shot the bolt before returning to her keyboard.

A
SOFT, DAMP
N
OVEMBER BREEZE BLEW
through the woods as Chris and Janie made their way by the light of an almost full moon. It was a freakish fall night, as warm as if Indian summer had never departed. A good night for investigating.

Janie was carrying her favorite stick, and Chris had acquired one by snapping a dead branch off a tree. “This way, we’re both armed,” he said with a smile. She smiled back, trying to shake an agonizing self-consciousness.

Because of a break in the tall trees, a patch of moonlight lay on the path ahead of them. Chris grabbed Janie’s arm and stopped her. “Look, Janie, a little pool of moonlight. Let’s stand in it.” They moved into the magic spot. Then he pointed up to the nearly perfect circle of light above them. “And look up there. Isn’t that a neat moon? They say people are driven mad by a full moon.” He looked at her, his eyes shining, his blond hair unkempt. “Do you believe that could be true?”

She threw back her long blond hair, cricked her neck, and squinted up at the moon. “Of course it’s true. Haven’t you ever seen
The Wolf man?”
Then she stepped out of the light and ran down the dark path. Chris ran until he caught up with her and then they both slowed down.

“You’re not very scientific, are you?” he prodded. Janie felt very small; she knew he was a science whiz.

He prattled on: “You don’t think that could be true, I bet. But cosmic things affect you. The moon affects the tides. You know that, don’t you? Why shouldn’t it have some effect on the mind? By the way, are you taking any science this year?”

“Of course I am—biology. But I don’t know yet if I’m scientific. I think the right side of my brain is the dominant side.”

“Hmm, right-hand side, huh? Didja ever read the book
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain?
It shows you how you can use the right side of your brain and become artistic, even draw stuff.”

“I’m trying to tell you that’s the kind of book I
don’t
have to read. The kind I have to read is about Einstein’s theory of relativity, or something.”

Chris shrugged and beat his stick against the small shrub trees on the side of the path. “I can see we’ll never be in a science class together. I’m way ahead of you. But anyway we can get scientific about this investigation. Where’re we going, for instance?”

“I wanted to come this way, because this is where the man scared me.”

“What man scared you?”

“We’re coming to it; that big place up there.”

“Oh. That’s the Hoffmans’. He’s some big shot. No kids.”

“He has a workshop in the backyard.”

“Good for cutting up bodies!”

“Oh yeah, I bet. It’s a really fancy house; he must have lots of money.”

“Who says he killed for money?”

“Who says he killed? I’m just telling you, I went up in his yard and peeked in his workshop and he didn’t like it. Then I dropped my stick and he threw it at me, only it missed and landed in the creek there.” She pointed to the small stream to the left of the path.