Night Relics (38 page)

“Yeah, but there
are
a couple holes in our fence,” Bobby said. “One goes into the Kleins’ yard. It’s where that possum was going back and forth,
remember?”

Bobby looked out through the window in the door now, into the backyard, apparently seeing nothing interesting. Then he looked
down toward the porch and said, “What’s all the flowers?”

“What?” Beth asked, looking out herself. There, at the corner of the porch, sat a vase of flowers. Out of curiosity she started
to open the door, then realized what it was, turned to Bobby, and said, “Time for bed now,” in a no-nonsense voice.

“Aw,” he said. “Can’t I stay up with you guys?”

“Nope,” Beth said. “Hit the sack. Peter and I want to talk.”

Bobby rolled his eyes. “Adults
talk
,” he said, as if it
were the stupidest, most pointless activity in the world.

Beth propelled him forward, through the kitchen and into the bedroom, thinking all the time about the flowers on the porch.
There wasn’t any doubt who left them. He’d been there again. She had come in through the back door when Mr. Ackroyd dropped
them off late that afternoon, and the flowers hadn’t been there.

“And
stay
there,” she said, tucking Bobby in and settling the quilt over him.

“Read me a story,” he said.

“No story. It’s too late for a story.”

“Then put in a tape. ‘Baby Beluga.’ ”

“All right.” She searched through the tapes in the tape box, found the right one, and slid it into the tape player, leaving
the volume turned up a little higher than she usually would. There was no use Bobby listening to her and Peter talk, and he’d
fall asleep anyway, no matter what the volume was like. His eyes were at half mast already, and he yawned wide, turning over
onto his side and shutting his eyes as the music started up.

By the time she got back out onto the porch, Peter had brought in the flowers. He stood in the darkness, peering out the window.
The police were still in the Kleins’ backyard, and one of them walked over to the fence, boosted himself up, and looked over.
He dropped, walking back toward his partner and dusting his hands off.

“Let’s go into the kitchen,” she said. “I’ll put on some coffee.”

“I’m going to stay out of the light for another minute,” he said. “Till the cops leave.”

He handed her the flowers. “You’ve got an admirer,” he said, then abruptly shivered as if he’d suddenly gotten a chill.

“I know I do,” she said, and kissed him on the scratched cheek. In a while she’d tell him about it.

“Don’t tell me you’re a vampire,” he said softly.

“Only in the dark.” She set the flowers down on top of the washer and put her arm around his shoulder, pulling him close to
her. Together they watched the night through the window.

T
HE POOL LIGHT GLOWED THROUGH THE DEAD LEAVES
that covered the water. Klein had pulled the chaise longue free of the pool, but he didn’t bother trying to net out the leaves.
There were too many, and he was too tired. He swam slowly, pushing clots of leaves away with each stroke, watching them swirl
away into the lamplit depths and not bothering to peel off the limp leaves that clung to his face when he raised his head
to breathe. A lawn chair sat on the bottom of the deep end, squarely over the drain, lamplight shining between the plastic
strips on the backrest like the sun through clouds.

He moved his arms mechanically, letting his feet trail behind him, pushing off the wall and plowing into the leaves again.
Lorna was gone; he didn’t know where, probably to her sister’s. She had put a few things in an overnight bag and then left
without saying anything to him except that tomorrow was Imelda’s day off, as if that piece of trivia had been worth opening
her mouth for.

He couldn’t even pretend that he blamed her—her going away like that, giving him the silent treatment, and he wondered how
much she knew, what she’d seen. He thought of her finding him like that, hugging the goddamn sofa pillow, and he flushed with
shame.

He stopped swimming and leaned on the coping, looking out into the hills. What had Lorna said about them acting like they
were on different sides in a war, when really they were on the same side? Sometimes she could say things just right, but he
couldn’t see the lightness of it until later, after he’d blown off a lot of steam and managed to hurt her. He had never thought
about whether there was such a thing as
too
late, and he wondered abruptly if he was scared a little by the idea of Lorna sober. Up till now it had always been easy
to win.

Why the hell hadn’t he told her about things this afternoon when she’d pleaded with him to get it out in the open? Hell, because
this—this thing in the poolhouse—wasn’t what she meant, that’s why. He couldn’t tell her about something that he himself didn’t
understand, something he couldn’t foresee. He wondered if she had seen the woman leave, known what he was doing out there?
He wasn’t sure himself if the woman had left at all, or had simply evaporated into the shadows.

His thoughts and fears trailed away into nothing, into fatigue, and he pushed off the wall and set out tiredly again. How
long had he been swimming? An hour? Two hours? The moon was halfway across the sky. He felt loose and enervated now, and out
of nowhere came the memory of something he’d read once, about someone who dived to the bottom of a pool, curled his fingers
into the drain cover, and then drowned, unable or unwilling to pull loose.

When he lifted his head to breathe, he could feel that the wind was starting to blow again. Little wavelets pushed the leaves
into the shallow end, and the water slapped his face, getting into his mouth. He submerged his head, treading water over the
sunken chair, then let himself sink, exhaling slowly, settling into the chair and gripping the aluminum arms to hold himself
in. The leaves curling down into the water looked black from underneath, and the wind churned the surface so that clusters
of leaves and twigs were stirred under, drifting in slowly moving currents.

His lungs ached, and he closed his throat and watched the leaves swirl. They caught the pool light and turned from black to
gold. He wondered if it was physically possible to open his throat and fill his lungs with water, and what Lorna would think
if she found him that way tomorrow, dead at the bottom of the pool, sitting in a lawn chair.

Christ, he nearly laughed out loud. He
would
drown if he didn’t quit acting like some kind of stupid … He pushed off hard with his feet, hanging on to the chair and carrying
it with him to the surface. He sucked air into his lungs as he kicked toward the side and with both hands managed to push
the chair up onto the coping. Immediately it tottered in the wind, nearly falling back in. “No, you don’t, you dirty bastard,”
he said, talking to the wind rather than to the chair, and he gave it a shove that propelled it into the flower bed along
the wall of the house. Then he climbed up the ladder, nearly falling back into the pool, surprised at how bone weary he was.

Inside the house he caught sight of the half-full decanter of scotch. The glass was gone. He picked it up and carried it into
the kitchen, pulling the scotch bottle out of the cupboard and dumping the contents of the decanter into the bottle before
rinsing the empty decanter at the sink and putting the bottle away. He went into the bedroom, where he left his wet trunks
in a heap on the floor. After a moment’s hesitation he climbed into bed on Lorna’s side and shut his eyes, breathing her scent,
his face on her pillow.

K
LEIN WOKE UP FAST OUT OF A DEAD SLEEP THE NEXT
morning and bolted out of bed, standing in the middle of the bedroom floor and looking around, breathing heavily, overwhelmed
with sudden fear. Then he saw his swimming trunks on the floor and the sunlight through the curtains. He moved the trunks
with his toe, grimacing at the pink stain that the fluorescent nylon had left on the white Berber carpet. He’d get Imelda
to scrub it out, except that it was Imelda’s day off. He looked at the alarm clock—nearly noon. No call from Pomeroy, thank
God.

He knew without having to look that the house was empty.

He got dressed and went into the kitchen, sitting down in front of the phone. After a few moments of thinking he punched in
Lorna’s sister’s number. She answered after the fourth ring, just as he was about to hang up so that he wouldn’t have to listen
to the phone message.

“Joanne?”

“Speaking,” she said, then waited. She knew who it was. Lorna was there, or had been.

“Can I talk to her?” he asked.

“She’s not here now.”

“Yeah,” Klein said. “Just let me talk to her.”

“She’s not here, Lance. She was here but she’s gone. If I were her I’d be scouting out lawyers, after what you did to her.”

“Whoa,” Klein said. “Wait. What the hell did she tell you?”

“She had to tell
somebody,
for God’s sake. She could hardly talk it over with
you.
She was a goddamn wreck when she got here.”

“What’d she say, Joanne?” Klein asked tiredly. “I need to know. There was a lot of confusion last night. I’m not even sure
I
know what happened. She wouldn’t say two words to me.”

After a silence she said, “Okay, Lance. I’ll tell you. She opened up with the whole story—the phone call, the jealous husband,
you out in the shed or wherever it was you took the bimbo to have your way with her while your wife was asleep right inside
the goddamn house, for Christ’s sake. You want more? If you had
any
kind of shame at all you would have died there when she found you. She even told me what you said: ‘I can explain.’ She started
laughing so hard when she told me that I nearly had to slap her. Then she curled up on the damned couch and wouldn’t say anything
more, just laid there and cried herself to sleep.”

There was silence again, but he could hear her breathing hard on the other end of the line. He stood with his eyes closed,
his mind stuttering. “What phone call?” he asked.

“What?”

“A phone call. You said something about a phone call and a jealous husband. What phone call?”

“From the guy. The one that’s
been
calling her. One of your friends or something, called her up and ratted you out. What’d you do?
Brag
about it to your pals beforehand?”

Klein counted slowly to ten, composing himself. “No,” he said finally. “I didn’t brag about it. There’s so much … so much
Lorna doesn’t know.”

“Thank God, I’d say.”

“Where is she now?”

“Why don’t you leave her alone, give her a little space?”

He fought down the urge to tell her what to do with her
advice. “Give me a break,” he said. “Give us both a break.”

“And what are you going to do if I give you a break, if I tell you where she is? Run over there and yell? Push someone around?
Get into someone’s face?”

“Please,” he said.

After a moment Joanne said, “All right. I’ll give you a break, but for God’s sake, don’t screw it up this time. She drove
out into the canyon. There’s that old man out there, the one she worked with at the library. She wanted to cry on his shoulder,
I guess.”

“Yeah,” Klein said. “I know him. Thanks, Joanne.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Just try to do the right thing this time, will you, Lance? And let me tell you something, because I know
you’re thinking about it. No, she didn’t drink anything last night when she showed up. I offered her a drink and she turned
it down flat. What she told me last night was
her
talking, not alcohol.”

“Yeah,” Klein said again. “Thanks.” She hung up then, and he listened to the silence until the dial tone started up. At loose
ends now, he walked to the front door, picked up the mail, and shuffled through it, pulling out a padded manila envelope with
something sliding around inside—some kind of junk mail, maybe a real estate come-on. But it was full postage, mailed locally,
and there was no return address. The lettering on the front had been rubbed on, a couple of the letters already peeling away
from the paper.

He closed his eyes, feeling his forehead tighten with a sudden tension. This was it; this was why Pomeroy hadn’t given him
a wake-up call—what all his talk yesterday morning had been leading to. He tore it open, scanning the contents of the several
pages of Xerox. It took him a couple of moments to understand what it was exactly. Inside the envelope lay a cassette tape.
There was no letter of instruction, no list of demands. Pomeroy wasn’t a hasty man; he was working this into a long-term investment,
like some kind of carefully built-up tax-sheltered retirement.

Klein walked into the living room, bent down, and turned on the automatic ignition in the fireplace. The gas burner whooshed
on, flames curling up around the cleverly painted concrete logs. One by one he fed the Xerox pages into the flames, picking
up the unburned scraps and feeding them back in until nothing but ash remained. He tore up the envelope then, and tossed it
into the fire, too. Then he snagged the tape out of the cassette with his fingernail and jerked it out, yanking yards and
yards of it onto the living room floor. Slamming the plastic cartridge down onto the brick hearth, he pulled out the ornamental
fireplace poker and beat the little rectangle of black plastic until the iron head of the poker flew off its spindly brass
pole and clunked into the leg of the coffee table.

He heaped the tape into the fire, watching it flare up and disappear, then snapped each half of the cassette shell apart with
his hands, getting up finally to throw the pieces away in the trash compactor. He washed the ash off his hands at the sink,
over and over again with Ivory soap out of the squeeze bottle as if it were Pomeroy and all his filth that he was washing
away.