Open Water (30 page)

“I think you make a mistake.”

“Yeah, well.”

“My husband is at the ice cream counters.”

Willis noticed she had an extra
s
there. Ice cream counters. That tipped her hand. She was a certified foreigner.

Willis parked the car right across three vertical spaces, paying no mind to customer conveniences, and walked into the Carvel franchise. He stood behind a line of customers. Nurses from Newport Hospital were on break, dressed in white nylon slacks, still carrying instant electronic thermometers tucked into their waistbands. He wondered just what temperature he was; he felt hot as a desert. He waited at the end of the line behind someone’s pilled nylon hospital coat while a teenage soda jerk filled a plastic boat with a fat coil of soft ice cream. He recognized the black nurse who had worked on his arm. She recognized him. “It’s Ted Bundy,” she said. She was grinning with a shelf of white teeth. “Ted Bundy with his decoy arm.”

“That’s right,” he said, enjoying her familiar, wide smirk. “What’s my temp?”

She eyed him. He was making a friendly request. She lifted her thermometer and fished around in her pocket. She found what she wanted and tucked a sterile plastic sleeve over the wand. She inserted it in Willis’s mouth. He waited a few seconds. The thermometer beeped. She removed it from under his tongue. “Ninety-nine point two,” she told him. “That’s normal.”

“Normal? I felt hot.”

“We all do ev’ry once in a while. It don’t mean we’re sick.” She was gleaming.

He looked through a window and saw Jensen was in a back room. Willis pushed through the swinging door. The room was just about a freezer and Willis watched his breath shoot over his collar. Jensen was standing over a stainless steel table with sixteen little ice cream cakes resting on paper lace doilies. Jensen was decorating the cakes with a
bag of frosting, wrapping the bag around his wrist and squeezing it out a silver nozzle.

“I’m looking for Holly.”

Jensen said, “Look downtown. Mod Squad paid her a little visit, is what I heard.”

“Excuse me?”

“She talked to me this morning. She’s at the station doing some elegant shit-stirring. That’s all I know.”

Willis went around the table to get eye-to-eye. Jensen’s breath feathered through his mustache and disappeared. “What are you trying to tell me,” Willis said, “Holly was picked up?”

“The house on Spring Street burned down. They’re asking her all about it since she’s made herself a local celebrity. This is a small town. They’ll carve it on her gravestone. ‘Close Cover Before Striking.’ ”

“Vincent Silva’s place burned down? When was this?”

“Other night.”

Willis said, “She was over there with me, that’s a couple weeks ago. That couldn’t of done it.”

“Maybe she went back there all by her lonesome.”

“Why would she do that?”

“She’s a sick girl,” Jensen said. “
Love
sick. For me and everyone else.”

Willis looked at the man holding the bag of icing.

Jensen said, “Like I said, she called me here.”

“Maybe she tried me first.”

“That’s right. You weren’t answering. She was ripped about that. They told her if she’s charged and they have to hold her, bail will be set at around thirty thousand. She only needs ten percent of that to come home. That’d be three thousand, she says. She asks me, do I have it? Three thousand? She’s asking
me.
Sure sounds guilty.”

Willis circled the table with the rows of little cakes. He
collected them one by one in his hands until he had a frozen stack of eight. He dropped them to the floor and put his boot down on the airy tower. The ice cream rose up over the ankle leather. Willis walked outside leaving a few slick footprints.

Jensen watched him go. He called after Willis, “Shit, man. I understand, believe me—”

Willis went to a pay phone and called the Newport Police Station. He asked an officer, “Is Holly Temple over there? When can I get her? How long is that? When is she finished?” None of the answers were answers.

He drove home. Nicole was standing in the driveway when he got out of the car. Nicole pushed Willis’s hair from his collar and rubbed his shoulder, pinching the deltoid between her fingers. “Shit, that’s rock hard. That’s from tension. Want a massage for that?”

“Christ,” he said. She didn’t stop pinching the muscle.

He removed her hand from under his tangled hair.

“Hey, what if I go sit with Rennie for a while?” Nicole said.

“You’ll go sit with her?”

“I’ll watch her until you show up.”

“Never mind. I’m going over there myself.”

Nicole said, “They’ve probably got tight security at that place. Did you think of that? Security?”

“Shit. We all want security. Everyone wants it. You know how to get it?”

“How?” She waited to hear a bleak speck of his wisdom.

“Only one way. We get cozy in our dirt blanket.”

Nicole tugged her blond tassel around her waist and twirled the tip like a rabbit’s foot. “Willis, you need a dose of sunshine. Maybe some bee pollen. You need dandelion salad,” she told him.

He shrugged his shoulders and walked into his house.

He telephoned Fritz. Fritz’s sister was reluctant to wake him. “You don’t know how Fritz acts when he’s half-asleep.”

“Asleep at noon? Try some cold water,” Willis told her. “You come over here and throw cold water on him.” “Beth, it’s an emergency.”

“So call 911. Why you calling me?” The woman was teasing now and she told Willis to hold on.

He heard the sound of her shoes tapping across the linoleum. In a minute, he heard the same tapping coming back the other way. “Fritz says he’s coming over there. He says he heard about the fire.”

“He knows about that fire? Ask him where did he learn it?”

“Willis, I’m not standing here for your back-and-forth. Okay?”

“I’m sorry, Beth. You’re great.”

“I just put up with it,” she said.

Willis hung up the telephone. He was feeling his stomach walls clanging and he remembered that he hadn’t eaten any breakfast, or much of anything for twenty-four hours. He didn’t want any food. Munro’s teacup was still where Munro had left it on the bamboo table. He thought of Rennie in Château-sur-Mer. Rennie would have to wait still another while. He’d get her home.

He didn’t want to think Holly had anything to do with the Spring Street place. He didn’t know much about her family history, but he believed he had researched the rivers of her interior, he had drilled down into the water table and it was clear. Holly liked her domestic chores at Saint George’s, and she loved cleaning those flower shacks at Neptune’s. There was something simple about the attention she afforded it. She was an innocent victim, unless
victims can’t be considered free of blame. Maybe innocence in and of itself was a weakness, a selfish trait. The facts would emerge just as worms rise to the surface in the rain. He didn’t lose faith in Holly.

But if the police were going to hold her, he had to find cash to get her out of hock. He figured he would hit Showalter for the cash. It was going to require a bit of bartering. The magnificent parrot was a pile of ashes, its carcass consumed except for the tough knob of the wishbone and the silvery tungsten breeder’s ring from its foot. Willis had the InstyPrint truck; at least he had a
version
of it. Maybe that would be something to trade for cash.

Willis telephoned Showalter. Willis said, “I’m asking three grand or thereabouts for the truck.”

“Three for the macaw?

“Forget the macaw, I’m talking about your truck.”

“I don’t want the truck,” Showalter told Willis.

“You don’t want your truck?”

“No.”

“I’m not following you.”

“I’ve got that truck reported stolen. It’s been written up. I don’t actually desire it back in my possession.”

“You reported it? What if I just deliver that truck, drop it off right there in front of your place. That would invalidate the paperwork, wouldn’t it?

“Go ahead, deliver my truck. I’m not paying cash for it.”

“Let’s talk about it,” Willis said. Willis remembered what Showalter had asked him—“Do you talk your way or fuck your way?”

Showalter said he was willing to discuss the bird, he wasn’t interested in the truck. “I hope that bird is in good condition. If it’s unhappy it might featherpick till it’s denuded. Is it chewing its feathers?”

“Chewing its feathers? No, it’s not doing that,” Willis said.

“That’s good.” Showalter told Willis to come up to Fall River at three o’clock, after the Miniature Book Society was finished with their buffet luncheon.

Willis said, “I’m on my own timetable.”

Showalter liked the desperate tone in Willis’s voice. He told Willis, “I have to see how you get out of this. This will be good. Tonight I won’t need to get over to Blockbuster Video.”

R
ennie surfaced from her last morphine supplement and noticed that her room in the Life Care Infirmary was decorated with a nautical theme. Sea charts hung on the opposite wall; she couldn’t read the soundings from where she was, but in the immediate corner beside her bed, an ocean topography map showed the Grand Banks, sea-mounts, and abyssal plains of the western Atlantic. She curled on her side and studied the map of the ocean floor and found it more than a bit comforting. She recognized the landmarks—Hudson Canyon, Kelvin Seamounts, and Flemish Cap—all the sobering checkpoints of the deepest unreachable canyons. She thought of Bill Hopkins sifting down that deep to where there wasn’t a fairy’s hair nor a filament of natural light.

A nurse came over and lifted her wrist. The nurse looked at her watch. Rennie was roused by the girl’s cold fingertips and she adjusted her eyes at the intrusion. The room wasn’t decorated as she had thought; it wasn’t decorated at all. She searched the peach-colored walls for the picture of the ocean floor. It wasn’t in its frame. She felt the nurse tugging the damp sheet out from under her hips.

“Did I wet?” Rennie said.

“Just a little,” the nurse said.

“We can’t have that,” Rennie told the nurse. “What time is visiting hour? Make sure I’m dry for that.” The congestion in Rennie’s lungs made it difficult for her to talk. She tried to clear her throat, but her cough reflex didn’t respond. She couldn’t expectorate a drop.

The nurse explained that there was no visiting hour per se.

“None, ‘per se’? Well, any minute, then,” Rennie croaked through a congestive veil, “my son will arrive.”

The nurse turned a crank for an outside awning. The heavy green fabric lifted away.

“More,” Rennie said. “I can’t see the water.”

The nurse told her that the water was on the other side of the building.

“Are you sure that’s not the water out there? I don’t have my cheaters,” Rennie said, her voice gurgling. “I thought I saw a Coast Guard dory go out from Castle Hill. It’s not a good sight to see. The crew in their storm skins. It could be the
Christy and Roland
in trouble.”

The nurse said, “That over there?” The nurse looked out the window, searching the tended lawns. “That’s just the sky.”

After a few minutes, a doctor came into the room and listened to Rennie’s breathing with a stethoscope. He tugged the stethoscope out of his ears and shoved the rubber tubing into his breast pocket. He palpated Rennie’s stomach and under her rib cage where the liver was distended with knotty masses. Next, he pressed his fingertip up and down Rennie’s forearm, watching the indentations and wells it left in her bloated muscle. She was swelling up like a ripe papaya. The nurse wheeled a tray of instruments wrapped in sterile towels and parked it beside the bed. The
doctor unfolded a towel and found what he wanted. He inserted a long needle into Rennie’s thorax to tap fluid from her lungs. He attached the needle to a tube that led to a plastic bag fastened beneath the bed. Immediately, rosy fluid started to dribble. “This will make a little difference for you,” he said.

“I’m waterlogged?”

“So to speak, yes.”

“That happens to the ancient fleet, doesn’t it?” Rennie said.

The doctor agreed. He didn’t waste reassurances. Rennie rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. She was distressed by the smell of urine on her fingers. She had been pinching her wet bedsheet. The mild trace of urine acted like smelling salts, and Rennie suddenly recognized what was happening: her body was shutting down all of its mechanical stations—diesel, Heister, VHF. Then she sank away from the certainty of her recognition. She fell into a half-sleep that was not restful sleep. Such a half-sleep only nourished the transformation that was occurring.