The Dark House (15 page)

The cadences weren't too bad. The writing seemed authoritative, if somewhat halting and melodramatic. Of course, it had been heavily edited. He cringed at the phrase “openly gay,” which Bowser had inserted to “juice things up” over Rollins' objections. Still, the piece had an atmosphere of intrigue. Rollins might have read until the end, several pages later, if he hadn't noticed the Post-it tab at the foot of the first page.
This you? M.

Rollins stood up and glanced diagonally behind him. This time, Marj was standing up with her back to him. She was on the phone, pacing back and forth by her desk. She had on a loose red top, with a spiky, orange necklace that had, to Rollins, a stirring, jungle aspect.

But after Henderson's warning, he didn't dare go to her cubicle. He was about to send an e-mail when he started to worry about that, too. For all he knew, Henderson had been snooping through his electronic correspondence. He wrote out a note by hand.
Meet me at Georgio's at 12:30. Don't tell
anyone
. Urgent. Can't talk. R.
Then he added a P.S.:
Pls. return this to me when you come.
He was about to fold the note and place it in an envelope when he reconsidered and added a final
P.P.S. I'll explain when I see you.

After checking to make sure the hallway was clear, he strode by Marj's cubicle. He took one step inside, just long enough for Marj to look up at him from her phone conversation. Her eyes were not as forbidding as he'd expected. He dropped the envelope on the chair by her desk and ducked out again. He continued on to the kitchen nook for a fresh cup of decaf. When he returned to his desk, he steeled himself not to look in her direction.

He left for Georgio's well ahead of time so he and Marj wouldn't be seen leaving together. He made straight for the restaurant—the small, industrial-chic place off Federal Street he liked—and took a seat in a booth. Because of the high dividers between booths, he would be nearly invisible from the street. He dabbed at his paper cut with his napkin, leaving tiny kisslike stains on the absorbent paper, then waited with mounting anxiety as the minutes ticked by on the oversize wall clock toward 12:30, and then past it, with no sign of her. At quarter of one, the plump Georgio, in his spattered white apron, swung by his table.

“Not eating?” he asked.

“I'm waiting for someone,” he said quietly.

“The redhead?”

Rollins nodded.

“Yeah, I'd give up food for her, too.” He gave Rollins a dimpled smile and slapped him on the back.

Then the front door opened, and Marj appeared. She seemed cautious, almost fragile, as she glanced about the two dozen diners at the little eatery. Finally, her eyes lit on Rollins, but her face showed no particular pleasure at seeing him. Rollins' stomach tightened.

“Now you can eat,” Georgio whispered to him before returning cheerfully to the kitchen.

Marj stood by his table, her fingertips resting on the top.

“Great to see you,” Rollins said, trying to boost her enthusiasm. “Please, sit down.” He gestured toward the far side of the table.

“Rolo, I—”

“Please,” Rollins repeated, gesturing again across the table.

Marj took a seat, but she seemed no happier. “All right. So what's the big secret—you pregnant or something?”

“Henderson heard about us being in the men's room together. He read me the riot act about the company's no-romance policy.”

“Well, maybe that will restrain you.”

Rollins looked at her. “He was serious.”

Marj met his gaze. “So am I.”

A bad feeling gathered in Rollins' chest as he thought back to the conclusion of their last encounter on Friday night. “Look, I'm sorry about the note. It was a mistake. I should never have done that.”

“It wasn't the note.” Marj's eyes flashed. “That was okay. Not great. But okay. It was the way you left it—a whole hour after you dropped me off, and
after
that whole thing at the Sloanes'! Scared the
shit
out of me. I was standing there inside the door—in my nightie, thank you very much—when I heard these footsteps coming real soft down the hall. I was sure it was Sloane or that skinny guy you say is following you around. I nearly screamed! Then I saw this tiny little white card slide under the door. I was shitless, Rolo.”

Rollins had never imagined that she had been so near. Even after all the apartments he'd seen, he couldn't picture Marj's beyond those few sharply angled glimpses up from the street. He couldn't imagine what she did when he wasn't watching.

“I hadn't meant to scare you,” he said.

“But that's the thing: You're sneaking around all the time. I don't know who you are!” She tapped the base of her fork against the tabletop to accent the key words—
know
and
are
. “Okay, sure, you're this preppy guy. Grew up around here, good schools, all that. But who are you, really? I don't know. I don't know if you do.” The way she looked at him, she seemed to be waiting for him to say something, but Rollins remained silent. It was either that or talk forever.

“And I'm not even talking about the driving stuff,” Marj went on. “I'm talking about everything. Like at Johnson, you do this shit job for years. People ask me, ‘Why is he doing this?' It's like a topic of conversation. I tell 'em you like it. But I don't know. Do you?”

“There are worse things.”

She pounded the table. “That's what I mean! ‘There are worse things.' What's that supposed to mean? Of course there are worse things. I worked the late shift in the lingerie section at Filene's Basement for six fifty an hour for three years while I put myself through school. That was worse, believe me. But there are better things, too.” She folded her napkin, then smoothed it out again. “I guess what I'm asking is, what is it that you want?”

“From a job?” Rollins wasn't sure he followed.

“Out of
life
, Rolo. What are you after? What are you searching for?”

“Can't we eat first?” Right then, he wasn't sure he had the strength to force out an answer, if he could even think what the answer was.

“Okay, okay. Forgive me. I'm just a jerk from the Midwest who didn't know you weren't allowed to ask real questions around here.” She plucked the menu off the table and snapped it open in front of her face.

“Hey, relax, would you please? I'm sorry. I'm not used to this.” He gently eased her menu down flat onto the table so he could see her bet
ter. “The answer is, I don't know,” Rollins began, stalling. He wasn't much good at defining himself. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “For what I'm missing, I guess.”

That seemed to slow her down a little. “Okay, that's a start.” Marj looked at him again. “But what might it be?”

“If I knew, I wouldn't be looking, now would I?” Rollins allowed himself a small smile, but Marj offered no reaction.

“My mother told me to call the cops, you know,” she said. “After the note.”

An unpleasant feeling spread through Rollins' chest, like ink in water.

“She thinks you're dangerous.” Marj swept away a stray hair that had settled over her brow. “Course, she thinks everyone's dangerous.”

Rollins was relieved to hear her tone lighten, but his palms still tingled. “Look, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done it. I just wanted to let you know how I felt.”

She took a sip of her water, and fidgeted with her knife, absentmindedly running her fingertip lightly down the blade. “Somehow I get the feeling you're hiding something. Like you have a wife somewhere.”

Rollins allowed himself a laugh. “Nope. No wife.”

“No girlfriend, even?”

Rollins shook his head. He thought of Tina and vowed never to let her into his apartment again.

“So what aren't you telling me?”

Rollins might have said something. Not everything, but something. He might have mentioned Tina, although, thank God, there was precious little to say about her. Or he might have taken Marj back into his past, spoken of the bitterness he felt for his parents, revealed his sorrow over the dead Stephanie and the vanished Neely. It might have been a relief to lighten his load. He wouldn't tell Marj much, but he figured he wouldn't need to. He figured that emotions were a bit like a new neighborhood. You didn't have to explore more than a block or two to get a sense of what lay farther in. But he hesitated, reluctant to weigh Marj down with his burdens. Before he could say anything at all, the waitress arrived to take their orders, breaking the spell.

Rollins had wonton soup and crab cakes. Marj said she wasn't hungry; Rollins ordered crab cakes for her, too. “To have the full Georgio,” he told her.

By the time the waitress moved off again on her spongy-soled shoes, the moment for intimacy had passed.

“So you checked me out?” Rollins asked, a bit of jauntiness back in his voice.

“I suppose you could call it that. Sure. You say all these things—that a cousin disappeared, that you were a reporter…. So, yeah, I checked you out.” Her eyes flickered very prettily. “I just wanted to see that article of yours. I wanted to find something about you I could hold in my hand.”

“That what a person does when her father walks out on her?” Rollins watched carefully, but Marj showed no particular distress.

“Don't bring him into this, please,” she said. “This is not about my father.”

“No?”

“Notice—you didn't tell me any of your secrets.”

“Maybe I don't have any.”

“We all have secrets.”

Marj let that sit there for a second, but Rollins didn't bite. “Okay,” she admitted. “Maybe the thing with my dad makes me careful with men. I don't know, all right? I never knew the guy. And I've only seen, like, one picture.”

“You're not too close to your stepfather either, I notice.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I just figured. You hardly ever mention him. It's always your mother.”

Marj peered into his eyes. “Well, listen to you. Yeah. Okay. I can tell you. Why not? No, we weren't close. That's one of the reasons I didn't stick around.”

Rollins' soup arrived, and he dipped his spoon into the pale broth. “Something happen?” He felt as if his view of her had always been blocked somehow, and this was his first good look at her in the full light, up close.

“I didn't
let
it happen, if you want to know. But I could tell that it was going to if I didn't get the hell out of there.”

“He made some kind of advance?”

“I think that's what you call it when a guy comes up behind you and sticks his hands on your boobs. He was drunk, but I didn't want to wait around long enough to see what he'd try when he was sober.”

Rollins took another spoonful of soup. “Did you tell your mother?”

“No. I just left. I still don't think she has any clue, either. I think she thinks I just got too big for Morton, Illinois.”

When the crab cakes arrived, Marj nibbled at the corner of one of them and told him the full story of her coming east. It was three days after her seventeenth birthday, and she used the money her grandmom gave her for a bus ticket. When she got to Boston, she'd stayed in the YWCA downtown for the first six months, then moved in with three other girls to a tiny little place in Cambridgeport, where she'd supported herself working in a used clothing store. She passed her high school equivalency exam, and swung a full scholarship to Lesley College. “Then I graduate, get more shit jobs like that beaut at Filene's Basement, jobs that are no better than the one I had before my precious college degree in business administration, and finally I end up on the bottom rung at Johnson.” Marj smiled. “So—we even now? I tell you one, you tell me one?”

Rollins set down his spoon. His senses were all concentrated powerfully on Marj. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn't know it was like that for you.”

“That's because you didn't ask. That's what a relationship is. It's about asking. Asking and telling, asking and telling. It's called conversation.”

Rollins pushed his soup dish aside. He said nothing. The obstacles in his life were not nearly so well defined, nor had he done anywhere near as much to overcome them. He had the feeling that if he started to speak now, he'd go on forever and still not tell her the first thing about what he'd been through.

Marj tapped her hand on the
Beacon
story. “That's all your cousin left behind—just a few footprints in the mud? Then—
wssht
?” She flicked her hand in the air. In the
Beacon
piece, Rollins had mentioned
that, a little ways down from Cornelia's house, police had found a footprint in the roadside mud that corresponded to an L. L. Bean boot that Cornelia had been known to possess, but was missing from the house.

“And she left some money.” Rollins explained about having lunch with his mother at the Harvard Club, a place Marj (bless her) had never heard of. He left out the more uncomfortable portions of the conversation. No need to burden Marj with his troubles with his mother. Instead, he told her about Cornelia's big inheritance.