The Rule of Thumb

Rule of Thumb - 6

6— DECEMBER 17, TUESDAY AFTERNOON

I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger. —Jean Genet

“I want to read about children. The things that happen to them and the things they do. Those novels of adult concerns — you know, the ones everyone reads about disloyalties and excess – I can’t find the heart in them. They all seem so much the same, so empty. As if marriage and its end were the most important events of life. Really. So, I like to read about children. Not children’s books, mind you... You do know what I mean?”

“I think so, Mrs. McNab.” Irwine tried to hold on to her unflinching gaze, but turned away.

“Call me Genie,” she said, her voice softening the way a teacher’s will.

“Do you mean like Lord of the Flies?” he asked her.

“Yes. Exactly. That’s just what I mean. Only there weren’t any girls in that story, which may be why it turned out so savagely.”

“Funny, I’ve always heard that girls are more ruthless than boys.”

“I didn’t say they weren’t ruthless. I said the boys were more savage.” Genie smiled secretively, then bit her lip: some octogenarian coquettishness. ” Boys lack imagination, ultimately,” she said, “which makes their wickedness rather predictable.”

Irwine stared at her, imagining the more than savage imaginations of these girls.

“Do you think you could find me some books like that, Don?”

“I don’t think we have anything, like that, in the library,” he said, then almost felt himself blush.

She waited with expectation, leaning forward across the kitchen table.

“Of course, I can check with the city library,” he mumbled. “I’m sure there’s something I could bring you.”

“Excellent,” she said. A motor buzzed on the middle of the word and set her wheelchair in backwards motion. “Would you like a cup of tea? Earl Grey?”

Irwine nodded and she whirled around, nimble at her custom sink. How long had she been at the Homes? Years before him. The husband dead in ’96 for he’d seen the stone in the Circle of Remembrance. She never came to the library, but they often passed on morning walks – her returning, him heading out – and once they’d had a conversation. She’d asked him to help her remove a piece of garden stone from the tread of her tire. Immediately, they’d discovered a mutual interest and knowledge in the waterfowl. Another time, later, she’d winked at him in the Sunday dining room.

“I hope you don’t mind – I heat the water in the microwave, but I’ll put the tea in loose. Do you still cook?”

As a matter of fact, Irwine hadn’t had his lunch yet: crushed walnuts and garlic; bread crumbs and milk to make a paste; stirred into hot fettuccini and served with parmesano and a large salad with biting vinaigrette.

“I won’t keep you long,” she said, moving the teapot, mugs, sugar bowl and creamer from a tray to the table. “I didn’t really call to ask you about books, but it’s not that I don’t want...”

She returned for the water and poured it very slowly into the pot.

Irwine was baffled by her, so he kept very still and waited.

“You see, there’s a mystery here, and I’d like you to help me solve it.”

Of all the things, thought Irwine, this was not one of them.

“I need you,” she said.

Need, he said, then, “Me? Mystery? Why?” He felt embarrassed.

“I feel I can trust you, Don. From the first I saw you, there was something. A certain something. Discretion, perhaps. A man who keeps to himself.”

Irwine squirmed and tried to lighten the tone. “A dour fat man with secrets,” he said.

“Who says all large men must be jolly?” she responded quickly.

“I’m afraid I make a disappointing Santa Claus,” he admitted.

“I don’t need a fairy, I need a sleuth. Wait here.” The motor on her chair buzzed again as she backed up then spun off to the living room.

Very stark living this room for a lady. A wingback chair, griffon-clawed before the TV. The TV itself set on top of an immense long low wooden cabinet with slender drawers. She tugged, and one rolled out with the click-click of bearings.

“I have a hard time with closets,” she smiled, catching him looking, “This was made originally for maps and pictures. In a museum. Storage. They were throwing it out because the drawers stuck. I had it refitted.

See?”

Irwine nodded. A very thorough explanation. No wonder the Homes folks didn’t gossip about her.

She pushed the drawer shut and motored toward him with a large black volume on her lap. She lifted it to the table with two hands.

“The fact is,” she said, “that I’ve known Marvel nearly my whole life.”

Irwine looked puzzled.

“Marvel, from next door. Mother to Cammy—she always called him Cammy—the murdered man. We grew up together in Toledo. Went to the same high school.”

She opened the scrapbook and without flipping through the pages, pointed at a formal photo of a wedding party.

“I didn’t know her that well. Her family had more money than mine. That’s why I was surprised when she asked me to be a bridesmaid in her wedding. This was after the war. July, 1947. Look at those suits—same as today’s. Even the dresses don’t look too dated. But you’d never catch a bridesmaid wearing something like that on her head now, would you.”

Genie tapped the photo with her fingernail and Irwine chuckled. The headdresses were indeed preposterous.

“Of course, they were fashioned at a millenary and the very peak of fashionable. Copied from somewhere. I don’t recall. It’s tulle, you see, stretched over wire and connected to the little froth there on the crown. We thought they were angelic.”

Irwine leaned in to get a better look. The four women and four men were arranged in a garden outside a house. The steps leading to a porch were visible in the back, and the grass was so short it looked like herbivores had grazed there. All of the women held bouquets and all of the men wore glasses. Genie was one of two bridesmaids sitting on chairs, essentially framing the photo. He knew it was her. She sat as straight then as she did now. With the silly headdress drooping to either side of her dark hair, she looked fiercely ovine.

He suddenly sputtered. “The way it frames your face—that’s you, isn’t it? It looks like ears.”

“Precisely!” she hooted and Irwine felt a satisfying blush of relief. “I thought the same thing when I looked at this photo last week. I look like a sheep. Exactly like a sheep—and not even lamb, mind you.”

“Both those two back there...”

“That’s Marvel and her sister May.”

“This one, May, her ears are like a bear’s, but Marvel...”

“She looks like an angel,” Genie sighed. “They got it right for her, at least.”

“And this is Harry.” Irwin pointed at the tall, thin stooping man to Marvel’s left.

“Yes. She said they met in Missouri. She was working in an airplane factory in, I believe, Saint Louis. Maybe he was from there originally. I don’t know. I never met any of his family, and after the wedding, they left for overseas. The Philippines.”

She closed the album and tented her fingers above the cover. Irwine couldn’t help noticing that whatever had incapacitated her legs hadn’t damaged her fingers. They were plump and supple as a girl’s.

“It was time ago, and such a busy, happy time,” Genie said slowly. “Marvel’s wedding was a surprise, but there were so many weddings and it’s hard now to separate them in my mind. Even from my own. One dinner was so much like another, and many of the participants the same.” She pushed the scrapbook away abruptly and turned to face Irwine. “Six years ago, Marvel called me. I’ll never know how she found me —
Dick was still alive then, but it was his last year — and she wanted to know about the Homes.” Genie shook her head. “The Homes! Well, it wasn’t more than a couple of months and they moved here, but Harry, he went poorly immediately, and they both ended up assisted living. The apartment next door.” She jerked her long thumb at the kitchen wall. “And after Dick died, I had to move to assisted as well. More tea?”

Irwine shook his head. The first cup was already doing its work on his empty stomach.

“So, what’s the mystery,” he said, wanting and not wanting to come to the point.

“I think there’s a secret. A treasure. I think it’s a treasure. Marvel was always something timid. Even as a girl. Just like her mother. And her father, I remember him as severe. Harry was something like that too, and when he died, it was like the supports went out of her. It’s not that we were so close anyway, because Dick was sick too and all, but she wouldn’t even talk to me after, after. Until one day —poof!— she was changed. Like a different person completely. Not at all like herself. Talking and talking and she’d rub her hands together like this. I think she addled.”

Genie hit the control on her chair and slowly backed in the direction of the microwave and the sink. Irwine swiveled and watched her. When she reached the counter, she slowed, stopped, then came forward again, resuming her position at the table. Irwine raised his eyebrows.

“It’s hard to sit still sometimes,” she said with a lopsided smile.

Irwine nodded, but he didn’t agree. He’d like nothing better to sit still hour upon hour. If only she’d offer him lunch.

“So, I was saying, she changed. Talk, talk, talk and so restless. She had a box. She kept it on top of the TV. She was forever showing me that box and whispering that inside was the key. Sometimes she called it a map. Once—imagine!—she said there was a door inside—inside the box!—and to open it would blind her with the treasure of kings. What I want to know is, where’s the box?”

Irwine blinked. “You’re asking me?”

“It’s rhetorical. I know, rather, I presume you don’t know where the box is and, in fact, have never seen it.”

Irwine crossed his arms over his belly to hold down the rising roar, but also to contain his growing delight.

He was enjoying himself.

He was enjoying himself!

He shook his head and grinned.

“That’s the thing. I think the box was stolen. I think that Marvel’s son and daughter-in-law were killed for that box.”

“How do you know the box isn’t still in there,” Irwine jerked his thumb like Genie at the kitchen wall.

“I don’t.”
“Wouldn’t it have been a lot easier to kill Marvel? Why wait until she was dead?”

“I don’t know.” She dropped her head and tented her fingers in her lap, biting her lip. Then, she looked up at him slyly. “I was hoping you could help me find out. Like I said, I need a sleuth.”

“You old fox,” he said to her, and when she smiled like a girl, he laughed out loud.

Rule of Thumb - 5

5— DECEMBER 17-18

With grace the great eagles fly over the black forests, but the east wind flies more gracefully. Swift is the horse of the Cossacks, but the east wind is swifter. —Hans Christian Anderson

“I’ve always wanted to go to New Orleans.”

“How about Houston? Haven’t you always wanted to go to Houston?”

Adana put a pretty bare foot on the dashboard and rubbed the gloss on her big toe with her thumb.

Devon sighed. “You know, New Orleans isn’t what it used to be.”

“Yes it is – the part I want to go to anyway. They fixed it up first thing for tourists.”

“The French Quarter.”

“No, I want to go to Bourbon Street.”

“Bourbon Street’s a street in the French Quarter.”

“Ohhh,” she cooed. “You’ve been there? What’s it like?”

“It’s kinda ... small ... it’s...”

Adana put her hand in his lap and pressed on the inside of his thigh. That was all it took. “How come you been everywhere and I been nowhere?” she pouted. “I want to be a tourist. I never been a tourist before.”
Devon put his hand on her hand and pressed harder, but she pulled away.

“I’ve got a buddy in Houston,” he said. “I’ve got a couple of buddies.”

“Aw, honey.” She put her hand back on his thigh and into the mounded angle between his thighs, pressing.

“It’d be just the two of us in New Orleans. Just two tourists. Hey, we could be me and you on a honeymoon. C’mon, sweetie, pretty please?”

“Do you really want to get married, baby?” Devon felt like he’d lost a lung.

“Maybe.” Adana rubbed her hand over his chest. “Just maybe I’m getting ready. We got everything we need now. We got that whole mountain of money.” She twisted to the left and gazed at the cardboard Smirnoff box setting between two grocery bags of snacks on the back seat.

“That’s the money to buy our life in Mexico.”

“Aw, there’s so much of it, baby, and I never been to New Orleans.” Facing almost completely backwards now, her right knee on the seat and the caramel-colored skin of her thigh slipping without a hitch over the curve of her butt cheek, rosy beneath the pink of her shorts.

“Just one little peek, sweetie. C’mon. Pretty please?”

“Okay.”

She dropped suddenly back into place and stamped both feet on the dashboard, licking her thumb and rubbing the wetness over her big toes. “Oh goodie. How much longer?”

Having just passed through Mobile, he reckoned they’d be there in two hours, or less.

She was so quiet he thought she’d gotten mad, but she was only thinking about what to wear. He had to promise to stop at the next rest station and then she couldn’t remember which bag held the perfect dress.

“How about you just buy a new one in New Orleans?”

“You don’t know nothing. I still have to look nice to go into the store.”
He locked the doors and trunk of the car carefully and went into the rest station building to look in the vending machines.

In what way were potato chips and chocolate not alike.

k

Adana walked. Adana walked and the men watched her. Devon wanted to watch too. No, he wanted her to lace her arm through his and then he wanted to watch the men watch her. Watching Adana walk. Walk with him. No. Not so. He wanted to watch Adana. Adana walk. Walking to her left and slightly behind he wasn’t so much a man but a security detail. The drum of her hips, the sweet smack of her foot leaving the sandal, the ends of her hair curled around her breasts, the glisten behind her knee, her mouth, her mouth, how could he savor the parts when he had to watch out for the eyes, the eyes. The eyes watching Adana walk.

She had found a red dress. Her mind made up, she had found the red dress quickly, a dress he’d never seen before, all puckers and slips. Red like a siren. Red like the sun in his eyes.

She stopped suddenly in front of a dark mirror. “Let’s go in,” she said, sliding her arm against his hip so he would take it.

Not a mirror. A store.

She guiding them to the door and he pushed it open with his free hand.

A jewelry store.

A man with a face slung forward by his nose frowned. The door behind them chimed, Do ... Re ... Mi. Adana laughed and shook her hair off her shoulders. She half-turned to Devon and let her eyes smile just for him.

The man stood up, buttoning his jacket, and Adana, smiling, dazzling, flounced across the blue carpet towards him.

“Ooo, look at those sweetie,” and Devon had the feeling he was supposed to swing his partner, doe-see-doe. She pouted. “But, I don’t want a ring today,” she said. “Not today.”

“May I help you, madam?” said the man. He talked through his nose, but Devon knew he was another thieving pair of eyes like all the rest.

“I want a bracelet,” she said. “Will you buy me a bracelet? A pretty one?”

But she wasn’t really asking him; she wasn’t even looking at him. She spun him around and he caught the scent of the hair just behind her ears, damp. The two of them were instantly in cahoots and he was cut adrift in the narrow channels of glass and blue velvet. With his hands clasped behind his back, he pretended arrogance, but really felt bored, panicky, chilled. The air rushed past his ears. He shuffled his feet. He put his hands on the counter and a fog appeared around his fingertips. Snatching them away he crossed his arms and turned to look at them. The clerk hunched like an money-counter. Adana laughed. Why was her conspiracy only for two? He had the money. He had all the money.

“Devon! Devon sweetheart, look at this!” She held her arm up and dangled her wrist.

He approached so sullenly that she laughed again and threw her arms around his neck.

“Oh darling. It’s so beautiful.” She was looking at the bracelet behind his back.

She removed her arms and let him hold her wrist in his hand. He made a show of appraising it as if he really knew what it was. What was it! It was silver, and maybe those were diamonds cut in squares. Yes, it was like a sparkling circle of light, but oddly masculine. Industrial. Not at all what he would have chosen for her.

“What, you don’t like it?”

“No.”

She held her hand out this way and that. She said simply, “But I do.”

The clerk smiled and his nose dipped to his chin. “The ladies always know what they want, isn’t that right, sir?”

Devon was afraid to look him in the eye.

“Please, please. please,” she said, running her hands up and down his bare arms, letting her eyes stray again and again to her wrist. “Please?”

So he paid for it with the credit card. He should have cut the card up before they left, but he hadn’t. It was in his wallet and she knew it. She knew that once they were out on the street, her unbraceleted arm securely through his own, he would crease the thing back and forth until it cracked in two. She took it for granted, this little going-away present from Mastercard, and ignored him when he threw it purposefully in the trash.

It wasn’t until they were back in the car and she slept with her face turned toward him, that he loved her again. Loved her so completely that the air went stuffy and he had to crack the window. In New Orleans, they’d ordered their martinis and tried the oysters. Weren’t oysters supposed to be an aphrodisiac? Were they supposed to look like a cunt? Cold, slimy, grey, shapeless, much too large, they were nothing like her two smooth petals and the pink pearl within.

She woke up outside of Lake Charles and held his hand as he kept them upright in the whitewater of eighteen-wheelers. The sky turned orange and green and she was quiet and watchful with him and he loved her with all his heart.

On the other side of Houston, he pulled into a rest stop and they slept for a while, her hand on his thigh. It was still dark when she woke him up and told him she had the blood and he needed to find her a drugstore or a WalMart, and then a maybe a Denny’s where they could eat something and she could take care of herself. She fell back to sleep soon after he started the car and once, she moaned.

It was early afternoon when they reached the border at Brownsville. Devon had already taken the precaution of hiding the cash in a compartment within the driver’s seat cushion. Even if they removed the whole seat, they wouldn’t find the opening without a careful, very careful search. He was sure. He was completely sure. He’d gone over it again and again, today and before they left, running his hands over the seams and joints. He’d even dusted the overturned seat with a handful of fine grey earth to disguise the unsettling.

Neither of them had ever been to a border crossing. Still, it was not at all what they’d expected. Carts, walkers, soldiers, bikes, dogs and babies strangled the motorized traffic and it wasn’t until Adana pointed to an arching banner in Spanish that said something, something Mexico that they realized they were inside.

“Or outside,” Adana murmured, looking back at the line of dingy cars following their own dingy car. “Where are we going now? Do you even know?”

“Of course I know. There’s a map under your seat if you want to look.” Why couldn’t she trust him awake like she did asleep? Earlier, smiling in her dream, she’d made a high whistling noise through her nose and he was so careful not to touch her.

“It looks like there’s only one road, and it goes south.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Isn’t it funny that there’s only one?”

“Funny how?”

“Well, there’s no choice then, is there?”

“Maybe there’s nowhere else to go.”

“The Mexicans, at least they can go the other way.”

If she trusted him, then he wouldn’t feel this sweat of unease. The car, even with its air-conditioning, wouldn’t grow stale with fog.

“Are you sorry you came with me, Adana?”

She looked hard at him for a moment, but he didn’t look back. She unbuckled her seatbelt and slid next to him.

“Oh, no sweetie. Not sorry. Not me.” She trailed her fingernails up his arm to the skin above his collar. The bracelet tinkled like ice in a glass. “You’re my honey baby, you know that. I’ll always stick to you.” She laughed from the back of her throat and he took his hand off the wheel and rested it lightly above her knee, smooth and cool and dry.

“We can’t ever go back, you know that.”

She laughed again, softer this time and let her head slide against his shoulder.

“I know it,” she said. “It means your mine, doesn’t it. All mine.”

If only she hadn’t had the blood, he would have stopped the car.

Adana picked out the biggest city on the road, Ciudad Victoria, and announced that they would sleep there in the best hotel. They talked about Mexican food, what they liked and what they hated, and Adana laughed so much that Devon forgot that he wouldn’t be able to touch her for four or five days. Car traffic was light, but long lines of open trucks caravaned along the brown road cut into brown hills. The bright orange tangerines in boxes shone like Christmas in the dust and emptiness.

But he wasn’t sorry. And he wasn’t sad in the least to be heading south on the only road. If he let it sink in a bit, it was like falling, falling through light brown, golden brown empty space. The tangle at the border made a perfect mental barrier. He didn’t have to remember. He was falling away from all of it and he felt strong—hard and supple as a rope.

Adana pointed, but he’d seen it too. A man, a young man, crouched in the ditch, his clothing bleached and coming apart in strips. Perhaps noting the separate tone of the car engine, he whirled to face them, and springing abruptlyto all fours, bared his teeth and snarled like a dog.

Chapter Four

4— DECEMBER 17, TUESDAY MORNING

Memory is a work of imagination. —Robert Pinsky

Devon laid the two brown paper grocery bags on their sides and brought the Mercury’s trunk down gently, squeezing the latch into place.

She’d said that she was done, that that was the end of it.

He leaned on the trunk and tried to believe her.

On the way back into the apartment, Devon caught sight of the Mrs. Titus’s newspaper, still in its plastic bag outside her door. He grabbed it and jogged up the stairs by twos, shutting the door noiselessly. Adana was humming somewhere out of sight. Probably the bathroom.

She sounded happy.

Her happiness, it made him catch his breath.

What? What made her happy?

He crept into the bedroom. Reflected in the mirror over the bed, Adana stood in front of the bathroom mirror. She was turning her head from side to side, lifting her chin. She smiled and examined her upper lip. She stuck the point of her tongue out between her teeth. She took a step back and adjusted her breasts inside their brassiere, pulling down the vee of her collar. She smiled again, humming still. Devon backed away unseen.

On the floor of the apartment, he unrolled the newspaper and scanned the headlines. The one he was looking for saw him and leapt behind his eyes:

Man and Woman Found Shot in Salt Pines Apartment

He tried to read the words that followed, but they blurred and slid away across the page. He put one hand on top of the article, to hold it down, and then he put out his other hand and quickly did twenty push-ups.

The happiness, it made him catch his breath.

“Baby? Is that you?”

Devon jumped up and ran to the bathroom, grabbing his girlfriend around her waist and lifting her off her feet.

“Oh, you’re killing me,” she said.

* * * *

SISALPINE — A Phoenix couple were discovered dead in the apartment of recently deceased Salt Pines Retirement Homes resident, Marvel Johnson. Camilo M. Johnson, 57, son of the deceased, and his wife, Alice Kennedy Johnson. 53, had arrived on Friday, May 19, to arrange the burial. According to a county police press release, the bodies were discovered early Monday morning by a Pines employee. “At this point, we’re looking at homicide,” says Detective Sergeant Nedra Coughy.

Irwine let the newspaper fall to the ground, putting his foot on it to keep it from blowing away. Bill and Irene Janson’s windchimes tinkled like a drug store door. Above that, the sound of the wind stirring the pine needles. Just listening, just letting everything else drift away, the sounds were like half-heard speech, like women talking quietly in the next room. Like after a funeral.

Whose funeral?

Once upon a time there was a boy and a doorway.

It was the sliding doors to a room they called the parlor. At Christmas, and once or twice in the summer, Molly would open the doors and pull the sheets from the furniture. The first time he saw her doing it, she told him the shrouded objects were polar bears and she was skinning them, wheeeee! He ran away then, but the next time she coaxed him to the harvesting.

The hall was so cold that his breath hung in front of his face.

If Pa were still alive, his breathing too would steam from the box.

He pressed his eye to the open space between the sliding doors.

The box was so deep.

The box was called a coffin. A man came—a man he’d seen before standing in his pa’s small office—with his deep box of tools and the slabs of wood and he’d hammered the box right there in the room they called the parlor. Molly said they’d have to take the window apart to get Pa and his coffin out of the house. There weren’t no way he’s going out the front door. And it serves him; didn’t never come in that way neither.

Only the minister, Minister Wadsworth, only he came to the front door in the wintertimes. The knife man, the insurance man, the iceman, even the Hoover man knew well enough to go round to the kitchen. It’s their sense of calling, Molly explained. Those as practice closer to the ground have more sense. Minister Wadsworth’s lofty, see.

To better see, he put his hands between the two halves of the doorway and pushed.

Donny, Molly had said yesterday before school, no need to going traipsing off this morning. Sit down and wrap your hands around a coffee. I got something to tell you.

He’d never had coffee before and he wasn’t sure he wanted it, but new was new and he might as well swallow as it didn’t look like there was anything else.

Pa died this morning, Donny. Davy and Dan was in the office with him when it happened and Davy said the doctor said it was his heart. Davy said he just kind of stiffed up.

There was a wide end and a narrow end to the coffin on the table. At Christmas dinner, Pa sat with his back to the window. The narrow end.

Davy said he didn’t say nothing. Not a sound. Twas peaceful, the passing, Donny, and Pa’s gone his way to Heaven to be with God and the Angels. Now drink your coffee, baby; I put lots of sugar in to make it sweetums.

Molly was his sister, but she might have been his mother. The tail end of a family of twelve, Ma and Pa were distant from his daily business of mealtimes and bathtimes, school and chores. When Ma died two winters later, the transition of the house and its economy to the next generation was unremarkable. It was when Molly got married, when she left him and moved across town to her own house, that’s when he felt the passing.

Come along, Donny, she’d said. Robert says it’s all right. You can have the room off the kitchen—you’ve seen it, you know which I’m meaning—and I’ll take care of you like I always have done.

But he wouldn’t bend to her. He would keep himself stiff like the wooden stirring spoon she rubbed with a towel. Stiffly alone and unsure of whether he wanted to see his pa’s face inside that box or not.

He wanted to. He did. Because he wasn’t sure he’d remember it later on if he didn’t study it now. He took a step into the parlor. And stopped.

What was it?

Nothing. Not a sound. Not even his own breathing.

He stepped backwards into the hall.

There.

The sound of his sisters and his aunts and their sisters and aunts, talking in the kitchen, muted, silvery. He played with the sound and the lack of it for a while, stepping in and out of the parlor and the hall, trying to go deeper, to make a game of it. But in the end, he drew the double doors together and went away to the women in the warm kitchen; without dragging one of the chairs from against the wall and knocking its back against the table edge, without climbing up to stand on its velvet cushion, without looking down on the hard blue face of the man called Pa.

* * * *

“’At this point, we’re looking at homicide,” says Detective Sergeant Nedra Coughy.’ Did you really say that, Jefa? Como no, and at the next point we’ll be looking at robbery, o qué?”

Nedra shifted the phone from her right hand to her left and lifted a tiny teacup to her lips. She smiled at the little boy sitting across from her. “Hmmm,” she said. “Delicious.”

“Well, it gets worse,” Robles moaned. “Listen: ’Coughy was promoted last year after the Shell Murder Mystery, a triple homicide involving a group of teens outside the gas station. A local police officer, Stan Morrissey, was later arrested and charged as an accessory.’ Now why do they always have to be bringing that up? What has it to do with the present case? Nada, that’s right. Nada. They’re just going under your skin. You with me, Jefa?”

“Uh huh.” Nedra held out her teacup and raised her eyebrows at the little boy. He knew just what she meant and set to work, pouring and measuring and stirring.

“You coming in what time?”

“In a couple of hours. Around ten.”

“I got the male vic’s old man’s obit: Harry Johnson. Had an international company that insured old cars.”

“What do you mean, ‘old’?”

“Antiguos. Muchos big bucks.”

“Follow the money, Joe.”

“Seguro, Jefa.”

“And Joe: Find me a witness.”

“Está bien. Nos vemos despues.”

Nedra pressed the off button and set the phone on the kitchen table above her head. Lifting her left knee up off the floor, she massaged the joint and the muscle above it. Anymore, there was no time or place that wasn’t painful.

“Hey, Timo: Did you look through that catalog of Christmas presents yet?”

Timo had sprung from tea- to potion-making. All available ingredients were in different stages of concoction. He looked up and frowned.

“Christmas presents?”

“Remember, I gave you that book and said you could circle the things you wanted.”

“For Santa?”

Nedra nodded. “Maybe we could look at it together, over there on the couch.”

Timo leapt up to find the catalog and Nedra nursed herself to her good leg and stood, both hands on the table, stretching it out. The kitchen, drab in the shadow of the radiant outdoors, caved in at the corners. Last night she’d dreamt that she was a waitress and the other waitresses were treating her badly because she was new. She’d scraped a lot of food into a filthy plastic bin, she’d washed dishes and cleaned the salt and pepper shakers trying to make herself a slip of helpfulness. Come to think of it, she’d also had a baby. In a basket. Every once in awhile she’d take him out, carry him around on her arm to make sure he was all right, then put him back.

She was exhausted. The more coffee she drank, the more she wanted to close her eyes.

Grabbing a pen, she went to sit with Timo. The little boy’s feet hung over the edge of the couch, brown and square and strong with their nails like the transluscent shells found along the Gulf. She looked at her watch. Another hour before Liliana arrived. Timo pointed at a photo of a wooden building set.

“Do you like that?”

“Yes.”

Nedra handed him the pen and he circled the item laboriously. He also circled a Velcro dartboard, battling robots and real toy washer and dryer. When he got to the end of the catalog, he returned to the beginning and began circling more things. He stopped and looked up at her.

“I don’t really need all these,” he said. “Santa can choose.”
Nedra put her arm around the boy and squeezed him to her. How was he like Cara? Cara was impatient, exacting, put off by anything out of place. She was a perfect world girl with her vivid imaginings of the ideal.

Just like me, Nedra thought. It was all a waste though—a waste of time, a waste of purpose. Because nothing will ever be just right. Only passion.

Timo pushed the catalog aside and stuck his thumb in his mouth. After a moment he pulled it out and let it rest under his chin. “When does Santa come?” he asked.

“Not for a few weeks. Three weeks. Twenty-one days. Let’s count them together: one…two…three…four…”

Timo leaned his his head against her left breast.

“Would you like me to sing you a song?”

Timo nodded, the thumb back in his mouth.

Nedra began to sing, quietly at first, then jostling the boy with the rhythm. “Oh, you better watch out and you better not cry and you better not pout I’m telling you why: Santa Claus is coming to town.” She came to the end and laughed, poking Timo in the tummy.

Timo frowned.

“What if I’ve been medium-good and medium-bad?” he wanted to know, his thumb bent and hidden in his fist. “Will I get some of some things and some of nothing?”

Chapter Three

3— DECEMBER 16, MONDAY

Having said it, she was not sure why. The more she wondered what she had meant the less she knew. —Muriel Spark

There was something about the fat man that reminded Detective Sergeant Nedra Coughy of her father’s words to the wise. Quick eyes, slow tongue, he’d said whenever she complained that he didn’t say enough.

Whenever, she thought, he was tired of listening.

It wasn’t that the fat man looked like her father.

In fact, he looked nothing like him.

For one thing, the man was fat. A gut like a fifty-gallon drum. And his mouth actually hung open—a consequence, perhaps, of the rippling layers of heavy chin.

There wasn’t an extra inch of anything about her father.

No more, no less, he’d say.

When did he say that?

What did it mean?

The fat man turned and began to shift his weight away from the edge of yellow tape. For a moment, their eyes met. Nedra was the first to look away.

I’m tired, she said to herself. I’m tired and I don’t even know where I’d rather be. Then, out loud, to the officer outside the door, “Anyone in there?”

“Yes, Sergeant, ma’am. That would be Detective Robles.”

Nedra extracted a package of sterile gloves from the back pocket of her purse, then pulled the purse strap across her shoulder until it rested flat against her back. “No one in till I say, Nick.”

The office grinned, nodded, and pushed open the door with a flourish. He wouldn’t want his wife working a man’s job, but if it had to be a woman, then let it be Nedra Coughy. She was a fox, but she was always a lady about it.

Nedra fitted the gloves finger by finger while her eyes adjusted to the gloom. She’d wear gloves all day if she could. White cotton so she could keep track of the grime. Why did the world get so much dirtier as she got older? Joe Robles burst into the kitchen-living area.

“Carajo! Didn’t hear you come in.”

Nedra ignored his remarks and pointed her toe at the body on the floor. “Did you get an ID?”

“Ah, sí.” Robles swooped to the body and hung there, flapping. “Alice Evart, wife of that tipo over here.”
Nedra looked where he thrust his arm. The back of a large, plush reclining chair faced a television. The picture was flickering, but the sound was off. Local news. A fire in the Everglades.
“TV on when you came in?”

Robles nodded.

“Sound?”

“También. Not too loud.”

She crouched and held her hand above the wound in the woman’s chest; it helped her concentrate.

“Same gun for both?” she asked Detective Robles, who hadn’t moved.

“Looks that way.”

“She had the box of garbage bags in her hand.”

“She was cleaning out the drawer in the bedroom. Already filled up the wastebasket from the bath.”

“Was it her mother, the old lady who lived here?”

“No, his.” This time he only waved a thumb in the direction of the TV, like a hitchhiker.

“She doesn’t look...” What was the word? Surprised. Horrified.

“She looks like a nice lady,” Robles said. “My mother-in-law gets red-handed with a thug in her living room and she won’t look so the angel.”

“When does your mother-in-law ever look like an angel?”

“Eso.”

“Let’s have a look at the fellow.” Nedra stood up and her left knee crunched. She shook it a few times before putting her weight on it.

“You gonna have that surgery soon, Jefa?”

Nedra walked around the recliner and stood with her back to the TV. First, she looked at the face of the man, his hands, his feet, then let herself see the flower of blood in the middle of his chest.

“Camilo Evart, son of Marvel and Harry Evart. Fifty-seven years old. 22476 Old Bridge Drive, Cleveland, Ohio. Looks a lot scrappier than you, don’t he.”

“Maybe being dead makes you look old.”

“He’ll never get any older; that’s a fact.”

“So, the killer came into the apartment,” Nedra backed up to the door, then walked forward to the back of the chair. “Mister Evart was watching TV; didn’t hear anything.”

“Didn’t feel anything neither.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I think about it muchísimo.”

“The guy blew his heart out. He’d never last a minute.”

“How long is a minute in a dream?”

“Long enough to miss Judge Judy’s point.”

“Okay, so I’ve killed the old man...”

“You’d have to do that first or he would’ve turned around...”

“Then I turn around and the lady’s standing there.”

“She came in to get the bags...”

“So, what did he take?”

Detective Robles shook his head and lifted his arms in time. He liked to wear very white, very stiff guayabera shirts; they made a neat rectangle of his torso. “Don’t know, Jefa. Nada out of place that I can see. Dead guy’s wallet’s in his pocket; lady’s purse is on the counter there.”

Nedra slowly spun in place, letting the rooms settle. Everything clean, straightened; Japanese scenes of changing seasons in bamboo frames; telephone and large address book on the counter separating the kitchen from the living room; no table—must eat meals out, but the kitchen indispensable for that homey feeling; the door with its blinds closed; picture window with blinds closed...

“You closed the blinds?”

“Haven’t touched a thing, Jefa, ‘cept for the volume on the TV.”

“It’s really cold in here.”

“Thermostat turned down as far as it goes.”

“So, this wasn’t an ordinary robbery.”

“What robbery?”

“The killer calculated and planned. Perhaps the deaths themselves were the object. What’s the bedroom look like?”

“Same as here: very tidy.”

Nedra sighed. “Is it a puzzle, Joe?”

“Ahora, it’s just a mystery.”

“All right, go see what you can get from the people in charge around here. Send the photographer in. Get the names back to the station—Camilo... is that Italian?”

“Or Spanish.”

“Unusual choice with his surname.”

Robles shrugged. “His mama must’ve picked it. No son of mine’d get hung with a girlie name like that.”

She smiled and dismissed him. Joe Robles had four children, all daughters. “Come back and get me when you’re done.”

* * * *

Irwine opened the right-hand cupboard door above the stove and removed the wooden bowl. Crudely carved, minimally polished, he’d seen it in the window of the jumble shop a few weeks ago, propped upside down to display the words Made In Haiti burned into the bottom. Originally a fruit or salad bowl, Irwine filled it with tortilla chips and layered salsa over the top, like green spume on golden waves. Right. Then, he lowered himself into the only chair in his living room and turned up the volume on the TV—just as the logo music began to play. Damn. He’d missed the murder. He turned the volume back down as the Brooklyn Bridge, red white and blue in traffic lights, cut to a commercial.

Irwine let the back of his neck sink into the top of the chair. He closed his eyes and his hands slipped from the sides of the bowl on his lap. Law & Order or no, sometimes consciousness just wasn’t exciting enough to keep one from wanting to fall asleep. Fall asleep and dream. Or not. Fall asleep and fall away from the poundage of daylight, of dreaming. Oh the weightless allure of darkness.

Tart tomatillos, coarse salt, onion, jalapeño. The cold green spice. The crunch. The crisp. And a beer to clean the palate between mouthfuls, each bite a flavor assault.

Irwine turned up the volume with one fat fingertip tapping. Vincent D’Onofrio cocked his head, curled his lips. Fifty-three minutes later, Irwine rolled himself out of his chair and farted like a jaguar.

* * * *

Nedra stared into the open drawer. For a moment, the beige and white shapes looked like soft bodies at the bottom of an aquarium. Soft bodies stirred by the current. An illusion of life for they were lifeless.

With a pencil, she lifted the bottommost strata. Pale grain of wood. A little sand.

The victim hadn’t been looking for anything here. She’s just been cleaning it out, layer by layer. And the perp hadn’t looked either. Not even curious.

What did he know was here? What did he take? Why?

The photographer stuck his head through the doorframe. “All done, Sergeant, Ma’am. Can they bag the bodies?”

“Have the folks outside gone to lunch? Then, do it. Shut the door when you leave.”

The other rooms, the living room and kitchen, had pictures, color, a sense of purpose. This room was bland and disorganized. It was the inconsolable room of a woman who cared about appearance.

Nedra sighed and ran her hand over the surface of the bed. A pale blue bedspread with a light greenish stain streaked across the bottom. The fabric was both snagged and pilling.

Did everything have to have a reason?

Is there anyone who can live his life randomly?

That morning, Cara, her daughter, had left for work before sunrise, taking Timo with her. She’d also left the bed unmade, towels on the floor, bathroom sink full of greenish spit, coffee cup on the floor by the couch, cereal bowls half full of milk.

When Cara’d been a baby, she’d loved her so much. So much it felt like sin.

Nedra walked the perimeter of the room, looking for the odd, the unnatural. Looking out of the corner of her eye.

On a dressser, a chest of tiny drawers. One of them was open. Nedra pulled it out and looked inside.

Earrings, grimy with tarnish and wear. She opened a few more drawers, here and there. More of the same.

Maybe random wasn’t the right word.

Random was like algebra: it couldn’t apply to human behavior.

What was the right word, then?

Nedra sighed and turned away from the dresser. On the top of the bookcase to the left of the backdoor was a key. She looked at it closely, but didn’t pick it up. The edges were sharp. It was a new. Holding it by the edges, she removed the key from the backdoor lock and placed it next to the one on the bookcase. They were identical. Why would anyone store a spare two feet from the everyday?

“I’m back, Jefa.” Robles stood in the doorway. Nedra motioned him in.

“I want forensics on these keys and the door here. What did you find out?”

“Camilo and Alice Johnson. Phoenix. He’s retired insurance—owned his own place in Ohio. Parents Harry and Marvel. Moved here three years ago. Harry died about six months later; Marvel died last week.”

“Funny name, Camilo.”

“Maybe they was funny.”

“What kind of name is Mavel?”

“Funny.”

Nedra looked at her watch. “I’ve got a meeting. You know what to do.”

Chapter Two

2— DECEMBER 16, MONDAY MORNING

Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what was in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and becomes a part of the ceremony. — Franz Kafka

At this time of the morning the sun slung its own butter into the pan on the stove, a perfect wedge of yellow light. So much the pity that he didn’t cook for breakfast, a necessary exercise in the slimming routine. The only exercise, really. The solitary concession he was willing to grant, the single pleasure he’d forfeit in this ism for everlasting earthly life. If he ate whole-grained cereal every morning, he reasoned — no, not reason, but believed — he could eat whatever he wanted the rest of the day. It was the matins fiber ablution. The rolled oats rosary to his colon. Blessed poverty of bran. Granola nut virtue.

Stop.

He was sounding sour.

There’s nothing worse than a sour fat man.

Makes you lose your appetite.

Don Irwine stepped out through his front door with a mug of coffee in hand. The sun that spread itself over his stove was also lying on the car park. Irwine would let the light lie on top of him for a minute or two — it got his juices going, although sometimes it made him want to go back to bed. And why not? There wasn’t anything for him to do that wasn’t invented by the staff. They’d only miss him the way you’d miss one guy of many who was supposed to show up and assemble a widget that no one wanted.

Irwine pushed his butt into a plastic deck chair and stuck his feet into the spongy stuff they called grass. He closed his eyes.

What did it matter?

The light under his lids went from white to red, then yellow.

It was almost too much to bear, the matter without meaning.

He reached over blind and pinched off a tiny leaf of lemon thyme growing in a pot, crushing it between his fingers. He inhaled.

Lemon and coffee, lemon and cream. Lemon thyme was nice in eggs too, sautéed quickly in butter. Butter. Butter cookies were scrumptious with morning coffee and sunshine. Sweet, sweet butter cookies with, yes, lemon thyme.

The recipe was simple and he was a simple man.

Not a sour man.

He was a fat man with cool fat fingers like his mother’s. Sugar and the flours of wheat and almond in a bowl, sifted with a fork, then the butter sliced off against its wrapping, not too thin for the key was in the cool. Cool butter, quick cool fingertips dipping and drawing and pressing. A marriage of moist to dry.

The lemon thyme — only a teaspoonful — must be finely chopped — minced is the word — then crushed beneath the blade’s white edge to bring the flavor; the flavor that is a trick of scent.

Irwine put the cookies in a single layer on a blue plate and covered them with a napkin. No buts, taking them to the library was just a gloss on the original pecadillo. And the patrons were no doubt as numb in the tongue as they were in the eyes and ears, and the fingertips too. The sensory input shut out in their ancient age, like a long shadow at sundown.

Or did all the rubbing make a callous in the end — is that what happens?

Does it matter?

Yes. It must. It must matter.

Surely there’s a reason why a woman like Maggie Doyle has a finger that looks like kindling when she extends it to press the auto-open button on the left side of the door. Now, as she thrusts herself into the library, her fingers are knotted to the handlebars of her walker. She hesitates, her magnified milky gray eyeballs agape, and she pats at her hair with those fingers like roots, like sticks, her magnificent shining white hair.

“Good morning, Mister Irwine,” she says with a slight drawl, a vanity of her sense of education. “I’ve brought you two new patrons, Mister and Missus Hanlay of Cleveland, Ohio...”

Irwine squinted through the tinted glass of the automatic door. It didn’t look like anyone was shut out there, and Maggie Doyle was plainly all alone inside with her walker.

Maggie Doyle, sensing that something was amiss, pushed her walker in a half circle.

“Why, where are they, Mister Irwine? Where did they go? They were with me just a moment ago. Are they out there on the landing?”

“I don’t see anyone, Missus Doyle.”

“What was that?”

“I don’t see anyone,” Irwine repeated, loud and clear.

“Open the door,” Maggie Doyle said, jabbing her walker at the glass. “Open the door please.”

Irwine pushed the button and stepped under the infrared eye to keep it open. Maggie Doyle screamed past him, rocketing to the end of the landing where there was another automatic door. She halted, her walker pressed against the glass like a snout. Irwine followed her and pressed that button as well. The door opened, but Maggie Doyle didn’t move.

“Are they out there?”

“No, no one’s there.”

“What?”

“No one there,” he bellowed in her ear.

“I don’t understand. They were right behind me. Missus Hanlay, she’s new. She just moved in two doors down from me. Her husband’s up here on the second floor. He’s got Alzheimer’s and Missus Hanlay likes to take him for a walk along the lake in the morning, even though there’s so much traffic – don’t you think there’s so much traffic? I’m going to have to talk to Maribel about it – there must be something the Pines can do. So, I said to them this morning, ‘Have you ever been to the library?’ and they said, no they hadn’t, and I thought it would be nice to bring them along and introduce them to you, Mister Irwine. Of course I knew today was your day at the desk.”

The electronic glass door tried to blink, but Maggie Doyle was parked, an oblivious irritant.

“You realize that I don’t see very well any more, but I’m sure they were behind me when we got off the elevator. I just don’t know where they could have gotten to. What?”

Irwine hadn’t said anything, and he was saved from having to say anything by the sudden arrival of Nurse Helen. Sudden and suddenly were always the words accompanying Nurse Helen – that is if there wasn’t an actual shriek of alarm. She was a large woman – large in the way he was large. Okay, she was fat. But not all fat’s alike. While Irwine was slow and smooth, like honey, like yoghurt, like heavy syrup, Nurse Helen was an explosion. Her arrival in a room flattened the occupants, or blew them to bits.

“Now Missus Doyle. What have you been up to this morning?”

It was not a question.

Irwine tried to back away.

The electronic door shuddered.

Maggie Doyle stuck out her neck like a tortoise

“What?”

“Good morning, Missus Doyle, it’s Nurse Helen,” Nurse Helen boomed in her ear. “Let’s get you out here where we can talk.”

“I’d love that.” Maggie Doyle beamed and allowed the woman to lead her, scuffing in the pathetic way of old folks.

Nurse Helen put her hand on Maggie Doyle’s shoulder. It hung there like the leaden vest at a dentist’s office. Irwine’s heart sank.

“We just recovered Mister and Missus Hanlay, Maggie. We had to send out two rescue parties when they didn’t arrive home. Missus Hanlay told up that you insisted on bringing them to the library.

Yes, yes, the good neighbor nodded and smiled, her head slightly fallen to one side.

“Maggie, I have to ask you not to devise entertainments for the Tendercare residents.

“What?” The words sudden and alarm were spreading like rictus across her face.

Nurse Helen searched momentarily for another, simpler expression. She found none and repeated, slowly, the original admonishment. “They just can’t keep up with you, honey,” she added, letting her heavy hand slip off the woman’s shoulder and down to her gnarled stick of a wrist. “No one can keep up with you — right, Mister Irwine?”

Irwine thought the time had come to rescue distressed old dame and he did his best to approach her warm and fluffy. Her old eyes only saw more bully bulk however, more misunderstanding, more failure to grasp her pure intentions, and she shied away.

Nurse Helen shot him a look which he ducked. “Come along, Missus Doyle,” she said from great heighth and breadth, like a man with a megaphone, “it’s almost dinnertime ... I’ll help you back to your room and we’ll have a nice chat.”

There were five major sections in the library: one for large-type westerns, one for large-type mysteries, one for history, another for the public-use computer, and one for everything else. Irwine spent the rest of the morning on the computer, reading the New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, CNN, Google News, he had a whole list of them to click through and scan; a habit like eating potato chips, addictive and unsatisfying. Usually, his snacking was periodically interrupted by readers in search of new material – the same kind of implausible narcotic fodder he was snuffling, only in hard copy – but no one appeared after Maggie Doyle’s tragic exit. No one at all. And soon it was dinnertime and he covered the blue plate of uneaten cookies with the napkin. It wasn’t necessary to lock up; he just hung a sign on the door that said “Attendant Returns After Dinner” and took the elevator to the first floor. It wouldn’t be him returning though, not today.

The twist of loneliness he felt then in his gut reminded him that he was hungry.

What’s for dinner?

It was Tuesday and Tuesdays were for Al’s on Lime Street, behind the courthouse. Pork roast with mango glaze and a hint of smoked chili. Rice cooked the Mexican way – toasted in oil in a sauce pan on the stovetop, then a brothy liquid added until the top layer was moist and nutty and the bottom a savory brown crust.

He stepped off the elevator in a reverie of taste, a gorge suspense – for the feeling of full was almost as important as the ingredients — and straight into a completely irregular throng of agéd citizens. There was barely room for his bulk and he had to hold his plate above his shoulder.

“What’s going on?”

“Murder,” said the man to his right.

“Our first,” said the woman to his right.

“Murder? Who? Who lived there?”

“That’s Marvel’s apartment, but she’s already dead.”

“She means that Marvel died last week; natural causes.”

Irwine had only spoken to the woman fantastically called Marvel once that he recalled. She’d been outside her apartment, scraping in the planters. What had she been looking for? Oh, right, a pearl necklace. South Sea pearls, she said. What were they doing in the bushes, he asked? That’s what I’d like to know, she said.
They didn’t find anything even though he helped her until the dinner bell rang.

“So not Marvel; who then?”

The man to Irwine’s right looked at the woman to his right.

“I don’t know,” the woman said, defensively. “Marvel never talked about relatives ... I think she would’ve talked about them if she’d had them.”

“Everyone else does.”

“But Marvel was nuts. Ever since Harry died.”

“Who’s Harry?”

“Her husband. A real son of a bitch, that guy. Cheated at cards.”

“No, he just beat you.”

“He cheated.”

The dinner bell rang then, and the crowd turned their backs on the crime scene. There wasn’t much to see, as Irwine was now able to discover. The apartment door was cracked a couple of inches, but the curtains were drawn. An officer shuffled outside, looking vague. Yellow tape, wrapped around the tops of several plastic patio chairs, defined the infected space.

South Sea, cream-colored, 14 millimeters, she’d said. Lovely. They’d gotten them in the Philippines on their honeymoon. So lovely. They glowed, she said, just like ... just like ... But he couldn’t remember what she’d said they glowed like, or if she’d said anything at all.

The Rule of Thumb - Chapter 1

1 — DECEMBER 13, FRIDAY

Here's your fear,
Its restive stubborn clockwork —Penelope Shuttle

Alice looked down into the open drawer.

“Oh my god, Cammy, come here, you gotta see this! Panty liners! The whole drawer’s full of panty liners!”

Alice knew that her husband would never actually get up to come and see so she leaned into the living room and waved a floppy handful.

“Cammy, look at this! Panty liners! Can you you believe it?”

Cammy screwed his head momentarily away from the TV. “What are those? Flip flops?”

“No, they’re panty liners. You mother’s top drawer is stuffed with them. It’s so sad. It’s like a tragedy.”

“What do you need batteries for?”

“Not batteries, honey, tragedy.” Not the least impatience creased the tone of her voice. She folded her arms and looked at her husband, but she wasn’t thinking about him. Rather about his mother, the old schemer. “She’d just die if she knew I was pawing through her private parts.”

“She’s already dead.”

“Yes, I know, but imagine if it was me, or you. What’s in your top drawer?”

“We’d be dead. It wouldn’t matter.”

“Oh, Cammy.”

“Just throw it away, Alice. That’s what I always tell you. Throw it away and let’s go get some lunch.”

Alice began to fan herself with the panty liners, then reconsidered. It was stuffy, but Cammy wouldn’t let her open the door. Too many old folks, he said. Don’t know any of them. Even the blinds were twisted down.

“Know what I’d like?” Alice mused. “Corned beef.”

“No one serves corned beef no more, you know that.”

“But I saw a place, on Florida, on the way to the pharmacy. They had a sign on the window.”

“We’re eating at the hotel. Only decent place in town. Close to our room.”

Alice sighed. A wistful, girlish sigh.

In the bathroom she found a wastebasket between the toilet and the sink. The white plastic liner was so fresh it clung to itself. She was glad for that. Bathroom trash wasn’t like kitchen trash. Bathroom trash made her squeamish.

Alice scooped the panty liners out of the drawer and dropped them into the wastebasket. It seemed a shame, throwing them away, new as they were in their pale yellow wrappers. Marvel must’ve bought them at a discount store there were so many all helter-skelter the length of the drawer.

Alice imagined someone, a stranger, opening her underwear drawer. Her panties lay flat and color-matched. One cup of each bra folded into the other cup, nice and neat. What would the stranger think of her? Nice and neat. Well, there were worse things.

She felt the tiniest stab of shame. She’d never liked Marvel; liked her even less after Harry died. Marvel became like a little girl, but greedy and sour. And it was Alice had to talk to her on the phone everyday.
She was Cammy’s mother, but Cammy wouldn’t talk to her. Women.

The plastic trash bag was stuffed and Alice tied the ends in a little knot before she removed it. The drawer was still half-full of dingy panties and fleshy bras. No one could want these. And what about the other drawers, the thready sweaters, the blouses with their blind stains? Was this what always happened? Would her black lace cake with the slippery talc of the unwanted?

Poor old Marvel. Alice sighed, but she was thinking of herself. The pang came again and she touched the bulge of her stomach. Maybe she was just hungry.

Where would Marvel keep the trash bags?

Alice didn’t look at her husband on the way to the kitchen.

She really only glanced at him on her way back to the bedroom for the holes in the stranger’s black mask sucked off her attention like a magnet, like a drain.

The box of trashbags dropped to the floor.

The eyes had a gun. The gun had an eye.

Alice stared at the tiny black hole of the gun; she stared at the glittering black eyes behind the mask; she started to raise her hands over her head.

The flash, the soft whump like a door sealing, her scarlet chest exploding -- it all happened at the same instant.

One single overwhelming instant.

* * * *

Devon’d seen the box straight off, first thing. Yeah, it was bad form to seek the treasure first when anything could happen, when the mark could’ve been agile or talking on the phone, but Devon couldn’t help it. His eyes snapped to the television and there was the box on top, just like the client’d said.

Anyway, the mark wasn’t agile. He was barely conscious in front of that TV. Devon put down his tool kit, slipped across the living room floor and shot the mark through the back of the chair. Easy.

But the woman scared the crap out of him. She appeared, suddenly, from another room -- it had to be the bedroom -- and bee-lined to the kitchen. She opened the cupboard under the sink and knocked something over.

Devon pointed his gun in her direction.

A drawer and then another slid open along a metal groove. Devon didn’t move.

The woman was halfway across the living room before she saw him.

Devon didn’t move.

Funny, she didn’t scream or make any noise at all. Kind of eerie. The look on her face could haunt him.
So he dropped the gun in his pocket and got down to business. First, he bolted the front door. Then he grabbed the box off the TV, making sure to push the flower pot to the center so it wouldn’t look like anything was missing. That’s what the instructions had said to do: first the door, then the box, then the flower pot.

He’d never had a client provide such detailed instructions before. Normally, there was just a goal, not a map of the journey. He’d memorized the instructions over two days then set fire to the hardcopy with a cigarette. Now that it was happening, it was like it had already happened. It was a weird feeling, but not completely unpleasant.

Devon put the treasure box in his tool kit and headed to the bedroom. Once in the bedroom, he headed to the back door. Everything was real. Everything was in its place.

The key to the back door was in the lock, just like the client’d said. Devon opened the door and looked out into the corridor, casual like. It was gloomy and damp. It was about five feet below the surface of the parking lot, that’s why. Thick dark bushes grew off the top of the retaining wall. A car door opened and shut and an old man’s hairless calves flashed between the branches. Devon lifted his cap and smoothed his bangs back.

Easy.

Squatting with the door between his knees, he examined the knobs of the back door and its bolt. The instructions had said he’d need two screw drivers: a standard and a Phillips. Devon stared. Sweat made his head itch so he took off his cap again and wiped his hair on the sleeve of his jacket. Sure, there were some different screws in the plates, but he didn’t need anything special to dismantle the lock. He didn’t even need a screwdriver. All he had to do was press the little button on the underside of the inside knob and the whole thing would come apart.

The instructions had said he’d need two screwdrivers: a standard and a Phillips.

Were the instructions wrong?

The sweat was springing off his neck and running under his collar.

The sweat was growing under the hairs above his lip.

Maybe the client didn’t know how to take apart a lock.

Maybe that was it.

The instructions weren’t wrong -- there was just a scratch. A mistake. He’d fix that and they’d be back on track. Back on track and one thing following the first thing like numbers, like connecting the dots, and the whole picture appearing at the end. Yes.

Devon dismantled the lock and laid the pieces on the floor. He opened his tool kit. On the shelf that swung back was a brand new lock with a brass bolt. He’d already removed and discarded the hard plastic packaging. Except for the two keys. They were still in their cellophane envelope. It only took a few minutes to put the thing together. The instructions said to leave one new key in the inside lock and the other one on top of the bookcase.

He stood up and brushed his knees and the back of his thighs.

* Now, take the treasure box out of the tool kit & put it under your arm where the folds of your jacket will hide it.

He did that.

* Pull the door to the apartment shut.

Okay.

* Leave the tool kit on the sidewalk, but take the old lock & walk left out of the door all the way to the end of the corridor. Notice the wheelchair ramp at the end. There is a trash can just around the corner to the right, next to the first gardenia bush. Discard the old lock in the trash can.

* Now, return to fetch the tool kit -- but first, quickly, on the wheelchair ramp, stuff the treasure box into the lower branches of the second gardenia bush.

* If you are interrupted & unable to accomplish this the first time, you must return to the tool kit, remove a screwdriver, & repeat the steps until you succeed.

Ah, but he did succeed and there was no need to try try again. Devon grabbed the tool kit with his index finger and swung it over his shoulder. He was leaving the scene. He was Devon Scott Free. He lifted his cap to an old lady with the thick cap of smooth silvery hair pushing a walker.

* If you meet a woman, smile & tip your hat, but don’t stop even if she speaks. Don’t stop. Nod & keep walking.

Yes, ma’am.

* * * *

The scissors had been a gift from her husband on the first anniversary of their marriage. Paper, of course, and scissors to go with. Hadn’t she made a joke about his wanting to snip away the loose end in their life together? Hadn’t he responded by saying he knew how she liked everything neat and clean? Small, light, perfectly balanced, they weren’t shears for cutting cloth, they were scissors for snipping -- precisely the sound they made when they bit through thread.

She was using them to cut paper.

Sewing scissors should never be used to cut paper as it dulls the blades, but she was sure her sewing days were over, therefore it was for the pure pleasure of holding them in her fingers and the articulate music she thought she could still hear that she used the fine instrument for any task at hand.

The first task this evening, now that she was home, was to cut down an old birthday card into a rectangle about two inches by four inches. Loving Birthday Wishes from Your Parents the card said. How many years? Thirty-two since the both of them had been alive. Although Mother could have sent it later, assuming Dad’s undying sentiment.

She hadn’t chosen the card for its message but for the aged look of the flowery illustration. Cut down and pasted carefully to the top of the treasure box, it looked like it had been there for years. Forever.

The unimportant contents of the treasure box were already spread across the bedspread. Odd buttons, odd earrings, a tiny pencil with its point neat. Loose ends. All of them. But in her home everything had a place.
A single scoop and the buttons disappeared into a tobacco tin along with hundreds and hundreds of others from three, perhaps four generations of sewing and mending. The tiny pencil slipped between the playing cards and Bridge tallies in the top drawer of the living room bureau. The treasure box itself became the new home for single earrings and other broken off bits. The former receptacle, the Dillard’s box, went in the trash.

She heated milk in a glass pitcher in the microwave. The numbers 1 - 0 - 0 were visible for only as long as she chose not to push the start button. She poured the milk into a Haviland teacup with matching saucer. It was early -- barely eight o’clock -- but she planned on taking her time in front of the TV with her tonic and her scissors, stripping away Marvel’s words quarter-inch by quarter-inch. Before the nurse arrived at nine, she would soften the strips in the microwave with a little water, then feed them to the disposal. The ruckus would begin, surely, in the early A.M., but she’d be all rested and put away. Why, with her hearing aids out, she slept like the dead.