AS THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD (18 page)

“Very nice.”

“Has it ever occurred to you that Snooky is interfering with
our
social life?”

“We’ll go home soon, I promise you.” She snuggled up next to him and put her head on his shoulder.

“Okay.”

They drank their coffee slowly, savoring it—Snooky always had plenty of excellent coffee beans in the kitchen pantry—then Maya closed her eyes and fell asleep. Bernard stared into the fire until his head began to swim. An hour later, when the door opened, the two of them were huddled together on the sofa, deep in slumber.

Snooky came in, shrugged off his coat and slowly unwound his long red muffler. He sat down opposite them and stretched out his legs toward the fire.

“Touching. Very touching. So these are the joys of marriage. Long evenings by the hearth, alone together, enjoying each other’s company.”

Maya woke up, yawned, stretched like a sleepy cat, and smiled at her brother. “And how was your evening, Snooks? Fun and games?”

“Fun and games as always, My.”

“Please don’t tell us about it,” said Bernard.

“Really? Now, I think you might be interested.”

“Why would we be interested?”

“Because I met someone.”

“You’re always meeting someone,” said Maya. “It’s your great personal gift. It’s that charming smile of yours and your devil-may-care attitude. Only those of us close to you know how sorely troubled you are underneath.”

“I’m not sorely troubled. I’m happy all the way through. You know that, My. So the two of you aren’t interested in who I met?”

“It must be a girl.”

“Yes.”

Maya looked faintly disapproving. “You already have a girlfriend, Snooks. Remember her?”

“This is not a girlfriend, Maya. At least not mine.”

Maya arched an eyebrow. “Whose, then?”

“Bobby Fuller’s.”

Snooky was gratified by the expressions of incredulity on their faces. Bernard sat up straighter.

“You’re kidding,” he said.

“No, I’m not.”

“Bobby Fuller’s secret girlfriend?”

“The very same.”

“How did you find her?”

“She was marching up the road toward Hugo’s Folly, and I recognized her from Charlotte’s description. ‘Hussy,’ by the way, is physically accurate but not strictly fair. She’s a very nice person.”

“She was going to see Irma?”

“Yes. I stopped, turned her around, took her out for dinner, and we talked. Then I took her to the police station, and Bentley interviewed her. A little while ago I took her home. She lives in Wolfingham, by the way. A nice little studio apartment. She’s a hairdresser.”

“What’s her name?”

“Diane. Diane Caldwell.”

“What’s her story?”

Snooky related it to him, in detail. When he was done, Bernard said, “Tell me again.”

“What?”

“Tell me again.”

“Tell you what?”

“Everything she said, Snooky. Tell me again.”

Snooky looked reproachful. “But I already told you. Didn’t I, My? Didn’t I just tell him everything?”

“Do as he says, Snooky.”

Grudgingly, Snooky repeated the conversation. Bernard
sat with his eyes closed, his head turned away. When Snooky was finished, he turned to his sister and said,

“Is he asleep?”

“He’s listening, Snooks.”

“The way he’s breathing, I thought he was asleep.”

Bernard’s eyes opened. “So Bobby felt nervous around Roger and Gertie? Those two in particular?”

“That’s what she said.”

“Either one of them more than the other?”

“She didn’t know. She said Bobby thought Roger’s interest in guns and hunting was creepy.”

“How about the other relatives—Dwayne and Sarah?”

“She didn’t mention them.”

“Hmmmm.” Bernard lapsed into a thoughtful silence. The flames roared and crackled. The wind gusted outside, rattling the window panes.

Snooky yawned. “I’m turning in, Maya. It’s been a long day. Do you know that she quoted my favorite passage from
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?
”

“ ‘Ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas’?”

Snooky was impressed. “I didn’t think you knew me that well, My.”

“You’re an open book to me, Snooky. William and I raised you from childhood, remember?”

“I’m touched. I’m really touched. I didn’t think you knew my favorite line of poetry.”

“I know a lot of things about you, Snooks. Not all as benign as
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
”

“Really? What’s my favorite color?”

“Green.”

“No. Yellow. You’re close, though. What’s my favorite piece of music?”

“ ‘My Hat, It Has Three Corners’?”

“No. Brahms’s Piano Concerto Number One in D Minor. Close enough.”

Maya looked disgruntled. “It used to be ‘My Hat, It Has
Three Corners.’ I remember because I had to sing you to sleep with it about a trillion times when you were little.”

“That was a long time ago, My.”

“Yes.” She grew reflective, looking at her brother, his lanky form stretched out on the sofa. “Yes, I guess it was. Brahms’s Piano Concerto Number One, you say?”

“Uh-huh.”

“All right. Good night, Snooky. Sleep well.”

“You, too.”

The next day, Bernard seemed distracted. He hummed to himself, grunted as he worked, and spent long hours staring out the window. He corraled Snooky and made him repeat the conversation with Bobby’s secret girlfriend again.

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore, Bernard. I’m sorry that I found her. I’ve already told you twice.”

“Tell me again.”

“No.”

“Tell me again.”

When Snooky was finished, he began to edge away.

“Wait just one minute,” said Bernard. “Where are you going?”

“I have to do the shopping, remember? None of us will eat tonight if I don’t get to Harry’s before it closes.”

Bernard waved him away with a magisterial gesture. “All right. You can go.”

“ ‘You can go,’ ” Snooky repeated incredulously to his sister later on that afternoon, when he had returned with his arms full of groceries. “ ‘You can go.’ Just like that. Like a … a royal command. As if he didn’t know I was there anymore, once I had served his purpose.”

“You have to understand him, Snooks. Bernard can be very imperious when he’s deep in thought.”

“He can’t be deep in thought all the time. And it’s not imperious, My. I call it arrogant. I didn’t like his tone.”

“I apologize for him.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Snooky said, taking the
groceries out of the shopping bags and tossing them onto the kitchen counter. “No, you don’t have to do that.”

“Maybe you can manipulate him into apologizing to you again.”

“It’s not worth it. It’s simply not worth it. What’s he doing now?”

Maya went to the kitchen door. “He’s sitting on the sofa and looking out the window.”

“Deep in thought,” said Snooky bitterly. As an outlet for his feelings, he tore a piece out of the brown paper shopping bag. Rapidly and neatly, with his long white fingers, he folded it into a paper airplane. Following that, in rapid succession, he produced a paper bird, then a fish, then a tiny elephant. Maya watched admiringly.

“You’ve always been good at origami.”

“I enjoy it.”

“You haven’t lost any of your talent.”

“I only do it when I’m angry. It’s kind of a release for me.”

“I remember when you were eight or nine years old. There was a time when William said he couldn’t turn around in the house without stumbling over some of that brightly colored Chinese paper.”

“I remember.”

“William was worried for a while that you’d turn out to be an artist.”

Snooky smiled. “William was wrong.”

“He was worried you’d be an artist, and starve, or eat up the family resources. In his worst nightmares he never imagined you’d turn out to do nothing.”

She said it with great affection. Snooky grinned. He held up a delicate paper cat, complete with stubby whiskers. “This is for you, Maya. You look like a cat, you know that?”

“Thank you, Snooks.”

“And this is for you, too, in memory of the old days.”

He took the remaining bag, smoothed it out, worked on it intently for a few minutes, then handed her a huge floppy three-cornered hat. Maya began to laugh.

———

In the living room, Bernard was gazing vacantly out the window. Thoughts were churning round and round in his head. Finally he shook himself and put a piece of paper in the typewriter. At the top he wrote:

BBYS GRLFRND (“Bobby’s girlfriend”)
ANGR (“anger”)
JLSY (“jealousy”)
PSSSSVNSS (“possessiveness”)

and

LS (“lies”)

He looked thoughtfully at this last word for a long time. He never believed anything that anyone ever told him about themselves. It was a long-established policy, and one that he found consistently useful. People’s capacity for self-deception was nearly endless. They would lie or steal—or kill, he mused—to run away from an unpleasant truth about themselves. It was the nature of the human ego, always frightened, always insecure, always ready to defend itself at the smallest slight. The most painful thing for most people was to appear wrong, or humiliated, or foolish.

Now, this woman, Diane Caldwell, had found herself in an extremely foolish position. She was the girlfriend of a man who had left her for a much less attractive, much older woman, simply for the money. Bernard tried to imagine how she must have felt. Humiliated, no doubt. And angry. Very, very angry.

She had told Snooky that she wasn’t the one who had murdered Bobby, but that meant nothing. Still, there were other things she had said that Bernard found very interesting. Slowly, thoughtfully, he typed down two names.

RGR
GRTI

Roger and Gertie. Yes, he found it interesting, that Bobby had singled out these two in particular. These two who were always in the woods … who always had a good reason for being in the woods … these two who were of the older generation and had been waiting for years to inherit Irma’s money. Particularly Gertie … it was her brother’s money, after all. It must have been painful to see it pass out of her hands, years ago.

But which, if either, of them? he wondered.

At the moment that Bernard was slowly and laboriously typing her name down, Gertie was striding through the woods near the cabin, head flung back, nostrils flared, inhaling the chill winter air deeply. Her round flabby cheeks were flushed red with the cold and high blood pressure—she had known about her blood pressure problems for years, but she didn’t let that slow her down, certainly not—and her hair, dyed a peculiar shade of steel blue, bobbed gently around her face. Her eyes were alert with interest, roving here and there, searching the bracken and the trees for possible specimens. A pair of large binoculars hung around her neck. Every so often she knelt to the ground with a whoop of delight and gathered a twig or piece of moss or other decaying vegetation tenderly into her pocket. It had not snowed recently, but it was gray and drizzling and the ground was wet. Gertie was undisturbed. Piglike, she loved mud. Her baggy pants and oversize coat were covered with it, but she did not even notice. She charged on, and the creatures of the woodland cowered, unseen, before her.

As she went, she breathed heavily, snuffling like a warthog. Recently she had noticed that she could not walk as far as she used to. She stopped every now and again to lean against a tree and catch her breath. So
stupid,
really … she never used to have to stop at all, not if she walked for miles and miles. Well, she was getting old, there was no doubt about it. Hugo had passed on years ago; the members of her family were not long-lived. She was resigned to it. She felt in tune with the cycles of the seasons, of the flowers
and plants, and of her own life. When her time came she would accept her death, just as the animals and plants do. No use fighting the inevitable.

But until then, she was going to enjoy herself. She picked herself up off the tree trunk and marched on impatiently, proudly. As she went, when she was not too short of breath, she hummed quietly to herself. She was a happy woman, she thought. A happy woman. Of course, what was there to be unhappy about? Everything was working out just fine.

Just fine,
she thought, eagerly crushing a brown leaf to her face to catch the elusive, damp scent.

Roger, on this cold winter’s afternoon, was doing what he had done nearly every afternoon since his retirement. He was sitting in the easy chair in his living room, watching TV. He was watching the television that Irma had bought for him, in the living room that Irma had furnished for him, in the house that Irma had built for him. Roger did not think about these painful facts anymore. He had accepted long ago that his sister was the successful one, with her wealthy marriage. He still saw himself as unfairly wronged by the vagaries of business. It was not his fault, he would reason when forced to think about it; it was not his fault; he had tried hard. Nobody could have worked harder than he did. It was just a fluke; some people succeeded while others failed. He was one of the ones who had not succeeded.

Now he sat, quite happily, sipping a Coke and watching the
Oprah Winfrey Show.
Oprah’s guests today were three people who had been raised as the opposite sex: two men who had been raised as women, and one woman who had been raised as a man. Roger made a sympathetic clucking sound. That was awful, wasn’t it? What kind of parents would do that to a child? Nobody seemed to know. The people on the show seemed angry … well, no wonder. Roger tried to imagine raising Dwayne as a girl. He shook his head. Why would someone do that? He had never
wanted a daughter, anyway. To tell the truth, he had never really wanted a son, or children at all; but when he married Dwayne’s mother, the boy had been eight years old, and Roger had had no choice but to accept him. Over the years he had become very fond of him. He was a good boy, even if he couldn’t figure out what he wanted to do with his life. He was a good son. Roger couldn’t imagine him as a daughter.

His attention drifted back to the television set. These were such sad stories. Roger preferred Oprah’s lighter shows, the ones with celebrity interviews and fashion models displaying the latest from Paris. He always watched the fashion shows with an all-absorbing interest, even though the majority of the clothes were for women and he would never dream of dressing the way the male models did, anyway. And the celebrity interviews were wonderful. He remembered one the other day with Arnold Schwarzenegger where Arnold had cracked up the audience by saying …