She woke next morning with the blurred pulse of a hangover running through her head, and she lay still for a long time, clutching the sheet to her. Her joints were stiff and her body felt beaten up. The smell of Dexter was on her. She was experiencing no remorse but she felt horribly scuffed and shop-worn. The day lay ahead of her, a parade of unknown terrors, random episodes that might involve another visit to the Cardboard House, negotiation with the crazed house-sitter, trying to get the police interested, terrible hassles, confrontations, guns, a shame-faced return to LA, another drunken night in the Rocket Saloon, or any combination of these things, or none of them.
There was a tentative knock on the motel door, and she knew it had to be Dexter. She felt no animosity towards him this morning. She kept the sheet around herself and let him in. He was carrying two small polystyrene cups of coffee. Kelly took one and grunted her thanks. She hoped he wouldn’t try to touch her or kiss her, but she had made her point. He kept his distance, sat quietly on the edge of the bed, demanding nothing. He seemed calmer than she’d ever seen him.
‘If I have anything to be sorry for, then I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘You don’t need to be sorry.’
‘Good, because that’s the way I see it too.’
‘Been up long?’ Kelly asked.
‘Hours.’
‘Got a hangover?’
‘No. Have you?’
She nodded.
‘They’re serving breakfast in the saloon. It’s as good a hangover cure as any.’
She wasn’t sure it was exactly what she wanted, but she put on clothes and went along with it. There was nobody eating in the saloon when they arrived, but the tough cookie who’d been working behind the bar the previous night was there wiping down a table and laying out knives and forks. She motioned for them to sit down and handed over menus. She didn’t smile or say anything, but she didn’t seem particularly hostile. She was inert and self-contained and that suited Kelly. She and Dexter had nothing to say to each other either, and they sat in the morning gloom basking in the dim silence.
She was glad of Dexter’s silence, glad to be free of plans and discussions. If anything needed to be said it didn’t need to be said at this precise moment. Later would be fine. The day would unfold in its own time, with its own logic.
They had nearly finished breakfast before the spell was broken. A police car pulled up outside and two solid, khaki-uniformed officers walked into the saloon. Kelly looked at their guns and their sunglasses; the stuff of legend and television. They looked serious and threatening and larger than life but they joked with the waitress who almost gave them a smile, and they deposited themselves at a table across the other side of the room from Dexter and Kelly and ordered breakfast. The silence and equilibrium had been kicked out of the room.
‘It’s a real mess out there,’ one of the police said.
‘I figured,’ said the waitress indifferently. ‘Know how it happened?’
‘I can guess. He was out of his head on something, booze or dope or both, and he passed out or fell over, dropped his cigarette or knocked over a candle or a kerosene lamp. Nothing we or anybody could do.’
‘Get the body out yet?’
‘What’s left of it. Looked like something your cook had finished with.’
Kelly watched Dexter as he determinedly refused to react to what he was hearing. He finished his last piece of toast, sipped his coffee.
‘Who owned that old hippie weirdo house anyway?’
‘Some big shot in LA. Hasn’t been there in years. He won’t be vacationing there now, that’s for sure.’
Dexter’s eyes stayed securely on his plate. He didn’t look up, didn’t glance at Kelly or the police. He continued to act as if he had heard nothing, as if the police had been discussing something as trivial as a parking ticket. Kelly couldn’t eat or drink, could barely swallow, certainly couldn’t talk, but when Dexter had at last finished and when he silently pushed back his chair and got up from the table, she followed him out, knowing that he would get in the truck and drive out to the Cardboard House, or whatever was left of it.
They didn’t speak on the way there. Dexter drove slowly, calmly. Certainly Kelly could see there was no rush, nothing that would change before they got there, but she still didn’t understand his icy self-possession, his lack of urgency.
They could see the smoke rising long before they arrived. It was still wafting up from the wreckage in thin, dirty streaks. There was one police car and a couple of unmarked vans parked beside the blackened, crumpled framework of the building. It looked crushed, stamped on. The Cardboard House had fallen in on itself, had been reduced to a mesh of loose, interlocking components. Kelly could still recognize sections of wall, roof, door and window, but they no longer made sense. The integrity of the building had gone. It had always been a house of fragments and discontinuity, now the fragments were united by a thick black tar that coated and held them.
Dexter parked beside the squad car but he and Kelly had barely stepped out of the truck before they were confronted by a policewoman, as big and formidable as either of the guys they’d seen having breakfast.
‘Do you have any business here, sir?’ she asked.
Dexter hesitated, and Kelly saw that if he was ever going to lay claim to the house, to his part in the action, this would have to be the moment. But he hesitated a little too long and the policewoman took that as a ‘no’, as an indication that they were only there to gawp, and she said, ‘Then you should get back in your vehicle and drive on, sir. This ain’t a tourist attraction.’
For a moment Kelly wanted to stay, to argue, to insist that she did have business there, that: she belonged, but almost immediately she saw this was no longer true. What business could she have with a burnt-out building? How could she possibly belong? And how could she possibly explain anything at all to a female Californian cop in a khaki uniform with sunglasses and a gun?
Kelly and Dexter got into the truck, back on to the road that led through Frontier Town, that would eventually take them back to the freeway, back to Los Angeles. Kelly looked over her shoulder, through the dusty rear window of the truck, watching the smouldering wreckage recede, become part of the desert landscape. Only after they’d been driving for an hour or so did they speak.
Dexter said, ‘You see, sometimes things have a way of fixing themselves.’
Kelly said, ‘I don’t know if I believe that.’