Nine

TODAY, THEN, I WAS GOING TO FIND HER. THE ANTICIPATION NEARLY paralyzed me. I took deep breaths and thought of the underliner. I could at least be as brave as she was, couldn’t I?

It was still afternoon. Wynn Teller would not likely be home. Lydia might well be. Which meant it was time to turn my words into action, even though my limbs felt heavy as sandbags.

I went to the back of the deli where the rest rooms and telephones were. I intended to use both, but couldn’t. No W. or L. Teller listed. Of course not. How could I have believed it would be that easy, ever?

I had no dimes, so I deposited a quarter and a computerized voice informed me that I had a five cent credit with the phone company. They failed to tell me how to collect it.

“Beth, I need Lydia Teller’s address,” I said after minimal pleasantries.

“Why on earth?”

“She’s the lady in the book.”

“What book?” Beth asked. Then she answered herself. “Oh, for heaven’s sake! That’s ridiculous! Laughable, if you weren’t so grim about it.”

On and on she went. She didn’t get to speak to adults often enough during daylight hours. I wondered if the phone company would remember my credit and allow me an extra five cents’ worth of sisterly monologue.

“If you knew the Tellers, you’d know they aren’t that sort at all!” she said.

“There is no sort!” Now that my stereotypes had been thoroughly disabused, I could be high and mighty about the less informed.

“Well, whatever sort they don’t have to be, they aren’t!” Beth’s grammar was confusing, but her message wasn’t. “They’re famous for their perfect marriage. I mean really, Mandy—first you thought I was the one, then Martha, now Lydia. You have a serious problem.” I hadn’t paid much attention to her wise older sister routine since I was twelve, when Beth at least had interesting facts of life to demystify.

I counted to ten. “One question. What would you do if you found a note from a woman who thought she’d be killed soon and the police wouldn’t be interested in doing anything about it?”

“I certainly wouldn’t create problems where there aren’t any.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to risk making a mistake than to risk somebody’s life?”

“You might as well know right now,” Beth said. “I don’t have Lydia’s address or phone number.”

If she weren’t a nursing mother and I hadn’t been in a public restaurant, I might have shouted ungentle words. Instead, I clung to logic by my fingernails. “You’re her friend. You worked with her.”

“Not a close friend, and I never went there. I saw her at meetings, events. She’s very reserved and private. Some people think she’s chilly, actually, but I don’t.”

“I don’t, either. Maybe not even reserved or private. Just scared that if somebody got close, she’d visit at the wrong time, ask the wrong questions. Find out what really goes on in that house.”

Alexander conveniently had a fit, and the conversation ended. When I hung up the phone, my cold, which had been in retreat, thumped back on the field. My head ached and my eyes felt like Red Cross flags.

I stomped through the deli to the cashier’s stand and paid the bill, ready to throw in the towel, or the book, and go home and huddle under the covers. Catch up on some of those million ways to snag guys. I was pretty sure that gratuitous sleuthing was not on the list.

My exit was halted by a sound that further disoriented me. “Mandy! Hey—over here!”

The call of my sort-of-beloved, peeking out of one of the trysting booths, where he didn’t belong. I didn’t need to go to detective school to deduce who occupied the other side of that brown wooden nook.

I considered bolting, but by the time the concept reached my muscles, Mackenzie was at my side.

“Come meet Jinx.” He guided me to their booth, as if I couldn’t find it myself. He’d been infected with acute southernness by his houseguest. “Went to the Barnes,” he said.

Mackenzie, while a man of many talents, had never seemed such a fanatic art lover that he’d take a day off from work to view an art collection, no matter how spectacular.

“Interestin’ place.”

“How? On a weekday.” Even dead, Albert Barnes remains one of the city’s eccentric codgers. In the 1920s, critics sneered at his collection of Impressionist art—Renoir, Cezanne, Monet, and Gauguin. They said paintings by Picasso, Matisse, and Modigliani were figments of diseased minds. Instead of having the last laugh, or letting anybody else do so, Barnes set his huff in concrete. Only personally selected art students were allowed a peek during his lifetime, and although a posthumous lawsuit somewhat modified his dictates, it was still necessary either to petition the museum for special admission or to line up on weekends and wait to be one of the one hundred unreserved admittants. I always meant to write and reserve a time. I always also meant to lose five pounds, jog, and read Proust in the original.

“Jinx took care of it from down home.” Mackenzie looked proud of the little lady’s accomplishments, which didn’t enhance my nonpleasure in meeting her. Nor did seeing her.

She didn’t look any of the ways I’d imagined. She wasn’t exceptionally anything, except, perhaps, predictable. Predictably shiny blonde hair, predictably blonde face. Predictably pert. I couldn’t fathom the attraction.

I also couldn’t compete on the pertness scale with my scratchy eyes, stuffed nose, and depression. I therefore detested everything about her, from her neat, inoffensive jacket and sweater to her cultural awareness and her pragmatic professional choice and the fact that she’d heard of the elusive, reclusive Barnes Collection while she was down in the Bayou.

“Saw such wonderful paintins!” she said after we’d made our introductions.

“Umm,” I murmured, over-aware that Mackenzie had seated himself next to her.

“This city’s really fun!” She squeezed Mackenzie’s upper arm for emphasis. “No wonder there’s that famous sayin’, ‘I’d rather be in Philadelphia.’”

“W. C. Fields,” I muttered. “And not much of a compliment.”

“Pardon?”

“W. C. Fields, the comedian, supposedly has ‘On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia,’ carved on his tombstone.”

She stared blankly, a worried but well-meaning smile trembling on her lips. “Tombstone,” she echoed. I wondered whether her MBA was mail-order. “Oh,” she said, her mouth working in slow motion. “I get it. It’s a joke.”

“And what are you doing in the hinterlands?” Mackenzie asked after we’d made our introductions. “Visitin’ your sister?”

That made me sound as dull and sexless as a missionary. Or, I suppose, as a spinster schoolmarm.

I shrugged, meaning to suggest trysts, luxurious suburban indulgences, anything to stir envy in Mackenzie’s heart and Jinx’s pert eyes. Unworthy motives, but I was prepared to lie as much as necessary. Then something possessed me. Something remarkably akin to a desire to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. I hadn’t done that in days. Also, I wasn’t averse to Mackenzie’s seeing how clever I’d been identifying Lydia. And he could help. No sweat for cops to find somebody’s address. So out it came. Everything.

Jinx said “Oh, my!” every third word, and “My goodness!” in between. She was attentive, even goggle-eyed, laughing when I got to the—anonymous—story of the grandma and the porno. The impressing-the-hell-out-of-her part of my mission seemed accomplished, until I realized her reactions might be nothing more than reflex Southern good manners.

And during this time, Mackenzie’s nostrils flared and he drummed the table. “Finished?” he said the instant my mouth stopped.

Jinx looked startled. I was sure that north or south of the Mason-Dixon line, nobody had spoken to her that curtly.

“Of course not. Not now that you know she’s not imaginary. Nor is this a prank the way you said. Her name is Lydia Teller. Wynn Teller’s wife. I’m sure you’ve seen his ads on TV and in the paper.” What did I expect? That Mackenzie would catch her name like a football and run with it? Come along, as a civilian, and help me get her out of the house and into safety?

“Mandy,” Mackenzie said, “if teachin’ doesn’t keep you busy enough, maybe you should switch careers.” The fact that the edges of his syllables were soft did not lessen their sting.

“You won’t help me?”

“I am helpin’ you. I’m askin’ you to give this up. You’re obsessed. Sick with it.”

I stood up. “How many dead ladies in the headlines will it take to convince you people about what’s going on?”

Across the aisle a boothful of diners ignored their blintzes in favor of watching me. But they didn’t answer my question. Nobody did. I took as deep a breath as my clogged system allowed and flounced off.

Then I remembered, and turned back. “Very nice to have met you,” I told Jinx. I didn’t want her to think Yankees lacked manners.

* * *

I couldn’t believe it was still daylight. Still afternoon. Several years had passed since the teaching day ended, and I wondered if we had skipped to summer’s deliciously late sunsets in the interim. But the temperature was miserable, and the light was grudging, so I knew we were still stuck in February.

And I was still searching for Lydia Teller.

I had crossed the street en route to my car before I realized I didn’t know where to go once I entered it. In my frustration, I kicked the side of a bus stop bench. And then stood staring at its back, emblazoned as it was with a TLC ad.

A genuine, irrefutable sign, by gum.

The beige receptionist didn’t blend in as well today. She was wearing a patriotic sweater in a red, white, and blue flag print, having undoubtedly gotten special dispensation for color deviance. At the moment, the back of the sweater was toward me and she was complaining to a brown-haired girl at another computer. “I mean how much more is he supposed to take? I worry about him. You see him this morning? Or yesterday?”

Clifford Schmidt appeared from down the hall. He stood at his office door, looking almost ready to say something to me, which would have ruined my plan, but happily, he changed his mind and sequestered himself.

The brown-haired girl eyed me and pointed silently, until the receptionist swiveled around.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m an English teacher and—”

She smiled expectantly, blankly. I had really made a big impression on her yesterday. “Applying for a tutoring position?”

“No, I—”

My sound waves crossed others blasting out of Teller’s office door. It sounded as if he had a crowd in there—high pitches and low, male and female. Good. If it was still business as usual, then Lydia Teller must still be alive.

The receptionist smiled even more brightly.

“I was wondering. I taught Mr. Teller’s son, and he called and asked for a recommendation. I gather he’s in a bit of a hurry—late college application, most likely—and since I was coming out this way, I said I’d pick up the form in person. But I just this second realized I left his address and phone number home, and my cat is no good giving me information over the phone.” I laughed, weakly, horrified that this oafish routine came to me so naturally.

“Mr. Teller’s son?”

“Yes, and what a relief to realize I was near here, where you’d have it, and I wouldn’t seem like such a dope.”

She bit her bottom lip.

I smiled hard. “I’m in something of a hurry,” I said. “Well, I mean he is. Needs to have it in the mail today. Overnight mail, actually. You know how rigid college deadlines are.”

The phone buzzed and she raised a finger to put me on hold while she answered it. Her face grew stony and she closed her eyes in exasperation. “I’ve given him the last five messages and he will respond as soon as he can.”

She listened again, holding the receiver out from her ear. “His schedule is already full, that’s why. Sorry, he’s already coming back here after dinner. Through nine, and I’m not to schedule beyond that.” Again the receiver was held away from her head and I could hear a furious male voice. “Of course I know how to spell your name, Mr. Quigley,” she snapped.

I shuddered.

True to her receptionist code of honor, she filled out a pink telephone message form and added it to a small stack. “Look,” she said when she realized I was still there, outside the cutout square, “this is a really bad time.”

“Oh, my, I can see that. So if you’ll simply pass over the Rolodex, I’ll take a peek and be on my way.”

“I’d have to check first,” she said without interest. “You’ll have to wait.”

My smile muscles ached. “I could understand if I were selling anything. Or if I looked like a terrorist. But I’m an English teacher, trying to help a kid.” I wondered if saying kid had hurt my chances.

“I certainly don’t know why he told you to go to his house when he was coming here.” Her smooth voice had a tendency to squeak now and then, as if she had sanded it down but missed spots.

“Here?” I thought he was among the missing and had been for years.

“Already is, so whyn’t you take a seat?” She returned to her computer screen, which blinked with various heights of orange columns. “Take a seat,” she said. “He’ll be out any second.”

“He told me to pick it up at his house, so maybe he left it there, and…” I sounded unbearably feeble, but I was plumb out of ideas.

“Young people are unpredictable, if you know what I mean. Why don’t you leave the material if you don’t want to wait?”

“No, no. He was leaving something for me.” The lie had outlived its usefulness, and so had this place. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll give Hugh a call later.” I hoped that saved face. “We’ll work it out.”

“Please don’t bother phoning me again,” she said in clipped, exasperated tones. “I cannot provide the requested information.”

“Not you. Hugh.”

She stared.

“Hugh,” I repeated, treating the first syllable like a hurricane. “Hhhugh. The name. With an h. Hugh Teller.”

“Who?”

“Hugh!” I cleared my throat and took a deep breath. “His son. The person you just said was in the office with him.”

“I never!” We might have gone on forever playing Hugh’s on First, but Teller’s office door opened and Wynn Teller, tall and solid, held the door for a young man and woman who shared his height, blocky build, and fair coloring. Their large, definite features were similar—especially their unhappy cast.

“This woman wants to see you,” Glenda said.

“No, no.” This young man was nothing like Hugh—too old, too fair, wrong-featured.

“Miss Pepper,” Wynn Teller said. “I’m surprised and delighted to have you return so quickly. Does this mean you’re going to join TLC’s staff soon, I sincerely hope?”

“Miss Pepper says she was Adam’s English teacher. She’s here about his college applications?” Glenda sounded suspicious and ingratiating, as if the king would reward her for unearthing my duplicity.

“No I didn’t,” I said.

The fair young man looked down at me. “I’m Adam Teller.” He smiled hopefully.

“And I’m Eve Wholeperson,” the young woman snapped. “Adam’s sister. We’re twins.” She was what the kids at school called an organic: unornamented and dressed in layers of wrinkled dun, as if both color and irons were politically incorrect. She was aesthetically out of synch with her twin, who wore penny loafers and a blue blazer. “Bad enough living in a phallocentric society,” she said. “I won’t tolerate a patronymic as well.”

I didn’t have time for fem-babble, so I smiled as unencouragingly as I could.

“I’m afraid I don’t remember you,” Adam said, ignoring his sister. “Although I’ll bet it was tenth grade, right?”

“There’s some confusion,” I said. “I didn’t mean…look, I’ll be toddling along.”

“But what was it you wanted?” Wynn Teller could have posed for the spirit of honest, compassionate concern.

What I wanted was to pull his lapel jackets and tell him I knew the bully who lived below the smart tailoring. I settled instead for not arousing suspicion because what I also wanted was to get Lydia to a shelter without alerting him. I didn’t want Wynn terrorizing me, or even suspecting a linkage.

“A phone call from Hugh, she said.” Glenda implied that she was too smart a cookie to believe that. Actually, she was.

“I wish I could meet Hugh,” Eve Wholeperson said. “It’s unnatural to have this half brother you never ever saw. I mean it’s weird meeting my father for the first time, too. It’s all been weird since Mom called, actually.”

“Oh,” I said softly. Now it all jelled. The crazy lady. Fay, who said she was the mother of Wynn Teller’s children. But Wynn had so successfully dismissed her as a crank, I hadn’t stored her words carefully.

Intriguing, but this portion of the family was not, however, my problem.

“Hugh called you?” Wynn asked. “Why? When? About what?”

I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten mired in so many levels of untruth. “Today. A message,” I finally said. “On my phone machine. About applications for school. About a recommendation. I was surprised to hear from him. But—maybe I misunderstood. I must have.”

Teller raised his eyebrows, held them there, then lowered them. “But he—he left town last weekend.”

I caught myself before I admitted surprise that he’d been around at all.

For a moment, Teller sagged, his face aging, going slack. He looked almost afraid. Or defeated. And then, so quickly I thought I’d imagined that there’d been any change at all, he was back, everything in place and smooth. “Of course, he’s a hard one to track. Once they leave the nest, you know. Maybe we should band them, like they do with birds.”

“Sorry for the confusion,” I said.

“So he’s considering college after all, is he?” Wynn Teller wore the sour look of one who’d won a victory, but who possibly preferred the defeat.

“Guess so.” I felt as if I was betraying Hugh’s rebellion. I extended my hand. “Very nice to have met you,” I told the twins. This was certainly my day for saying it was nice to have met people it wasn’t particularly nice to have met.

This was also my day for not getting what I came for.

I reentered my mobile wind tunnel, sneezed, and decided that perhaps humans were too much trouble. There was a lot to be said for inanimate objects. They couldn’t lie or have scruples or say you were crazy or unwise.

I therefore directed myself toward the most inanimate of objects, Philly Prep. The fortress of learning was locked and battened against the night, but not against me or pilfering for a good cause.

I was going to find Lydia Teller. And I was going to find her today.