ON THE FOURTH DAY, as Bernard Steeple had predicted, the inquest came to an end with the coroner finding no cause to consider Runyon’s death as suspicious. The case was closed without so much as a single line in the Ladybank Expositor. Things settled down at home. Camelot breathed again, but to Declan Steeple, nothing seemed the same any more.
The rains came. April showers a month late. Dec stopped looking for excuses to go to the big house. He just went. She wasn’t always there. Sometimes he saw her outside the mansion but never far from it, as if she were a moon held in a tight orbit by its gravity.
She liked to surprise him. Shock the wits out of him. She would jump out and then disappear, giggling like a little girl.
One time they had a tea party in the dining room with real bone china and imaginary scones. He asked her why Daddy said scone so that it rhymed with gone and she said scone so that it rhymed with stone.
“We say lots of things different, your dad and me,” she said. “He likes to say, ‘You’ll never grow up, Lindy Polk.’ And I like to say, ‘Bernard Steeple, you’re growed up enough for both of us.’“
Another time she wanted to bowl in the drawing room, using Encyclopaedia Britannicas for pins and a bowling ball she had dug up from who knew where.
Then there was the time they played catch in the conservatory.
“Bernard Steeple won’t like this,” she said, hurling the ball just over Dec’s outstretched hands. It bounced against the glass wall — only a tennis ball, harmless. But when sixteen-year-old Dec watched the trajectory of the ball that his younger self could not catch, he saw the glass wobble in its dried-up and crumbling putty.
He was two people in one these days. He was a child and a teenager, a participant and a watcher, a son and an intruder. He had thought the past was something that was over. Apparently, he was wrong.
Late one afternoon, he ventured out back to where the sweeping driveway came to an end. The rain had let up for a bit and everything smelled alive. There were two garages, each with four bays. He rolled up the first door of the older building. Only three of the bays were occupied; the empty space was where his father’s very first car used to sit. Now Dec saw it again, waxed to a glossy shine, the Wildcat. It was a black convertible with white interior. The top was down. He doubted his father had left it that way.
“Wish I’d known him when he was young,” said Lindy. Dec looked up. She had been standing in the shadows at the back of the garage, in a black raincoat with her collar up and the belt cinched tight. She looked like a spy.
“I was just out of school,” she said. “He was thirty by then. Not so old, I guess, but some people age real fast.”
She ran her hand admiringly along the chrome that stretched the length of the car and then leaned over to see her reflection in the hood.
“Think of it, Dec. Your daddy, just a boy, eighteen, away at college and — Pow! — both parents dead in a car crash.” Her eyes flashed. “Suddenly he’s a millionaire. Just like that! And the best part is, no meddling relatives to tell him what to do with his money.”
She laughed out loud.
“I’d have said to hell with university if I’d been him, but not your dad, oh, no.” She scowled. “He was too busy majoring in boredom.”
“Daddy’s nice,” Dec said.
“Oh, he’s nice, all right,” said Lindy. “Nice and handsome, nice and rich. Why else do you think a girl would marry a guy a dozen years older than her?”
“I don’t know,” said Dec, shoving his hands into his pockets. Adults all seemed about the same age to him.
Lindy scruffled his hair. “Bernard is so nice a girl could just die.”
Dec wrapped his fists tightly around the Micro-Machines in his pockets — a pick-up in the left, an ambulance in the right.
“Ah, Skipper,” she said, seeing the trouble in his eyes. “It’s just that sometimes it seems like he’s got his feet stuck in two big fat pails of concrete.”
Dec laughed.
Then Lindy bent down so that they were eye to eye. “Do you ever ask yourself why?” she said, her voice a throaty whisper.
“Why what?”
“Why a guy like that would buy a car like this?”
Dec had never thought about it before. The Wildcat wasn’t like any of his father’s other cars, that was for sure.
She opened the driver’s door and peered inside. “You know what I think? His folks dying like that so sudden must have scared some life into him.” She made a face. “He sure got over it fast.” She rubbed her hand over the leather of the driver’s seat, shaking her head in wonder.
Then she looked at Dec, a wicked grin on her face. “You think maybe he stole it?”
Dec laughed out loud. What a joke that was! “Oh, ho!” she said. “You think your daddy never stole anything?” Her voice had changed. He couldn’t tell any more if she was fooling.
He kicked at the white-walled tire. “Daddy’s not a crook.”
“Don’t you be so sure,” she said, wagging a finger at him.
She held onto the car door and leaned way back.
“The man who bought this car was young and daring. When he showed it to me, I thought, Hey, girl, he may seem like a pussycat, driving his beige Le Sabre with the cruise control set right on the speed limit, but there’s a Wildcat in there somewhere.” Then she exploded with laughter. “Crazy mama,” she said.
She grew quiet again and he watched, not sure what she would do next. Then the grin was back and she gave Dec a hurry-up wave.
“Hop in, Big Stuff,” she said. “Come on, quick now.” He crawled in behind the steering wheel. She clambered over him and lounged in the passenger’s seat. “Take me somewhere,” she said.
“Where?” asked Dec, both hands on the wheel, only wishing that his foot could reach the pedal.
“California,” said Lindy. “I need a little sun in my life. How ‘bout you?”
He drove a bit. She made loud driving noises. She joked about him running over a cow. “Careful you don’t put us in the river!” she said. “Hey, is that Las Vegas up ahead? I think it just might be. Viva Las Vegas.”
Then they sat quietly with only the sparkling green lawns of Steeple Hall before them. “You don’t think your daddy was a crook?” she said, her voice tetchy now. “Well, I used to have a life. Where’d that go, huh?”
Dec sat staring at her, her bare feet up on the seat, her knees supporting her chin, her sad face, her puffy eyes. He didn’t like it when she got sad. He crawled up on his knees, leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek. She wrapped her arms around him.
“Get me out of here, Declan,” she whispered between smooches. “Get me out of here. Before it’s too late.”
Thunder rumbled a long way off.
Dec opened his eyes. How old had he been? The memories came back to him willy-nilly. He had no control over them. Sometimes he was eight or nine, sometimes he was little more than a baby. But he never seemed to get too close in age to the time she left. That time was a blank. She had left in the fall, just a few months after Sunny was born. He had been ten.
He looked back towards the house. His ten-year-old self was walking around in there somewhere, lost to him.
Lightning crackled across the southern sky. He shuddered. He should go inside. He closed the door on the empty bay. The rain would be back; the Wildcat wouldn’t. One night she drove it away, all by herself.