Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [96]
“Reason I know is, I phoned his mother. Mrs. Millet. She’d remarried, is the reason it took me a while. I told her I was a buddy of Tom’s wanting to get in touch with him. I didn’t say no more though till I got your say-so. Should I go ahead now and pay her a visit?”
“No, never mind.”
“She’s bound to know the kids’ relatives. Small-town kind of lady; you could just tell she would know all about it.”
“Maybe I should get her address,” Ian said.
“Okay, suit yourself. Mrs. Margie Millet. Forty-three Orchard Road, Portia, Maryland. You need to write that down?”
“I have it,” Ian said. (He would have it forever, he felt—chiseled into his brain.) “Thanks, Eli. I appreciate your help. You know where to send the bill.”
“Aw, it won’t amount to much. This one was easy.”
For you, maybe, Ian thought. He told Eli goodbye and hung up.
From the kitchen, his mother called, “Agatha? Time to set the table!”
“Coming.”
Ian met Agatha at the door and stepped past her onto the porch. She didn’t notice a thing.
The evening was several shades darker now, as if curtain after curtain had fallen in his absence. Thomas was swinging the swing hard enough to make the chains creak, and down on the sidewalk the little girls were still playing hopscotch. Ian paused to watch them. Something about the purposeful planting of small shoes within chalked squares tugged at him. He leaned on the railing and thought, What does this remind me of? What? What? Daphne tossed the pebble she used as a marker and it landed in the farthest square so crisply, so ringingly, that the sound seemed thrown back from a sky no higher than a ceiling, cupping all of Waverly Street just a few feet overhead.
* * *
“Lucy Ann Dean was as common as dirt,” Mrs. Millet said. “I know I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but there’s just no getting around it: she was common.”
They were sitting in Mrs. Millet’s Pennsylvania Dutch-style breakfast nook, all blue painted wood and cut-out hearts and tulips. (Her house was the kind where the living room waited in reserve for some momentous occasion that never arrived, and Ian had caught no more than a glimpse of its white shag rugs and white upholstery on his journey to the kitchen.) Mrs. Millet slouched across from him, opening a pack of cigarettes. She was younger than he had expected, with a very stiff, very brown hairdo and a hatchet face. Her magenta minidress struck him as outdated, although Ian was not the last word on fashion.
He himself wore a suit and tie, chosen with an eye to looking trustworthy. After all, how did she know he wasn’t some knock-and-rob man? He hadn’t phoned ahead because he hadn’t fully acknowledged he was planning this; he had dressed this morning only for church, he told himself, although he almost never wore a tie to church. After services he had eaten Sunday dinner with his family and then (yawning aloud and stretching in a stagy manner) had announced he was feeling so restless, he thought he might go for a drive. Whereupon he had headed north without consulting a map, relying on the proper road signs to appear or else not, as the case might be. And they did appear. The signs for Portia, the signs for Orchard Road. The giant brass 43 glittering, almost shouting, from the lamppost in front of the redwood cottage. “My name is Ian Bedloe,” he had said when she opened the door. “I hope I’m not disturbing you, but I’m Lucy Dean’s brother-in-law and I’m trying to locate some of her family.”
She hadn’t exactly slammed the door in his face, but her expression had frozen over somehow. “Then maybe you better ask her,” she told him.
“Ask who?”
“Why, Lucy Dean, of course.”
“But … Lucy’s dead,” he said.
She stared at him.
“She died a long time ago,” he told her.
“Well,” she said, “I’d be fibbing if I said I was sorry. I always knew she was up to no good.”
He was shamed by the rush of pleasure he felt—the bitter, wicked pleasure of hearing someone else agree with him at long last.
Now she said, “First off, her parents drank.” She took a cigarette from her pack and tamped it against the table. “How do you