The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [139]
But gradually the impressions built. He would glance at her and catch the shadow of an expression on her face that did not belong there. He would awaken at night and sense that she was feigning sleep, as she had done during her worst periods. And there were other little particles of inconsistency, none enormously significant in and of itself but all of them combining like dots in a pointillist landscape to present an image of madness.
He played with it and found it made sense to him. Her recovery had been total and instantaneous because it had been no recovery at all. Before she had been mad; now she was a madwoman feigning sanity as she feigned sleep. A true recovery would have had to be halting and tentative, as her attempts had been in the past. But a false recovery was something different. It came naturally to her because she had woven it to mesh with the fabric of her insanity, had made it a part of that insanity.
Or had she?
Or was he the madman, building his own fantasies, to fit the dimensions of his own delusion? How could you tell? How could you possibly tell?
TWENTY-TWO
On the first Thursday after Labor Day, Linda sat at the desk in the Lemon Tree balancing her checkbook. There should have been nothing to it, as she had opened her account at the Solebury National Bank less than a month ago. This was the first statement she had received, and it contained the three checks she had thus far written. According to the bank, she had a balance of $142.58. According to her own records, her balance was $143.28. The ninety-cent difference seemed unimportant enough, but it galled her that she could not see where either she or the bank had gone wrong. She stopped to explain to a tight-faced woman that there was no public rest room, then went back to her calculations. She caught the error at last and of course it was her error and not the bank’s. She had assumed as much from the beginning and now made the appropriate corrections in her checkbook.
It was pleasant having a bank account. The convenience, so widely heralded in bank advertising, was not what pleased her most; it had been convenient enough for her to settle her accounts in cash, and postal money orders were easily obtained if she needed to send money through the mails. But the simple possession of a checkbook gave her a feeling of substance, as insubstantial as her own balance might be. More, it gave her a feeling of belonging to the community, a feeling that had grown over the recent months. Now the building on the northeast corner of Bridge and Main was not merely the bank. It was her bank.
She glanced at her watch. It was just past six and Olive McIntyre had not yet arrived. Olive had been due at six, and Linda could not remember the woman having been late more than half a dozen times, and never by more than a handful of minutes. Olive was almost invariably early, and often by as much as an hour. She would always offer to take over upon her arrival, and more often than not Linda would stay to keep her company. They both enjoyed the easy conversation that passed during their moments together at the shop.
She wondered how long Olive would be able to her working full time. Labor Day weekend, a maddeningly hectic four days, had come and gone, and with its passing the heaviest of the summer traffic was over for another year. According to Olive, the greatest reduction would be in human volume rather than dollar volume. Serious customers would be as numerous as ever during the fall months, while the number of casual browsers would drop sharply.
“How you do in the fall depends on the sort of business you’re in,” Olive had told her. “The ice-cream shop has a big decline in sales because their volume is tied directly to the number of clowns wandering the streets, not to mention that ice cream has less appeal in colder weather. The art galleries and antique shops drop on the ground and thank the Lord when Labor Day is over and done with. Once the gawkers are out of the