This Sweet Sickness (11 page)

“I can't even think of anyone I know around there,” David said, feeling a little nauseated from Wes's cigarette smoke.

Wes only stared at him disbelievingly, still smiling. Then he shrugged and puffed again on his cigarette. “I don't want to pry, Dave, I really don't. I'm sorry. Don't take it—Don't take any offense, will you?” His brown, gold-speckled eyes almost pleaded.

“Of course not!” David said generously. “I just think there's some mistake.” He looked with insane bravery and calm into Wes's eyes again and asked, “Effie told the police she saw me at that house too?”

“Oh, no, she didn't.” Wes chuckled, about to drink the last of his first scotch. “Sweet little kid, she told them she made up some directions and didn't even know if there was a house there. She just wanted to get a drunk out of Mrs. Mac's place, she said. You see, she thinks you might be seeing a girl there, and she's so crazy about you she's making the supreme sacrifice.”

David's deliberate smile became a smile of relief. What a piece of luck! He couldn't have told Effie better what to say. “The most mixed-up story I've ever heard.”

Wes looked at David slyly, as if reassessing him in the light that he might be spending his weekends with a girl, might have been all the time Wes knew him. “A mixup,” Wes repeated sarcastically, and pulled his other drink in front of him. “There are some pieces I don't get either.”

David was silent.

“Why don't you go by Effie's and pick up your portrait sometime?”

“I don't know why,” David said quietly.

Wes laughed. Then a moment later, leaning across the table, “Tell me how you knew Delaney.”

David looked at him, for the first time sure that Wes and therefore Effie did not know about Annabelle. “I don't,” he said.

Wes frowned. “Dave, you can't expect me to swallow that one!”

“I don't care what you swallow, Wes, or what you don't.”

“All right, Dave, don't get sore at me. If anybody ought to respect privacy, it's me, and I do. Whatever I know, and it sure isn't much, won't go any further, Dave.” But he was still waiting to hear about Delaney.

“I can't understand why people're so curious,” David said with irritation. “Good God, I wouldn't be.”

“Human nature,” Wes said cheerfully. “And don't forget, that guy was looking for you to do you some damage. He had a gun. Maybe you forgot that detail.”

“I didn't forget,” David said with boredom.

“You wouldn't've had some girl in common, would you, Dave? That's my last question.”

“Don't be silly.”

Wes had a third drink, after asking David if he minded sitting there another couple of minutes, and Wes courteously brought up a different subject—the latest satellite firing in Florida. As he was driving David home, Wes remarked that David's name had been in the paper that evening and asked David if he had seen it. David had not. It had been a small item, Wes said, saying that Delaney's wife had told the police that Delaney had been looking for David Kelsey—something that anybody at Mrs. McCartney's could have told them, too, David thought. Apparently, Annabelle had not yet told the police Gerald had been jealous because David Kelsey was in love with her. David hoped she had not, and not merely for his own sake, but because if Annabelle wanted to keep it a secret, it seemed she attached importance to it and respected it. David had not even thought to look at the evening paper, and he admitted to himself it was because he had been afraid to look.

“Got to rush home to the little wife,” Wes said as he let David out. “We haven't eaten yet. I told her I had urgent business and walked out, she thinks to see Effie. It's going to be great.” Bolstered by the scotches, Wes smiled broadly and waved good-bye.

In his room David took off his overcoat and flung himself face down on the bed, one arm under his head, the other out at his side, around an imaginary Annabelle. He pressed his mouth against her cheeks, and then her lips, and floated away to that sanctum of calm, that swiftly rising awareness of her presence that brought a pang at its peak, and that he made linger by his concentration. It struck him that it was the first time he had been with Annabelle in this ugly room. Yet even the sourish, dusty smell of the counterpane seemed funny and pleasant now, because he shared it with her.

15

D
avid worked late in his house on Friday night, packing a trunk and suitcases, wrapping his dishes in newspaper in readiness for the barrels that a storage company was going to bring Saturday afternoon. And he was up early Saturday to continue the dismantling of lamps, the tying up of mattresses, until eleven when he had an appointment with Mr. Willis. He was sorry he had agreed to go to Beck's Brook, because he did not want even to be greeted by one or the other of the two police officers there, and he was on the brink of going somewhere to telephone and ask Mr. Willis to come to his house instead, when he heard a car outside. He looked through his front window. The car had stopped thirty feet away on the drive, and due to the sunlight on the windshield, he could not see who was driving it. Then the door opened and Effie Brennan got out.

“Jesus!” David said, turned around and rubbed his palm across his forehead. He walked to the stairs and ran up. In the half-empty bedroom he paced slowly, trying to ignore the urgent, metallic rap-rap-rap of the front door knocker.

It went on and on and on, until David wanted to scream from where he was for her to go away.

“David?” Her voice came feebly into the closed house. “It's Effie. Can I come in?”

Rap-rap-rap
.

Then a blessed silence.

But she had only gone to the back door, and the knocking and rattling started again. “David? Are you in the basement? It's Effie.”

And suddenly he dashed down the stairs as if he were racing to put out a fire that had started on his back doorstep, yanked the door open, and said, “What the hell do you want?”

She was in flat shoes, and his words seemed literally to knock her over backward. She staggered, regained her balance, and quickly her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, David, I just wanted to talk to you for a minute.
Please
. I'm your friend, David. Or is there somebody else here?”

“No.”

“A friend of mine lent me her car. I thought I'd just drive up and say hello. I won't stay long, David,” she said as she moved past him, leaving a trail of scent behind her.

David scowled.

She turned and looked at him, still frightened, still wide-eyed with shock, as if she might run suddenly out the open door, which David hoped she would. “This
is
your house, isn't it?”

A tangle of shame and wrath kept him from answering anything. He moved toward another door, his hands in the back pockets of his blue jeans.

She followed him. “David, don't be angry with me. I think I said what you'd have wanted me to say. To the police. I said I made it up about this house, you know. I didn't tell them you—that it was your house.”

He said nothing.

“If that's what you're angry about. Is it?”

“Why don't you leave, Effie?” he asked, turning to face her. “I'm not in any state to talk.” His voice cracked foolishly and he could see his own trembling.

Prying, snooping, she had crossed the kitchen and was looking into the disordered living room. He wanted to hurl her through a window, anything, to get her out. “You're moving,” she said, and David burst out in an insane laugh, rocking on his sneakered feet, his head back. And she looked at him as if he were a ghost.

“Yes, moving today,” he said loudly and cheerily.

Her eyes looked at him steadily, but again as if she were trying to choose the right instant to dart away from him, out of the house, and David wondered what could be so frightening about himself, standing there with a genial, inane smile on his face. “Who is William Newmester?” she asked.

“A friend of mine, a very, very good friend,” David said promptly.

“He lives here?”

“He certainly does.” With those words, a sour anger began to grow in him.

“You told Wes you didn't know him.”

“I didn't want to go into it with Wes.”

“And you spend all your weekends with Newmester?”

“Yes. Dear old Bill.” He smiled a little.

“Were you here Sunday—last Sunday when the man arrived?”

“I happened to be out.”

Effie nodded and looked uneasily about her. She was holding a large brown pocketbook with her two hands, fumbling along its top. “Is there a girl here, too, David?” she asked shyly.

He only stared at her.

“Please don't be angry. I don't know why you're angry, since I only want to do the right thing. I even lied to the police to help you.” She was getting her courage back, and now she smiled suddenly, though her eyes were still wary of him. “I know you want to keep it a secret, whatever you do here. You don't owe me anything, I know, but I asked about a girl—because
I
care, you see? If there's a girl—” She stopped.

“I think I told you I was engaged.”

“You know, I just don't believe that story. Wes told me too. But that just isn't the way things are.”

Something in her words reminded him of Annabelle's letters, and made him still angrier.

“If you're with a girl now, that's one thing.” She bit her underlip. Then quite flatly she said, “I love you, David.”

“
Get out
!”

Effie jumped. She took a step back and stood again. “You've no reason to be angry,” she said, starting to cry. She opened her arms sadly. “If you're packing up today, I'll even help you.”

Somehow it was the last straw. David moved toward her, and she retreated, protesting, across the living room. They were both yelling at once now, and she kept raising her arms as if to ward off a blow, like a jerking little doll. It was the last straw, this common little stenographer crashing into his house, telling him she loved him, and offering to pack up his possessions that had been meant for only Annabelle to see, offering to destroy what had been created for Annabelle, the rooms and the pictures and the music Annabelle had never heard here, every damned item of which had pained him to touch last night and this morning, because he had put it where it was for Annabelle, and she had never even seen it.

“I think you're insane!” Effie gasped, and now her eyes looked as if they were about to pop out of her head. She bumped against the front door, though he had not even touched her.

“And you're not the first to say it!” he shouted back.

Her breath came with shuddering. She groped for the doorknob, still staring at him with her terrified eyes, as if he had just beaten her within an inch of her life, or had just made an attempt to kill her. He seized the doorknob, opened the door for her, and she darted past him around the door and out, running to her car. David stood watching her, feeling his heart shake his body with every slow and heavy stroke. The car's engine whirred and stopped twice before it caught, and then as it jerked backward in reverse, the engine stalled, and he saw her frantic hurry to start it. Then he shut the door.

David stood looking at a rolled-up carpet for a minute, feeling suddenly very tired, much too tired to think about what had just happened. He felt absolutely justified; that was all he had the energy to realize. He went back to the task he had been at when she arrived, and immediately remembered that he had been going to call Mr. Willis. Now it was a bit late, but he was about to try it anyway when he decided he did not want Mr. Willis to come into his house either. David undressed, stood under the shower for a minute to wash off his nervous sweat, then dressed and drove to Beck's Brook.

He did not see either of the two police officers. Mr. Willis greeted him triumphantly with the news that a Mr. Gregory Peabody had looked at his house and wanted to buy it, and that his down payment would arrive on Monday. Mr. Willis asked him if he would be interested in another house in the neighborhood for a future date, and David, dazed with his good luck in selling so soon, said that he would be, and that he was storing his things for only a year or so. But when Mr. Willis began to show him maps and photographs of other houses, David realized that he would never want to be anywhere near Ballard or Froudsburg or Beck's Brook again.

“I really can't think about it at the moment,” David said. “I've got too much else on my mind.”

The men from the storage house came in the afternoon, bringing a dozen large barrels for his books and dishes. They were due to come back on Monday morning, when David would not be there, and load the barrels and the furniture, everything that was in the house, onto their truck, to be stored in the name of David Kelsey. It was dangerous, he well knew, but he saw no other alternative—at least no honorable one. He could have stored his things in Mrs. McCartney's name or Mrs. Beecham's, he supposed, and if it all crashed down on his head, he wouldn't be at all interested in having his clothes and furniture back, anyway, but to have hidden behind their names would have been disgraceful. And a concocted name would have presented the difficulty of identification when the time came for him to get the stuff out of storage. So if the police or even the people at the storage house noticed that Neumeister had deposited his things in the name of Kelsey, that was just his bad luck. None of his suitcases bore any initials. He kept out one good suit and a white shirt. But the only things he was taking from the house were the two pictures of Annabelle and the few letters she had written him, and some papers from his desk, including his insurance policy that named Mrs. Annabelle Stanton Kelsey as beneficiary.

He sat for a while on the sofa, which was already tied up with newspaper. The house was filled with a shocked silence, like the silence after the explosion of a bomb. The words he had said to Effie came back to him now, repeating themselves like maddening echoes in his head. Had he really said, “I despise you! Get out or I'll throw you out!”? He had certainly said Neumeister was a good friend of his, and he had told Wes that he had never heard of Neumeister. What was Wes going to make of that? What was Effie going to make of it? David stood up with a thought of talking to Effie again, asking her—But he remembered her terrified face, and he knew now he had made her his enemy. She'd talk to Wes all right, probably immediately.

To hell with it, David thought. He was again worried about the wrong things. Annabelle was the only thing worth worrying about.

As for knowing or not knowing Neumeister, he'd tell Wes, in case Wes brought it up, that he'd told a slight lie to him in denying knowing Neumeister—who really did own the house in Ballard, and who was a friend of his—but that the police had asked him not to discuss the thing with anyone, because of Neumeister's accidental and unfortunate connection with Delaney's death. David smiled a little bitterly, and from a silver box, still unpacked among some other small things on the floor, he took a cigarette and lighted it. William Neumeister smoked a few cigarettes on his weekends, and this one was a last salute to him. It was dry and crackly. David inhaled it, even though it gave him no pleasure.

The doorknocker sounded, and he walked to the door quite calmly. There stood the young officer from Beck's Brook.

“Afternoon, Mr. Newmester. Well! You're moving?”

“Yep. I'm going to be traveling for a bit. Do you want to come in?”

“Thanks,” he said, coming in. “I saw a little activity around the place, so I thought I'd drop in and see how you are.”

“I'm fine,” David said.

The young officer pushed his cap to the back of his head. “You weren't ever at the Barclay, were you?”

“No. I had to stay somewhere else the first night and the second I was told I could get in, but—” David made a gesture as if it were too unimportant to go into.

“We tried to reach you at the Barclay Thursday, because Mrs. Delaney was here.”

“Here?”

“She came to see us. She wanted to see the spot where her husband died. She wanted to talk to you, see, so we put in a call for you at the Barclay. We thought, if you were willing, you could've come up and talked to her, because she'd've waited a couple of hours, but we just took her around outside here and she went back. She was with another woman. Very pretty girl, she is.” He looked with a dreamy smile at David, as if her image were still in his eyes.

David looked out a front window. That ground, and Annabelle's feet. It was almost incredible, having hoped for so long to bring her here, and then that she had actually come when he was not here, and gone away again.

“You moving out?” the young officer asked.

“Yes. I'm going to be traveling for a while. I'm selling the place.”

“What're you asking?”

“What I paid. Twenty thousand. Seven and a half acres go with it.” David frowned. “Did Mrs. Delaney stay very long?” he asked, prodded by a tremendous curiosity.

“Oh, just about ten minutes. You shouldn't be so surprised, people're always like that. They want to see where it happened and they want every detail you can give 'em. Unless they're old people. Old people don't want to hear details, y'know, about car wrecks and things like that.”

David nodded, wondering if Annabelle still wanted to see William Neumeister, and if she were going to persist until she did. “Do you think I should telephone her?” he asked.

“Up to you. I guess I would. You could probably tell her what she wants to know on the phone.” He drifted toward the door. “Got her phone number at the station if you want to drop by for it. Otherwise it's Hartford, Mrs. Gerald Delaney. Information'll give it to you.”

“Was she very upset?”

“Kinda teary, but she held up okay. Nice girl, you can tell. And with a two-months-old baby. Jesus! I think her name's Anna. Something like Anna.”