Bill Pronzini - With an Extreme Burning

Jerry's gaze returned to her. “Do you think he blames himself?” he asked.

“Who? Dix?”

“For the accident, Katy's death.”

“Why on earth would he blame himself?”

“He might if they had an argument that night. If that was why she went out driving by herself.”

“Dix never said anything about an argument.”

“I know, but …”

“But what?”

“You were Katy's best friend, Cecca. Were they getting along?”

“Of course they were. What makes you think they weren't?”

“Well …” He looked uncomfortable now, and to mask it he gave her a quick bright smile and said, “Let's just forget it. How about another round?”

“No, one's my limit tonight. Jerry, what were you getting at?”

“Nothing. I shouldn't have opened my mouth.”

“Do you know something about Dix and Katy?”

“No, no …”

“Something about Katy?”

She watched him fidget, his eyes not quite meeting hers. Then he said, “I don't like telling tales. Especially not unsubstantiated ones about friends.”

“If you do know something—”

“But I don't. I don't know anything. Like I said, I shouldn't have opened my big mouth.”

“You can't just leave me hanging like this.”

“Cecca, Katy's gone. And Dix is still alive. I know how he'd feel if—I just know how he'd feel. I've been there.”

Been there. The phrase made her wonder if Jerry's wife had been having an affair, too, if that was what had broken up his marriage. She asked, “How Dix would feel about what?”

“He's been through enough,” Jerry said. “He doesn't need harassed friends like me making things worse.” Abruptly he signaled to the waitress. “Look, I know you want to get home, and I'd better do the same. Forget we had this conversation, okay? Please. I don't know anything you should know, believe me.”

But he did. Or at least he suspected something. Heard rumors … from Eileen's big mouth? Or was it more personal and direct—words spoken to him, a first-hand observation?

Eileen, Louise Kanvitz, Jerry—and how many others in Los Alegres? Well, the more there were, the better the chances that somebody besides Louise knew or suspected the identity of Katy's lover. It wouldn't, couldn't, remain a secret much longer.

TEN

The next few days were difficult for Dix. Half-knowledge, suspicion, frustration, a painfully emerging self-awareness, the waiting for something to happen—little bricks adding weight to an already oppressive burden. He'd told Cecca what he had learned from Harold Zachary, but he didn't share his fear that Katy had in fact been murdered. The weight of that brick alone kept him from sleeping much, and gave him little rest when he did sleep.

The new telephone number provided an excuse to call Jerry on Tuesday. He hinted around, tried to pry loose whatever it was Jerry knew; but Jerry wouldn't admit even as much to him as he had to Cecca. Just danced around, using good humor to fend off questions, as if he were on a mission to protect poor old Dix from any more adversity. Nobody else could or would tell him anything either. He considered confronting Louise Kanvitz himself, but he knew it would be wasted effort. If she hadn't opened up to Cecca, another woman, she sure as hell wouldn't open up to Katy's husband.

The phone did not ring once in three days. And the longer it remained silent, the more he kept listening for it. There were no more surprises in his mailbox; no surprises of any kind, for him or for Cecca. Cat and mouse. They agreed that it was only a matter of time until the harassments started again. And he thought privately that when they did, they would be worse than what had gone before.

He forced himself to work with Lawrence Hampton's History 453 notes, adapting them to his own style of teaching. He did some necessary reading for the coming semester—recent issues of historical journals and American Heritage —and managed to absorb most of what he read. He worked on the sideboard. He swam, ate, tried to fight off depression, and brooded too much when he couldn't.

Little bricks …

On Friday morning he finished the sideboard.

Most of Thursday evening he had devoted to the last fine-sanding of the top and sides, paying particular attention to the inlaid design he had built into the top, and then hand-wiped on three coats of Watco Danish oil finish. When he came out on Friday to look at it, the piece had a rich, warm luster that was close to being just right. One more coat of satin? Or a coat of Varathane? He decided on the Varathane; it would give the wood a smoother, shinier gloss. He applied it without the latex gloves he'd used for the oil stain, taking his time because this was the final step and because he had a desire to feel the grain of the wood against his fingers.

When he was done he washed in the laundry sink, then ran the garage doors up to get a look at his handiwork in natural light. He stood looking at the sideboard for a long time with the sun warm on his back. There was satisfaction in him, the craftsman's kind for a job well done; even the critical creator's eye could find no real flaws in the workmanship. Yet he felt no pleasure or pride in what he saw, nor any in the accomplishment itself. The sideboard had been and still was a symbol to bridge a gap, built for therapeutic reasons. Not a piece of furniture to be used and enjoyed, but an object meant to kick-start a new phase in a life that had been suddenly and violently reshaped.

But it was not the closure he had intended it to be. It had helped him come to terms with the loss of Katy, a life without her. Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them? What love was ever as deep as the grave? Swinburne. Truth in that, and irony, too: Swinburne had been one of Katy's favorite poets, but not his. The Englishman's work was too melancholy, too full of Victorian excesses for his taste. But he had more to deal with than the fact of no more Katy. There could not be a full closure, any real peace, until he came to terms with two other vital issues.

One was Katy's affair, and whatever dark reasons lay behind her death.

The other was Dixon Mallory.

After lunch, a restlessness drove him out of the house and into the Buick. He had no idea where he was going—or at least no conscious idea—until he got there: Oak Grove Cemetery.

In his forty-one years he had visited Oak Grove just four times, and on each occasion it had been to watch a loved one being buried. First, when he was very young, his grandfather; then, two days before his seventeenth birthday, his mother; then, nine years ago, his father; and finally, Katy. The idea of visiting graves on holidays or birthdays, the so-called paying of respects, was repugnant to him. The idea of graves was repugnant to him. Repositories of bones were all they were, with labels to mark each pile as if it were an archaeological exhibit. Funerals were barbaric and so was the concept of placing a bloodless cadaver in a box and burying the box so flesh and wood could rot together in the cold dark. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out … It was far more civilized, after you were dead, to have your remains reduced to ashes and the ashes scattered. It troubled him, vaguely, that no one in his family felt the same way, that not even Katy had felt the same way.

So why had he come to Oak Grove today? Not to have a little morbid chat with Katy, that was for sure. People who went to cemeteries to talk to the dear departed were self-delusional, and self-delusion was not one of his problems. If anything, the opposite was true—now. Why, then, so soon after he had been here to see her buried?

The cemetery was on the north edge of town, in what had once been open farmland; now it was hemmed in on all four sides by “country living” tract homes and condos. There were two halves to it, one nondenominational and the other Catholic. The older sections of both ran up hillsides thickly grown with heritage oaks, cypress, and eucalyptus. The newer sections were on flats and in hollows that contained fewer trees. Those sections reminded him of the Civil War burial grounds he and Katy had visited in the early eighties, when he was researching his novel. Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia; Antietam, South Mountain, Harpers Ferry, Gettysburg, Manassas Junction, Bull Run, Chancellorsville, Appomattox. The rolling green meadows and rows of white-markered graves at Gettysburg had impressed him the most, but he had found all the burial sites as fascinating as the actual battlefields. Katy had considered the paradox amusing. So had he, mildly, although he'd argued that his interest was scholarly and had nothing to do with the gravesites as gravesites.