the cold dark weight of those places was no different, no less horrible. It would be easy to lose one's strength to ascend. And then the will. And finally even the desire.
I stared at the shaggy green staircase that led to the second floor. Then, half in a trance, I walked upstairs.
"Tres?" Maia called.
I looked in the doorway of Dwight Hayes' room. His car magazines and books had been scattered on the floor, the football posters taken down, the boysized mattress overturned.
In the bathroom opposite the stairs, I flipped the light switch and saw only myself in the medicine cabinet mirror. I looked at the bathtub - a small porcelain model, nothing special. Chrome fixtures, a permanent grime ring, faded 1970s flower decals on the bottom. The drain was wet.
The walls of the bathroom were avocado tile from waist down, yamcoloured wallpaper from the waist up. I imagined how high a small boy could reach, ran my hand along the wall. I hit the soft spot just in the middle of the right wall - an area no bigger than a doorknob, where the wallpaper felt like membrane.
I punched through, ripped away the edges. There was a layer of lightercoloured wallpaper underneath, and a dark void eaten into the wall behind.
I stared at it for a long time, until Maia came up behind me.
"What?" she asked.
I said, "A hole somebody never filled in."
Chapter 42
The rains had been good for Faye DoeblerIngram's front garden. Patches of wild rosemary had shot up to four feet. The bees were going nuts around her red and white hibiscus. Whitebrush was blooming, permeating the air with a scent like Christmas trees.
Maia Lee picked a blackeyed Susan. I got the morning paper off the porch, shook the dew off the plastic sleeve.
For an abandoned house, Faye's place looked pretty lively. An old yellow Honda and a brown sedan were parked in the driveway. Light shone through the living room window, flickering from the blades of a ceiling fan. The screen door was latched, but I could smell coffee inside, baking cinnamon bread. The stereo was playing an acoustic instrumental.
We knocked on the screen door, got no answer, called hello. Still no reply.
Maia kindly offered her key chain knife, which I used to unlatch the door.
The living room was bright with morning sun. Pothos and ivy crowded the windows. I put the newspaper down on the sideboard.
A suitcase lay open and empty on the sofa. On the coffee table was the large brown binder Faye had shown Maia and me the week before.
Maia went to the stereo, checked out the case on the CD player. She might've been waiting in a doctor's office, for all the anxiety she showed.
I sat next to the suitcase, opened the memory book. The picture of Ewin Lowry and Clara Doebler stared up at me - Clara smiling, her hand resting on the hood of the '65
Mustang as if it were a favourite horse. Ewin Lowry's smile was more devilish, his teeth perfectly white. Small build, dark skin - not really olive, as I'd speculated before, but the hue of cinnamon.
Something shattered.
I looked up. Faye Ingram was standing in her kitchen doorway, shards of a Jimmy Doebler coffee cup at her feet.
Her fingers were flaked with mud. She wiped them absently on her gardening apron, then touched her face as if to make sure her mascara and jewellery and pennyred hairdo were still in place.
"Mr. Navarre," she said. "Miss Lee. What are you doing in my house?"
"You haven't disappeared," Maia said. "I'm glad to see that."
Faye glanced behind her, into the kitchen. "I'm fine, thank you. I think you should leave."
"He's here," I said. "Isn't he?"
She knelt down, began picking up pieces of the cup, using her apron as a collection pouch. "I'm afraid - I'm not quite awake yet, Mr. Navarre. I haven't had my second cup of coffee, haven't had my thirty minutes in the garden. I'm afraid I'm not following you."
I slipped the picture of Ewin and Clara out of its plastic pocket. "The resemblance is there, isn't it, if you blend the two of them together? I just wasn't looking for the right connection."
"You shouldn't be here."
She stood, the pottery shards in her apron. Plucking up the ends of the fabric, she looked as if she were about to curtsy.
"Twentyfive years ago," I said. "You saved your sister's child."
"Please don't ask me this."
"Clara had her second son, but it was another battle she couldn't win against the