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I was sitting in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel the night before, waiting for my compatriots, Jim Woolsy and Andre Dubose, to come down from their rooms. The plan was to go out to Olive Garden and brainstorm, the ultimate goal being to come up with two good pitches. No more than two. Lawyers think they know everything, but lawyers also get easily confused. I had a notepad on which I’d jotted: WHY GET FUCKED WHEN YOU CAN DO THE FUCKING? CALL DEBBIN & DEBBIN!
Probably a non-starter. I flipped the pad closed, put it in my jacket pocket, and glanced into the bar. That’s all I did. I think about that sometimes, how I might have looked out the window, or back at the elevators to see if Jim and Andre were coming. But I didn’t. I glanced into the bar.
There was a woman on one of the stools. She was dressed in a dark blue pants suit. Her hair, black and streaked with white, was styled in the kind of cut, maybe what hairdressers call a Dutch bob, that brushed the nape of her neck. Her face was only a quarter turned to me as she raised her glass to sip, but I didn’t need to see more. There are things we just know, aren’t there? The tilt of a person’s head. The way the jaw angles into the chin. The way one shoulder might always be slightly lifted, as if in a humorous shrug. The gesture of a hand brushing back a wing of hair, the first two fingers held out, the other two curled toward the palm. Time always has a tale to tell, wouldn’t you say? Time and love.
It’s not her, I thought. It can’t be.
All the time knowing it was. Knowing it could be no one else. I hadn’t seen her in over two decades, we’d fallen completely out of touch, not even holiday cards for the last dozen or so years, but I knew her at once.
I got up on legs that felt numb. I walked into the bar. I sat down next to her, a stranger who had once been my closest friend, the object of my lust and my love. The woman who had once killed a rabid dog in defense of her son but too late, too late, too late.
“Hey, you,” I said. “Can I buy you a drink?”
She turned, startled, ready to say whatever it was she meant to say, thanks but I’m meeting someone, thanks but I’m not looking for company… and saw me. Her mouth made a perfect O. She swayed backward on the stool. I caught her by the shoulders. Her eyes on mine. Her dark blue eyes on mine.
“Vic? Is it really you?”
“Is this seat taken?”
Jim and Andre did the brainstorming session by themselves, and the lawyers ended up greenlighting a really awful advertising campaign featuring a has-been cowboy star. I took my ex to dinner, and not at Olive Garden. Our first meal together since three months after the divorce. The last ended in a bitter argument; she threw her salad plate at me and we got kicked out. “I never want to see you again,” she said. “If you need to tell me something, write.”
She walked away without looking back. Reagan was president. We thought we were old but we didn’t know what old was.
There were no arguments that night in Providence. There was a lot of catching up and a fair amount of drinking. She came back to my room. We spent the night. Three months later—long enough for us to make sure this wasn’t just some kind of holding-onto-the-past mirage—we remarried.
The police came in three cruisers—maybe overdoing it for one dead old woman. And yes, there was an ambulance. The shirts were removed from Allie Bell’s corpse and after an examination by the EMTs and the sort of in situ photographs no one wants to look at, my neighbor was zipped into a body bag.
The county cop who took my statement was P. ZANE. The one who took the photographs and videotaped my statement was D. CANAVAN. Canavan was younger, and curious about the stroller and the child-sized clothing. Before I could explain, Zane said, “She’s kinda famous. Loopy but nice enough. Ever heard that song, ‘Delta Dawn’?”
Canavan shook his head, but as a country music fan in general and a Tanya Tucker fan in particular, I knew the one he was talking about. The similarity wasn’t exact, but it wasn’t bad.
I said, “It’s a song about a woman who keeps looking for her long-gone lover. Mrs. Bell liked to push around her twins, although they were also long-gone. They died years ago.”
Canavan thought it over, then said, “That’s fucked up.”
I thought, Maybe you have to have lost a child to understand.
One of the EMTs joined us. “There’ll be an autopsy, but I’m guessing it was a stroke or heart attack.”
“I’m betting on heart attack,” I said. “She took pills for arrhythmia. They might be in her dress pocket. Or…”
I went to the stroller and looked in the twin pouches on the backs of the seats. In one there were two little Tampa Rays baseball caps and a tube of sunblock. In the other was a bottle of pills. The EMT took it and looked at the label. “Sotalol,” he said. “For fast or irregular heartbeat.”
I thought she might have overturned the stroller while trying to get her medication. What else could it have been? She certainly hadn’t seen a rattlesnake.
“I imagine you’ll have to testify at the inquest,” Officer Zane said. “Are you going to be around for awhile, Mr. Trenton?”
“Yes. This summer it seems like everybody’s sticking around.”
“True,” he said, and self-consciously adjusted his mask. “Walk with us. Let’s see if she left the house open. We should lock it up if she did.”
I pushed the stroller, mostly because nobody told me not to. Zane had taken the pills and put them in an envelope.
“Jesus,” Canavan said. “I’m surprised that squeaky wheel didn’t drive her nuts.” Then, considering what he’d just said: “Although I guess she sorta was.”
“She brought me cookies,” I said. “I meant to oil it that night, but I forgot.”
The house behind the wall of rhododendron and palmetto wasn’t a McMansion. In fact, it looked like the sort of summer place that in the mid-twentieth century, long before the Richie Rich types discovered the Gulf Coast Keys, might have been rented to a couple of fishermen or a vacationing family for fifty or seventy dollars a week.
