Banshee

Chapter Five

The Reverend Michael Dunlop’s wife, Lorna, saw the briefcase on the hall rack beside the front door.

She said, “Surely you’re not going out again tonight.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“One of my parishioners wants to see me.”

“What if your wife wants to see you too?”

“You’re seeing me right now,” Michael said, “and you’re obviously not enjoying it much.”

She had followed him out into the dimly lit hall of the house that went with the job in lieu of a decent salary. It was a mean little house with narrow windows that squeezed out the scenery. It had seemed cozy at first. The scenery didn’t matter and Lorna’s arms were loving. But the roof leaked in the winter rains and the place never had enough light even in summer and the upstairs room at the rear intended to be a nursery remained vacant.

“You don’t give me much of a chance,” Lorna said. “You’ve been acting so different lately, so secretive. We’re married, we’re supposed to share things, all kinds of things.”

“Not everything can be shared, Lorna.”

She pulled at a strand of her black curly hair as if she meant to straighten it out, straighten everything out. “Is this parishioner of yours a woman?”

“No.”

“I guess that ought to reassure me. But it doesn’t. You hear some awfully peculiar things these days about so-called respectable people.”

“I’m not a bisexual if that’s what you mean.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“You meant,” Michael said. “Sorry I can’t tell you the name of the man I’m going to see because if I did you’d want to know why and if I told you that I would be betraying a confidence.”

She gave the strand of hair an extra-hard yank. “Oh, you’re always so high-minded, aren’t you? You can’t understand how a lowbrow like me feels staying home alone every night with nothing to do but watch television.”

“That’s what you do when I stay home with you.”

“No, it’s not. We talk.”

“Sure. We talk about what you’re watching on television.”

“If some of the married couples you counsel could see and hear us now they wouldn’t believe you’d have nerve enough to be giving them advice on how to make a marriage work. No doubt it’s more blessed to give than to receive when it’s a matter of advice. It’s certainly easier.”

He smiled as he leaned down to kiss her. “Why, that’s good, Lorna. Mind if I use it in one of my sermons?”

“Go ahead.” She didn’t return his smile or kiss but her face softened and he knew that the next day there would be a neatly typed note on his desk: File under advice: It is more blessed to give than to receive, certainly easier.

“I’ll make sure you get credit for it,” Michael said.

“Oh, it’s not that good.” She picked up the gray-striped cat that was rubbing its back on her legs and held it against her left shoulder as if she were burping a baby. “Shall I wait up for you?”

“I’d rather you didn’t, but you will anyway, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

“Is it me or is it Johnny Carson?”

“It will do you good to wonder,” she said. “At least you’re wearing your clerical collar. That gives you a protection of sorts.”

In some neighborhoods like the Latino barrio it did. In others like the black ghetto it was more of a provocation at times, a reminder that God was white and right and rich. Since he was never sure where he was going he kept a change of clothes in the trunk of his car, well-worn jeans, a nylon jacket, a turtleneck sweater, sneakers and a black watch cap.

Among the materials Miss Garrison had copied and put in Michael’s briefcase was a complete file of newspaper clippings covering a period of nearly four months.

Most of the clippings were from the local newspaper which ordinarily downplayed violent crimes but had assigned a full-time reporter to this one because of the prominence of the people involved and the overwhelming public interest in the little girl’s disappearance. Everyone who had a child, knew a child or indeed had ever been a child, everyone in the city, county, state followed each step of the investigation.

It was discussed in bars and classrooms, at private clubs and public meetings.

Money was contributed to the original reward of fifty thousand dollars offered by the Hyatts. When the fund reached one hundred thousand Howard requested that it remain at that figure. If there was no legitimate claimant to the hundred thousand dollars, more dollars wouldn’t make any difference and contributors’ money could be put to better use elsewhere.

The ad appeared in every edition of the local paper. At first it had read:

There was a large picture of Annamay, the time and place she was last seen and a complete description of her. Height, four feet four, weight sixty-one pounds. Blue eyes, blond straight shoulder-length hair, fair skin slightly sunburned, mole on right wrist. Wearing faded blue denim shorts, blue sandals, striped T-shirt stamped with her initials, ARH.

After the bones were found the entire wording of the ad was altered.

The local television station also carried four sixty-second spots of the offer every twenty-four hours. These included a close-up of the child and a short segment of a movie Kay had taken of Annamay with the two dogs.

The ads failed to bring forward anyone with a reasonable claim or even a plausible story, but the police dutifully made a report of each one. Howard and Michael read them all through at their first meeting in the guest cottage.

Mrs. Edwina Pascal, thirty-two, of 2003 Estero Gordo Street, Santa Felicia, claimed that her husband, Geronimo’ had molested their daughter and his stepdaughter, had probably done the same thing to the Hyatt girl and should be put in the gas chamber.

Truman Wilson, forty-five, no fixed address, charged that his best friend had disappeared on the same day that Annamay did and he was positive there was a connection. The friend owed him ninety-three dollars and was no damn good. Wilson planned to use the reward money to buy a racehorse but he couldn’t remember his friend’s last name, and the money remained in the bank.

A female psychic offered to pay her own fare from Connecticut if she would be allowed to stay in the princess’s palace for a week to absorb the atmosphere and possibly establish contact with Annamay’s spirit. The reward money would be used not for her personal gain but to found a center for the study of parapsychology. Her letter included a phone number.

Howard got in touch with her.

“I was like a terminally ill cancer patient reaching for laetrile,” he told Michael. “So I called her.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing. She was too stoned to talk.”

Small blond girls sprang up like mushrooms all over town: alone, with a young man, an old man, a black man and woman, three teenagers, and an entire Mexican family. One of the reports came from a Mrs. Jeanette Orchard who claimed she saw a middle-aged man at a gas station with a blond child who was crying. A follow-up by a sheriff’s deputy revealed that the middle-aged man owned the gas station and the child, a short fat ten-year-old, was crying because he wouldn’t let her have any more candy bars. Mrs. Orchard was extremely disappointed since she’d put a down payment on a mobile home in anticipation of the reward money.

“At least she didn’t want to buy a racehorse,” Howard said, laying aside the reward file. “What’s next?”

“Pictures,” Michael said. “Hundreds, from publications throughout the country. There’s not much point in looking at all of them.”

“I think there is. We decided in the beginning that we’d examine all the police files in the hope of finding an area they failed to cover. Wasn’t that our mutual decision?”

“Yes.”

“So, let’s go.”

There were literally hundreds, carefully labeled, each subject identified and each photographer credited, with the date and place taken and the initials of the deputy who had filed the picture.

There were formal poses of Annamay intended for Christmas gifts, and snapshots of her at play and at school; of the school itself; of the house Annamay lived in and the palace and even of the man who’d designed them both, Benjamin York. There were pictures of Kay and Howard together and separately; of Chizzy coming out of the coroner’s inquest; Dru in the hall of the courthouse standing between her mother and stepfather, looking small and scared. Even Mitsu and Suki, who normally smiled a great deal, stared somberly into the camera as if it were a judge.

There were also pictures of nearly everyone who lived, worked, or visited in the neighborhood, from Ernestina, the maid next door to the Hyatts, caught throwing a plate into the garbage can, to the old madam waving to the world from one of the balconies of her villa. The madam lent a sinister air to the case as bits and pieces of her past came out in the newspaper accounts.

It was hinted in one of these accounts that the madam had supplied children to some of her special customers, but a disclaimer was printed in the next edition. Many people missed seeing the disclaimer and others regarded it simply as a ploy to avoid a possible libel suit. The madam received crank letters she wasn’t allowed to read and crank phone calls that weren’t relayed to her. The upshot of the matter was that her conservators found it expedient to double the wages of her household staff.

All the members of the staff had been interviewed by sheriff’s deputies, some briefly, some at length, depending on the verbosity of both parties involved. But the madam herself had not been questioned.

The file listed her real name as Rosa Firenze: Born in Chicago, raised in a succession of foster homes until her first arrest at age thirteen for aggravated assault. After a series of arrests she drifted westward and finally discovered her destiny. In San Francisco at the beginning of World War II Rosa found the fleet and the fleet found her.

Michael said, “Why wasn’t Miss Firenze questioned?”

“Since she has been declared incompetent by the court her lawyer’s permission was necessary and he refused to give it. So officially the police could do nothing.”

“And unofficially?”

“Miss Firenze sometimes escapes from the grounds. On one of these occasions a deputy found her wandering around the neighborhood and exchanged words with her. The exchange didn’t last very long. An attendant arrived and whisked her away. But according to my informant she was coherent and eager to talk to an outsider. There is even a rumor,” Howard added, “that she is writing her memoirs and the whole crazy lady bit is a ploy to keep her under observation. There are undoubtedly a certain number of bigwigs in the armed services and politics who would prefer to keep Miss Firenze out of print and circulation. I’m inclined to doubt the memoirs story. She’s the kind of woman who inspires such stories, maybe starts a few of them herself.”

“If the rumor is true,” Michael said, “Miss Firenze might be interested in seeing a publisher.”

“You.”

“Me.”

“You could be pretty convincing, I’m sure. But if the rumor is false you blow your chance of ever seeing her. Better stick to your own profession.”

“What makes you think she might want to see a minister?”

“I have a hunch. My dad, who’s spotted her through the telescope in the lighthouse, says she wears clothes that look like a nun’s habit. That could indicate some sort of penitence on her part.”

“Maybe. I’ll give it a try anyway.”

Rosa Firenze’s name was added to the list of subjects needing further attention. More interviews were read aloud, first by one man, then by the other, until it was almost midnight and they were both tired, and Howard was depressed as well. Although more than a dozen names were added to the list, no really promising leads emerged from the mass of material, no glaring omissions on the part of the police.

What had started out as a serious project with a chance of succeeding now seemed hardly more than a child’s game Annamay and Dru might have played after finding one of the goldfish dead in the lily pond or coming across the body of a bird or butterfly. Throughout the gardens the graves of many small creatures were marked by miniature crosses made of twigs or popsicle sticks. We are two grown men playing with twigs, Howard thought.

He sat by the window which had a view of the main house. His father’s quarters were dark, but lights were still on in the kitchen and Chizzy’s room downstairs and in Kay’s bedroom upstairs. He was surprised at how little time it had taken him to think of it as Kay’s bedroom although the closets and drawers still contained most of his clothes.

He opened the window. The smells of autumn drifted in, damp earth, eucalyptus wood burning in someone’s fireplace, lemon blossoms. But the most teasing and pervasive of all was the scent of bread baking. Chizzy was cooking again to bake away her blues. And while Chizzy cooked, he and Michael were playing a child’s game for the same reason.

“What if we’re only wasting our time?” Howard said. “We can’t bring her back anyway.”

“No, but we might prevent another child from suffering the same fate.”

“Face it, Mike. We’re dreamers, that’s all. Dreamers.”

“Okay, so I’m a dreamer,” Michael said. “Wake me when the world is over.”

“I wish I had your kind of faith.”

“And what kind is that?”

“Whatever it is that keeps you going.”

“What would keep me going right now is a slice of Chizzy’s homemade bread. Let’s go over and beg some from her.”

“Good idea.”

Chizzy was flustered by the sudden appearance of company. She pulled her plaid flannel robe around her and tried to tidy her wiry gray hair. Neither effort was successful. She had long since outgrown the robe and her hair always looked the same, resisting her determined attacks on it with brush and comb. It sat on her head like a steel-wool scouring pad.

“I didn’t mean to wake anybody,” she said, wiping her hands on the dish towel that dangled from one pocket of her robe. “I was waiting for Miss Kay to come home and I decided to pass the time by doing a bit of baking.”

The bit of baking filled one entire section of the counter. There were at least a dozen loaves of various shapes and sizes, including a very tiny one which Chizzy attempted to hide before either of her unexpected guests saw it. Howard saw it anyway and knew the miniature loaf had been made for Annamay. He averted his eyes and Chizzy finished her clumsy job of hiding it in the cupboard.

“I was about to wrap everything and pop it in the freezer. I don’t suppose you’d like a slice or two.”

“You suppose wrong,” Michael said. “That’s why we’re here.”

The two men sat down at the kitchen table while Chizzy sliced the bread and brought out butter and jam and put milk on the stove to heat for chocolate.

Howard said, “What time did she get home?”

“About fifteen minutes ago.”

“I didn’t hear Ben’s car.”

“She came in a taxi,” Chizzy said. “Which in my opinion was the rightful thing to do under the circumstances.”

“What circumstances?”

“Married women should not be seen at this time of night with younger men in sports cars.”

“Ben took her to a concert. I asked him to.”

But the explanation didn’t satisfy Chizzy’s hunger for reassurance. She added twice as much cocoa and sugar to the milk as she should have, so there was enough hot chocolate for half a dozen people. Whatever was left over she would of course finish herself, and the flannel robe would become tighter and her self-image more distorted, a thin woman followed by a fat shadow.

“Won’t you join us?” Howard said.

“No, thanks, I’m not hungry.” This was certainly true since she had eaten the first loaf that came out of the oven in order to test its quality and half the next loaf as well to make sure it conformed. “All this aggravation has disturbed my appetite. And I bet there’s someone sitting in this very room who’s just as aggravated as I am.”

She glanced pointedly at Michael who responded with a shrug. “Aggravation has never disturbed my appetite, especially if I don’t know what I’m supposed to be aggravated about.”

“Things aren’t normal around here,” Chizzy said. “They’re not normal.”

“Normal changes from day to day, Chizzy.”

“Why?”

“Because events happen. Circumstances change and so people change. The world is always in a state of flux.”

Bulloney, Chizzy thought, but she didn’t say it out loud. Although she had no religion herself, so many people did that she was forced to concede the possibility that there was Somebody Up There listening and she didn’t want to be heard talking back to a minister. It seemed only fair, however, that she be allowed to disagree politely.

“I don’t buy that flux business, begging your Reverend’s pardon. No sir. Everything around this place went along the same, year after year. That was normal.”

“And you want it back.”

“Oh, I know I can’t have it all back. But Miss Kay and Mr. Howard, I could have them.”

“You’re talking about me as if I’d gone away,” Howard told her. “I didn’t. I’m still here.”

“Not to me you aren’t, not like in the old days. All I’ve got now is the old man and the two dogs and a bunch of silly-looking fish.”

“Don’t let my father hear you call them that. He paid twenty thousand dollars for the big black one.”

“He got taken, if you ask me.”

“My father’s not easy to take. I learned that before I entered school. The black fish is a magoi, eighty-three years old. You know that, Chizzy.”

“I’ve been told. That doesn’t make it the truth.”

“The magoi belonged to the same Japanese family for three generations. These koi have pedigrees much like dogs.”

“Well, give me an eighty-three-year-old dog any day.”

“This,” Michael said glancing at his watch, “is definitely not normal. I’m sitting at midnight eating hot homemade bread and discussing an eighty-three-year-old fish. Flux, Chizzy, flux.”

“What’s so great about getting old anyway? It’s not as if we become more valuable like koi. I certainly don’t want to live to be eighty-three.”

“Don’t worry, you won’t,” Howard said, “unless you lose some of that blubber.”

“I have a glandular disorder,” Chizzy said coldly. “You paid for me to go to that diet doctor and that’s what he told me.”

“Is it?”

“Well, if you can believe that damn fish is eighty-three years old you can believe I have a glandular disorder.”

“I think it’s time for me to leave,” Michael said, and no one gave him any argument. Chizzy was prepared to defend her glandular disorder to the death and Howard was unlikely to subtract even a year from the age of the fish. “Thanks for the snack, Chizzy.”

“Just a minute. I’ll give you some to take home.”

She put four loaves in a large paper sack and followed him outside. By the time they reached his car, an old Buick bequeathed to him by a member of his congregation, Chizzy was puffing as if she’d been carrying bricks. He put the bag in the trunk of the Buick and waited a minute or two until Chizzy caught her breath.

“You really ought to lose some weight, Chizzy. Exactly what did the doctor tell you?”

“That I eat too much. Imagine getting paid for telling fat people they eat too much. What a racket.”

“No glandular disorder?”

“No. But I can’t admit that to Mr. Howard. I wouldn’t want him to think he had wasted his money.”

“That’s very considerate of you,” Michael said gravely.

“Also I’d hate him to think I was just a pig. Because I wouldn’t be if things were normal again.”

“They’ll never be the same again. But they’ll be normal because your concept of normal will change.”

“Highfalutin words like concept and flux don’t mean a hoot to me. What’s right is right.”

“You’re a hard case, Chizzy. Good night. And thanks for the bread.”

Howard went upstairs and knocked on the door of what had recently been his own room.

“Kay?”

“Come in.”

She was standing by the window still wearing her concert clothes, a long-skirted, royal-blue velvet suit with fake diamond buttons that looked exactly like the real diamonds she wore in her ears. He had given her the earrings as a wedding present before he found out she didn’t much like jewelry of any kind. Tonight she was not only wearing the earrings, she was drawing attention to them by having her hair pulled back severely into a French knot.

He noticed that there were a few strands of gray in her hair. He still thought of her as a girl and the gray hairs disturbed him, made him feel that he had turned away for a few minutes and looked back to find that years had passed.

He said, “Did you have a good time?”

“Yes.”

There was a long silence.

“Is that all, yes?”

“Do you want a blow-by-blow description? All right. Ben picked me up at seven-thirty. We arrived at the theater early so we had some wine in the lounge. Chablis, I think. I wasn’t paying much attention to the wine because I could feel people staring at me. They probably thought I should be at home crying. Then that dreadful woman from down the road, Mrs. Cunningham, came up and started a conversation. I guess it was a conversation. I could hardly understand what she was saying. She kept talking about a meat loaf, and how she was allergic to meat loaf and that’s why she couldn’t accept it. She babbled on while that son of hers stood there not saying a word, smiling that nasty little smile of his. The music was fine though I can’t remember what it was. I kept thinking of that damn meat loaf. Do you know anything about a meat loaf?”

“I could write a book about meat loaf,” Howard said. “Meat loaf prep school, meat loaf college cafeteria, fraternity, country club, Mother’s, Chizzy’s—”

“Chizzy,” Kay repeated. “That’s it. Chizzy got into one of her cooking fits and started distributing food around the neighborhood again. You must talk to her about that, Howard.”

“I’d rather she distribute it than eat it… You look nice tonight, Kay. Is that a new outfit?”

“Yes.”

“Pretty color. Did you have supper after the concert?”

“No. Was I supposed to?”

“Chizzy said you missed dinner. You must be hungry.”

“Sorry, Howard. If you programmed me to be hungry, better check your computer. I’m not.” She removed her earrings as if they’d suddenly begun to pinch. “Do you want the rest of the report on Kay’s big night out? Well, Ben invited me to go dancing at a supper club and I refused. I didn’t feel like dancing and I didn’t want any more music. Or any more Ben either, for that matter. He was trying so hard to make me enjoy myself that he made me nervous. I came home alone in a taxi. If Ben wants to go dancing let him take his Ms. Quinn.”

“No one can please you anymore, Kay.”

“Then why doesn’t everybody simply stop trying?”

“Because we love you.”

“I don’t want to be loved. I want to be let alone.”

“All right. Good night, Kay.”

“Good night.”

He went out, closing the door quietly behind him. He had turned away for a few minutes and when he looked back again there was gray in Kay’s hair and she didn’t want anyone to love her.

He was halfway down the steps when Kay’s door opened again and she came to the head of the staircase.

“By the way,” she said in a cool dry voice, “next time you buy tickets for a concert, please remember that I prefer to sit a little farther back.”

“I didn’t buy the tickets.”

“They were waiting at the box office in your name.”

“Ben paid for them. My secretary merely made the reservations.”

“How sweet. I suppose she loves me too.”

“Most secretaries consider the boss’s wife a pain in the neck,” Howard said. “I don’t imagine mine is any exception.”

“Hurray. There’s nothing more bracing than a dose of good honest hate. It’s like a spring tonic.”

Another long silence fell over them like a mist net used to trap birds.

“Will you be going out with Ben another time, Kay?”

“If that’s what you have me programmed for. There’s probably a computer readout on your secretary’s desk right now with everything arranged but the weather. Maybe you could even do something about that too. I wouldn’t put it past you to try.”

“Why all this hostility, Kay?”

“Those people who stared at me at the concert tonight,” she said bitterly, “they were right. I should have been home crying.”

Shelley Quinn’s centerfold body was hidden under a pair of Ben’s pajamas and crumpled into his favorite lounge chair. Quinn was simultaneously eating an apple and combing her long auburn hair, still damp from a shampoo.

Ben noted that she didn’t appear particularly happy at his return. She looked at him over the top of a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles he had never seen before. It was a solemn look, as if he had interrupted something very important.

She said, “Hi,” and put down the comb and the apple and turned off the radio. “All I could find to eat around here was an apple. Don’t you ever buy any groceries?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“And another thing, why do you live in a dump like this?”

“I like dumps.”

“I mean it, Benjie. You should build yourself a show-place, put up more of a front.”

“I like your front.”

“Be serious. Why do you want to live like this?”

“It suits me,” Ben said.

“I don’t see how it can suit you, listening to people walking around upstairs and the television blaring next door and cars coming and going all night.”

He didn’t try to explain that these were the very things that gave him privacy, more privacy than Howard had on his exclusive eight acres. Everyone knew where and how Howard lived. Nobody knew much about the tenant in the front apartment of the Vista del Mar, and nobody cared. The old apartment house was squeezed between a cluster of expensive oceanfront condos on one side and commercial development on the other. Both sides were fighting to tear it down and turn it into a parking lot. Meanwhile the card on the front mailbox was printed York, and underneath it the name Quinn written in green ink which was Quinn’s favorite color. Both names looked impermanent. A hundred had preceded them; perhaps a hundred would come later.

Ben went into the bedroom to hang up his jacket. Quinn’s clothes were strewn around the room as though she’d had some old school friends in for a slumber party. “This place is a mess.”

“I know. I’m collecting my laundry to take over to Mom’s. Moms are really great, aren’t they?”

“I don’t know. I never had any.”

“Well, don’t feel bad. Sometimes they’re not so great. Would you like a drink, Benjie?”

“I would.”

“Me too. I’ll take a spritzer.”

“I thought you were offering to make me a drink.”

“No, I wasn’t. You’re always telling me to be precise, so I was. But what’s the use of me speaking precise if you don’t listen precise? All I said was—”

“Okay, okay, I make the drinks.”

“Good. I’m too tired. I’ve been working like a dog all evening.”

“Doing what, vandalizing my bedroom?”

“I was doing,” Quinn said, frowning, “exactly what you told me to. You said if I wanted to improve myself I should listen to discussion programs and make notes, write down words I didn’t know and stuff like that. So I did.” From the table beside her she picked up a notebook. “It was a real interesting discussion, all about sexual abrasions.”

“And what are sexual abrasions?”

“You know, kinky stuff.”

“The word is aberrations,” he said, and spelled it for her.

“It sure sounded like abrasions to me. Anyway, I was surprised to find out how innocent I am, considering. Listen to this one. A-i-l-u-r-o-p-h-i-l-e. Know what that means?”

“No.”

“It means a guy who gets turned on by cats. How’s that for a sickie?”

He handed her a glass of white wine. “Here’s your spritzer, minus the club soda we don’t have and the lemon we also don’t have.”

“Gosh, Benjie, you really should buy some groceries.”

“I will, any day now.”

“You probably have a lousy diet.”

“Probably.”

She took a sip of the wine, then returned to her notebook. “Here’s another dandy. P-e-d-o-p-h-i-l-e. I know what it means but I didn’t know there was a word for it. Did you?”

Ben didn’t answer.

“I asked you a question, Benjie. Did you know there was a word for a guy who gets turned on by little children?”

“Shut up.”

“Hey, you can’t talk to me like that; we’re not married. Here I spend a whole evening doing what you told me to and all you have to say is shut up.”

“That’s all I have to say — shut up.”

As if she were getting ready to slug it out, Quinn removed her spectacles and put the notebook back on the table. But by the time she unfolded herself from the chair Ben had disappeared into the kitchen. She followed him.

He was standing in front of the sink which had the only view window of the apartment. The night was clear and moonless. Strings of lights lined the breakwater and the marina walkways. There were lights also in the harbormaster’s office and the all-night café underneath it, and in a few of the live-aboard boats.

No matter what the weather, this window was kept open so that Ben could hear, during lulls in the traffic along the oceanfront boulevard, the waves smashing against the breakwater. The sound of this incessant attack excited him. It was the sound of war and there was no doubt who the winner would be. The concrete of the breakwater was already crumbling in spots and its exposed reinforcing cables and iron railings were rusting.

“Benjie?”

Quinn knew how he hated to be touched when he was upset, so she stood behind him within touching distance and said again softly, “Benjie? Listen, I’m sorry. I forgot all about the little Hyatt girl when I said that word. Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?”

“Yes. You can finish packing your laundry and take it over to your mother’s and stay there.”

“I can’t believe you’re serious, Benjie.”

“Force yourself.”

“It’s not reasonable. Why should one mistake, in fact why should a little girl I’ve never even seen come between me and a guy I really like? I really like you, Benjie. We suit each other, we fit, we’re exactly the right size for each other. You can’t imagine how awkward it is sometimes when you get a really big guy—”

“I’ll try.”

“I mean, you and me, we fit together so great I could drop off to sleep while we’re, you know, together, except I always have to go potty afterward.”

“Will you for God’s sake stop using expressions like go potty? You’re a grown woman.”

“My mom still says it and she’s nearly fifty. She taught me never to use obscene language and I never ever do. Kindly remember that I didn’t say those words I heard on the discussion program, I spelled them.”

“I see. It’s all right to spell them.”

“It’s not really all right, it’s just not quite so wrong… This woman you took to the concert tonight because her husband was busy, is she as old as my mom?”

“No.”

“Well?”

“What do you mean, well?”

“Well, don’t you want to tell me how old she is?”

“I don’t want to and I’m not going to.”

“Is she pretty?”

“Yes.”

“As pretty as I am?”

“Yes.”

“But she’s a lot older.”

“She’s a lot smarter,” Ben said. “Too smart to ask the kind of questions you’ve been asking.”

“If she’s a friend of the family like you claim, I don’t see why you should be so secretive about her. Anyway, you told me you never had a mother so how can you have a family? I think you’re lying to me, Benjie, and lying is wrongful like bad language.”

“Right now I feel like doing something more wrongful than either of them.” He turned and grabbed her by the shoulder. “So I suggest you get the h-e-l-l out of here before I knock the s-h-i-t out of you.”

“Who are you trying to scare anyway? I don’t scare that easy. Another one of the things my mom taught me is how to knee a guy in exactly the right place.”

“Your mother must be a mine of information.”

“You’re d-a-m tootin she is.”

Shrugging off his hand she walked back into the living room and rearranged herself in the lounge chair and turned the radio on again. The program had changed. A man was discussing musical terms and it wasn’t nearly as interesting so she went to bed.

After a while Benjie came to bed too, and Quinn, who was a kindhearted girl, welcomed him. She still didn’t understand why he had reacted so violently and she decided she would ask her mother when she took the laundry over. Because her mother liked to set a good example to her offspring by spelling out certain words, it probably would be a long conversation.

One thing was for sure: Benjie was no p-e-d-o-p-h-i-l-e.