Burn

16

Carver was on Jacaranda Lane at ten the next morning.

This time he parked the Olds directly in front of Marla Cloy’s house. The maroon Toyota was parked in a patch of sunlight in the driveway, though there was no sign of life around the house. The drapes were closed and the green awnings drooped over blank windows. The lineup of dead plants on the small concrete porch hadn’t been moved. The cracks in the faded yellow stucco oddly gave the house the look of permanence, as if it had obtained a patina of long-ago minor damage and wear as it settled in for centuries. Age-checked oil paintings had that look about them, as did ancient mausoleums.

It was warm but not yet brutally hot, and a slight breeze kicked up to pop the house’s green awnings like sails and ruffle the palm trees that lined the sad avenue. A good morning to sleep in late with the windows open. Maybe that’s what Marla Cloy was doing, escaping into sleep from her daytime nightmare.

Or maybe not escaping anything and not dreaming at all, sleeping the sleep of the not-so-innocent.

Carver thought it would be fine if he woke her. Then she might not be thinking clearly enough to maintain whatever facade she could be hiding behind. The cobwebs of sleep might reveal more than they concealed.

He’d decided it was time to confront Marla directly. If she really was persecuting Brant with false claims of harassment, knowing that he’d hired help might prevent her from continuing. At least make her think twice before doing anything bold.

And if Brant really was harassing her, and was using Carver in whatever scheme he was working, Carver might be able to find out why.

He limped up onto the porch and pressed the doorbell button with his cane. The button had been painted over, and he had doubts as to whether it still worked, but he heard faintly from inside the house what sounded like the old triple-note NBC signal chimes. It brought to mind hours spent listening to the twilight of radio drama when he was a boy, the tiny arched dial glowing feebly in the dark.

The drapes in the window to the left of the porch moved a few inches to one side, then back.

Then the door opened. Carver had passed inspection. Meaning he wasn’t Brant.

Marla was wearing cutoff Levi’s with a tucked-in white T-shirt with BEYOND BITCH lettered on it. She was barefoot, and Carver was fascinated by the perfection of her squarish feet with their pedicured bright red nails. For the first time in his life he wondered if he might be a latent foot fetishist. Her dark hair was slightly mussed and her eyes-so deep a blue they were almost purple-looked lazy and sleepy, and bruised because of their odd color, which seemed to reflect on the flesh around them. Beneath the bleached and stringy unhemmed cutoffs, her legs were shapely and tan, so free of blemish that sheathing them in nylon would be redundant. She smelled un-perfumed but clean, a fresh, soapy scent. Carver noticed that her hair behind her ears and around the back of her neck was wet. She might have just gotten out of the bathtub or shower. Maybe she bathed as often as she washed her clothes.

He told her who he was and that he was working for Joel Brant.

She didn’t blink, but her eyes looked a little less drowsy. Close up, she was a lot more impressive. He thought he saw some of her mother’s strength in her features, a beauty that hinted at character.

“He’s not allowed to come near me, so he sent someone?” she asked, but she didn’t seem afraid.

“No, Joel doesn’t know I’m here. I decided on my own to talk to you and see if this thing can be settled.”

A smile was slow to form but quick to disappear on her fresh-scrubbed features. “He wants money, right?”

“Not any more than the rest of us. His story is that he never heard of you until you began filing complaints about him with the police. He’s puzzled, and he hired me to find out why you’re harassing him,”

A wasp was buzzing around the dead potted plants. The morning was beginning to heat up and get uncomfortable.

“May I come in?” Carver asked. He knew the sun wasn’t doing his bald pate any good.

She stared appraisingly at him, at his stiff leg and his cane.

“I’m allergic to wasp stings,” he lied.

She came to her decision about him and nodded, then stepped back to make extra room for him to pass, since he walked with a cane.

There didn’t seem to be any air-conditioning running, but the house was still cool from last night. The living room was dim and full of overstuffed blue furniture clustered around an oval, woven rug that contained every known color and so went with any decor. On one wall was a crude bookcase fashioned from cinder blocks and unfinished pine boards. It held a small stereo and a lot of tattered paperback books. A wooden table stood near the window. On it were an old portable Smith-Corona electric typewriter, a stack of vegetarian magazines, a thick paperback combination dictionary and thesaurus, a bottle of liquid white-out, and two plastic in-out trays that contained typing paper and long sheets of yellow paper from a legal pad. The top sheet had writing in pencil on it. There was a lamp with a black shade on a back corner of the table, plugged into a long, frayed extension cord that ran across the floor beneath the window and disappeared behind the bookcase. A fire hazard.

“I see you’re a writer,” Carver said, lowering himself into the soft, sprung sofa.

“I’m sure you already knew that,” Marla said. She walked over and opened the drapes so light flooded in over the worktable and made the room much brighter.

“I’d heard,” he admitted. He pointed at the magazines with his cane, remembering her devouring a hamburger at Mc shy;Donald’s. “Are you a vegetarian?” he asked, giving her a chance to lie.

“No, I’m doing an article on it, though. Some people theorize that since humans are omnivorous by nature, being a vegetarian might hold hidden long-term health hazards.”

“Oh? That’s interesting. What do you think?”

She smiled. “I’m omnivorous.”

She sat down in a bulging blue chair that matched the sofa and crossed her tan legs, pumped a perfect foot a few times. Deep inside him Carver felt a tugging sensation, as if something in him were attached to her toe by a string. He was undeniably attracted to this woman and wondered if in some complex way it had to do with Beth’s pregnancy. Or maybe it was because she might be extremely dangerous. Beth had once pointed out to him that he was drawn to dangerous women. Well, he wasn’t the only one with that failing; there were a lot of victims strewn along the landscape between Delilah and Lorena Bobbitt.

“Why are you doing this to Joel Brant?” Carver asked.

“I’m not. He’s doing it to me.”

“Why would he? He says he doesn’t even know you.”

“He knows me now. As to why he’d harass me, it’s well known how some men become fixated on a woman. She doesn’t have to be beautiful or behave in any particular manner. It all originates in the stalker, not in the object of his compulsion. She only has to strike some chord in his sick mind, and he chooses her for his victim.”

“Most men aren’t like that,” Carver said. “Joel Brant doesn’t strike me as an exception.”

Again the smile, confident, superior. “I’m not surprised you don’t believe me. You’re a man. Only women really understand this kind of all-too-common oppression and victimization.”

“I didn’t say I disbelieved you.”

“Yes, you did. Indirectly.”

She might be right; he couldn’t recall. “I came here to listen to your story,” he said. “That means I must have harbored some tiny doubt about Joel’s.”

“My story is that I turned around one day and Brant was there, and I was in the crosshairs, where I’ve been ever since. He’s stalking me. It’s a familiar story, but too often the woman being stalked isn’t believed until she’s proved her point by dying.”

“You’re an enigma,” Carver said.

“Maybe I am. Men can’t stand an enigma. They have to try to figure it out, to master it so they can discard it and move on.”

He was getting tired of her talking like a 1970s militant feminist, but he didn’t tell her so. “It sounds as if you’ve had some bad experiences.”

“Some. They made me realistic, but they didn’t make me paranoid or delusionary. I’m not imagining Joel Brant is a threat to me. He showed me a knife and said he was going to kill me.”

“He denies that.”

“Can he say where he was at the time it happened?”

“Yes. He was at the grocery store the same time you were, but that could be because you made it a point to be there at the same time he was.”

“Uh-huh. As I said, I’m not surprised you don’t believe me.”

Being a man, Carver thought. “It’s not a gender thing,” he said.

“Sure it isn’t.”

Trying not to show his irritation, he decided he could never convince her that he wasn’t a misogynist. “Are you writing about this?”

“This what?”

“You and Joel Brant.”

She laughed bitterly, “Sure, I’m persecuting an innocent stranger so I can do an article.”

“A book, maybe.”

“I’m afraid not, Mr. Carver. But I’m not at all shocked that you’d think so. Did you ever consider that Joel Brant might be writing a book? You don’t have to be a pro to be published.”

Carver smiled. “You’ve got me.” He tapped soundlessly on the woven rug with the tip of his cane. From the rear of the house he could hear a soft humming now, probably a window air conditioner. “Do you feel safer now that a restraining order’s been issued?”

“Safer,” she said, “but not safe.”

“If Brant were really stalking you, why would he hire me?”

“That’s a question he might want asked in court some day.” She stood up and crossed her arms beneath her breasts. “I was just about to settle down and try to do some work.”

Carver leaned his weight over his cane and fought his way up out of the deep, deep sofa.

“Something bothers me,” he said. “You don’t seem frightened.”

She moved a step closer to him and her face got hard. Her dark eyes sparked with pinpoints of light as she moved into the sun pouring through the window. “I’m frightened, all right,” she said, “but I’m also determined. I won’t be brutalized or die a helpless victim who didn’t fight back. I intend to defend myself if I must.”

Carver remembered Willa Krull telling him she was trying to talk Marla into buying a gun. “Defend yourself how?”

“Any way I can.”

“Do you own a gun?”

“Does Joel Brant?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

“Neither did I.”

Carver made his way to the door, walking slower than he had to with the cane. She walked ahead of him and held the door open.

Heat moved in as he moved out. Marla didn’t flinch or move her body an inch as he edged past her onto the porch.

He turned to face her. “Believe it or not, I agree with you about how women are at a disadvantage in something like this,” he said. “I’m only trying to get a sense of what’s really going on.”

“Thanks for you sympathy.” She said it with a faint curl of her upper lip. “I’m going to do whatever I can to make sure you won’t be expressing it at my funeral.”

He looked directly into her deep blue eyes and found nothing he could read. She stared back at him with no sign of discomfort, only calm determination. He didn’t hear the door close behind him until he was almost to the street.

When he’d started the engine and switched on the air conditioner, he sat for a while in the car before driving away. It was unsettling to him that he felt himself drawn to Marla Cloy even though she was no less a dilemma and a danger than when he’d rung her doorbell.

And something else was unsettling. He had the feeling that despite her brittle and wary talk, she might be attracted to him.

Of course, he could be dead wrong about that. He’d been wrong that way before. Male ego, Marla would probably say.

Beth would probably say the same.

He drove.