Baptism in Blood(89)
“Somebody could come in and keep the bell from ringing. Somebody could show up just wanting to steal something.”
“How could somebody keep the bell from ringing? It rings if you just lean against that door.”
“I think you’re very naive, Kathi, I really do. You don’t realize the kind of people there are out there. Clever people. And we’ve got all these strangers down from New York.”
“I think you must be sick,” Kathi said. “You’re not making any sense at all today. Do you want to go upstairs and lie down and leave it all to me for the rest of the day?”
“I want to go for a walk,” Rose said, wondering where that had come from. Did she want to go for a walk? Where would she walk to? “I want to get out in the air.”
Kathi was as solid and boring and unfazed as always. “Fine,” she said. “You go take a walk.”
“I could be the whole afternoon.”
“I’ve been here for the whole afternoon by myself before.”
“The painters might come,” Rose said, thinking that she knew exactly where she wanted to walk to. “The ones who are going to fix the front room and the kitchen because of the storm damage. You’d have to give them directions.”
“You wrote out the directions. Don’t you remember? You put them on lined paper next to the cash register so you could hang them on the door in case you had to be out and the painters were coming. I’ve been looking at them all day.”
“Oh,” Rose said.
Kathi blew her bangs out of her eyes with a long stream of air. The gesture made her almost repulsively unattractive, and Rose winced.
“I’m going to go back out front in case somebody comes in,” Kathi told her. “If you want to go for a walk you should go for a walk. You aren’t doing any good around here. And I can lock up by myself, Rose, I’ve done it before and you know it.”
It would be a terrible thing, Rose thought, if Kathi knew how stupid Rose thought she was. Everything about Kathi was graceless and disjointed, almost as if she were an embryonic form of what those women up at the camp had come to maturity at, whatever that was.
“Go for a walk,” Kathi said again, stopping in the storeroom’s door. Then she disappeared into the hall, and Rose held her breath, waiting for her to be truly gone.
After that, it didn’t take very long. Rose had been wearing a frilly little apron to unpack the pen and pencil sets. She took it off and dumped it into one of the open cardboard boxes on the floor. Her feet hurt, but she didn’t want to exchange her elegant high-heeled shoes for serviceable flats. All in all, she thought she looked pretty good. Her hair had been colored only a few days ago. Her skirt was wide and full of flowers. Her blouse was made of silk so fine, you could almost see through it.
Rose went out in the hall, looked up and down it to make sure that Kathi wasn’t lurking anywhere, and then headed for the back and the door to the driveway. She let herself out into a day that seemed hotter than it should have been. Usually by this time of year the worst of the heat was gone. She went around the little paved walk to the front of the house and Main Street. She saw Charlie Hare on a chair outside his store, reading the newspaper. Ever since she had had that blowup with Charlie about religion the other day, he’d been telling people that she was possessed by the Devil.
Well, Rose thought, maybe I am.
She kept carefully to the side of the street away from Maggie Kelleher’s and Charlie Hare’s. On this side of the street, there were mainly souvenir stores that catered to the tourists. She was finding it very hard not to run. She was also finding it very hard to breathe. The headline on the Bellerton Times was all about this new murder. There was a black-and-white picture of Carol Littleton on the front page, looking even more blurry and out of focus than Carol had in real life.
At the end of the long center block of Main Street—the block with Charlie Hare’s and Maggie Kelleher’s stores on it—Rose made herself stop and draw in air. Then she walked another whole block, crossed the road, and turned down Barton Street. Town Hall was on her right, a mass of blank-faced brick. She started breathing a little more easily as soon as she knew she was past the point where anybody could see her. Most of the houses on Barton Street belonged to summer people and were shut up for the winter.
Barton Street, like all the streets on this side of Main, petered out after less than three blocks. There were still roads out here, but they weren’t town roads. The houses were slutty-looking, too, shacky and listless. They reminded Rose of what happened to people who didn’t take care of themselves.