“Really,” Fanny said.
“I thought it was funny,” Mindy said, “because, you know, it was really late. It was after eleven o’clock.”
“And what were you doing up after eleven o’clock?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” Mindy said. “I never can sleep when it gets too hot. You should let me have the air-conditioning on in my room.”
“It was only forty degrees last night,” Fanny said. “And you can’t have the air-conditioning on just in your room. It would have to be on for the entire second floor. You’d be happy, but I’d be frozen into an icicle.”
“I was just lying there trying not to be bored,” Mindy said. “I mean, I’m not supposed to turn on the light or anything, so it’s not like I can read. And if I turn on the iPod you always hear me. I use the earphones, but you hear me anyway. So I was just lying there. And then I heard them coming along the golf course, you know, so I got up and went to the window and looked out.”
“The bus is late again,” Fanny said. “What is it about this bus that it’s always late?”
“I just thought it was funny,” Mindy said. “I couldn’t figure out what they were doing there that late and everything. I thought maybe they were burying treasure, because you’re supposed to bury treasure in the middle of the night. But they weren’t doing anything. They were just walking on the golf course. And they were laughing.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Heydreich were walking? Maybe they couldn’t sleep.”
“It wasn’t Mr. and Mrs. Heydreich,” Mindy said. “It was Mrs. Heydreich and that guy, you know, the one who hangs around all the time at the pool. Except he wasn’t at the pool, this time, he was just at the golf course. Maybe they were going to play golf. They didn’t have golf things or anything, though.”
“What?” Fanny asked.
The school bus was pulling up to the curb. The other mothers were herding their children toward the doors. The other mothers acted as if Fanny and Mindy and Josh weren’t there, and Mindy and Josh acted as if the other children weren’t there. It felt as unreal as everything else did these days, and Fanny didn’t have a word for it.
“Sherry Carlson says Mrs. Heydreich and the guy from the pool are doing something nasty with each other,” Mindy said, “but I think that’s just because her mother has all of Dallas on DVD.”
Fanny looked up, startled. Mindy was disappearing into the bus. Josh was right behind her. Fanny watched as the two of them sat down together in a seat and then turned to the windows to wave good-bye.
A second later, the bus and everybody in it was gone.
Fanny was left standing on the side of the road, thinking that this was just one more day, one more hour when she had no idea what was going on in her life. It all just came and went, and none of it made sense.
8
When it was time to leave, it was time to leave. Arthur Heydreich held fast to that thought, because it was the only thought he had that made any sense. He was a man of routine in the strictest possible sense. Only routine made sense to him. He could hear Cortina wandering through the rooms of the house, letting loose a soft stream of Spanish. He suddenly wished he lived in a time and place where he could forbid his maid from having a cell phone. She would be talking to all the other maids in all the other houses that ringed the golf course. She would be talking about the bright pink car in the garage. She would be talking about the pocketbook on the coffee table in the family room, the cell phone still in it. She would be talking and talking, and in an hour or two the maids together would have solved any mystery that might have arisen in the Heydreich house before eight o’clock in the morning. Except that they wouldn’t have solved it. They would just have made it up.
Arthur went back upstairs to his bedroom and closed the door behind him. He was surprised. If he had been Cortina, he would have come up here first. He would have wanted to check out the story that the bed had been slept in. Maybe she was waiting for him to leave the house.
He went over to look at the bed himself. There was nothing to see that he hadn’t already seen when he first woke up, nothing that had changed when he came out of the shower. The sheets and pillows and quilts were rumpled and twisted the way they always were when Martha had slept in them. He could remember her pulling them back across the bed and getting in under them the night before. He could remember her lying stretched out, talking about committees. He hadn’t listened. He’d fallen asleep and slept like a stone for hours. Then suddenly he was awake, and she was not there beside him.