Skeleton Key(11)

“Sometimes I really do believe in God,” Zara Anne said. “I believe in a God of the devil. If you get what I mean.”

“No. No, I don’t.”

“I bet nobody ever threw that girl out. The rich one. I bet she gets to stay anywhere she wants for as long as she wants. I bet all she has to do to get a lover is say she wants one, and there it is.”

“It?”

Zara Anne swivelled her head around. Her face was mottled with red. The skin of her face was slack and loose and creased, like polyester that has been left to wrinkle at the bottom of a laundry basket. Faye didn’t think she could have been this unattractive when she first came here. In fact, Faye was sure she couldn’t have been. If Zara Anne had been this unattractive, Faye would never have brought her home.

“If you think you’re going to get rid of me just by saying so,” Zara Anne said, “you’re going to have to think again. I’m not a piece of cardboard. I’m not here just so that you can push me around.”

“I don’t want to push you around,” Faye said, automatically, but the thought came to her that this possibly wasn’t true. It would be a great deal of help if she could push Zara Anne around, at least to the extent of getting her to move a little. Sweep the floor. Remember to pick up her clothes instead of leaving them where they fell as she took them off, even if they fell in the middle of the upstairs hall, because she took them off on the way to the shower.

Zara Anne had drifted off again, her mind on the television set or the air or wherever. “You can’t push me around,” she said again, but her heart wasn’t in it.

Faye looked at the set and saw Ann Nyberg on News Channel Eight, tapping papers together on the anchor desk. The graphic behind her said CHILD ABUSE, but there was no way beyond that to tell what the story was about.

Faye left Zara Anne to it and went through the living room to the little back hall. She went down the back hall to the kitchen, where the dinner dishes were still piled in the sink and three dirty coffee mugs were standing out on the counter. She began to put things away automatically, at the same time she was filling the kettle and putting it on to boil.

It was time she rethought her life, all of her life, from beginning to end. Lesbian or not, New Age or not, she was behaving just like a man with the way she chose her lovers. Maybe she was behaving worse than a man, because no man would have chosen Zara Anne out of the dozens of women wandering around the Hartford Civic Center that afternoon. No man would put up with Zara Anne’s wild clothes, or her Depression-era Okie thinness, or her stupidity.

The kettle whistled and Faye took it off the stove. She started to put a Red Zinger tea bag into her favorite mug and then opted out. Red Rose would be better. She could use all the caffeine she could get.

She left the tea to steep on the counter and went out the back door to stand on the little porch there. Through the small back windows, she could see the lights she had left shining in the garage, and the hulk of her Escort. She could see the empty space where the Jeep had been, too. Obviously, Zara Anne wasn’t the only thing in her life that was out of control.

If there was one thing Faye Dallmer couldn’t stand, it was being out of control. She had been that way once, when she was very young. She didn’t intend to be that way for any length of time again. Not even by accident.





5


It was fifteen minutes after eleven, and Sally Martindale was having a hard time keeping her stomach under control. It had been bad enough when she was still out on Interstate 84, with wide empty roads and good road lights and nothing to be afraid of except the existential kinds of things that had plagued her, endlessly, ever since Frank had moved back to New York. Losing Frank and getting fired all at once—it was exactly the kind of double whammy Sally had always been suspicious of when it happened to other people. Surely there must have been something they’d done. Surely it couldn’t be plain old innocent bad luck. Now that it had happened to her, she hadn’t the first idea of what to do. Tonight she had simply driven out to Ledyard, where the Mashentucket Pequots had their gambling casino, and used her last two hundred dollars to give the slots a shot She had kept back fifteen dollars for a full tank of gas, which was a good thing. The slots had been absolutely dead for her all night, the way the rest of her luck had been dead for her for almost two years. It was amazing how luck always seemed to travel in packs. It was even more amazing just how long a string of bad luck could go on, without even taking a break for air.

Right now, she was driving under the dark cover of the trees on Swamp Tree Road, heading for the main lodge of the Swamp Tree Country Club. She thought she ought to know this road by heart by now, since she drove it every morning of her life. Doing the books for the Swamp Tree was the only job she had been able to get after she had been fired from Deloitte, Touche in New York. At the time she had been offered it, she had been glad to get in, in spite of the fact that it was part-time and didn’t come with benefits. It was only that she realized what an impossible position she was in: still a member of the club, still cheerfully intending to bring her daughter out at the Swamp Tree’s Midnight Cotillion, and so short of cash that she was afraid to go to the doctor when she got a little sick. She hadn’t been to a dentist for over eighteen months.