“Listen,” he said, leaning forward to make sure the driver could hear him. “Maybe we could stop along the way here for a minute. I’d like to get some breath mints.”
“There’s a parking place at the curb ahead,” the driver said, looking straight through the windshield, as if he were talking to a voice on the radio. “There’s a place called English Drugs.”
“Good,” Gregor said. “A drugstore. That will be perfect.”
The driver didn’t say anything. Gregor sat back and looked out the side window at the narrow streets edged with stores and churches. The stores were made of clapboard and had false fronts, so that they seemed to go up a story higher than they really did. The churches were very old, and looked it. The Methodist one had a square bell tower that looked to be the tallest structure in town. Gregor felt his sense of claustrophobia increasing. He had never been able to understand how people managed to stay in places like this.
The driver pulled the car up next to the curb and cut the engine. He looked up into the rearview mirror—victory, Gregor thought, he knows I’m here—and said, “What kind of breath mints would you like, sir?”
“Oh,” Gregor said. “I don’t know. You don’t have to go get them for me. I’d like to get out and walk around.” He almost added “if you don’t mind,” but didn’t, because it was absurd. You didn’t apologize to a man being paid to drive you because you wanted to get out and walk around.
The driver was no longer looking into the rearview mirror. He was looking straight out the windshield, but he didn’t seem to be paying attention to the other people on the street or the other cars parked at the curb. Gregor didn’t think he had brought a book. What would he do while Gregor was walking around, stretching his legs, looking at the scenery? He didn’t even have the job of opening Gregor’s door and closing it for him. They’d discussed all that at the outset, and agreed that it—like a limousine—would only be conspicuous. Actually, Gregor thought, they hadn’t agreed on anything. Gregor had just given directions, and the driver had acted as if he hadn’t heard a thing.
“Right,” Gregor said now. He popped his door open. “I won’t be long. I just want to walk around a little.”
The driver said nothing. Gregor tried to remember his name and couldn’t. Then he got out onto the sidewalk and stretched his legs a little.
If he’d been expecting a revelation of some sort, he didn’t get it. It was quite possible—in fact it was likely—that Hollman had exhibited a few tense oddnesses in the days after Michael Houseman had died, but that was more than thirty years ago. Now it looked exactly like a hundred other places of the same type, from Maine to Nebraska and maybe even beyond. The men who passed him were wearing either stiff-collared polo shirts with little animals embroidered over their breast pockets (but not Izod alligators) or the kind of suits you bought in Sears when you weren’t used to wearing them. The women were not so much fat as lumpy in the way women got when they were neither particularly athletic nor committed to working out. Everybody looked tired. Gregor looked up and down this side of the street. Elsa-Edna’s was a dress shop with pretensions to sophistication. JayMar’s was a restaurant that would have been called a diner anywhere else. English Drugs was a drugstore and the biggest enterprise on the block, except that it wasn’t really a block. It went on for far too long in both directions, broken only by driveways.
Midway up from where he stood now, back the way they had come, the flat faces of the false-fronted windows were broken by the existence of a small Victorian house, painted red. Gregor stepped back a little so that he could get a better look at it. It had a sign hanging over the four small steps of its entryway, the way a bed and breakfast would. The sign said: COUNTRY CRAFTS. Gregor moved up the street a little to get a better look. It was not an unusual or particularly interesting place, on its own. Like the town, it was surely one of thousands of identical places all across the country. The porch made it impossible to see anything that might have been sitting in its windows. Gregor had the idea that that must be a very bad thing for a store. He walked up the slight incline of Grandview Avenue until he was right in front of the place and stopped. There was another sign besides the one over the front porch entry. This sign was bolted into the porch rail next to the steps, and it said more than just COUNTRY CRAFTS. It said: PROPRIETORS GEORGE AND EMMA BLIGH.
Gregor reached into the inside breast pocket of his jacket—Bennis had been absolutely right, as usual. He shouldn’t have come here with nothing but suits—and took out the notebook he’d been using to organize his notes on the Hollman trip. Bennis had given him a Palm Pilot last Christmas, but he’d left it in the top drawer of his dresser, the way he always did. He could not get the hang of using it. What he kept in his breast pocket was a simple stenographer’s pad. He flipped through it and found want he wanted: Emma Kenyon. Now Emma Kenyon Bligh. Runs Country Crafts.