Fatal Obsession Page 2

  “Freckles. Drove a Merc with fender skirts. What’s he doing now?”

  “Drives a gravel truck.”

  “And he was the first?”

  “You mean sex?”

  “I guess.”

  “I don’t think I’ll tell you, Marsh. I don’t think I want you to know.”

  I glanced at Gail. In the scramble of light and shadow her look was peculiar, a mixture of flirtation and righteousness. Sibling strangeness. I hauled my suitcase out of the trunk and followed her up the steps to the front porch.

  Instead of opening the door Gail turned and leaned back against it, facing the town she lived in more than me. “I think you’ll find it pretty much the same,” she said softly. “Not much happens in Chaldea except births and deaths. Not much that’s good, anyway.”

  It was a common sentiment but not exactly true. Whenever I talked to Gail on the phone she would regale me with news that was complex and vital and unending: acts of bigotry and hospice, comedy and courage, bankruptcy and philanthropy, slander and success. And among it all people like my parents and their friends had led lives of richness, highlighted by regular and substantial exercises in altruism, that eclipsed anything I knew or heard of since. Whenever I thought of my parents I inevitably thought of the things they did: hayrides and scavenger hunts and square dances and a hundred other things that seemed to bring them joy. But lives are least appreciated by those who live them, and so it was in Chaldea.

  “Marsh?”

  “Yes?”

  “Have you changed? I mean, deep down?”

  “I don’t think so, Gail. A little, I suppose. Why?”

  “I hope you haven’t, Marsh. I couldn’t stand it if you were different, too.”

  I breathed deeply and with dread in the wake of Gail’s soft questions. I had probably lied to her about not changing, but since she would soon know better than I where the truth of it lay, I decided to let it go.

  “You’ll stay here with us, won’t you, Marsh?” Gail asked.

  “I don’t know, Gail. I think a motel would be better.”

  “Don’t be silly. We’ve got all kinds of room now that the kids are gone.”

  “I’m not used to living with other people, Gail. Plus you’d be better off if I was out of your hair for at least part of the day. Tom seems like a man who values privacy.”

  She yielded more quickly than I would have guessed. “Well, come in for coffee at least. Tom will be glad to see you. If he’s home yet.”

  Gail fiddled with the lock on the door. The porch swing to my left purred quietly as it swayed on its chains, pushed by the evening breeze. Two dogs pranced purposefully down the walk and a street rod cut around its muffler a few blocks away, making the noise of battle. Then the evening sounds came not from the hum of busy streets but from trees and plants and the things that lived in them. By the time Gail opened the door I was thinking how strange it was that it was locked at all.

  The living room was dark, the air heavy and still. The lamp Gail turned on barely colored the blackness. I sensed the room was unused. The order was too permanent, the arrangement too formal, suited more to admiration than conversation. It was a place for visitors, company, callers, and it was also the place where my parents’ furnishings had come to rest. The speckled couch and pouf, dad’s threadbare club chair, the tile-topped coffee table listing slightly on a leg I had both broken and repaired, the glass-doored breakfront which had once housed china we never used and which then made room for schoolboy trophies. Even the Book of Knowledge and the Harvard Classics had found their way to Gail’s front room.

  These and other silent things beckoned me, but Gail slowed not at all so I followed her into the kitchen. It was a large, high-ceilinged room with walls of rough, undulating plaster, dominated by a six-foot white-pine pie saver and a thick black range. Various pieces of ironware hung on wooden pegs in the walls, as did prints of flying birds. The linoleum on the floor was as speckled as hash. The smells were of baked starches and canned fruits. The drop leaves of the round oak table had been raised to welcome me.

  I sat at the table and looked at the ears of Indian corn in its center and at the platter of hazelnuts that surrounded them. The varicolored kernels had been polished to a pointillistic shine. I thought of holidays and snow and prayers of grace.

  “Tom must be upstairs,” Gail said. “I’ll get him.”

  She started out of the room, then pivoted and walked to the counter beside the stove and pulled a heavy crockery jar off a shelf and carried it over to the table. Yellow birds and blue flowers were emblazoned on its bulbous flanks. “Here,” she said. “I baked these this morning. I remembered you like them.”

  I reached into the jar and pulled one out. Gum-drop cookies. Soft yet gritty, as big as saucers. “Great,” I said, around the crumbs. Gail went off to find her husband.

  I ate a second cookie and walked around the kitchen, imagining the bounty that issued from it. Gail liked to cook, always had, great quantities of simple, wholesome fare. She was much better at it than our mother had been, and when they both realized it, during Gail’s last year at home, the meal situation improved geometrically as did my weight: I gained twelve pounds and moved from halfback to full.

  There were some snapshots taped to the refrigerator, each of them depicting a pretty, ash-blond girl who I knew was Gail’s daughter Karen. She was alternately posed with her husband, a gangly, guileless boy, or her baby, a small and red and strange little package, like all babies. There were no pictures of Bruce, Tom and Gail’s other child.

  I pulled open a cupboard to see if there were any other goodies around but saw only canned goods and packaged staples and one thing more. Pills, bottles of them strung all along a bottom shelf, brown plastic cylinders with wide white lids. I lifted one and then another and found all of them were empty. I couldn’t decipher the labels, but they were all made out to Gail’s husband, Tom Notting. When I heard him trudging down the stairs I closed the cupboard.

  Tom entered the kitchen with a hand outstretched. I took it in mine and we smiled the testing smiles of enemies and in-laws. I had met Tom Notting only once, when they’d come to visit. He had been quiet but pleasant, an observer rather than an initiator, agreeable to most everything that came his way. As I remembered, he held mildly liberal opinions about the events of the day and thought Gail was a divine presence on the earth. I hoped none of that had changed, but one thing certainly had. The hand that didn’t hold mine held a gold-topped cane.

  Within the folds of his red plaid robe, Tom seemed even thinner than his smile. His hair had dwindled along with his flesh, and his back bent thankfully toward his cane. The slippers on his feet were the type I associated with grandfathers. When I dropped his hand it trembled for an instant before sinking to his side.

  In the bright fluorescence of the kitchen Gail seemed altered as well, her fatigue not a badge of Calvinist honor but the vestige of a plague. She had never worried about herself, her looks, her health, but always before she had been the better for it, her vitality making mockery of the beauty produced by bottles and oils and sprays. But now she appeared neglected, a plant in need of water, her hair straight and splayed, her brown eyes slow and overlidded, her shoulders slack and rounded, the whole of her beaten by something far more energetic than she had ever been.

  Tom and I exchanged the basic greetings and then a silence swelled until Gail pricked it. “Marsh is talking about going to a motel. We won’t hear of it, will we, Tom?”

  “Of course not.”

  “See?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s better to want to see people than to have to. I’ll feel less guilty if I’m out of your way. Who knows? I may want to romp and stomp a little, as we used to say.” I laughed uneasily.

  “Please, Marsh. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

  “We can talk all you want, Gail. But I’ll make someone else listen to my snores.”

  Tom’s failure to say anything beyond his ritual invitation
made me all the more determined to override Gail’s hospitality. I wanted to be free of family for at least a part of my stay, free to go wherever the dreadful thrill of being home again might take me, whether on nostalgic excursions or to the nearest bar. I looked at my watch. “Is the Welcome Stranger still in business?” I asked.

  Gail laughed. “It’s still there,” she said. “A bit long in the tooth. There’s a new place out Highway 60. And they’ve remodeled the hotel, Marsh. It’s real nice. Why don’t you try it?”

  “The National?”

  “Right. Some retired general from Kansas City bought it. Spent half a million fixing it up, so they say. There’s a coffee shop and everything.”

  “Maybe I should give them a call.”

  “They aren’t full,” Tom said bluntly. “Never have been; never will.”

  “And you can take the Chevette whenever you want, Marsh. Just keep it while you’re here. I can use the Ford.”

  “Tom’ll need that at work, won’t he?”

  “Tom doesn’t work anymore, Marsh. So don’t worry.”

  I looked at Tom for some sort of explanation, but all he gave me was a blank and feckless stare. The last I heard Tom had been the county assessor. Now, apparently, he was not. I wondered if the reason was his illness, if he was too sick to work. I wondered what was wrong with him. But while I was wondering, no one said a thing. “Maybe I’d better get going, then,” I said at last. “I’m kind of beat.”

  “Stay a little longer, Marsh,” Gail said. “So we can talk. I want to tell you some more about Karen and Paul. And about the baby. Christine. Oh, she’s just the cutest thing. Sleeps through the night already, never cries. They’re all so sweet I could just cry.”

  She looked like she meant it, the crying part. Clearly Gail was concerned about her daughter and her family, about their future. As of course she should be. My problem was, that future seemed somehow bound up with me. “What about Bruce?” I asked. “What does he think of this farm thing?”

  Gail looked at Tom. Tom frowned. “Bruce and I had a falling-out when he decided to waste four years of his life in the navy. We haven’t talked to him about it, and I’m sure he couldn’t care less in any event.”

  “Not even about the money?” I asked. “Assuming the place is sold?”

  “Bruce won’t get a penny of that money,” Tom spat. “Not as long as I’m alive.”

  There was suddenly a lot of tension around, of a quality that seemed obscene in the placid room and town. I stood up to leave.

  “Marsh?” Tom’s smile was strange and crooked.

  I waited for what he had to say.

  “Thought you might want to read this,” Tom went on. He walked to the counter and picked up a piece of paper and handed it to me. “Was on the front page of tonight’s Chaldean.”

  I looked at the column of newsprint he had handed me and sat down at the table again and read it. The headline was “Decision Near on Tanner Plot,” the byline was Mary Martha Gormley, editor and publisher, the text was long and somehow ominous:

  After a lengthy period of speculation and conjecture, a decision is expected within a week on the future of the 320 acres on the southern edge of Chaldea known as the Tanner plot. For almost a year, various interests have made their desires for the future use of the land known to the heirs of Raymond Tanner, owners of the property. These interests include the environmental group WILD (Wilderness Is the Last Domain), which insists the property be dedicated as open space and a wildlife refuge; the Black Diamond Coal Company, which intends to strip-mine the property to reach a vein the company claims can be profitably extracted; and the Chariton Valley Oil Company, a subsidiary of Cosmos Petroleum, an independent wildcatting operation. Also expressing interest are various agribusiness concerns, most prominently an Illinois consortium represented locally by attorney Clark Jaspers. For its part, the city of Chaldea will reportedly seek to acquire the plot as an industrial park in an effort to attract small manufacturing concerns to replace the loss of payroll the city has recently experienced. The Daily Chaldean has learned that the four heirs to the Tanner plot are convening in Chaldea this week to vote on the ultimate disposition of the property, which is primarily grain farming on a share arrangement with the neighboring landowner. The Tanner heirs include local resident Gail Notting, wife of former Appanoose County Assessor Tom Notting, Curtis Tanner of Glory City, Matthew Tanner of Chicago, and John Marshall Tanner of San Francisco. Local sports fans will remember “Marsh” Tanner as an All-State football player at Chaldea High.

  When I’d finished the article, I looked into the slanted smile of Tom Notting. “Thought you’d like to see what you’re in for the next few days,” he said. “Have fun.”

  I reached for another cookie and went out the door, my sister’s eyes and hopes on me all the way to the car.

  Three

  I parked in the alley behind the hotel, got a room and a key from a disheveled desk clerk who seemed nonplussed by the transaction, and went straight to bed. The building uttered groaning nightmares and all the plumbing seemed routed through the wall behind my head. Some people down the hall spent almost an hour performing stunts their bed was in no shape to endure. But some time after my travel alarm read one A.M. I fell asleep.

  I got up early, or so I thought, but when I entered the coffee shop at seven thirty it was already half full of an amazingly spry assortment of men. They were local business people rather than tourists, talking over the events of the previous day, filtering the world through the thin and biased fibers of Chaldea. I recognized a few faces, and matched names with about a quarter of those. As I moved to a table I attracted several stares, and a couple of them evolved into whispers. While I waited to see who would make the first move, I ordered a short stack of buckwheats from the buxom young waitress who was wearing what looked like a nurse’s uniform. The hanky pinned to her waist bore the name Darlene.

  A man sitting at the largest table in the room stood up and headed my way, a broad smile parting the thick flesh of his face, his walk the careless swagger of a man among friends. He stopped squarely in front of me and put his hands on the back of the empty chair. “Marsh Tanner, isn’t it?” he asked cheerily, knowing the answer.

  “Right,” I said.

  “I’m Norm Gladbrook, Marsh. Run the hardware store here on the square. Maybe you remember me. Your dad and I were real good friends, rest his soul. On the hospital board together. And you bought a ball glove off me once.”

  “Sure. How are you?”

  “Real fine, Marsh. Real fine. And you?”

  “Fine, too.”

  “Staying here at the hotel?”

  I nodded.

  “Fixed it up real nice, haven’t they?”

  “Sure have.”

  “’Course, it’s not like those places out in Frisco. Stayed in one once cost sixty bucks a night. Can you believe it? Sixty bucks. Bought a De Soto once for less than that.”

  I took a sip of coffee. My neck was beginning to stiffen from looking up into the sunny face of the hardware man. “Why don’t you sit down, Mr. Gladbrook?” I asked, when it was obvious he had more in his mind than a greeting.

  Gladbrook pulled back the chair. “Just for two shakes,” he said. “Wouldn’t want your buckwheats to get cold,” he added, confirming my guess that any word I uttered could be heard throughout the room.

  Gladbrook settled into the chair and the waitress brought my breakfast. I took a bite, uncomfortable under the heavy stare of my guest. With one more bite I gave up on the buckwheats and asked Gladbrook what he wanted to talk about.

  “We heard you and the rest were coming to town about now,” Gladbrook began. “You need anything while you’re here, you just give me a call at the store. Anything at all.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You need a car? Marv Clemons, the Plymouth dealer, he’s got a nice little loaner he’ll let you have. Want me to give him a call?”

  “No, thanks. I’ve got Gail’s car, my sister�
�s. It’s no problem.”

  “Well, if you’re sure.” Without asking, Gladbrook sipped water from my glass. “Now, the thing is, your dad was a fine man, Marsh. Town lost one of its best when he went down.”

  “That’s nice of you to say.”

  “Just the truth,” Gladbrook said, his face suddenly losing sun and gaining shadow. I sensed the cause was more than his reference to the departed. “Your dad thought a lot of this town,” Gladbrook went on. “Gave a lot of his time to it. Your mother, too,” he added quickly. “Grace was a handsome woman. Real active in the community. Civic music. The Tri-T. Wednesday Club. PEO. She was up for Citizen of the Year at least twice, don’t know if you knew it. Lem Fiddler beat her out one time, for his work on the bandstand. Don’t recall the other. Might have been me,” Gladbrook concluded with a chuckle.

  I took another sip of coffee and eyed my soggy flapjacks, my mother’s face alive and smiling in the space between us. I retained only a child’s view of her, an unreal, romantic view, but one I wanted to keep. When I glanced around the room several eyes scurried away from mine.

  Gladbrook seemed to be struggling over tactics. “Your brother here yet?” he asked. “Matt, I mean?”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  He nodded. “You seen Curt?”

  “No.”

  “Curt’s changed.”

  “So I hear.”

  “Gail okay? Haven’t seen her in a long time.”

  “Seems to be,” I said.

  “Haven’t seen Tom much, either. Used to eat here of a morning, you know, but since he retired, well, he took it real hard when the party wouldn’t back him. Real hard. Probably why the boy ran off so sudden, Tom tightening up that way.”

  “What boy?”

  “Tom’s boy. Bruce.”

  Because it seemed a betrayal of Gail to discuss her husband and her son, I stayed quiet, even though Gladbrook was poised to tell me more. Part of the mystery of Tom had been answered, but the part about his illness hadn’t. I glanced at my watch and Gladbrook took the hint.

  “Like to talk to you about this farm thing sometime, Marsh,” he said. “I’m president of the Chamber this year, so the boys asked me to pass on the—what you might call the business community’s thoughts on the thing. Not right now, necessarily. Maybe later today? You could stop by the store?”