true speed, recklessness, and chance of motorized transportation. She had to pull over on the gravel shoulder and steady her head on the steering wheel between her gripped hands. Gave herself a talk. Doesn’t matter you’re scared to death, it is only you in this car. Only you. Drive. She’d put it in gear again.
Phelan signaled her, and they went downstairs together. Outside steam was masquerading as air, and the small parking lot to the side of the building was an archipelago of blacktop islands amid a rainwater-sea filling its ruts and dips.
“Guess this is it.”
He paused by a dented, side-scraped ’68 Dodge Dart, green or black depending on which side you were standing. Besides being Delpha’s parole officer, Joe Ford was an old high school friend of Phelan’s. He’d told Phelan he’d be dropping off a car this morning. Keys’d be under the seat. The Dodge belonged to Joe’s wife’s father, and it was supposedly in a garage for repair. In the last year, by the father-in-law’s own grudging confessions, he’d hit several Godzilla potholes, sideswiped a couple parked cars, and rear-ended a cement mixer. Had the bruises and a concussion to prove it. The father-in-law had staggered into the Texas Department of Public Safety, where they’d extended his driver’s license for four more years. Joe had swiped the keys, and instead of taking the Dart to a body shop, he’d left it for Phelan to hide for a while.
Phelan dropped the keys in Delpha’s palm. “All right, I’ve got some phone business we can talk about later, and I’m gonna go eat. You take your lunch, too, and then—the realtors are all yours.”
As he strode away, Delpha admired the back of his head, that thick hair, barely curling at the ends, and the long lines of his body, thinking how graceful the man was made. Then she blinked. Had there just been a change here, in terms of her job at Phelan Investigations?
Her turf, a steno chair and a desktop, a secretary office and a fat blue pillow sofa, had just enlarged to include a dilapidated Dodge and the city of Beaumont, Texas. Hadn’t it? Mr. Wally that taught Business at Gatesville, was this what he would call “division of labor”? No—that was when you sewed legs all day while the girl next to you sewed sleeves. Still, she pondered this notion.
The car door creaked, reluctant at first, then pop flew open. She slid the key in the ignition and turned it. A rumble bloomed around her. Uh oh. Well, probably a lot wrong with this car, after all those collisions. Gash in the muffler, poor tuning.
Delpha turned into the Pig Stand. When the tray arrived at her rolled-down window, she tipped the sweating waitress and carefully papered her lap with napkins. She ate a hamburger, drank a Coke from a bendy straw while consulting her written directions.
Then she turtled the loud car around to the realtors’ offices. One owner refused on grounds of privacy. But the secretaries—if the bosses and agents were out with clients, which many were, they hardly let her finish her story. They passed over the Sold records like a pan of stale Rice Krispie bars.
Around quarter to five, she came to the home office of Kirk Properties, situated in a remodeled garage attached to a neat yellow ranch house with a porch swing. Strip of fluorescent light illuminating a mustard carpet, gray file cabinets, rows of Kirk Properties calendars on both walls going back twenty years. Each calendar featuring a woman in handsome middle age, softening and thickening until there sat the proprietor herself, sixty-ish, a dome of hennaed hair and powder in the cracks of her face. She was in greeting mode, her hands lightly clasped in the air over her desk like a catalog model in white gloves.
“Good afternoon, young lady. You and your husband in the market for a new home? I’m Nan Kirk, and I’d be pleased to help you find one.”
Delpha said her name and politely asked if Mrs. Kirk kept a record of all the houses she’d sold in the past year.
“Well, I do,”—the woman peered into her face—“but what would you need it for?”
She was looking for a single man who was so mad at his family he’d moved and legally changed his name from theirs. She worked for Mr. Norville, the attorney of the man’s father. That gentleman was ninety-three and not well. He wanted to reconcile with his son.
The hand model pose collapsed. Mrs. Kirk laced her hands against her bosom. “Well, family’s all we got for sure in this world. What did he change his name to?”
A curl-tailed pug dog scrambled up into the woman’s lap, craned its neckless head, and confronted Delpha with goggle-eyes.
“That’s the problem, Mrs. Kirk. The father doesn’t know.”
“Now isn’t that sad? I only sold two houses to single men in the last year, and one of ‘em wasn’t but twenty-four years old. Doesn’t seem like his daddy would be ninety-three.” Mrs. Kirk bent down and pulled out a lower desk drawer.
A side door flung open, causing Delpha to reel back, and a pigtailed teenager leaped through, singing, “Nana Nana Bo Bana, Banana Fana Fo—”
“Aileen, you idjit, this lady and I’re talking here. Excuse yourself.”
The girl’s short pigtails were the color of a peeled sweet potato. They were cinched high on her head like a pair of foxy ears, the back of her hair fallen down from them. She wheeled toward Delpha, revealing a freckled nose and a bold chin, and stopped short. Either she’d been fooling with a makeup pencil, or she had two genuine beauty marks, one black dot under each wide green eye.
Mrs. Kirk had retrieved her Sold information and was gesturing toward Delpha’s legal pad. Delpha held it out. The older woman copied down names and addresses, reading each syllable aloud, and then passed back the pad.
Delpha glanced over at the teenager. The girl had been gaping past Delpha, her forearm and an out-turned palm shielding her chest, but her arms dropped, and her eyelids fluttered, shutting away the beauty marks. She had gone motionless, her eyes fixed unwaveringly on Delpha, who asked, “Is she OK?”
Mrs. Kirk swiveled toward the girl.
“Oh Lord. She gets these…thoughts, ever once in a while. Aileen, go on back in the house and do your homework, honey.”
“I’ll be on my way,” Delpha said to Mrs. Kirk. “Thank you very much for the information. Mr. Norville will be grateful.”
“Huh uh. Huh uh now. You’re kinda a sight, lady. But to start off with, you’re fibbing ’bout Mr. Norville.” Aileen wafted over and grasped the side of Delpha’s hand. The girl was talking in Delpha’s direction rather than to her. She lowered her head again—the pigtails poked forward—and pressed the bone of Delpha’s little finger.
“You saw the worst thing, didn’t you. I can tell because I did once, for just a little bitty bit. I saw a man that had this black rim around him. Like the opening to a cave you wouldn’t never, ever go in. Scared me to death. Hey, that thing’s way far back from you now. You should keep it back there.”
The pug dog hit the floor and pranced desperately around the teenage girl’s bare ankles. “You just turned your head quick and saw it, right? That’s what happened to me. On a man at the racetrack when Pawpaw and me went.” Her head tilted. “Wait a minute. It came closer to you. Real close. You understand what I mean?”
Delpha had chilled, standing on the worn carpet with calendars of years on years on her either side. “Maybe.”
A flushed Mrs. Kirk shoved back her chair, saying, “’Scuse us.
