The Sleepwalker(53)

It wasn’t lunchtime yet, but already I viewed the day as a small victory: apparently, neither my father nor Paige had noticed the scrapes on my hands over breakfast. My right wrist was sore, as were my ribs, but neither was incapacitating and I had gotten dressed. Most importantly, no one had witnessed my debacle last night on the bridge. Now I was sitting across from Marilyn Bryce in her home on one of the hills high above the village. Marilyn’s painting studio was in an old sugarhouse behind their home, near a pond the Bryces had constructed some years ago. It was just the two of us, and we were sitting in the family’s living room with its spectacular view of Mount Lincoln, one of the few four-thousand-foot massifs in Vermont. I was on the couch and Marilyn was on a burgundy pouf. She had set the tea service between us, on a round table fashioned from an antique milk jug and a dark marble saucer the size of a manhole cover. I watched in silence as she poured what she called the oolong tea from the special red clay pot she had brought back from China; the tea had been steeping inside it for precisely three minutes. The woman had used the timer on the oven.

It was clear to me that she had been smoking before I arrived: the living room reeked of weed, and her eyes were a red I knew well. I almost offered her the Visine I had in my shoulder bag. If I had any doubts, they were obliterated by what she said next: “This pot has been well seasoned over the years. It has the flavor of a thousand cups inside it.”

Only someone who was stoned could say something like that with conviction.

“I’m impressed,” I answered because I couldn’t think of anything else I could say that would sound in the slightest way earnest. Moreover, I wasn’t a big fan of tea. The few times I had drunk it, I had simply dropped a bag in a mug filled with tap water and nuked it in the microwave for a minute.

“You’ll detect a hint of jasmine in the flavor,” Marilyn told me affably.

“Jasmine,” I repeated. The word was everywhere these days. It was, I decided, a sign—though I had no idea what the sign meant.

“And lily,” Marilyn added. I reached for the mug—a local potter’s own hypsiloid-shaped, thunder-head-colored creation—and took a small sip. The woman was watching me intently. It wasn’t coffee, but it was drinkable. I was pleasantly surprised.

“Delicious,” I told Marilyn.

“I’m so glad you like it!”

“This is what you served my mom?”

“Absolutely. She was a fan.”

I nodded. My mom drank coffee at home and when she worked, so clearly she wasn’t a big fan. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said about my parents at the supermarket.”

“Oh, you should probably forget I ever said anything. I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“You said that my mom was very close to the detective and my dad was a pill. That was the gist of it.”

“I didn’t say he was a pill, did I?”

“You said he was difficult to live with.”

“Children don’t need to know their parents’ secrets. I was just babbling.”

“I do need to know my parents’ secrets.”

“Why?”

“Because my mother is missing.”

She blinked and held her eyes shut a long second. I knew that maneuver. She was trying to will her buzz away. It never worked. “And your father had nothing to do with that,” she said after a moment, her eyes open and veined as ever.

“I know.”

She sipped her tea and savored—or pretended to savor—the experience. I sensed she was stalling. “Then why?” she asked. “What could I possibly tell you?”

“What sorts of things did my mom say about my dad?”

“She wasn’t playing Mrs. Robinson with that detective, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I believe you. But what might she have been sharing with Gavin Rikert that she wouldn’t tell my dad? I mean, was it as simple as she was making fun of my dad’s poetry? Or was it something more important?”

“I doubt she was making fun of his poetry. I think she respected his work.”

“Then what?”

Her shoulders sagged ever so slightly and she put down her mug. “You know how much I loved your mother,” she said, her voice a little soft and soapy because of the weed. “You know how much I miss her.”

I believe that in Marilyn’s own way she had indeed loved my mother and now she did miss her; but I had not for one moment lost sight of how quickly she had moved on—the speed with which she had forgotten my father and Paige and me. I wasn’t moved, but I pretended to be; I sensed it was the best way to wear Marilyn down. She was close to telling me something, and she was just stoned enough that she might. “I do,” I said. “And I know she felt the same way about you.”

“We were a little like sisters.”

“Absolutely.”

“Absolutely,” she agreed.

Half a dozen turkeys were wandering through Marilyn’s yard. At first I thought they were aimless, but then they stopped beneath a bird feeder on a low branch in one of her sugar maples. They were like a family. Another time, I might have watched them until they moved on, and it would have made me happy.

“So, my mom and Gavin,” I said. “Was it just the sleepwalking that connected them—when they first met?”