Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare)(49)

She supposed he could have wrested them from her. She fancied she saw the thought cross his face. But in the end he said, “I will only tell police Bunny is maybe not vegetarian. Okay?”

“Tell them she didn’t take the mice.”

“I will tell them you think she didn’t take the mice.”

Kate decided that was the best she could hope for. “Do it, then,” she said.

He took his cell phone from the right front pocket of his shorts. Then he took his billfold from his back pocket. He pulled out a business card. “Detective assigned to my case, personally,” he said with some pride. He held the card up for her to read. “How you pronounce this name?”

She peered at it. “McEnroe,” she said.

“McEnroe.” He clicked his phone on, studied the screen a moment, and then began the laborious process of placing a call.

Even from where she stood, she could hear the single ring, followed immediately by a male voice making a canned announcement. “He must have turned his phone off,” she told Pyotr. “Leave a message.”

Pyotr lowered his phone and gaped at her. “He turned it off?” he asked.

“That’s why his voice mail picked up so fast. Leave a message.”

“But he said I call him night or day. He said this was his personal number.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. She snatched the phone away from him and pressed it to her ear. “Detective McEnroe, this is Kate Battista,” she said. “I’m calling for Pyotr Shcherbakov; the laboratory break-in case. He told you that my sister, Bunny, could be a possible suspect, but that’s because he was thinking Bunny’s a vegetarian, and she’s not. She eats meat. Also she was home all last evening and I’m sure I would have known if she had gone out during the night, so you can take her off your list. Thanks. Bye.”

She ended the call and returned the phone to Pyotr. It was anyone’s guess whether she had spoken in time to be recorded.

Pyotr put the phone in his pocket. He said, “Detective told me, ‘Here’s my card.’ He told me, ‘You should call me any time, if you have any further thoughts.’ And now he does not answer. Is final straw; is last straw. This is worst day of my life.”

Kate knew it was unreasonable of her, but she couldn’t help feeling insulted.

She gave up the keys in silence.

“Thank you,” he said absently. Then he said, “Well, thank you”—the unaccustomed “well” slightly softening his tone. He passed a hand over his face. He looked drawn and weary, and suddenly older than his age.

“I have not told you this,” he said, “but the three years I have been here have been difficult years. Lonesome years. Perplexing. Everyone acts that to be in America is a gift, but is not one hundred percent a gift. Americans say things that are misleading. They seem so friendly; they use first names from beginning. They seem so casual and informal. Then they turn off their phones. I do not understand them!”

He and Kate were facing each other, no more than a foot apart. She was close enough to see the microscopic blond glints of his whiskers, and the tiny brown specks mixed in with the blue of his eyes.

“It is the language, maybe?” he asked. “I know the vocabulary, but still I am not capable to work the language the way I want to. There is no special word for ‘you’ when it is you that I am speaking to. In English there is only one ‘you,’ and I have to say the same ‘you’ to you that I would say to a stranger; I cannot express my closeness. I am homesick in this country, but I am thinking I would be homesick in my own country now, also. I have no longer any home to go back to—no relatives, no position, and my friends have lived three years without me. There is no place for me. So I have to pretend I am fine here. I have to pretend everything is…how you say? Hunky-dory.”

Kate was reminded of her father’s confession weeks earlier, when he was telling her what a long haul it had been. Men were just subject to this belief that they should keep their miseries buried deep inside, it seemed, as if admitting to them would be shameful. She reached out and touched Pyotr’s arm, but he gave no sign he had noticed. “I bet you didn’t even have breakfast,” she told him. It was all she could think of to say. “That’s what it is! You’re starving. I’m going to fix you something.”

“I don’t want it,” he said.

In the church she had been thinking that maybe the reason he went ahead with the wedding regardless was that underneath, he…well, liked her, a little. But now he wasn’t even looking at her; he didn’t seem to care that she was standing there so close to him with her hand on his arm. “I just want mice back,” he said.

Kate dropped her hand.

“I would like that the thief would be Bunny,” he said. “Then she could tell us where are they.”

Kate said, “Believe me, Pyotr, it wasn’t Bunny. Bunny’s nothing but a copycat! She just has this little semi-crush or whatever it is on Edward Mintz and so when Edward said he was vegan…”

She paused. Pyotr was still not looking at her or even hearing her, probably. “Oh,” she said. “It was Edward.”

Then he did flick his eyes in her direction.

“Edward knows where the lab is,” she said. “He went to the lab with Bunny, that time she brought Father his lunch. He must have been standing right beside her when she punched in the lock combination.”