Sunburn: A Novel(34)

Cath decides she’s going to take whatever money Polly scratches together and still tell everyone. Hasta la vista, baby.





19


Polly locks the door behind Cath. Adam is planning to visit later, but too bad for him. Let him steal up the stairs, try the door, be surprised when he discovers it is locked. Will he knock? Call out her name in the street below? She has told him over and over again that they must not draw attention to themselves. Even in this block, a ghost town after five, someone might hear.

If he does knock, will she let him in? She’s not sure. She needs to think.

It’s clear that Cath doesn’t know much. She can fish all she wants, but the only thing she has, solid, is that Polly served time for killing her husband and some people think she lied about the abuse. Interesting that the old money gossip follows her. At least, she’s pretty sure it’s the old gossip, about the old money. When those reporters looked into the commutations, they wrote, semiaccurately, that Ditmars took out life insurance a few months before she killed him. But that policy was in Joy’s name and Joy became a ward of the state after Polly was sentenced.

Could someone be gossiping about the other stuff? There’s only one possible source to these rumors, and he’s bound by law not to tell anyone. Which doesn’t mean he hasn’t. Lie down with dogs, as they say. He didn’t have the best reputation. But then—that’s exactly why she chose him. Polly can’t afford men with good reputations.

She can leave, of course. Even absent Cath’s threats, there are good reasons to leave. Adam is acting oddly. She never planned to stay past Labor Day. She has things to do. Why not leave? Leaving solves everything. And she won’t have to pay Cath a dime. That’s how stupid Cath is. She doesn’t realize that, with blackmail, it’s one or the other. You can’t tell someone to leave and expect to be paid off. Why would Polly, once gone, care what anyone in Belleville thinks of her?

Adam. It grieves her to leave him behind, vulnerable to Cath’s lies, if not to Cath herself. He will think the worst of Polly. That she’s a killer, a liar, a rip-off artist. And maybe she deserves his low opinion, but only if he knows the whole story, not whatever jumbled mess that Cath relates. If she leaves now, Cath wins.

Cath can’t win.

Footsteps on the stairs. She watches the knob turn. Even the knob, squeaking in alarm, seems surprised when the door fails to open. Now it rattles, turning back and forth, as Adam whispers her name.

“Polly? Polly? It’s me.”

Of course it’s you. Who else would be at my door this late? She says nothing, just stares at the knob, mesmerized.

“Polly?” Louder now.

She stands still, barely breathing. He knows she’s here. Where else would she be? How much do you want me? she thinks. It’s not vanity on her part. It’s vital information.

She hears him retreating down the stairs. Okay, that’s it, she has to leave town, he’s not going to stand by her. She is already mentally packing. She’ll rent a U-Haul, load up her things. She could be in Reno next week.

Then his footsteps roar back, it’s like a big wave rolling in after a series of small ones have lulled you into thinking the surf is calm. To her shock and delight, the door flies open with what sounds like one swift kick, the frame splintering.

He rushes in and she is terrified, but only for a moment. This man will never hurt her. She jumps up, her arms circling his neck, confident of being caught.

*

“What was that?” he asks later.

“What?”

“That stupid game with the door. Did you not tell me to come by tonight?”

“We have trouble,” she says. “And very little time to decide what to do. Cath’s figured out that we’re together. She’s willing to do anything—anything—to force me to leave town. A woman scorned and all that. You won’t believe the lies she’s willing to spread.”

He doesn’t ask about the lies. Interesting.

“I’ll go with you,” he says without hesitation. More interesting, still. How much does he know? And how? Yet he’s loyal to her, still wants her.

“Let’s sleep on it,” she says. “I don’t trust decisions made in the middle of the night.” She is telling the truth. Although she killed Ditmars in the middle of the night, she planned it by day. For weeks and weeks she planned. She was planning his murder even before she realized it. The universe all but told her to do it.

It began with a nurse’s aide, who came to help twice a week. Respite care, they called it. At first, Polly would use those hours to grocery shop. Then she found the film series at the museum, free on Thursday afternoons, and she escaped the long Baltimore summer in that cool, hushed place. Afterward, she’d go to the sculpture garden, studying the families in the museum restaurant, wondering what it would take to be like them. She couldn’t believe that they were the same species on the same planet, that’s how far away their lives seemed to her.

The summer of 1985, the film series was all black-and-white films from the 1940s. Double Indemnity. Mildred Pierce. The Postman Always Rings Twice. Polly didn’t understand at first how they were linked, why the series was called Raising Cain, but then someone explained they were all based on books by a Maryland man who had lived in Baltimore and Annapolis, grown up on the Eastern Shore.