The Rabbit Factory: A Novel (21 page)

“You know,” she said, leaning on his shoulder for a while. “I just love going where I’ve never been.”

She loved food the same way he did. She wouldn’t make a peep while you were trying to watch a movie but would bring peanuts and pretzels and chips and dip and wine and frigid beer noiselessly. She knew all about baseball and played on the police league fast-pitch softball team in the summers, and pitched. Merlot was already thinking up names for the kids. They’d name one KuShondra, another Raymond, maybe a Herman.

They spent the first night in a perfect house off the beaten path, a place they found by just getting off the Trace close to Starkville and cruising over to Columbus and driving around in the city until they saw a friendly-looking police officer taking a smoke break on a bench and stopped and asked him about a place to stay. His name was Calvin and he said there was a great bed-and-breakfast called White Arches just up the street and told them what street and exactly how to get there and told them to just knock since it was so early and the old lady who ran it would come to the door. And he was exactly right. There was a huge old brown house with a wide brick walk and white trim around the windows and a deep front porch where wicker rocking chairs were set up and the porch ceiling was high and lined with bead board and the front doors were tall and very thick with leaded glass panels and brass latch plates and knobs and there were giant magnolias in the yard and even a small lighted goldfish pond with curved stone benches where you could sit and read a book if you wanted to, the old lady said, except that it had gotten too dark to read by then. There were some woods up behind the house, owls in the woods, she said gaily, told them they might hear them hoot hoot hooting!

The old white-haired lady was tiny and bent over slightly with a small hump in the middle of her back but she welcomed them in, babbling like she was on Ecstasy, and said she had a room or three ready and that if they would like to drink some wine and nibble on some Brie and shrimp and give her an hour or so, she could have the maid fix up some dinner for them. The room was upstairs and Merlot and Penelope carried their stuff up into the bedroom, which was full of antiques, and it had a high four-poster bed with a canopy and a dark-green velvet drape. There was a pair of French doors that opened onto a short balcony. The ornate wallpaper was slightly torn in a few places, but a delicate bedside table held a bottle of red wine, a bowl of fruit, two glasses, and a corkscrew. The maid, in a crisp uniform and a starched cap, knocked and then entered with a tray holding a warmed wedge of the cheese and a knife and an array of crackers on napkins and a small bowl of peeled pink shrimp alongside a bowl of cocktail sauce and another one of lemon wedges and a bottle of green Tabasco. She set it down on the coffee table and went back out butt first with a little bow.

Merlot dropped the luggage and sat on the bed and pulled out one of the joints and fired it up. The bed had five or six thick pillows piled against the headboard and he leaned against them. Penelope closed the door. Then she locked it. She was looking around, touching a leather couch, taking off her blouse, smiling, shaking her head over a footstool made from an elephant’s foot. The ceiling was high and carved with wood intricacies by some long-dead carpenter and the windows were draped with sheer white material over the blinds.

“Pretty nice, huh?” Merlot said, and passed her the joint. She snuggled down beside him and took a few tugs on it.

“Wow,” she said. “Did you see that straight-up piano downstairs? That thing’s got to be two hundred years old.”

She took one more toke and then handed the joint back to Merlot. He took a few more hits and then moved some little tied-up lace bags of colored rice from a brass tortoise shell and mashed it out. He handed her a glass and got the corkscrew and opened the wine and poured them half a glass apiece. They sipped and lay back on the bed. Merlot smiled at her.

“And did you hear the old lady cackling with happiness? Hell yes she takes American Express! I thought she was gonna carry our luggage up.”

Penelope giggled in her deep and lovely voice.

“She’s a sweet old thing, ain’t she? Reminds me of my mamaw. I bet this house has been in her family since the Civil War. I bet we’ll sleep good in here.”

“Yeah, if we get to sleep any,” he told her, and bent her back on the bed, since her snow-white bra was showing about a foot of deep brown cleavage. There was a tiny silver star pinned high on the left cup that he knew she wore just for fun. But her gun was in her bag. Loaded probably. It had made him a little nervous to have it in the Four-Runner the whole way down here and it was still making him nervous to have it in here in the bedroom with them but he didn’t say anything. Not then.

Penelope was radiant in a clingy dark-blue knit dress with a neckline that would stop a man in his tracks, her hair pinned up in a tight, shiny bun, and Merlot couldn’t get enough of just looking at her. Even though he was pretty full, he was already smiling at the thought of being naked with her on that big soft bed with the canopy, holding her good brown body in his hands, and then going to sleep beside her, safe and warm in Columbus.

“You turn me on,” he said, and she squeezed his hand across the table. He could already imagine the food they were going to cook together. She knew all those Creole recipes for jambalaya and all that good New Orleans food. He could show her how to make bread. He could show her how to make biscuit pudding like his mother’s. They could call his mother up, maybe drive down to Gulf Shores and see her sometime.

She picked up her wine and sipped at it. She’d been a little quieter the last few minutes and he wondered if something was bothering her. But he held off asking her. It might not be any of his business. And he hadn’t known her that long. She kept sitting there and sipping lightly on her wine.

“What’s wrong?” he finally said.

She smiled too quickly.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t bullshit, baby.”

Then she looked away and rested her chin on her hand for a moment.

“I shouldn’t be here, Merlot.”

He leaned back in his chair and picked at a scrap of truffle with his fork. It seemed almost cruel to train pigs to hunt them but not give them any when they found a nice juicy patch. They probably fed them the rotten ones.

“Why not?”

She took her hand down and put both of them in her lap.

“I ought to be back there helping them look for Perk.”

“The cop who’s missing?”

She was slow to raise her eyes and look at him. Finally she did.

“Yeah. I knew him pretty well. Or at least I used to.”

It wasn’t so much what she said. It was the way she was looking. So. Okay. There it was. She’d been lovers with this missing constable maybe. But did he expect her to be a chaste virgin? Hell no. She was thirty-three. Would it have been unusual for a female police officer to be at some point in her life sexually involved with a male police officer? Shit no. Not unless it would be unusual for a female dill-pickle slicer to be involved with a male dill-pickle slicer. And the same thing could be said for dogcatchers and librarians, or those who climbed tall poles with spikes on their boots and tools swinging from their belts. Maybe they’d shot their guns together on the weekends.

“Well,” he said. “I’m not here to ask you a bunch of personal stuff about your private life before I met you ’cause I just met you.”

She toyed with her napkin. She seemed suddenly at a loss for the proper words.

“I know you did. And you’re a sweet man.”

“Don’t beat yourself up. You’re off duty.”

She nodded and looked down at the floor.

“That’s right.”

“You’re actually suspended from active duty for two whole weeks. With pay.”

“That’s true.”

“So they probably wouldn’t let you help look for him even if you were still back there. Would they?”

“I don’t guess they would,” she said. “They’re pretty strict about stuff like that.”

She looked up at him, and her eyes were almost wet. Her nostrils flared.

“I just thought maybe I should tell you about him. I don’t want any secrets between us about…stuff like that.”

Merlot held her eyes with his. The question kept running through his mind, face-to-face with her like this. Was now the time to level with her about Candy? She was damn sure leveling with him about this damn constable.

“Baby. I’m not asking any questions.”

“I think I’m going to call sometime and see if they’ve found out anything.”

He tapped his fork gently on the edge of his plate and then laid it down. He wasn’t sure what to say about all that. He lifted his wineglass and sipped from it briefly.

“Do you think he’s dead?”

She didn’t answer at first. Merlot set his glass down and ran his hand over the tablecloth. It was littered with a few bread crumbs that he swept together with the edge of his hand and then put them on his plate. He dusted off his hands. He looked up at her.

“I don’t know. Rico would have made the guy tell him where Perk was if the guy hadn’t escaped from the hospital. If the guy knew. If he’s got anything to do with it. And he probably does. He carjacked you pretty close to a place where Perk parks sometimes.”

“Where Perk parks? Who’s Rico?”

“Elwood’s brother. Perk’s brother. He’s a detective. We left before he got to the jail, but I know he was on his way over there. And he would have made him tell.”

“How would he be able to do that?”

She sighed and took a sip of her wine.

“He would have probably held a knife to his balls. He did that to a guy who robbed a bank with some friends in Coffeeville and Rico wanted to know where the rest of them were. He found out, too. That’s how he got promoted to detective.”

“Holy shit,” Merlot said slowly. “You were dating his
brother
?”

About that time the old lady returned with a tray and brandy glasses and a bottle of Christian Brothers. So they had to stop talking about all that, and start sipping brandy and listening to the old lady, who was originally from Starkville, where the legendary Johnny Cash himself had once been nabbed for picking flowers, back when she was about fifty, although there was no plaque that she knew of in the town to commemorate the historic event. At least not yet.

He hiked his leg up and peed on a potted plant and wandered on down the hall, in and out of rooms. The door to his goodie room was closed. He whined and scratched at it, but not for long. He’d learned. Dogs do. He went on looking around.

Then he went into another room and stopped dead still. A big white bone was lying on the floor and it was the biggest bone he’d ever seen. There was some noise coming from the top of the bed, only he didn’t know it was a bed. He probably didn’t have any way of knowing it was Miss Muffett snoring, but maybe in some other way, some secret dog way that people don’t know anything about, he did.

He walked around to the end of the big bone and found a hollow place where he could put his teeth into it. It was kind of heavy when he started dragging it, but the little dog went down the hall backward with it, pulling it toward the stairs like a sled dog mushing in reverse.

He got down them one step at a time. Pull a little, rest a little, pull a little, rest a little. In this way he managed to get it down to the kitchen. It must have made him thirsty because he took some more drinks of his water, and then looked around, as if searching for a good place to bury it. Then he saw his own personal door.