Threats (15 page)

Sitting there, David came to the slow realization that he had not brought any clothes of his own to wash. It seemed likely that soon enough, the attendant might notice he wasn't using any machines, was simply sitting in a plastic chair watching the kids play pinball, and the attendant might call the police. The thought made David nervous in a way that was immediately actionable. He stood and walked to the other side of the room, where a folding table was ringed by men and women arranging clean clothes into baskets.

David approached one woman, who noticed him and was already shaking her head at the look on his face.

“I'd love to help you fold your clothes,” he said.

“No,” she said. “No, honey.”

He looked at the woman next to the first woman, her friend it seemed, because they looked at each other and then the friend spoke. “I'm not going to let a crazy man fold my clothes,” she said. The women laughed, and David laughed too. “No offense,” she said.

“You don't have to be crazy to fold clothes,” he said. “But it helps.”

“I don't care how crazy you are, as long as you're working for me,” said a third woman, so small beside the folding table that it seemed as if she would be more comfortable underneath. “Come here,” she said, and David saw that it was the woman from the first night, Shelly, and she was wearing earth tones again, and he had not seen her from across the room because she was much smaller than he remembered and had been hidden by the machines.

“How are you?” David asked.

Shelly pushed a pile of warm shirts over to him and he picked one up. “Sick and tired,” she said, glancing at him. “You know, you could probably stand to do a load or two while you're here. I have some spare shirts if you need.”

“I'm fine.”

She shrugged and returned to folding. “Some days I'm mostly sick, and then it hits me how tired I am. Opposite sides of the same rolling coin.”

The shirt he picked up was long-sleeved. He held the collar and flipped the sleeves back. “I feel more tired lately,” he said. “People keep coming to my house.”

“Not like that,” she said. David widened his grip on the shoulders, but she shook her head. “Here,” she said, digging into a bag at her feet and hauling out a clipboard nearly the size of her torso. She took the shirt and flattened it on the table, positioned the board in the center, and folded the sleeves inward. She tucked the shirtsleeves back, flipped the board over, and slid it out in a smooth motion, leaving a perfectly folded shirt.

“I'll try again,” David said, reaching for the folded shirt.

She snapped it off the table and laid it in her rolling basket. “You'll find no utility in going backward,” she said. “Move forward.” She prodded the pile.

He took another shirt, positioned the clipboard, made a few false starts with the sleeves, but placed them, flipped the shirt over, and removed the board.

The woman clapped once. “There you go,” she said. “Soon you'll be doing it without the board. Soon you won't even need your eyes. There's a goal.”

The two friends on the other side of the table snickered but stopped abruptly when the small woman pointed at them. “You won't always have your eyes,” the woman said. “You lose everything you love in the order in which you love it.” David finished another shirt and the woman patted his arm. “You're so kind to help,” she said. “So kind, without expecting anything in return.”

He felt kind, though her words made him wonder what he could expect in return. It was possible this woman knew something about Franny, had seen or spoken with her on one of Franny's trips to the laundromat. He pictured his wife with a load of towels from the salon, a bag stuffed full of curtains requiring the delicate cycle. He imagined her measuring cupfuls of detergent and bleach into the industrial-size washer, loading quarters into the machine, and settling down in one of the yellow plastic chairs with a magazine advertising a pill you could take to make your eyelashes grow faster.

“The expression on your face,” Shelly said. “I could eat it.”

David held up his hand to the offer. They folded shirts while he thought about Franny propping her feet on a rolling cart or wiping spilled detergent from a machine with a towel and dropping that towel into the wash with the rest. Franny's eyes shone when she saw him folding from across the room. “You moron,” Franny said, smiling, beatific. She was holding an incisor in an oversize antique gold tooth extractor.

“Listen, I don't see you for months, and this is some—”

She raised one finger to her lips and he was quiet. The extractor seemed heavy, and she leveraged her elbow into her side for support. David could see that her arm was spotted with wounds, like cherries dropped over a field of snow. The marks clustered around her wrist and pinpricked all the way up her arm and into her dress, which draped her body in ivory. His mouth dried suddenly, as if he had swabbed it.

“What happened to you?” he asked.

She shrugged. Her saint's smile skewed and she lifted both arms, hefting the tooth and its extractor skyward, exaggerating the shrug, a move that showed David the red marks on her other arm as well, a constellation blooming red, spreading and darkening as the blood dotted in individual pools and then broke through their membranes and streamed down her arms, veining together and dripping down her elbows, her arms lifted, the extractor in her fist raised to the ceiling in a pose that David realized now was a bleeding diorama placed for him.

He clenched his teeth but could not make a connection from molar to molar. His inability to grind the teeth to powder inspired a closed-mouth scream, pushing the air from his body in the scream until his vision spangled and his balance shifted, at which point he became aware of pressure around his body and realized that the women in the laundromat had surrounded him. The two friends were holding him by the arms, restraining him while Shelly was trying to push her gloved hand into his clenched mouth, leaning into it and pushing as hard as she could against the barrier of his jaw. Others stood and cheered, blocking the exit.

Shelly whacked him on the jaw with the palm of her hand as if he was a dog. The indignity of it made him slacken his face. She laughed, but the women were still gripping him by both arms, moving him toward the door. One of them said, “God damn, but you are an idiot,” and the other said, “Get it right out of here.”

The other people in the laundromat moved out of their way. He bent his arms at the elbow to grasp the bar on the glass door so the three of them wouldn't crash into it. The friends increased their velocity at the threshold and threw him out, his feet leaving the ground with the force of their outward motion. He landed unevenly and tumbled down, skinning his hand on the parking sign he had grasped for stability.

“I'm sorry,” he said. A pinkish hue welled into his hand, then a line of blood.

One of them waved her hand at him with a
go on
motion and headed back inside while the other held the door open. “You scared that old lady,” she said. “Shame on you.”

“Tell her I'm sorry.”

Now the other one waved her hand. “You're not watching where you are,” she said, closing the door behind her. He assumed she was speaking figuratively until a tall Weimaraner on a leash stepped gingerly on his stomach with a front paw and then a back paw as he progressed.

The dog's owner approached on the other end of the slack leash. David couldn't see the man's face from his position on the ground. “You were in his path,” the owner said from above. Dog and owner approached the end of the sidewalk, looked each way, and crossed the street.

 

42.

THE POLICE STATION was centered in the main town square and surrounded by a constant stop-and-go flow of traffic. The building, which was the color of old oatmeal in a jar, had once been the town's first bank. Inside, dusty marble floors matched the walls and baseboards stained with neglect. The building was a hundred years old, and few improvements had been made to the electrical map over the course of its life. Schoolchildren on station tours blinked when they entered the dark rotunda from outside. They bumped into one another, necks craned back toward the domed ceiling.

David took the stairs up to the third floor. He liked the sound his feet made on the marble steps and thought about installing similar stone in the primed, ready stairwell of his own home. Franny would find the stairs extravagant. She might not even recognize the place when she returned to it. She might leave the house, keep walking down the street, and lose herself in the woods.

The stone and the sound it made gave the room a feeling of permanence, as was the purpose of its design. He imagined how similar the old police station would remain after the end times came to pass, for example. He had been taught as a child that the end times could come to pass at any moment. A strong structure would stand even a spiritual test. The horsemen might knock down some file cabinets and vaporize all the nonbelievers, but the marble flooring would survive.

The third floor was a hallway of doors leading off the rotunda. Behind the doors, individuals sat behind desks, determining when to investigate private citizens. David saw a pair of uniformed officers and followed them into the detective unit. At the front desk, a boy was using the side of his hand to organize a pile of staples on the desk, brushing them off the surface and into one of the watercooler's paper cones. “Do you have an appointment?” the boy asked.

“I don't. I'm here to see Detective Chico,” said David. “He might be expecting me. My name is David, young man.”

“You don't have an appointment?”

“Sorry, is the receptionist here?” David was bad at guessing the ages of children but estimated this one to be between six and fourteen years old.

“You'll have to wait,” said the child, dropping the paper cone into the trash and taking up the stapler again, ejecting staples individually onto the desk. He pointed at an empty seat on a bench, next to a woman hunched over a clipboard.

“It'll just take a second,” David said.

The child switched the stapler to his nondominant hand and jabbed toward the bench with his stronger pointer. “I'll let the detective know you're here,” he said.

David sat. The boy frowned and resumed his stapler task, ejecting spent staples one by one until the stapler was empty. He took a new paper cup from the watercooler and filled it again, bringing his face close to the desk to focus on his task. When the cup was full, the boy dropped it into the trash, slid off his chair, and walked into the back room.

“Your best bet is the awning behind the trash compactor in the alley on Fifth Street,” the woman said. She was wearing a purple tracksuit. The map on her notepad was dotted with stars and skulls. “Sometimes you can score in the hallway in front of the ATM in the city center, but that's rare because there's all this light going right into your face, right into your eyes.” She smelled like a bucket of peaches in an advanced state of decomposition. “You'd think there on the corner of Fifth where those kids hang out by the grocery would be a good spot, but cops are always watching there. They got cameras, and inside each camera is at least two eyes. I saw a camera with three eyes once, but the third eye was busted and kept rolling around at the top of the lens. I was trying to fix it but the two other eyes called for help. You ever ask a stranger to look at your tongue?”

The boy was back at the desk. He was taking a pair of safety scissors to a piece of construction paper. “That's enough,” he said.

“I'm worried,” she said, tearing off a sliver of paper on the edge of her notebook and packing it into the side of her mouth.

“I'll look at your tongue later,” the boy said.

“Are your parents around?” David asked him.

“Depends on how you define ‘around,' and how you define ‘parents,'” the woman said. She turned in her seat, shifting from hip to hip, chewing. “Depends how you define ‘missing,' depends how you define ‘dead,'” she said.

The boy began searching for something in the recesses of his desk. “Quite enough,” he said.

The woman was scratching her face with her pencil; then she threw the pencil into her lap and clawed at herself with her fingernails. “I'll get you started,” she said. “Christ, scratching is the resurrection.”

Chico emerged from the back room. “David,” he said. “What a pleasant surprise. My executive secretary said you were here, but I didn't believe it until now.”

The boy slumped. “Why didn't you believe me?”

The detective gestured for David to follow. “Only a joke,” he said to the child. “We'll talk about it later.”

Chico's office was dark and dominated by newspapers and pieces of books and maps and photocopied stacks of paper, all of which encroached on his keyboard and side cabinets. The paper mounted an offense against his coffee, jutting over it, spare pages drooping over the steaming mug. The room smelled of ink and paper clips. Chico picked a stack off of one of the chairs and balanced it on a smaller stack on the edge of his desk. “Doing some catch-up this morning,” he said. “I'm glad you came by. What can I do for you?”

“I want to know what you know about my wife.” David nudged folders on the floor until he had enough space for his feet.

“The autopsy came back,” Chico said, still standing, flipping open a file. “She was found with multiple lacerations on her arms and legs. Massive laceration on the right-side femoral artery, which killed her.” He tapped the top of his right thigh. “Something caused by a dull blade, sad to say. No drugs in her system. Some vegetable matter in her stomach, also objects like thin cloth or paper, about the size of a berry.” He tapped his pencil on his desk. “A small berry.”

“Cloth or paper?”

The detective shrugged and flipped the page. “Matter like what gets eaten by stomach acid for five to seven hours. We couldn't get anything out of it. The rest is stuff you already knew. She was barefoot, hypothermic. She would have lost her toes had she survived the event.” He looked up. “We can slow down if this is bothering you.”