Vinegar Girl (16 page)

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” she snapped.

She would be reclaiming her old room, it appeared. Her life would pick up where it had left off. On Monday when she went in to work she would explain that things just hadn’t panned out. She would tell Adam Barnes that she wasn’t married after all.

This didn’t cheer her up in the least. Adam had nothing to do with her, really. He would always make her feel too big and too gruff and too shocking; she would forever be trying to watch her words when she was with him. He was not the kind of person who liked her true self, for better or worse.

This last phrase sent a little echo of sadness through her. It took her a moment to recollect why.

She rose and followed Bunny into the aisle. It felt as if she had lead in her stomach. All the color seemed to have been washed out of the room, and she saw how bland it was—a dead place.

She and Bunny stood waiting while their father shook their uncle’s hand—or more like
clung
to his hand, with both of his own, as if hanging on for dear life. “Thank you anyhow, Theron,” he said in a funereal voice. “I apologize for taking up your—”

“Khello?”

Pyotr was standing in the corridor doorway, with Miss Brood smiling anxiously behind his left shoulder. He wore an outfit so shabby that he looked like a homeless person: a stained white T-shirt torn at the neck and translucent with age, very short baggy plaid shorts that Kate worried might be his underwear, and red rubber flip-flops. “You!” he said too loudly. It was Bunny he was addressing. He charged into the chapel, and Miss Brood melted away again. “Do not think for one minute that you will not be arrested,” he told Bunny.

She said, “Huh?”

He arrived directly in front of her and set his face too close to hers. “You…vegetable eater!” he told her. “You bleedy-heart!”

Bunny took a step backward and dabbed at her cheek with the heel of one hand. He must have been spitting as he talked. “What is
with
you?” she asked him.

“You went to lab in dead of night; I know you did. I do not know where you took mice but I know it was you who did this thing.”

“Me!” Bunny said. “You think it was
me
who did it! You honestly believe I would mess up my own father’s project! You’re nuts. Tell him, Kate.”

Dr. Battista managed to slip in between them at this point. He said, “Pyoder, I need to know. How bad is it?”

Pyotr turned away from Bunny to clap a hand heavily on Dr. Battista’s shoulder. “Is bad,” he told him. “This is the truth. Is bad as it can get.”

“They’re
all
gone? Every one?”

“Every one. Both racks empty.”

“But how—?”

Pyotr was walking him toward the front of the chapel now, his hand still resting on Dr. Battista’s shoulder. “I wake up early,” he said. “I think I will go to lab early so I am in time for wedding. I get to door; is locked the same as always. I punch combination. I go inside. I go to mouse room.”

They slowed to a stop a few feet from the altar. Uncle Theron and Kate and Bunny stayed where they were, watching. Then Pyotr turned to look back at Kate. “Where
are
you?” he asked her.

“Me?”

“Come on! We get married.”

“Oh, well,” Dr. Battista said, “I don’t know if that’s really…I think I’d just like to get on down to the lab now, Pyoder, even if there’s nothing to—”

But Kate said, “Wait till we say our vows, Father. You can check the lab afterward.”

“Kate Battista!” Bunny said. “You are surely not going ahead with this!”

“Well…”

“Did you hear how he just talked to me?”

“Well, he’s upset,” Kate told her.

“I am
not
goddamned
upset
!” Pyotr bellowed.

“You see what I mean,” Kate told Bunny.

“Come here
now
!” Pyotr shouted.

Uncle Theron said, “Goodness, he
is
upset,” and he chuckled, shaking his head. He walked up the aisle to the altar, where he turned and held both arms out from his sides like an annunciating angel. “Kate, dear?” he asked. “Coming?”

Bunny gave a hiss of disbelief, and Kate turned and handed her tote to her. “Okay, fine,” Bunny told her. “Be like that. The two of you deserve each other.”

But she accepted the tote, and she trailed after Kate up the aisle.

At the altar, Kate took her place next to Pyotr. “I at first did not understand it,” Pyotr was telling Dr. Battista. “Was obvious what had happened, but still I did not understand. I am just staring. Two empty racks and no cages. Painted letters on wall next to racks, painted directly on wall:
ANIMALS ARE NOT LAB EQUIPMENT
. This is when I think to call police.”

“The police: oh, well, what can the police do?” Dr. Battista said. “It’s too late now for all that.”

“The police take a very, very long time and when they finally come they are not intelligent. They say to me, ‘Can you describe these mice, sir?’ ‘Describe!’ I say. ‘What to describe? They are ordinary
Mus musculus
; enough is said.’ ”

“Ah,” Dr. Battista said. “Quite right.” Then he said, “I don’t see why
I
had to get dressed up if you didn’t.”

“She is marrying me, not my clothes,” Pyotr said.

Uncle Theron cleared his throat. He said, “Dearly beloved…”

The two men turned to face him.

“We are gathered here in the presence…”

“There must be some way they can track them down, though,” Dr. Battista murmured to Pyotr. “Hire a rat terrier or something. Don’t they keep dogs for such purposes?”

“Dogs!” Pyotr said, turning slightly. “Dogs would eat them! You want this?”

“Or ferrets, perhaps.”

“Do you, Katherine,” Uncle Theron was saying, in an unusually firm voice, “take this man, Pyoder…”

Kate could sense Pyotr’s tension from the extreme rigidity of his body, and her father was jittering with agitation on the other side of him, and she could feel the waves of Bunny’s disapproval behind her. Only Kate herself was calm. She stood very straight and kept her eyes on her uncle.

By the time they got to “You may kiss the bride,” her father was already turning to leave the altar. “Okay, we go now,” Pyotr said, even while he was ducking forward to give Kate a peck on the cheek. “The policemen want—” he told Dr. Battista, and then Kate stepped squarely in front of him and took his face between both of her hands and kissed him very gently on the lips. His face was cool but his lips were warm and slightly chapped. He blinked and stepped back. “—policemen want to talk to you too,” he said faintly to Dr. Battista.

“Congratulations to both of you,” Uncle Theron said.

In order to get into Pyotr’s car, Kate had to enter from the driver’s side and struggle past the stick shift to the passenger’s side. This was because the passenger-side door seemed to have been caved in by something, and it no longer opened. She didn’t ask what had happened. It was pretty clear that Pyotr had been driving even more distractedly than usual.

She put her tote on the floor among an assortment of discarded flyers, and then she fumbled beneath her for whatever the lump was that she was sitting on. It turned out to be Pyotr’s cell phone. Once he was settled behind the wheel, she held it toward him and asked, “Were you texting while
driving
?” He didn’t respond; just grabbed it away from her and stuffed it into the right front pocket of his shorts. Then he twisted the key in the ignition, and the engine roared to life with a grinding sound.

Before he could back out of his parking space, though, Dr. Battista rapped his knuckles on Pyotr’s side window. Pyotr cranked the window down and barked, “What!”

“I’m dropping Bunny off at home and then I’m going straight to the lab,” Dr. Battista told him. “I’ll talk to the police after I check things out. See you two at the reception, I guess.”

Pyotr merely nodded and shifted violently into reverse.

Barreling down the Jones Falls Expressway, he seemed to feel the need to relive every last second of the tragedy. “I stand there; I think, ‘What am I seeing?’ I think, ‘I will just blink my eyes and then everything will be normal.’ So I blink, but racks are still empty. No cages. Writing on wall looks
shouting,
looks loud. But room is very, very still; has no motion. You know that mice are always moving. They rustle and they squeak; they hurry to the front when they hear anybody coming; they find humans…promising. Now, nothing. Stillness. Four, five cedar chips on bare floor.”

His window was still open and the wind was whipping her hair into snarls, but Kate decided not to mention it.

“I am so not wanting to believe it that I turn and walk into other room. As if mice just maybe took themselves elsewhere. I say, ‘Khello?’ I don’t know why I say, ‘Khello?’ Is not as if they could answer.”

“You want to veer left at this fork,” Kate said, because they were traveling so fast that it seemed he might not be planning to do that. At the last second he swerved violently, throwing her against her door, and shortly afterward he took a speedy right onto North Charles Street without checking for traffic. (
He
certainly felt no hesitation about merging.) “I never trusted that Bunny, right from start,” he told Kate. “So baby-acting. Is like what they say in my country about—”

“Bunny didn’t do this,” Kate told him. “She doesn’t have the nerve.”

“Of course she did it. I told police she did it.”

“You what?”

“Detective wrote her name down in notebook.”

“Oh, Pyotr!”

“She knows combination of lock, and she is vegetable eater,” Pyotr said.

“Lots of people are vegetarians, but that doesn’t make them burglars,” Kate said. She braced her feet against the floor; they were approaching an amber light. “Besides, she’s not really a vegetarian; she just says she is.”

Pyotr sped up even faster and sailed through the light. “She
is
a vegetarian,” he said. “She made you take the meat from the mush-dish.”

“Yes, but then she keeps stealing my beef jerky.”

“She is stealing your beef jerky?”

“I have to change my hiding place every couple of days because she’s always swiping it. She’s no more vegetarian than I am! It’s just one of those phases, one of those teenage fads. You have to tell the police she didn’t do it, Pyotr. Tell them you made a mistake.”

“Anyway,” Pyotr said gloomily, “what is the difference who did it? Mice are vanished. All that care we took for them; now they are scampering the streets of Baltimore.”

“You really think animal lovers would turn a bunch of cage-reared mice loose in city traffic? They do have
some
common sense. Those mice are stashed away someplace safe and protected, with all their antibodies or whatever perfectly intact.”

“Please do not contradict me,” Pyotr said.

Kate rolled her eyes at the ceiling, and neither one of them spoke again.

Dr. Battista’s plan had been for Kate to start wearing her mother’s wedding ring after the ceremony, and she had brought it with her to the church. But it had not been mentioned during the vows—a sign, perhaps, that Uncle Theron was more flustered by the general tumult than he had let on—and so now she bent and drew her billfold from her tote and took the ring out of the coin compartment. The wedding ring was yellow gold and her engagement ring was white gold, but her father had told her that was perfectly acceptable. She slipped it onto her finger and returned her billfold to her tote.

They zipped down North Charles, somehow managing to hit every intersection just as the traffic light was turning red. Pyotr never once stopped. They whizzed past cherry trees and Bradford pear trees in full bloom, each with a puddle of pink or white petals on the ground underneath. When they reached the construction mess around the Johns Hopkins campus, Pyotr took a snappy turn off Charles without bothering to signal, nearly mowing down a crowd of young people carrying picnic baskets. It was almost one o’clock now, and the whole world seemed to be heading out for lunch—everyone laughing, calling to friends, strolling aimlessly with no sense of urgency. Pyotr cursed under his breath and cranked his window shut.

In front of Mrs. Murphy’s house, Pyotr scraped his tires alongside the curb and cut the engine. He opened his door and got out and nearly shut it on Kate’s ankles, because she was in the act of sliding past the stick shift and across the driver’s seat. “Watch it!” she told him. At least he had the grace then to stand back and wait for her to emerge, but he still didn’t speak, and he closed the door with unnecessary firmness once she was out.

They smushed a layer of pale pink blossoms carpeting the sidewalk. They climbed the three brick steps and came to a stop on the stoop. Pyotr slapped his front pockets. Then he slapped his rear pockets. Then he said, “Hell damn,” and put his finger on the doorbell and held it there.

It seemed at first that no one would answer. Finally, though, a creaking sound came from inside, and then Mrs. Liu flung the door open and demanded, “Why you ring?”

She was wearing what appeared to be the same clothes she had worn when Kate first met her, but she was no longer all smiles. Without giving Kate so much as a glance, she scowled fiercely at Pyotr and said, “Mrs. Murphy having her nap.”

“I don’t want Mrs. Murphy; I want to get into house!” Pyotr shouted.

“You have key to get into house!”

“I locked key in car!”

“Again? You do this again?”

“Do not
quack
at me! You are very rude!” And Pyotr shoved his way past her and strode directly to the staircase.

“Sorry,” Kate told Mrs. Liu. “We didn’t mean to disturb you. Monday I’m getting an extra key made, so this shouldn’t happen again.”

“
He
is the one is very rude,” Mrs. Liu said.

“He’s had a really hard day.”

“He has many hard days,” Mrs. Liu said. But she stepped back, finally, and let Kate enter the house. Belatedly, she asked, “You got married?”

“Right.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” Kate said.

She hoped Mrs. Liu wasn’t feeling sorry for her. Before, she had acted so fond of Pyotr, but now it seemed they disliked each other.

Pyotr had reached the second flight of stairs before she caught up with him. She bypassed him and started toward the room that was going to be hers, where she planned to deposit her tote. Behind her, Pyotr said, “Where my extra keys are?”

She paused and turned. He had stopped on the landing, and he was gazing all around him. Since the landing was entirely bare, without a stick of furniture or a picture or so much as a hook on the wall, it seemed an unlikely place to look for his keys, but there he stood, wearing a baffled expression.

She censored the first response that came to her, which was “How should
I
know where your extra keys are?” She set her tote on the floor and asked, “Where do you keep them?”

“In kitchen drawer,” he said.

“Let’s look in the kitchen drawer, then, why don’t we,” she said. She spoke more slowly and evenly than usual, so that she wouldn’t come across as exasperated.

She led the way to the kitchen and began opening the cranky white metal drawers beneath the counter: one drawer containing dime-store knives and forks and spoons, one containing an assortment of cooking utensils, one containing dishcloths. She returned to the utensil drawer. That seemed to have the most possibilities, even if it wasn’t where she herself would have kept keys. She rattled through several spatulas, a whisk, a hand-cranked eggbeater…Pyotr stood watching with his arms hanging limp, offering no help.

“Here you go,” she said finally, and she held up an aluminum shower-curtain ring bearing a house key and a Volkswagen key.

Pyotr said, “Ah!” and lunged for them, but she took a step back and hid the keys behind her.

“First you have to call the police,” she said, “and tell them you made a mistake about Bunny.
Then
you get the keys.”

“What?” he said. “No. Hand me keys, Katherine. I am husband and I say hand me keys.”

“I am wife and I say no,” she said.

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!”