Cactus Heart - [18]

Somebody said a great novelist could see the beautiful young girl inside the old woman. It would have been difficult with Frances Richie, even though the old news photos showed a young woman who was somewhere between cute and beautiful. Now her face was dominated by an enormous double chin, bulbous nose and battleship gray eyes poking from bony temples-the skull starting to come out at last-all mounted on a body long since overtaken by starchy food, inactivity, and disease. Heather Amis turned her toward me, knelt down and told her who I was.

She just stared and nobody said anything for a long time. In the silence, the room’s smell of Lysol covering urine became apparent. Somewhere in the background, an electric something-or-other hummed.

Finally, I said the only thing that seemed to matter. “We found the bodies of Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell.”

Frances Richie just stared that watery, unfocused stare, her eyes fixed on a place we couldn’t see.

I went on: “We found them bricked up in a wall, down in a tunnel in a building near Union Station in downtown Phoenix.”

Heather shot me a nasty look. I could see Frances Richie breathing harder, her bulky chest laboring to fill her lungs.

“Miss Richie,” I said, “tell us how those boys got in that building.”

“Is this really necessary?” Heather whispered, looking at me like I was the vilest man alive. “I’m going to get some coffee. I can’t listen to this.” She clopped off down a hallway, and I was alone with Frances Richie. But the old woman looked out into the sunlight, her face an unreadable ruin of wrinkles and fat. I stood and walked maybe ten feet, to a grimy window.

Outside, brand-new sidewalks cut across the flat brown earth of the desert, heading to other buildings past barbed wire, elaborate gates and security cameras perched like electronic vultures. On the other side of the parking lot, a group of male convicts wearing orange jumpsuits were doing something in a cotton field. What was the tunnel into Frances Richie?

I said, “I saw the photo of you in the dark dress the day you were brought back to Phoenix. Seemed like a very pretty dress.”

I continued to look outside, just like she was doing.

I heard a word that sounded like “blue.” Then she said, very clearly and not in an old-lady voice, “It was navy blue. It was the first store-bought dress I ever had in my life.”

I didn’t turn around. I didn’t want to break the spell.

“You bought it in Phoenix?”

“It was a present. From someone very dear to me.”

I spoke carefully. “From Jack? Jack Talbott?”

I turned to face her and she merely shook her head. Then her voice seemed to gather strength and timbre from being used again. “Jack Talbott. I haven’t thought of him in years.”

Now it was my turn to be silent.

“He was just a boy, really. We were so young then. He had a hard life and didn’t know any other way of getting by in the world, so he drank, he ran with women, he fought, he had a very quick temper.” She paused.

“He was your lover?”

She strained to hear. “Lover?” she asked loudly. “They told me never to talk about that, never.”

“It’s okay.”

She inhaled loudly. “He always treated me like a lady, like a queen.”

“How did you meet him?” I leaned against the wall. Maybe the distance between us made her feel safe.

“I worked at the Owl Pharmacy on Adams Street,” she said. Her sentences had a very even cadence until the last two words, when they felt an emphasis whether they needed it there or not. “Is it still there?”

I shook my head.

“We’d come from Oklahoma in 1936 and papa worked off and on in the produce sheds down by the railroad tracks. But a truck backed over him one day and he died.” She paused and breathed heavily. “So mother worked as a maid, but she died of TB, and I got a job at the drug store. I could eat lunch for free at the soda fountain.”

She reared her head up a little and took another deep breath. “He was walking by one day on the sidewalk, and I was inside by the pharmacy counter, and we saw each other through the window. And he turned back and came inside. I didn’t want to seem easy, but I couldn’t stop looking at him, couldn’t stop smiling. And he couldn’t either. What is your name?”

“David Mapstone.” I could see Heather starting back in the room, but she picked up on my eyes and came in slowly, quietly, behind us.

“Jack Talbott worked for Mr. Yarnell. Jack wanted to open his own garage someday.” She raised her head again, as if inhaling the memories. She paused. “Mr. Yarnell took kindly to him. Mr. Yarnell was a kind man.”

She licked her mouth with a huge gray tongue. “Do you believe in love at first sight, David Mapstone, sheriff’s deputy? Do young people still believe in that?”

I shrugged not-so-wisely. “I’ve seen it happen.”

“Never met a girl in stir who didn’t believe,” Frances Richie said. It was strange to hear a woman who looked like a grandmother use a word like stir so casually. But she was nobody’s grandmother.

“Why did Jack take the twins?” I was so damned clever. Just toss in the hard question after the softballs.

“Jack.” It was the only thing she said. She rubbed her eyes.