fan, the room was warm. But she hadn’t been sweating before she began to recall the dream.
“Is there anything else, any other details?” I asked. “Even the smallest thing might help me. What were you ... I mean your dead body ... what was it lying on? A floor of some kind? Grass? Blacktop?”
She thought for a moment, shook her head. “Can’t say. The only other thing was the man, the dead man.”
I sat up straighter on the sofa. “You mean another ... corpse?”
“Next to me ... next to my body. He was sort of tumbled on his side, one arm twisted behind his back.”
“Were there other victims?” Stormy asked.
“Maybe. I didn’t see any but him.”
“Did you recognize him?”
“Didn’t get a look at his face. It was turned away from me.”
I said, “Viola, if you could try hard to remember—”
“Anyway, I wasn’t interested in him. I was too scared to wonder who he was. I looked in my own dead face, and I tried to scream, but I couldn’t, and I tried harder, and then I was sitting up in bed, the scream squeezing out of me but, you know, only just the wheeze of a scream.”
The memory agitated Viola. She started to get up from the chair. Maybe her legs were weak. She sat down again.
As though she were reading my mind, Stormy asked, “What was he wearing?”
“What—him in the dream? One foot bent back, the shoe half off. A loafer.”
We waited while Viola searched her memory. Dreams that are as rich as cream while they unfold are skim milk when we wake, and in time they wash out of our minds, leaving as little residue as water filtered through cheesecloth.
“His pants were splattered with blood,” Viola said. “Khakis, I think. Tan pants, anyway.”
The slowly swiveling fan stirred the leaves of a potted palm in one corner of the room, raising from its fronds a dry rustling that made me think of cockroaches scurrying, and rats, and nothing good.
Reading the last details of her dream that yet remained in the cheesecloth of memory, Viola said, “A polo shirt ...”
I got up from the sofa. I needed to move. I realized that the room was too small for pacing, but I remained on my feet.
“Green,” Viola said. “A green polo shirt.”
I thought of the guy behind the shoe-rental counter at Green Moon Lanes, the blonde drawing beer behind the bar—both in their new work uniforms.
Her voice growing even quieter, Viola said, “Tell me the truth, Odd. Look at my face. Do you see death in me?”
I said, “Yes.”
ALTHOUGH I’M UNABLE TO READ FACES to discover either a person’s future or the secrets of her heart, I could not look a moment longer at Viola Peabody’s face, for I imagined what I couldn’t truly read, and in my mind’s eye saw her motherless daughters standing at her grave.
I went to one of the open windows. Beyond lay a side yard overhung by pepper trees. Out of the warm darkness came the sweet fragrance of jasmine that had been planted and tended by Viola’s caring hands.
Ordinarily, I have no fear of the night. I feared this one, however, because the change from August 14 to August 15 was coming express-train fast, as if the rotation of the earth had drastically gained speed by the flicking of a godly finger.
I turned to Viola, who still sat on the edge of her armchair. Her eyes, always large, were owlish now, and her brown face seemed to have a gray undertone. I said, “Isn’t tomorrow your day off?”
She nodded.
Because she had a sister who could baby-sit her daughters, Viola worked at the Grille six days a week.
Stormy said, “Do you have plans? What are you doing tomorrow?”
“I figured I’d work around the house in the morning. Always things to do here. In the afternoon ... that’s for the girls.”
“You mean Nicolina and Levanna?” I asked, naming her daughters.
“Saturday—that’s Levanna’s birthday. She’ll be seven. But the Grille is busy Saturdays, good tips. I can’t miss work. So we were going to celebrate early.”
“Celebrate how?”
“That new movie, it’s a big hit with all the kids, the one with the dog. We were going to the four-o’clock show.”
Before Stormy spoke, I knew the essence of what she would say. “Might be more of a crowd in a cool theater on a summer afternoon than at a Little League game.”
I asked Viola, “What did you plan after the movie?”
“Terri said bring them to the Grille, dinner on her.”
The Grille could be noisy when all the tables were filled, but I didn’t think that the enthusiastic conversation of the patrons in our little restaurant could be mistaken for the roar of a crowd. In dreams, of course, everything can be distorted, including sounds.
With the open window at my back, I suddenly felt vulnerable to an extent that made the skin pucker on the nape of my neck.
I looked out into the side yard again. All appeared to be as it had been a minute ago.
The graceful branches of the peppers hung in the breathless, jasmine-scented night air. Shadows and shrubs plaited their different darknesses, but as far as I could tell, they didn’t give cover to Bob Robertson or anyone else.
Nevertheless, I stepped away from the window, to the side of it, when I turned once more to Viola. “I think you ought to change your plans for tomorrow.”
By saving Viola from this destiny, I might be sentencing someone else to die horribly in her place, just as might have been the case if I had warned off the blond bartender at the bowling alley. The only difference was that I didn’t know the blonde ... and Viola was a friend.
Sometimes complex and difficult moral choices are decided less by reason and by right than by sentiment. Perhaps such decisions are the paving stones on the road to Hell; if so, my route is well paved, and the welcoming committee already knows my name.
In my defense, I can only say that I sensed, even then, that saving Viola meant saving her daughters, too. Three lives, not one.
“Is there any hope ...” Viola touched her face with the trembling fingers of one hand, tracing the bones of jaw and cheek and brow, as if discovering not her skull but instead Death’s countenance in the process of replacing her own. “... any hope this can pass from me?”
“Fate isn’t one straight road,” I said, becoming the oracle that earlier in the day I had declined to be for her. “There are forks in it, many different routes to different ends. We have the free will to choose the path.”
“Do whatever Oddie says,” Stormy advised, “and you’ll be all right.”
“It’s not that easy,” I said quickly. “You can change the road you take, but sometimes it can bend back to lead you straight to that same stubborn fate.”
Viola regarded me with too much respect, perhaps even awe. “I was just sure you knew about such things, Odd, about all that’s Otherly and Beyond.”
Uneasy with her admiration, I went to the other open window. Terri’s Mustang stood under a street-lamp in front of the house. All quiet. Nothing to be alarmed about. Nothing and everything.
We had taken steps to be sure we weren’t being followed