“No. I applied to a dozen different schools and had the answers sent to a post office box. I felt like a woman having an affair, sneaking around. And that’s how my mother and father treated me when they found out. My dad has come around a little — I think he suspects how bad it was, although of course he doesn’t want to know any of the details — but my mother? Not her. She’s furious with me. She had to change churches and quit the Sewing Bee. Because she couldn’t hold her head up, she says.”
In a way, this seemed as cruel and crazy as the broom, but I didn’t say so. A different aspect of the matter interested me more than Sadie’s conventional Southern parents. “
“No. My mother understood, of course.” Sadie’s ordinarily faint Southern accent deepened. “I just shamed that poor boy so bad that he didn’t want to tell
“Never a word from him? Not even a postcard saying, ‘Hey Sadie, let’s tie up the loose ends so we can get on with our lives?’”
“How could there be? He doesn’t know where I am, and I’m sure he doesn’t care.”
“Is there anything you want from him? Because I’m sure a lawyer—”
She kissed me. “The only thing I want is here in bed with me.”
I kicked the sheets down to our ankles. “Look at me, Sadie. No charge.”
She looked. And then she touched.
I drowsed afterward. Not deep — I could still hear the wind and that one rattling windowpane — but I got far enough down to dream. Sadie and I were in an empty house. We were naked. Something was moving around upstairs — it made thudding, unpleasant noises. It might have been pacing, but it seemed as if there were too many feet. I didn’t feel guilty that we were going to be discovered with our clothes off. I felt scared. Written in charcoal on the peeling plaster of one wall were the words I WILL KILL THE PRESIDENT SOON. Below it, someone had added NOT SOON ENOUGH HES FULL OF DISEEZE. This had been printed in dark lipstick. Or maybe it was blood.
From overhead.
“I think it’s Frank Dunning,” I whispered to Sadie. I gripped her arm. It was very cold. It was like gripping the arm of a dead person. A woman who had been beaten to death with a sledgehammer, perhaps.
Sadie shook her head. She was looking up at the ceiling, her mouth trembling.
Plaster-dust sifting down.
“Then it’s John Clayton,” I whispered.
“No,” she said. “I think it’s the Yellow Card Man. He brought the Jimla.”
Above us, the thudding stopped abruptly.
She took hold of my arm and began to shake it. Her eyes were eating up her face. “It is! It’s the Jimla! And it heard us!
“Wake up, George! Wake up!”
I opened my eyes. She was propped on one elbow beside me, her face a pale blur. “What? What time is it? Do we have to go?” But it was still dark and the wind was still high.
“No. It isn’t even midnight. You were having a bad dream.” She laughed, a little nervously. “Maybe about football? Because you were saying ‘Jimla, Jimla.’”
“Was I?” I sat up. There was the scrape of a match and her face was momentarily illuminated as she lit a cigarette.
“Yes. You were. You said all kinds of stuff.”
That was not good. “Like what?”
“Most of it I couldn’t make out, but one thing was pretty clear. ‘Derry is Dallas,’ you said. Then you said it backwards. ‘Dallas is Derry.’ What was
“No.” But it’s hard to lie convincingly when you’re fresh out of sleep, even a shallow doze, and I saw skepticism on her face. Before it could deepen into disbelief, there was a knock at the door. At quarter to midnight, a knock.
We stared at each other.
The knock came again.
Sadie put her cigarette in the ashtray, gathered the sheet around her, and ran to the bathroom without a word. The door shut behind her.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“It’s Mr. Yorrity, sir — Bud Yorrity?”
One of the gay retired teachers who ran the place.
I got out of bed and pulled on my pants. “What is it, Mr. Yorrity?”
“I have a message for you, sir. Lady said it was urgent.”
I opened the door. He was a small man in a threadbare bathrobe. His hair was a sleep-frizzed cloud around his head. In one hand he held a piece of paper.
“What lady?”
“Ellen Dockerty.”
I thanked him for his trouble and closed the door. I unfolded the paper and read the message.
Sadie came out of the bathroom, still clutching the sheet. Her eyes were wide and frightened. “What is it?”
