It was Peters in a car of about the same vintage as his truck, but with a more recent license plate. Mimi watched with despair as he pulled up to within a few yards of where she stood. He got out and with only a nasty glance her way went to the edge of the precipice and looked down. He turned to her.
“Did you see anything?”
She nodded. “It’s gone,” she said.
He swore, looked around, and then looked back at her. “What about the boy?”
She shrugged. A good question, she thought. What about the boy? But then Peters turned to look up, through the rain, at the hillside with which she had been having her one-sided conversation or soliloquy or whatever it was.
“He up there?”
“Do I look like I know?”
Peters was standing near enough to her that she could smell whatever gunk he’d put in his hair when he’d come a-calling. But she wasn’t frightened of him at all. His attention was on the hillside. He was chewing away at his lower lip, scanning the brush, as she had done, but, from the stormy expression on his face, it was pretty clear they did not have the same motives. And in the next moment, it became clearer still. He walked over to his car, opened the back door, and took out a rifle.
“You see this, Cramer Lee? You come out right now and I’ll hold my fire. You stay hid and I start peppering the bush with this thing-see how you like that!”
He had been ready to go to her. He had been that close to standing up, making his way down the hill, and coming clean. He even knew near enough what he would say, or at least the first thing he would say. I am not a thief, he would declare to her, his hand on his heart. He would not be tongue-tied. There would be a lot of explaining to do, but everything depended on her believing that he had not stolen Jay’s guitars, although he had a sinking feeling he knew who had. He would explain to her about who Jackson Page was to him and who he was to Jackson Page. That’s how he would start.
And then-Cramer’s luck being what it was-Peters arrived and he had a gun. A shotgun, twelve-gauge, by the look of it. And he might have started shooting, but the storm came instead, and it didn’t take but a moment before there were sheets of rain pounding down on the road, and Peters was running for the shelter of his car. And it still might have worked out, because Mimi wouldn’t accept the old man’s offer of a ride. She backed away from him, yelling at him, though Cramer couldn’t hear through the rain what it was she was saying. But then there was an almighty flash of lightning and a thunderclap, so loud and close that Cramer covered his head with his arms as if the whole roof of the sky was caving in. And when he looked up again, through the gray veils of rain, Peters was dragging Mimi to the car and pushing her in. And they drove off.
Jay stood on the screened-in porch looking out at the storm. The river looked like an ocean, wild with whitecaps. It was lucky he hadn’t kayaked down from the snye or he would never get back. He checked his watch. Where was the Internet guy? He should never have done this. Never let Mimi talk him into letting her stay up there alone. How did she do it? She was four years younger than him, for Christ’s sake! Chutzpah-that was it. Guts. He was gutless. That was what was wrong with him. It was what was wrong with his music. Who cared what was right, what was serious, what was befitting? He had gotten by so far on clever. He had gotten by so far on pitch-perfect. He had gotten by so far on following the rules. But what he hadn’t done was anything remotely gutsy. If he wanted electric guitars in his goddamned piece, then he should just use electric guitars! Of course, he didn’t have an electric guitar anymore. And he couldn’t help thinking that it was his gutlessness that had led to this impasse.
Thunder crashed, not far away. He phoned Mimi again. He had tried a couple of times without any luck. He tried to tell himself the storm was responsible. He hoped she was okay. If anything happened to her…
“Hello?”
“Thank God!” he said. “Where are you?”
“Mr. Peters is driving me home,” she said. “Aren’t you, Mr. Peters?”
“From where?”
“It’s a long story.”
“What’s going on?”
“I’m fine. But I can hardly hear you.” She was shouting now. “I’ll tell you all about it, when you get back out here.”
“Okay,” he said.
“But, Jay? Stay on the line, okay? Did you get that?”
“Yeah. Sure. What’s up?”
“Just in case Mr. Peters accidentally forgets to stop and let me off.”
“Is he kidnapping you?”
“No. But better safe than sorry, right?” Thunder boomed again, louder on the phone than outside Jay’s place. The storm must be centered up that way. “Are you still there?” she asked.
“I’m still here,” he said. “I won’t leave.”
“I know it,” she said, and he marveled at her confidence in him.
“Ah, here we are, now. Hold on.”
“I’m holding.”
Jay listened, heard the sound of the car slowing down, muffled by the rain. Then the car door opened. After that he couldn’t hear anything but the rain pelting down and the car door slamming shut.
“Home free!” Mimi shouted above the clamor into her phone. “Thanks, bro!”
And she hung up.
Cramer wanted to go straight to her, straight to the house on the snye. He didn’t trust Peters, but it wasn’t just that. He had held too much inside for too long. That was part of what had gotten him in this mess. Somewhere along the line, he had let holding himself together get confused with holding back anything that he might really want. Maybe he could even put that into words for Mimi. He had this crazy feeling that he could say anything to her, and the thought of it pushed him on through the storm. But there was something he had to do first, en route. And soon enough he saw ahead, the mailbox, hanging on its chains from the cedar pole, bouncing around in the wind like a piece of flotsam on choppy water.
He looked inside. There was no letter there. So he ran up the steep drive, the gulley down its middle churning with brown runoff, and across the windswept yard to the house. The screen door was flapping, slapping back against the wall with each gust. The inner door was wide open, the doorstep and linoleum floor sopping wet.
The house had been turned upside down. There wasn’t a drawer that hadn’t been opened, its guts spilled out on the floor. Every cupboard had been raided, the studio torn apart. Upstairs was the same.
Cramer hadn’t known what he would find, but this mess did not fall outside of his expectations. He stood looking coolly around, realizing that this was something he could not clean up. This was the kind of disaster that would have happened ages ago if he hadn’t been there to stop it from happening. Why was this only clear to him now?
There was nothing he wanted from here. Well, almost nothing. In the kitchen, he found a blue velveteen bag with a yellow string to close it. A bottle of Seagram’s whiskey had arrived in that bag many years ago, but now all it held were a handful of silver spoons that had belonged to his grandmother. He chucked them out and went back up to his room to recover what it was he would take with him. He felt a sense of urgency, as if this house, like everything else around him, was on the verge of sinking. He found the stone and, under his mattress, the picture of Mimi. He wrapped it in a facecloth and placed the two objects in the little blue velveteen bag. Then he stepped back out into the storm.