Chapter 8
Alice left work that night as she had left the house in the morning, without speaking to her sister. Elizabeth was not amused. She had decided to give her sister the ring to snoop around in Marla's office and also to admit her oversight in not checking the computer, but they had not had another chance to talk before the end of the day. When Elizabeth went down to offer her sister the ring, Alice was already gone.
Alice's car was not parked in front of the house or even on the same block. The dream spot was occupied by an enormous red sport utility vehicle that was parked well over two feet from the curb and took up so much space in the street that cars driving by in opposite directions had to take turns passing it.
Elizabeth had to park around the corner and part way down the steep hill to Sugar Bottom. She turned the wheels toward the curb and prayed that the brake would hold. She trudged up the hill and around to the front door. When she turned the key in the lock, Penrose appeared in the foyer.
He said, "Put on the ring if you have it."
She could hear the sound of Dirk's voice and another man's raised in anger out in the living room. Fumbling with the buttons of her coat, she reached into her trouser pocket for the ring. She slipped it on and closed the door quietly behind her. "What's going on?"
"Hush. You might be invisible, but you are not inaudible. One of Dirk's ex-boyfriends is here, the one that he went to Mexico with. He wants the velvet Elvis back for some reason, and Dirk is refusing to give it to him. This is an excellent opportunity to get it out of the house. Do you think you could put it in his truck while they're arguing?"
This seemed rather duplicitous to Elizabeth. She had no particular feelings one way or another about the velvet Elvis, but assented when she saw Penrose's agitation. Tiptoeing past the door to the living room on her way back to the Velvis, she nearly let slip an exclamation of surprise when she saw Dirk's ex.
The leather-clad man she had seen shaking down Marla in the shoe store was sprawled across a dainty velvet sofa which swayed on its spindly carved legs. The piercings in his face outlined a nasty sneer. As he listened to Dirk refusing to give up his velvet painting, he clicked his tongue stud against his teeth in an irritating staccato.
Dirk was saying, "Listen, Carl, you can't show up out of the blue, months after we break up, and then demand a gift back. If you want a velvet Elvis, you can just order one off the Internet or something."
"I want that one. And I didn't give it to you, it was supposed to be ours, remember?" Carl tilted his head back and his eyes smoldered at Dirk from beneath perfectly etched brows.
Dirk laughed shortly.
Penrose touched Elizabeth's elbow and drew her back to the dining room before she could hear Dirk's retort. The Elvis hung in its shadowy place above the ebony sideboard. It moved slightly in the draft and its eyes seemed to follow Elizabeth as she approached. The Elvis bore more than a passing resemblance to Carl.
"This is probably the best chance we will have to get rid of it," Penrose said. "I am not corporeal enough to carry it all the way out to the truck, but you are."
"You were corporeal enough to drag me out of the sand pit," Elizabeth pointed out, rubbing wrists which ached with remembered cold. "Why do you want to get rid of it? I don't like it either, but it's Dirk's painting. Maybe we can just make him keep it in his room." The Elvis glowered threateningly and Elizabeth was reluctant even to touch it.
Penrose said, "I think it's cursed, or at least bad luck. I know that sounds superstitious, but if we have to believe in magic, we can believe in luck too. Hurry, before Dirk throws him out and we have to hide it in the trash or something." His voice took on a tone of urgency as the voices from the living room increased in volume. Carl was demonstrating an exquisite grasp of invective and its use as a crowbar. Elizabeth heard thumping sounds as the discussion grew more physical.
She reached up and removed the Velvis from its hook without looking it in the eyes. She quickly rolled it up around the rod from which the cloth was suspended. "How do I get this out without them seeing it? I can't hide it under my coat, it's too big. The guys will probably suspect something if they see it floating through the air and out the front door."
"Go out the back door and around the house. I don't know if his truck is unlocked, but you could just put it on the hood."
"Or up the tailpipe," Elizabeth said. She hurried through the kitchen and let herself out the back door.
Penrose came with her. Out in the twilight, his image seemed less solid than it did inside the house. He was looking a little peaked and Elizabeth wondered if pulling her out of the sandpit had been more of a strain than he'd allowed.
She looked both ways as she exited the garden. She did not want the floating velvet painting to be seen by the neighbors who were going from their cars to their houses. She heard a car door slam and saw Trip going up the steps to his house. He had not called her, in poor contrast with Officer Joe, who had already called Alice a few times and even chatted pleasantly with the others when they answered the phone. Trip looked distracted and she did not have to stop herself from hailing him; he did not look like he wanted to talk to anybody.
After Trip entered his building the coast was clear, except for a woman down the street, who was loaded down with grocery bags and attempting to herd three children in soccer uniforms up the brick steps to their home. Elizabeth ventured out towards the SUV. The truck's engine was running, so she did not immediately try to stuff the painting into the tailpipe. Instead she tried the front passenger side door. As she pulled on the handle, Carl and Dirk burst out the front door. Startled, she dropped the painting and scurried back around to the garden gate.
Dirk heard the rod of the painting bang against the sidewalk and ran down the steps. "What's going on?" he demanded. "Did you have some of your skeevy friends break in and steal it while you were messing with me?" He picked up the Velvis and brushed it off.
Carl grabbed for the painting, but Dirk held it out of his reach. Carl said, "I came here alone. Nobody broke into your place. Give it to me." He grabbed a handful of Dirk's shirt and took a swing at him.
Dirk whacked him in the head with the painting and drew blood from Carl's pierced brow. Carl dropped to his knees and let go of Dirk's shirt. Dirk backed away through the front gate and closed it behind him.
Carl wiped at his forehead, saw the blood on his hand, and shouted a few threats and obscenities, which were gleefully repeated by the soccer kids down the street, before he returned to his truck with a dire promise to be back.
Elizabeth went back around to the backyard. Thinking it would be a good idea to let Dirk cool down, she lingered for a while on the porch, looking out over the yard, which was in need of more raking, before going into the house. Elizabeth made a mental note to talk to Bob about the leaves. She suspected that Alice and Dirk were not the principal rakers in this household.
Penrose was sitting glumly on the swing and kicking at the floorboards of the porch.
"I'm sorry I didn't get rid of the Elvis," she said, although she was not terribly so.
Penrose looked like he needed cheering up. He said, "It's not your fault. I ought to be able to think of a good way to get rid of it myself."
"We, or you, could put it down in the sandpit in the basement. It could join my slippers and sink down into the train tunnel."
Penrose's eyes focused vaguely in the direction of the carriage house. "I have the feeling that that would be a very bad thing to do."
"You could burn it."
His eyes narrowed to tiny slits. She wondered if he could even see. "That could be worse," he said. "If it's cursed, then destroying it without taking proper precautions might have unforeseeably bad results. And the proper precautions are…complex."
Elizabeth thought of offering to have Miss Price deal with it for him. Instead, she left him to his own dark company and pulled off the ring as she entered the kitchen.
She found Dirk in the dining room, replacing his velvet Elvis in its spot above the sideboard.
"Did you come in through the back?" he asked.
"Yes."
He stood back and contemplated the Elvis. Despite an enigmatic, charming smile that she hadn't noticed before, the Elvis still seemed to cast a frown in her direction. Rolling and use as a weapon had crushed the unpainted area of the velvet into the image of a blurry, anthropoid form rising up behind the Elvis.
He asked, "Did you see anyone, any strangers, out in the yard or out in the street when you came in?"
She said honestly, "No. Why?"
"I thought my ex had some of his friends come in through the back and steal this while he was arguing with me out front. I haven't seen him for ages and all of a sudden he turns up and wants it."
"Do you think he'll come back?" Elizabeth asked.
"Probably."
"Maybe you should hang it up in your room. For safekeeping," she suggested, thinking that if she could not get rid of it for Penrose, then she could at least get it out of the public rooms.
"Oh, now you too. None of you have any appreciation for truly fine kitsch," he said loftily and stomped back to the kitchen.
Dinner, spaghetti with sauce from a jar and powdered cheese on top, was eaten with envious eyes on Dirk's nutritionally balanced vegetarian chili and rice. Bob wandered in yawning and heated up a frozen pocket sandwich that he ate before it was even thawed.
After the meal, Dirk proceeded to sterilize the sink and counters by mixing cleansers in the combination on the "Warning! Do Not Mix" part of the label. Prudently saying nothing and leaving him to it, Elizabeth stacked her dishes aside to wash later and cleared out after opening a few windows.
She found Penrose in the library. He had opened up a tall walnut cabinet to reveal not books, but a battered television set. The rabbit ears had broken off and turd-shaped wads of aluminum foil had been stuck on the ends of the antenna stumps. The innards of the television were in similarly bad shape. The vertical hold intermittently lost its grip and the predominant color on the screen was green, regardless of the true colors of the image.
Penrose was sprawled upon the couch in front of the TV in the universal posture of watching what was on in hopes that something better might come on eventually. On the TV, two men with bad hair dueled awkwardly with very large swords.
Elizabeth plopped down on the end of the couch and watched for a minute. "Is that Highlander?"
Penrose raised an eyebrow. "You've seen it?"
"Parts. When it was on at people's houses. It makes immortality look like a drag."
"It can be."
"Maybe you're just missing the overwrought soundtrack," Elizabeth giggled and they watched for a while in silence.
Two male characters stood on a beach and watched a stag. One exhorted the other to "feel the stag" and then they bounded down the beach together, following the stag (who had wisely decided to run away).
Elizabeth whooped. "Can you believe the homosexual subtext? The fan base must be writing slash on this even as we speak." She wiped tears of laughter from her eyes, but Penrose only sighed and slumped lower on the couch. After that, the movie which had started out mildly tolerable, if senseless, slipped downhill fast. Elizabeth grew bored when nothing even remotely amusing to make fun of appeared on screen. She'd only ever seen parts because parts was all she could take.
She asked, "How can you watch this?"
"It's easier when people don't keep talking."
"Fine, fine." Elizabeth got up to poke around among the books. Like a crow, she was drawn to the shine of some brass instruments set out upon a broad oak desk. She only recognized one, an astrolabe made of several disks of pierced brass, artfully etched with stars and planets. She twisted the disks back and forth for a while, but since she didn't know how to read it, all she could do was admire the patterns. She set it aside and pulled open the desk drawers.
As a child, she would, when driven to extremes of boredom, poke through her parents' desk at home. The sole item of interest in their desk was a prism-shaped architectural ruler. Once she tired of fiddling with that, she had to content herself with some stiff rubber bands that would disintegrate if pulled and a small collection of paper clips which she was forbidden to link together. She had better hopes for Penrose's desk.
"Stay out of there," Penrose called from the couch. "I don't go through your things."
"Yes, you do actually," Elizabeth said. She found a smooth ivory paper knife, its handle carved with a bas relief image of a Chinese scholar writing at a desk with a cat curled at his feet. The long flat blade was buttery smooth to her touch.
"That was just books."
"You mean that if I hadn't been around when you wanted that stamp, you wouldn't have gone through my stuff until you found one?" She set the paper knife aside and pulled the drawer out further. A small round object rolled toward the front of the drawer. It was white and glistened slightly. More ivory? She picked it up.
"Yuck." Not ivory. It was a skull made of sugar, about as long as her thumb. Gray smudges darkened its surface and obliterated the words that had been written in frosting on its forehead. She recalled that Miss Price had some in the bookstore by the register. "What's this?"