Page 70 of A Good Heart is Hard to Find
He wandered round the kitchen, lifting things up as though the pipe might be playing a game of hide-and-seek with him. I had a sudden strange vision of Eddie as the next TV chef: ‘Naked Stoned Old Hippie in the Kitchen’, perhaps? Buy his new cookbook now:Fifty Fun Ways with Weed.Not so much a recipe book, more a way of life.
‘Jamie’s goingto leave the navy and run a poultry farm somewhere with those two daft friends of his, Boz and Foxy.’
‘Even chickens have souls,’ he said absently, turning over the contents of the bread bin.
‘I dare say they have, especially compared to Jane,’ I agreed, trying to remember where the conversation had started out and failing.
I finished the last of my late breakfast and just sat there feelingexhausted but sated, for last night I worked non-stop like someone had cut open a major writing artery.
Lover, Come Backis not far off completion, and so is Keturah – she’s pregnant with something, though until it arrives she won’t know quite what, or who – or even how. And considering what she did to Sylvanus and Vladimir, I now feel quite benign towards them both and the world in general.Sated, even.
There’s nothing like a bit of blood-letting.
‘I’ve nearly finished my book,’ I said, more for the glow of saying it than expecting an answer, but Eddie beamed his lighthouse smile at me and said warmly: ‘Clever Cass!’
The doorbell rang, and since Eddie seemed quite happy to stand there and beam indefinitely without even noticing it, I heaved myself up and went to answer it.
Ayoung woman stood on the doorstep, and one glancetold me that this must be Dante’s sister Rosetta even before she told me, for the resemblance was striking.
In her, Dante’s springy, raven’s-wing hair had been downgraded to shaggy dark brown curls, and her eyes were an everyday blue-grey, but she certainly had the nose. It was not pretty on her, but combined with the rest to give her a pleasantlyrangy, Afghan hound sort of appeal, like Cher before the nose-job.
‘I’m Dante’s sister, Rosetta, and I hope you don’t mind me calling?’ she asked anxiously. ‘Only Dante says you’re the local ghost expert, and you were terribly kind to him when he first got here, so he thought you wouldn’t mind answering a couple of questions.’
My mouth fell open. What did he mean,kind?
‘I thought perhaps youmight have some books on local hauntings that I haven’t found yet – you know, to add a bit of spice to the ghost-hunting?’
‘Come in,’ I said, finally remembering my manners. ‘Your brother said I waskindto him?’
‘Yes, and I was quite surprised, because he’s always been reserved, and now he’s so withdrawn and – oh!’
I wasn’t surprised at her losing the thread of the plot, because she’d suddenlycome face to face with Eddie; and though thankfully he was wearing the clean but tattered remnants of a pair of jeans, he did look like a half-naked Saxon wandered in from the wrong century, though they probably didn’t put multicoloured beads on the end of their braids.
‘This is my brother Eddie,’ I said, but I might as well have been speaking to myself for they were staring into each other’seyes like a pair of telepaths. Maybe theywerea pair of telepaths, and that’s why communication with Eddie had never been entirely straightforward?
Neither of them seemed able to look away. I hadn’t seenEddie so serious since the time we were little, and he managed to open the cupboard door with a bit of bent wire to let me out, and Pa caught us.
Then Eddie’s pearly smile returned four-fold.He held out his hand, Rosetta took it, and he led her outside without a word.
‘Eddie?’ I called. ‘Rosetta?’ But without a backward look they climbed into Eddie’s van and vanished from my view.
Well!
I sat down again at the table with another cup of coffee, waiting for them to reappear, but when I looked out later thevanhad gone too.
Ruffled by Dante’s references to my kindness, I found ithard to fall into my early afternoon doze, and then when I did drop off I was instantly awoken by Max phoning again.
He’d simmered down about the police questioning: seemed to have put it right out of his head, strangely enough, and instead asked me all sorts of inane questions about the slave auction, which he had never shown any interest in before.
Perhaps he was feeling lonely and just makingconversation, because he also asked about my new book and the Crypt-ograms, which was unusual: normally he just talked about himself.
He was at his most charming, too, his voice low and caressing. But somehow it didn’t seem to be working any more, and I didn’t think the fact that I was still exhausted but exhilarated after my mammoth blood-letting-by-proxy stint, and so not in a receptive frameof mind, had any effect on the matter.
After that I tried to settle back down again, but before I could insert the earplugs against the surrounding Birdsong and TV babble, Dante called to ask if I’d seen his sister.
‘She left hours ago to visit you.’
‘She was here,’ I told him. ‘Briefly. But then she went off somewhere with Eddie.’
