The Mole in His Bed novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Dundalk

Cora reaches her mother before the six o'clock news does, and finds Neil sitting in the kitchen.

A marshal drove me to Dundalk with the lights off and the radio low.

Judith had signed the paper herself. "Forty minutes," she'd said. "Then you're in the safe house and you don't leave it."

It was ten to five when we stopped in front of my mother's building.

The door to the stairwell hung open on one hinge.

Somebody had spray-painted a word across the brick beside it, and somebody else had scrubbed at the word until it was only a gray stain.

I climbed three flights and stood in front of 3C.

I had her key in my pocket. I had carried it for five years, and I hadn't been able to make myself use it.

I knocked.

"Who is it?" my mother called.

Her voice had gotten older.

"Mom."

The chain slid, the lock turned, and the door opened on a short woman with gray hair, glasses on a chain and her cardigan sleeves pushed up past the elbow.

Winnie Tallant looked at my black hair, at my glasses, at my face.

She did not say a word.

Then she slapped me, hard enough that my head turned.

"You were dead," she said.

"I know."

"I put a stone up. I stood in that cemetery in the rain and I put up a stone for an empty box."

"I know, Mom. I'm sorry."

She hit me once more on the shoulder, not hard, and then both of her arms were around my ribs and her face was against my collar.

I held on to her.

She smelled like the same lavender soap.

"You're too thin," she said into my jacket.

"You're not sleeping either."

"Don't you tell me about sleeping."

She pulled back, wiped her face with the heel of her hand and looked me over again.

"Is it true?" she asked. "What they said about you?"

"No."

"I knew that." She nodded sharply. "I told every person who spat on me that I knew that."

The apartment was two rooms and a kitchen.

A square of cardboard was taped over one pane of the front window. A stack of unopened envelopes sat on the radiator.

On the refrigerator, under a magnet shaped like a crab, was a photograph of me at my police academy graduation.

Someone had written across the corner of it in marker, and my mother had crossed that out too.

"They stopped my pension," she said, following my eyes. "The church stopped calling. The house went in the second year."

"I'll fix it."

"You'll sit down first."

On the kitchen table was a white envelope with the word Rent written on it in pencil.

"Who pays your rent, Mom?"

"The parish." She said it without any suspicion. "A man comes on the first of every month and leaves cash with the super. No name. Nearly five years now."

"Which parish?"

"I stopped asking when I stopped eating." She waved a hand. "God sends what He sends."

I noted it, because that was what I did with a fact that didn't fit.

Then, through the wall, a television came on in the next apartment.

"Good evening," an anchor said, a little too loudly. "A stunning development today in the trial of Elias Crane."

My mother turned her head toward the wall.

"The state's first witness," the anchor said, "was Detective Cora Tallant, the officer blamed for the Pier Nine disaster, who was declared dead five years ago."

She did not move.

Next door somebody dropped a glass.

"They're saying your name," my mother said.

"Yes."

"They're saying it like you're alive."

"I am, Mom."

"I know that." Her voice cracked on it. "I'm standing here holding you."

She pressed her fist against her mouth for a moment.

Then she squared her shoulders, because she had been a school secretary for thirty years and she'd never once let a hallway see her cry.

"I'm making tea," she said. "I don't care what's on the news. We're having tea."

She went into the kitchen.

She stopped in the doorway.

I came up behind her, and I saw what she saw.

The kitchen light was already on.

Neil Garrick stood at the counter with his back to us, his coat still buttoned.

He had taken two mugs down from the cupboard and set them side by side.

My mother had never given him a key. She had never once let him past her door.

"How did you get in?" Winnie asked.

"The super," Neil said, without turning around. "I showed him my badge."

His hand was still on the second mug.

He had opened the second cupboard from the left without looking for it.

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