The way he treats me, girls, he’ll do the same thing to you
And that’s the reason I got those weepin’ willow blues
When she finished, Jubilee didn’t say a word, but Samantha could tell from his face that she had indeed sung the song correctly. There was that look that needed no words to explain it: You sound just like her, hung in the air.
On impulse, while both Jubilee and Mike were staring at her in wonder, she went to the window and yelled angrily in challenge in the direction of the horn player, “Did I pass, Ornette?”
At that, both Mike and Jubilee burst into laughter, Jubilee sounding like an old accordion that had a few holes in it.
“Sassy like her too,” Jubilee said, nearly choking. “Maxie was never afraid of anybody.”
“She was afraid of something,” Mike said soberly, “and we’d like to find out what it was.”
Jubilee would tell them nothing about Maxie. He kept playing the piano, asking Samantha if she knew this song and that and repeating that he hadn’t seen Maxie since the night she disappeared. When Samantha asked him if he had any idea why Maxie had disappeared that night, he mumbled that no, he didn’t.
r /> A hundred and one years old, Samantha thought, and he still couldn’t lie convincingly. She tried to calculate how many times she was going to have to visit him, how many Bessie Smith songs she was going to have to sing, before he told her what he knew about Maxie.
When she and Mike told him good-bye, Samantha kissed the old, leathery cheek and said she thought she’d probably see him again.
On the landing, waiting to lead them downstairs again, was the little boy, but he did what Sam thought was a rather odd thing: He slipped his hand into Mike’s. She’d already seen that Mike had a natural rapport with children, but still, there was something unusual about this. It wasn’t until they were outside and she saw Mike slide the hand the child had been holding into his pocket that Samantha realized that the child had given Mike a note. From Ornette, she thought, and she knew without a doubt that Mike was going to keep whatever was on that note a secret from her.
In the backseat of the car, all the way back downtown, she acted as though she knew nothing about the note. “Ornette,” she said lightly. “I think I’ve heard that name before.”
“Ornette Coleman. Alto sax,” Mike said, looking out the window.
When they were back at the house, Mike instantly disappeared into the bedroom and Samantha was sure he was looking at his secret note. When he came out, he was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt and had the Sunday New York Times under his arm. They ate lunch (deli delivered) outside in the garden, both of them looking at the paper. Later, they sat in wooden deck chairs, Mike still with the paper, seeming to spend hours on the financial section, while Samantha put the laptop computer on her knees and tried to write down all the facts she knew so far about Maxie.
There wasn’t much. Maxie maybe had been and maybe hadn’t been in love with two men, or three if you counted Cal. However many there had been, in the end, she had left them all. Where had she gone and why?
Every few minutes she would get up from her chair, mumbling something cryptic, such as, “I need another floppy,” then disappear into the house, where she took as long as she dared to search for the note the child had given Mike. She searched the clothes he had worn that morning, looked in every box in the guest bedroom he was using (and felt a little pang of guilt that she had run him out of his bedroom), and even looked in the toes of his shoes.
It was on her sixth foray into the house that she dared to look in his wallet. Somehow that seemed to be the ultimate invasion of privacy, and she hesitated before picking it up off the dresser. But once she looked inside it, she made a thorough search. He had three credit cards, all gold, and twelve hundred dollars in cash, the amount making her draw in her breath a bit. There was nothing else in the wallet, no list of phone numbers or account numbers, nothing, but then she thought that maybe a man who could multiply as Mike could might be able to memorize the numbers he needed to know.
Just as she was about to put the wallet down, she remembered that when she was a child her father’d had a wallet with a “secret” compartment, and he used to allow her to find treats in it. Digging around in Mike’s wallet, she found a hidden compartment and pulled out the piece of paper she found inside.
She nearly had to sit down when she saw that the hidden document was a photo of herself—a picture of Samantha when she was in the fifth grade, and she knew that Mike had to have taken the photo from her house in Louisville. Was it a gift from her father or did he take it from her room where she knew he had stayed? Why was he carrying it in his wallet?
Guiltily, she put the photo back into its hiding place, but when it wouldn’t slide back in smoothly, she knew without a doubt that she’d found the note.
Nelson—Paddy’s Bar in the
Village—Monday—Eight
With the speed of lightning, she put everything back the way she’d found it and went back into the garden to sit with Mike. Her curiosity got the better of her, and after sitting quietly for a few moments, she asked him what his father’s office telephone number was. Without looking up from his paper, Mike answered.
“Your oldest brother’s telephone number.”
“Home or mobile unit or the office in Colorado or the office in New York or the house in the mountains?”
“All of them.”
Mike put down his paper and looked at her. “Is this a test?”
“What’s my Social Security number?”
With a crooked grin, he told her.
“Do you know my bank account number as well?”