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e her face.
“I was wondering if I could talk to you for a few minutes,” I went on, not sure what the protocol for this sort of thing was. I looked up at the speaker beside the door and noted that none of the little lights were lit, but this did not prevent me from wondering if anyone was listening in.
If the room was being monitored, there was nothing to be done about it except to hurry up and talk before anyone came to remove me.
“Here’s the thing,” I told Kitty, who hadn’t budged and did not seem remotely interested in carrying on a conversation. “I’m here because I wanted to talk to you about Green Eyes. ”
I thought her smooth, gold-draped head might have twitched, so I paused. But she offered me no further acknowledgment. I stepped forward a couple of feet until I’d reached the foot of her bed.
“Could I just sit here, for a minute? If you don’t want me to touch your stuff or anything I understand, but I’d really love it if we could chat. And…if you’re not going to answer, I’m going to take that as ‘Sure, make yourself comfortable. ’ Speak now or forever hold your peace. Okay then. I’m going to park right here and keep on talking. Feel free to jump in anytime. ”
She made a small sigh, or grunt, or it might have been the first syllable of a cynical laugh. I couldn’t tell.
“Okay. Okay. Right. ” I folded and unfolded my hands, laying my elbows on the top of my thighs and leaning in her direction while I spoke. “I don’t know if you’re aware or not, but you had another visitor a few nights ago. He didn’t make it all the way inside, but he really wanted to see you and say hello. So I’ll start by passing along his greetings. ”
Technically, I didn’t think Malachi had told me to tell her anything; but I didn’t think it would hurt, and it might even get her attention.
“He used to live here too, in the Bend. ” I shuffled my buns along the bed and lowered my voice, for all the good it would do me if anyone was tuning in through the monitoring system. “His name is Malachi. I’m his…” I started to tell her the truth, but on the chance that someone was eavesdropping I changed my mind. “He’s an old friend of mine. ”
Two muffled words rose up from the half-fetal figure balanced on the floor like an egg. “Malachi’s dead. ”
I waited to see if she had anything else to add, but she didn’t. “Is that so?” I asked, and I asked it carefully because something about her voice told me that she didn’t believe it when she said it.
“S’what I heard. It was on the news, about a year ago. ”
Again I looked over to the speaker on the wall. Nothing indicated that we were being overheard, but I wanted to play it cautious all the same. “Maybe he is, and maybe he isn’t—but he was coming to talk to you the other night. Were you two good friends?”
I thought maybe I’d lost her again; it took a full ten or fifteen seconds for her to respond. “Don’t know about good friends. He was all right. Thought I was crazy, though. ”
“But you knew what he was in here for, right?”
She nodded, rubbing her forehead against her leg in the process.
“Then maybe you should take a look at me, and hear me out. I started this on the wrong foot, maybe, with a fib. Let me begin again—Malachi’s not exactly a friend of mine, but he and I have come to an understanding. He’s the one who told me about you. ”
Since everything with this woman happened in slow motion, I let the conversation lull drag on while she slowly swiveled her eyes up from her lap and over to the bed where I was sitting.
She was a pretty woman in a corn-fed sort of way—big blue eyes and good bone structure, like thirty years ago she might have gone on an album cover for the Mamas & the Papas.
Kitty fixed me in a stare that wasn’t precisely blank, but apathetic. “You’re his sister, then,” she said. “That must be some interesting understanding. ”
“Yeah,” I confirmed. “It is. But it works all right. ”
Unwrapping her arms one at a time, and unfolding her legs in a similar fashion, Kitty stretched herself out. She pivoted on her tailbone and reassembled herself into the same crunched position, this time facing out at me.
“What’d Malachi want?” she asked.
I gave the talk-box one last look and gave up. If they could hear me, they could hear me and there wouldn’t be much stopping them. Maybe, so far as they were concerned, it would just be chatter—one lunatic to another. Let ’em listen, then. Let them hear us.
I leaned in forward, closer to her but only by inches. “He wanted to talk to you—see if you could answer some questions for him. He ran into some trouble looking for you, though, because they’d moved you since he was here last. I ended up picking him up and sending him home. ”
“Then what do you want?”
“I want to talk to you about why they moved you upstairs here. Are you more comfortable up above ground level?”
She shrugged. “I guess. Yeah. ” She clutched absently at her knee, halfway between scratching at it and rubbing it.
“It puts you farther off the street, and away from the Hairy Man, doesn’t it?”
