Gin Palace 01 - The Poisoned Rose

Mac,” she said. “We need to get you inside and wash it off.”

EPILOGUE

    There was an early autumn that year, the August nights for the most part unseasonably cool. Some mornings it was even cold in my apartment. During my free time I did little more than watch over Elm Street from my three front windows. I watched as the days passed. Eventually I found work at the Mexican restaurant next door to the Hansom House, washing dishes and cleaning up after the cooks. Weekends I worked double shifts, from seven in the morning to well after midnight. The money wasn’t any better than what I was used to but it was all I was willing to do. I didn’t leave my block at the end of Elm Street for weeks at a time. Augie said there was shit going down in town and I didn’t want to know about it. I needed to play it safe. When I wasn’t working, I was home, at my windows; when I wasn’t at my windows, I was trying to sleep. This was as much life as I was allowed. It was all I wanted now.
    I barely saw Augie. He made it clear enough right off that he was there for me if I needed him and then left me alone. I appreciated that more than anything. Augie knew the hurt I was in, had felt it himself when his wife was killed in Colombia.
    Marie Bishop wasn’t my wife, but I had loved her, and she me, in our own ways.
    Tina stopped coming around. School started, but of course it was more than that. We all knew that if it weren’t for Tina, if I hadn’t had to stop at the Hansom House that night to look for her, Marie Bishop would be alive and long gone right now. Tina was a kid and I tried not to blame her for Marie’s death. There was no way she could have known, there was no way she could have seen it coming. I knew that if she had she would have done things differently. But what happened had happened, and it was because of this that Tina stayed clear of me.
    Eventually after a few months of my self-imposed house arrest I did venture off my block and into town. I hadn’t planned on it. It was my only day off from the restaurant and I stepped outside one afternoon and sensed a stillness in the air I hadn’t known in a long time, since last spring, since that night I came down looking for Augie. It seemed, this stillness, to be coming from the heart of town. This was the kind of East End day we locals lived for, that day when the tourists are finally, completely gone and the town, which had vibrated all summer long with crazy energy, goes suddenly quiet, like a ringing tuning fork pinched into silence between two fingers. I put on my denim jacket with the missing third button and walked the length of North Main into the village.
    I looked south, in the direction of Village Hall, but I didn’t head toward that part of town. I had learned one thing, and that was quiet didn’t necessarily mean safe.
    I walked west instead, past the IGA, walking with no real direction. A breeze brushed my unshaven face. The town was as silent as it was empty. Maybe it was this sense that led me to continue west. After a few minutes I was passing the cinema, where Long had picked me up and taken me to the Bishop home. At this point I was aware that I was heading somewhere specific, though I still wouldn’t admit to myself where that was. I just kept on, moving at a steady pace, heading into the breeze, deeper into the stillness. It wasn’t till I turned from Hill Street onto Halsey Neck Lane that I finally admitted to myself where it was I was going.
    The Bishop estate, behind its hedges and gate, looked all closed up, the way so many houses here did at the end of the season. The gate had been chained but there was enough slack in it for me to squeeze through. I walked the gravel drive to the front door. I remembered being told by Marie’s father so long ago how that door, so heavy and ornate, had been rescued from a ruined church in France and brought over when the house was built in the twenties. I remembered passing through it as a boy freely, how it was never closed to me. I remembered how I had felt inside that house, running down its long halls or feeling the sun on my skin as I ate meals with Marie’s family in what their father called the open room. I remembered how the sun was made even more intense by the thick glass it shone though, glass that ran in long, narrow lead-lined panes from ceiling to floor.
    I walked around to the back of the house. I felt safe within my connection to this place. I was no trespasser. I walked