Nobody's Fool

car.
    â€œYou’re all discombobulated,” Mrs. Gruber said. “I can tell.”
    â€œI’ll be fine,” Miss Beryl assured her, adding cruelly, “And if I’m not fine, that’s fine too.”
    Which was the way she felt. The phone had been ringing off the hook all morning, people wanting to know where Clive Jr. might be. Actually,the phone calls had begun yesterday, a series of them from the dreadful Joyce woman who’d been waiting, her suitcases packed, for Clive Jr. to pick her up for their long-planned weekend in the Bahamas. The calls had gone from anxious (“I wonder where he could be? Something awful must have happened!”) to vengeful (“He may think he can get away with this, but he can’t. He’s made promises!”). Vengeful was the result of Miss Beryl, who had taken pity on the woman and told her the most likely scenario—that Clive Jr. had simply run away. A story had appeared that morning in the
Schuyler Springs Sentinel
hinting at the possibility of an investigation into the North Bath Savings and Loan, particularly its connection to several other savings institutions in Florida and Texas. The story also suggested that some of the Bath institution’s considerable assets might have been inflated through a scheme of buying and selling tracts of land and other properties, transactions that existed on paper without any actual money ever changing hands. This story had prompted a call from a reporter in Albany and even an inquiry from the often inebriated, always scooped editor of the
North Bath Weekly Journal
, a longtime acquaintance of Miss Beryl’s who’d started to ask her the same questions as his colleagues, then said to hell with it, apologized for intruding and advised her, “Don’t give the bloodsuckers so much as a syllable.” In addition to calls from the newspapers, there’d also been several agitated calls from the junior vice president of the savings and loan, wanting to know if Clive Jr. had been in touch with her. He had not taken his flight to the Bahamas, the woman said. He was not at home. She wanted to impress upon Miss Beryl that she needed to speak to Clive Jr. immediately, as in yesterday, if not before. “ASAP,” the woman said. Miss Beryl, who understood none of this, nevertheless had a pretty good idea of what it all added up to. Her son was a ruined man.
    Miss Beryl had been about to take the phone off the hook when Mr. Blue called to tell her that the Queen Anne had been repaired and was ready to be picked up. “I’d deliver it myself,” he explained, “except I had an accident and broke my ankle.”
    Miss Beryl, grateful for a legitimate reason to leave the house and the phone, had agreed to drive to Schuyler Springs.
    â€œMy grandson’ll be here to help you put it in the car,” Mr. Blue told her, adding sadly, “I’d do it myself if I could.”
    He gave her directions to his shop, which was located on an avenue that intersected the main street of Schuyler’s business district. Without Mrs. Gruber’s incessant chatter to distract her, Miss Beryl found the shopwithout difficulty. In winter, Schuyler Springs looked nearly as unlucky and deserted as Bath, and there was a parking space right in front of the store. Mr. Blue, a man in his late sixties, awaited her on crutches in the doorway, his right ankle so heavily wrapped in a tan bandage that it reminded Miss Beryl of a wasp’s nest. “I feel awful making you come out here, Mrs. Peoples,” he said, ushering her into the shop where a boy with coffee-colored skin and kinky hair with reddish highlights sat on the counter next to the register, banging his heels and staring at both Miss Beryl and his grandfather contemptuously. He looked to be about twelve or thirteen, an age Miss Beryl knew well.
    â€œDown off there,” Mr. Blue told the boy, adding, “Stand up straight” when his grandson settled into a sullen slouch.
    â€œThis is my grandson, Leon. He comes up here on vacations to help me out,” Mr. Blue told Miss Beryl. Something about the way he said it suggested a different truth entirely—that this was a troubled boy, sent away at every opportunity into a less volatile environment. The boy gave his grandfather the kind of look that said, who are you kidding?
    Mr. Blue had done a wonderful job on the Queen Anne. No one who didn’t know it had been