Velocity

Yet he remained at the table.
    Her eyes had lowered once more to the pistachios, and her hands had returned to the quiet, useful work of shelling.
    “My grandmother was deaf from birth,” Ivy said. “She’d never heard a word spoken and didn’t know how to form them.”
    Watching her nimble fingers, Billy suspected that Ivy’s days were filled with useful work—tending to her garden, maintaining this fine house in its current state of spotless perfection, cooking—and that she avoided idleness at all costs.
    “She’d never heard anyone laugh, either, but she knew how to do that, all right. She had a beautiful and infectious laugh. I never heard her cry until I was eight.”
    Billy understood Ivy’s compulsive industry as a reflection of his own, and sympathized. Quite apart from the question of whether or not he could trust her, he liked her.
    “When I was much younger,” Ivy said, “I didn’t fully understand what it meant that my mother had died in childbirth. I used to think that somehow I had killed her and was responsible.”
    In the window, the raven stretched its wings again, as silently as it had done before.
    “I was eight when I realized I had no guilt,” Ivy said. “When I signed my realization to my grandmother, I saw her cry for the first time. This sounds funny, but I had assumed when she cried, it would be the weeping of a perfect mute, nothing but tears and wrenching spasms of silence. But her sobs were as normal as her laugh. As far as those two sounds were concerned, she was not a woman apart from those who could hear and speak; she was one of their community.”
    Billy had thought that Ivy mesmerized men with her beauty and sexuality, but the spell she cast had a deeper source.
    He knew what he intended to reveal only as he heard the words come forth: “When I was fourteen, I shot my mother and father.”
    Without looking up, she said, “I know.”
    “Dead.”
    “I know. Have you ever thought that one of them might want to speak to you through the wall?”
    “No. I never have. And, God, I hope they never do.”
    She shelled, he watched, and in time she said, “You need to go.”
    By her tone, she meant that he could stay but understood that he needed to leave.
    “Yes,” he said, and rose from his chair.
    “You’re in trouble, aren’t you, Billy?”
    “No.”
    “That’s a lie.”
    “Yes.”
    “And that’s as much as you’ll tell me.”
    He said nothing.
    “You came here looking for something. Did you find it?”
    “I’m not sure.”
    “Sometimes,” she said, “you can listen so hard for the faintest of sounds that you don’t even hear the louder ones.”
    He thought about that for a moment and then said, “Will you see me to the door?”
    “You know the way now.”
    “You should lock up behind me.”
    “The door latches when you close it.”
    “That’s not good enough. Before dark, you should engage the deadbolts. And close those windows.”
    “I’m not afraid of anything,” she said. “I never have been.”
    “I always have been.”
    “I know,” she said. “For twenty years.”
    On his way out, Billy made less noise on the hardwood floors than he had done on his way in. He closed the front door, tested the latch, and followed the arbor-shaded walkway to the street, leaving Ivy Elgin with her tea and pistachios, with the watchful raven at her back, in the hush of the kitchen where the clock had no hands.
     
     
     

Chapter 44
     
    Steve Zillis rented a single-story house of no distinguishing architecture on a street where the bonding philosophy among the neighbors seemed to be neglect of property.
    The only well-maintained residence was immediately north of Zillis’s place. Jackie O’Hara’s friend, Celia Reynolds, lived there.
    She claimed to have seen Zillis in a rage chopping chairs, watermelons, and mannequins in his backyard.
    The attached garage stood on the south side of his house, out of Celia Reynolds’s line of sight. Having driven with frequent glances at his mirrors and having seen no tail, Billy parked boldly in the driveway.
    Between Zillis and his southern neighbor rose a wall of eighty-foot, untrimmed eucalyptus trees that provided privacy.
    When Billy got out of the Explorer, the extent of his disguise was a blue baseball cap. He had pulled it low on his forehead.
    His toolbox gave him legitimacy. A man with a toolbox, moving with purpose, is assumed to be a repairman, and excites no suspicion.
    As a bartender, Billy had