Gardener put his scalded palm to his mouth and looked at the water coming out of the tap. It had already fogged the lower edge of the shaving mirror on the back of the medicine cabinet. He reached out, found the tap's handle almost too hot to touch, and used the facecloth to turn it off. Then he put in the rubber plug, drew a little more hot water-cautiously!-and added a generous dollop of cold. The pad of flesh below his left thumb had reddened a little.
He opened the medicine cabinet and moved things around until he came to the prescription bottle of Valium with his own name on the label. If that stuff improves with age, it ought to be great, he thought. Still almost full. Well, what did he expect? Whatever Bobbi had been using, it sure as hell had been the opposite of Valium.
Gardener didn't want it, either. He wanted what was behind it, if it was still
Ali! Success!
He pulled out a double-edge razor and a package of blades. He looked a little sadly at the layer of dust on the razor-it had been a long time since he'd shaved in the morning here at Bobbi's-and then rinsed it off. At least she didn't throw it out, he thought. That would have been worse than the dust.
A shave made him feel better. He concentrated on it, drawing it out while his thoughts ran their own course.
He finished, replaced the shaving stuff behind the Valium and cleaned up. Then he looked thoughtfully at the tap with the H on its handle, and decided to go down cellar and see what sort of magnificent water heater Bobbi had put in. The only other thing to do was watch Bobbi sleep, which she seemed to be doing well on her own.
He crossed into the kitchen thinking that he really did feel well, especially now that the aches from a night in Bobbi's rocking chair were starting to work out of his back and neck. You're the guy who's never been able to sleep sitting up, right? he jeered softly at himself. Crashing out on breakwaters is more your style, right? But this ribbing was nothing like the harsh, barely coherent self-mockery of the day before. The one thing he always forgot in the grip of the hangovers and the terrible post-jag depressions was the feeling of regeneration that sometimes came later. You could wake up one day realizing you hadn't put any poison in your system the night before… the week before… maybe the whole month before… and you felt really good.
As for what he had been afraid must be the onset of the flu, maybe even pneumonia-that was gone, too. No sore throat. No plugged nose. No fever. God knew he had been a perfect target for a germ, after eight days drinking, sleeping rough, and finally hitching back to Maine in his bare feet during a rainstorm. But it had passed off in the night. Sometimes God was good.
He paused in the middle of the kitchen, his smile drifting away into a momentary expression that was puzzled and a little disquieted. A fragment of his dream-or dreams-came slipping back
(radio ads in the night… does that have something to do with feeling well this morning?)
and then it faded again. He dismissed it, content with the fact that he felt well and Bobbi looked well-better, anyway. If Bobbi wasn't awake by ten o'clock, ten-thirty at the latest, he would wake her up. If Bobbi felt better and spoke rationally, fine. They could discuss whatever had happened to her (SOMETHING sure did, Gardener thought, and wondered absently if she had gotten some terrible news report from home… a bulletin that would undoubtedly have been served up by Sister Anne). They would go on from there. If she still even slightly resembled the spaced-out and rather creepy Bobbi Anderson who had greeted him the night before, Gardener was going to call a doctor whether Bobbi liked it or not.
He opened the cellar door and fumbled for the old-fashioned toggle switch on the wall. He found it. The switch was the same. The light wasn't. Instead of the feeble flow from two sixty-watt bulbs-the only illumination in Bobbi's cellar since time out of mind-the cellar lit up with a brisk white glare. It looked as bright as a discount department store down there. Gardener started down, hand reaching for the rickety old banister. He found a thick and solid new one instead. It was held firmly against the wall with new brass fittings. Some of the stair treads, which had been definitely queasy, had also been replaced.
Gardener reached the bottom of the steps and stood looking around, his surprise now bordering on some stronger emotion-it was almost shock. That slightly moldy root-cellar smell was gone, too.
She looked like a woman running on empty, no joke. Right out on the ragged edge. She couldn't even remember how many days it had been since she'd gotten any sleep. No wonder. I've heard of home improvement, but this is ridiculous. She couldn't have done it all herself, though. Could she? Of course not.
But Gardener suspected that, somehow, Bobbi had.
If Gardener had awakened here instead of on the breakwater at Arcadia Point, with no memory of the immediate past, he wouldn't have known he was in Bobbi's cellar, although he had been here countless times before. The only reason he was sure of it now was because he had gotten here from Bobbi's kitchen.
That rooty smell wasn't entirely gone, but it was diminished. The cellar's dirt floor had been neatly raked-no, not just raked, Gardener saw. Cellar dirt got old and sour after a while; you had to do something about it if you planned to be spending much time belowground. Anderson had apparently brought in a fresh load of dirt and had spread it around to dry before raking. Gardener supposed that was what had sweetened the atmosphere of the place.
Fluorescents were racked in overhead rows, each hooded fixture hung from the old beams by chains and more brass fittings. They shed an even white glow. All the fixtures were single tubes except for those over the worktable; those each had a pair, so here the glow was so bright that it made Gardener think of operating theaters. He walked over to Bobbi's worktable. Bobbi's new worktable.
Anderson had had an ordinary kitchen table covered with dirty Con-Tact paper before. It had been lit with a gooseneck study-lamp and littered with a few tools, most of them not in very good condition. and a few plastic boxes of nails, screws, bolts, and the like. It was the small-repairs workplace of a woman who is neither very good at nor very interested in small repairs.
The old kitchen table was gone, replaced by three long, light tables, the sort on which bake-sale goods are placed at church sales. They had been placed end to end along the left side of the cellar to make one long table. It was littered with hardware, tools, spools of insulated wire both thin and thick, coffee cans full of brads and staples and fasteners… dozens of other items. Or hundreds.
Then there were the batteries.
There was a carton of them under the table, a huge loose collection of long-life batteries still in their blister-packs: C-cells, D-cells, double-A's, triple-A's, nine-volts. Must be two hundred dollars” worth in there, Gardener thought, and more rolling around on the table. What in the blue hell-?
Dazed, he walked along the table like a man checking out the merchandise and deciding whether or not to buy. It looked as though Bobbi was making several different things at once… and Gardener was not sure what any of them were. Here, standing halfway along the table, was a large square box with its front panel slid aside to reveal eighteen different buttons. Beside each button was the title of a popular song -'Raindrops Keep Fallin'on My Head,” “New York, New York,” “Lara's Theme,” and so on. Next to it, an instruction sheet tacked neatly to the table identified it as the one and only SilverChime Digital Doorbell (Made in Taiwan).
Gardener couldn't imagine why Bobbi would want a doorbell with a built-in microchip that would allow the user to program a different song whenever she wanted to-did she think Joe Paulson would dig hearing “Lara's Theme” when he had to come to the door with a package? But that wasn't all. Gardener could at least have understood the use of the SilverChime Digital Doorbell, if not Bobbi's motivation in installing one. But she seemed to be in the process of modifying the thing somehow-hooking it, in fact, into the workings of a boom-box radio the size of a small suitcase.