Oswald dug into his back pocket, produced his wallet, and gave her a bill. She stuffed it in her purse without looking at it and started back toward the Rotary Apartments. Then she thought of something else and turned to him once more. I heard her clearly. Raised to shout across the fifteen or twenty yards now between them, that reedy voice was like fingernails drawn down a slate blackboard.

“And call me if you hear from Lee again, hear? I’m still on the party line, it’s all I can afford until I get a better job, and that Sykes woman from downstairs is on it all the time, I spoke to her, I gave her a real piece of my mind, ‘Mrs. Sykes,’ I said—”

A man passed her. He stuck a theatrical finger in one ear, grinning. If Mama saw, she took no notice. She certainly took no notice of her son’s grimace of embarrassment.

“‘Mrs. Sykes,’ I said, ‘you’re not the only one who needs the phone, so I’d thank you to keep your calls short. And if you won’t do it on your own, I may have to call a representative of the telephone company to make you do it.’ That’s what I said. So you call me, Rob. You know I need to hear from Lee.”

Here came the bus. As it pulled up, he raised his voice to be heard over the chuff of the airbrakes. “He’s a damn Commie, Ma, and he’s not coming home. Get used to it.”

“You call me!” she shrilled. Her grim little face was set. She stood with her feet planted apart, like a boxer ready to absorb a blow. Any blow. Every blow. Her eyes glared from behind black-rimmed harlequin glasses. Her kerchief was double-knotted beneath her chin. The rain had begun to fall now, but she paid it no mind. She drew in breath and raised her voice to something just short of a scream. “I need to hear from my good boy, you hear?” Robert Oswald bolted up the steps and into the bus without replying. It pulled away in a chuff of blue exhaust. And as it did, a smile lit her face. It did something of which I would have thought a smile incapable: it made her simultaneously younger and uglier.

A workman passed her. He didn’t bump or even brush her, as far as I could see, but she snapped: “Watch where you’re going! You don’t own the sidewalk!” Marguerite Oswald started back toward her apartment. When she turned away from me, she was still smiling.

I drove back to Jodie that afternoon, shaken and thoughtful. I wouldn’t see Lee Oswald for another year and a half, and I remained determined to stop him, but I already felt more sympathy for him than I ever had for Frank Dunning.

CHAPTER 13

1

It was seven forty-five on the evening of May 18, 1961. The light of a long Texas dusk lay across my backyard. The window was open, and the curtains fluttered in a mild breeze. On the radio, Troy Shondell was singing “This Time.” I was sitting in what had been the little house’s second bedroom and was now my study. The desk was a cast-off from the high school. It had one short leg, which I had shimmed. The typewriter was a Webster portable. I was revising the first hundred and fifty or so pages of my novel, The Murder Place, mostly because Mimi Corcoran kept pestering me to read it, and Mimi, I had discovered, was the sort of person you could put off with excuses for only so long. The work was actually going well. I’d had no problem turning Derry into the fictional town of Dawson in my first draft, and turning Dawson into Dallas was even easier. I had started making the changes only so the work-in-progress would support my cover story when I finally let Mimi read it, but now the changes seemed both vital and inevitable. It seemed the book had wanted to be about Dallas all along.

The doorbell rang. I put a paperweight on the manuscript pages so they wouldn’t blow around, and went to see who my visitor was. I remember all of this very clearly: the dancing curtains, the smooth river stone paperweight, “This Time” playing on the radio, the long light of Texas evening, which I had come to love. I should remember it. It was when I stopped living in the past and just starting living.

I opened the door and Michael Coslaw stood there. He was weeping. “I can’t, Mr.

Amberson,” he said. “I just can’t.”

“Well, come in, Mike,” I said. “Let’s talk about it.”

2

I wasn’t surprised to see him. I had been in charge of Lisbon High’s little Drama Department for five years before running away to the Era of Universal Smoking, and I’d seen plenty of stage fright in those years. Directing teenage actors is like juggling jars of nitroglycerine: exhilarating and dangerous. I’ve seen girls who were quick studies and beautifully natural in rehearsal freeze up completely onstage; I’ve seen nerdy little guys blossom and seem to grow a foot taller the first time they utter a line that gets a laugh from an audience. I’ve directed dedicated plodders and the occasional kid who showed a spark of talent. But I’d never had a kid like Mike Coslaw. I suspect there are high school and college faculty who’ve been working dramatics all their lives and never had a kid like him.

Mimi Corcoran really did run Denholm Consolidated High School, and it was she who coaxed me into taking over the junior-senior play when Alfie Norton, the math teacher who had been doing it for years, was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and moved to Houston for treatments. I tried to refuse on the grounds that I was still doing research in Dallas, but I wasn’t going there very much in the winter and early spring of 1961. Mimi knew it, because whenever Deke needed an English sub during that half of the school year, I was usually available. When it came to Dallas, I was basically marking time. Lee was still in Minsk, soon to marry Marina Prusakova, the girl in the red dress and white shoes.

“You’ve got plenty of time on your hands,” Mimi had said. Her own hands were fisted on her nonexistent hips: she was in full take-no-prisoners mode that day. “And it pays. ”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I checked that out with Deke. Fifty bucks. I’ll be living large in the hood.”

“In the what?”

“Never mind, Mimi. For the time being, I’m doing all right for cash. Can’t we leave it at that?”

No. We couldn’t. Miz Mimi was a human bulldozer, and when she met a seemingly immovable object, she just lowered her blade and revved her engine higher. Without me, she said, there would be no junior-senior play for the first time in the high school’s history. The parents would be disappointed. The schoolboard would be disappointed. “And,” she added, drawing her brows together, “I will be bereft. ”

“God forbid you should be bereft, Miz Mimi,” I’d said. “Tell you what. If you let me pick the play—something not too controversial, I promise—I’ll do it.” Her frown had disappeared into the brilliant Mimi Corcoran smile that always turned Deke Simmons into a simmering bowl of oatmeal (which, temperamentally speaking, was not a huge transformation). “Excellent! Who knows, you may find a brilliant thespian lurking in our halls.”

“Yes,” I said. “And pigs may whistle.”

But—life is such a joke—I had found a brilliant thesp. A natural. And now he sat in my living room on the night before our show opened for the first of four performances, taking up almost the entire couch (which bowed humbly beneath his two hundred and seventy pounds), bawling his freaking head off. Mike Coslaw. Also known as Lennie Small in George Amberson’s okay-for-high-school adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.