The Curator by Owen King

Author:Owen King
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2023-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

The Fields, Pt. 2

“I looked for you everywhere,” Robert said when she raised her head from the desk to see him sitting on the opposite side. “I thought you’d run off with one of your wax swains. I don’t think they like me, Dora. Especially the clamdigger with her little beach. She reminds me of someone’s very formidable mother. It’s discouraging. I find this whole place discouraging, but her especially. She looks so pleased and certain of herself, swinging along with that bucket. Dora, she looks victorious. I have this feeling that she’s about to tell me that her daughter, who I love, has already agreed to the proposal of a richer man’s son. Or maybe to the proposal of one of the wax miners.”

Dora blinked her sticky eyes. She had fallen asleep in the curator’s office. Her lieutenant regarded her with his elbow propped on the desk and his clean-shaven chin propped on his fist. A groggy dustiness filled the small room.

“Are you throwing me over for one of the miners?”

“No. The telegraph operator. What time is it?”

“Just after noon. Isn’t the telegraph operator… oh, I remember, the small room by the chemist’s laboratory, Telegraph Service above the door. The operator wears a white suit? Holds a notepad and a pencil? Portly?”

“Yes.”

“He has jowls.” Robert used a hand to shape a jowl in the air around his own face. He frowned. “They don’t have parts, do they?”

She shook her head. “No, they don’t. They’re smooth. But the telegraph operator pleases me in other ways, Lieutenant.”

“That son of a bitch. I’ll have to kill him.” He spoke without any conviction whatsoever, leaned back in his chair, and crossed his legs. He nodded at the tintype of the old king on the wall. “You should take that down.”

He was right. D stood and grasped the sides of the framed picture of the old king, whose murky eyes were seeded beneath wooly eyebrows. What Ike had said after seeing the kings carved into the rowboats was true; if you took away the medals around his collar, he was a mutt. The old king could have been the brother, in fact, of the nightsoil man on the second floor, who hunched arthritically under the arms of his barrow.

D lifted the picture off the wall and revealed the bright-yellow window of paint beneath.

“You look wretched,” Robert said.

D set the picture on the floor against the wall. “The telegraph operator hardly lets me sleep.”

“Enough.”

“It’s funny, but that’s what I said to the telegraph operator last night.”

Robert said he was taking her somewhere for a few hours, wherever didn’t matter, she needed some sunshine, needed to get away from this place.

“It smells awfully ripe too,” he said. “Have you looked to see if something crawled into the basement and expired?”

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