Throughout the evening Lomax checks in with the game warden by telephone, and so far the search has turned up nothing. When Lomax calls Mr. Holt with an update, he sounds inebriated, and orders Lomax to search Euphemia’s apartment immediately. But since battering down that oak door earlier, the lightning strikes to the apex of his spine have been unrelenting, and he can barely take a breath without a wince. Desperate to carry out his employer’s wishes, Lomax pulls from his desk the box of opium-laced cigars that Mr. Holt’s doctor gave him. While they aren’t exactly legal, the doctor didn’t mind making a special preparation for such a valued employee. Lomax rips away the paper seal, takes a cigar, and runs it under his nose: scents of orchid, clove, manure. And beneath that a vivid memory of his childhood: the strange pipe of his father’s that he kept hidden in the coal scuttle.
Also a large man, Walter Lomax was a drinker, an opium smoker, and a part-time magician with pockets full of marked cards and a wandering eye for women. “Our vaunted guest,” his wife would proclaim when he’d skulk home for Sunday dinner and slump in his armchair, tie loosened, guzzling water like a prizefighter in his corner.
When he finally left them for good when Harvey was twelve, to make ends meet the boy was forced to take a job collecting on milk accounts for the Holt Dairy Company. As the youngest collector, the most hopeless cases in the foulest neighborhoods fell to him. Most collectors went in for intimidation, threats—overt or implied. Some squeezed the woman a little if her man wasn’t around. But Harvey didn’t need to. Even at twelve, already he struck an intimidating figure, and after his first month he’d recovered more than the firm’s best collector. Soon he was drawing a dollar a week in commission, money that kept him and his mother from destitution. Then, twenty years ago, Lomax was recruited by Mr. Holt himself. Violence is a language Lomax learned to speak early, from the drumming cadence of his father’s fists, and he quickly discovered the thrill to be had in roughing up a thief or a cheat—someone who’d gleefully shirked his responsibilities in a way Lomax would never dream of. Life had already dealt him so much pain; why shouldn’t he redistribute some back out into the world, if the situation warranted? And while the frequent violence has exacerbated his condition, the job has allowed him to provide for his family and prove that he’s cut from a markedly different cloth than his deadbeat father.
So what harm could one measly cigar possibly do? Lomax thinks now as he snips off the end then lights it, taking only a modest puff. As the smoke spreads languidly through the fleshy closets of his lungs, he feels nothing—no euphoria, no life-altering rush—so he takes another puff of equal measure. Wary of overdoing it, he places the extinguished cigar back in the box and sits in his chair, waiting. Slowly, almost at the speed of a sunrise, he feels a balmy relief come over him, a bright sensation that hums sweetly through the length of his spine like water through a pipe.
Feeling more limber than he has in years, Lomax drives to the low-rent apartment near the docks that Mr. Holt provides for Euphemia. He uses the landlord key to let himself inside, and just as he expected, she isn’t there. Though her mind is meticulously well ordered, she has always kept her place a terrific mess: a blizzard of fruit flies rear upward from food-ridden plates in the basin; jewellery dazzles in heaps around the dressing mirror; books lie splayed open on every surface, some stacked a dozen high, nested face-down like Ukrainian dolls. He touches the silk dresses and nightgowns that dangle in her wardrobe, and on a nearby shelf he spots framed photographs of her family, headed by a proud, coal dust–blackened man standing rod-straight beside a grinning, middle school–aged Euphemia, gap-toothed and already lovely. Lomax momentarily entertains the notion of his eldest daughter, Hattie, moving to the big city with even bigger aspirations, only to end up as the bruised plaything of a rich tycoon—a thought that upheaves his stomach. Then, tucked inside Euphemia’s flip-top desk, he finds the slipcase she keeps her journal in. Upon its spine is written:
THE SECRET & PRIVATE THINKINGS & DOINGS OF EUPHEMIA BAXTER
But the slipcase is empty.
Perhaps she somehow managed to make it back here to the apartment to collect the journal and has already skipped town? But she was always sentimental about her family, so why leave her photographs? Suddenly, the irrefutable absence of the journal, coupled with Mr. Holt’s inevitable disappointment at Lomax’s failure to find it, launches him into a frenzy. He yanks out drawers, flips the mattress, drags boxes from the closet, and tips over the desk, toppling a sewing kit and spraying needles and notions across the floor. Ignoring the clawing jolts in his back brought on by his savage actions, he pulls back a few loose pieces of wall panelling with hooked hands in case she’s tucked the journal in behind.
Breathing hard, with blue sparks crackling behind his eyes and nearly unable to stand, he eventually finds his hat, takes up the empty slipcase, then locks the apartment door and limps to his car. There he opens his glove box and pulls from it the half-smoked cigar he’d brought along just in case his back acted up. But after imagining his father’s meaty face sucking on his opium pipe, Lomax pitches the cigar to the pavement and drives off.
While tossing in bed that night, he worries that if the wrong person gets hold of the journal and blackmails Mr. Holt, it will be all Lomax’s fault, given that the affair’s concealment was his responsibility. And so he reassures himself that the search party will locate Euphemia and her baby by tomorrow afternoon at the latest, and that she quite likely has the journal with her. It will be a chilly second night for them to spend in the woods, yet not fatally so. Mr. Holt will be furious with her for running, though his relief at recovering his child will win the day. And before the dust settles, Lomax will take the journal, unite it with its slipcase, then promptly dump them both in a roaring fireplace where they belong. And this whole irritating matter will be put to rest.
BLANK
AT FIRST LIGHT, Everett scoops the child into his wool coat, cinching his belt overtop to suspend it against him, before setting out for Saint John. The baby fusses some, then goes slack after a half-mile’s walk through the trees. He makes this trip as seldom as possible, and never overnight. The city always disturbs him: automobiles backfiring like German artillery; hard-browed loggers coming to blows outside taverns at midday; over-pruned trees living stunted lives on the boulevards. Usually, after trading his syrup at the general store, he’ll see a moving picture. Many times he’s sworn off the extravagance, yet during each visit to town he becomes fatigued by people, by their gawking and talking, and the shadowy theatre is a welcome relief, a place where people are his to examine, not the other way around.
As he walks up Broad Street, everywhere he looks seems as good a place as any to abandon the child: the crook of the dogwood near City Hall, an old crone’s washbucket, a well-swept doorstep, the front seat of a polished silver automobile. But there are too many people about. Though literacy escapes him, he scans the dailies on a newsstand for images of a missing baby and finds nothing. Nobody wants this child, you dolt, he thinks. It was hung in the forest to die.
Everett walks to the Catholic Charities on Waterloo Street, where a long queue of derelicts snakes out front and down the block. It’s there the nuns tell him that they don’t accept orphans from men. After that, he can’t just leave it on the street with so many onlookers, especially men who may recognize him. So with no other options, he veers crosstown, dodging some destitute boys hawking cigarettes rolled with aspirin and greasy napkins of roasted peas, and knocks on the door of a man familiar to him from his tramping days.