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Chapter One
She went to find him when he most longed to see her, walked through town in her white
cotton dress and her bare feet, and all along the way men stopped and stared at her as if
to wonder if she were not a figment of their imaginations. Adam sensed the men’s
agitation before he became aware of Blue’s presence, heard the murmurs of their
hearts and their faint, embarrassed gasps as she traveled past them like a breeze in the
heat of the two o’clock sun of a Sunday afternoon in August. Then he recognized the
stirrings of an old sadness, felt Blue move toward him with the beat of his own breath,
and by the time he went to the door and saw her, he knew he should never have come back.
She looked like rain.
She stood before him with her purple eyes and her innocent’s smile, a storm of
golden-red hair against her tulip-white skin, her body long and lean and Unself-conscious,
her arms bare and cool and hinting of desire—and he realized that he knew nothing
about her at all, that he had spent days investigating the woman without gaining the
slightest understanding of her.
“I wanted to see you,” she said.
They stood in front of the Lamar-Church Boardinghouse in downtown Knoxville. An old
colonial mansion built on one of the original sixty-four lots that had comprised the city
in its early days, the house had been abandoned for close to forty years—victim of
the urban flight that overtook Knoxville after the Great Depression and that lasted well
into the mid-1970’s. For forty years the house had sat, unoccupied, along a deserted
street, its windows smeared with dust, its steps crumbling with age and covered with
kudzu. Around it the city had slept in shells of empty department stores and locked
offices, houses overrun by colonies of mice and giant cats, cobblestoned alleys frequented
by naked ghosts and orphaned children, railroad tracks that transported only freight cars,
and a station where no train ever stopped. Then the city’s leaders had embarked on a
plan to invite life back into its center. The boardinghouse had been sold for a pittance
to the first and only bidder, and money had been loaned for a renovation. Investors had
been invited to take over stores and businesses. Streetlights had been installed. The
train station had revamped. A year after it had opened its doors, the boardinghouse was
still among only a handful of buildings that held a semblance of life downtown.
That Sunday Adam shared the hotel with three other guests—college students from
Amsterdam on a year-long cross-country tour of the United States. One of the boys had
heard her come in and was now standing at the window of his room overlooking the street.
Even without turning to see him, Adam could imagine the look of stupefaction on the boy’s
face, the way his eyes watered as they strove to swallow Blue’s image whole, the way
he whispered to his friends “come-to-the-window-and-look-for-yourselves-this-is-definitely-a-sight-to-see,
the-one-we’ll-remember-when-we’re-old.”
Adam had been in Knoxville for ten days already. He knew where to find Blue, of course.
She had lived in the same house in Fort Sanders since she had moved here from a far-off
and exotic land twenty-four years ago. Her husband, a man everyone knew as as “the
Professor”, had brought her here with no fanfare and with little explanation of her
background. In Knoxcille the last few days, Adam had followed Blue’s trail around
town and talked to people who knew her, looked up her records at the county courthouse and
the DA’s office, searched the archives of the local press for references to Blue and
her past. He knew he had to call on her, of course—to look her in the face and
determine for himself the truth or falsehood of the rumors surrounding her. Yet every time
he came close to seeing her, he was overcome by an instinctive sense of danger, a feeling
that he would lose objectivity the moment he set eyes on her, and so he had kept his
distance, from hour to hour and day to day, until she made the first move.
“You’ve been asking about me,” she said.
The smile had spread from her lips into her eyes, and spilled like heat onto everything
she looked at. Adam watched the edges of her mouth, the soft dimple in her right cheek,
the curve in the nape of her neck. Her dress, cut at the top in the shape of a V, was
almost transparent. Through it he could see the bareness of her breasts, the line that ran
from the center of her chest down over her stomach, the tips of her hipbones against the
sheer fabric. She was like a creature from another world, he thought—a child’s
drawing of a woman, all those vivid, improbable colors, the red and purple and blue that
belonged more to trees and to fish than to humans. She must have picked up a box of
crayons, he thought, once when she was three years old and her world was filled with
promise, picked up the colors and painted herself into what she thought a woman would look
like.
Blue shook her head to move the sun out of her eyes. Her hair fell in long, soft curls
onto her back and shoulders, reflecting a thousand variations of light, giving her an aura
of unreality. She walked closer to Adam and out of the sun. At the second-floor window,
the trio from Amsterdam inhaled uneasily and remained glued to their spots. Aware of their
desperation Blue raised her eyes at them for a split second, acknowledging their presence,
accepting their eagerness. Then she looked back at Adam.
It occurred to him then that she was not afraid of him at all, though she must realize why
he was here—because he had read about Little Sam Jenkins’ death and come back to
investigate how he had died, because Sam may have well died at Blue’s hands—he
had said as much to the sheriff in the hours before his death—because Adam was
determined to establish the truth or falsehood of that claim.
She came even closer to him and stopped. He thought he could feel the warmth of her body
spreading under his skin—like water moving through the earth, finding every pore,
filling a longforgotten but excruciating need.
She was not afraid of him at all.
“Come inside,” she said.
Excerpted from SUNDAY'S SILENCE © Copyright 2001 by Gina Barkhordar Nahai. Reprinted with permission from Harcourt Brace. All rights reserved.
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