Chapter 6

The basement was cool and dark and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the new lack of light. It wasn’t completely pitch black which was helpful as I was there for a specific purpose and it wasn’t to break my neck stumbling through a pitch black basement but, if there was one thing that those few moments of darkness made me realize, it was just how exhausted I was. I hadn’t exactly come with a plan for what I wanted to do during the time I spent waiting for Beverly, I guess I had always assumed that I would just wander around and check out the inside of her home to see what it was like and if it could tell me anything about who she was as a woman, the kind of style she had, and maybe about her family but now that idea seemed a lot less appealing. No, what I wanted to do was rest and, as luck would have it, Beverly was storing furniture, among other things, down in her basement. Perhaps they were remnants of the life she had before her husband had left her although the bed I was staring at seemed too small to be a marital bed. Still, it was possible that she hadn’t always been as well off as she obviously was now so, maybe, the bed in the basement was one in which Beverly’s son was conceived. In the end, I could have stood there and speculated all afternoon and not have come up with a straight answer, but that bed just looked too inviting.