That night, though, I awoke and sat upright in bed. Oliv Snyder couldn't resist bottles of pills, so every drawer and shelf in his house was loaded with them. He couldn't resist women, so ...
I was so overcome with curiosity about his home life that it took me an hour to get back to sleep.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
GRANT GREW VERY tired of the conscientious customers who made a point of delivering the keys to one of us personally before leaving. It was annoying enough for us to have to interrupt breakfast or a bout with the razor or the dishpan to answer the bell and accept a key; but it was infuriating to be called out of bed unnecessarily in the wee small hours. Most of our customers, of course, sensibly left their keys inside the cabin, or sticking in the keyhole of their cabin door; but for the maddening few who insisted on seeing the keys safely home, Grant bought a silver mailbox and nailed it just outside the office door. He was in such a hurry to get the thing finished, now that he had actually started, that he didn't even take time to put exact, measured lettering on it. He simply dipped one of David's slender paint brushes into a bottle of black ink and wrote in shaky letters on the face of the mailbox "Please return keys here."
With a big safety pin Grant secured the front of the mailbox, so that people wouldn't pull it down and let the keys fall out.
Practically all of our customers put their keys dutifully into the little slot in the top of the mailbox when they were ready to check out, but there were always a few who were bewildered by the whole setup. This type would study the mailbox for a long time, read and reread the words on the front of it, ponder the safety pin, and peer into the slot to see whether there actually were any keys there--and sometimes, even after all these preliminaries, would ring the bell and hand one of us the key.
One morning I was dusting the Venetian blinds in the office when a plump woman in cerise slacks, with a hat that looked like a ring mold of feathers, minced toward the office door. A key was dangling from her hand, and I moved away from the window to watch her unobserved. She didn't look very intelligent, and I wondered how long it would take her to figure out how to dispose of the key.
She studied the mailbox, the words painted on it, and the safety pin, for several minutes. Then she moved her arm upward determinedly--and just as she did, Donna, in the living room, let out a piercing shriek.
By the time I had dashed into the living room, located Donna, whose head was stuck between the davenport and the wall, extricated her head and secured for her the ball she had been chasing, the cerise-slacked, feather-hatted woman was gone.