A Curious Affair (10 page)

“Jillian?” Tyler prompted, touching my arm lightly.

“I must be exhausted. I even took the wrong coat.” I forced myself to look up at him.

“I saw that. That’s the nephew’s coat.”

He’d seen me. Great.

“Would you like me to walk you up the hill?” he asked.

“No. You stay here and do some detecting,” I said without thinking. I opened the red door.

“Detecting of Peter Wilkes?” Tyler asked bluntly, following me outside. I was glad that no one except Atherton was close enough to overhear us, and the cat had had the good sense to climb under the bench. Tyler added: “I’m not blind, Jillian. I know you don’t like the man. And I don’t think it’s because it’s like seeing a ghost, though the resemblance is uncanny. There can’t be any doubt of him being Irv’s kin.”

“You’re right. I don’t like Peter Wilkes—and it isn’t because he looks like Irv, though that’s obscene in its own
way. Everyone should have exclusive rights to their own face.” I stopped, unable or at least unwilling to say more. It wasn’t that I didn’t want Tyler on my side. I did—really badly. But I wasn’t sure that the truth was what would put him there, and I wanted some time to think before I said anything more. “Tyler, do you use intuition a lot on the job?”

I willed him to respond affirmatively. He considered my question a moment before answering.

“A certain amount of it, yes. Not that I’d ever admit it in court since we aren’t supposed to play hunches in law enforcement,” he told me. “Why? Your intuition speaking up about Irv’s nephew?”

“Yep. It’s loud and clear and ugly. I’m going to go home and have a long bath and a longer think and see if I can’t find some reasonable basis for what I know is true. That man is a killer.”

Tyler’s fine eyes narrowed. “If you find one, call me. Right away. Because right now we have a drug dealer running a meth lab in the area where Irv hiked who looks like a much better suspect—assuming the autopsy proves that Irv’s death wasn’t an accident, which I don’t think it will do. And, Jillian…” He paused, probably trying to find a way to be diplomatic. “Look, don’t do anything stupid trying to prove your suspicions on your own. She who doesn’t fight and runs away, lives to not fight another day. If this guy has anything to do with Irv’s death, we’ll find it out through the usual channels.”

“You’ll be the first—and probably only—person I call with any amazing insights,” I promised, at least agreeing to the first part of his speech. And it was true. I didn’t have anyone else to share my thoughts with except a wary, feral cat. That was a depressing enough thought all by itself. It reminded me again that Cal was gone and that my folks were gone, and there was only my brother,
Garth. We’d been close as kids, but we had both married people with strong and diametrically opposing personalities. Debbie’s was self-involved and extremely social—as in upwardly social. Cal was social-minded and involved in mankind. Same word, entirely different meaning. Garth’s wife Debbie saw this concern with everyman—and our moving from the city—as being downwardly mobile, and a bad influence on her children.

I should have liked Debbie more than I did since I understood self-absorption all too well these days, but we just didn’t get along, even with Cal out of the picture. And I wasn’t any too fond of my niece and nephew since they were turning out to be little facsimiles of their label-conscious mother. There was no sign of Garth’s easygoing and loveable nature in them. I think sometimes that they were cloned solely from Debbie’s DNA.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Tyler said. His voice was again gentle. I was too tired and discouraged to ask why.

As soon as Tyler went back inside, Atherton came out from under the bench.

“Would you like me to carry you back to the house?” I asked him.

He eyed the damp streets, whose gutters were gluey with dissolving leaves, and then looked me over.

No, I shall walk
.

I didn’t argue. Atherton was heavy and the walk home was all uphill.

There were a few people on the street, huddling in doorways and under awnings as they closed up their shops or hurriedly used their ATM cards at the credit union before scurrying home to a late and well-deserved supper. I found myself looking at them as a stranger might, assessing their vulnerabilities and being horrified at how they simply trusted no one to look over their shoulder and steal their PIN numbers as they entered them into a machine, or that no thief would scoop up
the bags of cash the merchants rested on the deep windowsills and ledges as they locked up their old-fashioned and not terribly secure doors, whose locks hadn’t been replaced since the turn of the century. They would carry their money in the open, like a purse, taking the day’s earnings to the night depository at the bank at the end of the street that was surrounded by oleander bushes where anyone could hide, but feeling no fear of what might be lurking in the shadowy doorways ahead because they hadn’t ever needed to be cautious. They would climb into unlocked cars and probably return home to their unlocked houses. Just like I did. Because our town was safe.

My world felt suddenly unfamiliar and dangerous to me, and all because I knew there was a murderer drinking beer back at The Mule, a true wolf among us unwary sheep, and I couldn’t prove it, couldn’t even spread the alarm. At least not yet.

“Shit.”

But at least we know who he is now
, Atherton consoled me.
We will get proof for the sheep man
.

“Yes, at least we know.” But I wasn’t positive that we would be able to get the kind of proof Tyler needed.

Molly insisted on a church funeral in the chapel where Irving had been baptized—and had never stepped foot in since. I couldn’t imagine much of anything less appropriate, but every choice of obsequies seemed equally bad, and like everyone else—the long-lost nephew included—I was just attending out of obligation and letting Molly, the only one who cared about such things, play one more day at being the grieving widow.

People entered the old churchyard by twos and threes. This wasn’t by choice but rather necessity. The first minister of the Mother Lode Gold Rush Church of Christ the Savior, one Reverend Marvell—formerly a Baptist and gold miner, but one who, late in life, decided to pioneer a new religion for those sinners who worshipped the idol of gold almost as much as God—had specified that the gate be built exactly thirty-six inches wide. He had taken Matthew 7:13 (
Enter by the
narrow gate since the road that leads to destruction is wide
and spacious
) very much to heart. The door into the now barn-red church was consequently every bit as narrow.

The house of worship was currently presided over by one Reverend Sugarbrown. His stock and trade was decrying the sins of virtue, which fortunately did not include the sin of gossiping. He was Goldie’s great uncle and I think that perhaps gene tic predestination had arranged for them to be as they are. Like Goldie, Dawg’s ex, the reverend had his good points, but he was a bad kind of gossip, someone who didn’t trade secrets out of curiosity but rather out of a rabid need to hunt down sinners so he could look good by comparison just in case God graded on a curve. He went around, Monday through Friday, vacuuming up unhappiness from all over town—and well beyond, too, if town life or his small parish proved to be too uneventful that week—until he was so full of dirty secrets that it actually made his face gray and bitter. Then he would sit down on Saturday and write his sermon. I don’t think he would have thrived in some happy coastal climate where people were laid-back because of easy living or else happily ambitious and chasing their careers. He needed a place where weather could drive people to desperation and an understandable belief in a vengeful God, and even here, his congregation was sparse. He should have stayed in Maine.

I wandered up the hill and took up a post in the watery shade of the O’Linn mausoleum where it was unpleasantly cold but the acoustics were especially good. It was also a long way from where Cal’s urn stood atop a Romanesque pedestal. I should have gone to visit him, I suppose, but the act was beyond me, especially with so many people watching.

The stony angel perched on top of the sepulcher seemed to flutter her wings as clouds passed rapidly overhead—light and shade, light and shade, her face first radiant white and then gray with sorrow. Trying to look inconspicuous, I read the mausoleum plaque with great care while I listened to a dozen conversations
floating up the hill. peggy, fernie, charlie and nell. Their young lives had all ended the same year: 1916. What was it that had killed them? One of the pandemic influenzas? Maybe Asiatic cholera. That killed within hours of the victim being infected. Or perhaps it had been a fire. I would have to ask Crystal. The story was bound to be sad, but at least the family could afford a monument, a place for the survivors to come and grieve the lost. Not everyone could pay for such things. In fact, most people had passed out of history without anything to mark their departure. The whole world is an unmarked graveyard. We sit on the pretty topsoil and don’t realize we are living on someone or something else’s bones. Or maybe we don’t care because it isn’t yet our turn to feed the worms and therefore can ignore the fact that in life we are still in the midst of death.

I hadn’t asked what would happen to Irv’s body. I’d assumed it would be cremated once the coroner released it.

Please
, I thought,
let it be cremated
. I didn’t want to stare at Irv’s restored corpse. My last view had been quite bad enough. I could live with it because it was honest, but I found the sight of the embalmed—madeup and coiffured as they never were in life—to be unutterably horrible.

Someone had left flowers on the tomb steps in the last day or so. hoc facite in meam commemorationem—do this in my memory, the carving on the threshold said, and so the family had. I didn’t bring Cal’s urn flowers since he had always thought such things a waste—
Bring me all my
flowers while I’m alive
, he’d said—but it still seemed like a nice gesture to me. Perhaps I would visit in the late spring when the wild lupines were out. It was pretty then, and maybe I would feel ready to face his grave.

I wasn’t ready that day. The sun was out and doing its best to shine, but the graveyard inspired some less than pleasant thoughts. And why shouldn’t it? The cemetery
was meant as a reminder that
Thou too shall die
. I enjoy good physical health outside of my stupid jaw, or think that I do since I have no worrisome symptoms of any dreaded disease, and that amounts to the same thing in terms of everyday living. Yet, standing among the dead, I was very aware of my mortality and how few people would miss me when I was gone, and it made me melancholic.

I was aware of other things, too. My dreams, visions of a bright future, weren’t dead, but they had been napping long enough to make me ask if they might have slipped into a permanent coma. I needed to find some way to revive them and soon, or I would be dead in all the ways that mattered, just another shadow taking up space until my body was as worn as my soul. But what did I have ambition for? What did I long for? Almost nothing. An end of emotional pain, maybe. To be able to endure human company. That was cause for feeling even sadder. I was lonely, but couldn’t bear to be around most people. It’s a fine line, the one between being alone and being lonely, and one can cross it so easily. Without realizing it, I had strayed from needed solitude into isolation, peace and quiet metamorphosing into loneliness and despair. Days had been fairly horrible, but I was living my life the same old way because I couldn’t think of anything better.

I turned and looked out over the town that I had chosen because I liked it above all others—and I felt nothing. Everything was familiar, but brought no joy. I could plainly see the dark square of cypress near the courthouse. It was one of three cemeteries in town. They were all distinct. The Jews got the cypress trees, the Catholics had white quartz paths and a sea of crosses and Marys that dazzled the eyes on a sunny day, and the Protestants got this place with green lawns and mausoleums. I don’t know what Buddhists and Muslims do. Go somewhere else, I guess.

Few tourists knew that the acres of grass I was standing in were kept cropped by a flock of grazing sheep, brought in bimonthly in the spring and summer. They were a sensible choice for a cemetery on a steep slope. The sheep were traditionally pastoral and there was a groundskeeper who made sure that there were no unsightly piles of dung desecrating the graves or visitors’ good shoes during daylight hours. At night the flock was watched over by a sheepdog whose job it was to make sure that the coyotes and mountain lions did not enjoy a free lamb-chop dinner.

The churchyard is perched halfway up the side of western hills. From there it is easy to see that the town is really just one long chain of buildings put up a hundred years ago out of handmade bricks, made after they had run out of river rock and learned the futility of building with wood. Repeated fires had convinced folks that rock or brick was the sensible choice in a place where summer wildfires are an inevitability.

What wasn’t so easy to see was that those bricks were made as much from blood, sweat and prayers as from local clay and straw. The current occupants of Irish Camp were white—blinding winter white—but what people had forgotten was that a lot of those prayers embedded in the walls where they lived had been said in foreign tongues: Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Yiddish. They’d all been here, praying for gold, then praying for water, praying to live to see another spring. Gold appealed to all races, and they had come in droves seeking their fortune in the gold-rush of ’49. There were many stories and legends of old murders for the nuggets and flakes—many, many, many. I was most afraid of the Chinese ghost who supposedly haunted the old drug store. He had died in the fire that destroyed what used to be Chinatown. The ghost was said to push people down the backroom stairs that led to
one of the numerous underground tunnels that zigzagged under the town. The tunnels were all closed to the public now for safety reasons, but some store owners had failed to board up the entrances. I knew of three that were still open: one ran from under the art gallery that had been a bank, one from the music store that used to be a butcher’s shop—I’d been down there and all the old meat hooks were still embedded in the walls—and one from a used bookstore that used to be a bordello to what is now the courthouse. These tunnels survived because the old merchants found it safer to travel underground to both the bank and the bordello, the former because it protected them from robbers, that latter from their watchful wives who didn’t approve of their spouses visiting the soiled doves.

I’d heard of one other shaft as well. There was supposed to be a tunnel under The Mule. Supposedly it had collapsed, killing three miners, but I had heard a rumor that the present owner had opened it back up and was using it for storage. With how honeycombed our streets were, it was a wonder we hadn’t had more of them collapse.

I shivered and pushed the thought of ghosts and cave-ins away. The present day offered tragedy enough. There was no need to be morbid about old losses and the number of souls that seemed to get trapped here when they died.

As I watched, hoop-skirted women and men in duster coats hurried through the streets, calling out to one another as they organized a posse. A man in black, riding on an equally black mount, galloped onto Grant Street and fired a pistol into the air. The men in dusters responded by running for the horses tied up in front of The Mule. They chased after the bank robbers heading at a full gallop for the part of Vermillion Creek called The Red Rapids.

I wasn’t seeing specters from the past. These reenactors were my civic-minded neighbors who still enjoyed playing dress-up, and this hubbub meant the rodeo would be coming soon and people were getting ready for the parade, the first big tourist event of the season. It meant we’d be hearing gunshots and general whooping twice a day at eleven and two for the next couple of weeks to bring in spectators who would spend their dollars here.

Irish Camp has always been deliberately—even theatrically—antique. But these days it was closer to thrift-shop goods than anything that belonged in a museum. The people tended to look a bit vintage, too, artifacts dressed in hand-me-downs that didn’t fit them all that well. There were exceptions, of course, like Linda who ran the Queendom Come boutique and the natty gentleman who had just bought the art gallery and expanded it to include sculpture and mosaics, and even paintings that didn’t have cowboys or miners in them. But by and large, the population wasn’t trying to make Blackwell’s Best Dressed list. That was one of the few things I missed about living in a city. However, for one week a year, the town dressed in its finest—circa 1880. In addition to the rodeo and parade, there was also a pioneer ball held at the old opera house. Period costumes were mandatory. Cal had adored this tradition and dressed up for it every year.

I swore as something hard bounced off of my head. There’s an acorn season, a time of danger when the little missiles escape the parent oaks and achieve a vertical escape velocity great enough to bury themselves in the stony ground. Or a person’s scalp. However, acorn season was months away. This particular missile hadn’t fallen, but had been hurled at me by another neighborhood squirrel.

I opened my mouth to scold him for his bad manners, but my ear caught a familiar name and tuned back to the conversation carried on between Molly and Dell as they
huddled over their cigarettes beside Dell’s mother’s grave. This combination was like vinegar and waffles. Or peach sauce on lasagna. I didn’t get it, but I listened attentively.

Sadly, nothing new was being said at the moment. Bored and frustrated with waiting, I looked beyond the bickering pair at the nearly naked rose that twined about the old wrought-iron fence, studying Irv’s pallid nephew. Peter Wilkes, standing alone by a storm-tormented shrub rose, remained a mystery. The recently-active grapevine knew that the sheriff had found him in Lodi, and no one in authority suspected him of anything illegal. In fact, no one suspected him of anything—except me and Atherton.

Which was understandable, I thought with a frustrated sigh I didn’t bother to contain. Why would anyone suspect this monkey-looking fellow of anything? He didn’t look like the crucible of greed and violence where began a plan for cold-blooded murder. Yet, I believed this primitive-appearing creature, this weak facsimile of Irving with knobby joints and powerful hands, was a murderer. Atherton’s certainty aside, you didn’t travel a hundred miles in the worst weather in a century to visit an uncle you hardly knew unless there was something in it for you.

I thought about Irv’s corpse and how it had worn the faintest of smiles lying there on the floor. It seemed he’d got the joke before he died. I could—barely—imagine the ignorant nephew demanding money from his uncle and then reacting in anger when Irv laughed at him and said there was none to spare. And Irv probably would have laughed. It wasn’t anything personal, but the thought of him having any money to give to a near-stranger would have incited his sense of the ridiculous. He’d laugh about it for days. Or he would have done so, if someone hadn’t ended his ability to laugh forever.

“What hast though done? Thou thinkest to conceal
it, but thy brother’s blood crieth unto Me from the ground,” I muttered, thinking of Cain and the murdered Abel. I swallowed once to shove down sudden bile, surprised as always at my abrupt anger. It vibrated in me a nerve strung the length of my throat and chest that was plucked into sudden life at the memory of Irv’s wry laughter. I reached in my pocket for my roll of antacids and attempted to think calm thoughts.