A Safe Place for Dying (17 page)

Read A Safe Place for Dying Online

Authors: Jack Fredrickson

BOOK: A Safe Place for Dying
2.78Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“How convenient,” I said, sneaking another glance at the blond-gray lady at the next table. The rose blush on her cheeks had deepened. Nothing like a little toddy to give a glow first thing in the morning. I turned back to the waitress. “Can you tell me where the Clarinda State Bank is?”
“There's no bank in Clarinda. I've lived here all my life, and there's never been a bank in Clarinda.”
“Might there be someone here who's been around longer?”
“I'll ask,” she said, and bustled off.
“I try to build up slowly, ease in the ecstasy with my fingers,” the red-haired woman at the next table was saying.
“Absolutely,” the blond-gray lady with the flushed cheeks agreed, bobbing her head. Or maybe it was that her head was wobbling. “Building for the whole hour is the only way.”
When I was in high school back in Rivertown, the hookers who worked the parking lot behind the bowling alley had a different name for it, but they built ecstasy with their fingers, too. They didn't go slow, though; they went real fast, and they only charged five bucks, less if they wore gloves. And it didn't take an hour, not with high school boys.
“You were inquiring about the bank?”
The man had come up behind me so quietly I hadn't heard him.
I looked up. He had a full gray beard and was wearing a white chef's jacket and hat. “Yes. I'm looking for information about the Clarinda State Bank. It was here in 1970.”
“Indeed it was, though it wasn't much of a bank. It closed sometime in the midseventies, torn down for that gas station.” He gestured out the window at the B.P. and smiled. “You can see Clarinda isn't really ripe for commercial development.”
“Is there a city hall, or a telephone company office? I'm looking for someone.”
“Might I inquire who?”
“Nadine Reynolds. She used to live here, or at least bank here.”
“Can't say as I know the name.”
“Is there anyone in town who might have known her?”
“There's old-timers around, but they're mostly retired loggers or sixties people farming little plots up in the hills.” He didn't pause to explain what kind of crops “sixties people” would be growing in small plots in the hills. “Your best bet is to go across the street, ask at the post office.”
I looked out the window. All that was across the street was the little general store.
“It's got postal boxes inside,” the chef said. “Ask Betsy, she runs the place. She might remember your Nadine Reynolds.”
The waitress brought me my check. Eighteen bucks, which was nine bucks a cake if they threw in the raspberry gratis. Of course, that included all you could drink of the sherry. I left twenty-two dollars on the table and walked outside, a healthy man.
The sign on the store said it opened at ten, leaving me an hour to kill. I got in the car and drove north a couple of miles, but there was nothing there but more hills and craggy cliffs. I pulled off at an observation point and leafed through the therapist directory I'd picked up in Bodega Bay.
The counter clerk at the motel had been right: There were advisors, therapists, and counselors peddling every kind of assistance,
from tantric sex instruction, avatar training, and radical forgiveness to polarity therapy and shamanic counseling. I didn't understand any of it; the ailments that were plaguing people in Northern California had not yet struck Rivertown. One ad in particular caught my eye. Some fellow was offering help in “Getting Right with Your Colon,” which sounded like it might be popular as a postlunch seminar topic outside Kutz's Wienie Wagon. I tossed the directory into the backseat and drove back to Clarinda.
A tall woman with braided gray pigtails was hauling out wire display racks from inside the store. I pulled in and parked.
“I understand this is also the post office,” I said from the convertible.
“It is.” She set down a round contraption full of T-shirts on hangers.
I got out, followed her inside, and helped her carry out a rack of brightly colored inner tubes.
“Inner tubes?”
“The Russian River is great for tubing,” she said. “Can I help you find something?”
“I'm looking for a Nadine Reynolds, used to live around here.”
“Still does,” she said, disappearing into the store. She came out with a shelf rack stacked with beach towels. “She in some kind of trouble?”
“I need to talk to her about an insurance matter.”
She nodded, satisfied.
“But Nadine Reynolds still lives here?”
“Think so.” She paused. “Still gets mail, mostly junk, ten, twelve times a year.”
“Where does she live?”
“Don't know. I've never seen the woman. Her mail comes general delivery. I hold it until Lucy comes in.”
“Lucy?”
“Lucy Vesuvius. When she walks down for her mail, she always
asks if there's anything for this Nadine Reynolds and says she'll bring it up to her. Got a letter in there right now for Nadine.”
“Do you have an address for Lucy Vesuvius?”
“She lives up in the hills, Runnelback Road.”
I pulled my cell phone out of my shirt pocket. “May I use your phone book?”
“Pay phone's inside.” She turned from straightening the T-shirts on the round rack and saw the cell phone in my hand. “Those things don't work around here,” she said. “Too many hills, not enough towers. The Zen folks say that's the natural order, the hills keeping cellular out. Me? I'd like to have one. Anyway, Lucy doesn't have a phone, regular or cellular. If you want to talk to her, you have to go on up.”
She grabbed a small brown paper bag from a stack on a seed table and sketched a map. “I expect she's at home. Lucy doesn't seem to get around much, except for a hike down here once, twice a month for provisions.”
“What does she do?”
“She's one of them in touch with her inner spirit. Sometimes I think I'm the only one's got a toe in the real world around here.” She paused. “You sure this Nadine isn't in some sort of trouble?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“Because I been running this place for twenty years, and excepting one other guy, you're the only one's asked for Nadine Reynolds.”
Good news, I thought. Till had mobilized one of his San Francisco agents. “The other fellow, was he a government type, in a suit, came up in the last day or so?” I asked.
She laughed. “Not hardly. First off, he calls, never comes here. Second, he sure doesn't sound like a government man. He's a little too soft-spoken, a little too polite. He always asks if I know how Nadine's doing. I always tell him what I just told you: I don't know her, but somebody comes down periodic for her mail, so she must
be doing all right. I always ask if I can pass on a message. He says no, and that's pretty much it until he calls again a few months later.”
“How long has he been calling?”
“Ever since I've owned the store. When I see Lucy afterward, she always gets real excited about it and promises to tell Nadine right away.”
“This caller, he doesn't leave a name?”
“Sure he does. Michael. His name is Michael.”
“Michael Jaynes?”
“He never has said his last name, but Lucy seems to know who it is.”
“I think I'll head up there,” I said, starting for the car.
“Hold on a minute.” She went into the store and came out with a small packet of mail. “Might as well bring the mail up, if you're going up to see Lucy.” She handed me the rubber-banded bundle.
I opened the car door and set the mail next to me on top of the bag map. “Where I come from, they're not this trusting with the mail,” I said.
“Neither are we, but you have a good face.”
“An honest face?”
She shook her head and laughed. “No. More like it's too confused to be dishonest.”
I smiled with her at that, then drove away.
A half mile up into the hills, I pulled over and slipped the rubber band off the mail. A letter-sized white envelope, computer addressed to Nadine Reynolds, was in the middle of the packet. The address was printed in the same font as the summer's two extortion letters, and it had been postmarked from the same Chicago zip code, the day after the money was left in the Dumpster behind Ann Sather's restaurant.
If my cell phone worked, I would have called Till.
As the crow flies, Lucy Vesuvius's place was no more than two or three miles from the store in Clarinda. But if the crow used Betsy's paper-bag map, following the same twisting, rutted dirt and stone roads that I did, it might still be hopping on its tiny, clawed feet. The squiggly lines Betsy had drawn on the map were accurate enough, but she'd used no street names, because there weren't any. Instead, she'd noted landmarks at intersections, like “Red Barn, Part of Roof Missing,” or “Fallen, Rotted Tree.” It must have been years since she'd been back up in those hills. The red barn had collapsed; I drove past the rubble twice before I thought to get out of the car to check the heap of boards for flecks of red paint. The fallen, rotted tree was gone, too—dinner, most likely, for a previous generation of termites.
The little cottage was so densely nestled in the woods that I drove past it three times before I spotted the painted plaque nailed to a tree. It had a picture of a volcano erupting, with READINGS lettered underneath a mountain. Vesuvius. Cute.
I parked as far as I could get off the narrow, one-lane dirt road and walked through the trees. The tiny house wasn't much more
than a shack. It had been painted lavender, with darker purple and red trim, but now most of the paint was off, and black mildew covered much of the exposed gray wood. Spindly trees grew right up to the cracked cinder-block foundation. The front door had moss on it and looked to be swelled shut from moisture. I knocked anyway, several times, but there was no answer.
I walked around to the back. There was a small, sunlit clearing behind the house, planted with irregular rows of a hodgepodge of different plants and bushes. I recognized tomatoes, a row of something low to the ground that could have been strawberries, and, in the center of the plot, several tall pointy plants that might have been destined to be smoked rather than eaten. At the opposite end of the clearing, a woman in a faded pink sundress and a tattered straw hat, unraveling at the brim, was bent down, tending a row.
“Hello,” I called.
She looked up. Her mouth moved, but I couldn't hear her. I walked closer.
“Hello,” I said again.
The freckled face under the unraveling hat was in its late fifties or early sixties, wrinkled and worn by the sun, but she had a child's smile, wide-eyed and full of innocent delight.
“Lucy Vesuvius?”
“That's me,” she said, straightening up. She stuck out a dirty hand. I shook it. It was calloused and rough. “Forgive me, I forgot I had an appointment.”
“We haven't. I just took the chance you'd be home.”
“You from the welfare?”
“No, ma'am.”
Her eyes got narrower. “I didn't figure you were. It's been years since I applied. What brings you here, then?”
“I brought your mail,” I said, handing her the small bundle with the letter to Nadine Reynolds on top. I watched her face.
“I don't know why Betsy down at the store bothers,” she said, holding out the packet far enough to see without reading glasses. “All I ever get is catalogs for stuff I don't—”
She stopped suddenly, and her fingers tightened on the white envelope with the Chicago postmark. She slipped it out of the packet, slit it open with a grimy fingernail, and pulled out a sheet of folded white typing paper. A twenty-dollar bill fluttered to the ground, but she didn't seem to notice. She was too intent on the white sheet of paper. She held it up against the sun and turned it over, looking for writing. The paper was blank. I had the feeling she no longer knew I was there.
I bent down to pick up the twenty-dollar bill and held it out to her. “I wonder if you can help me.”
Slowly, she lowered the blank piece of paper. Her eyes were unfocused, like her mind was a million miles away. Then she smiled and took the twenty. “I get so little mail. Come inside and we'll have peppermint tea. It's the least I can do for you driving up my mail.”
I followed her to the back step of her fading lavender cottage. “Please remove your shoes,” she said, pausing to kick off her sandals. “Keeps the karma in balance.” She dropped the blank sheet of paper and the envelope into a plastic tub filled with old catalogs and opened the back door.
Lucy's tiny kitchen was a war zone of clutter. Pots, pans, and metal utensils, some rusted, lay nestled on the shallow counter beneath sagging chipped-enamel cabinets.
She moved to an indoor hand pump set into the counter, next to the sink. “Just take a minute,” she said, working the pump until water came out. She filled a dented copper teapot and set it on a narrow two-burner propane stove that could have been scavenged from an old house trailer. She scratched a wood match against the underside of the counter, held it to the burner until a flame caught, and set the kettle on to boil.
“Take a seat,” she said, waving the match. She came over to the
two scratched white-painted wood chairs by the stained oak table and pushed aside a few red clay pots so we'd have room for our tea. We sat down.
“You didn't tell me what brings you all the way up here.” She smiled at me across the corner of the tiny table, smoothing the wrinkles on the lap of her sundress.
“Nadine Reynolds.”
Her mouth held the shape of the smile, but the life went out of it. It was like a switch had been closed, shutting off the animation to her face. She looked at me with frozen eyes.
“Obviously, you know Nadine Reynolds.” I gestured toward the backyard. “That was her mail you opened out there.”
The teakettle started to whistle. She didn't move; she continued to sit, paralyzed, oblivious to the shrieking steam for several more seconds until, at last, the sound got through. She pushed herself up from the chair like she had arthritis and shuffled the three steps to the stove. Slowly, she filled two silver tea balls with dried leaves from a mason jar, dropped them into white china mugs, and added boiling water from the kettle. She brought them back to the table and sat down with a sigh.
“I grow my own tea,” she said in a faraway voice. “Peppermint's my favorite.”
“Nadine Reynolds?”
She looked down and pulled at the little chain holding the tea ball in her cup. “You from the police?” she asked without looking up.
“No, ma'am.”
“You'd have to tell me if you were law enforcement, right?” she said. Her eyes were still down.
“I suppose I would, but I'm not.”
She raised her head then and looked at me. “Nadine Reynolds has not been here for a long, long time.”
“She still gets mail here. Money.”
“Nadine Reynolds was a confused young woman, a girl really,
filled with love and uncertainties about her fellow man. Nadine could not live as she had.”
She stopped.
I waited.
“Drink your tea,” Lucy Vesuvius said after another minute. She took a small sip. Some of the life was coming back into her face. “Peppermint's at its most exhilarating when it's hot.”
I took a sip. She was right; it was exhilarating. Of course, after one slice of dry wheat toast and two granola hotcakes topped with an orphaned organic raspberry, beef broth could have sent me to the stars in ecstasy.
“Nadine Reynolds,” I said again.
“What do you want with her after all these years?”
“I'm not looking for her. I'm looking for someone she knew. Michael Jaynes.”
“Michael?” All the dullness was gone from her voice now. “Has he sent you?”
“Do you know where Michael is?”
“Have you seen Michael?” She leaned forward in her chair.
I shook my head. “I'm trying to find him.”
“Why?”
“Something about insurance on an electrical contracting job he worked on a long time ago. Do you know where he is?”
She looked down as her fingers strayed to her dress pocket to touch the twenty-dollar bill. Then her eyes moved up to my face.
“A long, long time ago,” she said, “when things were very confused, there was a war that no one wanted. It was a time of upheaval, a time of fear. Our own police, supposedly sworn to protect, had turned on us. Some people left the country, to Canada, to Europe. Some put their heads down and endured, praying the horror would pass. And some, like Nadine Reynolds, protested peacefully. Nadine had grown up privileged, in Ohio. She came out here to college, to Berkeley. There she met a group of peace-seeking people, and she
lent her presence to those who were trying to convince the politicians that what they were doing in Vietnam was wrong. But some of those gentle people had lost their way, too. They did things they shouldn't have done, things they couldn't see were just as wrong as what they were protesting against.”
Lucy Vesuvius got up, went to the stove, and held up the dented kettle. I shook my head. She poured more hot water into her cup, brought it back to the table, and watched the steam rise for a minute before continuing. “One night, the little group that Nadine had joined set off a small disturbance, a little explosion in the middle of the night, when no one was supposed to be around. Underneath a police car, just an empty police car, behind a police station.” She shook her head, still looking down at her tea. “There was a girl, come to see a rookie cop on his break. She was out in back, waiting in the parking lot. She got hit by a tiny part from the car. Just a bit of the outside mirror, the paper said, but it was enough to blind her.” Lucy raised her head. Her eyes were wet. “Don't you suppose everyone knows that wasn't supposed to happen?”
“I'm not here about that.”
She pulled a piece of paper towel from a roll on the table and dabbed at her eyes.
“It was Michael who built the bomb?”
She shook her head, hard. “No. Like Nadine, he had no idea the others were planning a bomb. It scared him. It made him angry. He was just home from Vietnam. He'd seen the horror, the wrongness of violence. All he wanted was for others to see that, too. But in the end, the people who'd built that bomb were no better than the people they were protesting against. That's what war does, Michael said: It infects everybody.”
“And after the police car blew up?”
“The ones who'd set the explosive took off, shocked and scared by what they'd become. Nadine dropped out of school, came up here.”
“What about Michael?”
“He'd learned electrical in the Army and went down to L.A. to work construction. It was no different down there. The craziness was everywhere, and it wore at him like an infection. He told Nadine he was going to check out the heartland, the Midwest, to see if things were less agitated there.” She blew her nose with the paper towel. “They were going to get married, you know, Michael and Nadine. But too much had happened. They were both changed people. He took off, and she stayed up here, out of touch with it all, hoping Michael would come back and they could rebuild what they'd had. He never did come back.”
“But he calls.”
She shook her head. “He never did come back.”
“Betsy down at the store said he calls every few months.”
Lucy shook her head again.
“And he sends her money.”
She dropped her eyes, and her hand moved again to the pocket of her sundress.
“That twenty was from Michael, wasn't it?”
She raised her head. “No telling. There's never a letter.”
“Why doesn't he write?”
She twisted the piece of paper towel she had in her hand. “What's there to say?”
None of it was making sense. “Is he running? Are the police looking for him for that car bombing?”
“I told you, Michael wasn't involved. When he went down to L.A., he kept on using his right name. If they'd been looking for him, they would have found him easy enough.”
“Then why doesn't he write? Why send money with no letter?”
She managed a small smile. “He's been doing that since he left. The message doesn't have to be in words.”
“In 1970, his employer sent his paycheck here, after he quit working for them.”
She closed her eyes and smiled, thinking back. “For sure, that
was strange. The check came with a note saying Michael had listed her name as somebody to contact. Nadine cashed the check and put the money in a cigar box. The money is still here.” She dabbed again at the corners of her eyes with the piece of paper towel. “Can you believe, still here after all this time, waiting for him?”
“You have no idea where he is?”
She forced a tight smile and looked right into my eyes. “I wouldn't tell you if I did.”
I stood up. “Thank you for the tea.”

Other books

Faerie Fate by Silver James
Captain by Phil Geusz
Mystical Circles by S. C. Skillman
A Woman's Place: A Novel by Barbara Delinsky
Sake Bomb by Sable Jordan
Sinful Suspense Box Set by Oliver, Tess
Flynn by Vanessa Devereaux