Bloodline (41 page)

Roxanne looked at me.

“Sorry,” she said.

So for the rest of the day we stayed put. The rest of the night, too. Poole didn't call that day or night or the next morning, either. Putnam didn't stop by to up his offer. Nobody called from Colorado or anyplace else. Finally, around eleven o'clock in the morning, I ran out of distractions and called the Varneys. Mary answered, and I asked if Clair was around. She said she thought he was in the barn, and should she get him? I said, no, I'd skip up.

“If Poole calls, tell him I'll be right back,” I told Roxanne. “Get his number. Tell him the whole story if you have to. If anybody comes, don't answer the door.”

She nodded.

Clair's barn was fifty yards down, separated from my house by the college girls' house and some woods. I trotted past the college girls' house and eyed the windows as I passed. Could somebody get in there and wait for me? I wished they were home. At least I'd have witnesses. The woods were second-growth maple and I peered into them warily. At one point, I stopped and watched and listened.

Rain spattered the leaves. Branches creaked. A blue jay flushed. And Clair's truck pulled out of his driveway and headed off down the road the other way.

“Damn,” I said, and trotted back home.

Poole hadn't called. We ate lunch silently: Roxanne had a salad with tuna, with lemon juice instead of mayonnaise. I had tuna on whole wheat with mustard.

“We'd have to clean out the refrigerator,” she said.

“Why?”

“If we leave, I mean,” Roxanne said.

“Oh, yeah,” I said.

I'd forgotten.

After lunch I called the sheriff's department again. The same dispatcher answered. He recognized my voice and said he'd tried to get Poole but hadn't been able to reach him. I asked how he would reach him if it was an emergency, like somebody had been killed. He said they'd send a cruiser, but if he wasn't home, he wasn't home.

“Please try him again,” I said.

“I'll do what I can, sir,” the dispatcher said, and hung up.

So I waited. I read all of the day-old
Globe
. Roxanne looked through my tapes and put on “Pachelbel's Canon,” then went back to her chair. She was three-quarters of the way through
The Big Sleep.

She smiled at me.

“This is still sort of nice,” she said. “Just being together. Don't you think?”

I smiled back, startled.

“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”

But when the phone rang a little after three, I jumped and grabbed the receiver. A woman's voice asked for Mr. McMorrow.

Damn.

“You may not remember me, Mr. McMorrow,” the woman said, her voice rough like a smoker's. “We met at Missy's funeral. Missy Hewett?”

“Yeah?”

“I'm Sue. Missy's sister. The one with the phone bill.”

“Hi.”

“Sorry to bother you, but I had this problem, and I didn't know but you might be able to help, 'cause my husband, he drives a truck, and he's in California. He had to take a load to Arcata and then pick up strawberries and he won't be back until, maybe Friday, and I knew you were trying to help Missy and everything, and did you find anything from those numbers?”

“Yeah, I did,” I said. “I found out quite a bit, but I'd rather not talk about it on the phone. Maybe we could meet.”

“Sure, I'd like that, but today I have my youngest home; the boys are in school, but Jessica, she's a wild one, and I don't think we'd get much meeting done.”

“Okay.”

“But that's not why I'm calling. I'm calling 'cause of my mother. You said you talked to her?”

“Joyce,” I said.

Joyce. Tight-jeans-and-vodka Joyce. Joyce of the come-on.

“Yeah, well, I've been trying to call my mom since yesterday, and she hasn't been home. I went over last night and her car wasn't there, and I wondered if you had talked to her or anything.”

“Not since the first time.”

“Well, this is really strange then, you know? 'Cause she doesn't just take off like that. Even if she meets some guy, she stays around. She doesn't, like, disappear.”

“And there's no sign of her at all?”

“Nope. Nothing.”

“Did you call the police?”

“Not yet,” Sue said. “My family has this, like, thing about cops.”

“I remember.”

“My husband really does.”

“Well, you know, I'd grit my teeth and call them this time. Swallow your pride or whatever it is,” I said. “I can't get into it all right now, but I can tell you that if I were you, I'd have the police involved. This whole thing is getting kind of dangerous.”

“Yeah, well, I don't know where she would have gone, you know? Without telling me? She would have called, even if it was to bitch me out. She's always doing that. God, when she's drunk, you can't get her off the phone. My husband just hangs up, but I can't do that. She's my mother, you know? I mean, I have serious problems about just hanging up on my mother, I don't care how drunk she is.”

And they say the family is a dying institution.

So again I told Sue to call the cops. She told me she'd think about it. I told her not to think about it too long. She thanked me and I said it was nothing. Which was true.

She hung up and Roxanne looked up from her book.

“Who was that?” she asked.

I was thinking.

“Missy Hewett's sister. She can't find her mother.”

“And she thought she might be here?”

“She thought I might have talked to her.”

“Have you talked to her before?”

“The mother?”

Roxanne nodded.

“Yeah,” I said. “She got drunk and tried to drag me into bed.”

“But you fended her off.”

“It wasn't hard. Vodka. Could have knocked her over with a feather. Now the sister says the trailer is empty and the car is gone and no mom to be found.”

I thought some more. Roxanne watched me, her book on her lap.

“Maybe some other guy wasn't as good a fender-offer as you are,” she said.

“They are big shoes to fill,” I said.

We sat for a while and didn't talk. Roxanne had gone back to her book when I told her I wanted to go out and get a paper. She said she didn't feel like coming, that maybe she'd walk down to Mary's and get the needlepoint. She'd left it in the kitchen. I said I'd drive her down. She could visit and I'd pick her up on the way back.

“I don't want to be a prisoner,” Roxanne said.

“Rats,” I said. “I was hoping I'd get to tie you up.”

But I did drop her with Mary, who gave her a big smile and a little hug. Mary said she'd left the needlepoint and Roxanne said she knew that, and Mary said she'd found some more that Roxanne might want to look at. I said I'd be back in a half-hour and walked back to the truck. Clair still was gone.

I drove up to the store in Knox in a cold mist that smeared the windshield with something that was more saliva than rain. At the store, I left the truck running and went in and bought a
Morning Sentinel
off the counter. Official business done, I went back to the truck, tossed the paper on the passenger seat, unopened and unread. I drove on, out the Knox Ridge Road and on to the Leonard Road. The gravel drummed on the underside of the Toyota as I drove.

When I came to Joyce's trailer, I pulled up the dirt driveway and stopped by the front steps. I turned the motor off and there was silence.

34

T
he front door was locked and the lights were out inside. I cupped my face with my hands and looked through the window next to the door but couldn't see much. A glass on the counter. The clock over the sink. A faint glow from a night-light plugged into the kitchen stove.

I stood for a moment and listened. Heard crickets and chickadees and downy woodpeckers in the woods. The faint faraway sound of a truck motor. The even fainter rasp of a distant chain saw. Then quiet.

Giving the front door a last pull, I walked down the steps and around to the back of the trailer. The backyard was an unknown strip of goldenrod and purple and white wild asters, the last flowers to give up in autumn. The grass was tall and there was a path broken through to the back door, which was narrow and had no steps and opened three feet above the ground. The path was recent and it stopped at the door. The door had been pried open and was bent.

I fought off a chill. Paused. Then swung the door open with the tip of my finger. Waited for a sound from inside. None came. I pulled myself up and in.

The trailer was quiet, a silent, carpeted box. I took two or three steps and stopped and listened. Took two or three more. I could
smell cigarettes, old and stale. The chemical odor of an air freshener. Perfume, maybe. Could hear nothing.

I walked to the front door and looked at the knob. It was locked but the chain was off, as if Missy's mom had swung it shut as she left. Was that before somebody had pried the back door open, or after?

Tensing, I turned to the hallway that led to the other rooms. The clock on the VCR said 4:03. I noted the time and then realized why. If I found Joyce Hewett dead in the bedroom, somebody would ask.

There were three doors from the hallway and all three were closed. I walked slowly to the first one, on my left, and stopped. Listened, but couldn't hear anything. Or anybody. Turned the knob very slowly until the catch released. I gave the door a push. It felt like it was made of balsa wood.

The room was half dark, the curtains drawn. They were pink and matched the bedspread, which was thrown back in a bunch in the middle of the unmade bed. There were white slippers on the floor between the bed and me. Beside the slippers was a woman's flannel nightgown. The nightgown was white and it was crumpled on the carpet like a body.

I walked to the bed and stopped. The covers were pulled down on a diagonal as if one person had slept there. Soundly. No reckless abandon.

There was a bureau against the wall and the top drawer was open. I went over and peered into it. Socks. I poked them aside. Condoms. Which had it been?

I walked back to the door and took a last look. It was like someone had gotten up late and dressed in a hurry. Kick off the slippers. Drop the nightgown. Throw on some clothes. Close the door on the way out to hide the clutter. Why? Was it habit, or had Joyce Hewett
been expecting company? When I left the room, I left the door open so that the hallway wouldn't be so dark. The next door was on the right, and I twisted the knob and pushed again. This time, I reached for a light switch. Found it. The bathroom.

It was small. A sink, toilet, and shower stall with sliding glass door. There was a towel on the floor in front of the shower and the glass door was open. The shower head was dripping. Slowly.

There was a toothbrush still in the sink. I felt the bristles. They were dry. The towel on the floor and the soap beside the sink were dry, too. But the balled-up washcloth next to the soap was still damp. A forensic lab could tell how long the cloth had been drying. If necessary.

Like a kid scared of the dark, I left the bathroom light on. I went to the next door and waited. Pushed it open and groped for the light switch again. The light came on and revealed a bedroom with cartons piled on the bed. There was a rock-band poster tacked to one wall, all long hair and leers. A cluster of faded Polaroids. I looked closer. Kids clowning for the camera. Girls. I recognized only one. Missy.

So this had been her room, before she'd left to make a life for herself in the big city. She'd been pregnant in this room. Maybe had gotten pregnant in this room. Had laid awake nights in this room, trying to decide what to do with her baby. Had laid awake and pondered, while from the living room came the murmur of the television, the clink of ice in her mother's glass.

I turned to the bed and peered into the cartons. One was filled with books:
The History of Western Civilization. Levels of Geometry. The American Short Story.
Missy's books from high school, their covers coated with a fine layer of dust.

Another carton was filled with jumbled notebooks. The covers were etched with doodles. Under the notebooks was a sheaf of papers
and reports. Missy had gotten an A-minus on a paper called “Jay Gatsby and the American Dream.” A full A for one called “Political Estrangement in an American High School.”

The stuff looked like it had been scooped up and dumped in. Somebody didn't appreciate good scholarship. Or had been in a hurry.

I glanced at the other cartons. Sneakers and shoes. Pencils and pens. Cassette tapes of bands I'd never heard of. The stuff of a teenager's life, one that ended all too soon. First with a baby. Then at someone's hands. I looked again at the Polaroids, her smiling face. Who would have thought ?

After a last look around, I stepped out of the room and stopped. Went back in and got down on my knees and looked under the bed. Got up and went to the closet door and opened it. There were three or four dresses, some dusty shoes. I left both doors open and went back down the hall to the kitchen.