Crazybone (11 page)

“Mrs. Wade, I’m surprised at you. Keeping a key to Archie Todd’s unit and then sending your son-in-law over there to trespass. I really ought to report you.”

Cybil managed to look contrite, and her apology was a model of false sincerity. Nurse Dunn relented, lectured Cybil on abiding by the rules, and then took her big hide out of there and left the three of us alone.

Cybil, reproachfully: “So you got caught.”

Me, defensively: “Nobody’s perfect. Not even that fictional super-dick of yours.”

“Did you find anything before the side of beef spotted you?”

“Probably not. Unless this means something to you.” I showed her the scrap of paper. “It was in one of his books.”

“Inca? No, nothing.”

“Last letter could be an ‘o.’ Inco.”

“I never heard Archie use either word.”

“Well, let’s see what calling the number gets us.”

It didn’t get us a thing. San Francisco number, all right, but it had been disconnected.

“Monday,” I said. “This, Evan Patterson, whatever else I can do. Just don’t expect much to come of it, okay?”

“I don’t,” Cybil said. “I didn’t when I decided to hire you.”

Which may or may not have been a mild shot. With Cybil you can’t always tell. She likes me, I think she respects me, but down deep she’s never quite forgiven me for not living up to her Samuel Leatherman ideal of the tough and infallible private eye.

When the phone rang at six-thirty that evening I was trying to relax by watching a forties film noir on TV.
The Web
, with Edmond O’Brien. Pretty good, but my head wasn’t into it. Cybil kept intruding; so did little Emily Hunter.

Kerry answered the call and sang out that it was for me. I went to take it on the kitchen phone.

A male voice said angrily, “She’s gone, goddamn it. You may as well know.”

“Who’s gone? Who is this?”

“Trevor Smith. You know damn well who’s gone.”

“Sheila Hunter?”

“And her kid. Both of them.”

I could hear my breath in my throat; it had a ground-glass sound. “Gone where?”

“She wouldn’t tell me.”

“When?”

“Yesterday afternoon sometime.”

“And you waited this long to call me?”

“She told me not to tell anybody, particularly you. I wasn’t going to, but... ah, Christ, I don’t know what to do.”

“Gone away for a while, or—?”

“Two or three weeks, she said. Someplace where she can pull herself together. But I don’t know... the way the two of them acted Thursday night, the way Sheila put me off on the phone yesterday, I don’t think they’re coming back.”

“Easy, back up a little. What happened—”

“Don’t tell me to take it easy,” he snapped. “You and your investigation, harassing her... this is
your
fault. If you’d just left her alone...”

“I’ll take the blame if you want to lay it on me. But the truth is, she’s running because of whatever she and her husband were mixed up in ten years ago.”

I listened to silence for eight or ten beats. He used the time to get a grip on himself; he sounded calmer when he said, “She claims you’re crazy, that she and Jack had a perfectly normal life in Pennsylvania before they moved out here.”

“And you believe her.”

More dead air, about five beats’ worth this time. “I don’t know what to believe,” he said.

“You tell her what I said about helping her?”

“I told her. She called you a liar and a lot worse.”

“How scared was she?”

“
Scared
, man. She nearly had a hemorrhage when I said that damn word to her.”

“What word? Crazybone?”

“She turned white. I thought she was going to keel over.”

“Give you any idea what it means?”

“No. I tried to get it out of her, but she— Don’t you know?”

“No idea.”

“Then where’d you get it?”

I told him about startling her in the potting shed on Tuesday. “It has a pretty terrible meaning for her, whatever it is. It’s tied to the reason she ran away.”

“Yeah,” Smith said. Then he said, “I think she was already planning to go before I showed up.”

“Thursday night, you mean. At her house.”

“Yeah. She didn’t say anything about leaving then, not until she called me at home yesterday — I took the day off work, waited around, I thought she might need me. I didn’t think she’d just run out of my life, I thought we had something better than that...” The last couple of words had a phlegmy sound, as if he were choking up. He drew an audible breath. “I wanted to marry her,” he said then. “I still do.”

There was nothing for me to say to that. I asked, “What makes you think she’d already made up her mind to run?”

“How uptight she was before I even mentioned you. Uptight and scared. Emily, too. Both of them.”

“Was Emily there when you talked to Sheila?”

“No. Crying in her bedroom by then.”

“Crying? Why was she crying?”

“Sheila... smacked her, that’s why.”

My hand tightened around the receiver. “Hurt her?”

“No. Slap across the face. She’s got a temper, a bad temper when she’s upset, and the kid wouldn’t leave the room. She knew something was going on... Emily did... and she wanted to know what it was.”

“And you just let her mother hit her?”

“I’d’ve stopped it if I could. It happened too quick. You think I like the idea of kids being smacked around? Well, I don’t.”

“All right. Is she in the habit of hitting her daughter?”

“I don’t think so. No.”

“Ever see Emily with bruises or marks?”

“No. Christ, Sheila’s not like that. She’s
not
, dammit. It’s just that Jack getting killed, the two of us seeing each other, this thing she’s so afraid of... everything coming down on her at once, it’s got her half crazy.”

No damn excuse, I thought, but I didn’t say it. I said, “What about the two of you? Going on how long?”

“What the hell does that matter?”

“How long, Trevor?”

“Three months. That’s all I’m going to say about Sheila and me.”

“How about her husband? He played around, too, didn’t he?”

“Damn right he did. Why do you think Sheila — Never mind, I’m not getting into that either.” He sucked in another audible breath. “Listen, you’re a detective, you’ve got your nose in this already. You think you can find her?”

“I’m sure going to try.” But not for your sake or hers, I thought. For Emily’s. “Did she ever mention anyone named Karen to you? Artist, makes stained glass, lives somewhere up the coast.”

“No. A friend of hers?”

“Or a relative. Emily calls her Aunt Karen.”

“Sheila didn’t talk much about her personal life,” Smith said. “Didn’t have any relatives in California or anywhere else that I know about.”

“Okay. They left yesterday afternoon, you said?”

“Before two. It was after one when she called me. Said she was leaving, told me not to tell anybody, don’t talk to you at all anymore — she’d be in touch. I said wait, let me come over, we’ll talk it over first, but her mind was made up. As soon as we hung up I drove up to her house. I live in Santa Clara, it took me forty minutes to get there. They were already gone by then. I stayed home today, too, I thought maybe she’d call. When she didn’t... I had to talk to somebody, I couldn’t just sit around and wait for a call that might never come...”

“You did the right thing contacting me. Where will you be tomorrow?”

“Emerald Hills. Another day here and I’ll go nuts.”

“All right. I’ll see what I can find out. Call you if there’s any news.”

“Yeah, thanks.” Pause. “I don’t blame you. The kind of trouble Sheila must be in...” Another pause. “Shit,” he said.

Yes, I thought, and the pile keeps getting bigger. And I wish I knew where to find a shovel.

I couldn’t sleep.

I kept lying there with my eyes wide open, watching the dark and listening to Kerry’s even breathing and thinking mostly about Emily Hunter. Her mother had overheard part of her call to me, or found out about it some other way; that was why she hadn’t shown up at the riding academy. It was also why Sheila Hunter had decided to pack up the kid, ripping out ten years’ worth of roots, and haul her off to Christ knew where. Bad trouble, all right, but it wasn’t just the woman’s anymore. She’d made it her daughter’s as well. Ten years old, sensitive, bewildered...
did
Emily have any idea of what it was all about? If she did, it wasn’t because her mother had confided in her. The only secret-sharing Mrs. Hunter had done was with her late husband and co-conspirator. And yet the Hunters’ relationship couldn’t have been all that tightly bound after a decade, else both of them wouldn’t have been seeking solace in other people’s beds. How long had they been cheating on each other? Recent thing, or had the marriage begun to unravel long ago from too much guilt, too much fear?

Crazybone. The word was at or near the center of the Hunters’ secret, of Sheila’s panicked flight. But without some connection, some piece of the hidden past, there was no way to decipher it.

A nonsense jingle began to run around inside my head; kept on running until fatigue drove me down into a restless sleep. Crazybone connected to the shoulder bone, shoulder bone connected to the neck bone, neck bone connected to the crazybone, and little Emily’s gone away...

On a Sunday morning the sleepy country-village atmosphere of Greenwood was even more pronounced. The main drag and side streets were mostly deserted, and what cars I encountered and what people I saw seemed to he on their way to and from church. A large contingent of worshippers was exiting the one church I passed, all of them well dressed. It was good to see that the old-fashioned standard of Sunday wear still applied in places like this. A surprisingly large percentage of churchgoers these days thought nothing of attending services in jeans and sweatshirts and the like. Meaning no disrespect, just making the statement that they didn’t see any good reason to dress up for the occasion. God didn’t run a fashion agency, so did He really care what His flock was outfitted in when they offered up their prayers?

The new breed had a point, but as a member of the old breed I preferred the upholding of tradition. Hypocritical member of the old breed, it could be argued, since I seldom attended Mass anymore, but so be it. Besides, formalized religion and strict interpretation of biblical doctrine don’t necessarily make a good Christian — a fact some radical members of the Religious Right would do well to recognize. A person’s relationship with God is or ought to be a personal and private thing. If individuals want to worship in a group, fine; if they prefer to worship alone and in their own fashion, fine. The world would be a far better place if people would stop trying to tell others what to believe and how to believe in it, in religious and other matters.

A sharpening breeze created a rippling effect in Whiskey Flat Road’s tree tunnel, so that branches and trunks seemed to be flowing around the car as I drove through. The motile illusion bothered my eyes, even though I was wearing sunglasses. So did the bright sunlight down here, it being another perfect day in this pocket paradise. Too little sleep last night and too much eyestrain over the course of nearly sixty years. Kerry had been after me to make an appointment with an optometrist — and I kept putting it off because I was afraid he’d tell me I needed to wear glasses all the time instead of just for reading.

The gates were still open at the foot of the Hunters’ driveway, so I swung in between the pillars without slowing. The parking area above was tenanted by nothing more than a scatter of leaves. I parked among them, got out and stood for a few seconds looking around. Except for all the house windows being draped, blinded, or shuttered, everything appeared pretty much the same as on my first visit. And why shouldn’t it? I thought irritably. Abandonment didn’t change the outward look of things, just the feel of them.

A red light bloomed on a key plate set into the porch wall, an announcement that the alarm system was armed. Even if I yielded to an impulse to jimmy my way through a locked door or window, I couldn’t do it without setting off the alarm. That wouldn’t have stopped Samuel Leatherman: he’d have bulled his way inside, discovered an important clue in two or three minutes, and been long gone before a security patrol or police car showed up. But I wasn’t Samuel Leatherman, and glad of it in spite of dear old Cybil. Chances were, Sheila Hunter hadn’t left any clues behind anyway.

I walked around the house to her potting studio, more for the exercise than with any purpose. Locked up as tight as the house. No alarm system here, and none needed. This was where she’d come to get away from her troubles; she wouldn’t keep reminders of the past around. Just the same I took a quick look through the glass wall. Tuesday’s tableau minus Mrs. Hunter, the clay in the tubs as cold as her dead husband.

Back the way I’d come and across to the detached garage. The double doors were locked and so was a side door; the only window had a shade drawn so tightly over it I couldn’t see inside. Alarm system on the house, shade on the garage window, and weapons somewhere on the premises, no doubt. Suburban paranoia had nothing to do with it, either. Damn safe bet somebody, somewhere, really had been after the Hunters for the past ten years.

An idea occurred to me on the way to the car. I fired up the engine and coasted down to the foot of the drive. Whiskey Flat Road was deserted, so I set the brake and got out again and went to the mailbox, which was attached to the inside of one of the pillars; there was a slot on the outside so mail could be put through when the gates were shut. The box wasn’t locked and there was mail inside, all right — yesterday’s delivery, at least. I fished it out. Two catalogues, three pieces of junk, and a PG&E bill. So much for my brainstorm. Like a lot of my clever little ideas, it was a practical bust.