Exile Hunter (55 page)

“Let me take a closer
look,” Denniston suggested. “Wow, his wife is quite a dish. But
she doesn’t look very British. Might she be a fellow Yank,
perchance?” he asked, brightening.

As Linder said nothing,
Denniston snatched up the newspaper and read the article silently.

“She might, indeed,”
he said, brightening in response to his own question. “And not just
any Yank, but Philip Eaton’s widowed daughter.”

“Makes sense, I
suppose,” Linder offered indifferently.

Denniston continued to
stare at the photo.

“You know who they
remind me of?” he asked, as if inspired by a sudden insight.

Linder remained silent.

“Gatsby and Daisy,”
Denniston continued. “Look at them, a couple of wayward souls, each
mistakenly looking to the other for salvation.”

He handed the newspaper
back to Linder for another look. Yes, Linder thought, the sadness was
there in both faces. Perhaps even a hint of desperation.

“Sorry, I don’t see
it,” he answered nonetheless. “If you ask me, they both look too
fat and happy to cut a tragic figure.”

“Maybe so, but that
photo is still one heck of an ops lead,” Denniston enthused,
pointing a finger at the groom. “If we could use Kendall to get
another shot at rolling up Old Man Eaton, that could be worth a
promotion for each of us. I want you to stay on top of this, Warren.
Let me know when you figure out a way to exploit it.”

* * *

LATE MAY, UTAH SECURITY ZONE

It was late afternoon
on the first Saturday after Patricia and Caroline Kendall moved into
Mrs. Unger’s Coalville bungalow when Linder mounted the front porch
and knocked at the door. He knew that his former landlady had planned
to spend the weekend with her daughter in Wyoming and was confident
of finding the new tenants alone.

Caroline greeted him
with enthusiasm and called inside for her mother.

“Mom, Mr. Horvath is
here. Are you decent?”

Patricia Kendall
emerged onto the porch a few minutes later, freshly dressed, her damp
hair gathered behind her head with an elastic hair tie. Patricia
invited Linder to sit with her on the wooden porch swing while
Caroline fetched iced tea.

As soon as they settled
back and set the swing moving beneath them, Patricia looked at him
with a bemused smile.

“You know, there’s
something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” she began. “Something
about you seems very familiar to me. Have we met before?”

Before he could reply,
Caroline arrived bearing a tray with a pitcher of iced tea and three
plastic tumblers, and waited expectantly. Though Linder realized that
this was his big opening with Patricia, he hesitated for fear of
having to defend himself in the unlikely event she connected his face
with that of Joe Tanner in Beirut. But then he had a lucky break.

“Sweetheart, why
don’t you take your glass back to the kitchen and put away the
groceries before we prepare dinner?” Patricia requested of her
daughter. “You know there’s not much time if we want to leave
here by six for the movies.”

Caroline rolled her
eyes but did as she was told.

When she was out of
sight, Linder spoke again.

“I’m afraid I
wasn’t completely open with you last Friday. Yes, we did meet, many
years ago in Cleveland,” he confessed. “Do you remember seventh
grade ballroom dance classes at Hawken School?”

A glimmer of
recognition showed in Patricia’s eyes as she struggled to recall.

“My real name isn’t
Horvath,” he continued with lowered voice. “If I share it with
you, do you promise not to tell anyone, not even with your daughter
or Mrs. Unger?”

“You’re not a
criminal, are you?” Patricia asked uncertainly.

“No more than you
are,” he answered. “But I’ve been in the camps, too. And I want
to be honest with you.”

“Okay, I promise not
to tell,” she answered, studying him closely.

“Does Warren Linder
ring a bell?”

Upon hearing the name,
Patricia remained oddly unresponsive and her eyes showed no sign of
recognition. Linder wondered if her memory of him had faded
naturally, or been cast by trauma into some dusty corner of her brain
with other memories of her pre-arrest life. Or might her mind have
become so clouded by alcohol that the old connections had been
erased?

On further reflection,
Patricia’s apparent failure to recognize his name seemed even
stranger to him. For, based on his own experience of interrogation,
it seemed inconceivable that her DSS interrogators would not have
grilled her quite hard about any links she may have had to Warren
Linder. And because the DSS would likely have questioned her about
both Linder and Tanner, there was a chance she might have connected
the two names despite his disguise in Beirut and the years that had
passed since she had known him a schoolboy.

Then, all at once,
Patricia’s face brightened and a youthful sparkle entered her eyes
that hinted at long-past happiness.

“Oh, that Warren!”
she burst out with a girlish giggle. “The Warren from Lyndhurst,
the one who could dance the tango! What a marvelous surprise!”

“Yes, that would be
me,” he acknowledged with a grin. “Of course, I could do the
tango. My father was the dance instructor. In fact, that’s the only
reason they let me join the class.”

“You were such a dear
boy in those days,” she went on with a wistful look. “For me,
seventh grade was a horrible, horrible time. When my mother died,
absolutely everything fell apart. You were the only person my age I
felt I could really talk to. I looked forward to dance class each
week because I could forget about everything else while we learned
all those complicated new dance steps. And when the music stopped, I
knew you would accept me just the way I was, without any thought
about the Eaton name or our family’s money or social whatever. Oh,
yes,” she said with a faraway look. “I remember
that
Warren very, very well.”

Their eyes met for the
briefest moment before the door opened and Caroline returned to the
porch with an empty tumbler.

“Groceries are put
away,” Caroline reported as she poured herself more iced tea. “What
next?” she asked with a bored expression.

For a moment, Linder
felt annoyed at the intrusion, but then for an instant he saw in
Caroline the Patricia of his youth, and he could not help but smile
at the thought that, despite all Caroline must have been through in
the past year, the foremost thing on her young mind was a movie on a
Saturday night. He rose and returned his half-filled tumbler to the
tray.

“Looks like you two
have a schedule to meet,” he remarked graciously. “I’ll come
back another time.”

Linder watched with
fascination as a dull-eyed expression returned to Patricia’s face.
In the next moment he felt as if she were keeping him at arm’s
length once again.

“That would be nice
of you,” she answered without suggesting a time or place.

“Do it soon!”
Caroline added with a coy grin before retreating into the house

* * *

A few days later,
Linder phoned his former landlady to inquire how her new tenants were
doing and managed to extract an invitation from Mrs. Unger to dinner
on Saturday night. He arrived a few minutes early and found Patricia
and Caroline embroiled in a shouting match in the kitchen. Though he
could not ascertain what had caused the dispute, Caroline had thrust
her face within inches of her mother’s and Patricia appeared on the
brink of losing self-control. The combined wattage of their
screeching brought physical pain to Linder’s ears. Recalling how he
had disrupted some colossal rows between his mother and sister when
April was a teen, he put on a giant grin and stepped between them,
handing Patricia the bouquet of flowers he had bought from a street
vendor. Thrown off balance, she and Caroline both shifted their
attention to the flowers and lowered their voices.

Linder said hello to
both before beating a quick retreat to the living room, where he
found Sharon Unger reading a novel on the sofa. She shot him a
reproachful look, as if to say, “You never told me what that pair
would be like!” But Mrs. Unger considered herself a Christian woman
and he knew she would not permit herself to say anything uncharitable
about her tenants. Then Linder recalled the smell of alcohol on
Patricia on the morning when he had brought her to the bungalow and
wondered if Mrs. Unger had discovered more than she let on.

Dinner went by quickly,
and the food, which Patricia and Caroline had insisted on preparing,
was not very appetizing. Mother and daughter were barely civil to one
another, with Mrs. Unger having little to add to the discussion.
Linder managed to keep conversation going only by rehashing
second-hand tales of Montana from Will Browning, since his
impersonation of Tom Horvath required that he represent himself as a
Montanan.

After dinner, Mrs.
Unger took Caroline aside at Linder’s instigation to help wash
dishes and prepare coffee, so that he and Patricia might have some
time alone in the living room. But before sitting with him, Patricia
excused herself for a few moments. Thus, Linder found himself
wondering whether her freshening up included stealing a nip from a
secret liquor stash. The glassy look in her eye upon returning seemed
to confirm his worst fears.

Still, he resolved to
press on with his project of revealing to her why he had come to
Coalville and how he intended to help her and Caroline, if only she
would let him. He began by delivering some news that was certain to
gain her attention.

“Have you heard what
happened at Kamas?” he asked in a quiet voice the moment she took
her seat.

Patricia gave him a
puzzled look.

“At the camp,” he
added.

“No, and I don’t
think I care to,” she replied flatly.

“Well, you should.
The prisoners have revolted and taken over the facility. They’ve
kicked out all the guards and are demanding reforms. It’s the first
camp-wide revolt the CLA has ever faced.”

“I don’t care,”
she insisted. “I hope I never hear that name again. Except, maybe,
to learn that Roger has been released. And, lately, I’m not sure
he’s even there any more.”

“Roger, at Kamas?”
Linder asked, taken aback. “When was the last time you saw him?”

“At his sentencing
last October, before we came west.”

“And where do you
send his mail?”

“To the CLA’s
western mail depot. But I always assumed Roger was across the wall
from us in the Kamas men’s division.”

“This may come as a
shock, Patricia, but I saw Roger in January at a camp in the northern
Yukon,” Linder declared.

Patricia gasped. “The
Yukon? But how could he…?” she asked with a baffled look.

“I don’t know how,
but there were quite a few of us from Cleveland up there,” Linder
answered. “Roger was in the camp hospital when I spoke to him.”

“How was he…?”
she began again, only to swallow her words.

“In pretty bad shape,
I’m afraid. Some kind of heart trouble. I don’t know if he ever
recovered, because the next day they moved him to another ward and I
never saw him again.”

Tears welled in
Patricia’s eyes.

“Did he say
anything…?”

“Roger and I each
promised to do whatever we could for the other’s family if we ever
got out. It was clear that he loved you very much,” Linder said,
resisting an urge to take her hand.

Patricia Kendall bit
her lip and dabbed one eye with a handkerchief, then straightened
suddenly, and put it away. Linder turned in time to see Caroline
enter the room bearing two mugs of coffee on a tray.

“Can we all go out
for a walk when you finish your coffee?” Caroline proposed as she
set the mugs on the coffee table. “It’s kind of stuffy in here.”

Patricia shot her
daughter a disapproving glance.

“Caroline is angling
to go out for ice cream,” she observed. “The answer is no. We’ve
already had pie for dessert and ice cream would be too much sugar too
late in the evening.”

“On the other hand,
ice cream and pie go together awfully well, and the sandwich shop is
open for at least another fifteen minutes. Why don’t we all go
out?” he proposed. “My treat, and we’ll burn off the sugar on
our way back. It’ll do us good to get the blood moving.”

“Please, mama?”
Caroline appealed.

“You two go ahead,”
Patricia responded with a sigh. “I’ve walked enough for one day.
But make it a small cone, okay? And don’t stay out long.”

* * *

Linder and Caroline
reached the sandwich shop on North Main a few minutes before closing.
As they ordered their cones, a brawny fellow in his forties and a
girl close in age to Caroline came up behind them and Linder suddenly
recognized the man as the deputy sheriff, Eldon. The girls greeted
each other like long-lost friends.

“Good evening,
officer,” Linder addressed Eldon cautiously, uncomfortable at
appearing on the deputy sheriff’s radar screen so soon after his
scuffle with Patricia’s former landlord.

“Lovely night, Tom,”
the officer replied with unexpected bonhomie. He cast a quick glance
at the two girls, who were absorbed in conversation.

“Sure is,” Linder
replied.

“Kids sure have a way
of showing us what’s important in life, don’t they?” Eldon
mused.

“They certainly do.”

“I just wanted you to
know, it was mighty decent of you to step in and help the girl’s
mother.” Eldon volunteered after casting a sidelong glance to
confirm that neither teen was listening. “I hope they appreciate
it.”

“Thanks,” Linder
replied. “I believe they do.”

“Do you have any kids
of your own?” Eldon inquired.

“Nope. Always too
busy to settle down.”

The deputy nodded.

“They’re a handful,
but I wouldn’t trade ‘em for the world,” he answered.