Fidelity (35 page)

When it was as deep as she could make it, she placed her right foot in it, raised her body up, and placed both her hands at the rim of the grave. She tangled her hands in the thick weeds, pushed off with her foot, and got her chest up to the surface. She used her hands to grasp other clumps of weeds as they came within her reach, dug her toes into the earth, and pulled herself out onto the ground. She lay there for a time, recovering her strength and her wind. Then she lifted her head to look around her slowly and carefully.

She could see the little house where she had spent the day and night handcuffed and in terror. It seemed harmless and empty now. She rose to her knees and took a long and careful look in every direction for some sign that the man had come back. She got to her feet and looked again, and then began to walk toward the distant road.

After a few minutes, Emily heard the sound of car engines in the distance, then saw a row of headlights coming up the dark road. She walked toward it, then began to trot, then broke into a run. As the lights approached, she could see that they were all too close together, too regularly spaced to be normal traffic. They were coming at a very high speed. When the cars reached the entrance to the long gravel road into the farm, they all pulled to the shoulder of the highway. Two men jumped out of the lead car in the glare of the headlights behind them, and she could see their car was a police car. The two men opened a metal gate, running with it to make it swing out of the way. The other cars all moved around the lead car. Four of them kept going, accelerating along the road past the farm, but the others all made the turn onto the gravel road.

Searchlights on the police cars swept across the weedy fields. When they crossed the gravel drive, they illuminated clouds of dust that their tires had kicked up. One of the beams swept across her, stopped, and came back to settle on her. Then the other beams joined it, and made it so bright that she couldn’t keep her eyes open. She just stood still and held her arms over her head.

She heard a man’s voice amplified electronically: “Are you Emily Kramer?”

“Yes,” she shouted, and nodded her head dramatically so they could see it from a distance.

She heard the sounds of running feet now, heavy footsteps and the whipping of weeds against their legs. A closer voice said, “Where is the man who took you?”

“He left. I don’t know how long it’s been. I had to dig myself out of a hole. At least half an hour or forty minutes, maybe an hour.” The lights seemed to dim a bit, so she opened her eyes. There were tall black silhouettes around her. One caught up with the others, and suddenly wrapped its arms around her.

“Emily,” he said.

“Hi, Ray. I knew if anybody looked hard enough for me, it would be you.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m okay. He just kept me handcuffed and asked me questions. I’m just really tired.”

“You’ll be able to rest. They’ll take you to the hospital and clean you up and make sure you’re all right.”

A big new silhouette appeared. “You’re safe now, Mrs. Kramer.” It was the voice of Detective Gruenthal. “Mr. Hall, I’d like you to ride with Officer Daniels here, and we’ll take Mrs. Kramer with us. We need to talk.”

Emily made a decision at that moment, and she was not even certain why. It was possible that it was simply the “You’re safe now,” which she had heard before and no longer believed. She would tell them all about the kidnapping and the man in the ski mask. But somehow the other part-the part she had figured out and kept from telling the man in the mask-didn’t belong to the police; at least not yet. It belonged to her.

The police kept Emily talking until seven in the morning. Ray Hall was sitting in the hallway when they released her, waiting to take her home. They drove through the heavy morning traffic to his house, and when they were inside, she said, “Ray, do you have Sam Bowen’s phone number?”

He looked at her for a moment, then went to the sideboard, opened a drawer, and pulled out an address book. He found the page and handed the open book to her.

“Thanks,” she said. She dialed the number and waited. “Hello, Sam? This is Emily Kramer. Oh, things haven’t been so hot around here since the funeral, but it’s a long story, and I don’t have the energy right now.”

She listened for a few seconds, staring at the floor and nodding her head, then said, “Why haven’t you opened it?” She listened for a few more seconds. “Well, open it now, and read it. I’ll be up there as soon as I can get a flight. I don’t know the schedule. I’ll call you from the airport.”

When she had hung up the phone, she said to Ray, “I know you won’t agree with what I’m doing. You’ll notice I haven’t asked you.”

“I assume what you were saying means Sam has the evidence. You haven’t told the police?”

“He has a package. I’m going up there, and we’ll see what’s in it.”

“That guy is still out there. He must have ditched the SUV within ten minutes after he left you, or they would have caught him. And he’s nuts. He could be right outside waiting for you.”

“If so, then the best way you can protect me is drive me to the airport and watch me leave.” She picked up the telephone again.

THE HOUSE WAS a two-bedroom cottage with brown clapboards outside Seattle overlooking Puget Sound. There was a wooden deck lodged in the space between two pine trees, and a hot tub. On a cool day, Sam Bowen could step from the tub into the warmth of his house in two steps.

Sam wore a pair of blue jeans and a green flannel shirt with buttoned flaps over the breast pockets. He sat on an Adirondack chair staring out at the water. An empty glass was on the table, and beside it was the stationery box with a maroon top and gold print.

“I never opened it until you called, Emily,” Sam said. “It arrived a couple of days ago, but the handwriting on the label was Phil’s. I figured it had to be just another one of those housekeeping things that Phil did sometimes. He would have something he didn’t want lying around the office, or maybe he even wanted to be able to tell somebody truthfully that he didn’t have it. He would stash it somewhere, sometimes with someone like me.”

Emily said, “Weren’t you even curious?”

“Shit, Em. I’m seventy-three years old. I was a cop for twenty years, and then a private investigator for about as long. I’m cured of that. I’m not interested in getting hit in the face or staying up late anymore, and there aren’t any secrets I haven’t heard.”

“But now you’ve read it, haven’t you?”

“Yes. It’s about a case we had.”

“What kind of case?”

“A bad one. It was one of those jobs that you hesitate to take, and you probably wouldn’t take at all, except that by the time you hear about it, the client is already sitting in your office. He’s so distraught that you can barely stand to look at him, and he’s there only because he’s already tried everything that had a reasonable chance of success.”

Emily said, “So it was a man who came to see you.”

“Not me, Phil. I wouldn’t have heard about it at all, except that Phil called me into his office to listen. He introduced me and said, `I want my associate Mr. Bowen to hear this.’ That was a bad omen. He never called anyone his associate unless that person was about to do something painful.”

“What did you say?”

“I sat down and shut up and listened. The man was rich. I could see it by looking at his shoes. They were Mephisto walking shoes, handmade. That was a telling thing, to me. What it said was that he had enough money to buy whatever he wanted, but that he wasn’t interested in impressing people. They don’t look like anything. He had a good haircut, a watch that looked expensive, but with a French name I hadn’t seen before. I could tell Phil had seen the same signs, and so I stopped thinking about what we were going to make, and listened to the story.”

“What was it?”

“Nothing special-a story we’ve all heard about a thousand times. Sometimes I think a third of my working life was spent with daughters looking for their fathers, and another third with fathers looking for their daughters.”

“That was the case?” Emily asked. “He was searching for his missing daughter?”

Sam nodded. “He had a lot of land in the San Joaquin Valley, and he lived in a big house on an enormous piece of land-the sort of place where if you want to gossip over the back fence, you have to drive there.”

“What was his name?”

“Theodore Forrest, the Something. Maybe the fourth or fifth.”

“And the daughter? What did he say about her?”

“Her name was Allison. He said that she had been a terrific kid at first, the sort of little girl who was always happy-maybe a little smart-ass, even-and who lit up a room as soon as she came into it. He brought a couple of old pictures of her at about age five and ten along with the others, and I could see what he meant. She was a really pretty kid, with a lot of intelligence behind the eyes.”

“You said `at first.’ What was the problem later?”

“He said that around age thirteen or so, troubles started. She had a kind of personality change. All of a sudden she wasn’t interested in the family anymore, just wanted to stay in her room. Her grades went all to hell. Her old friends seemed to move on, and they were replaced by a different kind of kid.”

“That doesn’t sound unusual. What kind of kid?”

“The kind that skips school, does drugs, and so on. This wasn’t exactly a new story to me, but it was to him, so we listened. He said the girls were the worst in his eyes. They were the kind that gave a father a lot to think about, for sure. He said that he’d heard stories about a couple of them. They were promiscuous in that scary selfdestructive way that girls are sometimes, kids who don’t seem to give a damn whether what they’re doing kills them or something else does. The more he tried to get rid of them, the more Allison liked them. She would sneak out to meet them. He moved her to a private school, and she would slip out at night to go out with them. Then she was gone.”

“How old was she at that point?”

“Sixteen. By then she was looking very grown up. When her father came to see us, we saw the pictures, and I remember thinking she would be hard to find because she could pass for twentytwo or so in the right clothes.”

Emily sensed something withheld. “Tell me more about the pictures.”

“There are a few in here.” Sam opened the box and pulled an envelope from a pharmacy’s photo lab out of a file. He set the envelope on the table in front of her, and she began to shuffle through the photographs.

One showed an athletic-looking man in his early forties in a fancy cabin or ranch house-possibly some kind of resort-sitting at a table with his arm around the girl. They were both grinning at the camera with similar expressions, and Emily looked closely at the two faces, trying to detect a family resemblance. There was nothing obvious. The girl had long chestnut hair and big green eyes and a pretty face, but it was the sort of wide-cheeked, fair face with Cupid’s-bow lips that she associated with Irish women she had known. The father had the long face with pointed, narrow nose that made her think of Englishmen. She found herself forming theories about Allison’s mother.

She kept going, looking at each picture, and then noticed a similarity. There were lots of places-a houseboat on a lake in a treeless landscape that had to be Arizona, a white sand beach on the ocean, a redwood grove, a place that looked like a restaurant on a balcony above a lagoon, outside an apartment or condominium-but just the two of them. In some shots Allison was alone, and in others she was with her father, but there were never any friends, either her age or his. And there was never anyone who could be the mother. She said, “Was the mother the one who took the pictures?”

“I think she was out of the picture, literally. There was no mother I ever saw, and no shots of her, either, even in the pictures of the girl as a toddler. I think they were all taken by strangers, people he handed the camera to and asked to press the button.”

Emily found one of Allison in a bathing suit, and understood what Sam had said earlier. The girl had an exceptional figure, like an hourglass, and it made her seem older than sixteen in spite of her smooth, untroubled face. “She was very pretty.” Emily returned the photographs to the envelope and put them back on the table.

Sam said, “He gave us the pictures. He showed us the girl’s birth certificate and a black-and-white photocopy of her driver’s license. After the first meeting, we asked for things. Anything we asked for, he would send by overnight mail. Phil wasn’t easy on him, either.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, a father from up north comes to you and says his sixteenyear-old daughter disappeared two months ago. He’s already had the local cops on the case, and he’s hired detectives up there. They’ve talked to all her friends and relatives, searched her room and her school locker, and every place she went regularly. Now he comes down to L.A. and hires a detective to find out if that’s where she went. It’s got to occur to you that most likely what you’re looking for is a corpse. Phil went up and got fingerprints off some things she touched in a ranch the family owned that nobody had visited since she left.”

“To identify her body?”

“Well, if the cops find a Jane Doe somewhere, they generally fingerprint her if they can. Our theory was that we might be able to end this guy’s uncertainty just by a records check. It didn’t pan out.”

“What did you do after that?”

“We started to search for a live girl, thinking we probably would find a dead one. It was one of those stories you wish you hadn’t heard. He grounded her because of her grades. She slipped out of the house on a school night in the middle of the week, and spent the night with a few friends of both sexes. There was drinking and, he suspected, some drugs. He got stricter. He said she couldn’t go out for the rest of the year, and that she would have to earn his trust if she was even to go out during her senior year.”

“Isn’t that going a bit far?”

“He thought he might have laid it on a little thicker than he needed to. After we talked to him for an hour or two, he mentioned that maybe he called her a few names, used words he might not have used if he had it to do over again.” Sam paused. “Only he didn’t. They kind of coexisted for a week or so. They didn’t talk much. His story fit one of the things I’d noticed a few times in this business. It’s a lot easier to avoid people if you’re rich. They lived in a big house with a lot of out-of-the-way rooms, and servants who would serve the girl a meal by herself so she didn’t have to eat with her father. And just having servants around all the time makes the house too public to hold a big confrontation that will clear the air. Then she was gone.”