Left for Dead (28 page)

Harlan snatched up the cordless phone on the second ring. He’d been sitting at the pantry table with his one beer for the night. Nearby in the family room, Tiffany was ensconced in front of the TV and her umpteenth viewing of
Finding Nemo.
Claire stood in the kitchen, cooking dinner.

“Yes, hello?” Harlan said into the phone. “Oh…Uh-huh…Yeah….”

Claire caught his eye, and she silently mouthed to him: “Who is it?”

Harlan turned his back to her. “So—is that where you’re calling from now?” he asked. He stepped closer to the sliding doors, and Claire couldn’t hear him any more.

She glared at him—though he was oblivious. Things had been a little strained ever since Harlan had come home at five o’clock to find her sitting in the living room with Linus Moorehead.

She and Dr. Moorehead had gotten Tiffany home—and to the bathroom—in the nick of time. Once she emerged from the bathroom, Tiffany showed Dr. Moorehead her drawings and her doll collection. “I think I’m more of a hit with your stepdaughter than I was with your son,” Dr. Moorehead whispered to Claire.

Then Harlan walked in. He waited until Linus had left and Tiffany had taken her dolls and drawings upstairs, before he started in on Claire. What was she thinking going off to the library without anyone besides Tiffany to keep her company? Why didn’t she stay with Linda like she was supposed to?

“Because I got tired of gardening, okay?” Claire snapped. “It wore me out. I’ve been in the hospital, for God’s sakes. Where were you this afternoon? You said you’d be in your office. I called from the library around four—and again when I came home. Both times, I got the machine.”

“Well, I must have been in the file room.” Harlan sighed, and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Anyway, you’re okay now. So let’s just drop it. I need a shower.”

Claire listened to the pipes squeaking upstairs, and she knew Harlan was in the master bathroom. She tried Tim at The Whale Watcher once again. Big surprise, still no answer in Tim’s room.

After hanging up, Claire pulled out a piece of scrap paper from the pocket of her jeans. She picked up the phone again, and dialed Directory Assistance. “What city, please?” the operator answered.

“Bremerton, Washington,” Claire said.

“Go ahead.”

“Do you have a listing for Steven Griswald?”

She was lucky. Violet Davalos’s surviving brother still lived in Bremerton. While Claire was dialing the number, she heard a click on the upstairs connection. “Hello?” she said.

“Oh—” Harlan said on the upstairs phone. “Who are you calling?”

“Linda,” Claire lied. “Who are
you
calling?”

“Um, work,” he answered. “I was going to leave myself a message.”

“Well, go ahead, honey. I can wait,” Claire said, then she hung up.

She listened to the pipes humming upstairs. He had the shower on, yet he was using the phone. He wanted her to think he was still in the bathroom. Obviously, he was making a secret call of his own. But to whom?

Claire didn’t ask.

Ten minutes later, freshly showered, Harlan came down to the kitchen. Claire had just put the chicken on the stove. She glanced over at him. “Hey, you know, at the Garden Plaza today, Molly Cartwright started talking about the Davalos family,” she said, ever so casually. With a fork, she pushed the chicken around the saute pan. “I had no idea there used to be a house on that spot.”

“Molly Cartwright has a big mouth,” Harlan muttered. He opened the refrigerator door.

“How’s that?” Claire asked, though she’d heard him.

“What did Molly tell you?”

“Not much,” Claire lied. She gave a little shrug. “Just that this family of four used to live in a house there. What happened to them?”

“They all died in a fire,” Harlan grunted. He sat at the breakfast table with his beer. “It’s not very pleasant conversation before supper. So let’s just drop it. What are you cooking up there anyway?”

“Chicken and pasta in a cream sauce,” Claire replied. She worked over the stove, and stole another look at Harlan. Frowning, he gazed out the sliding glass doors.

What happened to the Davalos family was a triple-homicide, arson, and suicide. It wasn’t just a fire. Harlan’s aversion toward discussing the tragedy seemed to echo Linda’s sentiments.

“Not very pleasant conversation before supper.”
This from a guy who at the dinner table last month went into grisly detail about a plant worker getting his arm eaten down to the bone by some chemical. Claire remembered telling him to change the subject, because he was upsetting Tiffany.

Yet he didn’t want to talk about the Davalos family.

And at the moment, he didn’t want her to know who was on the phone.

When it had first rung, Claire immediately thought of Tim. But now, she watched Harlan with his back to her, muttering into the cordless, and she wondered if it was the person he’d been secretly calling a few minutes before.

“All right, come on over,” he said. Then he hung up.

“Are you going to tell me who that was?” Claire asked.

“Your cop friend, Tim Sullivan,” Harlan said, turning to stare out the sliding glass door again. “He and Walt think they’ve found where your stalker’s been hiding out. They’re coming over to check around and make sure he isn’t here—just as a precaution.”

He stuck his head in the family room. “Tiffany? Baby, turn off the TV, and come in here.”

Harlan closed the blinds in the family room. He took Tiffany by the hand, and led her toward the front of the house.

Claire turned off the stove, then followed them into the living room. She sat down on the sofa with Tiffany, and stared out the window. Dark clouds were racing across the night sky, and for a moment, the moonlight briefly illuminated the unfinished house across the way, the “face house,” Tiffany called it.

Harlan shut the drapes. Then he went downstairs to his workroom, where he kept a gun.

“I’ll get to the bottom of this, and find out what the hell’s going on,” Walt Binns said, studying the road. He sped along Evergreen Drive, toward the Shaws’ cul de sac. “The whole time I was talking to Fred Maybon, he kept giving me this look like I had a screw loose, like it was
unreasonable
for me to be upset he’d just shot at you—
at us.”

“Do you know him very well?” Tim asked. Nervously tapping his foot on the floor of the passenger side, he glanced over at the speedometer on the dashboard. Walt was going sixty on the dark, narrow winding road.

“Fred’s with the Guardians, this local men’s group I belong to. But he and I aren’t exactly close. I don’t know what his problem is.” Walt shook his head. “Fred said he shot at you because he thought you were a deer.”

“Maybe he should get his eyes fixed,” Tim offered.

“Maybe you should, pal,” Walt replied. “Didn’t you get a look at the Colt M-16 Conversion rifle Fred had slung over his shoulder?”

“No, why?” Tim asked, gazing at Walt’s profile.

Walt was frowning. “Because,” he said. “That’s not a gun for deer hunting. It’s a gun for people hunting.”

Walt switched off his headlights as they turned down the cul de sac. They parked about half a block away from the Shaws’ house, then walked. Tim shined his flashlight in the bushes, then toward the half-constructed house across the street. Walt carried his gun in his jacket pocket.

They came up the Shaws’ front walkway and rang the bell. After a moment, Harlan Shaw opened the door. He gave his friend a very stalwart hug, then punched his arm. “Don’t let Tiffany know what’s going on,” he whispered. Then he nodded curtly at Tim, and invited them both in.

“Hi, Uncle Walt!” Tiffany squealed. Jumping off the sofa, she ran to him, and threw her arms around his legs.

Tim glanced over at Claire, seated on the couch. Their eyes met, and she gave him a wistful, furtive smile.

“Tiffany, baby,” Harlan was saying. “Uncle Walt needs to talk with Dad and this other gentleman. So—why don’t you go back to your movie, okay? Claire will watch it with you.”

When Tiffany was out of earshot, Harlan told them about Claire’s brush with her stalker at the library. “I want to get this son of a bitch,” he whispered. But begrudgingly, Harlan relinquished to Walt and Tim the job of searching the woods behind the house. He stood guard outside the sliding glass doors while Claire and Tiffany watched a movie in the family room.

Tim ventured into the forest with a flashlight as his only defense. He’d left Al’s gun in the hotel room—locked away in the briefcase that held the materials for his comic strip. He felt like a sitting duck. He was just waiting for someone else to take another potshot at him. The near-fatal mishap from Fred Maybon made four times he’d almost bought it within the last two days. They’d tried poison berries, sabotaging his car, breaking into his hotel room at night, and just an hour ago, what might have been a “hunting accident.”

Trudging through the woods, Tim thought back to what he’d first suspected a couple of days ago. Certain people on this island were involved in a cover-up. But it didn’t make sense that Fred Maybon, Linda Castle, Dorothy Herrmann, a “waitress” calling herself Ronnie, and maybe several others in Deception were all connected to a serial killer. If the cover-up—or conspiracy, or whatever it was—had nothing to do with Rembrandt, what were these people hiding?

Walt said he would
“get to the bottom of this.”
Tim hoped Harlan’s friend would have some answers—before the next
“accident”
fell upon him.

After a half-hour, in which Tim had scraped his face on a couple of low hanging branches, and stepped ankle-deep in a mud puddle, he heard Walt call to him:
“Hey, I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry, and I have burrs on my socks. Let’s wrap this up!”

When they got back to the house, Harlan agreed that if anyone had been out in those woods, they’d probably been scared away—at least, for the night. Their shoes covered in mud, Tim and Walt didn’t step back inside. Claire came to the sliding glass door, and asked them to stay for dinner.

Harlan turned to his wife, with a pinched smile. “Honey, I’m sure Officer Sullivan has work to do—”

“That’s right,” Tim quickly chimed in. “But thank you anyway.”

Walt said something about needing to take Tim back to the inn. Harlan gave his buddy another stalwart hug. Claire kissed Walt on the cheek.

Tim was surprised he got a warm smile, a handshake, and a “Thank you,” from Harlan Shaw. Claire thanked him as well, calling him “Officer Sullivan.” As she shook his hand, he felt something in her palm, a folded-up piece of paper.

Tim took it, then shoved his hand in his pocket.

He and Walt walked around the side of the house. Harlan’s friend asked if he wanted to grab dinner at the Fork In The Road. Tim was tired and frayed. He needed a shower more than anything else. Right now, the idea of sitting in his hotel room by himself, ordering a pizza, and watching bad TV was somehow strangely appealing. He asked Walt if he could take a rain check, and suggested they meet for lunch tomorrow.

They approached the Range Rover. As Walt moved toward the driver’s side, Tim reached into his pocket and furtively pulled out the note Claire had slipped to him. Tim quickly unfolded the piece of paper, and shined the flashlight on it:

By 9:35, the dinner dishes were done, Harlan had nodded off in front of the television, and Claire had sent Tiffany to bed.

She used the phone in the bedroom to call Steven Griswald in Bremerton. It rang twice, before a machine picked up:
“Hi, you’ve reached Steven and Sherry Griswald,”
a woman chirped on the recording.
“And Trevor!”
a little boy piped in.
“We can’t come to the phone right now…”
the woman continued.

Claire hung up. What she wanted from Steven Griswald wasn’t something she could ask on an answering machine.

She dialed The Whale Watcher again. This was her last chance before the switchboard closed for the night. She asked the operator for Tim Sullivan’s room.

“I think you’re in luck this time,” the operator said.

Tim answered on the third ring. “Hello?”

“Hi, it’s Claire,” she said.

“Thank God,” he murmured. “I didn’t think I’d get a chance to talk with you tonight. How are you doing?”

“I’m okay,” she said. “I must have tried you a dozen times today.”

“Well, I have Al’s cell phone,” Tim explained. “Your husband has the number. Didn’t he give it to you?”

“No. Just a second, let me grab a pencil.” Claire found a pen and pad on the nightstand by Harlan’s side of the bed. She got back on the line, and Tim read off the number to her. Claire scribbled it down, then tucked the piece of paper in her jeans.

“I can’t understand why Harlan didn’t give you that number,” Tim said.

“He’s a little jealous of you. And it’s not totally unfounded,” she admitted. “I think that’s why he didn’t want you staying for dinner tonight.”

“Yeah, I definitely caught that.”

“Did you read my note?” she asked.

“Yes. I stopped by the police station after Walt dropped me off here. It’s all locked up with an emergency number on the door. I forgot, one of the deputies is out of pocket, because he’s watching the Logan cabin—in case your stalker shows up tonight. So—who are the Davaloses anyway?”

Claire told him about working at the Garden Plaza with Linda Castle and Molly Cartwright today and how when Molly mentioned the Davalos family, Linda bristled, then quickly changed the subject.

“Harlan had the same reaction earlier tonight, when I asked about them,” Claire explained. She recounted for Tim what she’d learned from Molly and from the story in that old
Islander
she’d found in the library.

“You sure it’s not just a civic pride thing?” Tim argued. “A triple-homicide, suicide, and arson aren’t exactly great for the tourist trade. Maybe that’s why they don’t want to talk about it.”