Liar (33 page)

“And he went along with this?”

“Think of the threat she could hold over him,” he said. “I’m not saying she ever did threaten him, but we both knew that my dad was dependent upon our silence.”

So my aunt had exercised her own form of blackmail over those years. Stay away from me and your son, or I’ll blow your alibi.

“Once she got an idea in her head,” Travis was saying, “it was harder than hell to get her to let go of it. A couple of years ago, she read a passage in one of her Georgette Heyer novels to me, about a shy woman. Heyer had made the observation that shy women often have strong prejudices. She asked me if I thought that was true.”

“What did you say?”

“I said the fact that she hadn’t spoken to my father in a decade ought to prove that Ms. Heyer severely understated the case.”

“This was near the time you had the fight with her over your dad?”

“Yes. I had reached a point in my life when I needed to get to know him. If he was a liar, a cheat, a killer-whatever-I needed to get to know him. The pity was, I had lost ten years during which he was perfectly healthy.”

The phone rang.

“Reed tells me I’m not supposed to yell at you,” the voice said. “Can I just say I’m worried?”

“Frank! Please don’t worry. I’m home, I’m safe, just a little bruised.”

“We’re leaving Boise tomorrow morning-”

“You’re coming home!”

“No,” he laughed, “but I’m glad you sound so excited about the idea. We think our guy is in Montana now. We have some pretty solid leads.”

“Oh.”

“Sorry. I’m anxious to get back, too. Twice as anxious now.”

“So where will you be?” I asked.

“I’ll call you when I know for sure. We’re still working on finding a place to stay.”

“Frank, you know how you’ve been telling me about the people you’ve met there, with the Boise PD?”

“Yes,” he said warily.

“Is there anyone there who might be willing to look something up for you?

He groaned. “For me, huh?”

“Okay, for me. It’s important.”

“What is it?”

“I need to know if there’s an arrest record for a Robert or Bobby De-Mont in the summer of 1940.”

“Did you just say
‘1940’?”

“Yes.”

“Irene-”

“Come to think of it,” I said, remembering that Gerald mentioned that school had just let out for the summer, “it was probably June of 1940.”

There was a pause. “Want to tell me why I should put any new acquaintance of mine to that kind of trouble?”

I told him about the conversation with Gerald Spanning.

“Hmm. Any idea at all what the charges might have been?”

“No, but to send a lawyer all the way to Boise-”

“A lawyer and a bunch of money,” he said.

“If it was a violent crime against a woman, it would be worth it to De-Mont to have it hushed up, don’t you think?”

“I’ll see if I can get anyone interested in it. Spell the name for me again.”

I did. “Thanks, Frank.”

“Irene?”

“Yes?”

“Be careful, okay?”

“You, too.”

“Think about staying somewhere else, okay?”

“I have been, much more seriously,” I said. “I’ll give you Travis’s cell phone number in case you can’t reach me here.”

He told me that Pete wanted to talk to Rachel, and I put her on.

“Travis,” I said, “Frank doesn’t think it’s a good idea for us to stay here, at least for a while. Do you mind if we stay somewhere else tonight?”

He looked relieved. “I didn’t want you to feel insulted. Let me pay for a couple of hotel rooms somewhere, or we could stay in the van. Either way, I’d feel safer.”

“I think I know someone who’d probably love to have us stay over at her place. The rooms are small, but the food is great. And wait until you see the gardens.”

Jack was willing to take care of the pets, so Travis and I arrived on Mary’s doorstep about an hour later. Rachel had been invited to join us for dinner but wasn’t going to stay overnight.

“Travis!” Mary cried, as he entered the house. Within moments she had instructed him to call her Aunt Mary if he wanted to, because even Frank and Rachel called her that. “So there’s no need to stand on genealogical ceremony,” she said. “Irene, he must be half-starved, waiting so late for his dinner. Travis, I hope you like beef stew, because I’ve got a big pot of it simmering on the stove.”

I never really think of her as motherly, or even grandmotherly, but as I watched her fuss over him in an agreeable way, I began to realize there were sides of Mary Kelly I didn’t always get to see. She might spoil Frank or goad me, but her treatment of Travis was more tender, and solicitous without being oppressively so.

“What happened to your hand?” she asked. His answer earned me a look of reproof from her. “Sweet heavens, Irene! I expected you to take better care of him!”

“Yes, I managed to injure him within twenty-four hours of meeting him,” I said.

“That’s not true!” he protested. “Irene has been nothing but good to me. And I think she was hurt worse today. I told you what happened, Aunt Mary-my injury was my own fault, not Irene’s.”

“Well, I’m just thankful you weren’t hurt any more seriously than that,” she said, turning back to the stove. Travis couldn’t see her face from where he sat, so he didn’t see her smile. I decided she must have been pleased that he had started calling her Aunt Mary. Maybe that was it.

She then began regaling him (and Rachel) with stories of some of the more ridiculous moments of my childhood. The story of Barbara locking me in my grandmother’s outhouse had already been met with hilarity.

It was with some relief, then, that I heard Rachel’s cell phone ring in the middle of the story about the time my father took off work to come to my school for a conference with one of the nuns, only to discover that the good sister had been barricaded in the library. Aunt Mary hadn’t reached the part about the fire when the phone rang.

It was McCain, trying to reach me through her. I told her I’d talk to him and she handed the phone to me. I glanced over at Travis, who was listening to Mary tell another story. I walked out of the kitchen. Rachel watched me, but didn’t say anything.

“I understand you’ve had a rotten day,” McCain said.

“I understand you have, too.”

He laughed. “Well, nobody’s giving me half a million to cheer me up.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your inheritance, Ms. Kelly. Arthur Spanning remarried your aunt.”

“I know,” I said. “I just talked to their priest today. He can tell you that neither Travis nor I knew that, by the way.”

“He can tell me that you acted like you didn’t know.”

“Ask Rachel to give you Harold Richmond’s number-he can tell you what happens to people who don’t let go of one idea. Maybe you’ve only ever had one in your lifetime, and this is it. But trust me, it’s a bad one.”

“Why should I doubt that the sole beneficiary of Briana Maguire’s estate should be interested in five hundred thousand dollars?”

“She didn’t have five hundred thousand. I doubt she had five hundred.”

“You should talk to your buddy Reed Collins about the
papers that
were found in Mr. Ulkins’s office.”

I sighed. “That can only mean something came to her through Arthur. Travis should have it. Travis already has most of Arthur’s money, and Arthur wouldn’t have wanted me to take anything from his estate. I’ll talk to his lawyer, if it will make you lay off.”

“Where is that lawyer, by the way? No one seems to be able to locate him. And you’re keeping your cousin damned close to you, aren’t you?”

“Look,” I said, “I was going to offer to help you out here, but maybe I’ll just have you talk to my own lawyer.”

“We’ll talk again, Ms. Kelly. By then, you’ll need that lawyer.”

I walked back toward the kitchen just in time to hear Travis say, “These stories are funny, but they must be embarrassing to Irene. Don’t you have any positive stories to tell about her?”

As I stepped into the room, I said, “She’s too old to change her habits, Travis.”

“I’ve got all kinds of stories about her,” Mary said. “But I don’t want her head to swell. She knows I’m proud of her.”

“Do you?” Travis asked me.

It was the look of worried uncertainty on Mary’s face that made me say, “Of course I do. And the reverse is true as well. She knows I’m proud of her.”

“This stew is about to burn,” Mary said, suddenly turning away to stir the pot.

I was assigned to the smaller of the two small guest rooms, to sleep on a bed that I had slept in before, and had always found to be comfortable. But on those previous occasions, I hadn’t been thrown against a wall a few hours before bedtime.

At about three in the morning, I decided to break down and take half of one of the pain pills I had brought with me, prescribed for an older injury. I rarely took them, but I needed sleep. I got back into bed and was trying to find a tolerable position, trying not to think of Ulkins, when there was a slight tapping at the door.

“Come in,” I called.

It was Mary, and by the hall light I could see she had a rather festively colored, comfy-looking robe on. She sat next to the bed, and took my hand. “You poor thing,” she said. “Anything I can get you?”

“I’ll be all right,” I said.

She sat next me, reminiscing for a little while about the numerous childhood injuries I had sustained, recalling some scrapes and bumps and a rather spectacular fall from a tree. All the while she softly stroked my hair the way my father used to do when I was little, whenever I had had a particularly bad day, and I wondered drowsily if she had comforted him in this same way when he was a boy. I don’t remember falling asleep or hearing her leave the room.

She didn’t wake me the next morning to go to Mass, but she took Travis to St. Matthew’s with her while I slept in. Later they dropped me off at my house, where I got into the Karmann Ghia, put the top down and headed for Huntington Beach. They were going shopping-in the Mustang-while I went to talk to the DeMonts.

I took the coast route, even though Pacific Coast Highway was bound to have heavy summer traffic. As it turned out, I didn’t have to pay too high a price for choosing it over the inland route; PCH was crowded, but the traffic moved. No local would think of expecting more.

I crossed the bridge over Anaheim Bay, passed the wildlife refuge and took my last good look at nature until I reached Warner Avenue. For the next few miles, the highway is dominated by a motley assortment of buildings: houses, bars, surf shops and restaurants.

Technically, Huntington Beach begins on the left side of the highway just over the bridge, the right side belonging to Surfside and Sunset Beach. But growing up in an area where there are now high school classes that will teach you how to hang ten, I had long ago developed other ideas about true local geography. For me, the real Huntington Beach begins when you get within sight of the pier. The two beaches on either side of that pier boast some of the most well-known surfing territory on the coast.
That’s
Huntington Beach.

Before long, I was at the edge of the oil fields that brought on the first boom years in Huntington Beach, back in the 1920s. There were still big platforms just off the coast, but fewer and fewer signs of drilling on shore. Most of the oil fields had given way to developments packed with large, imitation villas in pastel stucco on streets with names like “Sea-point” and “Princeville” and “Castlewood.”

I took a last look at the water before turning left on Golden West, still thinking about my surfing days, wondering if I d ever work up the nerve to paddle out again.

The DeMonts lived in a section of the city that was older that the ones I had just passed; their homes were on one of the numbered streets between Main and Golden West. Although the neighborhood was older, that didn’t mean the homes were-it soon became apparent that most of the original structures on these streets had given way to new buildings. The result was a mixture of housing: many of the lots had condos and apartment buildings on them; others, large single-family dwellings; a few were smaller, older homes. There was even a strip of colorful faux Victorians.

I turned right on Acacia, found the street I was looking for and slowed when I came to the address for Leda DeMont Rose and her father, Horace-a corner lot. I got lucky with parking and found a space not far away, then walked back to the corner.

It was a large house, though not among the very newest on the street. Judging by its design, I thought it probably had been built in the 1970s. I studied the addresses and realized that Robert’s home was on the same side of the street, at the beginning of the next block, on the opposite corner of the intersection. His was a single-story crackerbox that was probably built in the 1940s. My guess was that a similar house had originally occupied Leda’s lot.

While Leda’s property was neatly kept, her brother’s was a little less so. Robert’s place could have used a coat of paint, and looking at the brown, patchy grass in his yard, I saw that no one could accuse him of wasting water on a lawn. The place wasn’t so far gone that you’d call it an eyesore, but it didn’t look like the owner had a lot of domestic enthusiasm.

I stood debating which household I should upset first, and decided that even in my current condition, I could take on a guy who was almost a hundred and live to fight another day. I wasn’t sure how old Robert was, but Gerald’s story about Robert’s arrest was enough to make me decide to save Robert for round two.

There was a low wooden fence around the front yard of Leda De-Mont’s home; I lifted the latch on the gate and made my way along a set of long, flat platforms set at right angles to one another. The platforms served as steps. On either side of each platform were carefully pruned bushes and shrubs that added privacy as well as greenery. The platforms ended at a deck that was concealed from the street by more plant life. At one end of the deck was a small rock grotto with a stream of water flowing through it. The water pooled at its base; the flow produced a soft gurgling, a not-quite-babbling brook effect.