Rainbow's End (43 page)

Nils Anders looked across the top of his bourbon and smiled. “I told you she wasn't much on details.”

Nils had been holding on to a table for them, by the time Jury arrived at the restaurant. Holding on for dear life it would have to be, judging by the crowd both sitting and standing. It was a favorite spot, a place where you couldn't get a table without a reservation, but the tourists weren't aware of that.

“She said it and just—walked away.” Jury sipped his whisky, dying for a cigarette. Thank the Lord Anders was a nonsmoker and they were sitting in the No Smoking section.

“Well, it sounds as if Mary doesn't much care for Cuz, doesn't it?”

“How about you?”

Anders looked puzzled. “Do I care for Cousin Dolly?” He shrugged. “She's all right, I guess.” Nils reached in the breadbasket for a piece of corn-and-chili bread.

“Mary hasn't said anything to you about Dolly Schell?”

“Anything like what?” Nils shook his head, buttered his bread. “Mary is very close-mouthed.”

“How did Angela feel about Dolly?”

“I'm not sure. I don't think we ever talked about her. Dolores, I mean. ‘Dolly' doesn't seem to suit her.” He smiled slightly, broke off another chunk of bread. “I wish the food would get here.”

“I second that.” Nils Anders (thought Jury) was perhaps not the best person to ask about “feelings.” Too rational. Or too involved with his theorems and axioms about light and space. The waiter arrived with their heavily laden plates. Maybe it was the air out here that made
him so hungry. Whatever it was, Jury picked up his fork the moment the coral-colored plate was set before him and dug into the
fajita.
He noticed that Anders was contemplating his food instead of eating it.

“You don't take it seriously, then,” he said to Anders.

“Take what seriously?”

Jury shook his head, changed the subject to the Colorado trip. “I'm sure she mourns her sister, but she doesn't demonstrate it much. She's a very self-contained girl.”

After a moment of neatening the pile of black beans with his fork, Anders said, “You know, there might have been some trouble there.”

“Trouble? Between Angela and Mary?”

Anders took a few more seconds rearranging the expertly positioned portions on his plate—pumpkin flan, tamale, fried spinach. “Ambivalence at best. Jealousy at worst.”

Jury shrugged. “I expect it's quite natural for a kid to envy her older sister.”

“I'm not talking about Mary. I mean Angela.”

Surprise cut Jury's laugh short. “You mean Angela was jealous of
Mary
?”

The answer was oblique. “The thing about Mary is, she's so down-to-earth, so close-to-the-ground, I think she's growing out of it sometimes—”

Jury remembered his own feeling about Mary's rootedness and smiled. “I know what you mean.”

“She loves the Southwest, the desert, the red rocks, the—
stuff.
But she thinks everything else is a sham. Santa Fe, or what it's become; this restaurant we're sitting in—” he motioned with the fork—“the hype, the galleries, the fêtes. There's something uncannily sophisticated, if that's the word I want, about Mary. There's something—” he paused, pushed his corn husk back a micro-measurement—“about the way she burns away all of the extraneous matter. Like this corn husk, if it were surrounding some point, some person . . . Mary would just rip it off. Anyway, she's not a walking Chamber of Commerce for Santa Fe, as are most of the people you'll meet—”

“All of the people,” Jury interrupted, smiling, remembering his early-morning walk.

“Right. And Sedona—the place Angela really loved—well, that's far worse as far as Mary's concerned. ‘Why would certain parts of
the earth be more powerful than others?' We were arguing about ‘vortexes' one day. The three of us were talking about Sedona and about stone circles—Avebury, Stonehenge, the ley lines. Mary reads a lot; I wouldn't be surprised if she didn't read more than Angela herself. But if someone she cared about was really interested in a subject, Mary would go and read a book about it so she could join in the conversation. Christ, she must drive her teachers crazy, what little she sees of them. Plays hooky a lot, is my guess.” Anders tilted his head, regarding the new relationship he'd made between the corn husk and the pumpkin flan. “Anyway, this one day in the shop, we were all drinking chamomile tea or something equally revolting, when Angela brought up Avebury and ley lines. It wasn't long before her trip.” Anders paused, looked sad, picked up his wineglass and held it. “Angela talking about ley lines. Mary said, ‘You might as well believe in UFOs.' Angela said that was different. It ticked Angela off, listening to her.”

“A woman getting angry with a thirteen-year-old because of the kid's beliefs? That's a little irrational.”

“Some thirteen-year-old!”

The nervousness in Nils Anders's laugh made Jury look up quickly, but Anders was looking down again at his plate.

Deep into his own thoughts, Nils said, “I wish she were ten years older.” He avoided Jury's eyes.

Jury could tell the man was deeply distressed by this admission, and said, “So do I, so what?” Anders then looked over at him, surprised. Jury went on: “I just spent—how long? Seven or eight hours with this kid and it felt more like seven or eight years. There's something extremely complex and even disturbing about her. I know exactly what you mean by ‘burning away extraneous stuff.' Maybe it's from having grown up with no parents and being thrown back on her own resources; maybe it's from sitting in the desert, thinking; maybe it's from watching a lot of phonies do a lot of phony things. I don't know. But Mary Dark Hope does
not
strike one—certainly not me—as your typical pubescent kid.”

Anders's look was a little less strained. He gave a brief laugh. “I was beginning to feel like a pederast.”

“What we feel is one thing; what we do is another.” Jury looked out over the packed dining room, and reflected for a few moments. He went on, “You know, a few weeks ago I was in Baltimore. It happened
to be around the date of Edgar Poe's birthday. Now, if we were living back in his day in the nineteenth century no one would really think twice about a relationship between a thirteen-year-old girl and a grown man. But today? There'd be an uproar about child abuse. Very sensitive area, as it should be. What would have happened in this decade to E. A. Poe and Virginia? They'd never have had a chance. Poe would have been locked away.” Jury added, with a force of sadness that took him by surprise, “and ‘Annabel Lee' would never have been written.”

Anders was still pushing his food, surely cold by now, around his plate.

“Nils,” Jury said, “why don't you eat that, instead of trying to penetrate the mystery of the relationship between the spinach and the corn husk.”

Anders smiled wanly and scooped up some beans, leaving Jury to think, uncomfortably, about his own fleeting reaction, quickly repressed, to Mary Dark Hope as they sat drinking cappuccino yesterday. Hoping to relieve some of Anders's obvious guilt, he said again, “Sexually disturbing, no doubt about it.”

Behind Jury, a woman's voice said, “Anyone I know? Or are you talking about the tortillas?”

The voice made Anders look up, turned Jury around.

“Hello, Clare,” said Nils, not very enthusiastically.

It was one of the dance-hall actresses that Jury had seen several hours before. She stood there smiling, the smile glimmering like the green silk dress she was wearing—smile, teeth, dress, hair—all with a sheen that caused a number of diners to turn and stare. Jury imagined she was used to being stared at.

Jury was introduced again and said hello. Clare glimmered at both of them yet again, then tossed the drift of dark red hair clear of her shoulder in a gesture Jury had always disliked. So coy, so clearly meant to display breasts and neckline. Then she moved off through the webbing of tables towards an escort who was stuck waiting for her.

“Definitely
not
jailbait,” said Jury, his eyes following her before turning them back to his companion.

Nils Anders was poking at the cold corn husk.

He hadn't noticed.

Melrose had been in the company of Divisional Commander Macalvie several times before: in Brighton; on Dartmoor; at the Hammersmith Odeon. And he found Macalvie's company—like the sea air, the slanting moor rains, the thunderous applause—bracing, to say the least.

Certainly, it must be for the person now in his office, a woman, from the sound of it.

As if reading his thoughts, Macalvie's secretary cocked her head towards the inner office. “Inspector Thwaite. She'll be out in a minute.” Under her breath, she added, somewhat mysteriously, “She usually is.”

Thwaite. Melrose thought he recalled Jury's having talked about her . . . yes, Gilly Thwaite. One of the few people on the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary Macalvie respects. Feels affection for. Love, possibly.

Well, the course of it was certainly not running smooth, then, for the female voice rising in arpeggiated imitation of a diva was in the throes of something other than aria.

“. . . her bloody ske—” And the voice took another dive.

Far more pleasant than Sam Lasko's secretary, the woman with whom Melrose shared the tiny outer office just smiled and shook her head as if any visitor to Exeter headquarters knew what Macalvie and/or this woman with whom he was closeted were like. She rolled her eyes.

Macalvie appeared to be talking about bones, a skeleton.

“Vertebrae match . . . X-ray twenty years ago. . . . It's her!”

“No, it isn't.”

“Yes, it bloody
is.
Perfect ma—”

“. . . do you explain
this
?”

Melrose heard a clink, a clatter, tiny, but distinct. Jingle of coins on hard surface, it sounded like. The aria ended, and now there was a cut-off wail, like a snatch of music he'd once heard on an old blues-jazz record, then a brief staccato exchange, followed by another aborted wail . . . this one seemingly of outrage. The woman who stalked out, paler (Melrose guessed) than when she'd walked (or stalked) in, was more intelligent-looking than she was pretty; but had an intensity and a vitality (even at this apparent low ebb in her crime-scene career) that more than made up for physical beauty. Yet, Melrose adjusted even that judgment as she passed before him, for she had a very graceful carriage and a headful of bobbish dark curls that softened the unflattering horn-rimmed glasses; she wore a bright coral lipstick, which made Melrose irrationally happy, seeing she hadn't permitted her femininity to be deflowered (so to speak) by the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, of which Brian Macalvie was divisional commander and chief superintendent—either or both.

As Inspector Thwaite made her exit, the secretary nodded and smiled at Melrose, inclined her head toward the door, and said he could go in.

Brian Macalvie smiled broadly and extended his hand. They had always got on extremely well, which surprised Melrose, for Macalvie was not the sort of policeman who took easily to amateurs. Well, he didn't really take easily to professionals either, so Melrose's amateur standing had nothing to do with it. Macalvie was still wearing his coat; Melrose recalled that he had always worn his coat—and it looked familiar, down to the little tear in the elbow—as if Macalvie had just come in or were just on his way out. All of his life, coming in, going out. No one could match Macalvie for intensity, not even Inspector Thwaite. Copper hair, neon-blue eyes, Macalvie seemed to exist within a magnetic field.

Right now, Macalvie was sticking a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and patting down his pockets for a light as if he were frisking himself for a gun; finally, he snatched a little box of matches out from under a batch of papers before he recalled himself to social niceties and offered Melrose the pack.

“No thanks.” Melrose was looking at the several coins that had been shoved aside in the process, wondering what clue they'd offered in Gilly Thwaite's case. He was also eyeing the overflowing ashtray, big as a luncheon plate. Probably, it
was
a plate. “Cut down, have you?”

Macalvie looked at the plate too. “Those? Those are Jury's.”

“Jury stopped smoking.”

Macalvie smiled cynically and rolled his eyes to suggest “a lot you know,” then, apparently deciding Jury hadn't actually been in the office long enough to cause such a butt buildup, added another smoker to the pile. “And a lot are Gilly Thwaite's. She just left.”

“No, they're not.”

In the midst of bringing round the pot to fill two cups with muddy-looking coffee, Macalvie's brows shot up in question. “Who says?”

“I says. She wears lipstick.”

“Ha! Aren't
we
the little sleuth?”

“ ‘Little' is the definitive word. If that coffee's for me, no thanks. I passed some roadworks chaps filling potholes who could use it for filler.”

“Yeah, it is pretty revolting.” Macalvie peered into the pot and returned it to the burner behind him. Then he was washing the papers all over his desk, found what he wanted, shied it over to Melrose. “Jury sent this.”

The stapled photocopied pages fluttered onto Melrose's side of the desk. He picked them up and read through the notes Jury had sent, detailed sketches of the people he'd seen and talked to, what they'd said, what they hadn't. After a while, Melrose removed his glasses and said, “Mary Dark Hope. She sounds interesting.”

“The kid sister. But it wasn't the sister who identified the body, according to my nemesis, DCI Rush. It was the cousin.” Macalvie frowned, as if the thought troubled him. “Mary Hope's thirteen; Rush—or could be the cousin—decided it would be too traumatic for the kid to undertake the trip and make the identification.” Macalvie nodded towards the photocopied report. “Though it sure as hell doesn't sound as if this particular thirteen-year-old is easily traumatized.”