Ray Elkins mystery - 02 - Color Tour (28 page)
Ray moved to her side. He pulled a pair of reading glasses from the pocket of his robe and looked at the columns of fine print. “Only a few of these are identified by owner.”
“Remember, I told you that we’re starting with Leiston employees first, then adding the others later.”
“Anything interesting?”
“I just had a few minutes to skim through these. Look at the names. Most of these are staff people who are coming to or leaving work. Remember, there were lots of parents visiting and a soccer game that Saturday, which probably accounts for the enormous number of unidentified plates. As you can see, this will take time, and I’m not sure it will yield anything.”
“And this other pile?”
“That’s from the night of the Medford fire. Six in the evening till six in the morning.”
They both scrutinized the two sheets. “Lot of action between seven and seven-thirty,” said Sue.
“Probably the kitchen staff was going home,” said Ray. He pointed to a name, “Who’s that?”
Sue ran her finger down a list of names. “That’s McAndless, the English teacher. Left at nine, back at nine forty-five. Looks like a milk run.” Sue scanned the bottom of the list. “The Warrington’s Toyota left the school about… ”
Ray, following her finger, completed her sentence, “Five in the morning.”
“When did it return?” Sue asked
“Don’t see it,” said Ray.
“No, it’s not there,” she agreed. She ran a pencil carefully down the page.
“But Warrington was at the fire. I saw him, I talked with him. I wonder where he was going at that time?”
“Maybe it was his wife. That’s something I’ll follow up on tomorrow,” Sue replied.
A security detail under Sue’s direction watched the exterior of Ray’s house; Sue also organized Ray’s colleagues and friends to be around the first few days after he came home from the hospital. Nora Jennings, now ensconced in the village with her friend Dottie, was two minutes from his hilltop home. With her dogs Falstaff and Prince Hal in tow, Nora was a frequent visitor in the late morning and early afternoon. Her main responsibility was to see to his lunch.
A volunteer at the village library, Nora filled part of her time organizing and shelving Ray’s large collection of books, many still in boxes from his move the previous summer.
Ray was drinking tea in the late morning when Nora came to his side with a copy of Joyce’s
Ulysses.
“Ray,” she said in a tentative tone as she placed the book in front of him, “This photo fell out when I was shelving this book. I hope it wasn’t being used as a bookmark.”
Ray took the photo from her hand and looked at it carefully. The color was faded, like a half-forgotten dream, but the subject of the photo and the place were instantly recognizable. A young woman in a black two-piece bathing suit was in profile, the expanse of Lake Michigan and the Empire dune the backdrop. He remembered the day, he remembered walking the beach with her, their picnic on a ridge overlooking Otter Creek. Holding the photo closer, he looked at her face for a long time. A tremor ran through his body, he could hardly breathe. He had first seen Allison’s photo when he and Sue searched Ashleigh’s apartment. That photo was of a slightly older Allison, a woman with an almost adolescent child. The photo in his hand was of the person he had known for a few fleeting days one August.
“Are you okay, Ray?” Nora asked, sensing that something was horribly wrong, fearing that he was having a stroke or a heart attack.
“Yes,” he finally responded.
“Can I get you something, some more tea, perhaps?” “I’m fine,” he responded in a thin voice.
“May I?” she asked, lifting the photo from his hand and slipping her glasses on. “I remember her, she was a friend of our daughter.”
“Tell me about her.”
“Oh, Ray, that was a long time ago. She was one of Jeannie’s up north friends, not someone from home.” She paused a long moment. “Her last name was, let me think, Ashton. Yes, Ashton. I met her mother a few times at parties. She was a niece of Mrs. Howard; they stayed with her. They lived out west somewhere, Oregon or Washington.
“Her name?”
“Which one, the mother or the daughter?”
“The daughter?”
“Her first name, she went by a nickname, something with a “y” ending. Buffy or Taffy or… ”
“Allie,” suggested Ray.
“Allie, yes, that’s it. Her given name would have probably been Allison or Alicia, maybe Alice. But I can’t remember anyone ever calling her anything but Allie. The picture, Ray, why do you have her picture?”
Ray hesitated as he considered what he wanted to divulge. “I met her one summer. We dated for a few weeks. She was in graduate school at Berkeley. She gave me that book, and I must have put her picture there. But that was so many years ago.”
“You gave me start a moment ago,” Nora said. “You looked so strange.”
“It’s the medicine,” said Ray. “It makes me feel queasy.”
While Ray had welcomed Nora’s company, now he wanted her gone. He needed some time to think, to gather things, to search for answers. He had been blocking his memories of Allison, not wanting to deal with the emotions the memories might evoke.
“Nora, I’m exhausted. Maybe you and the guys could leave me for a while. It’s hard for me to sleep when anyone is here.”
“Are you sure you are okay?”
“Yes. I couldn’t sleep last night, and I think I’ve finally crashed.”
“How about lunch, Ray? It’s almost time. I’ve brought fixings for Welsh rarebit and a Caesar salad.”
“Maybe if you came back in a couple of hours.”
“My guys were hoping for leftovers, but we’ll do that.”
Ray waited a few minutes after Nora left, then rolled his wheelchair into the third bedroom. One side of the floor was littered with boxes containing personal things—notes, correspondence, and memorabilia—from the last thirty years, most untouched since the move. As he looked at the clutter he remembered there was no apparent order. The more recent accumulations were stored in computer paper boxes, regular shapes and sizes, the tops neatly sealed with transparent packing tape. The things from his twenties were in a motley collection of cardboard containers, deepening shades of brown suggesting relative antiquity.
Handicapped by his lack of mobility, Ray struggled to see the contents of the boxes from the confines of his wheelchair. Finally, in frustration, he set the brakes on the chair and carefully slid to the floor. Scooting in a crayfish-like manner, dragging the heavy cast behind, he moved from box to box, tearing open the flaps, leafing through the detritus of decades long past: graduate school notes, snapshots, brochures, prints, and maps from his travels around Europe and England.
Finally, he found what he was looking for, a small paper carton. He carefully removed the contents: letters and cards from the years he served in the military and later when he was in graduate school. He laid these out on the floor around him, stopping to examine and read some of them. Then it surfaced, a small envelope addressed in a delicate hand. There was no return address, just a faded California postmark.
He removed a single page of stationery.
Ray piled the rest of the letters and cards in the box. He put the letter back in the envelope and slid it into the pocket of his robe. He struggled into the wheelchair. Once back in the kitchen, he abandoned the chair for a pair of crutches. From Sue’s carefully arranged table of documents, he retrieved a copy of Ashleigh Allen’s birth certificate. Ray checked the mother’s name, Allison Ashton. “Allison,” he said softly. No father was listed.
Ray hobbled into his study and slipped into the chair next to his computer, waited impatiently for the computer to boot, then opened a calendar program. He clicked on the “view date” icon, entered Ashleigh’s birth date, and printed the calendar for that month and the preceding 10 months. He carried the papers to the kitchen and laid them out on the counter.
Ray looked at the date of the postmark, September 4, a few weeks after she had left, and did the math. He closed his eyes and let the memories come streaming back.
They had met the third week of August on the beach. He was home from Europe, on a month-long furlough, before he went back to serve the last year of his enlistment. Through an unexplained twist of fate, he had been assigned to a military police unit in Germany; most of the people he had trained with had gone to Vietnam.
Allison told him she was visiting relatives in the area. Ray remembered her deep tan, rich blue eyes, and the swirl of her long auburn hair. When he first met her, there was an unopened copy of Joyce’s
Ulysses
on the sand next to her towel. He used his limited knowledge of Joyce as a gambit to start a conversation. He learned that she was staying with her aunt and that she had gone to Sarah Lawrence and was now a graduate student in English at Berkeley.
Now, as he stood at the kitchen counter, memories came flowing back: Allison’s gorgeous smile; her warm laugh; her lovely, resonant voice. And there was also a hint of sadness that he never quite understood.
For the next two weeks they met almost daily. He was the tour guide, taking her to all his favorite beaches from Arcadia to Northport. They climbed the dunes, walked the sandy shorelines, and ate picnics that he carefully packed for each day’s excursion. And each evening, before it was dark, he returned her to her car at the beach in Empire and watched her drive away.
The day before she flew back to California, she met him in the late afternoon. This time she brought the picnic in a large wicker hamper—cucumber and watercress sandwiches and a bottle of French champagne. They found a protective alcove in the ridge of sand high above the beach. They ran down to the beach, swam out to the second sand bar, and played in the rolling surf until they were thoroughly chilled by the Lake Michigan water. They toweled off and, hand in hand, walked the beach for more than an hour.
Tired and hungry they returned to their bower high above the shore and ate, sipped champagne, and watched the sun slowly descend toward the horizon. There were bits of conversation and long periods of silence. In the final glow of the setting sun Allison crawled on top of him and kissed him passionately. He felt her pull her top loose, her warm breasts falling against his bare chest. She moved her moist lips along his neck and then kissed him again, her tongue meeting his. Even with the passing of so many years, Ray could remember the intensity of their lovemaking. They stayed for several more hours, wrapped in a blanket, looking at the stars, and talking quietly. At her urging they finally returned to their cars. As he held her door, she retrieved the copy of
Ulysses.
“A small gift,” she said. Then they embraced for a last time. Ray remembered standing a long time, watching the taillights of her car disappear.
A few days after her departure a letter arrived—general delivery—at the village post office. There was no return address, just a California postmark. He remembered reading the two sentence note several times, standing on the sidewalk in front of the post office. The letter was in his shirt pocket when he boarded the North Central Airlines flight in Traverse City on his way back to Germany. The copy of
Ulysses
was in his bag. He thought that after he was mustered out, he’d go to California and find her. But it never happened. A year later he was starting graduate school and trying to find ways to support himself. He picked up construction jobs during the summer and worked as a bouncer in a campus bar the first few terms. Eventually he picked up work as a teaching assistant and did legwork on some of his professors’ funded research projects.
During the next several years, on the occasional weekends Ray came north, he looked for Allie. And a number of times during the ensuing decades he thought he caught sight of her in Leland, or Empire, or Glen Arbor, or Frankfort. But when he got close, it was always someone else—similar hair color, or facial structure, but not Allie.
Ray thought back to what Jack, the owner of the Last Chance, had said, that the local boys didn’t hit on Ashleigh because they knew she was out of their class. That’s probably what kept him from pursuing Allison; she was out of his class, beyond his milieu. His feelings of love and loss were mitigated by fears of humiliation and thoughts of inadequacy. He recognized long ago that he was into his thirties before he got beyond the psychological constraints of growing up poor in the woods of northern Michigan.
Nora Jennings met Sue in the driveway as she and her dogs were leaving Ray’s house after she had returned and made him lunch. “I’m glad to see you,” Nora said. “I’m concerned about Ray; he doesn’t seem himself. I think you need to get him to the doctor.”
“What’s going on?” asked Sue.
“He’s tense and tetchy. I’ve never seen Ray like this. He’s behaving like my Hugh did before he had his stroke.”
“How about his lunch—is he eating?”
“He made me go away for several hours, said he needed sleep. When I came back, he was up, asking me to mail this package,” Nora showed Sue a package she had been carrying between the handles of her picnic basket. “I don’t think he ever really napped. It was half past two when I finally served him lunch. I made him Welsh Rarebit, it’s something he loves. And he just picked at it.”
“I’ll keep an eye on him,” Sue responded. “He’s lucky he has such a good friend, Nora. Thanks.” She opened the tailgate of Nora’s Explorer and helped her with the ponderous basket. She lifted the package off the top, scanned the addressee,
Orchid Genescreen,
and held it out to Nora. “Do you want this back here?”
“No, I’ll take it up front. I promised Ray I’d get this in the mail this afternoon.”
Sue stood by as Nora loaded the dogs in the back. She wondered about the contents of the mysterious package as she watched Nora’s vehicle disappear down the steep drive. Then she looked toward Ray’s house; she loved the small dwelling’s clean, modern design and the way it blended with the wooded hillside.
