The Stalker (5 page)

What
about
Beauchamp? he wondered. And Cavalacci and Wykopf? Why had Drexel said it didn’t concern them any more? Had something already happened, had the others somehow been taken into custody? Christ, if ... No, no, no. If the authorities had learned of three, they would have learned of all six; if they had gotten three, they would have gotten all six. It was something else then, something else ...

Kilduff went into the bathroom on rubbery legs and ran some cold water into the shell-pink basin and splashed it over his face and neck. He looked at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror. His face had a grayish, unhealthy cast; fear, the old fear, the trapped fear, had replaced the dullness in his eyes. He looked away, reaching mechanically for one of the velour towels on the rack next to the shower bath. Another thought came into his mind, then: How had Drexel known where to find him? How had he known he lived in San Francisco? After the Statute of Limitations had run out, and they were able to leave Illinois, they had all gone their separate ways, none of them telling the others what their plans were, what their eventual destinations were. That had been an integral part of their agreement, just as their pledge never to contact one another had been an integral part. Since Drexel lived so near him—in Los Gatos, hadn’t he said? less than fifty miles away—it could be that he had somehow run across Kilduff during the past eight years. Still, the telephone was listed in Andrea’s name, he had insisted upon that, and he hadn’t been married, hadn’t even known Andrea, in Illinois. And there was the fact, too, that Drexel knew about Jim Conradin living in Bodega Bay ...

Kilduff’s temples began to throb rhythmically, achingly, and there was the distant half-realized sound of surf in his ears. Robot-like, he went into the living room again and sat on the chair he had occupied earlier. It’s all beginning to crumble, his mind said; first the money running out, and then Andrea leaving, and now Drexel coming impossibly out of the past—it’s finally beginning to crumble.

He sat with his hands gripping the cushioned side of the chair, staring at the closed drapes. After a while, some of the tautness left his body and the pressure at his temples abated. He took several deep, tremulous breaths, looking up to the sunburst clock on the near wall. It was a little past two.

Six hours. He knew he couldn’t sit there, waiting, alone, in the neat, empty, antiseptic apartment. He had to get out; a walk, a drive, anything, he had to get out.

Trina Conradin stood at the sitting room window, staring past the shimmering sea of vermilion and pink and lavender ice plants in the front yard. It was one of those old-fashioned, multi-paned windows, with a dome-shaped, lead stained-glass rosetta above it, and the imperfectness of the panes and the ebbing gray tendrils of fog made the retreating figure of her husband seem frighteningly surrealistic.

She watched him get into their eight-year-old Dodge, and a moment later heard the sound of the starter and a sharp, metallic rending as the automatic transmission was jerked out of neutral. The rear tires spun on the crushed-shell drive, and the car shot ahead, going too fast, its red brake lights coming on like twin demon’s eyes in the fog as he slowed momentarily to negotiate the sharp turn at the bottom of the inclined drive; then the car disappeared onto Shoreline Highway, east around the curve of the northern flat of Bodega Bay, toward Highway i.

Trina stood at the window for a long moment, and then, with her long thin hands hugging her shoulders, she turned to face the dark sitting room. There had been a time when she took pleasure in that room, in the ponderously heavy oak paneling of the walls, the tarnished-brass floor and table lamps with their tasseled shades, the dated wing chairs with their tufted velvet seats and heavy black lacquered arms that had begun to spider-web with thousands of tiny age cracks; there had been a time when the old white house, which had been built by a wealthy Irishman when the area around Bodega Bay produced great quantities of potatoes in the early 1900’s, had evoked from her happy comments of “quaint” and “picturesque.” But now the house, and this room, seemed only somber and somehow faintly foreboding, harboring ghosts and faded memories that were as musty as the sometimes intangible, sometimes pronounced odor which seemed to permeate the dwelling.

Slowly, Trina moved through the sitting room to the spacious hallway leading to the rear of the house. She paused there, looking at the telephone on its eagle-claw stand. She worried her lower lip, still hugging herself, thinking of the call only a few short minutes earlier—a man’s voice she had never heard before, asking for Jim Conradin. She had called him out of the kitchen, where he had been eating the Crab Louis she had prepared for lunch, his face red from the whiskey she knew he had been drinking at The Tides that morning. At the sink in the kitchen, she had heard him say hello. There had been an instant of silence, and then Jim’s voice, strange and breathless in her ears, saying, “Sweet Mother of God!” A short, sibilant, unintelligible conversation followed, and she was aware that he had lowered his voice to prevent her from hearing. When he came into the kitchen moments later, his face had chameleoned from red to bone-white, and his eyes were veiled.

“Jim, what is it?” she had asked, alarmed.

“I have to go out now.”

“But you haven’t finished your lunch.”

“I don’t have time for it,” he had told her, pulling his sheepskin jacket off the chair back.

“Is it that important?”

“Business. Something’s come up.”

“Well, where are you going?”

“San Francisco.”

“San Francisco? Whatever for?”

“It’s nothing that concerns you.”

“Jim ...” she had begun, but he was already moving toward the front of the house, taking the car keys from the pocket of his jacket, slamming the door on his way out to cut off her words as she called after him again.

Trina passed a hand through her long dark hair, sighing tremulously now. She was thirty-one years old, with the slim, athletic figure of a girl; but the tiny crow’s feet at the corners of her brownish-gold eyes, the rather stem set of a mouth that had not had occasion to smile or laugh often in the past few years, made her seem even older than her years. She sighed again, pulling Jim’s old brown sweater tightly about her shoulders, and entered the kitchen. She began to clear off the table, thinking of her husband, as she always did when she was alone.

When she had first met him, when he was a senior and she a junior at Healdsburg High School in 1955, he had been such an outgoing person, fun to be with and to know, always ready to embark on some new adventure, always the first to suggest a picnic or a beach party or a hiking trip through the redwoods. She remembered the time they had driven to Mt. Lassen for the weekend, just the two of them, one summer when she was staying with her permissive Aunt Jocelyn; they had slept under the stars in two old sleeping bags he had borrowed from a friend, close together, by a stone-ringed fire in an isolated clearing, and she had known she was in love with him then because he had only kissed her once, gently, in the moonlight, and hadn’t tried to take advantage of her or of the situation. She remembered the week before he left to enter the Army, when he had given her the gold band engagement ring with its thin circle of tiny diamonds, a very expensive ring that he had bought with money he’d saved from his summer job in the apple orchards near Sebastopol; and how she had said she would wait for him, wouldn’t even go to a movie with another boy, and how she had been faithful to that promise. She remembered the letters, love letters—she still had them tied with a faded blue ribbon in the bottom drawer of her dresser—that he had written to her, one each week, faithfully, and the ones she had written to him. She remembered when he had called her after his discharge to say that he was going into some kind of business venture in Illinois for a while, he wouldn’t tell her what it was, very hush-hush, and that he would return to California when he had saved enough money for them to be married and to buy that salmon fishing boat he had always talked about having. She remembered how she had pleaded with him to allow her to come out to Illinois, they could be married there, but he had said that the business venture would be taking up all of his time, he couldn’t be with her the way a husband should, and that was no way to start a marriage; she had acquiesced, finally, and had written to him every day and he to her twice a week.

And then, three years later, he had come home with all the money he had saved—he wouldn’t tell her how much, just that it was considerable and they wouldn’t have to worry about anything for a long while to come—and they had been married in the little white church near her home in Healdsburg. He had bought the salmon boat and this house in Bodega Bay, and she had never been happier.

But she had begun to sense that something was wrong almost immediately. Jim had changed—in small ways at first, hardly noticeable, and then as the years passed, in progressively larger ways until he became a different man. Where he had always been outgoing, warmly laughing, making new friends, he became introverted, reticent, almost rude at times to neighbors and acquaintances; where he had always been ready to investigate new things and new places, constantly on the move, he became almost a recluse, leaving Bodega Bay only on the rarest of occasions—what was the use of having a home and a business someplace if you were going to be running around the country all the time? They had talked about children before, in their letters and when they were together, and Jim had said he wanted a large family, four boys and four girls; laughingly, “I’m going to keep you barefoot and pregnant, woman.” But when Trina had suggested having a child right away, he had said he’d changed his mind, they should wait for a while longer, and it was the same answer every time she broached the subject to him. Also, there was the fact that he had begun drinking. She couldn’t understand that; he had never been one for liquor, even in high school—when the other boys had gone out on weekend beer busts, he had usually begged off, or if he did go, he was the one who invariably ended up driving the others home. Now he drank heavily, almost habitually, in the winter months, when the salmon weren’t running; in the summer, he put himself into the fishing with a fervor that she thought bordered on the fanatical.

Trina couldn’t understand any of it. Could it have been her? She had asked herself that question an incalculable number of times, and had unfailingly given it the same answer: No. She had been everything a good wife should be, she was certain of that—she loved him, she was interested in him, in what he did and said and felt, she was passionate, trusting, undemanding. No, it wasn’t her; it was something else, something, possibly, that had happened while he was in the Air Force or when he was involved in that business venture in Illinois. But she could never get him to talk about that; he always managed to change the subject when she brought it up. Perhaps that call today had had something to do with it, perhaps ...

An involuntary shudder moved across her shoulders. She wished Jim had not gone to San Francisco, she wished that call had never come. There was something ... something
sinister
about it—melodramatic as that sounded—something dangerous and alien and incomprehensible.

Suddenly, intuitively, Trina Conradin was more frightened than she had ever been in her life.

The fishing shack squatted on the very tip of a narrow point in Duckblind Slough—a subordinate tributary of the Petaluma River several miles north of where that body of water empties into San Pablo Bay, and some thirty miles north of San Francisco. One of three similar structures in the slough—the others were set inland one hundred yards on either side—it was low and box-shaped and seemed to list slightly toward the water, as if the strength of the wind had been too much for it to withstand. It was built of raw, unfinished sawmill planks, covered with tar paper for insulation purposes, and it sat raised some two feet off the thick gray-black mud of the sloping bank, on four wooden corner blocks. Attached to the rear, immediately beneath one of the shack’s two windows, was a short floating dock, tar-papered like the shack itself, that jutted some fifteen feet into the turbid water. Tule grass and cattails and milkweed and tall brown rushes grew densely to the water’s edge; across the slough, perhaps seventy-five yards wide at that point, thick clumps of anise and sage dotted the flat marshland. In the distance, beyond the Petaluma River itself, the rising black oakcovered foothills of the Sonoma Mountains lay brown and desolate against both summer and winter skies.

You got to Duckblind Slough by way of a narrow dirt road leading off Highway 101 north of Novato, in Marin County. The road wound inland for a mile or so, through aromatic eucalyptus and bay and pepper trees, past a club for trap shooters and the Mira Monte Marina and Boat Launch—a small cluster of buildings which catered to outboard boats and fishermen and water skiers during the summer months. At that point, a sign announced that the road would now pass through private property, and that trespassers would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Three miles further along, a second private road branched off to the east, crossing a raised bank of railroad spur line tracks; a wooden gate capped with barbed wire and fastened closed with a chain-and-padlock blocked the road there. Duckblind Slough was another half-mile beyond the gate.

The road ended in a small clearing just large enough for four cars if they were parked carefully side by side. Three separate paths led from there to the shacks. The two inland ones were owned by Sonoma County businessmen, who used them sparingly for bass fishing and duck hunting in season, and who seldom if ever used them at any other time. The one on the point belonged to Steve and Andrea Kilduff.