The White Road-CP-4 (33 page)

Number 1200 was an impressive classical revival tabby manse that must have been more than a century old, its facade constructed from a mixture of oyster shell and lime mortar and dominated by a two-tiered entry porch supported by slender white columns. The SUV was parked to the right of the house. I walked slowly up the central staircase, stood in the shade of the porch, and rang the doorbell. The sound of it echoed in the hallway beyond, eventually losing itself in the sound of firm footsteps on the boards before the door opened. I half-expected Hattie McDaniel to be standing before me in a pinafore, but instead it was the woman I had seen arguing with Elliot Norton on my first night in town. Behind her, dark wood extended through the empty white hallway like muddy water through snow.

“Yes?”

And suddenly I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t even sure why I had come here, except that I couldn’t find Elliot and something told me that the argument I had witnessed went beyond any professional issue, that there was more between them than a typical client-lawyer relationship. Also, seeing her up close for the first time, I was confirmed in another suspicion that I had: she was wearing widow’s weeds. All she needed was a hat and a veil and the look would have been complete.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” I said. “My name is Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator.”

I was about to reach into my pocket for id but a movement on her face stopped me. Her expression didn’t soften, exactly, but something flashed across it, like a tree moving in the wind that briefly allows moonlight to flash through its branches and illuminate the bare ground beneath.

“You’re him, aren’t you?” she said softly. “You’re the one that he hired.”

“If you mean Elliot Norton, then yes, I’m the one.”

“Did he send you here?” There was no hostility in the question. Instead, I thought there was something almost plaintive in it.

“No, I saw you…talking to him in a restaurant two nights ago.”

Briefly, she smiled. “I’m not sure that ‘talking’ was what we were doing. Did he tell you who I was?”

“To be honest, I didn’t tell him that I’d seen you together, but I made a note of your license plate.”

She pursed her lips. “How very farsighted of you. Is that how you usually behave: making notes on women you’ve never met?”

If she was expecting me to act embarrassed, she was disappointed.

“Sometimes,” I said. “I’m trying to give it up, but the flesh is weak.”

“So why are you here?”

“I was wondering if you might have seen Elliot.”

Instantly, there was worry on her face.

“Not since that night. Is something wrong?”

“I don’t know. Can I come in, Ms. Foster?”

She blinked. “How do you know my name? No, let me guess, the same way you found out where I lived, right? Jesus, nothing’s private anymore.”

I waited, anticipating the closing of the door in my face. Instead, she stepped to one side and gestured for me to enter. I followed her into the hallway and the door closed softly behind me. There was no furniture in the hall, not even a hat stand. Before me, a staircase swept up to the second floor and the bedrooms. To my right was a dining room, a bare table surrounded by ten chairs at its center. To my left was a living room. I followed her into it. She took a seat at one end of a pale gold couch, and I eased myself into an armchair close by. Somewhere, a clock ticked, but otherwise the house was silent.

“Elliot’s missing?”

“I didn’t say that. I’ve left messages. So far, he hasn’t replied.”

She digested the information. It seemed to disagree with her.

“And you thought that I might know where he is?”

“You met him for dinner. I figured that you might be friends.”

“What kind of friends?”

“The kind that have dinner together. What do you want me to say, Ms. Foster?”

“I don’t know, and it’s Mrs. Foster.”

I started to apologize but she waved it away. “It’s not important,” she said. “I suppose you want to know about Elliot and me?”

I didn’t reply. I wasn’t going to pry into her affairs any more than was necessary, but if she felt the need to talk then I’d listen in the hope that I might learn something from her.

“Hell, you saw us fighting, you can probably guess the rest. Elliot was a friend of my husband. My late husband.” She was smoothing her skirt with her hand, the only indication she gave that she might be nervous.

“I’m sorry.”

She nodded. “We all are.”

“Can I ask what happened?”

She looked up from her skirt and stared directly at me. “He killed himself.” She coughed once, then seemed to have trouble continuing. The coughing grew in intensity. I stood and followed the living room through to where a bright modern kitchen had been added to the rear of the house. I found a glass, filled it with water from the tap and brought it back to her. She sipped at it, then placed it on the low table before her.

“Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know why that happened. I guess I still find it hard to talk about. My husband, James, killed himself one month ago. He asphyxiated himself in his car by attaching a pipe to the exhaust and feeding it through the window. It’s not uncommon, I’m told.”

She could have been talking about a minor ailment, like a cold or a rash. Her voice was studiedly matter-of-fact. She took another sip from the glass of water.

“Elliot was my husband’s lawyer, as well as his friend.”

I waited.

“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” she said. “But if Elliot’s gone…”

The way that she said the word “gone” made my stomach lurch, but still I didn’t interrupt.

“Elliot was my lover,” she said at last.

“Was?”

“It ended shortly before my husband’s death.”

“When did it begin?”

“Why do these things ever begin?” she answered, mishearing the question. She wanted to tell and she would tell it in her own way and at her own pace. “Boredom, discontent, a husband too tied up with his work to notice that his wife was going crazy. Take your pick.”

“Did your husband know?”

She paused before she answered, as if she were thinking about it for only the first time. “If he did, then he didn’t say anything. At least, not to me.”

“To Elliot?”

“He made comments. They were open to more than one interpretation.”

“How did Elliot choose to interpret them?”

“That James knew. It was Elliot who decided to end things between us. I didn’t care enough about him to disagree.”

“So why were you arguing with him at dinner?”

She resumed the rhythmic stroking of her skirt, picking at pieces of lint too small to be of real concern.

“Something is happening. Elliot knows, but he pretends that he doesn’t. They’re all pretending.”

The stillness in the house suddenly seemed terribly oppressive. There should have been children in this house, I thought. It was too big for two people, and far too large for one. It was the kind of house bought by wealthy people in the hope of populating it with a family, but I could see no trace of any family here. Instead there was only this woman in her widow’s black picking methodically at the tiny flaws in her skirt, as if by doing so she could make the greater wrongs right again.

“What do you mean by ‘them all’?”

“Elliot. Landron Mobley. Grady Truett. Phil Poveda. My husband. And Earl Larousse. Earl Jr., that is.”

“Larousse?” I couldn’t keep the surprise from my voice.

Once again, there was the trace of a smile on Adele Foster’s face. “They all grew up together, all six of them. Now something has started to happen. My husband’s death was the beginning. Grady Truett’s was the continuation.”

“What happened to Grady Truett?”

“Somebody broke into his home about a week after James died. He was tied to a chair in his den, then his throat was cut.”

“And you think the two deaths are connected?”

“Here’s what I think: Marianne Larousse was killed ten weeks ago. James died six weeks later. Grady Truett was killed one week after that. Now Landron Mobley has been found dead, and Elliot is missing.”

“Were any of them close to Marianne Larousse?”

“No, not if you mean intimate with her, but like I said they grew up with her brother and would have known her socially. Well, maybe not Landron Mobley but certainly the others.”

“And what do you believe is happening, Mrs. Foster?”

She took a deep breath, her nostrils flaring, her head rising, then released it slowly. In the gesture there was a trace of a spirit that had been subdued by the black clothes and it was possible to see what had attracted Elliot to her.

“My husband killed himself because he was afraid, Mr. Parker. Something he had done had come back to haunt him. He told Elliot, but Elliot wouldn’t believe him. He wouldn’t tell me what it was. Instead, he pretended that everything was normal, right up until the day he went into the garage with a length of yellow hose and killed himself. Elliot is also trying to pretend that things are normal, but I think he knows better.”

“What do you think your husband was afraid of?”

“Not what. I think he was afraid of someone.”

“Do you have any idea who that person might have been?”

Adele Foster rose and, with a movement of her hand, indicated that I should follow her. We ascended the staircase, past what, in the house’s former days, would have been used as a receiving room for visitors but was now a large and very luxurious bedroom. We paused in front of a closed door, in its keyhole a key, which she now turned to unlock the door. Then, keeping her back to the room, she pushed the door open and revealed its contents. The room had once been a small bedroom or dressing room but James Foster had transformed it into an office. There was a computer desk and chair, a drafting board, and a set of shelves against one wall lined with books and files. A window looked out onto the front yard, the top of the flowering dogwood below the window visible above the bottom of the frame, the last of its white blooms now fading and dying. A blue jay stood on its topmost branch, but our movement behind the glass must have disturbed him because he disappeared suddenly with a flash of his blue rounded tail.

Yet, in truth, the bird was only a momentary distraction, because it was the walls that drew the eye. I couldn’t tell what color they had been painted because no paint showed through the blizzard of paper that seemed to have adhered to them, as if the room was in a constant state of motion and they had been propelled there and held in place by centrifugal force. The sheets were of varying sizes, some little more than Post-it notes, others larger than the surface of Foster’s drafting board. Some were yellow, others dark, some plain, a few lined. The detail varied from drawing to drawing, from hurried sketches executed with a flurry of pencil strokes to ornate, intricate depictions of their subject. James Foster had been quite an artist, but he seemed to have only one main theme.

Almost every drawing depicted a woman, her face concealed, her body swathed in a cloak of white from the top of her head to the soles of her feet. The cloak spread out behind her like water pooling from an ice sculpture. It was not a false impression, for Foster had drawn her as if the material that covered her was wet. It clung to the muscles in her legs and buttocks, to the sweep of her breasts and the thin blades of her fingers, the bones of the knuckles clearly visible where she gripped the cloak tightly from beneath.

But there was something wrong with her skin, something flawed and ugly. Her veins appeared to be above rather than beneath the epidermis, creating a tracery of raised pathways across her body like the levees over a flooded rice field. The result was that the woman under the veil seemed almost to be plated, her skin armored like that of an alligator. Unconsciously, instead of drawing closer I took a single step back from the wall and felt Adele Foster’s hand come to rest gently on my arm.

“Her,” she said. “He was afraid of her.”

We sat over coffee, some of the drawings spread on the coffee table before us.

“Did you show these to the police?”

She shook her head. “Elliot told me not to.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“No. He just said that it would be best not to show them the drawings.”

I rearranged the papers, setting the depictions of the woman aside and revealing a set of five landscapes. Each depicted the same scene: a huge pit in the ground, surrounded by skeletal trees. In one of the drawings a pillar of fire emerged from the pit, but it was still possible to pick out, even there, the shape of the hooded woman now clothed in flame.

“Is this a real place?”

She took the picture from me and studied it, then handed it back to me with a shrug.

“I don’t know. You’d have to ask Elliot. He might know.”

“I can’t do that until I find him.”

“I think something has happened to him, maybe the same thing that happened to Landron Mobley.”

This time, I heard the disgust in her voice when she said Mobley’s name.

“You didn’t like him?”

She scowled. “He was a pig. I don’t know why they let him stay with them. No—” she corrected herself—“I do know why. He could get things for them: drugs, booze when they were younger, maybe even women. He knew the places to go. He wasn’t like Elliot and the others. He didn’t have money, or looks, or a college education, but he was prepared to go places that they were afraid to go, at least at first.”

And Elliot Norton had still seen fit, after all those years, to represent Mobley in the impending case against him, despite the fact that it could bring no credit to Elliot. This was the same Elliot Norton who had grown up with Earl Larousse Jr. and was now representing the young man accused of killing his sister. None of this made me feel good.

“You said that they did something, when they were younger, something that had come back to haunt them. Do you have any idea what that might be?”

“No. James would never talk about it. We weren’t close before his death. His behavior had altered. He wasn’t the man I married. He began to hang out with Mobley again. They went hunting together up at Congaree. Then James started going to strip clubs. I think he might have been seeing prostitutes.”