by Sue Grafton
“I take it Raymond is still asleep,” I said.
She nodded, tears welling up as the extent of the vandalism became more and more apparent. I could feel myself relent. Even if Lyle had done it, it was mean-spirited, a violation of something precious to Grace. She had already suffered enough without this. I set the flashlight aside and began to pile papers back into the boxes: costume jewelry, lingerie, old issues of Seventeen and Vogue, patterns for clothing that Libby had probably never made. “Do you mind if I take these boxes with me and go through them tonight?” I asked. “I can have them back to you by morning.”
“All right. I suppose. I can’t see what harm it would do now anyway,” she murmured, not looking at me.
It seemed hopeless to me. In this jumble, who knew what might be missing? I’d have to go through the boxes and see if I could spot anything, but the chances weren’t good. Lyle couldn’t have been down there long—if it had been him. He knew I was coming back for the stuff and when he’d been there earlier, Grace probably told him exactly what time I expected to arrive. He’d had to wait until dark and he probably thought we’d spend more time upstairs before coming down. Still, he was cutting it close—unless he simply didn’t care. And why didn’t he break in during the three days I was gone? I thought back to his insolence and I suspected that he might take a certain satisfaction in thwarting me, even if he was caught at it.
Grace helped me cart the boxes to the car, six of them. I should have taken the stuff the first time I was there, I thought, but I couldn’t picture driving to Vegas with the entire backseat filled with cardboard boxes. Still, the boxes would have been intact. It was my own damn fault, I thought sourly.
I told Grace I’d be back first thing in the morning and then I pulled out. It was going to be a long night.
I bought two containers of black coffee across the street, locked the door to my motel room, and closed the drapes. I emptied the first carton onto the bed and then I started making stacks. School papers in one pile. Personal letters. Magazines. Stuffed animals. Clothing. Cosmetics. Bills and receipts. Grace had apparently saved every article Elizabeth had touched since kindergarten. Report cards. School projects. Really, six cartons seemed modest when I realized how much there was. Blue books from college. Copies of applications for work. Tax returns. The accumulation of an entire life and it was really only so much trash. Who would ever need to refer to any of this again? The original energy and spirit had all seeped away. I did feel for her. I did get some sense of that young girl, whose gropings and triumphs and little failures were piled together now in a drab motel room. I didn’t even know what I was looking for. I flipped through a diary from the fifth grade—the handwriting round and dutiful, the entries dull. I tried to imagine myself dead, someone sorting carelessly through my belongings. What was there really of my life? Canceled checks. Reports all typewritten and filed. Everything of value reduced to terse prose. I didn’t keep much myself, didn’t hoard or save. Two divorce decrees. That was about the sum of it for me. I collected more information about other people’s lives than I did about my own, as though, perhaps, in poring over the facts about other people, I could discover something about myself. My own mystery, unplumbed, undetected, was sorted into files that were neatly labeled but really didn’t say much. I picked through the last of Elizabeth’s boxes but there was nothing of interest. It was 4:00 in the morning when I finished. Nothing. If there had been anything there, it was gone now and I was irritated with myself again, berating myself for my own poor judgment. This was the second time I’d arrived too late—the second time some vital piece of information had slipped away from me.
I began to repack boxes, automatically rechecking as I went, sorting. Clothes in one box, stuffed animals tucked into the spaces along the sides. School papers, diaries, blue books in the next box. Back it all went, neatly catalogued this time, compulsively arranged, as though I owed Elizabeth Glass some kind of order after I’d pried into the hidden crevices of her abandoned life. I riffed through magazines, held textbooks by the spine, letting the pages fly loose. The stacks on the bed diminished. There weren’t that many personal letters and I felt guilty reading them, but I did. Some from an aunt in Arizona. Some from a girl named Judy whom Libby must have known in high school. No one seemed to refer to anything intimate in her life and I had to conclude that she confided little or else that she had no tales to tell. The disappointment was acute. I was down to the last pile of books, mostly paperbacks. Such taste. Leon Uris and Irving Stone, Victoria Holt, Georgette Heyer, a few more exotic samples that I guessed had been from some literature survey course in college. The letter slipped out of the pages of a dogeared copy of Pride and Prejudice. I nearly tossed it in the box with the rest of the stuff. The handwriting was a tightly stroked cursive on two sides in dark blue ink. No date. No envelope. No postmark. I picked it up by one corner and read it, feeling a cold pinching sensation begin at the base of my spine.
Darling Elizabeth . . . I’m writing this so you’ll have something when you get back. I know these separations are hard for you and I wish there were some way I could ease your pain. You are so much more honest than I am, so much more open about what you feel than I allow myself to be, but I do love you and I don’t want you to have any doubts about that. You’re right when you say that I’m conservative. I’m guilty as charged, your Honor, but I’m not immune to suffering and as often as I’ve been accused of being selfish, I’m not as reckless of others as you might think. I would like to take our time about this and be sure that it’s something we both want. What we have now is very dear to me and I’m not saying—please believe me— that I wouldn’t turn my life around for you if it comes to that. On the other hand, I think we should both be sure that we can survive the day-to-day absurdities of being together. Right now, the intensity dazzles and it seems simple enough for us both to chuck it all and make some kind of life, but we haven’t known each other that long or that well. I can’t afford to risk wife, kids, and career in the heat of the moment though you know it tempts me. Please let’s move slowly on this. I love you more than I can say and I don’t want to lose you—which is selfish enough, I suppose, in itself. You’re right to push, but please don’t lose sight of what’s at stake, for you as well as me. Tolerate my caution if you can. I love you. Laurence
I didn’t know what to make of it. I realized, in a flash, that it wasn’t just that I hadn’t believed in an affair between Laurence and Elizabeth. I hadn’t wanted to believe. I wasn’t sure I believed it yet but why the resistance? It was so neat. So convenient. It fit in so nicely with what I knew of the facts and still I stared at the letter, holding it gingerly by one corner as I read it again. I leaned back against the bed. What was the matter with me? I was exhausted and I knew I’d been through too much in the last few days but something nagged at me and I wasn’t sure it had so much to do with the letter as it did with myself, with something in my nature—some little niggling piece of self-illumination that I was fighting hard not to recognize. Either the letter was real or it was not, and there were ways to verify that. I pulled myself together wearily. I found a large envelope and slipped the letter inside, being careful not to smudge fingerprints, already thinking ahead to Con Dolan, who would love it since it confirmed all his nastiest suspicions about what had been going on back then. Was this what Sharon Napier had figured out? Was this what she could have corroborated if she’d lived long enough?
I lay on the bed fully dressed, body tense, brain wired. Who could she have hoped to blackmail with this information if she’d known? It had to be what she was up to. It had to be why she’d been killed. Someone had followed me to Las Vegas, knowing that I would see her, knowing that she might confirm what I hadn’t wanted to believe. I couldn’t prove it, of course, but I wondered if I was getting close enough to the truth to be in danger myself. I wanted to go home. I wanted to retreat to the safety of my small room. I wasn’t thinking clearly yet, but I was getting close. For eight years, nothing happen
ed and now it was all beginning again. If Nikki was innocent, then someone had been sitting pretty all this time, someone in danger of exposure now.
I saw, for an instant, the look that had flashed in Nikki’s eyes, unreasoning malevolence, a harsh irrational rage. She had set this all in motion. I had to consider the possibility that Sharon Napier was blackmailing her, that Sharon knew something that could link Nikki to Libby’s death. If Sharon had dropped out of sight, it was possible that Nikki had hired me to flush her out and that Nikki had then eliminated any threat with one quick shot. She might also have followed me back to Sherman Oaks for a frantic search through Libby’s belongings for anything that might have linked Libby to Laurence Fife. There were pieces missing yet but they would fall into place and then maybe the whole of it would make sense. Assuming I lived long enough myself to figure it out . . .
18
I dragged myself out of bed at 6:00 A.M. I hadn’t slept at all. My mouth felt stale and I brushed my teeth. I showered and dressed. I longed to run but I felt too vulnerable to jog down the middle of San Vicente at that hour. I packed, closing up my typewriter, shoving the pages of my report into my briefcase. I loaded the boxes into my car again, along with my suitcase. The lights in the office were on and I could see Arlette taking jelly doughnuts out of a bakery box, putting them on a plastic plate with a clear dome lid. Water was already heating for that awful, flat instant coffee. She was licking powdered sugar from her fingers when I went in.
“God, you’re up awful early,” she said. “You want breakfast?”
I shook my head. Even with my penchant for junk food, I wouldn’t eat a jelly doughnut. “No, but thanks,” I said. “I’m checking out.”
“Right now?”
I nodded, almost too tired to talk. She finally seemed to sense that this was the wrong time to chat. She got my bill ready and I signed it, not even bothering to add up the charges. She usually made a mistake but I didn’t care.
I got in my car and headed for Sherman Oaks. There was a light on in Grace’s kitchen, which I approached from around the side of the building. I tapped on the window and after a moment, she came into the service porch and opened the side door. She looked small and precise this morning in an A-line corduroy skirt and a coffee-colored cotton turtleneck. She kept her voice low.
“Raymond’s not awake yet but there’s coffee if you like,” she said.
“Thanks, but I’ve got a breakfast meeting at eight,” I said, lying without much thought. Whatever I said would be passed on to Lyle and my whereabouts were none of his business—or hers. “I just wanted to drop the boxes off.”
“Did you find anything?” she asked. Her gaze met mine briefly and then she blinked, glancing first at the floor and then off to my left.
“Too late,” I said, trying to ignore the flush of relief that tinted her cheeks.
“That’s unfortunate,” she murmured, placing a hand against her throat. “I’m . . . uh . . . sure it wasn’t Lyle . . .”
“It doesn’t matter much anyway,” I said. I felt sorry for her in spite of myself. “I packed everything back as neatly as I could. I’ll just stack the boxes in the basement near the bin. You’ll probably want to have that repaired when you get the basement door fixed.”
She nodded. She moved to close the door and I stepped back, watching her pad back into the kitchen in her soft-soled slippers. I felt as if I’d personally violated her life somehow, that everything was ending on a bad note. She’d been as helpful as she knew how and she’d gotten little in return. I had to shrug. There was nothing I could do at this point. I unloaded the car, making several trips, stacking boxes just inside the damaged bin. Unconsciously, I listened for Lyle. The light in the basement was cold and gray by day, but aside from the splintered lathework and the shattered window, there was no other evidence of the intruder. I went out the back way on the last trip up from the basement, checking idly for smashed cigarette butts, bloody fingerprints, a small printed business card perhaps, dropped by whoever broke in. I came up the concrete stairs outside, looking off to the right at the path the intruder had taken—across the patchy grass in the backyard, over a sagging wire fence, and through a tangle of bushes. I could see through to the next street where the car must have been parked. It was early morning yet and the sunlight was flat and still. I could hear heavy traffic on the Ventura Freeway, which was visible in glimpses through the clumps of trees off to the right. The ground wasn’t even soft enough to absorb footprints. I moved around the building to the driveway on my left, noting with interest that the power mower had now been pulled off to one side. My palms were still ripped up in places, two-inch tracks where I’d skidded across the gravel on my hands. I hadn’t even thought to use Bactine and I hoped I wouldn’t be subject to raging gangrene, perilous infections, or blood poisoning—dangers my aunt had warned me about every time I skinned my knee.
I got back in my car and headed for Santa Teresa, stopping in Thousand Oaks for breakfast. I was home by 10:00 in the morning. I wrapped myself up in a quilt on the couch and slept for most of the day.
At 4:00, I drove out to Nikki’s beach house. I had called to say I was back in town and she invited me out for a drink. I wasn’t sure yet how much I would tell her or how much, if anything, I would hold back, but after my recent gnawing suspicions about her, I wanted to test my perceptions. There are moments in every investigation when my speculations about what’s possible cloud and confuse any lingering sense I have of what’s actually true. I wanted to check out my intuitions.
The house was situated on a bluff overlooking the ocean. The lot was small, irregular in shape, surrounded by eucalyptus trees. The house was tucked into the landscaping—laurel and yew, with pink and red geraniums planted along the path—its exterior made of cedar shingles, still a raw-looking wood brown, the roofline undulating like an ocean swell. There was a large oval window in the front, flanked by two bow windows, all undraped. The lawn was a pale green, tender blades of grass looking almost edible, curls of eucalyptus bark intermingled like wood shavings. White and yellow daisies grew in careless patches. The whole effect was of subtle neglect, a refined wilderness untended but subdued, curiously appealing with the thick scent of ocean overlaid and the dull thunder of waves crashing down below. The air was moist and smelled of salt, wind buffeting the ragged grass. Where the house in Montebello was boxy, substantial, conventional, plain, this was a whimsical cottage, all wide angles, windows, and unpainted wood. The front door had a tall oval leaded-glass window in it, filled with tulip shapes, and the doorbell sounded like wind chimes.
Nikki appeared at once. She was wearing a celerygreen caftan, its bodice embroidered with mirrors the size of dimes, the sleeves wide. Her hair was pulled up and away from her face, tied with a pale-green velvet ribbon. She seemed relaxed, her wide forehead unlined, the gray eyes looking light and clear, her mouth faintly tinted with pink, curving upward as though from some secret merriment. The languidness in her manner was gone and she was animated, energetic. I had brought the photograph album Diane had given me and I handed it to her as she closed the door behind me.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Diane put it together for Colin,” I said.
“Come see him,” she said. “We’re making bread.”
I followed her through the house. There were no square rooms at all. The spaces flowed into one another, connected by gleaming pale wood floors and bright shag rugs. There were windows everywhere, plants, skylights. A free-form fireplace in the living room looked as if it had been constructed from buff-colored boulders, piled up randomly like the entrance to a cave. On the far wall, a crude ladder led up to a loft that overlooked the ocean. Nikki smiled back at me happily, placing the album on the glass coffee table as she passed.
The kitchen was a semicircle, wood and white Formica and luscious healthy houseplants, windows on three sides looking onto a deck with the ocean stretching out beyond, wide and gray in the late afternoon. Colin was kneading b
read, his back to me, his concentration complete. His hair was the same pale no-color shade as Nikki’s, silky like hers where it curled down on his neck. His arms looked wiry and strong, his hands capable, fingers long. He gathered the edges of the dough, pressing inward, turning it over again. He looked like he was just on the verge of adolescence, beginning to shoot up in height but not awkward yet. Nikki touched him and he turned quickly, his gaze sliding over to me at once. I was startled. His eyes were large, tilted slightly, an army-fatigue green, his lashes thick and dark. His face was narrow, chin pointed, ears coming to a delicate point, a pixie effect with the fine hair forming a point on his forehead. The two of them looked like an illustration from a faerie book—fragile and beautiful and strange. His eyes were peaceful, empty, glowing with acute intelligence. I have seen the same look in cats, their eyes wise, aloof, grave.
When I spoke to Nikki, he watched our lips, his own lips parting breathlessly, so that the effect was oddly sexual.
“I think I just fell in love,” I said and laughed. Nikki smiled, signing to Colin, her fingers graceful, succinct. Colin flashed a smile at me, much older than his years. I felt myself flush.
“I hope you didn’t tell him that,” I said. “We’d probably have to run off together.”
“I told him you were my first friend after prison. I told him you needed a drink,” she said, still signing, eyes resting on Colin’s face. “Most of the time we don’t sign this much. I’m just brushing up.”
While Nikki opened a bottle of wine, I watched Colin work the bread dough. He offered to let me help and I shook my head, preferring to watch his agile hands, the dough developing a smooth skin almost magically as he worked. He made gruff, unintelligible sounds now and then without seeming aware of it.