Four Classic Alex Delaware Thrillers 4-Book Bundle

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “No thanks,” I said. “I had a big lunch.”

  “Wendy’s a wonderful cook, isn’t she?”

  “Wonderful early warning system too.”

  “As I said, Dr. Delaware, this is a sleepy little hamlet. Everyone knows everything about everybody.”

  “Does that include knowledge of Shirlee and Jasper Ransom?”

  “Especially them. They need special kindness.”

  “Especially now,” I said.

  Her face collapsed, as if suddenly filleted. “Oh, gosh,” she said, and opened a desk drawer. Taking out an embroidered handkerchief, she dabbed at her eyes. When she turned them on me again, grief had made them even larger.

  “They don’t read the papers,” she said, “can barely read a primer. How am I going to tell them?”

  I had no answer for that. I was weary of searching for answers. “Do they have other family?”

  She shook her head. “She was all they had. And me. I’ve become their mother. I know I’m going to have to deal with it.”

  She pressed the handkerchief to her face like a poultice.

  “Please excuse me,” she said. “I’m as shaky as the day I read about it—that was a horror. I just can’t believe it. She was so beautiful, so alive.”

  “Yes, she was.”

  “For all intents and purposes I was the one who raised her. And now she’s gone, blotted out. As if she never existed in the first place. Such a damned, ugly waste. Thinking about it makes me angry at her. Which is unfair. It was her life. She never asked for what I gave her, never … Oh, I don’t know!”

  She averted her face. Her makeup had started to run. She reminded me of a parade float the morning after.

  I said, “It was her life. But she left a lot of people grieving.”

  “This is more than grief,” she said. “I’ve just been through that. This is worse. I thought I knew her like a daughter, but all these years she must have been carrying around so much pain. I had no idea—she never expressed it.”

  “No one knew,” I said. “She never really showed herself.”

  She threw up her hands and let them drop like dead weights. “What could have been so terrible that she lost all hope?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m up here, Mrs. Leidecker.”

  “Helen.”

  “Alex.”

  “Alex,” she said. “Alex Delaware. How strange to meet you after all these years. In a way I feel I know you. She told me all about you—how much she loved you. She considered you the one true love of her life, even though she knew it could never work out because of your sister. Despite that, she admired you so deeply for the way you devoted yourself to Joan.”

  She must have read the shock on my face as pain and gave me a look rich with sympathy.

  “Joan,” I said.

  “The poor thing. How’s she doing?”

  “About the same.”

  She nodded sadly. “Sharon knew her condition would never really improve. But even though your commitment to Joan meant you could never commit fully to anyone else, she admired you for it. If anything, I’d say it intensified her love for you. She talked about you as if you were a saint. She felt that kind of family loyalty was so rare nowadays.”

  “I’m hardly a saint,” I said.

  “But you are a good man. And that old cliché remains valid as ever: They’re hard to find.” A faraway look came onto her face. “Mr. Leidecker was one. Taciturn, a stubborn Dutchman, but a heart of gold. Gabe has some of that goodness—he’s a kind boy. I only hope losing his dad so young doesn’t harden him.”

  She stood up, walked over to one of the blackboards, and made a few cursory swipes with a rag. The effort seemed to exhaust her. She returned to her seat, straightened papers, and said, “It’s been a year for losses. Poor Shirlee and Jasper. I so dread telling them. It’s my own doing. I changed their lives; now the change has wrought tragedy.”

  “There’s no reason to blame you—”

  “Please,” she said gently. “I know it’s not rational, but I can’t help the way I feel. If I hadn’t gotten involved in their lives, things would have been different.”

  “But not necessarily better.”

  “Who knows,” she said. Her eyes had filled with tears. “Who knows.”

  She looked at the clock on the wall. “I’ve been cooped up in here all afternoon grading papers. I could really use a stretch.”

  “Me too.”

  As we descended the schoolhouse steps I pointed to the wooden sign.

  “The Blalock Ranch. Weren’t they into shipping, or something?”

  “Steel and railroads. It was never really a ranch. Back in the twenties, they were competing with Southern Pacific for the rail lines connecting California with the rest of the country. They surveyed San Bernardino and Riverside for an inland route and bought up a good chunk of both counties—entire villages at a time. They paid top dollar to get Willow Glen land away from the apple farmers who’d homesteaded it since the Civil War. The result was a huge spread that they called a ranch. But they never grew or raised anything on it, just fenced it in and posted guards. And the railroad was never built—the Depression. After World War Two, they started selling some of the smaller parcels back to private people. But several of the big tracts were snapped up by another corporation.”

  “Which one?”

  She patted her hair. “Some aviation concern—the one run by that mad billionaire, Belding.” She smiled. “And that, Dr. Delaware, is your California history lesson for the day.”

  We entered the playground, strolled past swings and slides, headed toward the forest that carpeted the foot of the mountains.

  “Does Magna still own land here?” I asked.

  “Plenty of it. But they won’t sell. People have tried. For all intents and purposes that keeps Willow Glen a backwater speck. Most of the old families have given up, sold out to rich doctors and lawyers who use the orchards for tax write-offs and run them down—capped irrigation lines, no pruning or fertilizing. Most of them don’t even bother to come up and harvest. In some places the earth’s turned hard and dry as cement. The few growers who’ve stayed have become suspicious and mistrustful—they’re convinced it’s all part of a conspiracy to run things down so the city folk can buy what’s left on the cheap and put up condominiums or something.”

  “That’s what Wendy thought.”

  “Her folks are newcomers, really pretty naïve. But you have to admire them for trying.”

  “Who owns the land Jasper and Shirlee live on?”

  “That’s Magna land.”

  “Is that common knowledge?”

  “Mr. Leidecker told me, and he was hardly a gossip.”

  “How’d they end up there?”

  “No one knows. According to Mr. Leidecker—I wasn’t living here then—they showed up at the general store to buy groceries back in 1956—back when there was a general store. When people tried to talk to them, Jasper waved his hands and grunted and she giggled. It was obvious they were retarded—children who’ll never grow up. The prevailing theory is that they escaped from some institution, maybe wandered away from a bus and ended up here by accident. People help them when it’s needed, but in general no one pays them much mind. They’re harmless.”

  “Someone pays them mind,” I said. “Five hundred dollars a month.”

  She gave a hand-in-the-cookie-jar look. “I beg your pardon.”

  “I saw their bankbook. Sitting on top of the dresser.”

  “On the dresser? What am I going to do with those two? I’ve told them so many times to keep that book hidden, tried to get them to let me keep it at my place. But they think it’s some kind of symbol of freedom, won’t part with it. They can get really stubborn when they want to. Jasper, especially. Did you see those wax-paper windows on their shacks? After all these years, he still refuses to have glass installed. Poor Shirlee freezes in the winter. Gabe and I have to bring down piles of blankets, and by the end of the se
ason they’re mildewed beyond repair. The cold doesn’t seem to bother Jasper. Poor thing needs to be told to come in from the rain.”

  She shook her head. “On top of the dresser. Not that anyone from around here would hurt them, but that’s a lot of money to advertise. Especially for two defenseless innocents.”

  “Who sends it?” I asked.

  “I’ve never been able to find out. It arrives, like clock-work, on the first of every month, posted from the central depot in Los Angeles. Plain white envelope, a typed address, no return. Shirlee has no clear concept of time, so she can’t say how long she’s been receiving it, only that it’s been a long time. There was a man—Ernest Halverson—used to deliver the mail until he retired in ’64. He thought he remembered envelopes arriving as early as 1956 or ’7, but he’d had a couple of strokes by the time I talked to him and his memory wasn’t perfect. All the other old-timers are long gone.”

  “Was it always five hundred?”

  “No. Used to be three, then four. It went up to five after Sharon left for college.”

  “Thoughtful benefactor,” I said. “But how could they be expected to handle that kind of money?”

  “They couldn’t. They were living like animals until we began taking care of them. Wandering into town every couple of weeks with two or three twenty-dollar bills, trying to buy groceries—they had no idea how to make change or how much things were worth. People are honest here; they never took advantage.”

  “Wasn’t there curiosity about where they were getting the money?”

  “I’m sure there was, but Willow Glen folk don’t pry. And no one realized how much money they were hoarding. Not until Sharon discovered it—thousands of dollars wadded up under the mattress, or just loose in a drawer. Jasper had used several of the bills for art projects—drawing mustaches on the faces, folding them into paper airplanes.”

  “How old was Sharon when she made the discovery?”

  “Almost seven. It was 1960. I remember the year because we had unusually hard winter rains. Those shacks were originally built for storage, with only a thin cement pad underneath, and I knew they’d be hit hard, so we went over—Mr. Leidecker and myself. Sure enough, it was dreadful. Their plot was half-flooded, boggy, the dirt running off like melted chocolate. Water had perforated the wax paper and was pouring in. Shirlee and Jasper were standing knee-deep in mud, scared and totally helpless. I didn’t see Sharon, went looking for her, and found her in her shack, standing on top of her bed wrapped in a blanket, shivering and shouting something about green soup. I had no idea what she was talking about. I took her in my arms to warm her, but she kept shouting about soup.

  “When we got outside, Mr. Leidecker was pointing, all wide-eyed, at bits of green paper stuck in the mud and washing away in the flood. Money, lots of it. At first I thought it was play money—I’d given Sharon some board games—but it wasn’t. It was real. Between Mr. Leidecker and myself, we managed to salvage most of it—we hung the wet bills over our hearth to dry them, put them in a cigar box and kept them safe. First thing after the rains stopped, I drove Shirlee and Jasper down to Yucaipa and set up the bank account. I sign for everything, take a little out for expenses, make sure they save the rest. I’ve managed to teach them a little elementary math, how to budget, how to make change. Once they finally learn something, they can usually retain it. But they’ll never really understand what they’ve got—quite a tidy little nest egg. Along with Medi-Cal and Social Security, the two of them should be comfortable for the rest of their days.”

  “How old are they?”

  “I have no idea, because they don’t. They have no papers, didn’t even know their birthdays. The government had never heard of them, either. When we applied for Social Security and Medi-Cal, we estimated their ages, gave them birthdates.”

  Miss New Year’s and Mr. Christmas.

  “You applied when Sharon left for college.”

  “Yes. I wanted to cover all bases.”

  “How did you come up with Sharon’s birthdate?”

  “She and I decided on one, when she was ten.” She smiled. “July Fourth. Her declaration of independence. I put 1953. I got a really good fix on her age from the doctor I took her to—bone-age X-rays, teeth, height and weight. She was somewhere between four and five.”

  She and I had celebrated a different birthday. May 15. May 15, 1975. A rare splurge for dinner and dancing and lovemaking. Another fiction. I wondered what that date symbolized.

  “Any possibility,” I asked, “that she was their biological child?”

  “Unlikely. The doctor examined all of them and said Shirlee was almost certainly sterile. So where did she come from, right? For a while I lived with the nightmare that she was someone’s kidnapped baby. I went down to San Bernardino and checked six years’ worth of papers from all around the country, found a couple of cases that sounded possible, but when I followed them up, I learned that both of those children had been murdered. So her origins remain clouded. When you ask Shirlee about it, she just giggles and says Sharon was given to them.”

  “She told me it was a secret.”

  “That’s just a game with her—playing secret. They’re really just like children.”

  “What’s the prevailing theory about how they got her?”

  “There really isn’t one. Mind you, the doctor wasn’t absolutely certain Shirlee couldn’t conceive—‘highly unlikely’ was the way he put it. So I suppose anything’s possible. Though the notion of two poor souls like that producing something so exquisite is …” She trailed off. “No, Alex, I have no idea.”

  “Sharon must have been curious about her roots.”

  “You’d expect her to be, wouldn’t you? But she never really went through any identity search. Not even during adolescence. She knew she was different from Shirlee and Jasper but she loved them, accepted things the way they were. The only conflict I ever saw was the summer before she left for college. That was really hard for her—she was excited and frightened and tremendously guilty about abandoning them. She knew she was taking a giant step, and things would never be the same.”

  She stopped, bent, picked up an oak leaf and twirled it between her fingers. The sky between the trees was darkening. Unintimidated by city lights, the stars were burning pinholes through the blackness.

  “When’s the last time Sharon visited here?” I asked.

  “A long time ago,” she said, making it sound like a confession. “Once she broke away, she found it very painful to return. That may sound callous, but her situation was unique.”

  We walked on. The schoolroom windows shone through the dark: butter-colored rectangles. We hadn’t gone far, had been walking in circles.

  “Her last visit,” she said, “was in 1974. She’d just graduated from college, had been accepted to graduate school, and was moving down to L.A. I threw a little party for her at my house. Mr. Leidecker and the boys wore starched white shirts and matching ties, and I bought new outfits for Shirlee and Jasper. Sharon arrived looking lovely, a real picture. She brought gifts for all of us, a handmade wooden checkers set for Shirlee and a tin of fancy colored pencils from England for Jasper. She also gave them a graduation picture—full cap and gown with an honors tassel.”

  “I didn’t see that back at the shack.”

  “No, somehow they managed to lose it. Just like the money. They never knew what they had, still don’t. You can understand why Sharon would have no place here. It’s a miracle she survived before I found her.”

  “Shirlee did show me a letter. How often did she write?”

  “Not regularly—what was the point? They’re only marginally literate. But she called me regularly, to see how they were doing. She really cared about them.”

  She threw away the leaf. “It was so hard for her—please understand that. She really struggled with breaking away; the guilt was nearly overwhelming. I told her she was doing the right thing. What was the alternative? Being stuck forever as a caretaker?” She stopped. �
��Oh. I’m so sorry. That was thoughtless.”

  For a moment I was puzzled by her embarrassment.

  “Joan,” I said.

  “I think your devotion is wonderful.”

  I shrugged. Dr. Noble. “I’m comfortable with my choice.”

  “Yes. Sharon said you were. And that’s my point. She had to make her own choices. She couldn’t be bound by some strange twist of fate.”

  “When did she tell you about Joan?”

  “About six months after the graduation party—her first year of grad school. She called to ask about Shirlee and Jasper, but she sounded troubled. I could tell something else was on her mind. I asked if she wanted to get together and to my surprise she said yes. We met for lunch in Redlands. She looked like a real professional woman, perfectly groomed, mature. But sad—a blue angel. I asked her why. She said she’d met the man of her dreams, spent a lot of time describing your virtues. I said, sounds like he’s perfect—why the long face? Then she told me about Joan, how it would never work out because of her.”

  “Did she tell you what caused Joan’s problems?”

  “The drowning? Oh, yes. How terrible, and you a little boy, watching.”

  She touched my arm in a gesture of comfort. “She understood, Alex. She wasn’t bitter or angry.”

  “Is that all that was troubling her?”

  “That’s all she talked about.”

  “When did you see her next?”

  She bit her lip. “Never. That was the last time. She did continue to call. But less and less frequently. Half a year later, the calls stopped. But we got cards on Christmas, Fruit-of-the-Month packages.” She managed a weak smile. “Everything but the apples.”

  Several yards later she said, “I understood. Though I’d helped her shed her old life, I was still part of it. She needed to make a complete break. Years later, when she got her Ph.D., she sent me an invitation to her commencement. She’d made it to the top, finally felt secure enough to reconnect.”

  “Did you go?”

  “No. It arrived late—the day after the ceremony. Mail mix-up, happens all the time on a rural route.”