by Linda Barnes
He blew out a deep breath. She was probably up at the winery by now, assuaging Howard’s myriad fears.
Automatically, he walked into the kitchen to check the refrigerator door for messages. The smudged porcelain surface stared back blankly and he realized that it had been seven years since he and Kate had used the refrigerator as their blackboard. Seven years … The discovery made him feel old.
He ran his index finger around the rim of a lipstick-stained coffee cup on the kitchen table. The inch of black liquid at the bottom of the mug was still warm.
He did a quick search of the downstairs rooms, climbed the steps to the second floor. Behind the closed bathroom door, the shower hummed.
He knocked and the wooden door opened, releasing a cloud of steam so fragrant, so redolent of Kate, that it hit him deep in the pit of his stomach.
She wore a long white terry-cloth robe, belted tightly at the waist, with a deep V neck. Spraggue kept his eyes carefully on her face, not knowing what to expect. Anything from anger to apology, he supposed. He was never certain with Kate.
“How are you?” he said.
“Okay,” she answered after a long pause. “I’m about to take the world’s longest shower. They made me take miserly little two-minute cold showers in jail, and the floors were cement. And the smell …”
Spraggue inhaled. “Is wonderful,” he finished.
“I’m working on it.”
“Can I stay?” Spraggue asked, raising one eyebrow.
“A change of heart? You weren’t interested on Friday.”
“I regret it. I missed you. Besides,” the eyebrow went up even higher, “jailbirds turn me on.”
She made a sarcastic noise and started to turn away.
“I’ll dry your back. I’m sure nobody dried your back in jail.”
“There are a lot of things nobody did for me in jail.”
“Kate—”
She pressed her hand over his mouth, leaned close, and whispered in his ear. “You can stay.”
They kissed in the doorway until she shivered and drew him into the warm scented room. He stripped in seconds and laughed when she made her traditional remark about his Eastern lack of a tan. Her robe slipped to the floor and he traced the bikini mark low on her stomach with his index finger.
“And you,” he said, “still wear the most indecent swimsuit on the beach.”
The yellow-tiled shower stall was too crowded for two; they’d come to that conclusion eight years ago. And ignored it. The crowding increased the pleasure.
They adjourned from the shower to the bed and made love with the easy familiarity of old lovers, tinged with the urgency of a new encounter.
When they had finished, they lay in silence for some time.
“You’ve loved someone since me,” Kate said finally.
“What is this, True Confessions?”
“Did you really miss me?”
He hesitated, then answered honestly. “Not until I saw you. I try not to think about you in Boston. Aunt Mary reads all your vineyard reports. She snatches them off the tray when Pierce brings in the mail, as if the simple sight of your handwriting might unhinge me.”
“Does it?”
“No,” he said, flinging back the sheet and frankly staring at her unself-conscious nakedness. “It’s your … beautiful … mind that unhinges me.”
“I’ll bet,” she said, laughing.
“You’d lose.”
“You know,” she said, her palm massaging a gentle circle on his stomach, “your body can remember something, long for something, even when your mind knows better than to get involved.”
“Your body has an excellent memory.”
She stalled before answering, twisting a strand of her long dark hair into a tight curl. “I think it made a mistake.”
“Why?”
She sighed. “There’s so much background for us, Spraggue, so much context. We’ve known each other too long.”
He smiled. “Too long to live together and too long to let each other go.”
She burrowed into his shoulder and, for the moment, felt as if she belonged there.
“We’ve had a thousand too many battles, Michael,” she said softly. “I don’t think we could make a new beginning. Not another one.”
His hand slid down her spine, went automatically to the small of her back, rubbed.
“Oh, Michael,” she said, “I get so tired of explaining myself to strangers, starting over from the beginning. Where was I born and who am I now and all the wayward twists and turns in between.”
“I understand.”
“Who else knows me the way you do? Who else remembers the girl I was at nineteen? Who else rubs my back in just the right spot?”
“You reinvent your past,” Spraggue said. “All the time, for every new friend, every new lover. It’s not really lying; it’s self-preservation, selective memory. Even the past changes with the years.”
“Sometimes it’s nice not to have to invent.”
“But we do. Don’t you think I have a version of our fights that’s totally different from yours? Your version would hardly sound familiar to me.”
“If it weren’t for the winery,” she said, “I wouldn’t have to see you again.”
“Would that make you happier? A clean break?”
“I don’t know.” She settled back on his shoulder, breathing evenly, and Spraggue decided that now was not the time to ask if she had killed Lenny Brent.
The phone rang. Kate gave it a reproachful look and leaned across the bed to answer.
“For you.” She handed the receiver to Spraggue. “Young and female. Have I been standing in for someone?”
“Lying in,” said Spraggue. “Hello?”
“Mr. Spraggue? This is Carol Lawton. I’m sorry to bother you, but I thought you might have tried to reach me.”
“I haven’t heard anything about the fingerprints yet—”
“Because,” she said hurriedly, “you wouldn’t have been able to get through. The most awful thing. The apartment …” Her voice trailed off into what might have been a cough or a sob.
“What, Carol? Tell me.”
“There was a fire. It must have started while I was out shopping for dinner. I wasn’t gone more than half an hour and the fire engines were there when I got back. Everything … everything was …”
“Where are you now?” Spraggue rested the receiver behind his ear and started reaching for his clothes.
“At the apartment. Not my—not our apartment. I’m calling from the superintendent’s, on the first floor. The damage—it was only on the upper stories.…”
“Wait there. I’ll be over as soon as I can. An hour, maybe less.”
He hung up, slamming the receiver down into the cradle. He pulled on one sock, fumbled with his shoelaces. “While I’m gone, Kate,” he said, “stay put. Don’t answer the door.”
“Are you going to tell me what this is all about, or are you just trying to scare me?”
“I’m trying to scare you.” He buckled his belt, ran a hand through his tousled hair.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t know what the hell is going on.”
19
Kate’s station wagon did a warning shimmy when it hit eighty-five. Then Spraggue would realize how far down he jammed the accelerator, how tightly his hands gripped the steering wheel. He’d take a deep breath, ease up on the pedal, shake out his left hand, then his right, unclench his jaw. Ten minutes later, the car would shake again.
He swallowed hard; even his saliva tasted bitter. He’d had his chance, and he’d blown it, taken nothing but a goddamn tooth glass and a cursory glance, when there must have been something to find, something vital. If it hadn’t been for Bradley’s call …
He rephrased it: If it hadn’t been for his own stupidity. Why leave so quickly, just to view another dead body? Even if finding that corpse meant all his theories were worthless?
He checked the rear-view mirror. No
followers tonight. But anyone could have trailed him that morning; he hadn’t even bothered to look. He’d behaved like some moronic movie actor who’d already read the script.
Carol Lawton sat on a flowered chintz sofa in the superintendent’s living room, trying to make a go of drinking a cup of tea. Her face was composed, but her hands betrayed her. When she picked up saucer and cup together, they jiggled and clinked against each other. When she tried the cup alone, finger crooked through the dainty handle, the hot liquid made dark stains on her khaki shirt. The superintendent, a bossy buxom woman, greeted Spraggue with such relief that he hurried Carol out the door. The woman probably resented missing a favorite TV show for an unwelcome dollop of real life.
They walked around the block again. Spraggue longed to return to their earlier circuit, yell “Cut! Take four, scene eight!” and play the hours since all over again.
The air was dead calm; the fire trucks gone. Wet patches of sidewalk glistened. The fourth-floor windows were shattered, and shreds of blackened curtains hung limply. They circled the block again.
Carol began to talk, hesitantly at first. Then, low and fast, she poured out the story, her voice carefully expressionless. Her short walk to the grocery store. Her decision to ignore Spraggue, to buy Mark Jason’s favorite foods. Her deliberation over packages. Controlling her tears in the check-out line. Walking home fast, building up a fantasy: the light will be on in the window. When I turn the corner, the light will be on and then I’ll know that the man was mistaken, that Mark is not dead. He’s home and alive. Every word came with a step, and the story turned to a ritual, like not stepping on cracks as a child. Over and over, to herself: The light will be on in the window, the light will be on.…
Instead, when she turned the final corner, the ghostly flames stopped her speechless, unable even to scream. Her two grocery bags smashed to the sidewalk. She stood rooted for a moment that seemed forever, and then her feet came unstuck and she ran screaming to the superintendent’s door.
“Everyone got out all right,” she said flatly. “No one was in there. Mark …”
“He didn’t come back,” Spraggue finished.
“No.”
“Have you seen the damage?”
“I looked in the door. There’s just nothing left. Nothing.…”
“You talked to the firemen?”
She shrugged. “They said it probably started in Mark’s study. He had an old lamp. I don’t think it was on. I don’t know. They’re going to send the arson squad around tomorrow. Look—” She stopped walking, touched his arm. “Do you think this has anything to do with … with what you told me?”
“I do,” Spraggue said gently. “I asked before, and you agreed to show me the apartment. I was interrupted. Can I see it now?”
“There’s nothing but ashes. And the firemen—”
“I know.”
“They sealed the door. The fire marshal said—”
“Is there another door? A back way? A fire escape?”
“One of those metal ladder-type things. I’ll show you, but I won’t come in with you.”
Spraggue nodded. “I’ll find you a hotel room. You can wait there. Damn. You haven’t had any dinner either, have you? That woman just gave you tea.”
“I couldn’t eat anything, really. Just go ahead with what you have to do. It’s nice out. I’ll sit here on the grass and wait.”
“I won’t be long.”
She gave him a weak grin. “I’ll holler if the police come.”
“Thanks.”
Halfway up, Spraggue thought it likely that the police would be there waiting long before he arrived. Four flights up a rickety metal fire escape, in the dark, shoeless to cut down on the racket. The project, eminently plausible on level ground, seemed stupider the higher he got. Breathing heavily on the fourth-floor landing, gazing in at the ruins of Jason’s apartment, it appeared practical again.
The afternoon’s barren tidiness seemed mocked by the shambles. Spraggue’s flashlight, the tiny one he always kept on his key ring, picked up sodden footprints in the formerly shaggy rug. The prints gave him confidence; if a fireman had stood there, the floor was structurally sound. Carefully, he lowered himself through the window. His socks were instantly soaked. The tenants on the floor below must have been damn near flooded out.
In Mark and Carol’s apartment it was a toss-up as to which had caused more damage: fire, water, or the final smashing ax searching for the last flaming hideout.
Spraggue dampened his handkerchief on the soaking rug, wrapped it around the lower half of his face, coughed. The acrid smell invaded his nostrils, seeped into his hair, his clothes.
The fire had started in the study. That afternoon, he’d sat in the living room. The archway, he’d remembered, led to bedroom and bath. That other door, to the kitchen. There: that small half-room, door crazily askew, that must be, must have been, Mark Jason’s study.
The lump of charred wood in front of the small window could have been a desk. Spraggue played the pencil-flash over it, found the brass hardware on the unopenable drawers. He poked at fragments of waterlogged paper with a tentative finger. Whatever Jason had kept in his desk was a secret now and forever.
The two-drawer metal file cabinet in the corner should have suffered less damage. Had firemen opened the drawers, soaked the already burning papers? Or had the file been opened before the fire, the papers strewn on the floor, lit with matches? Maybe the arson squad could find the answer, the futile answer. The papers were destroyed.
Spraggue searched the apartment with quiet irrational thoroughness, marveling at the destruction, unable to concede defeat. He found the odd item almost untouched, by fortuitous placement or pure chance. A jewelry box was singed, soggy, but otherwise whole. Spraggue placed it carefully on the sodden bed. A stuffed unicorn was gray rather than white, even its golden horn smudged with soot, but he added it to the pile. He thought about clothes, a toothbrush for Carol, decided against them. They could be bought; no sentimental value to a toothbrush.
At the very back of the bedroom closet, an attaché case stood out in the flash beam. Spraggue dragged it out onto the bed. The locks held, but the fabric gave way easily, and it opened in a way never intended by the manufacturer, yielded to reveal soggy, wrinkled papers—unburned, water-stained, possibly legible.
Spraggue replaced the empty case in the closet, added the papers to the pile of salvage on the bed. He stuffed his meager acquisitions into a damp pillowcase, checked to see that he’d left the flat in its own disorder, and climbed cautiously out into the night.
Carol was cheered by the sight of the jewelry box, saddened by the unicorn. But she took them both with a simple “thank you” and held her emotions in check.
“Someplace to eat and a quiet hotel,” Spraggue said firmly, taking her arm and helping her to her feet.
“I could … I don’t know … maybe stay with a friend. Or even call my folks.”
“Do they live nearby?”
“Not really. Down near San Diego. And I guess I’d rather stick around. In case—in case Mark comes back.” She bit her lip. “I know you don’t think he will.”
“But I do think it would be a good idea for you to stay in Davis. It might help the investigation. The Napa County Sheriff’s Office would foot your hotel bills,” he said. He’d pay the bills. In case they needed her to identify the headless corpse.
“Food and drink,” he said. “Where?”
She gave him halfhearted directions to a storefront restaurant on a dimly lit side street. Most of the tables were bare formica slabs; a few boasted faded red-and-white-checked cloths. An aging flustered waiter doled out cracked leather menus. Italian food, Italian wine. Spraggue ordered a bottle and waited until Carol downed a glass like medicine before he started to talk.
“I didn’t find much up there,” he said.
“I’m surprised you found this.” She indicated the jewel case. “There’s nothing valuable inside, but I’m glad to have
it, as a keepsake.…” She folded her arms on the table, rested her head on them, closed her eyes. “I think I’m in shock or something. I just can’t believe it, that I don’t have any of my things anymore, my books, my clothes. And Mark …”
“Carol, I need help. I know you’re tired, and if you can’t handle it now, I could wait until tomorrow.”
“What?”
“I want to ask you some questions about Mark. What he was like. What he was working on.”
“We didn’t talk about his work. I’m not into wine-making.”
“Whatever you remember will be more than I’ve got now. You willing to try?”
They spent some time over menus. “The lasagna’s good,” Carol said, “and the baked eggplant. But—”
“Not hungry?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Order something. If looking at it makes you sick, we’ll hide it under the table.”
She ordered eggplant; Spraggue ordered lasagna. The waiter smiled and went away. Spraggue wondered if Carol had dined here with Mark Jason.
“Okay, when was the last time you saw Mark?”
She gulped and turned pale.
“I’m sorry. We can do this some other time—”
“No … No … I’ll try. I’m sorry. It was a Thursday morning, I think. Yes. The eleventh.”
“What time?”
“Early. Eight o’clock.”
“How do you know?”
“The alarm rang.”
“Usual time?”
“No. Early. So Mark could leave.”
“How was he that morning? Nervous?”
“Excited more than anything. Singing in the shower.”
“Did he give you any phone number where you could reach him?”
“No. He said he’d be traveling around, that he’d try to keep in touch. He hates it when I get possessive.”
“Did he mention any winery he was going to?”
She shook her head.
“Any person, any name?”
“He might have. I don’t remember.”
“A woman’s name?”