The Mural

  He is proving to be too stupid for my purposes, the Voice had said, and from what she knew of Marcus Broarty, Elley could understand that. Right after she opened the door of the cell, the shitbag had actually attempted to hit on her. I’ve always thought you were wasted on Jack, he’d said, and then winked heavily. She winked back, licked her lips seductively, and then clubbed him on the left temple with the gun, cuffed him, and when he was able to once again walk well enough, guided him outside to the Lexus, keeping the pistol jabbed in his side to keep him from calling out. She pushed him in the back seat, where he began babbling about how some god would not let any harm come to him. When that didn’t work, he turned on the bullshit macho bravado, warning her that he was a dangerous man, that he had already killed someone and stuffed the body inside his car trunk.

  “What a great idea,” Elley had commented, screeching the car to a lurching halt just outside of the village. With no one around to see them, she had pulled Broarty out of the car, keeping the gun jammed in his gut, opened the trunk, and then shoved him inside, bringing the lid down hard on his legs so that he would pull them in. Once he was safely locked in, she’d jumped back behind the wheel and took off. “Kinda sucks being kidnapped, doesn’t it?” she had shouted in the direction of the trunk.

  The thumping and screaming from the trunk that had ceased for quite a few miles now started up again, if anything, heavier than before, as though Broarty was making an all-out effort to escape. There were no cars behind Elley for at least a quarter mile, so she sped up and then stomped on the brake, throwing the Lexus into a screeching, smoking sideways stop on the freeway. The satisfying thud of a body slamming helplessly against the call of the trunk told her she had produced the desired effect. She then stomped on the accelerator and listened to him slam back the other way. Elley laughed out loud and she pulled the stunt another couple times, after which the pounding stopped.

  They were heading north, just as the Voice had instructed, though her ultimate destination was as yet unknown to her. The answer to that came quite a few more miles up the road, when the Voice once more came over the car radio. Hello, my dear, it seduced. Are you ready to continue?

  “Yes,” Elley answered.

  The voice dictated a series of detailed instructions, and Elley nodded quietly as she took them in. Then the radio went silent, and she turned it off.

  Another twenty-five miles, he had said, and then that would be that. For the second time in as many days she was about to commit murder, and that made Elley Gorman Hayden strangely happy.

  BOOK FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Even though Althea did not carry much in her purse, it took her a while to find the tiny leatherette-bound address book hiding in one the corners. This was shaping up to be one of those days when her brain and her hands were working as well together as a Democratic president and a Republican congress. When she finally got hold of it, she turned to the Kinchloe page and scanned down until she found Tim—work, followed by a Portland phone number. She punched it in on the motel phone and when the man’s voice answered the phone, Althea Kinchloe said: “Hi, Tim, it’s Noni.”

  “Noni!” her grandson practically screamed. “Where on earth are you? Don’t you know everybody’s been searching for you for days? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, dear.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m staying at a nice motel in San Simeon.”

  “San Simeon? California? How did you get there?”

  “I took a bus part of the way, and then a nice man and his little girl drove me the rest of the way.”

  “So you just decided to take a little vacation?”

  “It’s really much more complicated than that.”

  “Dad’s called the police, you know. By now he might even have the FBI out looking for you. He’s a wreck.”

  “Your father always was prone to rile easily. That’s why I called you instead of him. I need your help, Timmy.”

  “You want me to come get you?”

  “No, I’m not finished down here yet, but I need you to find something and send it to me.” Althea described for him an old trunk that was stashed in a corner in her garage. At least that was where it was the last time she saw it. She hadn’t moved it, and she doubted anyone else had, so chances were good it was still there, if the spiders hadn’t carried it off. “It’s not locked,” she went on. “Please go inside and look for a small journal.”

  “A journal,” Tim repeated. “Is it yours?”

  “No, it was given to me by a friend a very long time ago. Honestly, I can’t remember what color the cover is, but somewhere on the inside it will have the name Howard Kearney.”

  “Is that Carney like Jay Carney?”

  “K-e-a-r-n-e-y,” Althea spelled out. “If you could find that and take it to one of those overnight mail places and send it up here, you’d be helping me enormously. Here’s the address.” Picking up the complimentary pad of note paper on the nightstand by the phone, Althea read off the address and phone number of the Tide Pool Inn.

  “Okay,” Tim said. “When do you need it?”

  “Now, actually, though I doubt it could get here before tomorrow morning.”

  “That’s kind of a rush, Noni.”

  “Yes, and I’m sorry.”

  “See, the thing is, the deadline for overnight pickup is usually five o’clock. So in order to get from Portland to Vancouver, go over to your house, get in the garage, hunt down the trunk and then get this journal, and take it to the nearest FedEx, I’d have to leave right now.”

  “You know the traffic better than I do, dear.”

  “But I’m at work. I’d just have to drop everything and walk out.”

  “I know, but...how many times have I ever asked for anything from you kids?” Althea said, suddenly feeling every day, every hour of her ninety-three years. “Oh, maybe to help me move a sofa around if you were there, but that’s all. I’m not used to begging, Timmy. I don’t like the idea of it. But if that’s what I have to do to get you to help me, I will. I need to see that journal. It’s very, very important, and time is running out. Please, dear. Please help me.”

  There was a pause, then Tim asked: “Noni, are you sure you’re okay?”

  Althea simply couldn’t lie to him. Not to Tim who, even though she knew better than to ever say it loud, was her favorite grandchild. “I don’t know, dear. I really don’t know.”

  “That’s it. I’m calling Dad and we’re coming down—”

  “No!” she shouted, her vehemence surprising both of them. “I’m sorry, Tim, but no, not your father. Please, dear, just trust me. Find the journal, send it to me. And if it’s not too much trouble, go up into my bedroom and get a few underthings out of the second drawer of my dresser, the one with the lamp on it, and throw those into the package as well. I didn’t pack for a long trip.”

  “Noni, I....”

  “I have to go now.”

  Tim Kinchloe tried to say something to keep her on the line, but the words would not form. “I love you, Noni,” was all he could say.

  “I love you too, dear,” she said softly. “Goodbye, Timmy.”

  Althea hung up the phone. A tear escaped her eye as she lay back down on the bed, now afraid to turn on the television, afraid of what else she might see on it.

  * * * * * * *

  Tim Kinchloe hung the phone up, shaking his head. He knew he should leave right now and get in his car and drive straight to the airport and take the first plane down to wherever the closest airport was to San Simeon—probably San Luis Obispo County—and pick her up, and to hell with this journal buried in a trunk somewhere in her garage. But he also knew that he was not going to do that. There had been something in his grandmother’s voice that compelled him to do exactly as she had asked. The finality, the conviction with which she had said goodbye convinced him of her sincerity. She had not been irrational in any way, simply mysterious and insistent.

  Fortunately
, his job as a newspaper reporter made absences somewhat explainable, if not necessarily easy. He was still on a deadline of sorts, having to file the story about the councilman’s alleged use of a call girl (at least as alleged as something can be when there’s a traceable debit card charge involved). But there was time. There was always time. And really, it wouldn’t take long to dash over to Noni’s tear the garage apart, get the book, and dash to FedEx.

  Logging off his computer, Tim ran across the newsroom and into the office of Crazy Madonna, the manager of the paper’s city section. Purely in terms of sanity, Donna DeCreasy-Adler probably had more marbles than most who worked at the paper, but her insistence on using her full hyphenated married name, which could be phonetically twisted into “Donna the Crazy Editor,” was fodder for the staff. Then someone took it a step further, singing “Crazy Madonna” to the tune of the Beatles’ Lady Madonna, and her nickname was assured. Tim knocked on the jamb of her open door and said: “Hey, Donna, I just got a tip I have to check out. I might be gone all afternoon.”

  “What is it?” she asked, looking up from her desk, peering over her narrow glasses.

  “I’d rather not say, just in case it’s nothing. But if it pans out, believe me, it will be worth it.”

  “Come on, Kinchloe, can’t you give me a hint?”

  “If the tip’s good, it could mean a whole expansion of the Councilman Felber story.”

  “A series expansion?”

  “If it pans out, yeah, possibly.”

  Donna DeCreasy-Adler’s eyes got wide and the corners of her mouth turned up in a smile. “Then why are you still standing here?” she asked. She made a shooing gesture and Tim dashed away, grateful.

  Of course, there was no lead, but once his mission had been accomplished, all he had to say was that the lead was bogus, dammit, and then write the story as he planned to anyway.

  In his car, heading toward Vancouver, Tim wondered if he should notify his dad that Noni had called. As much as he hated to see the old man running in circles like he’d been doing (and he was the easiest guy in the world to rile, especially now that he was retired and bored as hell), he thought that informing him of Noni’s whereabouts would only make things worse. Besides, she had been absolutely right: she had never asked anybody for anything. Never. So the fact that she was doing so now meant it was important to her, even if Tim didn’t understand completely.

  Traffic was good this time of day, and he made it to Noni’s neighborhood in near record time. But as he drove up to the house, he realized that he had never even stopped to consider this possibility, though he should have: standing out in the middle of Noni’s front lawn, talking to a policeman, was his father.

  Pulling his car over and crouching down, Tim watched from down the block as his father started arguing with the cop, who was remaining cool. Finally the officer started to edge Geoffrey Kinchloe toward his car. He seemed to be convincing his father to leave the premises. It took several more minutes, but he finally did. Tim watched as his dad got into the beaten old Nissan he claimed he was restoring and drove away. Then policeman took stock of the house, went up to the front door and checked it to make sure it was locked, crossed the street and got into a car that was parked there and drove away.

  Tim glanced at the car clock: it was 3:43. He kept watch for another ten minutes before making his move. Deciding it best to leave his car where it was, he got out and walked to Noni’s house, then as nonchalantly as he could (just in case someone was watching), he went straight for the flower pot out front under which everyone in the family knew she kept an emergency key. What if it’s not here? he momentarily fretted, but moving the pot, he saw that it was.

  He let himself inside and went straight up to Noni’s bedroom, and grabbed a handful of her underwear out of her dresser (rifling through your ninety-year-old grandmother’s panties...how creepy was that?) Then he went down into the garage. Noni still kept a car in there, though she hadn’t driven it in at least a year. It was covered with cobwebs and dirt. The garage was filled with decades worth of stuff, but Noni was nothing if not neat, so it was neatly stacked stuff, box after box tucked into a honeycomb of wooden shelves that he imagined Grandpa had built at some point. It did not take long before he spotted a weathered old trunk that matched her description. Finding a small step ladder, he climbed up so that he could reach the trunk. It was not particularly heavy, but it was filthy. No one had been inside this box in a very long time.

  Taking it down, he opened it up and looked through the contents. There was an ancient cardboard box with Wedding Dress written on it, and other artifacts from nearly a century of life. He handled each one carefully as he took them out, digging down for the journal.

  It was on the very bottom. The book had pasteboard covers and age had turned the pages past yellow and straight to light brown. Opening it, he looked inside the cover and read: The Journal of Howard E. Kearney, begun May 19, 1937.

  This was it.

  Setting it down, Tim carefully picked up all of the other items and set them back inside the trunk, then closed it and returned it to its spot. Taking the journal up again, he began perusing the brittle pages. Most of it consisted of Howard Kearney’s impressions of the places he visited and the people he met. Every now and then there would be a reference to painting, and a couple of the pages were decorated with pencil sketches—some of them pretty good—so Tim presumed that he was also an artist.

  Wait...hadn’t Noni one time talked about an old boyfriend who had been a painter for the public art administration in the thirties? Was this him? That would make sense, even if the urgency with which she wanted the journal from a few hundred miles away did not. He fanned the rest of the book, finding that not all of the pages were filled with writing. The final quarter of the pages were empty, at least until the very last page in the journal, on which something was written. After Tim read the words, only one sentence, he dropped the book and slumped against the abandoned car behind him, his breath suddenly thick.

  He couldn’t possibly have read that right. He couldn’t have.

  Tim, it had read, stop dawdling and get this to your grandmother.

  Picking up the journal, Tim slowly opened once more to the last page and read again. Then he started hyperventilating, they way he used to when he was in high school; the way he had not done since his college senior finals. Tim gasped vainly for air as all of his limbs began to numb. The attack was so strong that he had to rush back into Noni’s house, race upstairs, and pull a plastic Glad Bag out of her kitchen cabinet to breathe into, before he passed out altogether.

  While breathing into a plastic bag, he had managed to convince himself that it was some sort of elaborate joke. Even though Noni had a sense of humor, he had never known her to be a practical joker, but that was the only explanation for what he had read. Once he had regained his wind, Tim went back to the garage and picked up the book, chuckling to himself as he opened it to the last page and read the words again.

  And once again he dropped it; only this time he cried out as well.

  There were now two additional lines that he had not read before, because they had not been there before: Maybe you should keep one of those bags in your pocket, just in case you need it again.

  Holding his breath, Tim Kinchloe staggered back to the kitchen, grabbed a handful of Glad Bags, and shoved them in his pocket. Just in case he needed one again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The Voice had been precise in its description of Elley’s ultimate destination, though in the deepening twilight it was not easy to spot. It was roughly in the middle of the stretch of rustic, scenic coastline called Big Sur, which snaked the coast high over sea level while tightly hugging the mountains out from which the highway had been blasted into existence. Elley smiled at the thought of the name Big Sur. She had lived in California her entire life and had heard it for most of that time, but she had no idea what, if anything, it meant. The reason for the smile was because that was the name she had
given to the seductive Voice on the radio: Big Sir.

  Finding the prescribed spot was easier than locating a place to turn the Lexus around on the narrow, shoulderless road. She had to go two miles beyond her destination before seeing a half-moon shoulder carved into the mountain, which was just large enough to muscle the damned car around so that it was now heading south on the highway.

  When she got back to the place where the cliff overlooking the ocean was at its steepest, her oil light went on, just as Big Sir said it would. Elley carefully pulled the car as far off the road as she dared. There was not really a shoulder, only a tiny wide patch. At one point it might have been a vista spot, but if so, it had been eroded by decades of salt wind and rain. There was a three foot guard rail running along side the patch of ground, but that was unlikely to pose a problem. Leaving the engine on and the car in drive, she got out. There were no cars coming in either direction, just as Big Sir had told her would be the case. She could only presume that he had managed dueling road obstacles a mile or so down in each direction in order to cut this stretch of Highway 1 off from traffic; maybe even a rockslide. Even so, the obstacles would not hold forever, so she had to hurry. The car inched toward the guard rail until it nudged it. A hoarse, muffled voice came from inside the trunk: “What’s going on out there?”

  Instead of answering, Elley scanned the side of the road for a suitably large rock, and finally found one.

  “Hey,” Marcus Broarty called again. “Why have we stopped?”

  “I’d buckle your seat belt if I were you,” she replied. “It’s going to be a bumpy ride.” Then she took the rock and stepped to the open driver’s side door. As forcefully as she could she pitched the rock down on the accelerator. The Lexus spun gravel wildly and pushed heavily against the guard rail, which was starting to give way. It only took a few seconds for the rail to collapse under the weight and power of the car, which then plummeted over the side of the cliff, rolling and smashing against the craggy surface all the way down until it struck the rocky beach far below. Marcus Broarty’s screams drowned out whatever engine sound there was until the impact at the bottom, at which point all sound stopped.