The Last Blue Plate Special

by Abigail Padgett

  He didn’t say anything as Brontë and I left, merely closed the door firmly behind us.

  In the silent hall I contemplated the fact that I’d been insufferably arrogant and insensitive as well as rude. It felt good. Then I realized that my pompous little lecture to Pieter Van Der Elst had even more relevance when applied to myself. That didn’t feel good. It meant I had to face the fact that hiding out in the desert was just another way of running and hiding. And it would have to stop now. There was sufficient reason for it to stop. The path Roxie Bouchie had chosen for herself was not my path, but that didn’t mean my own path couldn’t run beside it.

  “Okay, here’s what I know about Pennsylvania,” I said to Brontë in the elevator. “There are Amish quilts and hex signs painted on barns.”

  It wasn’t much, but it would do. Maybe I could find a place with a shed and paint a hex sign on it. The thought was like an anchor and made me smile.

  24

  The Sagebrush Resort

  The phone in my purse started ringing as we loped through the lobby, causing a basset-eyed French tourist to whisper “Madame, a sonne ?” preparatory to inviting me and presumably my dog for a drink.

  “No, I didn’t ring,” I told him, tapping my ear and shaking my head. “It must be retard de jet. Jet lag. They say drinking a lot of water helps.”

  It was Wes Rathbone on the cell phone.

  “Got your number from Roxie,” he told me. “Look, I need to stay at the hospital until we can get a statement from Grecchi, and that may take hours. She’s in surgery. No telling how long. But both Thomas Eldridge and Megan Rainer’s husband, Christopher Nugent, have called downtown demanding to know what’s going on. Apparently Megan became upset when she couldn’t reach her father on the phone, and Kara Eldridge got scared when she tried to call Grecchi and heard a tape saying the service was disconnected. Everybody’s got the jitters. The desk sergeant told both of them somebody would be around shortly to bring them up to date, except there isn’t anybody to do it. Would you mind? You’re still on the payroll, you know.”

  “No problem, Wes,” I agreed. “By the way, are the Power Rangers still camped out at my place?”

  “Nothing changes until we get a confession from Grecchi,” he said. “They won’t move until we’re sure she’s our man.”

  I didn’t point out the logical inconsistency of his remark.

  “I’m on my way to the Eldridge place,” I said. “Then I’ll see Megan Rainer and Chris Nugent on my way home.”

  “Good. I’ll have somebody call them, tell them you’re on the way. We’ve already left a message on Pond’s machine, asking him to contact you for an update. He’ll get the message when he gets home. You don’t have to go by there.”

  “Roger,” I said briskly.

  On the drive up I-5 to the Eldridges’ home in Carlsbad I thought about Isaiah 34, blue willow plates, and female serial killers. If Isadora Grecchi was the perp, why had she chosen the plates as an icon for whatever rationale had driven her to murder? They didn’t match her decor. And even if she’d heard, in that long-ago foster home, the Old Testament tale of Edom’s grisly destruction at the hands of a violent deity, why would she identify with the destroyer and call herself the Sword of Heaven? The plate icon and the dramatic title were, I thought, nothing but advertising. The attention-grabbing narcissism of small children and some immature men, whose need for recognition does not abate until late in life, if then. Even if that recognition is for murder. The female murderer has no such need and never advertises her crimes. It just doesn’t happen.

  “Maybe Isadora Grecchi is really a man,” I told Brontë, fully aware that I would need a degree in psychiatry to understand what I’d just said. The tools of my own profession could only reveal what most men and most women, regardless of any variable other than gender, actually do. On the subject of one woman who advertises herself as a killer in order to get public attention, the field of social psychology is silent.

  I was still pondering that silence as I pulled to a stop in front of the Eldridge home. There was a small van in the driveway with an auto-rental agency’s sticker on the rear bumper. The side door was open and I could see that the back of the van was packed with a number of bulging trash bags. As I closed the truck, leaving Brontë inside, a blonde girl in jeans and sneakers tottered from the house under the weight of another bag.

  “Namey, hold it from the bottom, so it doesn’t tear,” Kara Eldridge called from the door.

  Or at least I thought it was Kara Eldridge. But she looked different. Her hair was shorter, attractively styled, and woven with platinum highlights. Gone were the unflattering culottes and in their place a trim pair of black slacks that made her look ten pounds thinner. On the front of her tan T-shirt was a black silkscreen of Stonehenge with the words GIVE ME THAT OLD TIME RELIGION. And she was wearing makeup.

  It must be Kara’s sister, I thought as I approached her. Maybe a twin.

  “Oh, Dr. McCarron, the police called to say you’d come by,” she said. “They wouldn’t tell me anything, but I know some-thing’s happened because when I called Isadora her line was dead. I just got a tape saying, ‘This number has been disconnected or is out of service.’ We had planned to talk before … well, I knew something was wrong, so I called Jeff, but he wasn’t home, and then I called Megan and she said she was worried about Dr. Rainer because she couldn’t reach him, and you know, Isadora has some problems and we thought Dr. Rainer might be with her, but… well, please, just come in and tell me what’s happened. Is Isadora all right?

  “Namey,” she said to the girl, “I want you to go out in the backyard and play with your brother while I talk to Dr. McCarron.”

  “But you said we were going soon,” the girl sulked dramatically. “You said—”

  “Naomi Ann, go.”

  It was Kara Eldridge. But she no longer reminded me of the cement sculpture of a girl reading a book on the front of a library. She was anything but oblivious.

  “You just missed T.J.,” she said as we sat on the pink and green plaid couch. “He dashed in for a bite to eat and then left for the Realtor’s office. I’m afraid I didn’t have time to make him much more than a snack, but I did manage that. A bowl of tomato soup and a baloney sandwich. And of course he’s got his cheese and crackers with him, so he’s all set. We’re, well, in an upheaval here. See, I had a wonderful job offer in Los Angeles, writing computer programs for … Oh, that doesn’t matter. But with the clinic closing and T.J. going to be out of work, it seemed wise for me to take the job and they want me to start immediately, so the kids and I are going on up and will stay with my cousin in Redondo Beach until he can sell the house and then join us. But tell me. What’s happened to Isadora?”

  She seemed overwhelmed by the sudden move and new job, but there was something else in her eyes as well. A somber determination she was making no attempt to hide. It was like an organ sonata in a minor key heard in a busy marketplace. Jarring.

  “It appears that Dr. Grecchi may have, um, harmed herself,” I said, not knowing how these things are put. “Her wrist. Ah, she cut her wrist, very deeply. She’s going to be all right, though. Dr. Rainer is doing the reconstructive surgery now. Her phone line was cut. That’s why you couldn’t get through.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Kara said, the bleak determination in her hazel eyes deepening as she looked straight through me. “I was afraid something like that had happened.”

  It wasn’t clear whether she was speaking to me or to herself. Nor was it clear what she was afraid had happened.

  “Has Dr. Grecchi had these … these problems often since you’ve known her?” I asked.

  Kara Eldridge seemed to remember suddenly that I was there.

  “Oh, no,” she said, “Isadora has never … I mean, we all knew about the depression, everybody at the clinic knew, and then she told me about it herself. We got to be friends after Marlis Rainer died. Isadora told me, well, a lot of things. She’s the one who encour
aged me to go to a community college and get myself some training so I could make a living if I needed to. She even helped me out with … with the money. She paid for it, paid for me to go to school. T.J. would never have allowed … But no, Isadora hasn’t tried to, to kill herself.”

  “But you said you thought that’s what had happened.”

  For a moment the earlier oblivion was back. The blank face BB and I had seen on the day we interviewed T. J. Eldridge. Dim, childlike.

  “Well, you know,” she said vaguely. “People who are depressed sometimes do that, don’t they?”

  “The officials think Grecchi is the killer,” I told her.

  “Yes, I suppose they do,” she replied, that minor-chord aura surfacing again and doing something to her face, tightening the muscles until she looked like an expensive professional photograph of herself. The character lines visible. A competent adult woman.

  “Mo-om,” a blond boy of about five whined from the kitchen door, “if we don’t go now maybe we won’t have time to see Disneyland tomorrow. You said we’d go soon. I wanna go.”

  “In a minute, Zeke,” she told him, then addressed me urgently.

  “Please tell Isadora I’ll be in touch with her as soon as I can,” she said. “Tell her I’ll be back to see her as soon as I get the kids settled in school and myself clear with this job. And tell her I said thanks.”

  “But Isadora is going to be in jail, Kara—”

  “Just tell her, Dr. McCarron. Now I’m afraid I do have to finish packing our things and get on the road.”

  “Of course,” I said as the girl, Naomi, emerged from the garage with a stack of framed photographs in her arms. The one on top showed Kara Eldridge in an apron slicing cheese in their kitchen. She looked like a mannequin.

  “Should we take these?” the girl asked.

  “No, we’ll leave those for daddy to bring,” Kara told her. “Remember? One of them got broken and he wants to fix it.”

  “Daddy broke it,” Zeke insisted. “It didn’t get broken. He threw a sandwich in it. I want to ride Space Mountain. Can we go now?”

  “You said your husband was going to a Realtor’s office?” I said, standing. “Could you tell me where it is? Maybe I can catch him. I’d like to ask him a few things about Dr. Grecchi while I’m here.”

  The question seemed to startle her.

  “Um, it’s in the big shopping center just east of the Coast Highway,” she stammered. “Century 21, I think. He was going to talk to several of them, but that’s where he was going right now, or at least that’s what I think he said. You don’t need to get back on the freeway. Just take the main drag through town and turn right where you see that big retirement complex on the beach side. Sagebrush Resort, it’s called. They’ve got a nice sign, looks western. You can’t miss it.”

  Sagebrush Resort.

  Wasn’t that the place Waddy Babbick had mentioned? I thought as I said good-bye to Kara Eldridge and her children. He’d said his rival for the title of “oldest s.o.b. in the valley” had moved there from Anza after breaking her hip. A woman named Reed McCallister. Her husband Bill had died from a rattlesnake bite. And she might, the old desert rat told me, know something about the adobe line shack that had once been used as a diner.

  A snapping, sizzling sensation made me dizzy for less than a second, but there was no ignoring it. My pal the grid, back again. I felt the way you do sometimes while reading and watching TV at the same time. When the two stories seem to overlap and you have to tell yourself, No, the drug-addicted doctor who’s about to operate on the child he doesn’t know is his son is the TV story, and the secretive woman lawyer isn’t the TV doctor’s ex-wife, but the lover of the embittered veterinarian who rescues abused race horses in the novel. That the sorting out is accomplished instantly is a tribute to the cognitive dexterity of our brains. Mine was dextrously pointing out to me that this was what I’d told Roxie I had to do. That I had to follow an irrational path paved erratically in glaring coincidences that blazed and vanished like mirages in my field of vision.

  “We’re going to see somebody in an old-folks home,” I informed Brontë. “Somebody named Reed McCallister.”

  Old-folks homes had obviously changed since my brother, David, and I dutifully went once a month with the Episcopal Youth Fellowship to take cookies to the institutionalized elderly of dad’s church. I had expected to see a lot of spindly, sad old people playing gin in a sterile day room that hadn’t been re-decorated since World War II. Instead, I seemed to have walked into a Las Vegas theme hotel, complete with a small casino.

  “We find that a bit of gambling keeps some of our guests on their toes,” the receptionist told me when I gestured quizzically toward the room full of flashing lights and intent octogenarians playing blackjack and slot machines. “They win scrip that local businesses match when they donate it to charity,” she went on. “Or they can use it to buy things at the coffee bar and the gift shop here. Flowers are very popular. Our ladies love to get flowers, and our gentlemen love to gamble for the scrip to pay for them. But how can I help you?”

  “I’d like to visit a guest named Reed McCallister. And is it all right if my dog comes along? She’s had her shots.”

  “Oh, we encourage people to bring pets. They’re wonderful for some of our older guests who are a little frail. Just petting a dog or cat helps them feel attached, you see. And let me check on McCallister. Ah! She’s in our assisted living unit, has her own little apartment on the grounds but eats communally in the dining room with her ‘village.’ You’re in luck. They were planning to attend the Death of a Salesman matinee at the Performing Arts Center in Escondido today, but the star is sick and they weren’t interested in seeing the understudy. You’ll probably find Reed in the gym. It says here that’s where she usually is when she’s not at the pool. Just go through those double doors, across the courtyard, and into the activities center. The gym’s on the left and there will be an attendant there to help you locate her.”

  The attendant pointed me to a wiry and deeply tanned woman with long white hair in gray sweatpants and a hot pink T-shirt, lifting five-pound free weights as she sat on a bench. Brontë wandered off to greet a man lying on his back on a table with a pile of little red sandbags on his chest.

  “Well, hello!” the man wheezed, and scratched behind her ears, which she loves.

  “Mrs. McCallister?” I began, sitting on the weight bench. “My name is Blue McCarron. Waddy Babbick told me you might know something about that old adobe line shack on Coyote Road outside Anza, about when it was used as a diner.”

  “Uhh-huhh!” she said, caramel-colored eyes behind thick trifocals alert with interest. “I wondered when that thing would come around!”

  “What thing? What do you mean?”

  “Here. Could you put these weights back in the rack for me?” she asked. “Got a bum hip. Have to be careful about carrying weights. One of the reasons I prefer swimming. That and the fact that I always wanted a pool but Bill died before he got around to putting one in. God, it gets hot up there in the desert!

  “But you came to hear about Lorene and her daughter Tommi, didn’t you? I figured someday somebody would come asking. Even kept a few clippings from the newspapers, although I’m afraid they’re in a trunk at my grandson’s house. You know how you just sense some things, like they’re written in the air and waiting all invisible, and then one day folks can see it, see what’s written there?”

  “Yeah,” I answered, noticing how clean the gym smelled. Like fresh towels and lavender. “I do know about that.”

  Then I told her about everything that had happened, including my unintended visit to a crumbling shack I’d never seen except in a photograph on my own wall.

  “So who are Lorene and Tommi?” I concluded. “It’s quite a story,” Reed McCallister said, dabbing at her forehead with a towel draped around her neck. “And I’m probably the last person alive who knows it, or at least knows it all.”

  The line shack
, she told me, had been built on Bureau of Land Management land by a special permit granted to the utilities company. When the line crew finished its work and left, the structure’s complicated legal status prevented its being sold, so it just sat there empty for years. Her husband, Bill, and others had used it from time to time to store feed, but it was inconveniently far from the herds and eventually they all built ramadas for that purpose closer to the grazing areas. After that, transients wandering through camped out in the place, a practice frowned upon by Anza’s residents. It was decided that a committee of townspeople would voluntarily manage the property until either the BLM or the utilities company decided what to do with it, which they never would, Reed explained, because it was too remotely situated for either agency to care about.

  So the town fixed it up a bit and rented it out for Cattle-men’s Association meetings and the like, school campouts and picnics, eventually a concession from October through June as more and more hikers found their way through Coyote Canyon after the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park was created.

  “Of course, the wives had to do all the work,” she went on, smiling. “Wives of the Cattlemen’s Association, wives of the Sheepmen, wives of the Anza Development Commission. Somebody had to sit up there selling lemonade and cold sandwiches from a cooler all day as the locals and hikers and school groups came in and out. This was over thirty years ago and we all had families, you understand. I was raising a set of grandchildren at the time after one of my sons got into trouble with drugs, got divorced, what a mess. Anyway, after a while nobody wanted to do it. Nobody had time to sit up there all day.”

  “So what about this Lorene and Tommi?” I asked, watching as Brontë left the man with the red sandbags on his chest and went to be petted by a heavyset woman in tights and a leotard who was doing something with a CD player.

  “It’s almost time for wheelchair aerobics,” Reed explained. “And I’m about to tell you about Lorene and her daughter.”