by Doug Allyn
“Can’t we all,” I said.
“She’s at least half crazy, you know,” Ross said. We were in a Lincoln Town Car, gliding sedately along the lakeshore drive. I looked him over as he spoke. Up close, I revised my first impression of him. He was older than I thought, late fortyish, maybe more. His dark hair had the faint plum highlights of a rinse, and the skin around his eyes was a tad too taut across his cheekbones. Cosmetic surgery? He’d be the type, I suppose.
It must be grim to be in the paid-companion business and start noticing crow’s-feet and gray hairs. Heck, it’s pretty grim even if you’re not.
“She was sharp tonight, on top of things,” he continued, keeping his eyes on the road. “But on her bad days she can be a handful. Did she try to hire you for something or other?”
I glanced at him without answering.
“I’m just trying to do my job, lady,” he said, giving me a flash of too-perfect teeth in a practiced, professional grin. “Sometimes it includes being nosy.”
“And what is your job, exactly?”
“Rent-a-pal,” he said frankly. “I help her in and out of her chair, cook for her, try to keep her out of trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“All kinds. On her bad days she orders things over the phone, from mink coats to phony gold stocks, and then forgets about it. She gets agitated and wants to drive and I have to jolly her out of it before she kills somebody.”
“She can drive?”
“Sure. She’s got a little modified van minus a driver’s seat so she can control it from her chair. She handles it all right, when she’s herself. But on her bad days...”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Just trying to avoid problems. She gets upset when she forgets things and I hate to see her like that. I think this Calderon business upset her more than she let on. It’d be better if he didn’t come around again. A lot better.”
“Better for whom?” I asked.
“For Audrey. I really do like her, you know. She can be a real trip to be around. But if she’s hired you for anything, you’d better clear it with Wally or me if you expect to get paid. Next time you see her, she may not remember who you are. Or even who she is.”
“I see,” I said, considering it.
“So, did she offer you some kind of a job?” he asked.
“Is Ross your first name or your last?” I asked.
He glanced at me a moment, reading my eyes. “It’s Ross,” he said, with a vacant smile. “Just Ross.”
Charlie Bauer’s county Blazer was parked in The Crow’s Nest lot when Ross dropped me off. Charlie and Ray Calderon were alone at a corner table. Charlie, bear-sized in his brown uniform jacket, was stolidly munching one of our cheeseburger deluxes, a two-fisted dinner even with paws the size of Charlie’s. Calderon was sipping a straight whiskey, not his first, judging from the flush of his jaw. Maybe serious drinking ran in the family.
“Hi,” I said, easing down across from Charlie. “Any news?”
“Mr. Calderon here made a call, but nobody back home had heard from his brother, so I contacted the Coast Guard. We’ll start an air search of the lake tomorrow. How much area do you figure we should cover?”
“That’s hard to say,” I said, hesitant to speak openly with Calderon there.
“It’s all right,” Ray said as though he’d read my mind. “I know the drill. How far could a body drift in ten days?”
“The river current’s thrust is still palpable a good two miles from the mouth,” I explained. “Might be farther with all the rain we’ve had. Deep water’s temperature is roughly forty degrees and bodies rise fairly quickly, say twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The prevailing wind’s been from the northeast the past week, so the floater — excuse me, the body, would drift south once it surfaced. I doubt it could be more than five miles out, so an air search in an eight-mile arc from the river mouth should do it. Plus a ground search of the South Point shoreline.”
“You’re assuming the torso’s intact,” Calderon said quietly. “If it’s been punctured, the body may already have sunk. What about scavengers, gulls, or fish?”
“The Great Lakes don’t have any scavenger fish that work on the surface, at least no large ones. Gulls might attack a fl—”
“Go ahead and call it a floater,” Calderon snapped. “I’m familiar with the term.”
“Sorry, I’m just trying... In any case, your brother was wearing a leather jacket when I saw him. It wasn’t in the car, so if he was wearing it when he went in, it would protect his upper body from gulls. I think there’s a good chance the body’s still afloat, possibly already ashore.”
“Wouldn’t somebody have found it if it had washed up?”
“Maybe not. Tourist season’s over, and a lot of the houses along South Point are summer homes.”
“I see. And if the body’s already sunk?”
I glanced at Charlie, not wanting to say it.
“If that’s the case, the chances of a recovery drop off pretty sharply,” Charlie said calmly. “In the spring, when the ice breaks up, it might be carried ashore. But to be absolutely frank with you, Mr. Calderon, if we don’t recover the body in the next few days, it’s quite possible we may never find it. Of course, it’s also possible it isn’t in the lake at all.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, so far we’ve assumed the worst. We find the car in the river, suitcases in the trunk. Granted, it looks bad. But suppose your brother made it out of the car okay? He’d been drinking, he’d just had a big disappointment, in effect he’d lost his father for the second time. Maybe he just decided the hell with it all and took off. Young guys do that sometimes.”
“No,” Calderon said softly. “He didn’t run off. I think Jimmy’s dead. I’m almost certain of it.”
“Why do you say that?” Charlie asked.
“I know it here,” Calderon said, tapping his heart. “I’ve felt it for days. We were very close as kids. My mom remarried a few years after Jimmy was born. A sailor. So we grew up as navy brats, always on the move. All we had was each other. Then I went in the service and Jimmy... I think I need to take a walk,” he said abruptly, rising, his eyes misty. “Is there a motel around here?”
“A couple,” Charlie said. “Harbor Inn’s the best, half mile or so down the shore. I’ll be glad to drop you.”
“No, I’ll find it. You finish your dinner. There is one thing, though. The air search? I’d like to go along. I’m not an amateur. I won’t get in the way.”
“I can ask,” Charlie said. “Can’t guarantee anything. It’ll be up to the Coast Guard pilot.”
“Thanks,” Calderon said. “For everything. You too, ma’am. And I’m sorry if I’ve seemed rude.”
“No problem,” I said.
“Right. I’ll be at that motel if anything... Well, you know.” He turned and walked out without a backward glance. And I’m human. I couldn’t help noticing how well he carried himself, and the way his shoulders moved... Charlie was watching me.
“So,” I said, meeting his gaze. “Do you think he’s right? The feeling he’s got about his brother, I mean?”
“Hard to say,” Charlie said. “I’ve never experienced it myself, but I’ve run into it a few times over the years. People call the station, ask us to check on somebody, usually a parent, because they’ve had a dream or a bad feeling something’s happened to them.”
“And?” I prodded. “How does it turn out?”
Charlie shrugged. “It’s only happened a few times. It’s not like I’ve done a big scientific study or anything.”
“And you’re ducking the question. Are they ever right?”
“They’re always right,” he said sourly, pushing his plate aside. “Every damned time.”
Calderon went up with the Coast Guard chopper the next day. For nearly ten hours they crisscrossed an imaginary grid over roughly eighty square miles of open water. The weather was ideal for a search, a brassy, beautif
ul October day, light wind, waves less than a foot, visibility almost perfect. Charlie buzzed me at four to tell me they’d struck out completely, both in the air and the ground search along the shore, but when Calderon wandered into the Nest a little after seven that night, there was no disappointment in his face. Or much of anything else. He was a closed book, but one that might be interesting to read.
He was dressed semiformally for this part of the country, jeans with a jacket and tie. He took the same comer table he and Charlie had shared the night before, and I wandered over.
“Hi,” I said. “Charlie told me how the search went. I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “Maybe no news is good news. Can I buy you a drink?”
“No, thanks,” I said, sitting down across the table from him. “But I’m a good listener.”
“I don’t need a shoulder to cry on,” he said. “At least, not yet. I could use a little consultation though, if you wouldn’t mind?”
“Not at all. How can I help?”
“The Coast Guard pilot told me that this time of year, with the weather and water temperature so cold, a floater will stay on the surface for quite a while. Sometimes weeks.”
I nodded. “Sometimes.”
“Well, you couldn’t ask for a better look than we had up there today, so I’ve got to assume that either the body’s gone down, or... that maybe it’s somewhere else.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, we don’t know for a fact that my brother was in the car when it went in. The sheriff said there was no blood or interior damage to indicate he was injured. Maybe there’s some other explanation.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Are you a gambler, Miss Mitchell?”
“Call me Mitch,” I said. “And I’ve been known to drop a few bucks at poker, why?”
“Then you know about probabilities. The odds. My little brother comes to a town he’s never been in before, doesn’t know a soul. He makes some inquiries about a guy who supposedly died umpteen years ago. And then, poof, he’s gone,” he said, snapping his fingers. “Disappears, just like that. What do you figure the odds are that it’s a coincidence?”
“I couldn’t say,” I said carefully. “But that might be exactly what it is.”
“An accident?” he said. “That’s what you think? Okay, where’s the body?”
“Mr. Calderon, people do disappear in the big lake. Someone... very close to me went through the ice last year. We never found him.”
“But they usually turn up, right? More often than not?”
“More often than not, yes.”
“Then all I’m saying is, for Jimmy to die accidentally only a few hours after he arrived, and for his body to disappear too, strikes me as one heckuva long shot.”
“Long shots come in sometimes.”
“Sometimes the turtle beats the rabbit” — he nodded — “but you don’t bet that way. Or at least I don’t. Plus, I’ve been thinking about what Mrs. McClain told us last night. She lied to us until I called her on it, you know. And now I wonder how much of the rest of it was true.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know,” he said, exasperated. “I’m not saying she’s an archcriminal, but her health’s obviously pretty shaky. Maybe her memory is too. Maybe she forgot something.”
“Ross, her butler or whatever he is, says she has good and bad days,” I conceded. “He also suggested strongly that we stay away from her. And maybe he’s right. She seems in rough shape.”
“Fair enough, but what about the lady she mentioned, the one who stopped by?”
“Megan Lundy?”
“Right. Do you know her?”
“To say hello to. She’s an artist, teaches at the local community college.”
“I’d like to talk to her. But since she doesn’t know me from Adam, I wonder, could you give her a call and set it up?”
“Sure. I’ll come along if you like.”
“I’d appreciate that. It might help.”
“Not at all. But just so we understand each other, Mrs. McClain offered to pay me to be your... chaperone, I suppose. She’s afraid you might embarrass her family.”
“I’ve nothing against them. Hell, in a way we’re related. How much is she paying you?”
“Nothing. I turned her down.”
“You turned her down? Then why are you helping me?”
“I turned down the money,” I said. “I didn’t say I didn’t want the job.”
Megan Lundy’s home was only a mile or so up the shore from the McClains’. It was a converted summer retreat, an unremarkable two-story slate-gray clapboard salt-box with chocolate eaves and shutters. It was flanked by eyeless vacation cabins, closed for the season from the look of them.
I rang the buzzer and a voice from above yelled at us to come around back.
A broad redwood deck with balustered railings had been built out from the rear of the house at the second-story level to overlook the rocky beach and the bay. We climbed an ornate spiral stairway up to the deck. And stepped into Wonderland.
A barefoot young woman with stringy auburn hair was stirring an empty pot on a prop kitchen stove at the far corner of the deck. Her threadbare flannel bathrobe was open to the waist, revealing her breasts and the silky curve of her abdomen. She was twentyish, and seven months pregnant. And she was in chains.
Black iron manacles encircled her wrists and a heavy chain draped from them to the deck. She glanced up as Ray stepped onto the deck, then returned to her pseudo-labor.
Megan Lundy was working furiously at an easel that held a three-by-four-foot canvas, lost in her work, thrusting with her brush like a duelist. She was wearing a paint-spattered terry-cloth jumpsuit, a big-boned woman, forty-plus, squarish face, broad shoulders, a wide bottom, and no discernible waistline between. Her eyes were dark and intense, with heavy brows that matched her close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair.
“Make yourselves at home,” she said absently. “I’ll be done in a few minutes. Hate to lose the light. October...” Her voice trailed off as her consciousness disappeared into her art.
Ray strolled to the railing, politely giving his back to the half-dressed girl. He folded his arms and stared out over the water and I sensed a Do Not Disturb sign in his stance.
A pair of French doors opened into a studio and I wandered in. It was a huge room for the size of the house. All the inner partition walls had been removed, leaving naked steel jackposts to support the roof. The wall facing the lake and the two adjoining were glass, huge picture windows with an incredible view of the sky and the shore. The street-side wall was covered with paintings, some properly hung, but many just stacked one atop the other.
The subjects were similar to the scene outside, women of various ages and physiques, some pregnant, some not. They were all shown at tasks, typing, washing their hair, mopping a floor, bathing a child. And all were in shackles, though some of the chains were laced with flowers, and a few gleamed like precious metal. The colors were subtle, pastels that might be found on any morel wall, an understatement that lent the work a fiercer impact.
And they were powerful. Stark emotion that would have moved a stone. But there were too many. My eyes were drawn from one to the next so quickly I had to turn away to keep from being overwhelmed.
The window ledges were cluttered with half-squeezed tubes of paint, discarded pencils, charcoal stubs. And handcuffs and shackles. I picked a pair up, wondering if they were props. Nope. They were very real indeed. Odd. The shackles probably weighed no more than a pound or two each, yet the bondage they represented made them seem infinitely heavier,
A small table draped in gold velvet stood in one comer, a display of a different kind. They were ceramic replicas of what appeared to be primeval figures, rude clay earth-mothers with swollen bellies and breasts. One of them was so striking I actually caught my breath. A pregnant nude rising from water, her arms raised in victory. She looked ancient and familiar at the same time, a
s though I’d known her in another life. I was utterly enchanted. Without thinking, I reached out to her...
“Please don’t touch them, Mitch,” Megan Lundy said. “Some of them were never fired, so they’re quite fragile. From my Ashtoreth period.”
“Ashtoreth?” I said, glancing up. On the deck the model was pulling a pair of slacks on under her bathrobe. Ray was still watching the last of the light fade into the water.
“Ashtoreth, Phoenician goddess of fertility,” Megan said, tossing a gauze dustcover over the display. “I’ll bet I did a hundred different versions of her in college. And sold about two. I keep these around to remind me that there’s more to art than passion.”
“They’re very powerful,” I said. “The figure in the water...”
“That’s right, you’re the diver, aren’t you? Must be a tough field for a woman to break into,” she said briskly, taking my arm and leading me to the wall of art. “And what do you make of my current endeavor?”
“Stunning,” I said honestly.
“I’m outa here, Meg,” the model said, popping her head in the door. “Think you’ll stop by later?”
“I’ll call you,” Megan said, giving the girl a goodbye kiss that lingered a heartbeat too long to be sisterly. The girl whispered something to Megan, then waved goodbye in my general direction and wandered off.
“Oh, to be that young again,” Megan sighed. “You were saying about the paintings?”
“I really like this series. They’re rude and refined at the same time, and for somebody who gave up on passion, they nearly bleed it.”
“I didn’t say I lost any passion,” Megan said. “I just learned successful art requires more than youthful enthusiasm. I call this grouping Womyn in Chains, women spelled with a ‘y.’ Personally, I think they’re a shade too topical for pure art, but they sell like proverbial hotcakes in New York. I earn more for a couple of canvases now than my college salary for a year.”
“Shouldn’t you take some steps against break-ins?” Calderon asked, joining us. “I mean, this place is all glass and I didn’t notice an alarm.”