After dinner, Hannah had surrendered the car keys, and now Oren set out for Mr McCaully’s house, aiming his headlights at signs posted along the back roads.
Offered the option of streetlights, the outlying citizens of Coventry had turned down these modern conveniences, arguing that they would pale the starlight. Ever backward-thinking, the town had also voted against cell towers, for who would want to carry a telephone in their pocket? It was annoying enough to have one in the house.
Amen.
Oren did not miss the trappings of a world that ended where the town began. Tonight he was counting on the old-fashioned methods of the man who once ran the local drugstore. Mr McCaully’s recordkeeping would have bypassed the age of computers in favor of hard copy. And that old man never threw anything away.
The wood-frame house was in sight, and the windows of the parlor floor were lit. The sound of the Mercedes’ ancient engine had preceded him, and the elderly householder was waiting on the porch when Oren turned off the ignition.
‘Hello again.’ The retired pharmacist gave him a sweet smile of false teeth and extended a frail hand lined with blue veins and freckled with liver spots. ‘So, you came for that nightcap. Well, good.’
When the judge’s regards had been passed along and condolences offered on the death of Mrs McCaully a decade ago, Oren explained his errand to the delight of his host. The old man put a fresh bottle of beer in the hand of his guest, then led him outside and across the backyard toward a long wooden structure of plain walls and boarded-up windows.
As they walked, the older man recounted the story of his family drugstore. ‘My father was a historian of sorts. He built that shed in 1932 to warehouse the records my grandfather collected. Did you know that Coventry’s first druggist was the town barber?’ Mr McCaully opened the door to the low hum of a motor, and he flipped on a wall switch. Long fluorescent tubes spanned the ceiling and illuminated row upon row of boxes sitting on metal shelves as high as walls. ‘My son installed the climate control years ago. That’s why we boarded up the windows. He says paper lasts longer this way. Some of it dates back to the eighteen hundreds.’
Oren followed his host to the last narrow alley of archives, and they walked through more recent history. ‘So you kept everything? Inventories, too?’
‘Oh, it’s much more than just a collection of receipts and inventories. It’s the heart of the town, a history of what ailed Coventry for more than a hundred years. Prescriptions from 1887 will tell you that the town’s first mayor didn’t sleep well at night, and that might be the sign of a guilty conscience. And there were potions and poultices for bullet wounds, too.’
He paused to give Oren a sly wink. ‘Outlaw days. There’s some who’ll tell you that period never ended. And then there were nerve tonics for the lunatics and stimulants for depression. Outlaws and mental cases have always been a big part of our customer base. You could lose your mind in Coventry, and that was nobody’s business but your own. The same held true if you robbed a bank – as long you did it in some other town.’
The old man stopped by a shelf for the 1980s and donned his bifocals to run one finger over the dates on box labels, drawing closer to the end of the decade and the year when Josh disappeared. At last, he came to the right boxes. He pulled them off the shelves, frowning when help was offered. ‘I can manage.’ One by one, he settled four cardboard cartons on the floor. ‘History, that’s what it is.’
Oren hunkered down beside the boxes and lifted one lid to turn back folders and loose papers. ‘I’m not sure about the exact date. It was an order for black-and-white photographs. Does that help?’
‘Oh, yeah. That would’ve been rare even twenty years ago.’ Mr McCaully opened one of the other cartons and perused the contents. ‘I remember Mr Swahn bringing in a slew of negatives and contact sheets. It was a big order.’
‘That’s not it,’ said Oren. ‘I already know about that one. I’m interested in a single roll of film. Hannah brought it in to have it developed. She ordered an enlargement, too.’
With no hesitation at all, Mr McCaully opened another box, and his hand went straight to one folder. He opened it and skimmed through the papers, plucked one out and smiled. ‘This is it. A receipt for the development of twenty prints, all standard-size.’ He pulled out another sheet. ‘And here’s another one of Hannah’s orders. This one ’s for an eight-by-ten enlargement.’
Oren took the folder from the old man’s hand. It contained only paperwork – no forgotten photographs. ‘I know she had to leave negatives with you to get that enlargement made. Any chance she left the pictures, too? Maybe she forgot to pick them up when the enlargement came in?’
The retired druggist smiled. ‘Over the years, a few tourists have forgotten to pick up their orders, and all of those photographs are stored in these boxes. But you won’t find the pictures from Hannah’s roll. I’m eighty-seven, Oren, and I’m not senile yet. I saw Hannah at least once a week. Don’t you think I would’ve remembered to give her the other prints?’
Oren was distracted by the date on the paperwork. The housekeeper had led him to believe that years might have passed by before she developed Josh’s last roll of film. And now he understood how Mr McCaully had found this record so quickly – why the date would stand out in the old man’s mind.
‘Sir, does the drugstore still close at six o’clock?’
‘Always has, always will.’
On this date, the days were long. At six o’clock in the evening, the sun still shone. Oren remembered that it was dark when he returned home – without his brother. The townspeople had gone into the woods with flashlights blazing to search for a lost boy.
Long before the alarm was sounded, Hannah had brought Josh’s last roll of film to the drugstore.
While Oren searched for the housekeeper in the back rooms of the house, calling her name, Hannah was out front, starting up the Mercedes with the spare keys. At the sound of the engine, he came barreling through the porch door on the run. And then he stopped.
She smiled and waved and rode away.
One mile later, Hannah nosed the car onto the old fire road and headed uphill. When the Mercedes pulled into the cabin’s parking lot, the yellow Rolls-Royce was no longer there, but most of the witchboard people had stayed to play, and that was strange at this late hour. She rolled through the lot and then down to the rear of the cabin, where Evelyn Straub was waiting with a worried look about her – not her nature.
Trouble?
‘Thanks for coming back.’ Evelyn fumbled with her key in the padlock of the crawl-space door. ‘We need some privacy.’
Hannah followed her into the small room in the cabin’s foundation. She sat down in one of the wicker chairs and then looked up to the ceiling, listening to the faint chanting of letters.
‘D-O-Y—’
‘I’ve never known them to stay so late.’
‘They won’t go home,’ said Evelyn, ‘and there’s never a shotgun around when you need one. I’m sorry to drag you out here again, but I didn’t want the judge around when I talked to you, and I don’t think this can wait till morning.’
‘What can I do for you?’
‘I’m in a tight spot.’ Evelyn settled into the chair next to Hannah’s, her eyes turned toward the ceiling, listening.
‘O-U-S-T—’
‘I heard they found a woman’s bones in Josh’s grave.’
Hannah leaned toward her. ‘A woman, you say? How do you know that?’
Evelyn pointed to the ceiling and the room above. ‘They all know. They heard it from the witchboard half an hour ago.’
‘Well, then it must be true,’ said Hannah, leaning heavy on the sarcasm. ‘And when did you become a believer in psychic nonsense?’
‘I-L-L-L—’
‘I knew about the woman’s bones this afternoon. I heard it from one of Cable’s deputies. Dave Hardy always stops by my hotel bar when he’s in town. I give him free liquor, and he talks up a storm. He’ll tell me
anything, but there was one thing I couldn’t ask. I know Oren went out with the search party today. He was there when they found the grave. Did he mention seeing anything odd in that hole? Maybe some clothes?’
‘Shopping for anything in particular?’
‘A yellow rain slicker. Plastic would hold up for twenty years in the ground. The damn things are indestructible.’
‘O-V-E-M—’
Upstairs the witchboard people were stamping their feet to the rhythm of the chant.
‘That’s new,’ said Hannah, looking upward. ‘So tell me more about this yellow slicker that can’t wait till morning.’
‘E-O-R—’
‘It ties back to a statement I gave the sheriff twenty years ago. I told him that Oren spent the whole day with me. I said Josh went on alone, heading uphill on the hikers’ trail. Cable asked if anybody else came by, and I said no. How can I go back on that now? How can I tell Cable I made a cup of tea for a strange woman that same morning and sat with her for half an hour? Next he ’ll think I made up the whole thing, and he’ll toss out Oren’s alibi.’
‘E-N-I—’
‘I see,’ said Hannah. ‘What do you know about this woman?’
‘She was a day-tripper. I only remember that because she checked her watch against a bus schedule. She didn’t want to miss the last ride home. Before she left, she pulled a yellow slicker from her knapsack. There was a shower that day. Didn’t last long, but it was raining when she finished her tea.’
‘M-H-E—’
Evelyn looked upward, irritated now. ‘I might have to set this place on fire to get rid of those idiots.’ She turned her eyes back to Hannah. ‘I made that woman a map of the old hiking trail that runs past my cabin and all the paths that connect it to the fire road. I let her out the back door and watched till she was out of sight . . . heading uphill.’
‘Where the bones were found.’ Hannah nodded. ‘What did this woman look like?’
‘R-E-O—’
‘Her hair was blond, a real light shade. I only remember that because it looked natural. And she was tall. Everything else was ordinary – her face, her clothes. I couldn’t tell you what she was wearing that day – apart from that yellow slicker.’ Evelyn opened her purse. ‘I can show you. I’ve been carrying a picture around. I was hoping to catch you alone tonight.’
‘You have her photograph?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘R-E-N-H—’
Evelyn pulled out a picture postcard of a Coventry street in a different season. ‘I got this off the rack in the hotel lobby.’ She pointed to a figure in a hooded yellow raincoat. ‘This slicker looks exactly like the one that woman was wearing.’ There were other specimens of the same garb in the background.
‘Well, everybody in town had one of those,’ said Hannah. ‘I remember when they went on sale at the dry-goods store.’ And the price had been ridiculously low. Back at the house, Josh and Oren’s slickers still hung on hooks by the kitchen door.
‘E-L-P-M—’
‘I think the stranger must’ve bought hers in town that morning,’ said Evelyn. ‘She probably couldn’t resist a big sale like that one.’
‘No woman could,’ said Hannah, in full agreement.
‘There’s no other reason she’d have that slicker tucked in her knapsack. That was a freak rainstorm – nothing about it in the weather forecast. Surprised the hell out of me, a downpour like that one. I remember that morning began with a clear blue sky. So everybody in town might’ve owned a slicker just like hers – but how many people would’ve been carting one around that day?’
‘Only a woman with an eye for good sale prices.’
‘E-O-R-E-N—’
‘You think this might help the sheriff find Josh’s killer?’
‘I doubt it,’ said Hannah. ‘It ’s not like you can tell him anything useful. Maybe that other set of bones in Josh’s grave belonged to your visitor – maybe not. I don’t see that it matters. I wouldn’t be surprised if the sheriff already knew her name and address by now.’ Hannah rose from the chair. ‘Oh, and we never had this little conversation. Understood?’
Evelyn nodded, mildly distracted by the voices overhead. ‘How do you suppose those people knew about the woman’s bones?’
‘Same way you did. One of them probably bought a drink for Dave Hardy today.’
Upstairs, the witchboard people had ceased to spell out letters. They stamped their feet and chanted, ‘Oren, help me, Oren, help me, Oren—’
TWENTY
The county sheriff ’s workday had just begun when Special Agent Polk walked into his office unannounced.
The man leaned back in his chair. He was trying not to smile and failing badly. ‘I guess you heard the news.’
‘You mean this?’ She slapped a copy of a recent e-mail on his desk. It bore the letterhead of a high-ranking politician, who instructed her to step away from the double homicide. She damned the luck that made this an election year for the office of State Attorney General. The top dog of the Justice Department had based his campaign on strong local authority.
Power to the people, my ass.
‘I won’t ask how you pulled that off,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you did. Now who’s behind it?’
‘Your own outfit, the California Bureau of Investigation. They made the final call on jurisdiction.’
‘The grave is on state land.’
‘Not anymore. Evelyn Straub just granted a petition of relief on that hundred-year lease. I guess she felt bad about ripping off the taxpayers. Those mineral rights weren’t worth a nickel when she sold them to the state.’
‘No,’ said Sally. ‘I don’t think that’s quite it. Years would go by before that petition worked its way through ten layers of bureaucrats. So I’m guessing Mrs Straub just filed an intention to quit the lease. Good try, though.’
She dragged a chair to the other side of the desk and sat down next to Cable Babitt. ‘Well, now,’ she said in the friendly tone of sharing gossip over a wash line, ‘I heard you made some headway on identifying that dead tourist, the woman who died with the Hobbs boy. That’s the rumor at the CBI down in Sacramento. Is that what you told them? And some solid citizen gave the Justice Department the funny idea that I might be hampering the investigation. Oh, you know – covering the same ground twice, getting in the way and such.’
‘Nothing personal, Sally, but there might be some truth to that. If you like, I’ll get back to you when we have a name for that poor lady tourist.’
‘I already identified her.’
Well, that wiped the smile off his face. The man shook his head in disbelief.
‘It’s true,’ she said, as if he had been unable to find the words to accuse her of lying. ‘I got the woman’s name and address from a missing-person report on file with the SFPD. Took me an hour.’
‘No, I ran all of those reports,’ said the sheriff. ‘I checked them myself.’
‘I’m sure you did.’ She knew he was lying, but tact forbade laughing out loud. It was certain that this man had never bothered with anything beyond a cursory search. ‘I guess that poor woman didn’t have any friends. It took a long time for someone to notice that she was missing.’
Sally pulled the missing-person report from her purse and laid it on the desk in front of him. ‘It’s dated three and a half months after Josh Hobbs disappeared.’ She gave the incompetent bastard her warmest smile. ‘Our lady tourist didn’t have a day job. New in town, they tell me. And she’d never spoken to the neighbors. They say she only talked to the plants on her balcony. She liked plants a lot. People – not so much. So it took the landlord a few overdue rent checks before he reported her missing. And he only did that so he could legally sell her stuff to cover what she owed him. I backtracked the rental application to her last address and found her dentist. His X rays matched up with our victim.’
‘My victim,’ said Cable Babitt. ‘But thanks for all your help, Sally.’
‘Oh, I’m no
t done.’ Her neighborly grin spread wide. ‘I plan to go on helping you.’
‘This is my case.’ He used a tone more properly reserved for a child’s sandbox brawl. ‘The State Attorney General said so.’ And this was a variation of I’m telling Mom.
‘But you can’t complain, can you, Sheriff ? You don’t even know the area code for the Attorney General’s phone number.’
The small lounge in the Straub Hotel was best described as a toy bar, only room for three stools, and two of them were occupied this morning. The waitress, who doubled as bartender, was busy with guests in the dining area.
Dave Hardy sipped his beer from a coffee cup. Oren drank actual coffee as he gathered slow details of the days before his brother disappeared. His drinking companion was inadvertently accounting for his time.
‘God, I hated that old bastard,’ said Dave.
‘I barely remember Millard Straub.’ Oren kept his eyes on the mirror behind the small bar, lest the Widow Evelyn should wander into the conversation.
‘Well, I had to look at his ugly face every day.’
‘Right, I forgot.’ Oren had forgotten nothing. ‘You used to do chores here after school. So how did those two get along, him and his wife?’
‘Mrs Straub was the only one who ever liked Millard well enough to call him Honey. But she got past that. Then the two of them settled into pet names like Filthy Whore and Dickhead Bastard.’ Dave lifted his beer. ‘And those were their good days.’
‘You think that old man might’ve wanted his wife dead?’
Dave’s cup hovered in midair for a moment as he considered this. ‘I’d say it was the other way around. He used to pay me extra to taste his food. I had to come by real early every morning to check his breakfast. And he wouldn’t eat one bite of lunch till I got out of school.’
‘He thought Mrs Straub was trying to poison him?’
‘I wouldn’t have ratted her out if she had. But old Millard died of a heart attack. That’s what I heard. I was long gone by the time he croaked. I couldn’t wait to get out of this town.’
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