Second Chance

by Jonathan Valin

  I glanced at my watch which was showing ten-thirty. “I’ll give you until two-thirty this morning. Then we talk about you, Herb, Carla, Estelle, this whole damn thing.”

  She nodded, yes.

  I started for the hall.

  “Stoner,” the woman called out. I looked back at her. “You were right—Ethan must have seen me with Talmadge.”

  “I thought you said you had nothing to do with Herb.”

  “He picked me up at work a couple of times in Carla’s car.” The woman laughed dully. “Who knows? Maybe it was planned that way.”

  26

  I LEFT the house but I didn’t go far. Up Ridge to a gravel turnaround about fifty yards from the head of Rita Scarne’s driveway. I sat there among the maple trees and the roadside hackberry bushes, listening to the tail end of a basketball game on the car radio, and waiting.

  Around eleven-thirty I saw headlights coming up the driveway. A moment later Rita’s car—the green Audi—cleared the crest of the hill and nosed out onto Ridge. Turning left the woman blew past me, heading west toward Roselawn. I waited until the taillights disappeared over a small rise, then put the Pinto in gear and started after her.

  The night was clear and there wasn’t any traffic on the road, so I had no trouble following even at a distance. And then Rita Scarne wasn’t making any tricky maneuvers—a left on Section, a right at the Paddock entrance ramp to the interstate. She got on I-75, and I did too, settling back a couple hundred yards behind her as she sped north toward Dayton.

  It began to flurry about a half hour after we got on the interstate—big flakes that fluttered lazily in the beams of the headlights and blew back against the windshield in sudden, undulant gusts. Through the side window I watched the dark, featureless hills along the expressway take shape beneath the snow—the stands of trees grow crooked limbs, white and fantastic-looking. Straight in front of me the twin red dots of Rita Scarne’s taillights marked the miles.

  About forty minutes outside of Cincinnati we hit the Dayton corporation limit. According to Nurse Rostow, Rita Scarne was from Dayton, Ohio, and I had the feeling that she was headed home.

  But she didn’t take the first Dayton exit. In fact she went all the way through the city before slowing down and pulling off the interstate on the north side of town. The exit ramp emptied into a working-class suburb of two-story brick houses and foursquare lawns. Red and green Christmas lights were strung on most of the porches. Here and there nativity scenes burned like lighted billboards in the slanting snow.

  Rita worked her way through a maze of side streets before finally pulling over in front of a staid red-brick St. Louis with no strings of Christmas lights on its porch, no nativity scene on its narrow lawn. I pulled over across from her and watched through the windshield as she got out of the Audi and walked up to the house. She was carrying the black leather satchel I’d seen in the hall.

  The St. Louis had front stoops on either side. Rita walked over to the right-hand stoop and up the stairs to the door. Someone opened the door immediately, as if she was expected.

  The door led to a living room with a picture window in front. The window was lighted and the blinds were up. After a time Rita came into view in the window, with a second woman trailing behind her. I couldn’t make out the second woman’s face because of the falling snow, but she was wearing a nurse’s uniform, just like Rita’s. The two women embraced for a moment, then walked off into another part of the house, disappearing from sight.

  ******

  At precisely one a.m., Rita Talmadge came back out onto the stoop at the side of the house. The snowstorm had blown over by then, leaving the night sky spangled with cold, distant stars. I heard Rita say, “Good-bye,” to someone inside the doorway, and watched as she walked down to the street and over to the Audi. She wasn’t carrying the satchel anymore.

  I waited until she drove away, then got out of the Pinto and walked up to the brick St. Louis. The front window was still lit. Through it I could see the second woman standing in the living room, staring queerly off into space. She was a tall buxom blonde like Rita. Only younger than Rita by five or so years and less weathered-looking. I went around to the right side of the house and climbed the stoop. There was a mailbox by the door with a name and number. I’d expected to find “Carla Chaney” written on it, but the placard read “Charlotte Scarne, 516 Minton.” I assumed Charlotte was Rita’s sister. It was unquestionably Rita’s old address. I knocked on the door.

  Charlotte Scarne must have thought Rita had come back a second time, for she was smiling when she opened the door. Her smile wilted when she saw me.

  “Yes?”

  “My name’s Stoner, Ms. Scarne. I’d like to talk to you about Rita.”

  The woman didn’t look surprised. She didn’t invite me in, either.

  “You know who I am?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I know. Rita told me.”

  “Did she tell you what kind of trouble she’s in?”

  She nodded again.

  “If you want to help her, you’ll talk to me.”

  “You’re not trying to help her,” the woman said scornfully. “You’re trying to put her in jail.”

  “I’m trying to find out what happened to two lost kids, Ms. Scarne. And I don’t want to send anyone to jail—especially the wrong person. But if you and Rita don’t cooperate, you’re not going to leave me a choice.”

  “I don’t know anything,” the woman said. But she was a poor, inexperienced liar, and the words caught in her throat.

  Charlotte Scarne was definitely not the hard character that her sister was. Everything about her was softer, less coarsened by experience—her voice, her face, her manner. I knew I’d have no trouble working on her—whatever her sister had left behind was visibly weighing her down.

  I said, “Ms. Scarne, help me put this thing together before someone else ends up dead.”

  The woman started as if I’d touched the right nerve. “Rita’s afraid of that.”

  “Can you tell me why?”

  “Something from the past—something she shouldn’t have done.”

  Charlotte Scarne stepped back from the door. It was as much of an invitation as I was going to get and I took it, stepping quickly into the room.

  It was an old-fashioned parlor full of dusty knickknacks and dark mahogany furniture. Framed photographs of Mom, Pop, and the girls lined the mantel. Other pieces of ancient memorabilia were scattered on end tables and sideboards—china plates from a postwar exposition, a Steuben trout blowing crystal bubbles in a crystal cube, one lorn tin trophy that Dad had won at a company picnic, a wedding picture of the folks fading to yellow in its glass frame.

  The room had the feel of arrested development—of life gone sad and sour and still. The whole house was probably the same. A woman like Rita Scarne could never live in a place like that. I had the feeling that her sister, Charlotte, was trapped in it.

  “I haven’t cleaned yet,” the woman said guiltily, as if that explained the dismal room. “I was on duty tonight, and I didn’t have a chance to clean.”

  “It’s fine,” I said to her.

  She laughed dully. “No, it’s not.” And that was all she said.

  I sat down on a dusty tuxedo couch, and the woman wandered over to a chair. “What can you tell me, Charlotte? What’s got your sister so frightened?”

  Charlotte Scarne looked down at the floor. “All she said was that it had to do with Carla—something she’d done for Carla a long time ago. She wouldn’t say any more than that. She told me it was better if I didn’t know.”

  “Carla, meaning Carla Chaney?”

  The woman nodded.

  “They were like sisters,” she said, then flushed a little at the irony in her words. “Carla rented the upstairs rooms for a few months in the winter of ‘74 and spring of ‘75, while she was working as a nurse. Rita was a nurse, too. So they just naturally got along.”

  From the sound of her voice I had the feeling that sh
e hadn’t shared her sister’s feeling for Nurse Chaney. “You didn’t like Carla?”

  “I liked her okay,” Charlotte said without conviction. “It was just that she was always so . . . ambitious. Carla wanted things, and she didn’t seem to care what it took to get them. She kind of infected Rita with her thinking. At least, I felt she did. It was a fact that Rita stopped coming to see us once the two of them moved to Cincinnati. She didn’t visit us for almost two years after they left town.”

  Charlotte Scarne frowned bitterly, as if those two years alone with the folks had cost her something she’d never been paid for. “Rita finally came back in ‘77 when Dad died. By then she had everything she wanted—car, clothes, money. She paid for Dad’s funeral out of her own pocket—several thousand dollars. She paid the last of the mortgage off, too. It was a humbling experience. Especially for Mom. I mean she thought Rita was going straight to hell when she left with Carla. I guess Rita showed her—and me, too.”

  “How did Rita make so much money in two years, Charlotte?”

  “She had a good job. She said she’d saved it. Now I’m not sure.”

  The woman got up and went over to a mahogany break-front. Opening a drawer, she lifted out the black leather satchel. “This is what Rita came for. She wanted me to have it, in case . . . ” She stared blankly at the satchel, as if it wasn’t the legacy she’d expected from her sister.

  “What’s inside?”

  “Money. Ten thousand dollars.” She handed the bag to me. “There are some bankbooks, too.”

  “Did Rita say where she got the money?”

  “Some of it was left over from a long time ago. Blood money, she called it. Some of it she said she’d saved on her own. She told me I was to use it to buy myself a new chance at life—I mean if something happened to her.” Charlotte Scarne shuddered violently. “I don’t want it. I don’t want any part of it. Someone died because of it.”

  “Did Rita say who?”

  Charlotte took a deep breath. “Carla, I think.”

  I stared at the woman for a long moment. “What makes you say that?”

  “Because we never saw Carla again after she and Rita left town. Rita never even spoke about her. I mean the two of them were inseparable friends. And then it was as if Carla never existed.”

  “Maybe she moved away from Cincinnati?”

  “I don’t think so,” Charlotte said. “Whenever I’d ask Rita about Carla, she’d act like it was something she couldn’t talk about. Something bad, you know? Carla could be pretty bad. I used to think that something must have happened to her when she was a kid—something really dreadful—to make her that way.”

  “What way is that?” I asked.

  “Just . . . brutal,” she said, flushing again. “Except for Rita she didn’t really seem to care about anything or anyone—like what was inside her, the caring part, had curled up and died. I sneaked up to her room once while she was living here and found this stuff—leather-and-metal stuff. I didn’t know what it meant then, just that it was bad. Later I realized that Carla liked to be hurt and to hurt other people.”

  I thought of Herbert Talmadge—a man after Carla’s own heart.

  “Your sister said she did a favor for Carla that she’d been paid money for. Did she give you any hint what that favor was—if it might have involved a man named Talmadge?”

  “All she said was that someone had died as a result. And that she was afraid she might die, too.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” the woman said helplessly.

  “Did she mention Kirsty and Ethan Pearson?”

  “Who are they?”

  “The children of a woman Rita once worked for. A phone call from them last night might have triggered this whole thing. You don’t know anything about that, do you?”

  “Why would I know anything?” the woman said, looking confused.

  “Your sister claimed you were house-sitting for her last night. And the agency Rita works for forwarded the Pearson kid’s call to Rita’s house.”

  “I don’t know anything about any call,” she said flatly.

  “And Rita never mentioned the Pearsons to you?”

  “She didn’t mention them.” Charlotte Scarne shuddered from head to foot. “Mr. Stoner, Rita acted as if she deserved to die. Whatever she did, it must have been a pretty terrible thing to make her feel that way.”

  Although the woman was talking about something in Rita’s past, I couldn’t help thinking of Herbert Talmadge, lying on that kitchen floor with his heart cut out. Of the deserted, blood-spattered Plymouth, sitting above the river where Estelle Pearson had died. Terrible things indeed.

  27

  CHARLOTTE WAS still staring dully at Rita Scarne’s satchel when I left the house on Minton Street. To her the money was tainted by death. Tainted also by her own ambivalence toward Rita—the prodigal who had run away from home, leaving Charlotte to live a life of dismal rectitude in that dismal house. No matter that it was probably the life that suited her best. It was less painful to blame Rita. And perhaps Rita had felt some of that blame was deserved. Ten thousand tax-free dollars certainly would have given Charlotte a fresh chance.

  It took me forty minutes to get back to Cincinnati and another ten to wend my way up the snowy Amberley Village side streets to Ridge Road and Rita Scarne’s house. It was after three in the morning by then, past the time I had set for my meeting with the woman. No matter the time I intended to talk to her.

  Because of the snowfall I had trouble finding the entrance to the driveway. I might not have found it at all if it weren’t for a pair of fresh tire tracks veering off Ridge and leading down the hill to the house. The treadmarks were a doubly good sign—they meant Rita Scarne had come home. After she’d run to her sister’s house in Dayton, I was a little worried that she might keep going—out of the city, out of the state. But she’d decided to come back. With all those bad memories in her head, maybe she didn’t have it in her to go anywhere else.

  I followed the tire tracks through the oak grove into the snowy dell, and found the green Audi parked in front of the garage. At least I thought it was parked there. But as I got closer I saw grey smoke trailing from the tailpipe. The engine had been left running. The parking lights were on too, throwing a faint yellow wash up the side of the dark house. The fact that there weren’t any lights on in the house itself bothered me. Even if the woman had dashed inside, intending to come right back out, there should have been lights on somewhere.

  I pulled up behind the Audi and realized with a start that Rita Scarne was still sitting in the car. I could see her head and shoulders in the beam of my headlights. I could see something else too. The passenger-side window of the Audi had a spiderweb fracture—the kind that comes from a gun shot.

  “Christ,” I said aloud.

  Leaving my headlights on I got out into the cold and walked slowly up to the woman’s car. The Audi’s radio had been left on. I could hear it singing softly over the idling engine. There was a sharp smell of cordite in the air, and something else. Something that wasn’t gunpowder or exhaust fumes. Taking a breath I bent down and looked inside the car.

  The driver-side window was open, and a bit of snow had blown through it, dusting the shoulder of Rita Scarne’s coat and what was left of her face.

  She’d been shot in the temple—at very close range because the powder burns had singed her blond hair above the left ear. The bullet had apparently gone through her skull, exiting the right side of her head and breaking the passenger-side window. There was no question Rita Scarne was dead. Half her brain was lying beside her in the passenger seat.

  There was enough light coming from my headlights and the Audi’s dashboard instruments for me to make out a gun—a snub-nosed .38—lying in the woman’s lap next to her outstretched hand. There was a sealed envelope on her lap too, spotted with blood.

  I stood up and looked around the car. Two sets of footprints, a woman’s shoe, stretched from the driver-side doo
r to the front door of the house and back again—as if Rita had gone inside for a moment. There were no other footprints, man’s or woman’s, in the front yard snow and no other tire tracks in the driveway, save for those from the Audi and my Pinto.

  I glanced back at the woman—at the blood-spattered envelope in her lap. She’d been deeply depressed that night. Talmadge was dead, probably at her hands. The Pearson kids were also dead with her connivance. An ugly thirteen-year-old secret—a secret full of blood and money—was coming back to haunt her. With me and the cops breathing down her neck, she could easily have decided to end it. In fact she’d told her sister she’d deserved to die no more than an hour before, after giving away all she had left to give.

  It was probably a suicide, all right. And yet I couldn’t quite buy it. Maybe because I hadn’t been prepared to find her dead. Maybe because she’d left me with too many unanswered questions. Maybe because I’d half believed her earlier that night when she’d begged me to give her time to make things right. She’d been afraid of someone. Not me or the cops but someone from her past, someone who had paid her the “blood money,” someone who had marked her—and Estelle, Talmadge, and the two Pearson kids—for death.

  Suicides could be faked—it was like a theme running through the case. The open car window could have meant that she’d been approached in the driveway by someone who had carefully covered his tracks. It could also have meant that she’d wanted a breath of air before pulling the trigger—a breath of air and some elbow room to hold the gun to her head. Finding the truth of it was a job for a forensic team and a coroner.

  Reaching through the window I flipped off the engine and pulled the keys out of the ignition. The sudden silence in the dell was dramatic enough to send a chill down my back. I looked around the yard again at the dark house and darker woods beyond it. If there was someone out there looking back at me, I couldn’t see him. But I wanted to get inside the house anyway—away from that car and my own paranoia.