“That would be great,” said Alice.
“I’ve always wanted to see it,” said Karl.
“All right,” said Gordon. “What am I missing here?”
“It’s the most — what’s the word I’m looking for — distinctive house in the county,” Gina said. “See for yourself tomorrow. We won’t spoil things by building it up.”
“I look forward to it,” Gordon said. “What else is there to do or report?”
“I connected with Gregory London, Charlotte’s brother,” Gina said. “I’ll be meeting him Saturday afternoon. Oh, and he said that because so many people from the school are out of town now, there won’t be a funeral right away. They’ll be doing a memorial service right after Labor Day.”
“Thank you, Gina. Anything else?”
“Ned London’s accident,” Karl said. “That’s probably one I can handle. The news story will be in the papers I’m looking at, and I’ll stop at the Highway Patrol office first thing tomorrow morning to get a copy of the accident report.”
“They’d still have it?” said Peter.
Karl smiled. “In the past 30 years, there have been only two commanders of the county’s Highway Patrol office. Neither of them ever threw anything away, and the office is blessed with ample storage space. Pack rats with storage space are the historian’s best friend.”
“I didn’t know you were on such good terms with the Highway Patrol,” Alice said.
“Well,” he said, “I am working on a history of the county. And you’d be surprised, if you looked into it, how many of the leading citizens of Forest County have died in automobile accidents over the years.”
SINATRA WAS SINGING “Strangers in the Night” when Gordon, Peter, Gina and El walked into Garbini’s. After the previous night, it seemed as if they were coming home.
“First of all,” said Gina, when they had been seated, “I apologize about Karl. I had no idea Alice was simply going to bring him in.”
“He might be an asset,” Gordon said. “He obviously knows a lot, and he’s getting things done.”
“What worries me,” Peter said, “is the way this group is growing. Somebody’s after Gordon, or something they think he has, and if we invite the whole town into the group, sooner or later, somebody’s going to be connected to our stalker.”
“But Peter,” said Gina, “You did a really good job of pointing out the threat.”
“And El,” Gordon said, “made it very clear tonight that we have to keep this to ourselves.”
“Self-preservation,” said El. “Whatever story we come up with, I want the paper to have it before the whole town knows. I think we’re all right for now.”
After drink orders were taken, Gordon turned to Gina.
“It occurs to me,” he said, “that with the family history at the center of all this, Charlotte’s attitude toward her family is worth exploring. She cared enough to write the history, but did she ever talk about them to you? In a personal way, I mean.”
Gina paused to sort out her answer.
“Not on an ongoing basis, but over the years, I suppose I picked up some things. Did you have anything specifically in mind?”
“For starters, how did she feel about her parents?”
“She adored her father. She said a number of times that he really encouraged her to be her own person and have her own life. And she told me that when he died so suddenly, she almost had a nervous breakdown. ‘The winter of 70 and 71 nearly did me in,’ was the way she once put it.”
“What else did she say?”
“I think she felt he was a warm and generous person, but also strictly moralistic. I know she once told me he was the son of a sheriff and had a very black-and-white sense of right and wrong. Charlotte was more a shades-of-gray person herself. I think that’s part of what she got from literature and tried to convey to her students. But she also said it helped being raised with a strict sense of right and wrong because it helped you draw the lines in the gray areas. If that makes any sense.”
“It makes a lot of sense,” Peter said.
Drinks arrived, same as the night before. Gina looked at Peter’s ginger ale.
“So are you a teetotaler?”
“I have been lately. Nothing against alcohol, but lately it’s felt like it was slowing me down. I have to be at my best in what I do, so I’m laying off. Sign of age, I guess, but I don’t miss it at all.”
“Age!” snorted Gina. “You’re younger than I am.”
“Ah, but you’re younger at heart.”
“Getting back to Charlotte,” said Gordon, “how did she get along with her mother?”
“Now that was a pricklier relationship, I gather. Her mother had a nervous disposition and wasn’t physically well by the time Ned died. I get the sense that some of it was real, and some of it was hypochondria, but it all came down on Charlotte. Her mother was gone by the time I came along, but Charlotte took care of her the last years of her life. That took her well into her forties and probably wiped out any chance she had of getting married.”
“Was she bitter about that?” Gordon asked.
“Not as far as I can tell. She seemed to feel it was one of those things that had to be done, so she did it. Still, it can’t have been easy.”
“How about her brother?”
“A nice guy, but a bit of a stick. He managed to get his father’s business sense without any larger world view. I gather Ned London was universally liked and respected, and that people felt his integrity was solid. Greg is honest and competent as far as I can tell, but he doesn’t have that sense of completeness that his father did. He went off to college and came back and married his high school sweetheart.”
“Gave Charlotte a niece and a nephew, didn’t he?”
“And Charlotte adored them. They were the kids she never had, and she loved having them over to her house when the parents were away or having a date night. She and Greg got along all right, but they weren’t really tight. She made a point of having lunch with him once a month after church as a way of staying in touch without getting too close.”
“Which church?”
“St. Luke’s Episcopal. I wouldn’t say she was terribly devout, but she felt it was important to formally incorporate some sense of a God in her life, and her father’s church was as good a way as any of doing that. I’ll tell you one thing, though. Lately, she only went twice a month. She said the new minister’s sermons lacked structure and intellectual rigor.”
Gordon and El looked at each other and broke out laughing. Gina arched an eyebrow.
“He gave the invocation today at Rotary,” El said. “I think we can appreciate what she meant.”
“Knowing how she felt about structure and intellectual rigor, it must have taken some effort on her part to go twice a month,” Gina said. “But Charlotte was nothing if not disciplined.”
They decided to stay for dinner, and when it arrived, El raised another point.
“We’ve been looking at this from the family history angle,” she said, “but there’s another point we shouldn’t overlook. Who benefits from her death? We need to find out what’s in her will as soon as we can.”
“I can answer that,” Gordon said. “Winters said it was all right to tell me since I’m the literary executor and it’ll be public pretty soon when he files for probate. But I don’t think it gets us very far.”
Everyone had stopped eating.
“The short version is that the niece and nephew get the house. Not much of it left, but the land’s valuable and they can rebuild. After a few bequests, the residue of the estate goes to Planned Parenthood of Northern California, with the directive that the money be used to expand services in Forest County.”
“Well, I’ll be,” said Gina.
“You’re surprised?”
“Not really. I mean, I wouldn’t have thought of it myself, but as soon as you said it, I thought, that’s Charlotte. We talked quite a bit about the bright girls in the school who got pregn
ant and either married too early, and often unsuitably, or ended up being single moms. Charlotte felt very strongly — we both did — that it was a waste of human potential. And some of the girls would go to Charlotte about it because they didn’t feel they could talk to their parents. So she understood at a deep, emotional level.”
“I take it, then,” said Peter, “that there’s no Planned Parenthood in this county?”
“I’m afraid reproductive health here is pretty medieval. It amounts to one doctor who will prescribe contraception for a teenage girl, but only with the written consent of both parents. He doesn’t get much business in that line.”
“Oh my God,” said El. “Doc Blanchard. I’d almost forgotten about him.”
Everyone turned to her.
“I was one of the few customers,” she said. “Anna and me. “When Anna turned 15, I took her in and got a prescription for the pill. Whatever else happened, I didn’t want her getting pregnant until she was good and ready.”
“Good for you,” said Gina. “That’s why she’s in law school.”
“You know what, though? When I was her age, I would have given anything for that, but I don’t think she appreciated it. I don’t even think she used it. I have a sneaking suspicion she was still a virgin when she graduated from high school.”
“Speaking as a medical man,” Peter said, “I think that was a good practical decision. Putting her on the pill, I mean. But why at 15?”
“That’s how old I was when I was ready to have sex, and I can guarantee you my father would never have signed the consent form. It still amazes me that she didn’t take advantage of it, but I suppose being a parent means your kids don’t appreciate you.”
“Fifteen,” said Gina thoughtfully. “You lost it at 15?”
“Actually, not until I was 16.” She took a sip of wine. ‘The wait just about killed me.”
Friday June 21
THE NIGHT BEFORE, Gordon and Peter had caught the auto-glass shop owner as he was closing up. With a quick phone call, he ordered a replacement window due in around 1 p.m., and said he could make Gordon’s Cherokee the first order of business after lunch. Accordingly, they decided to rent a boat for the morning and get back in time for Gordon’s lunch with the Paris family, during which Peter would take care of business at the glass shop.
The morning air that streamed in where the window had been suggested they would get a hot day, perhaps with a late afternoon thunderstorm. Everything but the gear for the morning’s fishing had been cleared out of the Cherokee, and Gordon decided to leave it unlocked in the marina parking lot and take his chances.
The boat eased out of the marina and onto the lake under a cloudless blue sky. A lone hawk coasted lazily overhead. It was early for the water-and jet-skiers, and aside from the thrum of the boat’s motor, it was agreeably silent.
“Can you humor me today?” asked Peter.
“Depends on how much it would put me out.”
“I’d like to try fishing Trout Creek.”
Gordon thought for several seconds. “All right,” he said. “I don’t really know anything about it, but we could try the usual small-stream techniques and see what happens.” He paused several more seconds. “I doubt the fish are very big.”
“It’s not all about size, Gordon. Catching an eight or nine incher in a small creek can be a lot of fun.”
“Let’s try it.” Gordon was feeling a bit of guilt over the way his charge from Charlotte London had interfered with their fishing; he figured he owed Peter agreement on a request so reasonable.
Half an hour later, he eased the front of the boat onto a small gravel beach were Trout Creek entered the reservoir. Peter jumped out and helped Gordon get the anchor, a block of cement, down on the sand. Gordon studied the creek. It was ten feet wide where it entered the lake, and it cascaded down a steep hillside, stopping for a series of small pools before continuing its descent. The creek was running full now, but by August, he guessed, it would be reduced to a trickle, and the fish in it would have moved into the lake.
They put on waders and tied on dry flies that mimicked no particular insect but looked good to most trout. The creek was closely flanked by aspens, pines, and shrubs. Gordon had expected it to be tight fishing, but as they moved upstream, it proved worse than he imagined. There was almost no room to cast and none at all for error. Many of their casts hooked the brush along the stream or the overhanging branches. They tried to fish the small pools from downstream, but even when they were able to make a decent cast, no fish rose to it. The climb upstream became steadily more difficult. In many places, brush, trees and boulders blocked them from getting out of the stream, and they had to grab hold of rocks and scoot up to the next pool. On three occasions one of them was about to put a hand on a rock for support but saw a snake on it. They were harmless garter snakes, but unsettling nonetheless.
The water cooled their feet and lower legs through the waders, and the canopy of trees kept the sun from beating down directly on them. Nevertheless, it was getting steadily hotter, and their exertions had them sweating. At ten o’clock, mosquitoes began to appear. Gordon had insect repellent in his vest pockets, and it kept them from being bitten for the most part, but the insects still swarmed annoyingly close. Half an hour later, sitting on a rock at the edge of the creek, swatting away mosquitoes, Peter raised the white flag.
“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all,” he said. “I vote we turn back.”
Gordon looked upstream and down. “I don’t see any reason to believe it’s going to get better. I make it unanimous.”
Peter stood up.
“Did you ever read Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America?” he asked.
“A long time ago.”
“There was a section where he wrote about fishing a small, overgrown creek like this one, with about as much success as we’ve had. At the end, he said, something to the effect that only a plumber could fish that creek. That pretty well describes our morning.”
They worked their way back downstream, trying one or two likely spots with no success. It was 11:15 when they returned to the area where they had beached the boat. Peter loaded his gear in, while Gordon looked at the creek running into the lake.
“I want to try one more thing,” Gordon said. He snipped off the dry fly that had been on his leader and tied on a #14 Hare’s Ear Nymph, adding a floating indicator seven feet up the line from it. “This creek is probably washing insect larva into the lake. Let’s see if there are any fish waiting for it.”
He lobbed the fly and indicator into the lake a few feet from where the creek emptied in, then began stripping out line to let the fly drift into the lake following the stream’s current. Forty feet from shore, the indicator jerked under water, and several minutes later Gordon landed the 15-inch Rainbow Trout, that had taken the nymph.
“It would appear,” Peter said sardonically, “that we were fishing in the wrong direction.”
AFTER CATCHING TWO MORE FISH apiece where the creek entered the lake, they motored back to the marina. Gordon cleaned up at a public pay-shower at the marina, changed into khakis and an olive-checked shirt he had brought in a gym bag, and was presentable for the lunch appointment at Ike’s Lakeside.
Ike’s had the look and feel of a building of mid-70s design. The interior featured an extensive bar on the left as one entered, opening up to an expansive dining area featuring tables with white linen tablecloths flanked by blond wood chairs, with a large circular stone fireplace in the center of the room. Across from the bar, the wall consisted of a solid row of double-paned windows, and at either end of the windows was a door leading down a short flight of steps to a capacious outdoor deck. On this warm day, the deck was nearly full and the fireplace was in disuse.
Roger Paris and his sons were seated at an indoor window table, with a commanding view of the lake and East Peninsula. If you knew where to look, you could barely make out the charred remains of Charlotte London’s house across the water
in the distance. Gordon spotted them at the same time Roger, seated with his back to the window, saw him and raised a hand.
“We saved a seat with a view for you,” he said as Gordon reached the table.
Gordon shook hands all around and sat down. Roger was to his right, Ronald to his left, and Bobby directly across from him. Bobby had thinning, sandy-colored hair, blue eyes, and a round, soft face that suggested decency and vulnerability.
“Just so there’s no misunderstanding,” Roger said, “we’re buying lunch. The London family and ours have been close friends for years. If not for Ned London, this restaurant wouldn’t be here, and we couldn’t afford to have lunch here every Friday. We’re grieving over what happened to Charlotte on Monday, but if you’re carrying on with her family project, you’re a friend of ours. Automatically.”
He lifted the glass holding his vodka martini in a toasting gesture, and Gordon raised his water glass in return.
“Thank you,” he said.
“And if you’ve never been here before, the trout is excellent, and the salmon left the docks in San Francisco this morning. Everything else on the menu is pretty good to excellent, so whatever you want.”
Gordon studied the menu, settled on the salmon, blackened Cajun-style, and after the waitress took their orders, leaned forward toward Bobby.
“You missed a good Rotary Club meeting yesterday,” he said. “I gather you were looking at property somewhere?”
“Come on, Gordon,” said Ron. “You’re being far too polite. I regard those meetings as my weekly dose of Babbitry, and I suspect your impression was along the same lines.”
“Now, Ron,” said Roger. “You know how much good the club does in our town. Think of the Little League fields, the Town Hall restoration …”
“I’m not denying that, father. I wouldn’t keep up my membership if I didn’t think it was doing some good. All I’m saying is that to someone coming into it cold, it probably looks as bizarre as the jungle rite of a South Pacific tribe.”
“It held my interest,” Gordon said.
“Talking about the London family,” Roger said, “that reminds me of when I joined Rotary in 1964. I was in real estate, but Ned London already had that classification, and back then you could only have one person from each profession in the club. Ned thought I should belong, so he proposed me as a member under the classification Land Management. That’s the kind of man he was.”
Not Death, But Love (Quill Gordon Mystery Book 3) Page 13