“Would you like to split a bottle of wine?” she said.
He hesitated. “I’m driving, so I shouldn’t have more than one glass.”
“So you do drink. You just weren’t because of Peter.”
Gordon nodded. “He seems to be doing all right now, but I was worried about him, and I wasn’t alone. When you’re doing surgery, you can’t afford to have a drinking problem — even a bit of one.”
“I recognized the look in his eyes. I saw it in Andre when his drinking got bad. Let’s order by the glass, then, but do have one anyway. We need to loosen you up a bit tonight.”
“All right. But just one.”
They ordered separate glasses of wine and dinner. El went for the trout, and Gordon chose pork medallions in a port wine sauce. When the wine arrived, they toasted each other and took a sip.
“I’ve been thinking more than usual this birthday,” she said. “Maybe I’m getting to the point in my life where I feel I have to clean up some issues. Like reconnecting with my father. He’s 75 and seems healthy, but who knows how much longer we have to set things straight.”
“Dear old Dad,” Gordon said. “I hear you on that one.”
“You too?” she asked. Gordon nodded. “What does your father do?”
“He’s a judge,” Gordon said. “He was up here years ago to preside over the trial of the lawyer who shot his wife … ”
“I’d forgotten that. I covered the trial, but I didn’t remember the judge’s name. He did a really good job of running the trial.”
“He would, of course. Everybody says he’s a terrific judge. He sets high expectations for the trial lawyers, just as he does for everybody else, including his family.”
“Surely you’ve met those expectations.”
“Not entirely. It probably isn’t possible. You know, I still remember when I was in high school, playing for the basketball team. It was the second to the last game of the season, and we were playing a team that was tied with us in the standings. Whoever won would be league champion and go to the playoffs. I was on fire that game. Scored 42 points, which was a school record, and we won the game by eight points. But I fouled out with 45 seconds left, and that’s all he talked about on the way home. Never good enough. It’s the story of our relationship. He still thinks I’m a failure because I didn’t go to law school.”
“You don’t believe that, do you?”
“That I’m a failure? No. I was very good at what I did, and I certainly made good money at it. But at a certain level, it wasn’t satisfying.”
“In what way?”
“What I was good at was looking at numbers and guessing whether they’d go up or down. The people who trusted me with their money appreciated that, I think, but I’m not sure what good it really did. I mean, it’s not like I was creating a business or jobs or anything of value. I just had a knack for figuring the numbers.”
“You’re being too hard on yourself.”
“Maybe. But I’ll tell you something. When Charlotte London put me in charge of her papers and her family history, I wasn’t very happy about it. Now, as we get deeper into it, and I see what the stakes are, I’m sort of glad this happened. I feel that I’m pushing myself to do something that’s really important for someone who put a great deal of blind trust in me.”
“You don’t want to let Charlotte down.”
“Exactly.”
“And you won’t tell me what was in her journal?”
“Not now. It wasn’t at all what I expected, and I have to think about it. Probably bounce it off Gina, too. Maybe tomorrow you’ll know more.”
The storm clouds had begun to break up, and rays of bright sunlight were illuminating the mountains on the other side of the lake. They watched the play of light on the mountains for several minutes without saying a word.
“We were starting to talk about your father,” Gordon said, “before we got sidetracked. Anything you want to get off your chest?”
“We didn’t get along, obviously. We still don’t. My older brother and younger sister always toed the line, but I was the wild one. I didn’t even feel I was being rebellious at the time — just curious. But let’s face it. Having a daughter who spent the Summer of Love in the Haight would try the most tolerant of fathers, never mind someone as conservative as mine.”
The food arrived, and El took a bite of her trout, chewing it slowly and appreciatively.
“This is really good,” she sighed.
“You’ve said several times your father was — is, I suppose — really conservative,” Gordon said. But you’ve never mentioned what he did.”
“He was a minister. Still is. Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Marin County.”
THEY TOOK THEIR TIME with dinner and lingered over dessert and coffee, talking comfortably, like old friends. By the time they got back to the house, there was just the faintest hint of light in the sky, and the moon, nearing the first quarter, was descending to the horizon in the west. El opened a side door and stepped out on the deck, Gordon followed her.
The temperature had cooled into the high 60s, and the air was still slightly humid from the storm. The evening sky was full of stars. Along the shore, crickets were chirping, and in the shallows of the lake, several frogs joined them in full throat. They could see lights along the shore across the lake, and also along the shore on their side, but at some distance. A sense of quiet and solitude enveloped them, and for a long time, they said nothing.
“On summer nights like this,” El finally said, “I’m really glad I bought this place.”
“It’s probably pretty awesome in the winter, when a storm’s moving in,” said Gordon.
“It is. In a different way, of course. You really feel the seasons in the mountains. Growing up in Marin County it seemed as if it was always cool summer or warm winter and hard to tell which.”
Gordon nodded. They were leaning against the deck railing, and somewhere in the lake, a trout rose with a loud splash.
“What do you think?” he said after another silence. “Are we making any progress on Charlotte’s case?”
“We’re making progress all right. There’s already enough for a story that should light a fire under our sheriff. And I think that with everything we’re coming up with, we may be circling the solution. We need more information and the inspiration to see it in a way that points to the answer. Also, I’m dying to know what’s in her journal.”
“You’re too young to die, so you’ll have to wait. I need to talk to Gina about how to handle it.
“You can’t even give me a hint?”
“Sorry.”
There was another pregnant silence.
“You know what I’d really like to do for my birthday, Gordon?”
“I’m afraid to guess.”
“I was just thinking about it. I’d like to run naked through a fountain again.”
The darkness, fortunately, masked Gordon’s reaction.
“I haven’t done that since I got married, and it would be a hoot to do it again. There are only three problems.”
Gordon maintained a strategic silence.
“Number one is that I probably need at least one more glass of wine before I try it. Number two is that there aren’t any fountains in this damn town. And number three is that it’s beginning to dawn on me that I’m getting a bit old for that sort of thing.”
“You shouldn’t say that. You’re a very attractive woman.”
“Don’t just tell me, Gordon. Show me.”
He did.
Part III: Secrets
“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which one is the true.”
—HAWTHORNE, The Scarlet Letter
Sunday June 23
WEARING A BATHROBE provided for the occasion, Gordon was sitting on a couch in the living room, a cup of coffee in one hand and Charlotte’s journal in the other. The day had dawned clear, bright an
d cloudless. All traces of the storm had vanished, and the morning air was as clear and pure as a high-country stream.
Now, with El in the shower, he was looking through the section of the journal following Charlotte’s abortion. The breakup, the pregnancy, and the death of her father seemed to have taken the starch out of Charlotte. She averaged three entries a week, rather than the previous six or seven, and these entries were typically half as long as what had come before and mostly concerned with the minutiae of her life.
He found two interesting nuggets, however. The first was an entry dated Saturday February 27, in which she reported meeting with her brother and the Paris family. They informed her that her father had picked out a lot on the Peninsulas for her and that they would see to it that a first-class house was built for her on that lot whenever she was ready. It was clear that the house that had burned down less than a week ago was the result of that meeting.
The second point was that her senior English class had apparently taken to Pride and Prejudice, and several students had written excellent papers on the book. Gordon took this as a sign that however demoralized Charlotte might have been, she still took pleasure in seeing her students get excited about a great book.
Reaching the end, he realized he had overlooked the last entry, dated Sunday February 28.
Really good service today. Father Michael spoke on the St. Francis prayer, and I have been reflecting on the second part of it: “Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted; to understand, than to be understood; to love than to be loved. For it is by self-forgetting that one finds. It is by forgiving that one is forgiven. It is by dying that one awakens to eternal life.” Not so sure about that last one, though I think Eliot (George, not T.S.) may have put it better at the end of Middlemarch. What those words do tell me, though, is that I need to focus on what I can offer the world, to help others, and, above all, forgive The Guv. The forgiving won’t be easy, but I shall vow to work at it until it happens.
There were several blank pages at the end; Charlotte apparently didn’t like to break up months over two journals and had decided this volume didn’t have enough pages left to contain her writings for March. Gordon carefully looked through all the pages — just to be diligent. When he turned the last one, reaching the inside back cover of the journal, he saw something else.
The inside cover had a diagonal flap running from upper right to lower left, providing a pocket in which stray pieces of paper could be slipped for safekeeping. It held a folded piece of pink paper, and Gordon gently pulled it out. The paper was wrapped around a faded Polaroid photograph that showed several people gathered around a bright red pickup truck, with what appeared to be Lake Año Nuevo in the background. Holding the picture up to the morning light, Gordon looked at it closely. There were two middle-aged couples, and one of the men was clearly a younger version of Roger Paris. The other man was standing with his wife (presumably) and a young man and woman. The woman looked like a younger, but still determined and confident Charlotte. Gordon guessed that he was looking at the London family, including Charlotte’s brother, whom he had not yet met. Two younger men stood next to Roger Paris; they could quite plausibly be younger versions of his sons Ronald and Robert. Turning the photo over, Gordon could see, written on its back in Charlotte’s unmistakable cursive, the legend, “Labor Day picnic, East Peninsula, 1970.” It was in pencil, and, judging from the fading of the paper on the back of the picture, had probably been written shortly after the photograph was taken.
Gordon put it back in the flap and frowned. The first question he had to consider was whether Charlotte had deliberately placed the picture there for him to see, should he ever come into possession of the journal, or whether it had been there for years and she had forgotten about it. There was nothing to indicate an answer one way or another.
He spread the pink paper on his lap and immediately recognized it as a relic from a bygone time. Back in the days of typewriters, many offices kept double-carbon memo sheets. They were triplicate sheets of 5 ½-by-8 paper used for memoranda, which, typed or handwritten on the top page, were copied through on to the pages below. The original page was sent to the recipient of the memo and the two copies, usually on different colored paper, duly filed. Howell, Burns & Bledsoe still used them when Gordon began working there in 1981, and the pink paper before him was a copy of a typed memo that read as follows:
To: Roger Paris
From: Ned London
Re: Crocker Bank Proposal
Roger, I have been giving this matter due consideration — thinking of nothing else, really. Try as I may to see your point of view on this, I cannot bring myself to go along with it. We are going to have to find some other way. I’m sorry. Can we meet tonight at your house or mine to discuss it privately and in more detail?
There were several strikeovers and cross-outs in the brief memo, indicating London had typed it himself rather than dictating it to a secretary, and it was signed, simply, “Ned,” in a way that made the three letters look like a long scrawl. It wasn’t until he read it the second time, though, that Gordon spotted the most salient element of the memo.
It was dated January 13, 1971, a week before the vote on the Peninsulas project, and the day Ned London had died in the auto accident.
GORDON NOW FELT CERTAIN that Charlotte had deliberately placed the photo and the memo in the journal before mailing it, but what did they mean? There was enough opacity in both documents to confound a more knowledgeable reader than himself, and he began to get irritated. Didn’t these people ever spell anything out? Why was Charlotte the one woman in ten (or more) who didn’t name her man in her private journal, but left him a cipher? Why did her father say nothing revelatory about the Crocker Bank proposal? Gordon guessed it was some sort of risky financial deal to fund the development and that, coming as late in the game as it did, it must have been important. But that still left him in the dark, and he couldn’t imagine what pretext he could concoct for asking the Paris family about it.
As he was thinking all this, he heard someone turn the handle of the front door from outside.
Thinking of his unknown stalker, Gordon felt a jolt of fear go through his body like an electrical current. The door was locked, but the lock was simple, and the door itself didn’t look any too stout. Anyone who really wanted to get in could do so quickly, and El’s house was isolated enough that there were no neighbors to take notice.
He jumped up from the couch, darted over to the kitchen area, and opened a drawer by the sink. He found several knives in it and grabbed one with a sharp, nine-inch blade. Holding it in his right hand, he moved over to the hallway facing the door just as it began to open.
The woman who came through it looked like no villain. She was, in fact, beautiful, even in worn jeans and a hoodie: in her 20s, tall, slim, with raven-black hair and almond-shaped eyes a man could look into forever. As she walked into the house, she saw Gordon, saw the knife, and stopped. She spoke first.
“You’re wearing The Robe, so you must be mom’s new squeeze,” she said, looking him up and down. “I see she’s going younger. I’m Anna, by the way.”
She extended her right hand. Gordon put his left hand behind his back, transferred the knife to it, and put his right hand out to her.
“Gordon. A pleasure to meet you.” He paused. “We weren’t expecting you until next week.”
“Is that what she said?” Anna pulled down the hoodie and tossed her head, whipping her shoulder-length hair backward. She was one of the few women Gordon had ever seen make that gesture without looking affected or juvenile. “Well, she’s as hopeless about dates as she is about men, so I can’t say I’m surprised. I hope there’s some food here. I’m really hungry.”
“Actually, we were about to go out for breakfast,” he said. “I’m sure … ”
El emerged from the bedroom. She was wearing a pair of well fitting jeans, but was barefoot and topless without a bra. Concentrating on pulling on a light sweater
top, she began talking without really looking around.
“I hope you’re ready for breakfast, Gordon. I’m starving. It’s been quite a while since I had that much wholesome exercise at bedtime. I could get used to it.”
Top in place, she turned to where Gordon was and saw her daughter.
“Honey. You’re home early.”
“I’m home when I said I’d be, mother. It’s good to be here.”
“It’s good to have you here.”
They embraced, and there seemed to be genuine warmth in the hug, which went on for a minute. When they broke off, El turned to Gordon.
“Anna, this is … ”
“Don’t bother, mom. We’ve been introduced.”
There was a brief, awkward silence.
“I’m hoping Anna can join us for breakfast,” Gordon said.
“I’d love to,” she said.
“Then we’re waiting on you, Gordon,” said El. “That has to be a first: The women waiting for the man to get dressed.” She laughed. Anna frowned.
“I’ll be ready in a minute,” he said.
It was less than ten feet to the bedroom door, which led to his clothes, but it seemed to Gordon like the longest, most self-conscious walk he had taken in his life.
“I WAS HOPING TO DRIVE all the way up yesterday,” Anna said, “but by the time I got to Sacramento I was beat. Finally, I pulled over in Williams and caught a few hours’ sleep at Motel 6 and headed up this morning.” She looked at Gordon. “I guess it worked out all right.”
They were drinking coffee at a corner table at the Shotgun, waiting for breakfast. In an hour, Gordon and El were due at Senator Bart Sturges’ house, and he was grateful for the self-imposed deadline on breakfast. The unplanned get-together was making him uncomfortable.
“So has anything exciting been going on in this old town?” Anna asked.
Gordon and El looked at each other. She answered the question.
“Do you remember Miss London, from the high school?” Anna nodded. “Well, she was killed in a fire at her house this past Monday.”
Not Death, But Love (Quill Gordon Mystery Book 3) Page 20