by Susan Dunlap
“What happened to Sonora afterwards? Why,” I said, “was it so clear that she killed Madelyn? It doesn’t sound as if Claire, or anyone, actually saw her do it.”
“No one there but her and Claire, and the migrants. They came and went. They had no reason to harm Madelyn. It wasn’t one of them.”
“But how do—”
“Or Claire, if that’s where you’re headed.”
It was. “How—”
“Because”—Edie paused, checked her audience—“the Eades girl’s fingerprint was on the knife. On the handle, pressed into Madelyn’s blood.”
The room went silent. Though I suspected that, as an audience, they were on the verge of applause.
“But—”
“No buts. Not at all. We must’ve had every cop and every sheriff and all the techs from the coroner’s office in here. And the press! That was back when papers had their own reporters, didn’t just pick up stuff off the wire.”
“. . . all over town, popping up next to us,” an overweight guy was saying. “Every kid and every granny was suddenly an expert! Remember?”
“It was awful,” Edie said. “Vultures.”
“Kept The Caboose open till midnight,” a woman at the nearest table offered. Her companions nodded.
“You remember that. You were here then.” This from the dark-haired woman. Wallinsky’s neighbor.
Edie was looking at him.
He hesitated.
This was bad.
“You were in school then, weren’t you? For a month or so.”
Very bad.
I patted Wallinksy’s shoulder. Said kindly, “It’s been hard enough on you all these years, but I think coming here tonight was a mistake. What do you say, how about some rest before we go?”
18
A VERY bad mistake.
“You went to school here?” I demanded as soon as I slid behind the wheel.
“Get out. Let me drive.”
“Oh, right, and have everyone looking out The Caboose window gossip about your miraculous recovery.” Restraining the urge to slam into reverse, I backed out slowly, glided down the tiny main drag, not pressing the pedal till we were on the unlighted two-lane. When we hit the first curve, I yanked the wheel hard, smacking him into the door. “You forgot to tell me you lived here for an entire month? What’s the matter with you?”
“I did say I’d been here.”
“Been here’s not the same as lived here! Been here’s a raindrop; lived here’s a lake. Does John know about that?”
“Listen, I—”
“No, huh?”
“Well, why would he? He hired me to find your brother, not to dig into the Cesko case.”
“Nothing like a coincidence.” I pulled around a slow car—one doing only the limit—and cut back in close enough to make him gasp. With luck I’d never come face to face with the other driver. As ticked off as I was at Wallinsky, I couldn’t stop thinking of Claire Cesko moving back into the bloody house. Were there still blood stains that had never come out? How could she be discharged from a psychiatric facility and be sent home to the scene of the crime? No wonder she talked suicide.
“Let me drive,” he said again.
“Talk.”
“Hey, it’s my truck.”
“Driving is nine-tenths of the . . . whatever.”
“You know, you—never mind.”
I eased off the gas pedal a bit. “Take your time.”
“Okay, okay.” He shifted around in the seat. “It was my first job. I was in college, or more accurately had dropped out of college, though I hadn’t quite realized it. I thought it’d be a kick to be a PI, do some fast talking, ‘loid a few locks,’ the whole schtick. Then suddenly, in the school cafeteria where I was spending the time I wasn’t spending on going to class, there was an old guy looking for an assistant. Like he’d materialized just for me. If I’d been up to any fast thinking then, I’d have gotten my antennae up when he didn’t ask about my classes or why I could take a month off with no problem, or about experience. He just watched me shoot the breeze.”
“Because you were what he needed?”
“Yeah. Needed someone who could listen, too. That eliminated most of the others he was eyeing.” He laughed. “Anyway, my new boss had a connection, a woman who’d say I was her nephew. She enrolled me in high school.
“Didn’t you need transcripts from your ‘last school?’”
He shifted to face me. “You think you have to be a genius to fake a transcript from Weehawken High, across the country in Jersey? Nice birth certificate, too.”
“So you were what, eighteen? Twenty?”
“Twenty. But I looked sixteen, which of course was why he chose me, not that I would have admitted that then.”
“So you enrolled . . . ?”
“Yeah, the idea was to get to know Claire to draw her out. But, of course, that didn’t happen because she didn’t come back to school. The PI kept me there a month, hoping she’d show, but by the end of the month she was on her way to gagaland in San Fran.”
“But you clearly made other friends.”
“I did what I could, joined clubs, tried out for teams. I was Mr. Congeniality. I’ll tell you, that month in high school really made me appreciate college. Not enough to try to finish the semester, but I understood that the lack of bells and being able to make your own schedule were real benefits.”
“Maybe they could quote you in the college catalog.”
He snorted.
“What were you after?” I knew, but I wanted to hear him say it.
I could hear him drawing in breath, feel him watching me, trying to stay two steps ahead. “That’s the frustrating thing. I don’t know. Sounds dumb. Was dumb. But I was a kid looking for a fun job and happy to have one dangled in front of me. If I’d known anything about detective work I’d have said, ‘Hey, what should I be asking? What am I after?’ But I didn’t. He told me to go and keep my ears open, not to ask anything particular, but to pay attention when anything useful came up. So I’d call him every night and make a report. It wasn’t till toward the end of the month that I began to think the whole thing was a sham—that he was telling whoever hired him that he was up here investigating while all along he was sitting in a Eureka bar. When I got back to town, eventually, after he’d dragged the gig out as long as he could, I told him what I thought.”
“And he said?”
“He just looked at me. Didn’t even give me the courtesy of any reply, much less an explanation.” Wallinsky made a noise that could have been a derisive laugh. “I didn’t know who was paying him; I had nothing. So I had him write me up the kind of reference you’d give the head of the class at Quantico. Don’t know if it ever fooled anybody, but I’ve worked steady ever since.”
I swung into the motel, cut the engine and turned to him. “Well, it’s not fooling me.”
The apron of light from the cabins was just bright enough to show an upward flicker of his eyes. He shrugged. “Busted!”
The guy wasn’t even embarrassed. “What was the deal?” I demanded. “What did this unnamed employer—oh hell, he didn’t exist, did he? It was just you. But you were here. You got yourself into school, and stayed a month. Why?”
“Okay, okay. You’re right. The thing is, I wanted to get to Claire. I figured she had to know something she hadn’t told the sheriff. Not that she was involved, but just that you don’t tell the cops everything, even if you intend to. You forget things, you don’t connect Points A and D, and when you finally do, you figure it’s too unimportant to go through it all again. Or you don’t want to be a pest—or else you just want to forget. Whatever. I figured there had to be something.”
“So was there?”
“Dunno. What I said about her being gone, that was true. I never saw her. But I’d left school, taken the trouble to set myself up here, so I stayed, hoping I’d be able to find something out from one of her friends. What I found was she didn’t have friends.”
> “That took you a month?”
“Took me a day. Then I tried to get a job in town where I could overhear stuff. Only thing I got offered was being a part-time stocker at the grocery. I had every intention of serious eavesdropping, but it’s hard when you’re shelving canned fruit on aisle one and the conversation’s at the far end of aisle two.” He reached for the door handle.
I reached faster for his arm. “What were you after? Was there some kind of reward?”
“Nah. It was cut and dried from the beginning. Sonora Eades tried to wipe her prints off the knife but there was still one good one left. The sheriff would have closed the case in record time if she hadn’t disappeared—”
“Dammit, what happened to her!”
“Hold on! We’re on the same page here. That’s what drove me crazy! What happened to Sonora? Answer: she disappeared. End of story.”
“Oh, come on—”
“That’s the truth.”
“You know I find that a very suspicious phrase.”
“Yeah, well. But sometimes ‘the truth’ is true. Like now. I went out there, to the house, three times trying to get a lead. First time there was crime scene tape and I was nervous. Second time the tape was down but there was a patrol car in the driveway. The last time the tape was gone and the driveway empty. But I was still nervous, and with good reason. Sheriff stopped me getting into my car half a mile down the road, suspicious I was looting or up to something an outsider kid shouldn’t be. That’s when I weighed the pros and cons and went back to Eureka. I talked to kids who knew her at Humboldt State—”
“What’d they say about her?”
“Nice, serious, committed. They said what friends always say about a murder suspect: Not the type to ever kill anyone.”
“That’s it?”
“I called her father. He was in the Navy when she was a kid and, frankly, he was useless. Hadn’t talked to her in months. That’s it. Truth.”
That might be the truth, but it sure wasn’t the whole truth. Still, I wasn’t going to waste energy on anymore of his variations on a theme. Tomorrow, I’d have another go at him. “What’s Claire like now?”
He shrugged.
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“Hey, lighten up. That was twenty years ago. She was sixteen. I didn’t see her then. Haven’t seen her since. What do you think’s going on?”
“I don’t know. Probably nothing. Probably Claire Cesko is a thirty-six-year-old woman whose only interest is which season to feature in her next book. Probably.”
It was too late to drive out to her house now, way too late. But I was going to feel a lot better when I laid eyes on her.
19
FRIDAY
WE DIDN’T GET much sleep, but I can usually make do on a few hours’ worth for several days before I crash. What I needed more than sleep was a long run or a couple hours in the gym—something to clear the mush out of my brain. Strapped in the passenger seat, I felt like a zoo tiger whose muscles were atrophying. I rolled down the window—it was already hotter than it’d be mid-afternoon at home.
Morning eases into San Francisco, usually with a thinning of the night’s fog. In summer it doesn’t clear till ten, sometimes not at all. But here dawn burst forth. Sunlight glistened off tree, grass, macadam—everything. As Wallinsky sped along the blacktop toward Madelyn Cesko’s house (or more accurately now her niece Claire’s), I accessed my messages. I wasn’t due back on the set for the second stunt till Monday, at least that was the schedule when I left there two days ago. But no word otherwise from Jed Elliot, so that was good.
I checked in with Leo. He already knew I wouldn’t be at zazen today. “Anything else I should know?”
“Do you mean have the police been here? Answer’s no. None of your family’s called.”
“Thanks. I should be back tomorrow.”
It was 7:00 A.M. when we turned off the hard-top onto a single lane of crackled macadam. “Her driveway?”
“Right.”
A frisson of excitement filled my chest. Karen’s copy of Claire’s cookbook had been signed, not inscribed, but signed. Still, the book could be signed stock and mean zip. Yet why had Karen Johnson bought or brought with her this single book?
Tall grasses, or what might less graciously be called weeds, filled the fields on either side. Ahead, the road disappeared over the edge of a slight rise. But the land was essentially flat. Wallinsky’s lips were tense, his teeth pressed together creating little pouches at the corner of his mouth and made his nose knobbier in a disarming way. The game of life is a kick, everything about him said. Hey, I’ve got a free spot of my team. Here’s the ball. See what fun it is!
We crested the rise and still I saw no house. A few scraggly trees had pushed up amidst the grasses. Wallinsky was checking both sides of the road, as if cataloging the changes in foliage. As if it mattered. Did it matter? As if something had been buried under one of those trees.
“What are you watching for?”
“Habit. Precautionary ass-covering.”
“How long is this driveway, if you can call this thing a driveway?” I asked. “Quite a distance for a college girl taking a survey to go.”
“It’s rural.”
“There’re houses in town, houses on the road leading to town. She could have gotten ten face-to-faces in the time she spent bouncing along this trail.”
Off to the right the grasses changed. Lighter. Something like a gigantic letter M stamped the earth a paler color. “What’s that?”
“Foundation. Madelyn was about to build a little inn. It was going to be a few guestrooms and a dining room. For her fans.”
I glanced back at what was close to rubble now and wondered what Sonora Eades would have made of the foundation—it must have been new—when she drove past it on her way in.
“Okay, so if Madelyn blew off Sonora the first time, of course she’d have gone back. Even if she blew her off again, it’d be worth another try, low percentage as that chance might be. Of course—” I caught Wallinsky’s smug expression an instant before he smiled and nodded. “Not ‘of course’?”
“You snapped up the story every sheriff and reporter followed.”
“And you didn’t?”
“I’m not saying it’s wrong. Could be a hundred percent right, could be fifty.”
“Could be Sonora came here hot for the interview and found something more compelling?” Something that’s still here for the taking?
Before he could answer the road curved and suddenly a house was dead in front of us.
In the way you realize you’ve had a fuzzy picture in the back of your head all along, I looked at the house with surprise. It wasn’t the vine-covered cottage with smoke wafting out a chimney cooking that I’d pictured for the cookbook author. Nor was it the weathered, overgrown pile of boards I was dreaming up for Claire Cesko. It was the kind of prefab house that could have been at a beach or in a development next to a mobile home court, the kind a truck delivers in two halves.
One step led to a door next to a plate-glass window backed by closed curtains. Smaller windows at the sides suggested one big room in the middle comprising kitchen and living room, bedrooms on the sides. The house was tan, almost the same shade as the flora. The paint was fresh, the windows clean, but the wild grasses grew right up against it. I glanced at the side windows. The blinds were drawn on both. “It’s like life outside doesn’t exist.”
“Or she sleeps late,” he said.
“Yeah, or that. Or she’s not in there.”
The edge of the curtain trembled.
“She’s there, Darcy. Let me do the talking.”
“Like at the bar?”
As soon as I jumped down from the truck the sun slapped my skin. The air was dusty. The path to the door was dry grass, the kind that had had any moisture fried out of it. I followed in Wallinsky’s wake. He knocked.
She didn’t open the door. I could hear her inside, not walking around but breathing
loudly.
He knocked again. “Claire?” And then, “Claire! Come on, open up.”
She opened it, and suddenly there she was. Standing with one hand on the frame, she had her other hand on the edge of the door as if afraid of it being shoved open. Cool air wafted through the doorway. She was tall but almost childlike in her slightness. Her skin was smooth and well-cared for. Her thin blonde hair was caught back in a ponytail neither at the top of her head or the nape of her neck, but the middle of the back as if she’d grabbed a rubber band and carelessly pulled the hair into it. The pale legs of a natural blonde protruded from shorts and her T-shirt had Chinese characters across the front.
But it was her expression that struck me. I couldn’t keep myself from staring. Her mouth was firm, pressed in annoyance. Her pale brown eyes peered directly at Wallinsky, but something in the pull of her brow gave them a look of terror completely at odds with the lower half of her face. She seemed undecided whether to slam the door in anger—or run.
“Have you seen the news?” Wallinsky asked.
“No.” She was staring at him the way I wanted to stare at her, to examine her. But the fear in her eyes was more pronounced.
“A woman in San Francisco jumped off a building, onto the freeway.”
She said nothing, just kept staring.
I didn’t correct Wallinsky’s assumption about Karen’s death. “The only personal possession in the place she was staying was your book.”
“Damn!”
“I can understand it’s a shock, but why would she—”
“Oh, damn. You’re reporters, aren’t you?”
“No, no.”
“Yeah, that’s what they said before when they were all over this place like ants, banging on the door, peering in the windows, parking all over the lawn like they owned it.” Her tone was sharp, her shoulders hunched in, but her face was all fear.
“We’re not reporters.”
“That’s how it was before, when Aunt Maddie died. They came like that, like an invasion, cars and trucks and cameras. Like a sandstorm squeezing in through the cracks around the windows.”
“I work in the movies. I do stunts.” That almost always gets people.