by Susan Dunlap
But it didn’t snag Claire Cesko. She wasn’t thinking about the woman who died, and she sure wasn’t paying attention to me; her whole focus was on Wallinsky. “You’re not a reporter? But I know you? You look familiar.”
What else hadn’t he told me?
“Maybe.” He was playing for time.
“The delivery boy at the grocery. You weren’t very good, were you? You brought the wrong order here twice.” She eased backward warily, her hand tightening on the door. “It was a long way to come with a mistake.”
Wallinsky hesitated.
“You were putting cans on the top shelves, pulling the old ones in back up to the front where people would buy them.” She was smiling but her brows were pulled down even farther in suspicion or fear, as if even the parts of her own face couldn’t decide how she felt about him.
I stepped in front. “He was a jerk.” I glared back at him. “And he’s still a jerk.” To her, I said, “There are no reporters. Not yet. Only us and the question why your new book was so important to that woman. She didn’t even own a saucepan.”
“Some people like to read recipes. They’re comforting. Cookbooks make good gifts for all sorts of people.” She said this last bit as if it were from a script she’d memorized.
“You could be right. But, on the chance there’s another reason, maybe she was—Karen Johnson—a friend.”
“I don’t know a Karen Johnson.”
I wanted to describe her, but how? Blonde, but she undoubtedly had had some other shade. Nice looking, but not natural, with easy-to-spot evidence of face work. “She talked about stepping off a hundred-foot pole.”
Claire started. She was looking past me at Wallinsky; his face had gone white.
“You know it, the koan?”
“That’s crazy,” she snapped. “Anyway, I don’t have friends. I’ve never had friends. I live way out here.”
“What do you do?”
“Do? I do what my aunt did, I work. People think writing cookbooks is pulling recipes out of a box and copying them. But it’s not easy to come up with something now. Food’s been around a long time, you know. To create something new, something that’ll make people want to try it, it’s not easy, and it damned well doesn’t happen on the first try or the seventy-fifth try. It’s . . .”
“Frustrating,” I offered.
“Damn right, it is.”
“How do you do everything? The cooking, the shopping, the gardening?” I asked. “You’ve got to have help.”
“Your aunt had help,” Wallinsky added.
“She had to. She had publication deadlines. She had to grow more—different—vegetables here.”
“And she must’ve had help in the house.”
Claire let out a bitter laugh. “Me.”
“Just you? You were a kid,” I said, feeling for her. “And the migrant help, what about them?”
She grabbed the doorknob, ready to slam. “You’re one of those damn lawyers. Don’t you know what a statute of limitations is? Besides, my aunt is dead! Just leave—”
He ignored her, pushing himself forward.
“Stop it, Wallinsky!” I shoved him aside.
“Hey, I—”
“Get away from her!”
He jolted back.
“Damn it, get away!” I shouted at him. “I only wanted help finding a lead on Karen Johnson and here you are terrifying Claire, who’s only trying to help me.” I turned to her. “I’m sorry. I know it’s been hard for you and we’re the last thing you need.”
Her hand was still on the knob. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Wallinsky walking slowly back to his truck.
“Please. Something connects Karen Johnson to you.”
“No!”
“To your aunt, then. Look, if I’ve discovered that, you know the police will. They’ll be here asking the same questions. Think! Karen Johnson was probably in her early forties, so she’d have been college age when your aunt died.”
College age. A college girl.
“My aunt didn’t have friends. I have to work all the time just to do the book, but she worked all the time because that’s how she was. She didn’t care about anything else. She cooked, she thought cooking, she wrote, she publicized. She could have been Julia Child, could have had her own TV show. She was driven.”
“She must have driven you, too.”
“Not just me, everyone. She didn’t have friends. Ask in town, see if you find one person she ever invited here, a single friend.”
“How about Edie?”
“Edie thinks she was a friend?” she asked, clearly amazed.
“She—”
“All I’ve ever wanted is to live like a normal person, to go to the store, the laundry, the movies. But people stare. People—you!—show up at my door. Go away! Leave me alone! I don’t know this person you’re asking about. And my aunt didn’t. I’ve spent too much of my life already getting over my aunt’s murder. Isn’t that enough for you?” She slammed the door.
I trudged back to the pickup, suddenly drained. Wallinsky was sitting in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead. Every bit of his shirt was damp. I walked around to the driver’s side and climbed in. I knew the answer, but I put a hand on his arm and then said, “Sonora Eades. She’s Karen Johnson, isn’t she? How long have you known that?”
He swallowed. “Can’t be sure. But age’d be right.”
I watched him as he wrestled with what was obviously a difficult thought. For the first time, I sensed, he’d be speaking the truth.
“D’you think . . . Was that always her plan, all these years, to jump?” he said, finally.
“She didn’t jump. She was pushed, murdered.”
He snapped open the glove compartment, rustled through stuffed envelopes, shut the door, then opened it again and sat back as if realizing what he was looking for was something that would act as a denial of her death. “What did this Karen Johnson look like?”
“People change. But about five eight. The little finger on one hand was twisted so the nail faced away from the others.”
“Shit.”
20
I DON’T KNOW how long I sat in the truck staring out the dusty windshield into the brown grass of summer. Sweat coated my face, ran down my back. I could have asked him to switch on the air conditioner; I didn’t. Karen Johnson a murderer? A murderer with a knife? It wasn’t possible, not the woman in the blue linen shell, not the person who laughed about Gary’s lack of exercise, not—“She saved a kid from being hit!”
“What?”
“Hit by a car. Not long after I met her.”
You can’t stand to believe anything bad about people you like.
“A carving knife’s so Lizzie Borden!”
Wallinsky didn’t answer and I was glad.
The keys hung in the ignition but I didn’t touch them. Eventually I got out and walked back to Claire’s door, knocked.
No answer.
“Claire,” I shouted. “This is important.”
Still no answer.
Sweat glued my hair to my neck, ran down under my arms. It was so hot I could barely breathe. “Claire! I’m not a reporter, but trust me, there will be reporters here soon and you don’t want them taking you by surprise. You need to hear the news from me first.”
The door stayed shut. No sound came from inside. But I was betting she was right on the other side of the door. I said in a normal tone, “Sonora Eades is dead.”
The door snapped open. “I don’t—Okay, come in and sit down.”
I stepped inside, appreciative of the suddenly cool air.
She motioned toward a ladderback chair at a round oak table. With her blonde ponytail at the odd, off-center spot in the back of her head, and her skinny pale legs sticking out of her shorts, she looked like a kid sent to the table to do the homework she’d been putting off all vacation. Her face had flushed but was already losing color, and that wariness I’d noticed before in her eyes seemed like a default expression.
After all she’d been through I could hardly blame her.
Karen Johnson had been here? In this doorway? Brandishing a knife? How could that be? How could she talk about us having dinner then steal a police car?
The room had an old-fashioned feel, as if Claire had changed nothing since her aunt’s death. Or maybe she’d just never had the interest or attention to give to redecorating. I could picture Madelyn Cesko busily at her six-burner stove. The image I had was some version of what I remembered from that cookbook of hers Mom once had. Was the murder, in fact, the reason it’d disappeared? Mom thinking there was something creepy about it—and who could blame her?
Claire interrupted my thoughts. “What’s your name?”
“Darcy, Darcy Lott.” I said. “I met Sonora Eades just before she died, in San Francisco, two days ago. She plunged off a building onto the freeway.” The memory of her boneless face on the morgue trolley blocked out everything. “It wasn’t an accident . . . or suicide.”
“But why does that give you the right to try to shove your way into my house?”
It was as if we were inhabiting parallel universes. I had to remind myself she might have a very different interest in the death of the woman who’d ruined her life.
“You want some herb tea?” she unexpectedly offered.
“Do you have black?” What I needed was a drink, or else Renzo’s espresso. English Breakfast was hardly going to resuscitate me. “Do you grow your own herbs?” I asked, although I thought I knew the answer.
Still, I was surprised when she said sadly, “My aunt did. I should. I’ve kind of let things get away from me. For a long time I just couldn’t face doing anything she did. It was too painful.”
I watched her from behind as she fiddled at the stove. It was a sitter’s back, buttocks already flattening so that her shorts sagged at the back and jutted out at the sides. She probably wouldn’t grow fat but her pale skin would sag and wrinkle from lack of tone. What did she do with her time out here day after day? Spend it like her aunt, cooking, planning to cook, and nothing else?
Once she’d poured the boiling water into mugs and put the kettle back, she seemed to be moving the mugs without purpose. But her shoulders tightened and she kept her back to me.
The stringed labels were hanging off the side of the mugs when she put them in front of us. The pale water would probably stay so. No aroma wafted up, as if the tea had been in the cabinet for years. “Thanks!”
Claire looked surprised—as well she might. Without pretence of drinking, she put her own cup down. “How did you meet Sonora?” she asked abruptly.
“The thing is, I liked her,” I said, and waited for the explosion.
It didn’t come. Instead, she stared at me, with an odd expression, and then lowered her eyes. “I liked her, too,” she admitted. “I never say that to reporters or anyone; it’d just cause trouble. When she came out here the first time and Aunt Maddie didn’t have time to be bothered with her, she hung around and talked. I didn’t get much chance to talk to anybody back then, so it was real nice for me. She was a few years older than me and I was impressed she had this summer job, going up to strangers’ doors in a strange town, asking questions, when I hardly even ever went to town without Aunt Maddie. I never worked in the garden on my own, either. I always let her tell me what to do. I was like a child . . . I—” She turned away from me. She sounded like she was crying, making me hesitate to come any nearer. “It was all my fault. The whole thing was my fault. Sonora would have gone away, gone to someone else’s house and probably it would have all been okay. But, see, I wanted her to come back. So I told her I could convince Aunt Maddie to answer her questions, that she should come back in a couple days. If I hadn’t . . .”
“How could you not want a girl your age back? Isolated like you were out here!”
“But if I hadn’t—I knew I wasn’t going to convince Aunt Maddie of anything. I never once had, not ever. She wasn’t going to talk to Sonora the next time either. The only difference—and I knew this, too—is that she’d be angry. But still I did it. I wanted to see Sonora. I thought after Aunt Maddie screamed at her, I could walk her partway out to the road and we’d talk and she’d understand I was sorry and we’d be, just for a little while, like friends. I just . . . just . . .”
She shifted, still more turned away than facing me. “When she came, Aunt Maddie’d had a bad day. She had a recipe that wasn’t working and she was on deadline. Plus, she’d had to get an entire side of beef because of some problem with the butcher. And using even the best knives slowed her down. She was never that good at it.” She stopped again, closing her eyes. “So she wasn’t in a good mood.”
“What happened then?” I couldn’t believe I was getting the whole story like this; it was as if a switch had been thrown.
“She drove right up to the door like she’d been invited—which she had. By me, like I said. But before she even knocked Aunt Maddie yanked open the door and started screaming. And Sonora exploded. Really. She just went off! I was so stunned I couldn’t get out of my chair—this chair, the one you’re sitting in. I was sitting right there.”
“She went off like that just because your aunt was screaming? Was your aunt shoving her, or hitting her?”
“No, just yelling, the way she did when she was frustrated. I figured she was going to be screaming at me as soon as Sonora left. I figured I had just enough time to run out the back door before she slammed the front one in Sonora’s face. Then I could run around the side of the house and tell Sonora how really, really sorry I was, and maybe she’d still hang around with me a little. I didn’t think so after what I did . . . but I hoped.
“But by the time I got there, she was standing holding the knife and Aunt Maddie was a heap on the doorstep.” Her hands were quivering but her eyes were dry as she looked directly at me. “You’re wondering how I can tell you that horrible story and not break down again, aren’t you? In the beginning I didn’t tell anyone, except the sheriff, because I’d fall apart before I got anywhere near the end. Then it got so I’d told it so many times the meaning started leaking out. It was just words and I sounded like a robot. If I’d have told reporters then they’d’ve said I’d had a lobotomy or something.”
“But Claire, why’d you tell me?”
“Because this is like normal. We’re sitting here like normal people, like we’re almost friends.”
“And?”
“Because I’m so fucking relieved.”
I could barely believe those words came out of her timid little mouth. “Relieved that Sonora’s dead?” I swallowed as hard as I ever have in my life, struggling to control the burst of fury I felt. You’re relieved Karen’s dead? You were the one who lured her back here.
“Yes!”
I thought she was going to burst into tears now, but once again, she didn’t. She looked away, and when she finally turned back we were both in better control. “Ever since—all this time—I’ve never pulled open that door without being terrified. When Aunt Maddie was here, a knock on the door meant somebody wanting something from her. She’d be polite to them but there was hell to pay after. And then everything had to be perfect so she could get back into her groove. It was always in the back of my mind, the fact that every knock was like an explosion. I was never ready . . . I had no plan . . . no insulation. That’s what the shrink in San Francisco said. You know what?”
It was a moment before I realized she was waiting for my reply. “What?”
“You’re probably not going to believe this, but I was in the bin there before it even occurred to me that normal people don’t resent every knock on the door. The girl in the next room there said her family left the doors unlocked. I assumed she was delusional, I mean seriously.”
I lifted my cup and drank to give myself time to consider. Isolation like that was almost incomprehensible to me, the youngest of seven children, growing up in a house where the front door was always banging open and Mom kept stew in the fridge to heat up f
or any kid or kid’s friend who wandered in between meals. It was a rare dinner without a guest or without three conversations going on at once. At least before Mike disappeared.
I felt for Claire, but still, something about her story didn’t fit.
“You liked Sonora and yet you’re relieved that she’s dead?”
“Now I don’t have to be afraid she’ll kill me, too.” She shook her head. “Listen, she must have been a psychopath. One minute she was a cheerful college girl and the next she grabbed Aunt Maddie’s knife and stabbed her. So you don’t need to look at me like that. Of course she dreamed of killing me, just like she killed my aunt.” Then softly, she said, “I don’t keep big knives here anymore. None.”
She lifted her teacup with steady hands. Why wasn’t she more visibly upset? Her neck and shoulders were tight, but otherwise it was as if her emotions were on a separate circuit from her body. She was the one who’d mentioned lobotomy. But it was still Sonora—my Karen Johnson—that was the biggest question mark. What had set her off like that? So enraged her that she’d grabbed the knife and plunged it into a woman’s chest? A virtual stranger. Had it been like a blood vessel bursting without warning? Or was she truly a psychopath with such a good façade I’d missed any hint of deviance?
Except, out of the blue, stealing a police car!
Suddenly I understood only too well what Claire was not saying—and maybe not even seeing. “I’m probably the only person you’ve met who knows just what you mean. I liked her, too, I told you. We were going to meet for dinner. And then, out of the blue, she stole a police car. How can I ever trust my judgment again?”
“If only she’d just taken our car!”
Despite everything, I almost laughed. “It must be hard to trust people after that. I mean, second-guessing yourself.”
“Why do you think I stayed way out here, alone? I invited a woman here who killed my aunt! I never had a clue. But I’m going to tell you something. You can’t learn judgment, no matter how many years you spend in the bin. So don’t even try. Look, I let you in!”
Was she making a joke? I couldn’t tell. Did she even have a sense of humor, or was she just a mass of quirks?