Civil Twilight

by Susan Dunlap

  But suddenly I remembered an important detail. “You and Madelyn weren’t totally alone. There was a migrant crew here.”

  “That’s right.” Once again, she was regarding me warily. “But they were way out in the garden, on the far side of the house.” Then she volunteered something surprising: “There’ve always been rumors that my aunt kept a lot of cash money around, to pay people, especially once the inn got underway.”

  “And it’s never been found?”

  “Of course not. It didn’t exist! Aunt Maddie wasn’t a fool. She may have been suspicious of banks, but she wasn’t an idiot. But people like that guy of yours are never going to believe it. He thinks he’s going to get rich.”

  “Has he been out here before, bothering you?”

  She nodded.

  “You could have called the sheriff.”

  A slight flush colored her face.

  “You didn’t because you were lonely?”

  “Bad judgment. I told you you can’t learn judgment.”

  “What can I say?” I was so furious at Wallinsky I could barely think straight. I picked up my cup to take to the kitchen and stood up.

  “Wait. I’ll make you a sandwich. You’re hungry, right? You probably didn’t have breakfast.”

  She sounded like a little kid begging for just a few more minutes of human attention. Don’t leave me.

  But I had all I was going to get here. Hanging around was just putting off driving home and calling Korematsu. “Claire, I’m sorry. I have to go back.”

  She looked like she was going to cry. Like she’d been controlling herself, or trying to, the whole time I’d been here. Now, all of a sudden, it was just too much.

  “Claire?”

  “But I was going to make sandwiches!”

  Why did the creation of food always make such a difference? Why did the food take on the whole pain? “I’m sorry.”

  “Promise me you’ll come back. I understand—I really do—you’ve got other stuff. You hardly know me. There’s no reason, but, well, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m so lonely here. Days, weeks, no one comes.”

  “But you could have—”

  “No! She’d have found me in a city! I was safe here. This place I know. No one’s going to get me here.”

  Tentatively, I put a hand on her shoulder. She flinched but didn’t shake it off. I could have reminded her Sonora Eades wasn’t going to threaten her anymore, but I just couldn’t. Despite everything, I still couldn’t make myself believe Karen Johnson was a psychopathic murderer.

  But looking at Claire, seemingly about to go to pieces, it would have been impossible to say she didn’t believe it.

  “But now,” she forced out, “now I don’t have to . . . I can go, do . . . Omigod, I don’t even know. It’s so scary.”

  “Give yourself time.” I smiled reassuringly.

  “I don’t know anyone, anywhere. The only place I’ve been is here.”

  “You’ve been to town. If it weren’t for Wallinsky outside, I’d be asking you to give me a lift.”

  “Sure, yes, I’d do that . . . for you. Sure. I even have a new car. I’ll show you. No one’s seen it. I mean there’s no one to show it to.” She thought about this for a moment, sighed and then, making some association, and still hoping to keep me, said, “Tell me about your stunts. You said you were in the movies?”

  “I’m doing a set now in San Francisco.” As we walked to the car, a new silver Honda that made me believe Claire really would free herself from her prison here, I told her about the set-up. “The character I’m doubling is a woman on the run from her husband’s killers. She’s being chased through the city. She—I—screeches around the corner onto California Street, side-swipes one cable car and hits another. Then her car explodes. That’s what I’m doing Monday night, the fire gag.”

  “Fire! Will you be on fire? How do you do that?”

  “Why don’t you come watch? I’ll leave your name with security. I’d like that.”

  “Really? Wow, that’s . . . great!” She looked longingly at her shiny new car. “I could take you for a ride.”

  “Next time. Right now I have to deal with him out front.”

  “We could stop somewhere, get brunch, it’d be fun!” Don’t leave!

  “I’ll see you on the set, okay?”

  I gave a wave as I loped off—glad to be moving—around the house and into Wallinsky’s steam bath of a truck. “So you lied to me again. Do you do it out of habit, or do you just lie so much you don’t remember what the truth was? Or are you just a colossal pain in the ass?”

  “The latter,” he said, in a tone that proved him right. “So I’ve been out to the house here? That’s what you mean, right?”

  “What else did you lie about?”

  21

  HE SHOVED THE passenger door open. “Get in. I’m driving.”

  “Fine.” That wasn’t going to be my battle. “You and Claire? Just what was that about?”

  For the first time he was silenced. He actually flushed a little.

  “You came on to her?”

  “Yeah. I needed to get close. It was business.”

  “To you.”

  “Me and my boss.”

  “The boss, as I recall, you did not have. So you came on to this poor isolated girl for the purpose of getting into her house and pants?”

  “Wasn’t like that.”

  “Wasn’t like what?”

  “Damn it, I needed to know. How was Madelyn Cesko killed? Why did Sunny—Sonora—pick up that knife?”

  “Sunny? Omigod, you knew Sonora, didn’t you? This isn’t just a story that grabbed you, you knew her before. You—you had connections here that got you a local job. You were already poking around this town before Madelyn was murdered, isn’t that right?”

  He didn’t answer, which I took as a yes.

  “That’s why it was easy for you to find a job. Because the grocery owner already knew you, isn’t that right? Isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” He hit the gas and shot down the dirt road, his eyes straight ahead. The truck bounced like a toy. He hadn’t even thought to turn on the air-conditioning yet. I flipped the knob.

  “So you weren’t here to find out about the murder. You were already after something before Madelyn was killed.”

  He shifted forward, nearly into the wheel.

  “Okay, Wallinsky. So, what did you come here for?”

  We were doing just under 75, about ten miles more than the road could handle. Amateur drivers terrify me; they’re like nervous perps with guns. I checked the door handle location, and the roof supports. If he rolled it, I wanted a fighting chance. Then I lied. “You’re not frightening me. I do car wrecks for a living. So answer my question, or you’ll hear it every ten seconds between here and Star Pine. What were you after at Madelyn Cesko’s?”

  With a great sigh, he let up the accelerator. “The migrant crews. They were virtual slaves. Nobody cared. I was hot to be an investigative reporter back then. It was a big story in my mind, but not for anyone else. Not sexy enough. But then I thought of the celebrity angle—to get some editor’s attention. Madelyn Cesko was a famous, big shot cookbook writer who was hiring them to do her vegetable garden. ‘Celebrity Cook Uses Slave Labor.’” He glanced over at me.

  I nodded. It was just about plausible. But, as always with Wallinsky, something was missing in the story. There had to—“Omigod, there never was any survey—”

  “Wrong!” He looked shocked by his own admission. “Of course there was a survey. Do you think their sheriff didn’t check on that? Sunny was in college, taking sociology, doing the survey, just like I told you.”

  He looked so smug I had to believe him. And yet . . . “Oh, wait, you piggybacked onto the survey, right? You spotted Sonora—Sunny—with this great cover story and you dangled your job, one that someone like her would jump at. You needed her to go out there and investigate it for you. You couldn’t do it yourself. Why? Too hard? Too dangerous?�
�� I didn’t wait for his answer. “So you sent her out and when she didn’t get the goods you sent her off again, right?”

  He still didn’t say anything. This time it looked like he couldn’t. His face was flushed and his lips pressed tightly together.

  Now I knew how she had gotten away after the killing. How she’d managed to get whatever fake ID she needed and vanish in those twenty-four hours before the sheriff even arrived at the Cesko house. Twenty-four hours! Still, in a high-profile case like this . . . amazing.

  But now I also understood why Claire had thrown him out. “You don’t believe Sonora was a killer, do you? At least not in the way everyone thinks.”

  “No.”

  I looked over just as he turned toward me. Our eyes met, and, for an instant, everything felt right. “I can’t believe it either. Tell me about her. Where she was from. Her parents. School. Everything. What was she like then?”

  “Looking back, she was a nice kid. I thought of her as too serious. But that was okay for me. What I needed. She was from one of those suburbs that got gobbled up by San Diego. Father in the Navy. Only child. Mother dead. Sunny hated the military life. She didn’t say much, didn’t need to, not to a guy who’d dropped out of college. Idealistic but not crazy. She could recite the Bill of Rights. From memory. I’ve worked for a lot of lawyers since then and not one has come close. But to her it was like a prayer.”

  No wonder I’d thought there was something between her and Gary. “Was she headed to law school?”

  “Probably. But she was only a sophomore then. She could just as easily have gone into reporting. She had a gift for chatting people up. At first, though, she seemed flighty, like she’d never stop talking. And I worried I’d made a huge mistake hiring her. I thought she’d never shut up long enough to hear anything.”

  Boy, had she changed by the time she became Karen Johnson.

  “What hooked her to begin with was the idea of working under a reporter. I listed the notice as an apprenticeship.”

  “She must have thought she was the one making the mistake when she saw you,” I told him. He missed the sarcasm, which was okay. “And not just because you were practically a kid yourself.”

  “Old enough to be acting on my ideals,” he corrected me. “She was a kid from some plastic subdivision. She wanted that story almost as much as I did. I didn’t have to twist her arm. Maybe she pressed Madelyn Cesko a little too hard about the migrants working here. I knew she was concerned about Claire out there, so isolated. But I don’t know what happened. I didn’t force her out there. She wanted to go back there again to see Claire, too. I figured Claire would help me. I was wrong.”

  “Were you in love with her?”

  “With Sunny?”

  “Yeah, with Sunny?”

  “Hell no. She weighed two hundred pounds.”

  “God, you are a pig.” And this time I wasn’t being sarcastic.

  He looked over at me as if I’d stepped off another planet.

  There wasn’t time to deal with his failings; a lifetime probably wouldn’t suffice. All I could think of, anyway, was the fact that his description of Sonora Eades was so different from the Karen Johnson I’d seen; I had to question once again if they could really be the same person. “So you know how to get to Alaska, right?”

  He didn’t answer me. But the set of his face gave him away.

  A pig, yes, but he’d pulled off a very tough vanishing act. Still, I wanted to smack him. Instead, I said, “Here’s what I know about Sunny afterwards. She had a backbreaking job carrying fish up a cliff in Alaska. By the time she got through she said she could see the outlines of her muscles like she was an anatomy model—”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “The day she died in San Francisco, we ran up the hill to Coit Tower. She was beautiful—blonde, slim, expensive clothes, expensive hair and face. Telling me she was here for a divorce. So, Wallinsky, what happened in the middle?”

  “Married money!” he said. Did I detect a note of bitterness?

  “Doesn’t take a detective to figure that. What else?”

  “Won the jackpot?”

  “No, that’s exactly what she wouldn’t—couldn’t—do. She couldn’t win a lottery because, Wallinsky, she was a fugitive. You can’t draw attention to yourself like that. So what else? How’d she get to be a beautiful woman in expensive clothes?”

  22

  FRIDAY

  IN THE ZENDO the bell rings into silence.

  Behind and to my left, I could hear the door easing closed and footsteps—slow, careful, as if prolonging the walk to a cushion might somehow make a 7:05 A.M. arrival seem less late than it was. Cloth rustled, knees creaked. I waited till the absence of sound expanded and took on its own sounds—of the birds, of breathing, of a bus hauling itself up Columbus Avenue. I struck the bell and listened to the sweet reverberation—as if a peach had become music—spread through the room and mesh with the silence. I hit the bell the second time, and then the third, listening to its sound melting into the room.

  Morning zazen varies from day to day. The unformed day can ease into a noting of breath flowing out and refilling, with the note of each new bird a greeting. Thoughts present themselves—but they can wait. Some days, for me, the pull of sleep is strong, drawing me into a dream from which I awake, dream again, wake again to one scene after another equally real, equally illusionary. This morning Karen Johnson/Sonora Eades was just too compelling to push away.

  Driving back along I-5, I’d wondered about her life in Alaska. How terrifying it must have been for an earnest twenty-year-old to wake up every morning as a hunted killer? The crime would have been news nationwide, till the next monstrous thing bumped it from the headlines. Fleeing, she’d had a head start, but not much of one. Then, to have to watch every word you utter, to scan every face for a threatening light of recognition—she must have been wrung out by the end of each day.

  Non-attachment is an axiom of Buddhism. Zen students know that attachment is the cause of misery. We see ourselves led by the nose ring of what we want, what we think we need. And yet we still want. Everyone in the zendo would resist giving up all the things they wanted. How much harder for a twenty-year-old girl like Karen Johnson to step off that hundred-foot pole?

  However, it had been eighteen years since Madelyn’s death. No one hauls fish up a cliff that long.

  So she’d married. Stopped working? Born children? Whatever the state of her marriage, she’d managed a comfortable life. But what had driven her to consider divorce and leave the safety she’d found for herself to return to an existence in which she could never get a driver’s license, hold a job that required a social security number, apply for a passport, or draw attention to herself. What could be that important?

  Leo was bowing to his cushion. I hadn’t even heard him come in. Zen practice is about awareness! I focused back on my breath flowing out, being pulled back in. I wondered . . . This time I let the thought go and noticed my exhale. Meditation, Suzuki-roshi said, is coming back to the breath again and again.

  At the end of the period, I rang the bell. The door opened and Korematsu stepped in, standing there and watching as the rest of us chanted the Heart Sutra. Form is no different from emptiness, emptiness no different than form.

  When I walked out of the zendo, Korematsu was waiting. “Why didn’t you call me sooner?” he demanded.

  I wanted to talk to Gary. He wasn’t at Karen’s apartment. It was obvious he hadn’t been there all day. Chances were he’d left right after I did and I wasn’t going to find him again, damn him. “I’m giving you Karen Johnson’s real identity. The better response would be ‘thank you.’”

  “I’ve got coffee. Thanks enough?”

  I nodded, followed him into the courtyard as he handed me a paper cup. Espresso, a double. Maybe a triple. It did make me think better of him. I sipped, realized it was cool enough and took a long swallow, following the heat down my body the way I’d just been doing with my breath. M
y eyes opened wider, my head cleared and I noticed how good Korematsu looked at this hour of the morning. Korematsu who’d used me to try to see into John’s mind. Get a grip, Darcy!

  “Talk,” he said.

  “Karen had a cookbook by Madelyn Cesko—”

  “Knife? Murderer vanishes?”

  It still shocked me to say it. “Karen Johnson is Sonora Eades.”

  A thatch of hair fell over his forehead and he pushed it back. Then he said, “Why do you think our Karen Johnson is Sonora Eades?”

  I tried to work out what my reply should be.

  “Darcy? You creating an answer?” Busted! Quickly, I said, “Sonora Eades’s little finger was twisted so the nail faced out. Ditto Karen Johnson’s.”

  “That’s your proof?”

  “Well, yeah! Hard to get clearer proof than that. Plus, now that you know she’s Sonora Eades, there’ll be fingerprints from the investigation in the database somewhere.”

  He slammed down his cup. The coffee spurted out the lid. “Fingerprints! Darcy, what is it you expect me to judge them against? Her fingertips are shredded like cole slaw. The best expert in the country’s never going to get a match.”

  “Well, what about the DNA?”

  “I asked you a question.”

  I hesitated. Karen’s prints had to be on the desk, the chair, the door of Gary’s office, but furious as I was at his disappearing again, I couldn’t bear to rat him out either. I compromised—a bad compromise, a semi-ratting. It’d lead Korematsu to Gary, but not right away.

  “I’ll make you a deal.”

  “Police don’t do deals.”

  I laughed.

  “I don’t do deals.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  He shook his head. “I’ve already stuck my neck out for John. You may remember, he and I are not close! We have history. But I covered, waiting for him to stop hiding out like a little kid.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “You should. I didn’t do it for him.”

  “Thanks.”