by Iona Whishaw
Chapter Twenty-Three
Darling and Lane climbed into the cab at the front of the inn, and Darling gave the cabby the instructions. They were just pulling into the narrow street when Lane saw a bank of clouds beginning to pile up in the west.
“Do you think it will rain today?” she asked the cabby. “It does seem cooler. I wonder if I should get my cardigan?”
The cabby stopped, backed up a few yards, and parked near the steps to the front door.
“That’s a good idea, ma’am. It can get cold if it rains. The hotel might have some umbrellas too.”
Lane got out of the car. A movement in the row of cars that was parked farther up the street caught her eye. Was the car blue? She shook her head, surprised, and hurried in to collect a sweater and umbrellas.
Once on the road again, she glanced out the back window. No flash of blue. It had been two years since the war had ended. Would she ever get over her professional vigilance? They were deposited on Church Avenue near the courthouse and given instructions for a pleasant historical walkabout and a suggestion for an authentic Mexican restaurant nearby.
“Now,” said Darling when they were standing gazing up at the courthouse. “What’s going on?”
“It’s all these men coming and going. It’s clearly worried Chela, especially when she learned one of them is a criminal.” She tried, even as she was talking about it, to put her finger on why it worried her so much. “I mean, out here in the open air, it really is just probably typical misbehaviour you’d get at any hotel. I think I let her make me feel a bit jumpy. I mean, for a moment I even thought we were being followed from the hotel. The whole thing is ridiculous.”
Darling weighed this. Lane had been trained in whatever the heck it was intelligence people had to do. He’d not known her to be ridiculous about anything. More disturbing to him was that it triggered an already brewing misgiving of his own, namely that trouble would come from Lane’s having helped Priscilla escape. He turned to her.
“I’ve never known you to be ridiculous. What made you think someone might be following us? Come, let’s walk around this confection of a building and see it from all angles.” He guided them along the front of the courthouse, but he began to watch the street.
“It’s just that when we stopped and went back to the hotel to fetch my cardigan, I saw what I thought was a blue car beginning to pull out and then stop as well. I told myself it was errant nonsense, of course.”
“Not errant enough not to keep an eye on the rear window, I couldn’t help noticing.”
“Yes, but who and why would anyone be following us?”
“I don’t know. You were witness to a murder, you kidnapped the assistant chief of police’s wife, you’ve been spying on a guest who might be associated with a mobster . . .”
Lane laughed. “I have not been spying on the guests. I just stumbled on that woman and her lover, and the rest was just Raúl’s sister worrying. And I can see you are scanning the horizon in search of enemies. Come. Let’s finish our tour of these lovely old buildings and find that restaurant before it starts raining. I propose to leave you over coffee and a newspaper after lunch and pop into a few local shops. You will be spared every horror associated with shopping.”
As per her promise, Lane left Darling at their small window table with coffee and the local newspaper. Darling turned to the crime-watch section and learned that Ivy and Edward Renwick had been arraigned subsequent to the death of Jack Renwick, Ivy’s husband and Edward’s brother, at an expensive local hotel. It interested him that Ivy Renwick had been released on a sizeable but unnamed bail on the condition that she remain in Tucson, but Ned Renwick had been remanded in custody. What did this mean? Had Martinez found stronger evidence linking him to the killing? According to the article, Edward had lied about being in Wisconsin when the murder took place, and there was some evidence of an association between the wife of the dead man and her brother-in-law. The reporter had also managed to get hold of the fact there’d been a poorly hidden dispute between the two brothers over the ownership of their father’s electric company.
This certainly put any possible involvement of Meg Holden and any of her improbable lovers into further doubt. He noted also that James Griffin would be on trial in two days on corruption charges related to his restaurant. He wondered about going to the public gallery for that. It might be interesting to see how the American system worked. His mind wandered further to what the relationship might be between Meg Holden and Griffin. He ordered more coffee and looked at his watch. Lane had been gone for over forty minutes, and he quailed at having to prolong his stay nursing cups of coffee for much longer.
Twenty minutes later, Darling paid the bill, got up, and went out onto the street. The promised rain had not yet materialized, but the afternoon felt ominously dark. Ought he to go looking for her? She would come back and be annoyed to find him not there. He moved slowly along the street looking into shop windows, trying to still his growing misgivings.
After a further half hour, Darling had moved from growing annoyance to actual anxiety. He looked up and then down the street, locked in indecision. He had no idea where she might have gone, but he was increasingly certain she would not have stayed away as long as this. She was much too courteous to make him wait. People passed him, bound who knew where, with parcels and friends, chatting and smiling, some on their own with worried faces. Two young women were laughing uncontrollably and, in his mind, were untroubled. He felt the envy of the burdened. None of them was Lane.
Would she have gone back to the inn? He could scarcely imagine she would have gone back without coming to fetch him. Well, it was the one solid move he could make. He crossed the street, breaking into a trot because the streetcar was coming faster than he bargained for, and went into a phone booth on the corner. He fumbled with the phone book, found the number for the hotel, and fished in his pocket for change. Worried he might have missed Lane at the restaurant, he looked through the phone box windows at the street. He found a nickel and put it into the machine, waited, and then dialled. His head swivelled when he saw a young woman pass. She wasn’t Lane. The wait seemed interminable.
“Santa Cruz Inn. Good afternoon.” An efficient, businesslike voice.
“Hello. This is Inspector Frederick Darling. I’m staying in number 26 with my wife.”
The voice warmed up. “Of course, Inspector Darling. How can I help?”
“Could you just check to see if my wife is back at the hotel? We seem to have crossed wires about where to meet.”
“I haven’t seen her come in, sir. I can send one of the girls to check. Would you like to hold?”
“Yes, I’ll hold, thank you.” He already had a sinking feeling he was wasting his time. She would not be there. He scanned the street anxiously while he waited. He could hear the hotel receptionist speaking to someone and then doing something with paper. A banging sound, like a chair hitting the edge of the counter. A long silence.
He glanced at his watch. The bloodless data of his watch face engendered a spike of anxiety. It was ticking well past an hour and a half. “Hello? Inspector Darling? I’m sorry, but your wife doesn’t appear to be here. Is there somewhere I can reach you if she does come in?”
“No.” Darling paused. What to say? “If she does come in, just let her know I’m on my way back.”
He pushed open the door, the sound of traffic seeming to burst on him after the silence of the booth. He felt disoriented by it and tried to place himself on a north–south axis but couldn’t remember which way the streets ran. A certainty lodged itself in his mind: they had been followed. Lane’s instinct had been right.
He would ask the way to the police station, but he knew it would be futile. In Nelson he would have told anyone calling to say their wife had been missing for an hour and a half to wait for at least twelve hours before sounding the alarm. There was no reason the Tucson police wo
uld be interested in a story about his wife not coming back from a shopping trip. But Martinez might be interested because the one clear possibility was that someone had thought Lane had seen something incriminating about someone on the day of the murder.
He went into every likely shop on the street and it appeared she had spent a good deal of time in a shop that sold clothing and Mexican weaving just around the corner from the restaurant.
“She was very interested in one of the shawls, but said she was going to look a bit more and might be back. That was, oh, an hour ago, easily. I’m afraid I didn’t see where she went after that.”
Conscious of time passing, Darling checked for likely businesses Lane would have visited, but no one had seen her. It was as if she’d gone up in smoke.
Martinez sat frowning and then shook his head. “It seems very unlikely to me, sir. Though we haven’t found the weapon yet, I’m fairly certain we have our man, and woman, for that matter.”
Darling sat back, his lips set in a grim line. “It’s been more than three hours now, Sergeant Martinez. I can tell you for a certainty my wife would never have disappeared for that length of time without letting me know.”
“Listen, I can put out a missing persons on her, of course. I think we should give it a little longer. My advice is that you go on back. For all you know she’s come back and is waiting for you.”
“Is Assistant Chief Galloway in?” Darling momentarily considered going over Martinez’s head, but even as he asked, he knew the sergeant was following established police procedure.
“He isn’t, sir. He hasn’t been in today.” Martinez glanced towards Galloway’s office. Where was Galloway?
The room was desolate in its silence. Darling walked into the bathroom and then back again, stopping at the dresser. He picked up Lane’s hairbrush, put it down, and looked toward the wardrobe, where he took up a handful of her cocktail dress—the one she’d married him in—and held it to his nose breathing in, his hands clutching tightly at the skirt, hearing it swish as he pulled at it. A kind of despair he had not thought possible flooded him. It was robbing him of any ability to act, he could see that. He closed the wardrobe firmly and went to sit at the desk. Pulling open the drawer he took out stationery and pen. He could occupy himself making notes, thinking through things, like she did. He was about to close the drawer when he saw her black notebook. He’d never asked to see it, and she’d never offered. He went to push it back, but his anguish drove him to open it instead.
Land and sky, here they balance
On a golden edge.
Heaven and earth, I am like that mystic
Of the Middle Ages, who looks with wonder
At the terrifying expanse above him.
My hand half raised to reach out,
Pulled to touch the starry eternity
That threatens to engulf.
And yet, it is not fear I feel
But yearning.
There were crossings out and additions. Darling imagined Lane whittling the poem—somewhere away from him in a place she kept only unto herself, words and partial words falling around her while she found her way to clarity. Desolation threatened to engulf him again. He closed the notebook and held it momentarily in his hand. He had read her poetry before and wondered at it, at the singular act of isolation that was required to write it. Even a Lane who went off somewhere he couldn’t follow to write was a Lane he devoutly wished for at this moment, rather than the one who seemed to have been snatched off the face of the earth, as if, he thought fancifully, into the very firmament she described.
He closed the drawer gently, picked up the phone, and was put through to the police department. Martinez wasn’t immediately available but would be called to the phone the minute he was free. Darling waited.
“Inspector Darling. I hope you are calling to tell me she is with you.”
“I am calling to tell you she is not, and I am not satisfied to wait any longer.”
“As it happens, Assistant Chief Galloway came in shortly after you left, and I spoke with him about it. We were preparing to mobilize in the event she was still missing. The boss has specifically said he wishes to take charge. I will let him know you have called, and I believe his first action will be to have you brought here.”
“I appreciate that. Tell him I am grateful.” He didn’t feel grateful. He only felt frightened, and the prospect of having to go anywhere with Galloway did nothing to make him feel better.
Eleanor Armstrong, postmistress of King’s Cove and a dear friend of her neighbour Lane, was looking out the window a little disconsolately. She felt bad about her mood—after all, who could be truly unhappy with a daily companion like her husband, Kenny? She could see him outside chopping wood for the stove, dressed in his ancient black wool pants and his thick maroon sweater with the rolled collar, his inevitable costume until it got too cold to go out without a jacket. She had knitted the sweater for him a few years after they married, and she thought it rather sweet he still reached for it on a cold autumn morning. Alexandra, their west highland terrier puppy, had gone out to help with the wood and now sat alertly watching and shivering intermittently.
I should knit her a little sweater, Eleanor thought. It cheered her up to think of having a project. The fact was she was missing Lane Winslow and, she amended her thought hastily, her nice husband, Inspector Darling. They were only gone for three weeks, but she had become used to Lane coming around to the post office, exclaiming over Alexandra, eating sandwiches or scones, and drinking tea.
Sighing, she picked up a sheet of newspaper she was about to consign to the wood box to start tomorrow morning’s fire when something caught her attention. She brought the paper closer and looked at the date. She glanced out the window and saw that Kenny had taken up an armful of wood and was making his way back to the house, Alexandra running ahead to clear the way. Eleanor opened the door and pushed the screen door to let them through.
“That should keep us a little longer.” He dumped the wood into the wood box and wiped his face with his handkerchief.
“Did you see this?” Eleanor asked, holding up the paper. “I don’t know how I missed it. Do you remember when we were going into town last Tuesday and we stopped to pick that woman up? We had to squeeze her into the cab with us. Blond thing.”
“I do. Why is the paper interested?”
“It’s not the paper, it’s the police. I wonder if it’s to do with that fellow they found dead in the car at the ferry?”
Kenny looked hopefully toward the sink where the kettle had stalled after being filled. “Why don’t you put that thing on, and I’ll go let them know. I hope it’s not too late! I bet Lane and her fellow will be sad to have missed the action! It doesn’t seem like a proper case unless she’s at the centre of it.”
“I’ll let him know, sir,” O’Brien said into the phone. “Can he phone you if he wants to follow up?”
Assured that he could, O’Brien put the receiver in the cradle and then looked up the stairs, contemplating a good loud shout. Considering the men on shift were quietly catching up on paperwork, he picked the receiver back up and dialled upstairs to Ames.
“Sarge, we’ve had a call from up the lake. A Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong did pick up a woman hitchhiking on the day in question. Blonde, curly hair, ever so nice. Knew it couldn’t be anything, but thought it was their duty to call. Dropped her about two miles north of Willow Point.”
“Armstrong? From King’s Cove?” Ames asked.
“That’s the place.”
“Did they say where they picked her up?”
“Sorry, I missed that bit. You could give them a ring back. Poor things probably have nothing to do all day. It’d be a treat.”
Ames smiled momentarily, thinking of the unceasing industry of everyone up in King’s Cove, and thanked O’Brien. His mood fell again immediately. A woman with curly blond hair. He picked up the
phone.
“Oh, no, dear me no, certainly not Miss Van Eyck. Nothing like. I remember her from the wedding, of course,” said Eleanor in answer to his anxiously asked question.
Relieved, though logic would have told him immediately that it couldn’t have been Tina, already exonerated at the dress shop, Ames asked, “Do you remember where you picked her up?”
“Yes, Mr. Armstrong and I were trying to remember. I’d say it was between Balfour and the Harrop ferry turnoff somewhere. She’d gotten a lift, she said, to visit her friend up the lake, and her husband was supposed to pick her up, only he hadn’t arrived, so she thought she’d better get back on her own.”
Ames leaned back in his chair and rubbed his chin. “Not very helpful,” he said to Terrell, who sat opposite. “For one thing, the woman was farther down the road from the ferry. For another . . . I don’t know. I haven’t got another.”
“It is singular that she had curly blond hair. That’s twice now that a woman is described as having curly blond hair.”
“Okay, let’s assume it is the same woman who bought the clothes. That puts her right in the middle of the thing, especially as we are looking for someone who might have left the car and had to get a lift back. Why is she coming from farther away when she gets picked up? It’s as if she’s continued down the lake and then turned around and comes back. Where does she go?”
“Maybe nowhere,” suggested Terrell. “Maybe she wants to throw off the scent.”
“Possibly. But here’s the other thing. This woman has twice been described as, well, a woman, not some young thing like Ada Finch, which is where the victim’s tastes clearly lay,” Ames said.