by Iona Whishaw
“They could be two entirely different curly blondes,” Terrell suggested. “I imagine the local beauty shops turn out a lot of curly blondes who aren’t that young but are trying to look it.”
“So, he’s either killed by a curly blonde, or, and we haven’t pursued this yet, someone he cheats at cards, or . . . or what about some other woman from his past . . . a blonde who was young once, had been seduced and discarded and never forgot, and has come back to get her revenge?” Ames said, animated again.
The phone on the desk jangled, and Ames picked it up impatiently. “Yes?”
It was O’Brien. “Sarge, I think you better come down here. A fellow has come in to confess to murdering Barney Watts.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
The pain was sharp and excruciating. Lane instinctively reached for the back of her head and found she could not. She had a momentary delusion that she was in a pram that rocked as it travelled, except she could not understand why someone would be yodelling. She opened her eyes slowly and was looking at the back of a car seat. She was lying on her side. She tried again to move her hands, if for nothing else but to locate and comfort the pounding pain at the back of her head. It was then she realized she they were bound behind her. Clarity began to reassert itself. The loud yodelling continued, and someone was ineptly yodelling along. Now she could feel the rope binding her ankles.
Closing her eyes, she tried to remember what must have happened before this moment. She’d been having lunch with Darling and said she was going to look into the nearby shops. She struggled to recall the exact trajectory of her movements. She had looked at the shops along the street the restaurant had been on and then turned the corner. She tried to bring to mind the name of the street she had turned onto but then discarded the effort as not essential. She had gone into a small dress shop and looked at a shawl. There was a black and white one with a beautifully woven fringe. She had been told it was a traditional Mexican r-something. Then that was it. She had come out of the shop, intending to look at other shops for shawls and then return for the black and white one. That was all that would come. No, wait. She opened her eyes. She remembered a sudden feeling of being closely followed, perhaps by two figures?
Judging by the pain, she must have been coshed and bundled into this car. She moved her legs onto the floor and struggled into a sitting position. The pain in her head surged. The yodeller was now singing, playing a guitar. Someone was sawing on a fiddle. The driver, who’d been singing along, stopped at Lane’s sudden appearance in the rear-view mirror and reached up to adjust it so he could see her better.
“Where are you taking me?” Lane leaned forward with some difficulty to talk to the driver. At least her voice still worked. He was wearing a cowboy hat and sported a bushy moustache. He looked like someone who ought to be easygoing and kindly, except for the coldness in his blue eyes.
“Good morning! Where am I taking you? Well now, that would be telling, wouldn’t it?” The driver had an easy delivery as if he plucked people off the street every day of the week and spirited them out of town—for out of town they were going.
Lane felt a momentary dismay. Was it morning? No. Late afternoon. Probably not long after she’d been at the shop. She was in the thrall of a sarcastic kidnapper. Wonderful. She looked with alarm at the passing landscape where the final sparse smattering of houses was disappearing. She could see the Catalina Mountains, where their riding expedition had gone just a few days before. So, they were going north, climbing a ridge that skirted the foothills. To Phoenix? But no. The driver turned east along a winding road.
“You’ve no right to take me anywhere. Who are you?”
“Would you shut up? Don’t make me sorry I didn’t throw a gag on you,” the man said loudly over the radio. He reached over and turned the radio down. The yodelling song was ending. Lane leaned back and watched the passing scene out the window. She could see the town, maddeningly down the hill, its small compact centre of office buildings rising like beacons in what was otherwise a vast sea of flat desert. Somewhere down there, Darling must be going absolutely mad, she thought. It was pointless to imagine rescue. She had been a block away around the corner from the restaurant when she’d been struck and bundled unceremoniously into the car. It was done in moments. She imagined it must have taken two people to get her into the car and tie her so quickly. Now there was only the driver. “That was Mr. Hank Snow with “Lonesome Blue Yodel,” here on kvoa from the Grand Ole Opry. Stay tuned for the nbc news.”
Irritated, the driver turned the radio off, leaving only the sound of the car on the gravel road. Lane considered another approach.
“Why have you kidnapped me?”
“That’s a little strong, isn’t it?” the driver said, looking into the mirror with a touch of a smirk.
More sarcasm. “Not from where I’m sitting.” She turned her head away to look at the city way below and then winced at the sharp pain at the back of her head.
The smirk turned into a chuckle. “Pretty and funny. You got it all.”
Lane, not wanting to indulge this type of conversation, fell silent again. They had moved far enough east that they appeared to be above the outskirts of the city. Abruptly the driver turned north again, and began a winding climb into the mountains. Lane looked out the rear window, trying to orient herself, but the city had disappeared behind the folds of mountains.
The saguaros gave way to a few deciduous trees and then to evergreens, a sign that they’d driven up into a more temperate zone. The car slowed and performed a hairpin turn onto a smaller, very bumpy road. They were headed west again, dropping slightly as they moved slowly parallel to the road they’d left. It seemed interminable. Lane kept her eye on the south, but the descending hills and the thicker cover of trees was making it difficult to calculate how far away from the city they were.
Finally they came to a stop. The sudden silence after the jarring ride made Lane feel as if something were pressing against her ears. The man leaned back, took out a pack of cigarettes, rapped one out, and stuck it in his mouth. Lane looked around, moving her head gingerly, trying to ascertain why they’d come to a halt. There was a cabin some fifty feet away, surrounded by pine trees that threw shade on a porch that ran the length of the front. Two rocking chairs gave an air of domesticity and comfort. Hardly the prison she thought she might be bound for. Still, she was bound.
“Are you going to untie me?”
The man took a long drag on his cigarette then exhaled, filling the closed car with a choking smoke. With a sigh he opened the door and got out, stretching and then spitting. “Come on then,” he said, opening her door. “Legs.” He waved his hand, indicating she should push her ankles in his direction so he could untie the rope. She hoped her skirt wasn’t riding up. He did not do the same for her arms. Longing to rub her ankles to get the circulation back, Lane struggled out of the car and rubbed one ankle against the other, thankful to be in the open air. The pain in her head engendered a wave of nausea. She breathed in deeply.
If it was meant to be her prison, it was an incongruously beautiful place. The black clouds hanging over the city had not completely blocked out the sun here, and though it was cold, the air had a sparkling freshness that seemed to emanate from the branches of trees that bobbed gently in the almost imperceptible breeze. Gulping air, as if fearful she would soon be deprived of it, Lane saw the view from the property, down a great cascade of overlapping hills, sky rising like a spreading dome, an intense blue in this clean air, dotted intermittently with puffy cumulus clouds. Though she could not see it, Tucson must be directly below them, or a bit west of where they were.
The man tossed his spent cigarette onto the ground and took her arm, wrangling her up the stairs to the front door. “Come on. Up we go.”
The cabin looked new. The door opened onto a generous sitting room with a massive stone fireplace and leather furniture. Navajo blankets were folded
over the backs of several chairs. The head of a bighorn sheep adorned one wall, and a shelf with one or two books but plenty of half-full bottles of various expensive whiskies occupied one side of the fireplace. This was someone’s vacation cabin, she thought. Someone with plenty of money.
“This is nice,” she said, trying to keep sarcasm out of her own voice. No need to enrage this man.
“Glad you think so.” He steered her across the room, opened a door and pushed her in. “Nicest room in the house,” he said, and then closed the door. She could hear the key turn in the lock with a maddening clarity. The man stood for a moment outside the door, as if waiting for her to protest, and then she heard his footsteps receding, she hoped in the direction of the kitchen. Perhaps he would be humane enough to bring her water. And some aspirin. At home an unused cabin would have the water turned off in the winter. She prayed it wasn’t so here.
She turned with a sigh to look about her cell—a large bedroom with its own bathroom. There was a double bed with a handmade quilt and a thick wool blanket folded at the bottom end. That was useful anyway, she thought. She couldn’t tell how long she was meant to be staying, but at this altitude it must be considerably colder at night than in town, and that was cold enough. No electricity. Everything here would be a lot easier to negotiate if her hands were not tied behind her back.
A window over the bed looked out over an ascending rocky treed hill. Even with hands, it would be a challenge to navigate, as the window was covered on the outside with an elaborate ironwork grill, no doubt, she thought bleakly, of some expensive Spanish Colonial design.
She sat with a thump on the bed and groaned at the pain that shot through the back of her head. She tried to feel her way along the rope tied around her hands. Her hands were crossed and face up and she could not feel where the knot was. Probably under her wrist where she could not reach it. The key in the door startled her, as if she’d been caught misbehaving, and she sat perfectly still and waited.
Holding a tray with a glass of water and a plate of sandwiches, the man came in and pushed the door shut with his foot. “Don’t say I never did anything for you. I’ll put these over here in case you’re hungry.”
“How do you expect me to eat with no hands?” Lane asked crossly.
“Keep your hair on. I’m gonna take the rope off. Don’t try any funny stuff. I have a gun in my belt and I’m not afraid to use it.” He pulled her to her feet and turned her so he could attend to the rope.
Her hands freed, Lane began to massage her wrists, wincing as she realized her shoulders also hurt.
“Why am I here? How long am I supposed to stay here?”
“Look, honey, I got no idea. I just do what I’m told.” He turned and moved toward the door.
“By whom?” Lane asked.
“You’ll be fine here overnight. Plenty of covers on that bed,” he said turning to her briefly and then letting himself out and locking the door behind him.
“Hey!” Lane called. “How about some aspirin?” But she got no reply. She put her hand up to feel her head and encountered a sizeable lump on the right side at the base of her skull. She gingerly pressed and held it in the hopes of reducing the swelling and looked longingly at the glass of water on the dresser. If she were to be here overnight, she’d have to husband her resources. She turned on the bathroom tap, and after a cough, a blob of water spit out, quite the wrong colour. She let it run while she inspected the bathroom window. It was high, clamped shut, and grated, just like the bedroom window. More worrisome, it was already getting dark outside. She looked with alarm at her watch and saw it was already ten to five. Soon, the temperature would drop even further, and she would be freezing in total darkness.
The water was running clear and she poured out the water she’d been given and refilled it from the tap. No point in taking risks. She stood by the door listening. She could hear her captor moving about, opening and shutting drawers, slamming cupboards. Then his footsteps approaching. She jumped away from the door and stood by the bed.
The man unlocked the door and threw a small yellow tin of aspirin on the bed beside her. “It’s all I could find,” he said, as if the search been an irritation that was making him late. He closed and locked the door again.
She wished she had charge of the key, particularly if her captor was spending the night. But then she heard footsteps going way from her. The front door opening and then closing. Was that another key turning in a lock? She put her ear to the door. The car starting and then slowly disappearing back along the road up the hill.
Kicking the door in irritation, she considered her situation. She was in the American southwest, locked in a log cabin with nothing but a sandwich for company, and soon it would be dark. She wished now she’d chosen a Zane Grey at the inn library. Surely something in one of those books would speak to her situation.
“Mr. Van Eyck,” Ames said, surprised. “You’d better come upstairs.”
Terrell settled him into a chair at the desk and Ames sat down and watched him, clasping his hands on the desk. “Now, what’s all this?” he asked, and then thought, God, I’m starting to sound like O’Brien.
Marcus Van Eyck looked nervously at Terrell, who had remained standing.
“I’ll get another chair from the next office, sir,” Terrell said, “and bring my notebook.”
Mr. Van Eyck sat looking down at his hands, his mouth working. He looked up when Terrell came back in with the chair and shifted his own chair slightly to make more room. The noise of the scraping of the chair on the floor was loud in the expectant silence.
Ames was about to speak when Van Eyck spoke up. “You mustn’t be hard on Tina. She doesn’t even know.” He looked at Ames in a way that suggested he was appealing to him personally on her behalf.
“Doesn’t know what, Mr. Van Eyck?” Ames asked. He was genuinely puzzled.
“She doesn’t know that I know. I’ve known for years. Her mother told me just before she died in ’37. She didn’t think it was right Tina should have that burden all on her own. I should have done something then, but then the war started, and Tina left, and I suppose he must have too. When it was all over and she was back, it was like the whole world had changed, wasn’t it? She was like a new person, that’s for sure. Confident, sure of herself, a heck of a mechanic. If she had any kind of a bad time in the old country, she’d learned how to handle it. I didn’t give it one thought till she had that argument with that Watts the other day.”
Ames sat for a moment after this rush of words. He could hear Terrell’s pencil on the surface of his notebook. Where to start? “So when you say you knew, do you mean about what happened to Tina when she was just out of school?”
“Being raped by someone? I know you’re reluctant to say the word, Constable Ames, I mean, sorry, Sergeant Ames. I was. I couldn’t bear to say it or even think it, but when I saw her with him, I knew he must be the one. She was like a wolverine. I was proud of her, Sergeant, and I thought, if she can bear it and defend herself like that, I’ve got no right to pretend it was anything but what it was. Honestly, it’s like they say, ‘a little child shall lead them.’ I felt powerless before, and then I knew I could never leave her alone with it ever again.”
“But you didn’t tell her you knew?” Ames clarified.
“Oh, God no. Can you imagine what it would have felt like for her to know her father knew something like that had happened to her? When I woke up the next morning and saw that word smeared across our bay doors, something snapped.”
“Can we just take a step back, Mr. Van Eyck? Were you aware she’d come here to the police to report the—the rape?”
Van Eyck nodded and took a big intake of breath. “Yeah. She, the wife, I mean, told me that. By the time my wife told me, that bastard had left the police, but I never forgot his name, Galloway, Sergeant Galloway.” He cleared his throat, as if he was unused to such a barrage of ta
lking.
“Let me get you a glass of water.” Terrell stood and put his notebook on his chair. Ames and Van Eyck sat quietly. They could hear Terrell walk to the top of the stairs and call down for one of the constables to bring water and then return, trying to sit as unobtrusively as possible, taking up his notebook again.
“So, can you tell me what happened on the day Barney Watts was killed?”
Van Eyck took a deep breath, as if he’d been preparing for this moment. “I checked the address we had for him in our records, and I drove there the next day and waited on the road to see if he would come down. When he did, I followed him. I thought he would head into town to work because he told me he worked in the rail yard, but I think he saw me. He drove away toward the north. He knew I was after him. He tried to get away by turning down the road to the ferry and realized he was trapped. I pushed him off the road and he was dazed. That’s how I got in and I killed him. There. I’m prepared to sign a statement.”
The door opened cautiously, and a glass of water was produced. Van Eyck took it and drank it down in three gulps and then put the glass down and looked expectantly at Ames.
Ames rubbed the side of his neck and glanced at Terrell, who was looking studiously down at his notebook. “Of course. I can get Constable Terrell to prepare it. Can you just clarify how you killed him? It’s best to get the whole thing down.”
Van Eyck looked up, pursed his lips, and then nodded. “Yes, of course. He had his window rolled down, and I reached in, and I guess I just got overcome with it all and I strangled him before I knew what I was doing.”
“And you did what with the window?”
“The window?” Van Eyck paused, looking puzzled. “Oh, yes. I see what you mean. “I . . . I went around the passenger side and rolled it up.”
“And did you do anything else? Take anything?”
“I just got out of there. I thought the ferry might come over and someone getting off might see me.”