“You could eat the linguine plain and skip the wine and bread.”
“Hah. I’d mug you for that jar of pesto and you know it.”
“What’s in the shopping bag?”
As soon as I asked the question, she started to chuckle. She hefted the bag; tissue paper rustled inside. It didn’t seem to be very heavy.
“Wedding present,” she said.
“Who from?”
“Paula Hanley.”
Paula Hanley ran an interior design company and was a client of the Bates and Carpenter ad agency where Kerry worked as creative director. They were friends as well as business associates, though on more than one occasion I’d wondered why. Paula had an outlook on life that was about twenty degrees south of normal.
“If it’s from her, it’s bound to be off-the-wall.”
“It is. Wait’ll you see it.”
“You opened it already, huh?”
“She made me open it in the office, in front of everybody. We all just howled.”
“Some kind of joke present?”
“Not exactly. Here, I rewrapped it for you.”
When I took the package out of the bag, the feel of it made me think it was a pillow. Right: a pink satin pillow, heart-shaped, with lace around the edges and white embroidery stitching on the front. The stitching formed a kind of motto:
IF IT HAS TIRES OR TESTICLES,
YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TROUBLE WITH IT
Kerry had been watching me with anticipation, chuckling again. I looked at her, then I looked at the pillow some more. All it did was make me frown.
“You don’t think it’s funny?” she said.
“No. What does it mean?”
“Oh, come on. You’re a big boy now. You know what tires and testicles are.”
“I know what it means,” I said. “I just don’t see the point of it.”
“The point,” she said, “is that it’s funny.” But she wasn’t chuckling any longer; she wasn’t even smiling. “It’s a funny saying. It’s especially funny to women. That’s probably why you don’t get it, not being a woman and not understanding women worth a hoot. Also, your sense of humor seems to have run away from home again, which it sometimes does for no apparent reason.”
“My sense of humor hasn’t gone anywhere. Just because I don’t happen to think a dumb saying like this—”
“It’s not a dumb saying.”
“—a dumb saying like this is funny, doesn’t mean I’ve lost my sense of humor.”
“It is not a dumb saying,” she said again. “It’s a true-to-life saying. A profound saying, as moments like this one clearly demonstrate.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I’m having trouble. With testicles.”
“Testicles? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Well, you’re the only one in this room who has them.”
“What do my testicles have to do with anything?”
“They’re not going to have anything to do with me tonight, that’s for sure. In fact, you may not have them much longer if you keep this up.”
“Why’re you getting so testy?”
“I’m not getting testy,” she said, “I’m getting testicled!” All of a sudden she burst out laughing. Then she grabbed the pillow out of my hand, clutched it to her chest, and charged out of the kitchen like a madwoman.
I put the linguine in the pot to cook. I could hear Kerry cackling to herself in the living room. Snockered, I thought. Drinks at her office and maybe somewhere afterward with Paula Hanley. Otherwise, why would she go off her nut over a silly saying stitched on a pillow?
I’m not getting testy, I’m getting testicled.
I didn’t see where that was funny either.
Chapter Five
MARLIN’S FERRY was one of those towns whose names are a puzzle to outsiders, and probably to most residents as well. It was sprawled out along both sides of Highway 12, near the junction with Highway 88 that leads up into the Gold Country; surrounded by walnut and cherry and apple orchards, vineyards, asparagus and onion farms, and farther to the east, cattle ranches. There was water nearby—the slender Mokelumne River and the Camanche Reservoir—but none of it was within a couple of miles of Marlin’s Ferry. Maybe the original proposed site of the town had been on or near the river. Maybe the Mokelumne had been a much wider body of water in the dim past—may well have, since steamboats had come up it as far as Lockeford in the post—Gold Rush days—and somebody named Marlin had operated a ferry service across it. Didn’t really matter what the town’s origins were, yet it was one of those little enigmas that nag at you. Nag at me, anyway.
I rolled in there at eleven on Tuesday morning. Cars and trucks skittered along the highway, but the town itself had that sleepy, static aspect that farm towns seem to have on weekdays. Few people out and about, desultory activity in the small houses and local businesses that lined the roadway like old men drowsing in the end-of-October sun. The simile was apt because it was an old town, timeworn and slowly dying: aged buildings for the most part, some with false fronts, some empty and boarded up; high, cracked sidewalks and here and there no sidewalks at all. To a lot of outsiders it might have been a depressing place, one to get through on the way to somewhere young and lively. To me it represented a world and a way of life that I liked better than the present ones. Marlin’s Ferry was over a hundred and I wasn’t yet sixty, but we had a lot of history in common.
With a population of nearly three thousand, it was large enough to have a newspaper. I stopped at a Chevron station to find out. Right: a weekly called the North valley Journal-Advertiser. Been in business a long time? I asked the station manager. Long as he could remember, he said, and he wasn’t much younger than me. Its offices were on Second Street, three blocks east, one block north.
The Journal-Advertiser’s home was at least half a century old, built of sun-bleached red brick. Venetian blinds covered the two plate-glass windows flanking the front entrance. Inside I found two women working, one behind a long counter and the other at a desk with a computer terminal on it. Computers again. Everywhere you went these days, including a tiny country newspaper. Well, what had I expected to find? A guy in a green eyeshade hunched over a type stick, a Linotype machine thumping away in the back room? Trouble with me was, I was more stubbornly old-fashioned than I cared to admit, to the point where it could—and sometimes did—cloud my judgment.
The woman at the desk turned out to be one of the editors, Alicia Cross. When I told her why I was there she said, “Well, I’m afraid there’s not much help I can give you. My husband and I bought the paper ten years ago; we lived in Sacramento before that. None of our staff was here in nineteen seventy-one either. But you’re welcome to look through the issues from back then.”
The morgue files were in a dusty, cramped room at the rear. Back issues were strung on those long wire-and-wood poles you used to see in library reading rooms, one year’s worth per pole. I found 1971 and the issue that had been published immediately after the nineteenth of November. There was a single birth announcement, but the date was the eighteenth and the child had been a boy.
Eleanor Nyland’s parting words echoed in my mind: Illegitimate? My God, if that was all it was . . . That poor girl. What she must have gone through . . . I’d have given the child up, too, if it were mine. Claire was a saint to take her. You could interpret the sum of that in different ways, but the ones that seemed most likely to me were abuse by the father or conception as a result of rape or statutory rape. Abuse was bad enough; rape was a worst-case scenario. Poor Melanie, if that turned out to be the truth of the matter. Poor me, if I had to be the one to tell her.
I riffled back to the February issues. There was nothing in any of them about a local rape or abuse case. Nothing in the March or April issues either; I checked those because of the possibility of a premature birth. Inconclusive either way. Some rape and domestic violence cases go unreported, and others, especially i
n small country towns, are suppressed to protect the victim. Also, if a crime had been committed against the mother it didn’t have to have taken place in or near Marlin’s Ferry. The only direct tie to the town that I knew about was Lyle Cousins, and there were any number of reasons to explain his involvement in the adoption proceedings.
On the Journal-Advertiser’s 1971 masthead the editor and publisher was listed as Evan J. Yarnell. I went out front and asked Alicia Cross, “Was it Evan Yarnell who sold you the paper?”
“That’s right.”
“Does he still live in this area, by any chance?”
“Well, we haven’t published his obit yet. Gladys,” she called to the woman behind the counter, “Ev Yarnell still lives out on Moss Road, doesn’t he?”
“Oh, sure. Same old place.”
“Moss Road,” Mrs. Cross said to me. She provided instructions on how to get there and a description of the property. Then she said with a wry smile, “Watch out for Ev. He’s a garrulous old coot and he’ll chew your ear off if you let him.”
“He’s welcome to one of them if he can tell me what I want to know. One last question before I go, Mrs. Cross?”
“Shoot.”
“I’m curious. How did Marlin’s Ferry get its name?”
Her smile slid off into a frown. “You know, I can’t answer that. As long as I’ve been here too. Gladys, how did this burg get its name? Somebody named Marlin found it or what?”
Gladys didn’t know either.
MOSS ROAD WAS a narrow county blacktop, dusty and in need of a pothole patrol, that meandered off Highway 88 in a loose parallel to the river. “After a mile or so you’ll see a red windmill,” Mrs. Cross had told me. It was more like two miles and the windmill was a faded orange color. A graveled drive led in past the windmill to a weathered frame house that had to be of turn-of-the-century vintage. Behind it was a barn, and on one side was a patchy lawn shaded by live oaks and droopy willows. Some distance beyond the barn, a section of the river glistened under the noon sun like sheet metal laid out between sloping, willow-strewn banks.
I found Evan Yarnell under one of the live oaks, stretched in loose comfort on a metal-framed hammock. He hadn’t gotten up when he heard my car and he didn’t get up when I approached him on foot; just lay there watching me with the casual interest of a hawk watching a rabbit. He’d been reading and having his lunch. On a TV tray next to the hammock was a half-eaten sandwich and a bottle of Sierra Pale Ale; the book fanned open on his chest was Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais. If he wasn’t eighty yet, he was crowding in on that milestone. Long, lean, stringy, with an egg-bald head discolored by liver spots and a nose like the blade of a hoe. The hawk’s eyes were brown and as shiny as the sun-struck river water.
I told him who I was and that Alicia Cross had pointed me his way, but that was as far as he let me get. He said, “Good woman, Alicia, her husband, Harry, too, put out a decent paper considering the handicaps,” and launched into a harangue on the differences between running a country newspaper in his day and now. “Cold type,” he said. “That’s what finally made me sell out and retire. You know what cold type is?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Photographic typesetting, computer typesetting. Couldn’t adapt to it. Word processors either. Damn dinky keyboards with a funny touch. I never even used an electric typewriter, you know that? Underwood manual, still works as good as the day I bought it in thirty-four.”
“Mr. Yarnell, the reason I’m here—”
“Call me Ev,” he said, “everybody does. Hot type, now, that’s the only proper way to print a newspaper. First job I ever had was helping a printer cast slugs on a Linotype. That was up in Oregon in twenty-nine, the year the stock market crashed. Small town near Astoria. Then they put me on the pony wire. You know what a pony wire was?”
“No, I really don’t know much about—”
“Didn’t have Teletypes in country offices in those days. Couldn’t afford ’em. What they did was, they subscribed to a telephone news service called the pony wire. Half hour each day the service dictated national and international news over the phone line. High speed, fast as the wireman could talk. You sat at a typewriter and put on earphones and tried to keep up with the dictation, get as much information down as you could. Had to be one hell of a fast typist. I was fast and I got faster. Before arthritis set in I could type a hundred and twenty words a minute on my old Underwood manual. . . .”
There was more in the same vein, anecdotes and details about the old-time newspaper business. It was interesting enough and I couldn’t seem to break him off of it, so I quit trying and let him ramble. But it was sad, too, listening to him. He hadn’t lost any of his sharp-witted intellect—or any of his desire for knowledge, as the Rabelais book testified—but he was also lonely and pining away for a vanished era, a time he understood and into which he fitted. Picking away at the past, clinging to fragments of it. Like Eleanor Nyland.
Like me.
Was this how I was going to be if I lived as long as Evan Yarnell? A sad old man looking backward, picking and clinging while I waited to die?
Yarnell finally ran out of steam after about ten minutes. Or rather, he seemed to realize suddenly that he was carrying on and to be embarrassed by the fact. He sat up in the hammock, thumped his knuckles against the side of his bald head as if punishing himself, and said, “I talk too goddamn much. Bored you silly, didn’t I?”
“No, sir, not at all.”
“Well, thanks for the lie. Interest you in a brew?”
“I’d better not.”
“Good pale ale, Sierra.”
“I’ve had it and it is, but I’ll still pass.”
“Don’t drink on the job, that’s good. I never did either. Private detective, you said? I knew a Pinkerton man once, in Denver right after Prohibition ended. He—” Yarnell stopped and thumped himself again, ruefully this time. “There I go again. Why do old farts like to talk? I didn’t talk half so much when I was young.”
I didn’t answer him. We both knew why.
“Well,” he said, “what brings you out here?”
“An adoption search.” I gave him some of the specifics.
“Lyle Cousins, eh? You sure he’s the one who handled the legal end?”
“On behalf of the Aldriches at least, yes.”
“Good man, Lyle. Known him forty years.”
“Honest?”
“As the day is long.”
“So in your opinion, everything about the adoption would have been strictly aboveboard.”
“Oh, sure. Absolutely.”
“The reason the birth mother gave the child up may have to do with unpleasant circumstances. My investigation so far suggests she might have been abused by a boyfriend or live-in lover, or that the child was conceived as the result of rape or statutory rape.”
Yarnell seemed to be working his memory. “Nineteen seventy-one, you said?”
“The child was born in November. The nineteenth.”
“Long time ago.”
“I know, but I’ve never known a news hawk who didn’t have a long memory. Can you recall if there were any reports of a rape in the early months of that year? Or domestic violence involving a pregnant woman?”
“Sorry, but I can’t. Cities don’t have a monopoly on violence, you know. We get more than our share out here in the sticks. Always have, always will.”
“Domestic violence, yes. But not that many rape cases.”
“Rapes too. I remember one time, back in the sixties, a gang of boys raped a Mexican girl—”
“Not the sixties, Mr. Yarnell. Nineteen seventy-one. February, March, April.”
“No,” he said.
He was lying. The abruptness of his response, the tone of his voice, his flat stare—all of those things said so. Something had happened early in 1971 and he remembered clearly enough what it was and he wasn’t going to tell me about it. Cover-up, all right, I thought. To protect the woman? Or the man involved?
One or both might have been a member of a prominent local family; that was the likeliest explanation.
A plane droned overhead. The sputtery sound of its engine made me look up. It was an old biplane crop duster and it came down steep over the river, then swooped back up the same way.
“Al Rogers,” Yarnell said. “Thinks he’s a stunt pilot. Damn fool’s going to kill himself one of these days. I remember one old crop duster in the forties—”
“Ev,” I said, “she really wants to know who she is.”
“Who does?”
“Melanie Aldrich. My client. She’s determined to find out who her birth parents are, if they’re still alive, and the reason she was given up for adoption.”
“No matter what, eh?”
“No matter what. She’s entitled, don’t you think?”
“Some things are better left alone. Don’t you think?”
“Maybe. But the decision isn’t mine. I’m being paid to do a job, and that makes me as determined as my client. I’ll find out sooner or later.”
“Probably will. Most things can be found out if you work hard enough and step on enough toes.”
“But not from you.”
“No,” he said, “not from me.” I watched him push up out of the hammock, set his book down on the TV tray. “Think I’ll go in and get myself another bottle of ale.” It was his way of terminating our conversation; the bottle on the tray was still half full.
I said, “Before I leave, there’s one other thing you can tell me. On a neutral subject.”
“What’s that?”
“How did Marlin’s Ferry get its name?”
“Why do you want to know that?”
“Curiosity.”
“Uh-huh. Well, the fact is, the origin of the town’s name seems to’ve slipped my mind. I expect you can find it out sooner or later, though, from somebody else. Determined fellow like you.”
He showed me a small, humorless smile and went away into the house.
ON THE DRIVE BACK to Marlin’s Ferry I considered stopping in to see Lyle Cousins. But there did not seem to be much point in it, at least not without more information than I’d scratched up so far. He hadn’t volunteered anything to an attorney of Philip Kleiner’s reputation; he wasn’t going to volunteer anything to me without some leverage, and probably not even then.
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