We were silent for a long time, looking at all the paper figures on the table- top.
“Let’s leave the question of the mastermind open for now,” I said. “Let’s just try to figure out what happened, okay?”
He seemed ready to object, then nodded. “We know the couples were separated, and that only Thelma and Barrett stayed at the marina. While all of that was going on, Katy and Todd and the dog were killed and put in the trunk of the Buick.”
“Which ends up on the farm. Griffin Baer might have been there that night, operating the tractor.” I looked at my notes again. “Jack told you he saw an old man operating it, right?”
“Yes.”
“Griffin Baer was sixty-two in 1958.”
“Jack had a skinful of martinis and a concussion.”
“Was he wrong about anything else?”
“No,” O’Connor admitted. He started pacing again.
None of this was going to get any easier on him, so I watched him for a minute or two before I said, “I think the killing must have taken place after the Buick was driven to the farm. And I think Katy or Todd fought them.”
He halted and stared at me. “What makes you say so?”
“The windshield. The fact that the car was wrecked. Maybe one of them was already dead when the other struggled-I don’t know. But Jack said the car’s grill was smashed in before it was buried.”
I told him about the dog fur being found on the flashlight, the signs that someone in the backseat bled-perhaps after being struck with the flashlight, too. “That had to be Katy, I think. When Woolsey finally releases the autopsies on Katy and Todd, we’ll know more. Todd was probably driving. Maybe Katy started fighting the man who took them.”
“More likely her than Todd,” he said quietly.
I tried to picture it. “Something happens to make the car go out of control, maybe the struggle in the backseat distracts Todd, or he’s shot-I don’t know. Blood ends up on the windshield. The dog is probably killed by a blow from the flashlight. Katy is hit with the flashlight, several times. She’s also shot, so maybe he shoots her after she’s unconscious.”
I heard him make a sound, as if he had been struck himself, and waited a moment before going on. He sat down.
“The killer puts Katy and Todd and the dog in the trunk, probably with Griffin Baer’s help. He takes off in a car that’s already waiting for him at the farm.” I moved the second unknown car to the farm.
O’Connor didn’t say anything. He looked toward the paper version of Katy’s house.
“Gus Ronden kills the nursemaid, Rose Hannon,” I said. “He doesn’t mind that part of it-he’s cruel. He might have someone with him, but I think it’s more likely he’s alone.”
“I agree.”
I put Gus and the baby in the Imperial, but before I moved it, I said, “Now, this is really important-blood matching Rose Hannon’s was found on clothing at his house, but nothing indicating the baby was there, right?”
“Right. Dan Norton searched the place for any sign of the child. Nothing was found. And the neighbor didn’t hear or see a child.”
“So he either killed the baby before he got home, or handed it off to someone else. No type O blood on the clothing Gus left in the hamper?”
“No,” he said slowly, “but an infant that young could be smothered or killed in any number of other ways that wouldn’t cause bleeding.”
“Yes, but this goes back to what I was saying when we were over at the Ducanes’-if the baby was supposed to be killed, Gus Ronden would have killed it there. And if the baby was just supposed to be held for ransom, why not take the nurse along as a hostage, too?”
“Adults are harder to manage.”
“Okay. But the fact is, no ransom note was ever delivered.”
“Maybe Gus bungled the kidnapping and the child died,” O’Connor said. “In truth, we just don’t know what happened to that little boy.”
“No, but Warren Ducane thought young Kyle Yeager-now Max-was that child, so that’s still a possibility. And if that’s true, we keep coming back to the same name again and again, and it’s the man you’ve suspected. Mitch Yeager could be the person who orchestrated all of this.”
O’Connor sighed. “Doubtless this has occurred to Lefebvre as well. But so far, there isn’t a thing anyone can do to prove that.”
“My guess is that the Baer farm was kind of a hideout for this gang, and had been for years.”
“Prohibition was long over by 1958,” O’Connor said.
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean smuggling was over. Or that criminals didn’t have a use for an out-of-the-way place.”
“Maybe.”
“Think about it-Gus has come back from killing Rose Hannon and handing the child off to someone. Bo Jergenson arrives and says he’s left a reporter at a hideout, where a double homicide was about to be covered up. Gus must have been rattled; he leaves a knife and his bloody clothes at his house. Of course, he thought he’d be able to go back to get them. He had a busy, busy night. He killed Bo, and maybe one or both of the other two, and then took off for the mountains. Or…maybe the other two are buried near the cabin, too.”
“Betty Bradford and Lew Hacker haven’t been seen or heard from in twenty years,” O’Connor said. “It’s not likely they’re alive. We would have heard from them after Lily and the new Max Ducane offered that reward.”
“I’m not so sure they’re dead.”
“Why, because of that phone call you got the other day?”
I shrugged. “A hunch. Maybe not a good one. I don’t know. Anyway, that night, or soon thereafter, Gus is dead. The only people left on the master-mind’s team are the murderer from the Sea Dreamer and the one who killed Katy and Todd in the Buick.”
“I can think of two people who are loyal to Mitch and wouldn’t have minded doing a night’s work like this,” O’Connor said.
“Eric and Ian? How old were they?”
“In their twenties.”
I thought about Eric holding Kyle over the railing. “I wonder if Ian and Eric know how to scuba dive.”
Barbara and Kenny never came by the paper.
I had Tuesday off and spent most of it taking my dad in for chemo and catching up on household chores and errands.
O’Connor called me at nine o’clock that evening to tell me that when he came home, my sister and Kenny were sitting close to each other on his living room couch. O’Connor wasn’t happy about finding them together, and neither was I, but we agreed there wasn’t a thing we could do about it.
When I told my father about it, he asked me if I had so few worries, I needed to borrow some from Barbara.
No. I had plenty of worries of my own.
I worried that my time with him was too short to waste with anything other than staying at his side. Nothing worried me more.
I worried that Mary would feel that I had trespassed on her kindness too often.
I worried that I’d never figure out what really happened that weekend in 1958, and more people would be harmed.
I worried that if I didn’t find something solid to back up all my great theories, I’d be covering a PTA fund-raiser by the middle of next week.
I worried that O’Connor and the other men in the newsroom were just humoring me.
I worried that someone really was following me all those times I felt watched, and I worried that no one was following me and I was losing my mind.
I worried that I liked Frank Harriman, the cop in Bakersfield, more than was healthy, because at the end of each day, no matter what else had occupied my mind, I found I had an urge to make a long-distance call to him, to ask if he was seeing anyone, to ask who was meeting him for coffee at the end of the shift these days, and-just to talk, to see if talking to him and listening to him still made me feel comfortable, at ease, in a way no one else seemed to make me feel at ease.
I didn’t make the call.