“She did by then,” Twining said. “Found it among Jack’s papers. I asked her why she hadn’t contacted me, and that was when she said she didn’t want to file a claim, didn’t want the fifty thousand.”
“Do you remember her exact words?”
“ ‘I don’t need the money, I don’t want it. Jack should never have taken out an insurance policy.’ She just wanted to forget the whole thing.”
“ ‘Jack should never have taken out an insurance policy.’ That’s a funny way to phrase it.”
“Funny?”
“As if he’d done something wrong.”
“I guess she figured he had. She seemed pretty upset about it.”
“Upset over a life insurance policy that would pay her and her daughter fifty thousand dollars. That just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
Twining made a Who-knows? gesture with one hand. “She’s one of those people who think insurance is a ghoul’s game.” He looked at me squarely and added, “Even stone-fox widows can be a little nuts.”
I ignored it; there was nothing to be gained in challenging him again. “Did you talk to her after that?”
“Once. To see if maybe she’d changed her mind. She wouldn’t even let me in the house.”
“So you haven’t told her about Intercoastal bringing in an investigator.”
“Not my place. Besides, Fujita said I should keep it confidential. You going to see her?”
“As soon as I can.”
“How about if I go out there with you, pave the way—”
“Not necessary. All I need is directions to her home.”
He provided them, and we both came up out of our chairs as if some kind of bell had gone off. No handshake this time, no parting words — both of us anxious for me to be gone. At the door I glanced back and he gave a little dismissive wave; his smile had slipped halfway into a sneer. What an asshole, his eyes said.
I went out thinking the same about him.
2
One of the good things about living in Greenwood was that no matter where you were located, even along the main road through the village, you felt you were in the country. Trees and ground cover grew in dense profusion: half the streets and side roads were shade tunnels created by the interlocking branches of oak, manzanita, eucalpytus, plum and wild cherry, other trees I couldn’t name. Busy six-and eight-lane Highway 280 was only a couple of miles away, but here the effect of quiet rusticity was so complete you might have been tucked away in a High Sierra backwater. To my mind, the best part was that it was still a natural habitat, not an architect’s wet dream like so many ritzy planned communities these days. The builders had taken advantage of the environment without any sort of destructive tampering. Peaceful coexistence between man and nature. Even developer in California, particularly the perpetrators of tracts thrown up on indiscriminately clear-cut and bulldozed land, in which every house looks the same and the overall effect is of a gigantic penal colony, ought to be force-fed the principles of the Greenwood method.
But even then, I thought in my cynical fashion, the greedy bastards still wouldn’t get it or give a damn if they did. They didn’t care where or how other people lived, as long as they didn’t have to be there among them. Half of the land-raping, build-’em-fast-and-loose developers in the Bay Area probably resided right here in woodsy, horsey, affluent Greenwood.
Whiskey Flat Road, along which I was driving as I indulged in these gloomy speculations, was a narrow lane about a third of a mile west of the village center, where the rolling land began to rise into steeper hills. There were homes on large parcels along both sides, a picture-postcard brook that kept meandering from one side of the road to the other through carefully constructed culverts. I passed gated drives, pastured horses, fences of wood and chainlink and stone and mossy brick, most of them overgrown with ivy or oleander shrubs. About half the houses were hidden, the rest partially so. Number 769 was more or less in the second category, set up on a little knoll on the west side and surrounded by trees and shrubbery so that you had a kind of filtered look at it even when you turned into the driveway. I couldn’t even be sure of its architectural style from down below, though most of the Whiskey Flat homes were variations of the sprawling, single-story ranch type.
The drive was gated, but the gate was open; I went on through, uphill past the first screen of trees. Ranch-style, all right, off-white with dark-green trim, tinted glass and brickwork, solar panels, a redwood side deck that wrapped around to the rear; the whole cradled by two huge heritage oaks. The garage was detached, off on the right. On the far side stood a smaller outbuilding with a slanted glass roof, its near wall two-thirds glass. Sheila Hunter’s potting studio.
I parked in a paved semicircle fronting the house. There were no other cars in sight, and when I rang the bell its chimes didn’t bring anybody. I wandered over to the outbuilding. The afternoon sun threw flamelight off the glass surfaces, lit up the interior in a glaring way. The effect, as I approached, was of a building on fire. The woman in white sitting in the glass-walled section, motionless with her head bowed, might have been a penitent in some weird religious ceremony — or a corpse prepared for cremation in a glass oven.
The illusion vanished as I reached an open door in the wood-walled section. Unpleasant image, given the circumstances, and I was glad to be rid of it. I had a clearer look at the woman now: she was seated on a stool before a potter’s wheel, her hands clasped between her knees, her back sharply bent forward and her head so far down I couldn’t see her face behind a hanging screen of dark hair. The white outfit was a man’s shirt and a pair of tailored jeans. No widow’s weeds for Sheila Hunter, if that was who she was. Not that clothes make a grieving spouse: you can mourn just as deeply naked or in the raiments of royalty.
I poked my head through the doorway. “Mrs. Hunter?”
No answer. She didn’t move, didn’t seem to have heard me. I thought: Why not just go and leave her alone? But it was reflexive and without conviction. Like it or not, the nature of my job is to bother people, too often at the worst of times. If I started giving in to my overload of empathy, I might as well get out of the investigation business.
I stepped inside. Storage shelves of pots, bowls, urns in odd, twisted shapes, some wearing bright green and blue glazes overlain with geometric black designs, others unglazed. Tubs of wet clay. Miscellaneous clutter. A doorway without a door gave access to the glass-walled section where the woman sat. In there I could see a kiln, squatty and much tinier than I’d imagined kilns to be, and the potter’s wheel and a long bench and not much else. I framed myself in the opening and said her name again. Still no response: she might’ve been in some kind of trance.
“Mrs. Hunter?” Louder, and a rap on the inner wall to go with it.
She came alive in a convulsive spasm, sitting bolt upright, the dark hair flying silkily as her head whipped around my way. For three or four seconds she gawped at me out of wide, bulging eyes — a look that made me recoil a little. It contained as much raw terror as I’ve ever seen in anyone’s face. Then she was on her feet, in a movement so sudden it toppled the stooclass="underline" backing away, one hand up in front of her as if she were trying to ward off an attacker. The edge of the workbench stopped her. She reached down to grab it with both hands, steadying herself, still radiating fear at me. Her eyes had an unfocused sheen. She was breathing so rapidly I thought she might start to hyperventilate.
“Crazybone,” she said.
The word popped out in a thin, choked whisper. There was dread in it, and something else, a visceral emotion from deep within her. She seemed unaware of having spoken; it was a sleepwalker’s word, a nightmare word.