Lydia stood and said, “We’ll be back in California tomorrow. If there’s anything we can do to help, here’s my business card. It has my number on it.” Sarah accepted it, but placed it on a bookshelf without looking at it.
She said, “Thank you. And, Mr. Mallon, I thank you for trying so hard to help my sister. I don’t think acts of kindness are wasted or lost. You made my sister’s last memory of people warmer and brighter.”
All the time she was speaking, they were advancing on the door, and then they were outside. Mallon looked for a last time at the yellow house. It was outdated now, the cheerful paint job and the neat interior all part of a phase of Sarah Carlson’s life that had stopped existing at the moment when he and Lydia had stepped onto her porch.
He stood on her front walk, gripped by the impulse to go back up the steps and tell her the rest of the story. He asked himself what he was longing for. Could he possibly want sympathy from her for the sense of loss that he felt? No, it was something else. He had momentarily imagined that telling Sarah something so private-so damning, now that Catherine had proved that her consent could not have been the free choice of a person in control of her will-would make Sarah reciprocate and tell him things that were equally private: intimate details and secrets that would make him finally understand what Catherine had been thinking. He recognized that the urge was insane. If he told Sarah that he’d had sex with her sister a couple of hours before she’d killed herself, she could only loathe him. He had already heard everything she would ever tell him.
“Bobby?” Lydia’s voice startled him. “Forget something?”
“No,” he said, turning toward the car, and took a step. “Just for a minute, I thought I had.”
“You’re right,” Lydia said softly. “We told her enough.”
CHAPTER 8
As Mallon drove the Town Car around the corner and pulled over on the next block, Lydia took out her cell phone and dialed a long-distance number. “Detective Fowler, please.” She turned to Mallon. “You know we’ve got to do it.”
Mallon nodded, then listened with undisguised curiosity.
“This is Lydia Marks. Robert Mallon and I are in Pittsburgh.” She repeated, “Pittsburgh. We’ve managed to locate the sister of Catherine Broward. Yeah, the one who killed herself. The sister’s name is Sarah Carlson and she’ll be calling you shortly. Want her number and address anyway?” She recited them, spelling the street name. “You’re welcome. Nothing you haven’t heard before. There was a boyfriend, he died, and she never got over it. The only odd thing was that he got murdered.” She rolled her eyes at Mallon. “Mark Romano. It was in L.A., about a year ago.” She paused for only a second. “I doubt it, but I’m going to look more closely when I get back. Of course I’ll let you know anything I find.” There was another pause. “Oh? That’s quick. I’d better let you take her call.”
She avoided Mallon’s eyes as she put the telephone away. “There,” she said. “Now he’s got nothing to bitch about, and if he finds out something we don’t know, he might very well save us from wasting our time trying to get it too. In any case, he hasn’t got the unpleasant suspicion that I’m a problem.”
Mallon gave a single nod and a perfunctory half smile of acknowledgment, but he seemed not to have necessarily agreed. He remained silent as he pulled back onto the residential street and turned in the direction of the highway back to their hotel.
“Well, what do you think?” Lydia asked. “This might be a good place to quit.”
Mallon looked surprised. “Why do you say that?”
“You tried to save a girl. You wanted to know why she wasn’t willing to be saved. Now you know: her boyfriend was killed, she felt depressed, and she never got over it.”
Mallon seemed to be comparing the assertion with some interior standard. “I’m not ready to quit. I don’t think I know enough yet.”
Lydia considered. “You don’t think the sister told us the truth?”
“Well,” said Mallon, “I think what she told us was true. I don’t imagine for a second that she told us everything she knew to be true, and I think she suspects still more that she isn’t sure is true, but may be. All of it together doesn’t seem to be enough.”
“Has it occurred to you that some things can’t be known so completely and in such detail that there are no mysteries left?”
“Sure,” Mallon said. “But I don’t think we’ve reached the end. We’ve just got one person’s reaction, with one point of view.”
Lydia said, “Let’s look at it from another point of view, then: yours. We’ve just listened to her only relative. What did you hear that makes you curious? You tell me what to look at next.”
“The relationship with Mark Romano.”
“Fine,” said Lydia. “That’s L.A. We can be on a plane back to L.A. in an hour or two. We’ll find out what we can about Romano, and see where that leaves us.”
The flight back to Los Angeles seemed longer to Mallon than the flight to Pittsburgh. This plane seemed to be smaller than the last, and Lydia had said little since the conversation in the car. Mallon opened the subject again. “I know I’m being self-indulgent.”
“If you know, then why are you doing it?”
“I think it’s because I realized that for the first time in my life I actually could. I’ve seen things happen to other people, had things happen to me. I don’t think I ever really understood why most of them happened. This one I saw coming. I knew what she was trying to do, but I still didn’t understand what she was thinking, why she was doing it. I don’t, even now. This seems to me to be a chance to find out one thing that matters.”
“I’ve known since the beginning that this isn’t just about her,” said Lydia. “When you first realized what she was doing, you felt as though you were reliving your sister’s last day, when you talked to her and couldn’t save her. You were trying to make sure that this time it came out right-that you said the right things, did the right things, and made it not happen.”
“Maybe I was,” Mallon said. “It didn’t work. All that’s left now is knowing.”
“What you want isn’t possible to get in one lifetime. It’s omniscience. That’s why people read books. Maybe you could take a night class or something.”
“Night class,” said Mallon. “That’s where she met him.” He was silent for a time. “What do you think of him?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I heard what Sarah Carlson said. So far the only person who ever laid eyes on him seems to have thought he was a prince. I need to find out more facts before I start having an opinion of my own.”
Lydia and Mallon rented a car at Los Angeles International Airport and drove it to the Hotel Bel-Air, then checked in. Lydia said, “I’m going to go to my room and see what I can get on the Internet. I’ll call you later for dinner.” Mallon followed a bellman to his bungalow. He unpacked his single bag, showered, changed, and went out.
Los Angeles was more crowded and intimidating than he remembered it. He knew that was a sign that age was advancing rapidly, making him not timid exactly, but prickly and unwilling to be inconvenienced. In Santa Barbara, people walked. Here, in order to go to a place where he could walk without appearing to be a vagrant or a criminal, he had to take a cab a couple of miles, past Santa Monica Boulevard to the shopping area of Beverly Hills. He walked up and down the streets pretending interest as he looked in famous windows at rather ordinary merchandise. The sidewalks and the fronts of buildings seemed to be particularly clean and mostly white. The blocks were short and required waiting for traffic lights to change, so he went around blocks in a series of squared loops.
When he returned to the hotel, Lydia was sitting at a table in the tiled patio dining area, sipping a tall glass of iced tea.
She said, “You must have walked halfway to Tijuana. I’m glad you finally made it back, because we’re meeting somebody here in a few minutes.”