He had been seven when his father disappeared. He still remembered his father, though he wasn’t sure which were real memories and which were things his mother often talked about: Do you remember the funny little car you and Daddy made with the wheels from your old scooter? Yes, he remembered the car, and the scooter wheels, but he couldn’t remember his father working with him to build anything; and Martha’s continued references, intended to create in him a strong father-picture, confused the boy and made him feel guilty about his memory lapses.
He crawled to the top of a boulder and lay down on his stomach, as still and silent as a lizard in the sun. From here he could see the road that led into the campgrounds. Pretty soon other people would start arriving for the weekend and by dusk the campsites would all be taken and the air would be filled with the smell of woodfires and hamburgers cooking, and the shriek of children’s voices. But right now he and his mother and Sally were the only ones; they had the choicest campsite, right beside the river, and the best stone barbecue pit and picnic table, and the tallest trees.
Do you remember the first time Daddy brought us here, Richard? You were halfway up a pine tree before we missed you. Daddy had to climb up and bring you down. He could remember climbing the pine tree but not being brought down by anyone. He’d always been a good climber—why hadn’t he come down by himself? As he lay on the boulder, it occurred to him for the first time in his life that his mother’s memories might be as tenuous as his own and that she was only pretending they were vivid and real.
He heard a car in the distance and raised his head to listen and to watch for it. A couple of minutes later it was visible on the road into camp, a blue and cream Ford Victoria with a man at the wheel. There was no one else in the car and no camping equipment strapped to the roof or piled in the back seat. Richard noticed these details automatically, without being especially curious. It was a few moments before he realized he had seen the car before. About a week ago it had been pulling away from the curb in front of his own house when he had returned home from the Y. When he went inside, he found his mother in the kitchen, white-faced and silent.
Fourteen
She saw Quinn getting out of the car and she said to Sally in a carefully casual voice, “Why don’t you go and find Richard? Supper won’t be ready for another half-hour. You could collect more pine cones so we’ll have some to gild for Christmas.”
“Are you trying to get rid of me?” The girl glanced thoughtfully at Quinn approaching from the road. “So you can talk to him?”
“Yes.”
“Is it about money?”
“Perhaps. I don’t know.”
Money, or lack of it, was a key word in the O’Gorman household, and the children had learned to respect it. Sally walked briskly away in search of her brother and pine cones.
Martha turned to face Quinn. She stood at rigid attention like a soldier confronted with a surprise inspection. “How did you find me? What do you want?”
“Let’s call this a friendly visit.”
“Let’s not. I can put up with your hounding me personally, but why do you have to bring my children into it?”
“I’m sorry, that’s the way things worked out. May I sit down, Mrs. O’Gorman?”
“If you feel you must.”
He sat on one of the benches attached to the redwood picnic table, and after a moment’s hesitation she walked over to the other bench and sat down, too, as if she were agreeing to a kind of truce. It reminded Quinn of the last time they had met, in the hospital cafeteria. Then, too, there had been a table between them, and that table, like this one, had been invisibly loaded with questions, doubts, suspicions, accusations. Quinn would have liked to brush them all off with his hand and start over again. He knew, from the hostility on her face, that she did not share this feeling.
He said quietly, “You’re not obliged to answer any of my questions, Mrs. O’Gorman. I have no official authority to ask them.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“You can, in fact, order me off the premises.”
“The premises belong to the county,” she said with a vague gesture. “You’re as welcome as anyone else on public camping grounds.”
“You like this place?”
“We’ve been coming here for many years, since Sally was born.”
The statement caught Quinn by surprise. He had assumed that Martha O’Gorman had begun coming to the campsite after her husband’s disappearance. As it was, she had merely continued a practice started years before. It fitted in with what he already knew about her character: she was still trying to carry on her life, as much as possible, in the same way as she had before O’Gorman disappeared or died, as if, by repeating the pattern, she could magically invoke O’Gorman’s spirit.
Quinn said, “Then your husband was familiar with the surrounding area, the river and so forth?”
“He’d explored every inch of the river—both rivers—a dozen times, as I have.”
She looked as though she was daring him to make something of it. Quinn didn’t have to, the point was already made. If O’Gorman had planned his own disappearance, his plans had been based on knowledge of, and perhaps experiments on, both rivers involved.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “You’re wrong.”
“Am I?”
“My husband was murdered.”
“A week ago you were claiming he died in an accident, you were very sure of it, in fact.”
“I’ve had reason to change my mind.”
“What reason, Mrs. O’Gorman?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t trust you,” she said bluntly, “any more than you trust me. That’s not very much, is it?”
Quinn was silent for a minute. “I don’t know exactly how much it is, Mrs. O’Gorman. I only know I wish it were more. On both sides.”
“Well, its not.”
She got up and went over to the grill and removed the ribs from the heat. They were almost as black as the charcoal they had been cooked over.
“I’m sorry if I’ve ruined your dinner, Mrs. O’Gorman.”
“You haven’t,” she said crisply. “Richard’s like his father, he has to have all meat burned so it’s less likely to remind him of—well, the source of it. He loves animals, as Patrick did.”
“You’re sure now that your husband’s dead?”
“I was always sure of that. It was how he died that I couldn’t make up my mind about.”
“But you have recently, in fact just this week, decided he was murdered?”
“Yes.”
“Have you told the authorities?”
“No.” There was a brief flash of temper in her eyes. “And I’m not going to. My children and I have suffered enough. The O’Gorman case is closed and it will remain closed.”
“Even though you have evidence to reopen it?”
“What gave you that idea?”
“A conversation I had this afternoon with George Haywood’s mother,” Quinn said. “Mrs. Haywood can’t resist an extension phone when other people are on the line.”
“Well.”
“Is that all you have to say, well?”
“That’s all.”