“Why should I?”
“You got me into this.”
The reminder touched off her anger again – it was very near the surface. “I’ve always known about voyeurs. But you’re an auditeur, aren’t you?”
“What are you so ashamed of?”
“I’m not ashamed,” she said hotly. “Leave me alone. I don’t want to talk about it.”
I sat without speaking for a couple of minutes. I suspected I was half in love with her, partly because she was Ronny’s mother but also because she was beautiful and young. The body sheathed in her tight black dress seemed infinitely poignant.
But her widowhood seemed to project around her a circle of shadow which I couldn’t enter. Besides, as I reminded myself, I was nearly twice her age.
She was looking at me with candid eyes, as if she had heard my thoughts. “I hate to admit it,” she said, “I never have admitted it until now. My marriage was a failure. Stanley lived in a world of his own, and I couldn’t reach him. Maybe if he was alive, he would say the same thing about me. But we never actually discussed it. We just went our separate ways in the same house. I looked after Ronny, and Stanley got more and more wrapped up in searching for his father. I used to look in on him late at night sometimes, when he was working in his study. Sometimes he’d be just sitting there shuffling through his pictures and his letters. He looked like a man counting his money,” she said with her quick disorganized smile.
“But I shouldn’t be making light of him,” she added. “I should have taken the whole thing much more seriously. The Reverend Riceyman advised me to. He said that Stanley was looking for his own lost self, and I’m beginning to realize he was right.”
“I’d like to talk to Riceyman.”
“So would I. Unfortunately he’s dead.”
“What did he die of?”
“Old age. I really miss him. He was a nice man, with a lot of understanding. But I didn’t listen to him. I was angry, and jealous.”
“Jealous?”
“Of Stanley and his parents, and their wrecked marriage. I felt as if it was competing with my own marriage, gradually edging it out of the picture. Stanley was living more and more in the past, and getting more and more impatient with me. Maybe if I had tried harder, I could have stopped him. Then all at once it was too late. That ad he placed in the Chronicle touched off this whole disaster, didn’t it?”
I didn’t have to answer her. The phone rang.
It was Willie Mackey. “Hello, Lew. Mission accomplished. Now what can I do for you?”
“I’m looking for a woman, aged forty or so. When she left Santa Teresa fifteen years ago her name was Ellen Strome Kilpatrick. She was traveling with a man named Leo Broadhurst. He may or may not be living with her now. According to my slightly freaked-out informant, she’s staying on the Peninsula now, in an old house two or three stories high, with a pair of towers. And trees around it, oaks and some pines.”
“Can’t you pinpoint it any better? There are still a lot of trees on the Peninsula.”
“There was a Great Dane in the neighborhood a week ago today. He acted lost.”
“What’s Ellen’s background?”
“She’s the divorced wife of a real estate man here in Santa Teresa; Brian Kilpatrick. He told me that she graduated from Stanford.”
Willie uttered a clicking sound of satisfaction. “That means we start in Palo Alto. The Stanford grads go back there like homing pigeons. Do you have a picture of Ellen Strome Kilpatrick?”
“I have one from an ad in the Chronicle that came out late in June. It shows her and Leo Broadhurst as of fifteen years ago when they arrived in San Francisco, using the name Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Smith.”
“I have the ad in my clipping file,” Willie said. “As I recall, it offers a thousand-dollar reward.”
“You have a good memory for money.”
“Yes, I do. I just got married again. Am I in line for the reward?”
“Unfortunately the man who offered it is dead.” I told him how Stanley had died, and the rest of it.
“What makes Ellen so important?”
“I intend to ask her. Don’t you ask her, though. When you find her let me know and I’ll take it from there.”
I said goodbye to him and then to Jean. Her mood had changed, and she didn’t want me to go and leave her alone. Before I closed the front door of the house I could hear her angry crying.
chapter 21
Along Mrs. Snow’s street the jacaranda blossoms hung like purple clouds caught and condensing on the branches of the trees. I sat in my car for a minute and rested my eyes on them. Brown-skinned children were playing in the yard next door.
The curtain over Mrs. Snow’s front window twitched like an eyelid with a tic. Then she came out and approached my car. She was wearing rusty silk that resembled armor and her face was blanched with powder, as if she was expecting an important visitor.
Not me. She said in controlled fury: “You have no right to do this. You’re persecuting us.”
I climbed out and stood with my hat in my hand. “That’s not my intention, Mrs. Snow. Your son’s an important witness.”
“But he doesn’t have to talk without a lawyer. I know that much – he’s been in trouble before. But this time he’s as innocent as a little newborn babe.”
“That innocent?”
She stood unsmiling, blocking the way to her house. The elders of the family next door, sensing the possibility of trouble, quietly came outside. They drifted in our direction like a forming audience.
Mrs. Snow gave them a long look, in which anger congealed into something very like fear. She turned to me:
“If you insist on talking, come inside.”
She took me into her little front room. The tea that Mrs. Broadhurst had spilled stained the rug like the old brown evidence of a crime.
Mrs. Snow stayed on her feet, and kept me standing.
“Where’s Fritz?”
“My son is in his room.”
“Can’t he come out?”
“No, he can’t. The doctor is coming to see him. I don’t want you getting him all upset, the way you did yesterday.”
“He was upset before I talked to him.”
“I know that. But you made it worse. Frederick is weak in his feelings. He has been since he had his nervous breakdown. And I’m not going to let you send him back to the nursing home if I can help it.”
I felt a twinge of shame, simply because she was small and female and indomitable. But she was standing in my way, and the lost boy was somewhere on the other side of her.
“Do you know Al Sweetner, Mrs. Snow?”
She compressed her lips, and shook her head. “I never heard of him.” But the eyes behind her spectacles were watchful.
“Didn’t Al come by your house last week?”
“He may have. I’m not home all the time. What was that name again?”
“Al Sweetner. He was killed last night. The Los Angeles police told me he escaped from Folsom Prison.”
Her dark eyes brightened like a nocturnal animal’s caught by a flashlight. “I see.”
“Did you give him money, Mrs. Snow?”
“Not much. I gave him a five-dollar bill. I didn’t know that he escaped from prison.”
“Why did you give him money?”
“I felt sorry for him,” she said.
“Was he a friend of yours?”
“I wouldn’t say that. But he needed gas to get out of town, and I could spare him five dollars.”
“I heard you gave him twenty.”
She looked at me without wavering. “What if I did? I had no change. And I didn’t want him hanging around until Frederick got home from work.”
“Was he a friend of Frederick’s?”
“I wouldn’t call him a friend. Al was a friend to no one, including himself.”