He listened for a moment, his face growing sober and concerned, then handed me the receiver as if it was hot. “Mommy’s sad.”
I said to her: “Are you all right?”
She answered in an emotion-clogged voice: “I’m fine. And I’m deeply grateful. When will I see you and Ronny?”
“About noon tomorrow, I’d say. We both need some rest before we drive south.”
A short while later, after the others had left, Ellen and I put Ronny to bed in a room which she said had been hers when she was a child. An old toy phone was standing on the table beside the cot. As if to demonstrate that he never got tired, the boy picked it up and spoke into it distinctly:
“Calling Space Control. Calling Space Control. Do you hear me? Do you hear me?”
We closed the door on his fantasy and faced each other in the upstairs hall. The hanging yellow electric light, the stains of old rainstorms on the walls and ceiling, and the shadows that imitated them seemed to generate other fantasies. The rest of the world was cut off and far away. I felt shipwrecked on the dim shores of the past.
“How’s Jerry?”
“He’s worried about what Armistead will do to him. But he quieted down. I gave him a back rub and a sleeping pill.”
“I’ll talk to Armistead when I get the chance.”
“I was hoping you would. Jerry’s pretty tense about it. He feels terribly guilty.”
“What did you do with the rest of the sleeping pills?”
“I have them.”
She touched the place between her breasts. She must have seen my eyes rest there and travel down her body. Both of us moved, so that her body was resting rather sleepily against mine. I felt her hand moving on my back, giving me a kind of sample back rub.
“I don’t have a bed made up for you. You can sleep with me if you like.”
“Thanks, but it wouldn’t be a good idea. You do all your living on canvas, remember?”
“I have a large unused canvas that I’ve been saving,” she said rather obscurely. “What are you afraid of, Archer?”
It was hard to say. I liked the woman. I almost trusted her. But I was already working deep in her life. I didn’t want to buy a piece of it or commit myself to her until I knew what the consequences would be.
Instead of answering her in words, I kissed her and disengaged myself.
She looked more rejected than deprived. “I don’t sleep with many men, in case you’re wondering. Leo was the only real lover I ever had.”
She was quiet for a while. Then she said: “I gave you a false impression earlier. I was forgetting, lying to myself. Whatever I had with Leo was real – just about the realest thing in my life.” Her eyes lit up with the memory as they hadn’t lit for me. “I was in love with him. And he loved me while it lasted. I didn’t believe that he would ever stop. But it ended, quite suddenly.”
Her eyes closed, and opened again with a changed expression, of wary loss. She leaned on the watermarked wall. The night was running down like a transplanted heart.
“There’s something I want to tell you,” I said. “I don’t know if I should.”
“Is it something painful?”
“Yes. Maybe not immediately painful.”
“About Leo?”
“I think he’s dead.”
Her eyes didn’t waver. Only a kind of shadow crossed her face, as if the hanging light above her head had moved.
“How long dead?”
“The whole fifteen years.”
“And that’s why he never came to join me?”
“I think so.” It was partly true, anyway. As for the other part of the truth, I was trying to decide whether to bring up Martha Crandall. “Unless my witnesses are hallucinating, somebody shot Leo and buried him.”
“Where?”
“Near the Mountain House. Do you have any idea who might have killed him?”
“No.” After a moment’s hesitation, she said: “It wasn’t I.”
I waited for her to go on. She said finally:
“You mentioned witnesses. Who are they?”
“Martha Crandall and her daughter.”
“Did he go back to Martha?”
She raised one hand to her mouth, as if she had made a damaging admission. On the heels of it, I said bluntly:
“He was in bed with Martha when he was shot. Apparently she was the one who came back to him. Her husband threw her out.” I hesitated. “You knew about their earlier affair?”
“Did I not. I first got to know Leo through it. Martha came to me when she got into trouble.” She was silent for a moment, then said with some irony: “I interposed my body between them.”
Nearly everything had been said. But we seemed to be held together by a feeling, impersonal but almost as strong as a friendship or a passion, that there was still more to say. The past was unwinding and rewinding like yarn which the two of us held between us.
“What about Elizabeth Broadhurst?” I said. “How did a man like Leo happen to marry a woman like Elizabeth?”
“The war brought them together. He was stationed at a military base near Santa Teresa, and she was active in the USO. She was a handsome woman when she was young. Socially prominent. Wealthy. She had all the obvious qualifications.” For the first time Ellen’s face was pulled to one side by malice. “But she was a failure as a wife.”
“How do you know?”
“Leo told me all about their marriage, such as it was. She was a frozen woman, a daddy’s girl.”
“The frozen ones sometimes explode.”
“I know they do.”
I said carefully: “Do you think she shot Leo?”
“It’s possible. She threatened to. It’s one reason I left Santa Teresa and tried to take Leo with me. I was afraid of Elizabeth.”
“That doesn’t prove she’s a murderer.”
“I know that. But I’m not just being subjective. Jerry told me something as we were talking just now.” Her voice wisped off, and so did her attention, as if she was listening to an internal voice.
“What did Jerry tell you?”
“He was telling me why he couldn’t go back to Brian – to his father. Elizabeth Broadhurst came to their house one night this summer to talk to Brian. There was more than just talk involved. She was crying and yelling, and Jerry couldn’t help overhearing everything. Brian had been extorting money from her. And not only money. He’d forced her into some kind of a real estate partnership in which she put up the land and he put up very little or nothing.”
“How could he force her into it?”
“That’s the question,” she said.
Ellen went to bed alone. I got the sleeping bag out of the trunk of my car and slept across the door of Ronny’s room.
The old house creaked like a ship sailing through the dangerous world. I dreamed I was rounding the Horn.
chapter 31
It was raining in Palo Alto, where Ronny and I had breakfast. It was raining in Gilroy and King City, and in Petroleum City it looked like rain.
I stopped at the Yucca Tree Inn to check on the Crandalls. Joy Rawlins was back on the desk. She told me Lester Crandall had rehired her that morning before he took off with his family for Los Angeles.
“Did you see Susan?” I asked her.
“Yeah. She’s calmed down quite a bit. All three of them seemed to be making more sense for a change.”
Before I left the Inn, I called the Santa Teresa office of the Forest Service. Kelsey wasn’t there, but I left a message for him: to meet me at noon, if possible, at Mrs. Broadhurst’s house. Then Ronny and I went back on the freeway for the final leg of our journey.
Using the buckle of a seat-belt as a microphone, the boy kept Space Control informed of our progress. Once he said into his imaginary mike: