Ramsey and her partner watched until their taillights were reduced to the size of pinheads, then got back into their car and drove away.
I was going to hunt up the Skilling house, but decided that before I did that, it made more sense to find, and talk to, Claire’s father, Bertram Sanders.
I found his address through my smartphone. Sanders lived on Lakeland Drive. I knew Lakeland, but never understood why it was called that. The street neither overlooked nor led directly to any body of water. I was hoping that when I knocked on the door, it wouldn’t be the mayor who answered, but Claire herself. After all, if she’d returned home since the cops had been to see me, there wasn’t anyone who would have felt obliged to let me know.
It was a lower-income, postwar neighborhood. That’d be the Second World War, not the one in Korea, or Vietnam, or the Gulf, or Iraq, or Afghanistan. We’d had so many of them, it was hard to keep track. It was a simple two-story house with clapboard siding, painted brown, and while the place looked narrow from the front, it went back a long way. The house was better maintained than many others on the street, several of which still sported rusted television aerials that probably hadn’t picked up a signal in years. Behind the house, at the end of the long, single-lane drive, stood a separate one-stall garage.
I parked on the street, went up to the door, and knocked. It was past eight and the streetlamps were on, but I didn’t see lights on in the Sanders house. I shielded my eyes and peered through the rectangular window set vertically in the wooden door. No signs of life.
It seemed fruitless, but I decided to walk around and try knocking on the back door, which, once I got there, I could see entered the kitchen. Again I put my eyes to the window and saw that the only light inside appeared to come from a digital display on a toaster. No one came when I knocked.
“You looking for the mayor?”
I turned and saw an elderly woman standing beneath a porch light of the house next door. She had a view of me over the fence.
“That’s right,” I said slowly. “I was hoping I’d catch Bert at home.”
“It’s Thursday night,” said the woman, like I should know the significance of that.
“What’s Thursday night?”
“The night the town council meets. You must not be from around here.”
All the years I’d lived in Griffon, and tonight I felt like a stranger. Everyone pointing out how little I knew.
“It slipped my mind.”
From inside her house, a man shouted, “Who you talking to?”
She turned around and shouted back, “Man looking for Bert!”
“Tell him to try the town hall!”
“I did that! You think I’m an idiot?” She turned back to me. “He thinks I’m an idiot.”
“I thought Claire might be home and I could just give her a message.”
“Haven’t seen her around today.” She hesitated, licked her lips, like she was weighing whether to tell me something. “You never know where she might be. Thank God our kids are grown and gone; they hardly ever call, but frankly I couldn’t be happier. But it can’t be easy for Bert, raising a girl on his own.”
I recalled what Donna had told me, that the mayor and his wife had split up. “Yeah, they can be a handful,” I said.
“What are you talking about?” the man yelled from inside the house.
“I’ll tell ya in a minute!” she shouted at her husband. “Don’t mind him. He just likes to be included.” She rolled her eyes.
“Does Claire spend all her time here?” I asked. “Or does she spend half of it with her mother?”
“That’d be tricky, spending half her time here and half across the border. Caroline’s living in Toronto with her new husband, what’s-his-name.”
“What is his name?” I asked, like I’d known it myself at one time. Maybe Claire was with her mother. It’d be worth checking.
“Ed,” the woman called back into the house. “Ed!”
“Huh?”
“What was the name of that guy Caroline married? One that runs the jewelry store that has the ads on the Toronto station.”
“Uh... it’ll come to me. It was Minsky.”
“No, that wasn’t it,” she shot back. “That’s your sister-in-law’s name.”
“Oh, right.”
She looked back at me. “I remember. His name’s Jeff Karnofsky. With a ‘k.’ Well, two of them. One at the beginning and one right near the end.”
“When’s the last time you saw Claire around here?”
“Last night. Saw her take off in some pickup truck.”
“What time would that have been?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. It was after the news.”
“Which news?” These days, especially with the cable networks, there was never a time when the news wasn’t on.
“Brian Williams,” she said. That would be the NBC Nightly News, on WGRZ, the local NBC affiliate. The show ran from six thirty to seven p.m. “He’s a handsome bugger, that one.”
“So was it soon after the news ended that Claire left?” I felt my questions were starting to get too specific, but this woman seemed happy to talk, and violating confidences didn’t seem to be something that troubled her.
“I don’t know. Seven, eight, eight thirty, I don’t know. Took off in a real hurry, tires squealing and all. Police should give them a ticket for driving like that. God knows they’re here enough.”
“What do you mean?”
“Been going on for a while now. There’s often a Griffon cruiser parked along the street, like they’ve always got their eye on the mayor’s house. I was wondering whether he was getting death threats or somethin’, but when I asked him about it, he said it was nothing, not to worry.” She chuckled. “I’d sure hate to have someone come by and shoot out his windows or anything. They might hit our house by mistake.”
Thirteen
Griffon Town Hall dominated the town’s center, situated at the end of the green, its spire drawing the eye skyward. It was an example, I’d been told, of Georgian architecture, with its gabled entrance and melding of red brick and white-painted wood. Like something out of Colonial Williamsburg, even though we were a long way from there. I did know that maintaining and restoring the building was a constant drain on the town’s budget, and that some taxpayers were in favor of building new municipal offices just outside the downtown area, near all those big-box stores and fast-food outlets on Danbury. Sanders, to his credit, had countered that if Griffon’s civic leaders were willing to abandon the downtown, what hope did the remaining merchants have? I could not recall ever meeting the man, but from what I’d read, I liked where he was coming from.
I drove the streets surrounding the town hall a couple of times, looking for a place to park. There seemed to be a lot more cars down here than usual. I was forced to leave my car a couple of blocks away, not something I wanted to do, because it meant I’d have to walk past Ravelson Furniture on my way back.
In my darker moments, I imagined conversations with my son, asking him why, if he had to end his life the way he did, he couldn’t have done it someplace I didn’t see every time I came downtown.
Sometimes I tried pretending it wasn’t even there, which was a challenge, considering that the store was in the largest, and one of the oldest, commercial buildings in Griffon, dating back to the late eighteen hundreds. But even if I never came down here, there was no escaping the Ravelson name. They bought newspaper ads every week, delivered flyers to the door, and ran commercials on the local stations featuring the owner, Kent Ravelson, a man unfamiliar with subtlety. My personal favorite starred Kent, seated in an overstuffed leather chair, smoking a pipe and wearing a pair of professorial glasses, playing a psychiatrist dispensing advice to a blond babe stretched out on a couch.