“Well, I’m sorry to interrupt your bath. I...”
He stopped again, this time because she had shut the door firmly in his face. He heard the bolt snap into place, and grimaced. No real need for her to be so abrupt. Not, of course, that he could really blame her, living there alone. Rather strange that she was, actually.
Curt started the VW with a little jerk because his mind was on things other than driving. Probably divorced, obviously childless, had gotten the house as part of the settlement, perhaps. He wondered if she worked, or lived on alimony, or what. A damned attractive woman.
After turning into Westpoint Drive, toward the Medical Center, Curt remembered and pulled over long enough to draw a line through Anderson, Barbara on his list of possibles.
Chapter 18
Curt ate a solitary Sunday breakfast, staring, without really seeing, out the kitchen window into the live oaks behind the house. In one tree was a vireo, in another a pair of wood warblers. Carrying his dishes to the sink, he saw the calendar. August 10th. Almost a month since he had begun looking for the Anderson boy, and summer vacation was drawing to a close. Fall term raised feelings of active distaste, probably because teaching meant a curtailment of his search.
But what further could he do? Advertise? He not only had exhausted all possible phone-book Andersons; he had, at Archie Matthews’ suggestion, gotten further names from the Polk Directory and the voter registration rolls at the County Courthouse. In all, sixty-seven Andersons.
Curt ran water over his dishes. To hell with it. Today he would try to forget it, the whole thing. Take a walk, maybe. This morning, right now, before the day got too hot. He thrust aside the insistent memory of planning a similar hike with Paula on the Friday night he had driven home to find her dead, and put on soft-soled shoes, sunglasses, a polo shirt. At the foot of the driveway, he paused: north or south? Had the boy on the bike gone north or... damnit, stop it. South he would go, toward the university.
He crossed Linda Vista to be facing traffic, started past the old green phone booth, which stood with open door, inviting confidences. Curt had none to impart, but he did stop, and in an untoward lightness of mood, pulled down the coin return. He chuckled aloud. A dime. He could buy two thirds of a cup of coffee with it somewhere.
Striding along in the growing heat, Curt tried to feel enthusiasm for the resumption of classes. No use. Looked at coldly from the shoulder of a country road, the whole concept of graduate study seemed artificial somehow. Perhaps it was because you could never admit error: not to your department, nor to your students, nor, given enough years of enforced infallibility, to yourself. Curt had always stressed, for instance, that environment determined behavior; yet could he really swallow that the predators were merely determined puppets, no more responsible for the destruction strewn in their wake than a hurricane which savaged the Florida coast before swinging blindly back to sea? No. Curt knew he couldn’t buy that. Wouldn’t buy it. Unless men were responsible, all of their actions were without meaning.
A quarter of a mile beyond the phone booth, Curt came across a narrow footpath beaten down through the high weeds of the ditch. He turned off into it, after a few steps found his trousers dotted with the thistles from August-ripened weeds. The narrow path was iron-hard from lack of rain; it probably had been worn by venturesome small-fry on long school-less summer days.
San Luisa Creek was dry, raggedly edged with blackberry bushes, mugwort, and the telltale red leaves of poison oak. The path rose beyond it, plunged abruptly into a thicket of elderberries and ceanothus and then under the shade of a stand of sycamore. It was much cooler under the trees; a flash of white wing patch and a glimpse of iridescent tail marked the passage of a yellow-billed magpie, and a squirrel scolded from a low branch. Curt topped the slight rise, could see the white siding of a house through the thinning undergrowth.
Beyond the trees was a strip of dusty straggled weeds, a shallow ditch littered with paper, and a loop of blacktop. Across it were tract houses. Curt shook his head. A few years ago there had been no path, no subdivision at the end of it. He crossed the ditch, turned left, downhill toward an intersection a hundred yards away. The cross street was Westpoint, he found; he had been walking on Edgewood Drive.
Aptly named, Edgewood. Wait a minute. Edgewood. Was that...
It came back in a rush. Barbara Anderson, 1791 Edgewood Drive. One of his first four prime possibilities. An attractive brown-haired woman in a red robe whom he had disturbed in the middle of a bath. He lengthened his stride until he was nearly trotting. A boy living on Edgewood, late home, would have walked his bike through those woods, along that path. Five minutes.
But she had said she was unmarried, had no children.
Women had lied before. When Curt got to 1791, he was sure she had lied, and felt a little sick to the stomach with frustration. The lawn was shaggy and yellowing, the neighborhood shopping papers distributed free were yellowing in a messy heap on the porch. Planted in the middle of the sere grass was a small neat FOR SALE sign. She had been the one, unless he accepted it all — path, precipitous move from the neighborhood, proximity to Curt’s house — as a series of coincidences.
Curt looked about almost wildly. Neighbors. Find out if she had a son. Find out where she had gone if she did.
Directly across the street was an open garage door with a car parked in the drive. A man was dragging a green plastic garden hose from the garage. He wore a Giants baseball cap, a white T-shirt, and Bermuda shorts shoved down under his stomach, so the ends of the legs covered his knees.
Curt crossed the street. “I’m looking for Barbara Anderson, sir. Could you tell me if—”
“She moved.” He scratched his nose reflectively. “Just about three weeks ago, real sudden like. One week talking about her lawn, next week just... packed up and gone, bag and baggage.”
Three weeks. Almost immediately after Curt had talked with her. A three-week head start. “Is she a Mrs. Anderson, or a Miss?”
“Missus. Well, you know, divorced. Thought at first she’d gone back to Charlie, but the next week here comes the realtor’s sign up.”
Curt nodded. “Funny she’d just move out that way, with the boy and all... I guess he’d be about ten now, wouldn’t he?”
“Jimmy? Yep.”
The man started to turn away, when Curt had a sudden inspiration. “Say, do you remember if anyone else was around asking about her? Say... sometime last spring, maybe?”
“Nope.” Then he frowned, and rested a foot on the front bumper of his car. “But now you mention it, a kid about high school age come around one Sunday morning, musta been in May, just about this time of the day, right after Barb took the boy off to church. Said he was looking for some other Anderson, I disremember the name — remember the kid ’cause he looked sorta Mexican. You know, dark skin, black curly hair — oh, and a long nose. I remember that nose, all right.”
Somehow they find out where the boy lives, talk to the neighbors to get the right name, then make a threat, probably by phone. A virulent threat, Curt thought, if he was right: because it had made Barbara Anderson and her son disappear just because Curt had dropped around to ask a casual question. Yes, it fit. Door bolted, night chain on in the middle of the afternoon. A tottery theory on a shaky framework, but...
“You... don’t know where I could reach Barbara now, do you?”
“Sure don’t, mister. Like I said, just moved out sudden. She didn’t leave no new address, not even a phone number. Not that I guess you’ll have much trouble finding her.”