“What did he look like?” I asked. “This Ralph Overholst?”
“Oh, let’s see. Medium tall, medium thin, about thirty, maybe older or younger. Brown hair... Why are you asking? Has he done something?” She leaned on the counter, woman-to-woman.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“They try to be careful here when they hire instructors, check references and stuff, you know?”
I nodded. They probably were careful. However, Mama was not. “Was he cleanshaven?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. They have to be. Mr. Barnard insists on it. Older women don’t trust men with beards, that’s what he says, and our clientele is mostly older women.”
“You told me.”
“So Mr. Barnard said he’d have to shave before he came to work.”
My hardbeating heart jounced in my chest. “So this Ralph Overholst had a beard when he applied?”
“Hairy! You wouldn’t believe.”
“Thank you,” I said, and ran out to my car.
I stopped at a drugstore and got a small bottle of brandy, then at a lunch counter I picked up a carton of takeout coffee. I drove back to the motel, laced the coffee with brandy, and dialed Jeff’s office. It was twelve thirty. He wouldn’t go out to lunch for another half hour or so, and I planned to give him something to chew on. “Jeff?” I yelled into the mouthpiece... “No, I am not home. I’m still here... Yes, I turned off the lights. And looked under the beds... Oh, shut up a minute and listen...” Then I laid it all out for him — Mama’s things in the antique shop, the young man in Mama’s Cadillac, Ralph Overholst of the Adult Driving place who quit when Mama did, and what did he think of that?
What he thought of it was the weirdly contrived logic of an ad man. “For Pete’s sake, Margaret,” he said impatiently, “your mother probably asked this young man to sell a few useless things for her, then she probably hired him to drive her someplace — on one of those trips she’s been talking about... Why don’t you stop fooling around and come on home?”
I hung up, poured some more brandy in the coffee, and drank it down. I thought, for one cynical moment, of the police, discarding the thought immediately with the certain knowledge that they would regard my suspicions with the same cavalier dis-passion as had Jeff.
I jumped into my car and drove to Mrs. Herter’s daughter’s house.
Mrs. Herter was there, shoes off, varicose veins swollen, serving her grandchildren a peanut butter lunch and hating me for being my mother’s daughter.
“Why did she let you go, Mrs. Herter?”
“Because she had that young dude there and you can’t tell me any different.”
“Young dude?” I asked.
“The way she simpered around him was enough to make anyone sick and him young enough to be her son, maybe young enough to be her grandson...”
“About how old?”
“At first, she made a pretense. Well, at first, I guess, he actually was teaching her to drive. He’d come after her on the days I worked there and she’d go trip-pin’ out on those heels of hers to the car he brought in front — you know, the one with two driver’s things...”
“Dual drive.”
“But later, he was teaching her in her own car — and I’ll bet that wasn’t all he was teaching her, either. I found some of his clothes in that other bedroom...”
I turned my face away.
“The day she told me she didn’t need me any more, I figured she didn’t want me nosing around. She was probably ashamed. If she wasn’t, she should have been.”
“And that’s all she said? That she just didn’t need you any more?”
“She said she could get along without me. Who knows? Maybe he was going to do the housework. He was already starting to do the yard work.”
“What did he look like?”
“Just young. All young people look alike.”
It was one o’clock. I knew a lot now that I had not known this morning, but not enough to know where Mama was and why. Enough only to know that her driving instructor, Ralph Over-hoist (or one who called himself by the name), a hairy, then cleanshaven man, finally neither, but looking like everybody else, had sold a number of Mama’s antiques.
I drove from Mrs. Herter’s daughter’s house across town and down a street of tiny look-alike houses to the one on the corner where Joe Gomez lived. His truck was not parked in the driveway, so I drove on. He was probably out clipping grass, and any question and answer game I might attempt to play with Mrs. Gomez would come out pure Spanish, which I cannot understand.
I turned toward the hills.
Mama’s street and the one above were as quietly austere, as uncommunicatively introverted, as always. I nosed the car onto the slanted driveway but short of the garage door. Then I opened the trunk of the car and rummaged around and found what I think is called a tire iron. The garage door was locked with a padlock. I pushed the end of the tire iron in behind the padlocked bolt and pulled. I heard the groan of old, termite-eaten wood as the bolt broke through. I pulled open the door onto an empty garage. Neat and empty. Tools hung on peg-boards, waxes, polishes neatly capped and lined up on the workbench, chamois in a basket.
I put the tire iron back into my trunk and slammed it shut. I walked down the cement steps into the yard below and noticed now that it looked better than it ever had during all those years Joe Gomez had taken care of it — more formally pruned, clipped, and manicured, the flagstones swept and edged — as if whoever was doing it was either taking pride or making mileage.
Just as I reached the front of the house, the mail truck was moving away from the box down at the curbing. I had forgotten about the mail! I ran down the front steps, opened the box, and drew out a couple of bills — one, the electric bill, postmarked the day before, probably today’s delivery — the other, a gas bill postmarked the day before that, yesterday’s delivery. The precanceled Occupant mail carried no date, but an envelope addressed to Mama from a local travel agency showed a postmark of three days ago. I tore it open upon brochures for “Romantic Hawaii,” climbed the front steps, inserted my credit card, and let myself in the house.
I left the door open, put the mail on the telephone stand, opened the drawer, looked up the number of the travel agency, and dialed.
“Why, yes,” the sweet young voice answered my question, “that was in reply to a telephone request from Mrs. Mossby. The request?” She seemed to be consulting some notes. “Why, it was the twenty-fifth, three days ago, the same day I sent out the brochures. She said she and her fiancé — I believe that’s who she said — would want to look them over before making a decision.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Well, would Mrs. Mossby...” she began, and I said, “I’m afraid not.” My throat closing, I hung up.
Mama had sat here three days ago, girlishly giddy, apparently alive and well, and made her telephone call — her fateful call, of that I was sure. It was all beginning to come together. I thought of those personal jigsaw puzzles so popular about ten years ago — Jeff had the account of a game company that manufactured them, and he was enthusiastic, so the company enlarged photographs and mounted them of each of the kids and cut them into jigsaw puzzles, big pieces for small fingers to put together, and Jeff brought them home, watching the kids with an ad man’s perceptive frown, and got the surprise of his life. Steve, four, slapped his together in nothing flat and screamed in terror at all the cracks in his face. Carolyn, two, managed to get her hair and part of her face locked in, then abandoned the project, which was exactly the position I was in at that moment. There was a big hole in Mama’s personal jigsaw puzzle and I didn’t want to find those remaining pieces.