"So you sort of volunteered to be her cat's-paw and bring me into the case for her."
She looked at me with a smile somewhere between bleakness and mischief. "At least you think it's a case, huh?"
I put on a fake frown, and she laughed. "Oh, please, John, he's such a good, bright little kid. He's had such a tough time so far, with his mother and all, and I'm so afraid for him out there."
"Okay, okay," I said, and motioned to the waiter. "Let's have our salad, and then you call Mrs. Kinnington to set up an appointment."
She smiled and shook her hair and poured herself another glass of wine.
"Today's the judge's day for tennis, so he won't be home until at least seven. She's expecting you at four-f1fteen."
THIRD
– ¦ Valerie wanted to drive me out to the Kinnington place, but I insisted that she merely lead me there and let me see Mrs. Kinnington alone. She reluctantly walked with me to a rent-a-car place in Copley Square (my ancient Renault Caravelle being in the shop awaiting a used A-frame from North Carolina). I rented a Mercury Monarch, and we bailed her car out of a parking garage.
We took the Mass Turnpike to Route 128, the elongated beltway around Boston. We were beating the high-tech rush hour by thirty minutes. After about six miles we took the exit after the one I used for Bonham and continued into Meade.
As we wound down the stylish country road, I began to get a better sense of the town. Meade was about as rural as its neighbor Bonham, but a good deal ritzier. In Bonham, there were big old farmhouses flanked by peeling, musty-looking barns with rusting agricultural machinery slumped in the yards. In Meade, there were big, skylighted farmhouses flanked by newly painted, too-red bams with burnished Mercedeses and Jags in the yards. I looked at myself in the rear-view mirror. Meade would happen to Bonham someday, and at that point I'd probably no longer be able to use the pistol range.
Val signaled a turn onto a private gravel road, then pulled past it to a stop. She stuck her head out the window and swiveled a hopeful face back toward me. I waved her on. She frowned and crunched some gravel on the shoulder as she accelerated out. I checked my watch. It was a shade after four, so I made the turn and weaved slowly upward through the trees.
As I approached it, the house appeared more modest than l had expected. It was a white colonial, with thin black shutters framing the smallish downstairs windows. No modern glass walls punched through here.
I swung around a wide circular drive with a small, nonspitting fountain in the center. I pulled past the fountain so that the Merc was headed out again. By the time I closed the car door, the main door to the house was open, and a middle-aged black woman stood frowning at me.
"Hello," I said, "I'm-"
"I don't want to know your name. I don't even know you're here. Mrs. Kinnington is upstairs. Follow me."
Maybe, I thought, it's my breath.
The central staircase was beautifully maintained, with a polished, curving mahogany handrail atop off-white pickets. The steps were mahogany under a narrow, oriental runner. I glanced left and right as we climbed the stairs. On one side I could see a living room with a large portrait of a young army officer over the mantel. On the other side was the corner of a dining room. Polished hardwood floors and no wall-to-wall, only old, tasteful orientals. A natural product of old, tasteful money.
At the top of the staircase was an invalid lift, a chair that would slide mechanically up and down on a floor-and-wall track. Through clever coloring, the wall tracks were almost invisible. We turned right, then left. There appeared to be a similar wing on the other side of the stairs. I realized that the house was a good deal bigger than it appeared from the driveway.
We entered a robin's-egg-blue bedroom that must have measured thirty by thirty feet. Sitting on a love seat, with a beautiful silver service on a low table in front of her, was a double for the late actress Gladys Cooper. A double except for the eyes, which were flinty-hard and so dark that there was no way to tell where the pupil stopped and the iris began. On one side of her rested a pair of metal braces; on the other was a Princess phone the color of the walls.
"Good afternoon, sir," she said. "Thank you, Mrs. Page; that will be all."
I half-turned, and Mrs. Page shot me a look that indicated that she was sorry her name had ever been mentioned in my presence. She closed the door behind her.
"No need to worry about Mrs. Page," she said in a tone she probably believed to be pleasant. "She and I have an understanding. Please sit down."
The least delicate-looking chair in the room had apparently been moved from a now-bare corner to a conversational distance from her. I took it.
"Will you have some tea?"
I declined.
She settled back with hers. "You look younger than I expected," she said from behind her teacup.
"It's the booze," I replied. "It acts as a preservative."
She sniffed a smile at me. "Middle-aged and impudent. Well, that's probably just the combination I require. Has Miss Jacobs fully informed you of what has happened?"
"Miss Jacobs has told me everything she believes is important."
A better smile this time, and the teacup was replaced on the tray. "Why don't we begin discussing what I feel is important, then?"
"Fine. Just so it doesn't interrupt our train of thought later, my fee is two hundred and fifty dollars per day, plus expenses."
"I trust then that you intend working on no other cases save this one?"
"By some frantic telephoning, I was able to clear my calendar."
"Continue."
"Second, the chances of one investigator finding one boy two weeks after he has vanished, even assuming he hasn't been kidnapped, are very, very slim."
"He hasn't been kidnapped."
"What makes you so sure?"
"There has been no ransom note, and Stephen packed before he left."
"Both good reasons, Mrs. Kinnington, but I'm afraid the lack of a ransom note would be consistent with packing if someone were trying to give the impression that the boy had skipped on his own."
She broke eye contact and retrieved her teacup.
"Could we please refer to my grandson as 'Stephen' rather than 'the boy'?" she said softly.
"Of course." A sincere emotion? Yes, all the more because while the voice changed, the face, more easily controlled, did not.
"I'm certain Stephen packed himself, because items are missing that another person, even his father, would never have thought to take."
I let the reference to the judge pass for the moment.
"For instance?"
"Before we go any further, I really must give you some insight about Stephen. He is an exceptionally gifted child. He was reading at age three. I had feared so that his mother's behavior and the shock of her death would crush his talents. But if anything, his unfortunate home life seems to have spurred him. His teachers and I, recognizing his abilities, have given him more and more advanced materials to study and absorb. Given a few months of intensive study, I daresay he would be a better lawyer than-but I digress. The point I mean to make is that Stephen has the emotional and intellectual courage to strike out on his own. He would know exactly and concisely what he would need, and that is what he packed."
"What did he pack for?"
"Until my stroke, three years ago, I was an active camper. The judge despises the outdoors and would invent illness when he was younger to avoid coming with my husband and… and me.
"Stephen, however, seemed born with a love for the outdoors. He would walk the property here, approximately seventy-five acres, endlessly, as one season changed into another, observing the wildlife and plants. After my stroke, he would come in each day and describe to me what he'd seen and heard and touched. He became terribly interested in the wilderness, and with my help, he and I selected numerous books and items from L. L. Bean, Abercrombie, and other catalogs to prepare a wildemess-survival kit for him."