“Go answer the door,” Carella said.
Sarah went to the door and unlocked it. A tall blond girl wearing a soaking wet trench coat and a plastic scarf on her head came in carrying a bulging brown paper bag. She put the bag down on the Parsons table just inside the front door, said, “What took you so long to open it?” and then saw Carella and Meyer and said, “Hi, fellas.”
“Hi, Lakie,” Carella said.
“They’re fuzz,” Sarah said glumly.
“Shit,” Lakie said, and took off the plastic scarf and shook out her long blond hair. “Is this a bust?” she asked.
“They got a search warrant,” Sarah said.
“Shit,” Lakie said again.
They had scarcely begun opening drawers in C.J.’s room when the door buzzer sounded again. A few minutes later, they heard loud voices in the entrance foyer. Carella walked out of the bedroom and toward the front door. Six wet and obviously annoyed men were standing there arguing with Sarah, who still wore nothing but the red bikini panties.
“What’s the problem, fellas?” Carella asked.
“Who the fuck are you?” one of the men said.
“Police,” Carella said, and showed them his shield.
The men looked at it silently.
“Is that a real badge?” one of the men asked.
“Solid gold,” Carella said.
“There goes the fuckin party, right?” Sarah said.
“Well put,” Carella said.
“Boy oh boy,” one of the men said, shaking his head. “I gotta tell you.”
From the bedroom, Meyer called, “Steve! Come look at this.”
“Close the door behind you, boys,” Carella said, and wagged them out with his hands.
“This was some great idea, Jimmy,” one of the men said.
“Shut the fuck up, willya?” Jimmy said, and slammed the door shut behind him. Carella locked it and put on the night chain.
“So what am I supposed to do all afternoon now, huh?” Sarah asked.
“Go read a book,” Carella said.
“A what?” she said.
“Steve!” Meyer called.
“You guys come bustin in here,” Sarah said, following Carella down the hall, “and we’re gonna lose half a yard, that’s what this party was gonna bring us.”
“What’ve you got?” Carella asked Meyer.
“This,” Meyer said.
“C.J.’s train schedule,” Sarah said, “big deal. What the fuck good is it now? She’s dead, she ain’t gonna take no more trains noplace,” she said, vigorously shaking her head and her breasts from side to side.
“Will you go put something on?” Meyer said. “You’re making me dizzy.”
“Lots of people say that,” Sarah said, looking down at her breasts. “I wonder why.”
“Go put on a bra, will you?”
“I don’t have any bras,” Sarah said, and folded her arms across her chest.
“Ever see her consulting this?” Carella said.
“Only once a week,” Sarah said.
“When?”
“Every Wednesday.”
“Look at what she marked,” Meyer said.
One side of the schedule listed all trains from Isola to Tarkington, which was the last stop on the Sands Spit line. The other side of the schedule listed all trains coming into the city from the opposite direction. C. J. had circled the name of one town on the return side of the schedule: Fox Hill.
“Listen,” Sarah said, “would you guys like a drink or something? I mean, I hate to waste the fuckin afternoon, I really do.”
“Next train out is at three-oh-seven,” Carella said, and looked at his watch.
“I mean,” Sarah said to Meyer, “you seem to dig the jugs, what do you say?”
“What’s this?” Carella said.
“Where?” Meyer said.
“Right here,” Sarah said. “My bedroom’s just down the hall.”
“Here on the bottom of the schedule,” Carella said.
“What do you say, Baldy?”
“Some other time,” Meyer said.
“When?” Sarah said.
Scribbled on the bottom of the schedule were the numerals 346-8711. Unless both detectives were enormously mistaken, they were looking at a telephone number.
The harbor patrolman who took them out to the island in the Elsinore County police launch was a man named Sonny Gardner. What had been a steady downpour when they left the city an hour before had become here on the Spit a faint drizzle that was something more than fog but less than true rain, a misty cold wash that blew in off the water and penetrated the skin as if by osmosis.
“You picked a hell of a day to go out to Hawkhurst,” Sonny said. “I could think of better days.”
“Is that what the island’s called?” Carella asked. “Hawkhurst?”
“No, that’s the house. The island is Kent. But the names are connected, if you know what I mean? The guy who built the house used to spend his summers in Kent. That’s in England, that’s a county in England. When the British were here on the Spit, the commander of the fort on one of the islands was originally from Kent. He named the two islands Greater Kent — that’s the one had the fort on it — and Lesser Kent, that’s the one we’re going to. Anyway, the guy who later bought Lesser Kent was familiar with England and when he built the house out there, he named the house Hawkhurst, which is a town in Kent.”
“Man named Parker, is that right?” Carella said.
“Nossir, not to my knowledge.”
“Phone company said the phone was listed to an L. Parker.”
“That’s the daughter.”
“What’s her first name?”
“Lily. The old man built the house for her when she got married.”
“What was his name?”
“Frank Peterson. Peterson Lumber, you familiar with it?”
“No.”
“Very big out here on the Spit. Started the business in Jackson Cove, oh, back after World War One sometime, turned it into a multimillion-dollar enterprise. Bought the island for his daughter when she was sixteen. Only child. A birthday present, you know? How’d you like to have a father like that?” Sonny asked.
“Yeah,” Meyer said, thinking the only thing his father had ever given him was a double-barreled moniker.
“Though who knows?” Sonny said. “People say the kid’s nuts now, so who knows about things like that, huh?”
“The kid?” Meyer said.
“Yeah, the daughter. Well, she ain’t a kid no more, she must be close to forty by now.”
“I take it she’s married,” Carella said.
“Was married,” Sonny said. “Husband left her practically on their wedding day. That’s when she went bananas.”
“How bad was she?” Carella asked.
“Well, she couldn’ta been too bad,” Sonny said, “cause they didn’t put her away or nothin. Took care of her out there on the island. I used to see the old man at the railroad station picking up the nurses — when they changed shifts, you know.”
“But people still say she’s nuts, huh?” Meyer said.
“Well, eccentric,” Sonny said. “Put it that way. Eccentric.”
“Where’s the old man now?”
“Dead,” Sonny said. “Must be six or seven years now. Yeah, that’s right, it was seven years this July. That’s when he died. Left the daughter all alone in the world.”
The boat was coming in toward a small sandy cove on the southern end of the island. A fog-shrouded dock jutted into the bay there, its pilings standing like ghostly sentinels in the mist. Beyond, on the ocean side of the island, the surf pounded in against a long white sand beach.
“Only house out here, you know,” Sonny said. “Hawkhurst. It’s a private island. This one and Greater Kent. Both private islands.” He maneuvered the launch into the dock, and Carella leaped ashore and caught the line Meyer tossed to him. He made it fast on one of the pilings, offered his hand to help Meyer ashore, and then said, “Can you wait for us?”