“You want to tell me what that was about?”
“She . . . We didn’t see eye to eye. I don’t understand why you’re asking me all this. Is this really necessary?”
Max said, “What, exactly, was the problem between you?”
Debbie sighed. “For one thing, that boy she’s raising. My dead sister’s child. My mother isn’t . . . wasn’t fit to raise a child, with her drinking. When the child was born, I told her she should take it to Child Welfare, where he could be adopted.”
“What about his father? Couldn’t he have taken Billy?”
“We have no idea who the father was. Some boy from her high school, too young and irresponsible anyway to take care of a family. Greta would never say who he was, only that his family refused to help.”
“And your other sister, Esther? She didn’t want Billy?”
“Esther didn’t want children,” she said shortly. Joe, listening to Max bait her, ask her questions to which he already knew the answers, wondered where this was going. Did he think Debbie was involved in Hesmerra’s death? Or was he, indeed, simply gathering background information?
“You were sixteen when you married Erik Kraft? Wasn’t that pretty young, too?”
“But we got married, we didn’t just . . .” Again she sighed, as if losing patience with his lack of insight. “I wanted out of there, I didn’t like living with my mother, I didn’t like her drinking. All right?”
“She was drinking then?”
“Not as much as now, I’ve heard. Not every day. She worked in an office then, some kind of clerk. Some weekends she’d go on a tear, then call in sick on Monday. We were living up in the hills above the village, renting a backyard guesthouse. My mother’s a loud, mean drunk. She yells and cries. I’m surprised they didn’t kick us out. Esther and Greta and I would get out of the house, go our separate ways. When I left to get married, she and Greta moved to that shack. Esther was already married and gone. What does this have to do with the fire and with my mother’s death?”
“Just trying to get a picture of her situation,” Max said quietly. “Did your mother try to get financial help from the state or county to raise the child?”
“I don’t know. Probably not. Who would give her help when she lived in that shack, and the way she drank? They’d just take the kid away from her. No, she would never apply for help, she didn’t like government do-gooders.”
“Did Hesmerra drink after the baby came?”
“I don’t know, I wasn’t there. Once in a while, I talked with my sister Esther. She said Mother was about the same.”
“You didn’t talk with Esther often.”
“She and I had a blowup. These questions have nothing to do with my mother.”
“They help to give me a picture of your mother’s life,” Max said, “to understand what might have happened.”
“What’s to understand? She got drunk and burned the house down. How did the fire start?”
“Fire investigators determined she left a skillet on the stove, with the burner on high. The grease in the pan got too hot, flamed up. Flames ignited the wall and then the ceiling. The house went up like tinder.”
Debbie’s face drained of color. But, strangely, her hands lay relaxed in her lap. Joe watched Tessa creep in and slip behind the couch. Vinnie appeared behind her, as if not to be left out. She found a place on the floor beneath a schefflera plant, sat there silent for once. Was Vinnie, too, intimidated by the law? Joe wondered, amused.
“It was about twelve years ago that you and Erik first separated?” Max asked. “That you left the village and moved up to your uncle’s, in Eugene?”
“Yes, but first I took what little money Erik gave me, and some I’d stashed, and enrolled for a summer semester at San Francisco Art Institute. Moved into the cheapest room I could find. I hardly had enough for food and for paper and paint. I don’t know, I thought it would lead somewhere, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I just knew I had to get away.
“Halfway through the semester, I found out I was pregnant,” she said bitterly. “When school was out, I moved up to my uncle’s—just before Vinnie was born.”
“And then some five years later you and Erik got back together?”
“Yes, but what does—”
“That’s when you left your uncle’s farm, and Erik rented the house in Eugene?”
She shifted her position on the couch, glancing impatiently toward the door. “I still don’t see what this has to do with my mother.”
“Just trying to get the whole picture,” Max repeated. “There’s some question about the cause of her death. In the investigation of a murder, we need to have some sense of the victim’s family as well as of her own life.”
Debbie stared at him. “A murder? Someone killed her? Someone set that fire and . . .” Her hands went to her face. “Someone burned . . . ?”
“She was dead before the fire started,” Max said. “But possibly not from natural causes.”
Debbie’s brown eyes remained fixed on Max. Joe tried to read her, as Max was reading her, but the chief was more skilled at this stuff. At first she had been too calm, too cool. Now, was her shock and distress genuine, or a good act?
Max said, “We don’t have many answers yet. I’m sorry to press you, but can we go back in time again, for a moment? Try to bring me up to speed?”
Debbie nodded, mute and still.
“When you and Erik moved into the Eugene house, he worked in that office during the summer months, came down to the Molena Point office for the winter, while you and the children remained in Eugene?”
“Yes. Tessa was only a baby.”
“And that is still the arrangement?”
“Until last fall, when he filed for divorce,” she said. “September. He sent child support money until just after Christmas, then the checks stopped. A month ago he stopped paying the rent, too. The landlord said we had to get out. I told him we had nowhere to go, and no money. I told him Erik took everything, but he didn’t care, all he wanted was money. I had to close out my household account, it was down to nothing. We have nothing.”
Nothing, Joe thought, but the two thousand bucks tucked away in your suitcase.
“Since you arrived in the village,” Max said, “have you been in touch with Erik? Or with Esther and Perry Fowler? Have you asked them for help in getting resettled?”
Joe knew Perry Fowler, the older of the two partners. You’d see him around the village dressed in tennis clothes, sometimes Fowler and Erik together. He was tall and slim like Erik but strangely pale despite the fact that he must be outdoors a lot. Pale hair, whitish skin, pale blue eyes, a hesitant way of moving. Joe had never seen Fowler’s wife headed for the tennis courts; he guessed Esther wasn’t interested in the game. He wondered what kind of tennis player Fowler was, as uncertain as he seemed.
“Erik doesn’t know I’m here. I don’t want him to know, so of course I haven’t contacted Perry, either. He’d be sure to tell Erik.” She looked at Harper pleadingly. “Erik would knock me around for coming here where he works. He doesn’t want people to know he left me. He won’t think I’d come here, this is the last place he’ll look. He’ll think I headed north, away from California. Maybe just keep going until I found a job.”
“How long did it take you to drive down from Eugene?” The chief knew she’d moved out of the rented house ten days ago; he’d called Eugene just after the autopsy, Charlie had told Ryan that. Apparently, while Debbie had left the landlord’s furniture intact, she’d taken everything else, down to the curtain rods, the towel racks, and the lightbulbs. Joe wondered if she’d left that little lightbulb in the refrigerator. He watched her fidgeting in her chair, her hands busy now, moving nervously, and then going rigid as she tried to keep them still. Max said, again, “The trip down from Eugene took you how long?”