Under the sink was a garbage bag; I dragged it out and stirred among the contents with two fingers. Couple of wads of paper towel, the carton the macaroni and cheese had come in, an empty package that had contained Ballpark Franks, and a shriveled, cooked or partially cooked hot dog. I lifted the hot dog out and examined it, sniffed it. Nothing wrong with it that I could tell. Heated and then tossed in the garbage.
Little things. By themselves they didn’t mean much, but when you added them all together...
I put the bag back where I’d found it, closed the cabinet doors. I was still humped over as I turned away from the sink, and the angle of my vision was just right for me to notice a faint smear on the blond-wood base of the island. It might have been grease or a food spatter, but it wasn’t. I knew what it was even before I flaked a little of it off on my fingernail.
Blood. Dried blood.
The smear was down close to the floor, near one of the corners. Sharp corners, this one nicked and gouged in a couple of places as if something hard had banged into it. Up close the marks looked relatively fresh. I checked for more blood residue, didn’t find any. The rest of the wood was clean, smelling of lemon scent, and the patterned linoleum floor underneath was also clean, as from a recent mopping. I got down on all fours and crawled around the island. The floor along the other three sides was not quite as spotless.
Away from me, against the baseboard under the bottom oven, something glittered.
I saw it as I started to get up. Whatever it was, it was tiny and yet it shone brightly in the track floodlights. I crawled over there and picked it up and laid it on my palm for a better look.
Thin piece of filigreed gold about an eighth of an inch long, bent on one end, jaggedly sheared on the other. Broken link from a bracelet or necklace, maybe. It hadn’t been down there long: no grit or dust to dull the polished surface.
Slowly I got to my feet. All sorts of things had begun to run around inside my head — facts, impressions, scraps of conversation dislodged from memory, irrelevancies that became relevant by short hop or quantum leap. My mind works that way sometimes, when it gets stuffed full enough — a kind of skip-around stream of consciousness that somehow sorts itself out into cohesiveness and clarity.
Dried blood and a broken gold link. Sharp corner, nicked and gouged, and a partly cleaned floor. Uneaten toast, uneaten macaroni and cheese. Half-clean pot in the sink, half-cooked frankfurter thrown away. Ballpark Franks — they plump when you cook ’em. DiGrazia’s Old-Fashioned Italian Sausages — new world elegance, old world taste. Roseanna, she says I got sausage on the brainhe sure wish she’d let me bother her a time or two. That’s all you ever think about, she says, your sausage. I can tell you this — she wouldn’t play the one time I tested the waters. Cogliona like that, hates you one minute, you talk to her right and the next minute maybe she changes her mind. Persistence is my middle name. Bada boom, bada bing, maybe she ends up sampling my sausage after all. Bombay Gin and Speyburn Scotch. Drowning herself in gin, as usual. I am a connoisseur of martinis, Charles, did you know that? I’ve got some really good twelve-year-old Scotch. She made his life miserable... cold-hearted bitch, someday I’ll tell her what I think of her. Out somewhere that required looking her best. Drunks are unpredictable, can’t tell what they might do. Bada bing, bada boom...
Little things, lots of them, and what they amounted to was something big and ugly. A chain reaction scenario of sudden violence, sudden death.
There was anger in me now, cold and focused. If my scenario was the right one, and I was reasonably sure it was, I had more work to do tonight. Hard work. Dirty work.
I went out of there to get it done.
21
Most businesses in the village were closed for the day; it was almost seven o’clock. The first open place I stopped at a liquor store, had a public phone outside, but the directory was missing. I went inside long enough to ask the clerk a couple of questions about Speyburn single highland malt Scotch. Then I drove on a ways until I came to a Shell station.
Two phone booths there, one with a tattered book. I flipped through the survivor’s white pages. There was a listing — an address on Ridgecrest Road. I had a map in the car that would tell me how to find it.
“He’s not here,” the woman said.
Her name was Lillian. She’d volunteered that information right after she opened the door, making it plain that she preferred her given name to her married one. Even in the pale porch light I could tell she had once been a beauty, the dark-haired, smoky type. She was still attractive at around forty, but there was a letting-go laxness to her facial muscles, a listlessness in her voice and movements, lines bracketing her mouth that had been deep-etched by the acid of bitterness. Behind her, inside the house, I could hear voices and laughter, some young and live, the rest canned — teenagers watching a TV sitcom.
“When do you expect him?” I asked.
“I don’t. He’ll be late, as usual.”
“Do you know where he is? It’s important I talk to him.”
“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”
“No. It’s urgent. Really.”
Pause. “He said he had a business meeting.”
“Did he say where or with whom?”
“No.”
“So you haven’t any idea where I can find him?”
Another pause, longer this time. Studying me. I was making an effort to keep my feelings from showing, but some of the anger must have leaked through. A good thing, as it turned out.
At length she said, “What do you want to talk to him about?”
“A personal matter.”
“I see. An urgent personal matter.”
“Very urgent.”
Her faint smile had no humor in it; in the diffused light the lines of bitterness looked deep and blood-dark, like slash marks. She thought she knew what kind of urgent matter, that was plain. And it didn’t seem to bother her. If anything, she was pleased. Long-suffering and fed up, and I’d caught her in just the right frame of mind.
“Well, then,” she said, “I may have an idea where he is. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but he has a cabin up in the mountains off Skyline. It used to belong to his brother before Dennis moved to Texas. He goes up there sometimes.”
“On business?”
The faint smile again, so fleeting this time it was like a shadow across her mouth. “When he wants to get away from me and the kids. His private little retreat.”
“Can you give me directions?”
“It’s about fifteen miles from here.”
“I don’t mind driving fifteen miles.”
“You might have trouble finding it.”
“I don’t mind that, either.”
She told me how to get there, in some detail. I said then, “A few more questions before I go. What kind of Scotch does your husband drink?”
“Now why would you want to know that?”
“Speyburn? The expensive twelve-year-old kind?”
“That’s right. Nothing but the best for him.”
“Is he in the habit of keeping a bottle in his car?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Her laugh was as cold as the night. “He wouldn’t want to be caught without it in an emergency. Such as a sudden business meeting. So you’d better be prepared, not that you aren’t already.”
“Prepared?”
“If he is at the cabin,” she said, “he won’t be alone.”
Lillian’s directions were explicit enough, but as she’d predicted I had a little trouble pinpointing the exact location of the cabin. It was northwest of Greenwood, on winding Tenitas Creek Road just off Skyline; the area was heavily forested, the property screened from the road by pine and spruce, the night dark, windy. Shifting splinters of light winked through the trees, but it wasn’t until my second pass that I spotted the half-hidden driveway leading in that way. The drive made a dogleg to the left partway along so I couldn’t tell whether the illumination came from a window or some kind of outside night-light.