At first I balked at the idea, but I sensed a reserve in Jeb Barkley; he might volunteer something useful in a less structured situation. “OK,” I said. “I’d appreciate it.”
We went outside to a parking area behind the real-estate office, and Barkley unlocked the doors of a blue Subaru Outback whose left side was badly scratched. He saw me looking at it and said: “Damn’ kids. Keyed it while the wife and I were at the movies last week.”
“I guess kids in small towns aren’t any different from those in big cities.” I slid into the passenger seat, wincing as the hot vinyl burned the back of my thighs.
“Makes me glad I never had any.” Barkley eased his big body behind the wheel.
“You mentioned that Tom Worthington had trouble with his children.”
“Yeah. Jeannie, the older one, got into drugs in high school. Tom had her in and out of schools for troubled teens, but it didn’t do any good. She’s out on her own now, only shows up when she wants money. The boy, Kent, has…I guess they call them anger-management problems. Did jail time for beating up his girlfriend. He’s in college now and doing well, but Tom says he’s still an angry young man.”
I made a mental note to find out more about Worthington’s troubled offspring. “And his wife…what kind of trouble did he have with her?”
“…I’m not sure I should be talking about that.”
“You’ll save me from having to ask him.”
“Well, OK, then. Betsy, that’s the wife’s name, she drinks. It’s gotten so that she doesn’t go out of the house, just drinks from morning till night. Wine after breakfast, the hard stuff in the afternoon, more wine during and after dinner. And then she passes out. They don’t have much of a life together.”
“Do you think she knew about Darya Adams?”
“Doubt the woman knows much about anything. I mean, when you’re in the bag all the time…”
“I hear you.”
Barkley drove north on the highway for about three miles, then looped off onto a secondary road that twisted and branched, twisted again, and began climbing into the hills between rocky outcroppings to which pines and sage and manzanita stubbornly clung. The road flattened briefly, and a scattering of buildings appeared-grocery store, propane firm, diner, and several small private homes.
“Chelsea,” Barkley said, and turned into a side road.
“Not much to it.”
“Nope. Of course, it suited Tom and Darya. As I said, they liked their privacy.”
“Why here, though? Why didn’t they buy a place nearer to Mammoth Lakes, where she had her shop?”
“Darya wasn’t comfortable with that. She’s…she was a prominent businesswoman, active in civic organizations and charities. Until Tom could see his way clear to divorcing Betsy, Darya preferred to keep their relationship secret.”
“Exactly why couldn’t he see his way clear?”
Barkley glanced at me, lips twisting wryly. “Money…what else? Community-property state, lots of assets at stake. He was trying to figure out a way to minimize the divorce’s impact on his holdings. I’ve been advising him how to do that.”
“You mean you’ve been advising him on a way to hide his assets.”
Barkley shrugged, turned his eyes back on the road.
After about a mile, he braked and made a sharp right turn into a graveled driveway. Clumps of dry grass stubbled the ground to either side, and ahead, tucked under tall pines and backing up to a rocky hill, stood the cabin. It was small, of stone and logs, with a wide porch running along the front and a dormer window peeking out from under its eaves. Barkley pulled the car up near the steps.
I got out and climbed to the porch. It was refreshingly cool there. Barkley followed, taking out a set of keys, and opened the front door. The interior of the cabin was even cooler.
The main floor was one big room: kitchen with a breakfast bar separating it from an informal dining area, sitting area centering around a stone fireplace. Rustic furnishings, the kind you expect in a vacation place. Stuffed animal heads on the walls; I could feel their glassy eyes watching me.
“Worthington’s a hunter?” I asked.
“What? No, the place came furnished.”
A spiral staircase led up to a loft. I climbed it, found two bedrooms with a connecting bath. In the larger of the two, the bed was unmade, the blanket and sheets tangled. In the bathroom, towels were draped crookedly over their bars; a silk robe in a red-and-black floral pattern lay on the edge of the tub.
I thought about the vacation place Hy and I owned on the Mendocino coast. At the end of every visit, we took time to tidy it, so we’d be greeted by a clean home when we returned. Tom Worthington claimed he had left the cabin on the morning of July thirty-first-apparently delegating the clean-up to Darya. Darya was due back at her shop in Mammoth Lakes on August first, and she probably would have wanted to go home and get settled in the night before, but there was no sign she’d been preparing to depart. I went down to the kitchen. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink, and a trash receptacle was overflowing. Barkley stood at the counter, his back to me, looking out a greenhouse window.
“Poor hummingbirds,” he said. “Their feeder’s empty. I think I’ll fill it.” He reached into a cabinet next to the sink as I went back to the living area.
There were two grass-cloth place mats and pewter salt and pepper shakers on the table, and the chairs had been neatly pushed in. The cushions on the sofa in front of the fireplace were rumpled, but I saw no books, magazines, or anything else of a personal nature. There were no knickknacks, photographs, or pictures on the wall.
Who are you people? I thought, standing by the fireplace. Or, in Darya’s case, who were you? With the exception of the disarray upstairs and in the kitchen, the cabin might have been a set for a TV movie. I couldn’t begin to fathom how the woman had died unless I knew how she had lived. And-with due apologies to Glenn’s instincts-I couldn’t fully assess Tom Worthington’s guilt or innocence until I knew what kind of man he was.
I decided to take a run up Highway 395 to Mammoth Lakes, in Mono County, right away. I’d speak to Adams’s employee there. Then, in the afternoon, I’d drive down to the Inyo County jail in Independence.
When Jeb Barkley dropped me off at my rental car, I called the office and asked Mick to start background searches on Tom Worthington’s son and daughter. Then I phoned Darya Adams’s employee, Kathy Bledsoe, and made an appointment to meet her at Adams’s shop, High Desert Mementoes. As I drove northwest on 395, I reviewed what I knew of the woman.
Kathy, according to Mick’s files, was an artist, in her midthirties, around Darya’s age. She’d enjoyed some success selling her landscapes through a gallery in Mammoth Lakes. For a number of years she’d been employed as a ski instructor at one of the area’s resorts, but had quit in order to devote more time to her painting; it must have been the right move, for a review of a showing of her works at the gallery last year predicted that her career was due to take off.
Mammoth Lakes struck me as an upscale community for Mono County. Hy owned a ranch to the north, near Tufa Lake, that he’d inherited from his stepfather, and I was accustomed to the small towns and open countryside of that area. But here you had good motels (presumably equipped with all the amenities my operatives would find desirable), a variety of restaurants, and shopping centers. A lot of shopping centers. I located Darya Adams’s establishment in one of them, not far from 395. Its windows displayed a better class of merchandise than usually found in tourist shops: obsidian sculptures, lava rock, dried desert plants, coffee-table books. The sign on the door said the shop was closed, but when I tapped on the glass, a slender, dark-haired woman admitted me and identified herself as Bledsoe.
When we were seated in a small office behind the selling floor, she said: “Truthfully, I don’t know what I can tell you that might help Tom. I mean, I was just here minding the store when Darya…Well, I just don’t know.”