“Just curious. Oh God.”
“Besides, driving rests me, the trip will do me good.”
“It might do us both good. A world of good.”
He got up. When he leaned over to pick up his hat from the floor he staggered slightly, and she wondered if he had had more to drink than he admitted, or if he was simply exhausted.
He kissed her at the door, a long kiss that seemed to Charlotte to be sad and bitter. She felt suddenly like weeping.
“Good-bye, Charley. Good-bye, darling.”
“Lewis, you’ll take care of yourself?”
“Of course. Have a nice time.”
“Wait. Lewis, if you don’t want me to go, if you have a reason...”
“Reason?” he repeated. “No. No reason except that I’ll miss you.”
“I hope you will.”
“Good-bye, Charley.” The words had an air of finality, as if he never expected to see her again.
The door closed.
14
She left the following morning long before sunrise. For the first hundred miles she drove along the coast where the road meandered like a concrete river following the curves of the sheer, barren cliffs, blanketed by fog. As the sun rose it swallowed the fog, leaving only a few undigested wisps hiding in the hollows and dips of the road.
The highway turned suddenly inland beyond the reach of the sea, where the heat lay thick over the fertile valley. Here the barren cliffs seemed remote and Charlotte could hardly imagine them only a few miles away from this sudden profusion of growth: acres and acres of silver-green lettuce — greengold, the farmers called it — and groves of oranges too huge to look real and miles of fat tomatoes reddening on the vines.
But the valley ended with the same finality as the cliffs. The road ascended, and the area of the redwoods began, trees so high, so ancient, that their origins dazed the imagination. There was a clearing where the trees had been ruthlessly cut down and hauled away, and from here Charlotte could see two mountains to the northeast, their snowy caps untouched by changes in the weather or by the footprints of men. It was as if nature — and the department of highways — had collaborated to give the tourist the whole scope of California in a few hundred miles.
When she crossed the border into Oregon she had to cut her speed because the noon sun, pressing down through the huge trees, made such brilliant patterns on the road that it was difficult to see any distance ahead or to distinguish the real from the shadow. Now and then she heard a mountain stream chortling furiously, violently, as if nothing could ever stop its mad, hilarious descent to the Pacific.
She reached the outskirts of Ashley a little after two o’clock. A sign informed her that she was about to enter Ashley, the Friendliest Little Town in the West, Population 9,394, Come Early and Stay Late.
She stopped at the first AAA motel that she came to. It was built in a small clearing of trees, two hundred yards off the highway, and it was so new that it still smelled of fresh wood.
A fat man in shirt sleeves was sitting on a kitchen chair tilted against a door marked “office,” fanning himself with a comic book. A dozen other comics were scattered around his chair, half of them without covers, the others brand-new, True Love Comics, Teen-Age Romance, I Was Jilted, Western Love and Romances. The fat man’s face was as innocent and devoid of thought as a marshmallow. He was probably laughed at in school as the fat boy, Charlotte thought. Now he’s getting back, he’s the hero of all the comic books, the lover who jilts, the cowboy who rides roughshod over women’s hearts. Poor man, poor boy.
“Any vacancy?” she said.
“Yes, ma’am. Number Four over there. Bath and shower, Beautyrest mattress. Six dollars a night.”
“That will do.”
She parked her car in front of Number Four, and came back to register at the office her name and address and the make and license number of her car. A card on the desk identified the fat man as Mr. Boy H. Coombs, Mgr., La Siesta Motel.
“You a doctor, eh?” Mr. Coombs said. “I see by your car.”
“Yes.”
“I never saw a lady doctor so close up before. In the movies I have, though. Ingrid Bergman was a doctor in a movie once, fell in love with Gregory Peck, only Peck happened to be...”
“Yes, I know. ‘Spellbound.’ ”
“Yes, yes, that was it. ‘Spellbound.’ I don’t know what she saw in Gregory Peck. He’s skinny as a broom, besides being a nut — in the picture, I mean.”
“Have you a phone book?”
The question took him by surprise. He had to stop a moment to make the transition from romance to phone books. “Well, sure we have.”
“I just want to look up an address.”
“Oh. Sure.” He searched around the desk and under the counter for the phone book and couldn’t find it. He stood up, panting from the exertion, and wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his pink shirt. “Somebody must have swiped it off of me. That’s low, stealing a phone book.” (But there was a dreamy look in his eye; the fat boy was Dick Tracy, out for revenge, on the trail of the thief who took the telephone book. On his slender wrist, a two-way radio. In his head, a photographic memory.)
“Perhaps you can help me locate someone,” Charlotte said crisply, and Mr. Coombs’s eyes snapped back into focus.
“I should be able to, lived here in town all my life.”
“Do you know Mrs. Myrtle Reyerling?”
“Myrtle? I sure do. Why, Sergeant Reyerling’s one of our war heroes, got his name on a plaque in the First National Bank, corner of Third Street. Myrtle lives in an apartment above Woolworth’s. You can’t miss it. Drive straight into town and there it is.”
“Thanks.”
The Woolworth store had a bright new façade but the apartments above it were dark and airless and smelled of last month’s grease and last week’s cabbage.
Charlotte paused before a door marked in pencil on a torn slip of paper, M. Reyerling. The transom was open and there were sounds inside the room, not sounds of quarreling, but of two women vociferously agreeing with each other about a third who wasn’t present
“I told her. I told her time and again.”
“I know you did, you bet you did.”
“But no, no, she was headstrong. Always believing the best of people. The best. Huh. I know now there’s no best in anyone. Only better. And them damn little better than the worst.”
“You’re absotively right, Myrtle, but don’t let it get you down.”
It was Myrtle Reyerling who opened the door, a tall, thin woman in her late twenties, with a six-inch pompadour that listed slightly to one side like a schooner in a high wind. Her mouth was pinched-looking, her jaw hard, but there was something pathetic about her eyes; they were questioning, bewildered.
“Mrs. Reyerling?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Charlotte Keating, a friend of Violet’s.”
The woman turned away, swallowing, swallowing again, before she spoke. “I guess you know about her then?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Come in if you want to. This here’s my girlfriend, Sally Morris.”
A dark-haired young woman with a wiry body and big muscular legs acknowledged the introduction with a nod.
“It’s all over town,” Mrs. Reyerling said. “Whisper, whisper, whisper, about how Violet was in the family way and not by Eddie. I don’t believe it. Violet was a good girl. My kid sister. Was a good girl and don’t anybody say different.”
“Now take it easy, Myrt.”
“She was a good girl.”
The young woman called Sally made a little gesture of impatience. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, good girls can do a lot of the same things as bad girls. I just told you, I saw her with my own eyes. She was in that bed, sleeping. And there were signs — know what I mean?”