A. Cremmins still wasn’t home, but one of the neighbors was and told him that Al Cremmins operated the service station a few blocks away. From Al Cremmins, who was busy trying to resuscitate an older car, and who was not especially communicative, he learned that Bobby Cremmins had been his nephew and an arrogant S.O.B.
He asked Al Cremmins if he knew Margaret Detweiler, but the man shook his head in dismissal and went back to work on the car, which looked sorely in need of his services.
Paul looked in the telephone directory under CPAs and found one Edward Detweiler. It was a name he hadn’t really wanted to find. It disquieted him. He looked at it a long time before he punched the number. He was able to make an appointment with Detweiler that afternoon on a “tax matter.” Paul thought that at this time of year the man probably didn’t have time for personal matters.
He ate a tasteless lunch, drove part way to Padre Island under a lowering sky the color of ashes, then went to his appointment with Edward Detweiler, who suggested that he call him Ed.
Detweiler’s offices were impressive, with a lot of plants and glass, and were staffed with mostly harried-looking men in shirt sleeves and a few intense young women hunched over adding machines and computers. Detweiler himself was no longer young. Paul would have put him at least ten years older than himself, but he was a well-dressed, handsome man with steel-rimmed glasses and a full head of graying hair which he wore a little longer than was fashionable. He greeted Paul in a private office and closed the door, to simulate, Paul supposed, confidentiality in tax matters, even though the work would doubtless be assigned to one or more of the industrious young people in the next room.
“I confess I don’t have any tax problems, Mr. Detweiler — Ed. I’m really here to see you about Margaret.”
“Margaret?” The man leaned forward. “Is she all right? Nobody here has heard from her in months. Where is she?”
Paul was disconcerted. He didn’t know what he had expected from Detweiler, but it was not the genuine concern the man was projecting across his expensive desk. And Paul was at a loss as to how much he should tell Maggie’s ex-husband.
“She’s fine,” Paul said. “She has a job, and she’s doing fine.”
The man leaned back, nodding as if relieved. “What is your interest in Margaret?” he asked.
“I’m her employer. I’m curious about her. She just appeared on our doorstep one day—”
Paul explained about his attending the conference in Houston, his free day, trying to make his inquiries sound as natural and casual as possible.
“Why did she leave Corpus?” Paul asked.
“Her daughter died.” The man looked at him as though he needed to have Paul understand. He made a steeple of his fingers. He had beautiful hands, long and well shaped. His nails were polished.
“Karen was in the hospital a long time, over eleven months. She was unconscious the whole time. The press called her the Sleeping Beauty, but she wasn’t; she wasn’t even pretty after a while. Her face had lost its character. Everyone told Margaret to let her go. But Margaret wouldn’t let her go. She went every day to the hospital. Every day for eleven months.” He paused, as if remembering.
“She divorced me because I didn’t share her obsession. I couldn’t. No one could. ‘She’s not your daughter,’ she would say. She wasn’t, but Karen was like my daughter. I married Margaret when Karen was twelve. Karen’s father had been a colonel in the army and died in Viet Nam. Colonel Jack Brand. Karen never forgot him even though she was only five when he was killed. Wouldn’t let me adopt her. Wouldn’t hear of it. Wanted to keep her own name and so forth. A stubborn girl, much like her mother.”
“What happened?” Paul asked. “Why was Karen in the hospital?”
He wondered how far he could go without exciting any hostility in the man, but Detweiler seemed willing enough to talk about his family’s tragedy to a stranger.
The man waved his hand. “Auto accident. She had been to a party. There had been a lot of drinking. Her date drove them from the party even though he probably shouldn’t have. She scarcely knew the boy. He said Karen made him pull over so that she could drive. Then they were going too fast for conditions. It had been raining. That’s what the report of the officer on the scene said. Hit a tree.”
He shrugged. “Karen becomes comatose, a vegetable, and this other kid walks away. It was terrible for Margaret. Then some idiot cop told her that he thought Karen had been the passenger in the car and not the driver, and that the boy had changed places with her and put her behind the wheel after they hit the tree. Because he had been drinking, you see. Thought so because of the nature of Karen’s injuries and so forth. Karen did have a broken neck and any movement might very well have severed her spine. Well, it was severed. But so what if it were true? There were no witnesses to the accident. There wasn’t any way to prove it. Do you think it made us feel better to suspect that the boy Karen was with might have aggravated her injuries? The police questioned him and let him go.”
Paul was cold. He thought the air conditioning must be on even though it was a blustery day in late February.
“Dumb cop.” Ed Detweiler pronounced sentence on the man.
“The insurance money ran out, Margaret paid out her own money until she didn’t have any left, then they moved Karen to a veteran’s hospital where she died a few days after she was taken off life support. Should have done it much earlier, but Margaret wouldn’t stand for it. She can be a very obstinate woman. Then it was out of her hands.”
“Margaret left Corpus?”
“Right after Karen’s funeral. Threw some things in a car and took off to I don’t know where.” He hunched forward as if he were pleading a case. “We all still care about Margaret, all her friends care what happens to her. But nobody here has heard from her.”
“And the boy? What was the name of the boy Karen was with in the accident?”
As if he didn’t know. But he had to hear it, didn’t he?
“Not likely to forget, am I? It was Cremmins. Bobby, I think. He’s a bicycle racer. Was a racer, I should say. I read the other day where he had gotten himself killed. Local paper carried the blurb. I think he still has an uncle who lives here.”
Paul thanked Ed Detweiler and drove back to Houston. He went through the motions of another day of the conference, collected all the collectibles, then took a Dramamine and flew back to Denver fortified with many scotches.
Maggie picked him up at ten o’clock that night at the Boulder motel where the shuttle from the Denver airport had deposited him. By then the things that had been so clear to him on the plane had become very confused. Sometimes he thought that she had used the time in San Angelo to put a buffer between herself and Corpus Christi. Probably to get a driver’s license with a San Angelo address, so that there would be no obvious connection between her and the cyclist. Or sometimes he thought that it could have been a place in which she meant to begin a new life. But then again, he was afraid that she had used him, had made him her witness, her accomplice to murder. Or had she? Could it have been an accident?
Before she undressed him and put him to bed he told her he had been to Corpus Christi and that they had to talk. But when he awoke the next morning feeling awful, mostly because of the drugs and drink, but partly because Willie was battering him in the forehead, she was gone. Her clothes were gone, her cosmetics were gone. There was no note.
She was not at the rooming house. She was not at the plant.
He remembered later that when he had returned home that day he had drawn himself into a ball in the middle of the living room, feeling the emptiness stretch out on all sides of him, seemingly forever. The sense of loss was crushing, the punishment completely out of proportion to his crime.