Apparently He’s the only one who knows for sure.
Or maybe Andrea Prescott knew. She was a cold blond, who was not quite as good-looking as she thought, all done up in several hundred dollars of good clothes-blue suede car coat, dark blue sweater, light blue slacks-anda pair of sunglasses that gave her the faint air of a starlet. She had set her very nice bottom on the edge of a picnic table and was in the process of lighting a cigarette when I walked up to her.
“God, you really are short.”
“Why, thank you.”
“I suppose that came off a little shitty.”
She put out a limp slender hand. I half expected she half expected me to kiss it. I gave it a good shaking. “You can do better than that, McCain. Put a little hurt into it.”
She smiled. She apparently found this all terribly, terribly amusing. Dear, dear Noel. She said, “Did anybody warn you about me?”
“Just that pest control company.”
“My mother says I’m a bitch on wheels.
But I really don’t mean to be.”
“My faith in humanity has been restored at last.”
I wanted a peek at her eyes. The shades made that impossible. “You’re a sarcastic little shit.”
“Thank you again.”
She took a terminal drag on her smoke, exhaled, and said, “I’m the one who called you the other night.”
““It wasn’t an accident”-t thing?”
“Yes. I thought I was pretty good.”
“Not bad.”
“Because it wasn’t, you know.” She reached into the pocket of her car coat and withdrew one of those tiny bottles of liquor they serve on airliners. She had herself a pop then returned bottle to pocket. “Sara was my cousin.”
“Lucky girl.”
“She said somebody was after her.”
“Did she say who?”
“She wasn’t sure. She just had this sense.
She was sort of a goody-two-shoes. She had no imagination at all. I used to put her on all the time and she always took everything I said seriously. A total square. That’s why I believed her. If my little cousin thought somebody was after her, then they were.” She walked over to the mounds. “You know anything about these things?”
“Not much except that the people who built them were way ahead of their time.”
She sighed. “I decided to go to Iowa instead of Northwestern so I could be closer to this boy I’m kind of in love with, who pledged Greek at the university. God, I wonder if it was worth it. I wanted to study real things. Not a bunch of Indians, for God’s sake.”
“The university’s a good school.”
“You went there, I suppose?”
“Yeah, after a couple of years Oxford started to get boring so I came back here.”
“Did I ever tell you how much I hate patter? Don, that’s my fianc@e, people think he’s stupid because he can’t small-talk.
I think it’s a sign of intelligence, not being a smart mouth all the time.”
“Like certain short private investigators you could name?”
She took off her glasses. She had wondrous beautiful blue eyes. “Exactly.”
Then, “You wouldn’t know anything about these Indians would you?”
“They’re dead.”
“Patter.”
“Actually, they’re very interesting. There’s a book on them at the library downtown.”
“Did they ever have to fight dinosaurs?”
“Different time period.”
“Oh.” She was disappointed but then most people are disappointed when they find out dinosaurs weren’t involved.
“I’m in a hurry, Andrea. What did you want to tell me?”
She smoked her cigarette right down to the nub.
“The time she had her breakdown? It was because she was seeing an older man.”
“I kind of figured that.”
“She was a sophomore.”
“I know.”
“In high school.”
“I know.”
“Seeing this forty-five-year-old.”
“Are you going to tell me his name?”
“I’ll bet you already know his name.”
“I’m betting Jack Coyle.”
She smiled. “You’re not half as dumb as you look.”
I laughed. “You know, if you were a real bitch you wouldn’t have to work so hard at it. You work up a sweat about it and that’s never any good. Instead of bitchy, you just come off sort of sad. Maybe even a little pathetic. Maybe you didn’t get the Christmas present you wanted one year. Or maybe your daddy would never kiss you. Or maybe you weren’t potty trained properly.”
“Try walking in on my mom screwing my uncle’s brains out.”
“Oh. I guess I was wrong. Sorry.”
It was a pretty dramatic moment. A thing like that could turn anybody into a bitch. “When did it happen?”
“It didn’t really happen. I just wanted to see if I could get you to feel sorry for me for a half a minute. You should’ve seen your face when I told you the bit about my uncle.”
“So your mom didn’t sleep with him?”
“His own wife won’t sleep with him.
He’s got this skin condition all over his body.”
“Ah.”
She smirked. “You should’ve seen your face, McCain.”
I knew my face was red. She was some piece of work. “So had she heard from Jack Coyle lately?”
“Three times in one week. Wanting to get together.”
“So that’s what you meant by it wasn’t an accident?”
“He has a terrible temper. She told me that much. I could see him killing her and David.”
I pictured him in his tennis whites. I guessed I could see him killing them, too.
“He was completely obsessed with her,” she said. “Say, you wouldn’t write a paper for me, would you?”
“Too busy.”
“A hundred dollars?”
“Too busy.”
A smirk. “A hundred dollars and an hour with me in the back seat.”
I decided to surprise her. “You know something?”
“What?”
“I like you.”
“Sure you do.”
“I do. You’re as insecure as I am but you don’t handle it well at all. You need to relax. The bitch acts gets old fast.”
“I got you going, didn’t I? With that story about my mom and my uncle?”
“Yes, you did. I felt sorry for you. I could actually see you as a little girl walking into that bedroom. What you mst’ve seen and how you mst’ve felt.” I reached out and shook her hand. “Thanks for the lead on Jack Coyle. It may come in handy.”
After finishing our handshake, I started toward my car.
She said, to my back, “McCain?”
“Yeah?” I kept on moving.
“What I told you about walking in on my mom was true.”
“I kind of figured it was.” And
I had.
“That’s why they got a divorce. But she wasn’t with my uncle.” Beat for maximum dramatic effect: “She was with my aunt.”
Eighteen
Mike Carlyle made it easy for me. He stood in the entrance to his lumberyard talking to a customer. He glanced at my ragtop as I drove by but didn’t seem to find it interesting enough to glance for long.
As I drove out to his place, I noticed all the early spooks appearing all over town, jack o’lanterns and cardboard witches in windows, and a few scarecrows on front lawns.
Halloween. With the smoky scent of autumn on the air, it made you want to be a kid again when the most frightening thing you had to face was boogeymen you could buy at Woolworth’s. I thought of Linda.
A cancer ward was about as scary a thing as I could imagine.
The Carlyle house was one of those new ranch styles that sprawled over half an acre in a valley. The wine-colored house was surrounded by jack pines that hid it almost completely when you approached, as I did, from the west. A long metal rail ran in front of the place up on the roadside to keep cars from sailing off the asphalt and smashing into the house below.
I found a small park a quarter mile away and walked back. I didn’t want to advertise I was coming so she’d have time to hide.
The sun was just beginning to set. A yellow school bus roared past, scattering dust and gravel. The air was brisk and clean. I always told big city people that I liked living in a small city because I was so close to the outdoors.