“No, Mr. Carver. Anyplace but here.”
She turned away from him.
Carver left her that way, standing and staring out her window at the drab buildings across the street. The woman who’d been traded for a guided missile.
25
He was leaning hard on the cane, trudging toward his cottage by the sea, his carry-on leather suitcase slung by its shoulder strap and jostling against his hip, when he stopped and stood in the heat, staring. Behind him the ocean pounded like a heartbeat.
Someone had been digging. Carver could see the edge of what appeared to be a mound of dirt alongside the cottage, toward the back and almost out of sight.
After depositing the suitcase on the porch, he walked around the side of the cottage to where he’d seen the dirt.
He stood quietly, looking down. There was a mound of loose, sandy earth heaped next to a freshly dug hole. Stuck in the mound was a new shovel, shiny through the dirt on its blade and with a price sticker still affixed to its wooden handle. The hole was rectangular, about three feet wide, six feet long, and six feet deep. Very neat and symmetrical. Carver knew immediately that it was a grave. Knew who’d dug it, and who was meant to lie in it. If I make up my mind you’re dead, then you’re dead.
Fear he tried to deny came to life in Carver’s brain. He pushed the cold, quiet scream of it to a corner of his mind and went back around the cottage to the porch and inside.
He dropped the suitcase just inside the door, turned the air conditioner on high, and thumped with his cane into the kitchen. A clear drinking glass rested upside down on the sink. He rinsed it and filled it with cold tap water, then hurriedly drank it empty. He filled the glass again and drank deeply from it. As if he were trying to drown something within himself. Then he splashed the rest of the water down the drain, replaced the glass too hard, upside down again, with a loud clink! and pushed himself away from his leaning position on the sink.
Carver limped into the main room and sat down next to the phone. He didn’t think, didn’t move, until the window unit had stirred enough stale air to make it reasonably cool in the cottage.
Then he phoned Dr. Lee Macklin and made an appointment to see her late that afternoon at Sunhaven.
Dr. Macklin saw Carver not in her office but in her home on Sunhaven’s grounds. It was a flat-roofed extension of one of the garish Plexiglas cubes, out of sight from the highway. Built of cedar, it was rather plain from the outside but opened up inside into spacious and surprisingly luxurious quarters. There was a living room, furnished modern with a lot of polished steel and glass, carpeted in dove gray and containing matching charcoal gray sofa sections in a sunken area-what used to be called a conversation pit. A white concert-grand piano looked right at home near the powder blue drapes that lined the back windows. The lid was down on the piano, and there was a vase of fresh-cut flowers on it. White and yellow roses.
Beyond the living room was a slightly raised level bordered by a natural wood railing. Several doors led from that area to what Carver assumed was the kitchen, dining room, and bedrooms. In one corner of the vast living room there was actually a small, round pond bordered by mosaic tile and groupings of lush potted tropical plants. Light streaming in through the wide front windows was transformed by the pond into a gently wavering luminescence that played over the room and was oddly restful. Oil paintings lined the walls, mostly psychedelic seascapes, with oversized suns rising or setting for color. The ocean was there in all its moods, from placid to stormy, but in no particular order. And looking like something dreamed by Van Gogh after a bout with a bottle.
Dr. Macklin stepped down ahead of Carver into the sunken area of the living room and motioned elegantly for him to have a seat on one of the sofa sections that were arranged more or less in a square around a low, glass-topped table with chromed legs. She was out of her work mode, apparently, wearing a graceful blue silk dress. Her long dark hair was combed back sleekly and then slung forward over her right shoulder, its feathery edges resting lightly just above her breast. She was slender and beautiful, with cover-girl features and complexion. Her dark eyes were made up skillfully to appear even larger than they were.
Yet at the same time there was a businesslike air about her, a crispness and economy of movement that suggested authority, and that somehow reminded Carver of Edwina. A woman of contrasts, obviously.
As she sat down opposite Carver, a man about sixty stepped through one of the doors beyond the wood railing and smiled at them both. He was short and had a stomach paunch, and wore baggy khaki slacks and a wrinkled but expensive yellow cotton shirt with flaps on the pockets and with epaulettes. A pair of gold-rimmed glasses protruded perilously far from one of the shirt’s breast pockets, as if the exposed round lens were chancing a wondrous peek at the world.
He said, “I’m going to drive down to Vanessa’s and take advantage of the marvelous light.”
Carver realized he meant the soft early evening light favored by painters and photographers.
Dr. Macklin seemed compelled to make introductions. “This is my husband, Brian, Mr. Carver. Brian, Fred Carver.”
“Nice meeting you, Mr. Carver, but I’m afraid I have to run. Someone’s waiting for me to pick them up.”
“Your work?” Carver asked, motioning with his cane to take in the numerous wild oil paintings on the walls.
“ ’Fraid so,” Brian Macklin said, strangely apologetic.
“Very nice,” Carver said.
Brian nodded his thanks.
“Don’t let Brian’s modesty fool you,” Dr. Macklin said. “His work’s been displayed all over the South. He sells his paintings regularly and has his own show in Miami next month.”
“Which I’d better get to work on now, if I expect to be prepared.” Brian grinned almost impishly. He had a round, scrubbed-looking face with even features. An aged, gone-to-seed cherub. His gray hair was cut short on the sides, but it was longer and still thick on top, so it lay in a mass of loose curls. It was the hairstyle of a much younger man, say one about his wife’s age.
“Remember to be home by nine, dear.”
“Not to worry,” Brian said. “Ciao.” He went back through the door. Carver heard movement in another room, and what sounded like furniture being shoved around. Then he heard the front door close. Felt a stirring of air.
“My husband’s studio’s behind that wall,” Dr. Macklin said, gesturing vaguely with a red-nailed hand. She sounded genuinely proud of whatever success Brian enjoyed. Florida was full of would-be artists, most of whom had never sold a canvas or had their paintings displayed publicly.
“He does excellent work,” Carver said.
“Do you know art?”
“No.”
“Neither do I.” She crossed her magnificent legs; Carver heard the swish of nylon against nylon and felt a tightening in the core of him. He remembered Dr. Macklin with Nurse Rule at the Medallion Motel, how they’d kissed. The unmistakable possession and passion. Nurse Rule! Jesus! “Why did you set up this appointment, Mr. Carver?”
“I think you know I’m looking into a matter concerning Sunhaven.”
“Let’s not be cute or evasive. You’re looking into Sunhaven itself. Why?”
“Some of the residents feel there’s something wrong here.”
“I won’t ask which residents. I will ask what they think is wrong.”
“They’re not sure. Which is why I was hired.”
“By one of the residents?”
“Not exactly.”
“Be exact, Mr. Carver.”
“All right. Some people think there’s something wrong with the deaths that have occurred here in the past several months.”
“This is an old-folks’ home, Mr. Carver. Old people live to get a little older, and then they die. Death’s part of the package, I’m afraid. Unless you believe in earthly immortality. Old people imagine things. Sometimes they get unreasonable, even paranoid. Don’t you have a grasp of that?”