Yeah, I thought. What if he’s dead too?
He faced me again. “Jerry’s not a killer, he’s a victim. You understand? He’s a victim whether he’s all right or not.”
“I understand, son.”
He seemed suddenly a little embarrassed, as if he felt he had displayed too much emotion in front of a stranger. “Look, I, uh, I’ve got work to do. Is there anything else?”
“Just a couple of things. Is Martin Talbot’s name familiar to you?”
“No. I never heard of him until yesterday.”
“How about Laura Nichols? Karen Nichols?”
“No.”
“About Christine-did she have any enemies you might know about?”
“You mean somebody who’d make those threats the paper said she’d been getting?” He shook his head. “No. Whoever that crazy bastard is, he must be the one who killed her.”
“So it would seem,” I said. And then asked him the question I had been saving for last: “What can you tell me about Bobbie Reid?”
His reaction was immediate: he jerked slightly, as if I had swatted him one, and his face closed up and something flickered in his eyes that might have been pain. “What does Bobbie have to do with any of this?”
“I don’t know that she has anything to do with it. But she and Chris were friends.”
“The hell they were.”
“You didn’t know that? It’s true, Steve.”
“Bobbie’s dead,” he said stiffly. “She killed herself more than a month ago.”
“So I’ve been told. Do you know why?”
“No.” But he said the word a little too fast, it seemed to me. “Listen, I don’t want to talk about Bobbie, okay?”
“You’ll have to talk to somebody about her sooner or later. If not me, then the police.”
“She couldn’t have anything to do with what happened to Chris. How could she? No-I’ve got enough dead people to think about as it is.”
I wanted to press him further, but it would not have done any good; his expression said that he was not going to do any more talking no matter what I said. “All right, Steve. Have it your own way. Thanks for your time.”
He was no longer looking at me. He said, “Yeah,” and bent to pick up the hose. I watched him walk away from me, open the nozzle, and begin to wash the floor again. But this time he did it in hard, jerky sweeps, with the stream of water thinned down to a jet.
I went out and down the corridor between the fish market and the restaurant. My hands and feet were cold; I decided on a cup of coffee before I made any more stops.
Inside the restaurant I sat near the windows overlooking the bay and did some brooding while I waited for one of the waitresses to serve me. Steve Farmer seemed like a decent enough kid, and his concern for Jerry Carding had struck me as genuine. But I was pretty sure he had lied about not knowing or at least suspecting the motive for Bobbie Reid’s suicide. Why? Deep personal feelings that had nothing to do with murder? Or for reasons that did have something to do with murder?
I wondered if Farmer had lied about anything else, or held back information of some kind. I wondered if the relationships between the young people in this business were what they seemed to be. Add all those questions to the dozen or so others that had accumulated, shuffle them together with the known facts, and what did you get?
Nothing.
So far, not a damned thing.
FOURTEEN
There was not much to the village of Bodega-just a grocery store, a post office, a tavern, a garage-and-filling station, a few more antique stores than I remembered, and an old country church. I had neglected to ask Steve Farmer how to get to the Darden house, so I stopped in at the grocery to ask directions. The woman there said the Darden place was up on the hill above the village, lots of ice plants out front, can’t miss it.
When I drove up past the church I discovered that it wasn’t a church, not any more; it was a galleria dispensing local artwork. Sign of the times. And of what had happened to the Bodega Bay area. The old values, the old traditions, did not seem to mean much any more. At least not to those who worshipped at the shrine of the Almighty Buck.
The road curled around behind the galleria and wound upward along the face of the hill. From there on a clear day you would have a fine view toward the ocean; now, all you could make out through the screen of fog were vague surrealistic outlines, like backgrounds in a dream.
The Darden house turned out to be a rambling two-story structure at least as old as I was. The ice plants in the fenced-in yard gave the place a good deal of color: vermillion and lavender and pink, all glistening wetly in the mist. I parked in front, climbed out, and went through the gate and up a crushed shell path to the porch.
Just as I reached it, a slender attractive woman in her mid-forties came around one corner on a branch of the shell path. She wore a scarf over short graying hair, a pair of man’s dungarees, and a heavy plaid lumberman’s jacket; in her right hand were several sprigs of rosemary. She smiled when she saw me-a nice smile, friendly, infectious.
“Hello there,” she said. “Something I can do for you?”
I returned the smile. “Mrs. Darden?”
“Yes?”
Her expression sobered when I showed her the photostat of my license and told her why I was there; a troubled sadness came into her hazel eyes. It was the kind of sadness you see in people who have faced tragedy and known sorrow in their own lives. She had lost someone close to her once, I thought. Her husband, maybe. Farmer had implied that she and her daughter were the only two Dardens who lived here; and she was still wearing her wedding ring.
“It’s terrible,” she said, “what’s happened to Jerry’s family and fiance. Just awful.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I just hope that… well, that no harm has come to Jerry too.” She sighed and shook her head. “His disappearance is a complete mystery to us. To my daughter Sharon and me, I mean.”
“Would your daughter be home now?”
“No, I’m afraid not. She’s gone to Santa Rosa for the day with her young man.” Mrs. Darden paused. “Come inside, won’t you? It’s much too cold to talk here.”
She led me into the house and then into a parlor appointed with forties-style furniture and an odd combination of feminine and masculine objects: hand-painted glass paperweights and a rack of well-used pipes; porcelain figurines and an old cavalry sword hanging above the fireplace mantel; oval cameo portraits in delicate frames and an oil painting of a square-rigged clipper ship. I declined her invitation of something to drink, waited until she had shed her coat and the sprigs of rosemary and seated herself in a padded Boston rocker, and put myself down on the couch.
I asked, “When did you last see Jerry, Mrs. Darden?”
“The night he disappeared. Around nine o’clock.”
“What was his mood?”
“Oh, he seemed very excited-very intense. He’d been in his room all day, working; he didn’t even join us for meals.”
“He was writing something, is that right?”
“Yes,” she said. “He’d borrowed Sharon’s typewriter a few days before and I could hear it clacking away during the evenings and all day Sunday. I asked him what he was writing, and so did Sharon, but he wouldn’t tell us. He was just like a little boy with a secret.”
“When he left the house, was it on foot?”
“Yes.”
“Alone?”
“Oh yes.”
“Did he say where he was going?”
“To the post office, he told Sharon. He had two envelopes with him.”
“What sort of envelopes?”
“Large manila ones.”
“Both stamped and addressed?”
“Only one, I believe. Seems to me the other was blank.”
“Did you or Sharon notice the name on the addressed one?”
“No, we didn’t.”
“I understand the police found nothing helpful among Jerry’s belongings,” I said. “No carbon of what he’d been writing, no discarded papers of anything like that.”
“Nothing at all, no.”