Using the directory and Algernon’s address book, Shephard translated the called numbers into names, and listed in his notebook parties called, times, duration of calls. After an hour’s work, it appeared that Algernon’s “fine old woman who lives in town” was one Hope Creeley. So Theodore got it a little mixed up, Shephard thought. To “hope it was Greeley.” Not bad for a man who can’t read or write. Her address was listed as 9487 Waveside, Laguna Beach, and Tim Algernon had called her a total of twenty-four times between 5 P.M. Saturday, August 23, and Sunday, August 24. Twenty-four calls of a minute each. The last was made at 11:54 Sunday night, six hours before Algernon had had his last whiskey with the man who killed him. What can a terrified man say in twenty-four one-minute calls that he couldn’t say in one twenty-four-minute call, Shephard wondered. He dialed Hope Creeley’s number from the booth outside, got no answer, and dialed again.
Back in the Mustang, he headed for Waveside Drive in the north end of town.
The house was a tidy, three-story Spanish-style manse with a clay tile roof and a spacious portico whose shade smelled of citrus to Shephard. He pushed the doorbell, which after a momentary silence prompted a muted chime from deep inside the house. Just to the right of the wooden door, a mailbox contained three envelopes. He removed them, glanced at the first and saw that it had been delivered that day. He rang again. No answer.
A wrought-iron gate opened onto a walkway that led around the right side of the house. Shephard pushed it open, the hair on his neck rising when it squeaked like fingernails on a chalkboard. The walkway was narrow and shaded from the house next door by a tall fence of redwood. It opened to a generous backyard that in spite of its size was still cloistered from the neighbors by three large avocado trees, growing in a semicircle against the back fence. Between the dark green avocados stood lemon trees, their round, symmetrical bodies sprinkled with fruit. The cement patio spread out before him like an island in a sea of grass, covered with chairs, tables, lounges, a barbecue. He judged it a peaceful backyard.
To his left he saw that the sliding glass door was open nearly halfway, the edge of a white drape lapping outward in the breeze. The family dog, a smallish breed by the look of it, had fallen asleep inside the house and its head was dangling over the tracks of the door and onto the patio. Not much of a watchdog, Shephard. Thought, considering the whining gate. He whistled quietly, but the dog still didn’t budge. The breeze stirred a windchime, scattering random music.
Shephard whistled again and went across the patio to the dog. Standing over it now, it was clear to him that the animal was dead. It was a basenji, eyes half open, its tongue dangling out, the tiny chin stained with blood.
Pushing back the drapes, he stepped inside. He stood and listened for a moment, hearing nothing. The living room was hushed in shadow and emitted none of the lingering friction of recent activity. The upholstered chairs were humped quietly around a low coffee table, a piano with covered keys blended into the darkness of the far corner, a meager portion of light forced its way through the drapes and washed almost unnoticeably into the pale green carpet. Shephard drew the Colt Python from his shoulder holster, but it felt wrong in his hand. Moving into the dining room, he put the pistol back.
Why is it so difficult to see a dining table and five chairs and not imagine people sitting there, he wondered. But the dark walnut chairs, polished exuberantly and waiting just so, were vacant. The armoire towering behind them twinkled with crystal even in the dreary light. The kitchen showed no signs of recent, or any other kind of use.
“Mrs. Creeley?” Shephard’s voice echoed quickly. He backtracked to the basenji and found that his powers as an investigator of human affairs meant little in the world of dogs. The throat seemed large, the neck swollen, but didn’t basenjis have a thickened, Egyptian head? The blood on the chin suggested strangulation, or did it? The expression on the dog’s face told him nothing. Standing once again on the pale green carpet, he regarded the staircase that began at the far side of the living room.
He climbed to the second story, aware for the first time that the house, despite the opened patio door, was stuffy and ill-ventilated. Each of three bedrooms on the floor was decorated with a zeal for American Coloniaclass="underline" hardwood floors covered with red throw-rugs, white and blue bedspreads across which huge eagles cocked their heads, massive maple headboards cut with Colonial heft and grace. The effect was museumlike, he thought, more to be looked at than lived in. Nowhere were there signs of a family’s energy, that wake of activity that leaves at the very least a chair out of kilter with its table, a coat tossed across a bed or sofa, a dish in the sink.
The stairway carpet changed from green to white where it began its rise to the third story. Shephard felt a quick flicker of vertigo when he reached the final floor: the relentless white skewed his sense of balance. He called again.
The third floor was as vast as it was colorless. The white carpet opened before him to a capacious anteroom whose walls, furniture, even fireplace, were crisp white. Unlike the downstairs rooms, the anteroom stood bleached in sunlight, which entered two west-facing windows unobstructed by shades or curtains and parceled itself into bright rhomboids on the carpet. Shephard noted again, as he had as a child, that in shafts of sunlight dust settles upward rather than the more logical down. He crossed the pristine carpet to a set of double doors, white, at the far end. Swinging them open he found still more of the pale carpet, expanding before him into the master bedroom.
Shephard thought it was the brightest room he’d ever seen. A cream-colored settee was backed against the wall to his left, over which hung a mirror framed in white that reflected more white from across the room. In the center stood a king-sized bed that seemed magnified by its lack of color. Shephard suffered the momentary illusion that everything was made of plaster. When he pressed his hand against the bed, the soft texture felt incongruous.
He stood in the bathroom doorway, faced with a full-length reflection of himself. The mirrored partition gave way on the right to a large vanity area consisting of two sinks fitted with white porcelain fixtures, a mirror that ran the length of the wall in front of the sinks, a white wooden chest fastened to the far wall beside a toilet, and a sparkling bidet. He turned back to the bathroom entrance, moved past the entryway mirror again, and found himself in a similar room: white walls, white tile.
But rather than a toilet and bidet, along the far wall was a bathtub, and Shephard’s first reaction when he looked at it was, Well, my sweet God Jesus, there is something that isn’t white.
Lying in the tub is something definitely not white.
He backed against the wall as a flood of sweat erupted along his back, and stepped back out to the bedroom. He stood watching the dust settle upward, breathing rapidly. Then a series of mental detours, in the form of questions. When did Jane Algernon awaken? Did Cal like last night’s dinner? How long could a dog survive on a strict vegetarian diet? Why does dust settle up? Who cares? Then there was the problem of his pistol. He drew it, put it back, drew it again: somehow he felt better with it dangling from his hand as he walked back into the bathroom and approached the tub.
The vortex of all the whiteness that spread around him was a naked woman. She was blackened so badly by fire that she seemed to have been reduced to some birdlike creature, a pterodactyl perhaps, with claws at the end of feeble wing-arms, a puffy underbelly, foreshortened legs that spread open obscenely and looked as if they could do little more than grasp a branch or fold flush to the body in flight. He saw a narrow face on which only the eye sockets and mouth were recognizable. One of the tiny hand-claws clutched the end of a shower curtain rod, which was blackened to its midway point. The shower curtain itself lay jammed into a white wicker wastebasket.