After awhile Carver realized that the feeling in the pit of his stomach was hunger as well as worry. He went inside and put a frozen sirloin steak dinner into the microwave. The carton said the dinner was low in saturated fat and contained only 250 calories. Carver didn’t see how that was possible, but he wanted to believe.
When he was finished eating, he understood how it was possible to have steak with a minimum of fat and calories; the key was in eliminating taste.
Back on the porch, his stiff leg propped up on the wooden rail, he watched dusk close in and slowly smoked a Swisher Sweet cigar. His mind gave him no rest. Now he couldn’t help thinking about Ezekiel Masterson, about the letters sent to the Gazette-Dispatch and to Dr. Harold Grimm.
Then he looked at his wristwatch, barely visible in the gloom. He wanted to talk to Grimm’s widow Adelle, and it might be a good time to catch her at home. He doubted that she was eating dinner out these days, other than occasionally buying fast food somewhere and then returning to her house. Grieving widows tended to stay close to home, a tangible piece of their less troubled past.
He scribbled a note for Beth and left it next to the one she’d left him, then got in the Olds and raised the top before driving back into Del Moray.
In the dark, the yellow stucco Grimm house looked white, its droopy green awnings black. Most of the visible windows in the house were glowing; Adelle was home.
Carver was steering the Olds toward the curb across the street when he noticed a vertical bar of light on the front porch-the door opening. He nudged the accelerator with the toe of his moccasin and drove on past, parking half a block down and turning off the Olds’s lights. Carefully he adjusted the rearview mirror so he could see the front of the Grimm house.
More light, spilling onto the driveway. A few seconds passed, then a car backed into the street and maneuvered to face the opposite direction the Olds was pointed. The light cast on the driveway dimmed as the automatic opener closed the garage door. Red taillights flared, then dimmed and began to draw closer together as the car drove away.
Carver started the Olds, used a nearby driveway to turn it around, and followed.
When he got close enough, he saw that the car was a black or dark blue Oldsmobile sedan, a younger and sedate cousin of Carver’s own car. The perfect vehicle for a doctor.
Or a doctor’s widow.
Adelle Grimm was driving and she was alone in the car, he was sure now. She’d left by the front door and opened the garage door from outside with a key or opener from her purse. She was sitting very erect, her head and shoulders, her graceful neck, set and stiff. Even from behind, the squarish symmetry of her features was evident whenever the Olds turned a corner or was driving away at an angle beneath enough light to allow the briefest glimpse of her in profile.
Carver was slightly disappointed. He would rather have seen someone else driving the car, someone who had paid a visit to Adelle and whose destination might prove meaningful. The larger the cast of characters, the greater the possibilities.
She drove fast, intent on her destination. Carver kept watching the back of her head, which remained perfectly steady. She didn’t so much as glance at her rearview mirror. Why should she? The thing she feared might catch up with her already had.
He fell back a prudent distance anyway, and when they reached traffic let a few cars get between them.
Adelle stayed exactly two miles an hour over the speed limit, probably using the car’s cruise control, and was heading east, maybe going somewhere mundane like a McDonald’s or to a liquor store. Maybe she was a secret drinker like Leona Benedict. They’d both been under the same kind of strain the last several years, and Adelle’s husband had been killed.
Still, Carver was curious.
When she reached the coast highway and turned north, driving away from Del Moray and putting distance between herself and her home, as Leona Benedict had been so anxious to do, he became even more curious.
33
The coast highway carried less traffic than the interstate. Which meant Carver had to fall back well behind Adelle’s dark sedan. Not that it caused a problem; she continued to hold her speed steady and gave no sign of taking any of the turnoffs.
They drove that way for a while, following their headlights into the night, the ocean on their left yawning vast and black like the edge of the world. Then, about three miles beyond the Del Moray city limits, the glowing red taillights flared and merged as Adelle braked and made a right turn off the highway.
Carver slowed and pulled the car to the shoulder, listening to the crunch and plunk of gravel as the tires mashed it and slung some of it against the fender wells. From where he was parked, he could see a tall neon sign in the form of a leaping blue dolphin above the letters BLUE DOLPHIN MOTEL. He depressed the accelerator and steered the Olds back onto the highway, then drove to the sign and made a right turn, as Adelle had done a few minutes before.
The motel was a long, low building made of rough tan stone. The office was brightly lit. A separate brick building was built in a U around a swimming pool, which was lit and threw a wavering blue glow over the area around it. Two heavyset women in red swimsuits were sprawled in webbed lounge chairs, listlessly watching some preteen kids splashing around in the shallow end.
All of the rooms looked out over the pool, and all of their doors were visible. Carver didn’t see Adelle either on the ground floor or on the steel catwalk running outside the second-floor rooms, and he didn’t think she’d had enough time to park her car, walk to one of the rooms, and disappear inside.
He tapped the accelerator and drove between rows of parked cars until he saw the dark sedan. It was at the far end of the lot, nestled alongside a white van with Illinois license plates and a chrome ladder up its back to allow access to the mound of plastic-wrapped luggage strapped to its roof. Adelle’s car was midnight blue rather than black, he decided, seeing it up close for the first time.
He drove past the late-model Olds and parked his own ancestral Olds at the opposite end of the lot, then walked through the dark evening heat toward the office. He couldn’t see or hear the ocean, but he could smell it, and a thick, salty dampness lay oppressively over his exposed skin. Near the motel entrance was a smaller door with a glowing blue neon DEEP WATER LOUNGE sign above it. Deep indeed, Carver thought.
As his hand moved toward the brass push plate of the lounge door, he paused. Better to go into the lobby and approach the Deep Water Lounge through a lobby entrance, if there was one. Assuming she wasn’t in one of the rooms, he might push open this door and be face to face with Adelle. He could see into the lighted office and lobby and knew she wasn’t there.
As he entered the lobby, he smiled and nodded to the middle-aged woman behind the desk. She smiled back, looked at him expectantly from beneath thick gray bangs for a moment, then went back to something she was working on with a hand-held calculator when she realized he didn’t want a room. The lobby spread out far beyond the desk and was carpeted in dark blue. Cream-colored wing chairs were grouped around glass-topped low tables with plastic NO SMOKING signs on them. No one was in the lobby other than an old man in a white pullover shirt, plaid shorts, and startlingly white deck shoes, seated in one of the chairs and reading a Glamour magazine. Its glossy cover promised latest beach fashions and the answers to a previous marital sex quiz, and featured one of those interchangeable supermodels in a scanty two-piece swim-suit, standing and posturing with long legs spread wide and elbows thrust behind her as she smiled dazzlingly at whoever might buy the magazine. The old guy was engrossed in the magazine’s contents and didn’t seem to notice Carver.