"What a great name. Swirling fog. A mansion on a rocky dill above the coastline. A devastatingly handsome man in a trench coat and evening clothes. He never talks about his past. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you . . . Mr. Edward Rinehart."
Feeling even more uncomfortable than before, I said, “I don't think he was much like Maximilian de Winter."
"Excuse me?"
"The husband inRebecca. Grand house, rocky shoreline, unhappy secrets."
"No,I'm sorry!Rebecca is one of my favorite movies. Laurence Olivier, of course, exactly."
I had been thinking of Daphne du Maurier's novel instead of the Hitchcock movie, but so what?
She placed her hand over mine. “I was going to show you the delights of Edgerton anyhow, so let's see what we can turn up along the way. Together, we could accomplish more than you could on your own." Her dead-level glance might almost have been a plea. "You'd be helping me, too. I need something to think about besides my stupid situation." A moment of self-recognition silenced her, and she glanced away, then back at me. "Look, Ned, if I'm being pushy, or intrusive, or anything like that... or sort of crazy . . ."
And Sylvan told my daddy, Howard, don't trust anyone but your kin and don't trust them all that much, because you'll be lucky if some night I don't come along and split your head open with an axe. I always thought it was likely that my daddy shot Sylvan with that revolver he was supposed to be cleaning at the time of his death.
I told her she didn't sound even faintly crazy, compared to some people in my family.
"All I mean is that helping you would . . ."
Would give her something to do besides brood about Stewart Hatch. "All right. Let's help each other."
“I'm free all day tomorrow. Stewart gets Cobbie on Saturdays. Which means that a hired flunkey pushes our son on the swings in Merchants Park until Stewart walks out of his office long enough to stuff Cobbie full of hamburgers and candy before delivering him to my house at eight P.M."
We tried to work out where to meet. The park across the street turned out to be the place where the flunkey pushed Cobbie on the swings. Laurie suggested the front of the main library, four blocks up from the hotel and two blocks south, on the corner of Graceand Grenville.
"Grenville?"
"Half the streets in Edgerton are named after the families of people still walking around. LikeCobden Avenue? Stewart's father was named Cobden Hatch, which is how Cobbie got his name, of course. When should we meet? Nine-thirty? A friend of mine, Hugh Coventry, who works at the library, volunteers at City Hall on the weekends. Everything's closed, but he has access to all the offices, and he gets in around nine."
I asked why she wanted to go to City Hall.
"Edward Rinehart should be in the records. And you might want to look at copies of your mother's marriage license and your birth certificate. Nothing like hard data."
"Nothing like a brilliant dinner companion," I said.
Most of the people in the restaurant looked up as we moved toward the podium. Vincent's smile barely concealed a leer.
In an alcove off the lobby, I went into a booth and placed two calls. Laurie Hatch was doing her best to look inconspicuous alongside a potted palm when I came out, and I hurried across the lobby and followed her through the revolving door. The doorman handed her yellow ticket to an eager kid in a black vest, and the kid raced down into the garage.
"Adventure beckons." Laurie lifted her eyebrows in a comic, slyly conspiratorial glance.
The boy in the black vest jumped out of a dark blue Mercury Mountaineer and held the door. Laurie winked at me and drove away, and I walked across Commercial Avenue, going toward Lanyard Street and Toby Kraft's pawnshop. According to Toby, long ago the street had been called Whore's Alley, but these days all the best hookers were married to money and lived in Ellendale.
• 33
• I began moving down Ferryman's Road at the top end of triangular Merchants Park. Three-story brick buildings set back on postcard lawns lined both of the streets fanning out from the apexof the triangle. At the top of the steps before the first building in the row, a heavyset man in a tan uniform was flipping through a hall of keys. Wondering what sort of business required the services of a security guard on a Friday night in Edgerton, I looked for a sign, which did not exist. Then I noticed the legend carved on a stone headpiece over the front door:THE COBDEN BUILDING. I laughed out loud—here was where Stewart Hatch did whatever he did with his father's money.
Set deep within a ravaged face the color and texture of oatmeal laced with maple syrup, the guard's eyes fell on me. He looked too old for his job.
"A lot of keys," I said.
"A lot of doors." The guard continued to stare at me, not with the suspicion that would have been inevitable in Manhattan, but with an odd, expectant attentiveness. "No matter how many times I tell myself to put a piece of tape on that first one, I always forget. Here's the little sucker." He held up a key, and his belly strained the fabric of the uniform shirt.
"Do you work for Mr. Hatch?"
"Fifteen years." His smile widened without getting any warmer. "You new in town?"
I told him I was there for a couple of days.
"You should take a walk around Hatchtown, see the real Edgerton."
Ferryman's Road reminded me of certain places I'd seen in the South, parts ofCharleston and Savannah. A sense of purpose having to do with my investigations into the life of Edward Rinehart buoyed me up. In time, Joy's irreconcilable story would fade.
My daddy had so much Otherness inside him, he didn't care how he acted. Cruelty was his middle name. It's nothing but a curse, that's all. Nettie, she's got her own views, and whatever's Dunstan can't be bad to her. But Nettie doesn't know. What was in our daddy mostly came down to me, and it spoiled everything.
At the wide end of the park, I turned right onChester Street and walked through a neighborhood of rooming houses and apartment buildings. Loud music poured from open windows. Mothers and grandmothers perched on the stoops. Outside the tavern on the next corner, men and women in bright clothes were dipping and moving to Ray Charles on the jukebox. Brother Ray was pining for Georgia, and the neighborhood people were celebrating the arrival of the weekend.
I turned the corner and walked past an alley where two guys were hauling crates out of a panel truck.
OnLanyard Street the old fancy-houses had been replaced bya shoe-repair shop, an appliance store,a mom-and-pop grocery. The three brass balls ofa pawnshop hung above an empty sidewalk.
I looked through the metal grate over the window lettered in gold withKRAFT TRU-VALUE PAWNBROKER. Two small lights burned at the back of the shop. I pushed the bell and hearda noise like an electric drill. A rear door opened in a sudden wash of light, and Toby Kraft came into view.
He unlocked the grate and swung it outward. "Get in here, will you? What a lousy deal, makes you think there's no justice in the world anymore, if there ever was." Toby closed the door and shoved a police bar into place. He closed his hand around mine. "Kid, your mother was a champ."
Toby pulled me into an embrace. “It happened this morning, did it? Were you there?"
"We were still at Aunt Nettie's," I said.