“But nothing between Anne and Keech, no,” David said.
We were standing just behind a flat. We couldn’t see the east wing, so when somebody bumped against a chair, I couldn’t see who it was. But I had a feeling that somebody might have been standing there listening for some time.
I walked around the flat. It was Evelyn.
“Sorry to interrupt you,” she said.
David and Donna came around.
“Hello, hon,” David said. She came over and let him kiss her. Apparently they’d made up from last night. But maybe not entirely. As usual, David handled his daughter with a certain unease.
“I just wondered if I could borrow your car,” she said.
“Sure,” David said. “The keys are in my sport coat in the office.”
“Thanks.” She stood on tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek.
Then she turned to me. “They haven’t found Wade, have they?”
“Not yet,” I said.
She looked at me frankly. “I hope they take him without hurting him.”
Her attitude puzzled me. Wade had supposedly killed her lover. For the first time I began to wonder about Evelyn.
“Well,” she said, “see you.” She nodded and was gone.
Quickly, I said to Ashton, “Well, David, thanks for the information.”
“Afraid I wasn’t much help.”
“Thanks again.”
I took Donna by the elbow. We were in the parking lot within two minutes. I fired up the Honda, whipped around the corner of the lot, and sat there with the engine running.
“I feel confident that you’re going to tell me what the fuck is going on, Dwyer.”
“Evelyn.”
“Gee, that’s a good clue. ‘Evelyn.’ What about Evelyn?”
Ordinarily, Donna would accept the mystery a bit more gracefully than this. I dropped all the coy stuff.
“Say somebody shot me. Wouldn’t you be pretty angry with him?”
“Not necessarily.”
“Very funny.”
“So what’s that got to do with Evelyn?”
“Well, she’s very bland when the subject of Wade comes up — yet he’s the one who everybody thinks killed her lover, Michael.”
“Yeah, I guess that sort of makes sense. But I still don’t understand why we’re parked here.”
“We’re going to follow her.”
“Evelyn.”
“Right.”
“God, Dwyer, if I didn’t have to think about poor Stephen out there somewhere, this would be a lot of fun. It really would.”
I patted her hand. “I’m happy for you.”
10
Ten minutes later, Donna said, “Aren’t you supposed to stay a few blocks back?”
“Where’d you get that idea?”
“I saw it on ‘Magnum P.I.’ one night.”
“Oh, right, ‘Magnum P.I. ’ ”
“Is there something wrong with that show?”
“Not at all,” I said. “As a matter of fact, in order to become a policeman in this city you have to watch a minimum of thirty-two episodes.”
“Har-de-har-har.”
Not that I had any idea where Evelyn Ashton was taking us. In fact, I got the impression after twenty minutes that she might have caught on to us and just be leading us around in circles to frustrate us.
By now Donna was curled up next to the door, asleep. Her period, all jokes aside, came hard and was very difficult for her. I reached over and touched her hip. At times such as these I loved her so much and so purely that it scared my ass off.
Ahead, Evelyn Ashton stayed on her inexplicable course. We went past the city’s largest and most exclusive country club; past three blocks of new condos; past a city park where ducks walked around in the mist, looking cute and solemn at the same time; past a burgeoning new area of plastic Holiday Inns and Motel 8s; and then past innumerable FOR SALE signs as we headed for the city limits and wide open spaces.
Finally, I figured out where she was taking us. Out of town, of course. I looked at my gas gauge. Given my usual state of finances, and because I never really left high school, I normally put in five bucks at a time. Fortunately, I’d only recently put in my latest geyser so the Honda could go for many miles.
You could see the spring coming up, even in the rain, which was increasing. There were corn and sorghum and oats and barley in the fields. In the murk, the foliage on the hills ringing the city was dark gray. A farmer on a tractor with bug-eyed headlights waved to us from the other lane. Now that she was on a two-lane highway, Evelyn Ashton seemed not only to know exactly where she was going but also to be in a hell of a hurry to get there.
We went deeper into the country, which was all right with me. I don’t like country music, hunting, horseshoes, or barn dances, but I do like living in a city that’s no more than twenty minutes away from the countryside. There’s a sanity in nature you could never find in the city.
The downpour continued, banging against the roof like bullets.
Donna woke up, reached over, and touched me affectionately on the arm. “How you doing, hon?”
“Fine.”
“We still following Evelyn?”
“Yeah.” The sleep had mellowed her out.
“We know where she’s going yet?”
“Uh-huh.”
Donna rubbed some of the steam off the window. “Boy, look at those poor cows.”
About a dozen milk cows stood on the side of a bare hill in the rain.
“Yeah,” I said, knowing what she meant. I wanted to buy a bunch of rain ponchos and go out there and cover them up.
“Can I turn on the radio?”
“Sure.”
“All right if I play Top Forty?”
“Fine.” Sometimes jazz bummed her out. Today she didn’t need any help being bummed out. A happy tune came on, bright, quick, empty. It was fine with me.
We had now gone maybe twenty miles. Ahead was a small town. Back at the turn of the century there’d been a railroad watering stop here, just big enough for a hamlet of a couple of thousand to spring up. It was named Brackett.
Evelyn turned off the highway on to an asphalt road that led to the town. From there I could see a billboard touting a restaurant that specialized in roast beef dinners. I could also see a DX gasoline sign, a church steeple, and a water tower.
“Damn,” I said.
“What?”
“She just turned but I’m not sure where.”
Ahead of me, Evelyn had followed the curving road into town. I’d made the mistake of thinking that she would follow the asphalt directly into Brackett. But now that I looked I didn’t see her. There were two gravel roads on either side of the asphalt, but they were mostly hidden by blooming trees. She could have turned onto either one.
I’d lost her.
I pounded the steering wheel and said, “Damn it.”
“Maybe you should start watching ‘Magnum P.I. ’ ” She had grace enough to lean over and kiss me.
I took the gravel road that headed east. It ran parallel to a narrow muddy river. Even in the rain there was a fisherman out there in rubber gear in his beat-up boat. He waved. We waved back.
“That’s what I like about the country,” Donna said. “Everybody’s so friendly.”
“I’ll take you to a small-town bar where the farmhands get together on Friday night,” I said, remembering a brawl I’d helped break up one night. “Then you’ll see just how friendly the country can get.”
“That’s it,” she said, “spoil my fantasy. Don’t you believe in Ibsen’s theory?”
“What theory?”
“Boy, Dwyer. You’re supposed to be an actor.”
“Last month I had to get inside a lumpy brown suit for a commercial and play a potato. I don’t know from Ibsen, believe me.”
“Well, he had this theory about the ‘saving lie.’ How the only thing that saves us from cracking up is our delusions.”