She paused for a moment and looked out at the tennis, and smiled.
“Of course, the irony is that I remember the worst students best,” she said. “They are the ones I spend the most time with.”
“You were headmistress then?” I said.
“In 1966? No, I was the head of the modern languages department,” she said. “I do not recall having Olivia Nelson in class.”
“Is there anything you can think of about Olivia Nelson which would shed any light on her death?” I said.
Dr. MacCallum sat quietly for a moment gazing past me, outside. Outside the girls in their white dresses were eagerly hitting tennis balls into the net.
“No,” she said slowly. “I know of nothing. But understand, I don’t have a clear and compelling memory of her. I could put you in touch with our Alumni Secretary, when she comes back from vacation.”
I accepted the offer, and got a name and phone number. We talked a little longer, but there was nothing there. I stood, we shook hands, and I left. As I walked down the curving walk I could hear the futile bonk of the tennis rackets.
“You and me. Miss Pollard.”
chapter thirteen
OUTSIDE THE CAROLINA Academy I paused at the curb to let a dark blue Buick sedan cruise past me, then I crossed the street and went up the low hill past the Alton Free Library toward the Alton Arms.
The white-haired desk clerk with the young face looked at me curiously as I came in through the lobby, and then looked quickly away as I glanced at her, and was suddenly very busy arranging something on a shelf below the counter. I glanced around the lobby. There was no one else in it. I went past the elevator and walked up the stairs and went in my room.
It had been tossed. Not carefully either. The bedspread hung down longer than it had before. The pillows were disordered. The drawers were partly opened. The window shades were exactly even, which they hadn’t been earlier. I checked my suitcase. Nothing was missing. There wasn’t much to be missing. I looked out the window. There was a dark blue Buick parked across the street.
I thought about the Buick for a while, and about my room being searched, and about how the desk clerk had eyed me when I came in. I looked at the door. It hadn’t bejen forced. I thought about that. Then I went back down to the lobby and said to the desk clerk, “Has anyone been in my room?”
She jumped. It wasn’t much, maybe a two-inch vertical leap, but it was a jump.
“No, sir, of course not.”
“What’s my room number?” I said.
She turned alertly to her computer screen. “If you’ll give me your name, sir, I’ll be happy to check for you.”
“If you don’t know my name or room number,” I said, “how do you know that no one’s been in there?”
“I, well, no one goes in guests’ rooms, sir.”
“My watch is missing,” I said. “I left it on the bureau and it’s gone.”
“Oh, my,” she said. “Well, he wouldn’t…”
I waited. She didn’t know what to say. I had time. I didn’t mind the silence. From the bar down a hallway from the dining room, I could hear a man laughing. I waited.
“I’m sure he wouldn’t have stolen your watch, sir.”
“Who?”
“Officer Swinny.”
“A cop?”
“Yes, sir. That’s the only reason I let him into your room. He’s a policeman. He said it was an important police matter.”
“Alton Police?”
“Yes, sir. He’s a detective with the Sheriff’s Department.”
“You know him?”
“Yes, sir. He was in high school with my brother.”
“He drive a dark blue Buick sedan?” I said.
“I don’t know, sir. I didn’t see him until he came in the lobby. He said it was official police business. Sedale might know about his car.”
“Sedale the black guy in the green uniform?”
“Yes, sir. Officer Swinny said I wasn’t to tell you. He said it was official business.”
“Sure,” I said. Then I smiled and looked deliberately at my watch. It was 3:10. She showed no sign that it registered.
I went out onto the wide veranda. Sedale was sweeping off the steps.
I said, “Excuse me, Sedale. You know Officer Swinny of the Alton Police?”
Sedale smiled a little.
“She can’t keep a secret for shit, can she,” he said.
“Not for shit,” I said. “You know what kind of car Swinny drives?”
“Came here he was driving a Ford Ranger pickup. Red one with a black plastic bed liner.”
“Happen to know who owns the blue Buick parked across the street?”
Sedale looked over at the Buick and then back at me and shook his head.
“Can’t say I do,” he said.
“You know Swinny was in my room,” I said.
“Sure,” Sedale said. “I let him in.”
“How come?”
“She told me to.”
“You stay with him?”
Sedale shook his head again.
“Just let him in. Don’t hang around cops no more than I need to.”
“You know when he left?”
“Sure. Left about twenty minutes ago. ‘Bout ten minutes ’fore you come back.”
I looked at the Buick again. It had no telltale whip antenna. But there was a small cellular phone antenna on the back window. The windows were darkly tinted.
“Anybody in the Buick?” I said.
Sedale shrugged.
“Been parked there since I came out,” he said. “You in trouble?”
“Not yet,” I said. I stepped off the porch and started across the street toward the Buick. There was someone in it, and as I approached, he drove away.
chapter fourteen
I WENT BACK in the hotel and called Farrell in Boston. Then I got directions from Sedale and walked on down toward Canterbury Farms. The racing stable was across town, but in Alton across town was not a voyage of discovery.
It had been early fall when I left Boston. But in Alton it was late summer and the thick leaves of the arching trees dappled the wide streets with sunlight. Traffic was sparse and what there was moved easily, knowing there was no hurry. The heat was gentle and closed around me quietly without the assaultive quality it always had in midsummer cities.
Beyond the Carolina Academy, I walked past a sinuous brick wall that stood higher than my head. There were no corners, no right angles. The wall curved regularly in and bellied regularly out. At the intersection of a dirt road, the wall turned cornerlessly and insinuated itself away from me. I went down the dirt road. It was soft red dirt, and my feet made a kind of chuffing sound as I walked. Here the trees didn’t droop, they stood straight and very high, evergreens, pine I supposed, with no branches for the first thirty or forty feet, so that walking down the road was like walking through a columned corridor. There was no sound except for my feet, and a locust hum that was so persistent and permanent that it faded in and out of notice. Down the road I could see the training track open up and, in the center of the infield, a vast squat tree, framed by a column of pines.
The light at the end of the tunnel.
There were hoofprints in the soft earth, then the thick sound of hoofbeats. I reached the training track. Several horses were pelting around it in the soft red clay. The exercise riders were mostly girls in jeans and boots and hard hats, with their racing crops stuck in their belts in the back and sticking up along their spines. Hundred-pound girls controlling thousand-pound animals. As I got close I could hear the horses as they gulped air in through their flared nostrils, and exhaled it in big snorts. The breathing was as regular as the muffled thud of their hooves.
To the left, about a half mile up the track, was a portable starting gate. Three or four men were gathered around it looking at the horses as they ran. One of the men was mounted on a calm, sturdy brown horse. The other three were afoot. Beyond the starting gate was a parking lot with three or four vehicles in it, and beyond the lot, to the right, was a cluster of white buildings. I walked toward it.