The flash of her legs and movement of her hips was something to watch as she went around behind the bar. Leave it to Uncle Dudley to winnow out the best.
“I’m Amanda,” she said.
“Well, hello, Amanda. Have you known Uncle Dudley long?”
She tipped a glance at me, probing, balancing my words and anything that might lurk behind them. “Almost a year. And the situation is something like you’ve guessed. I’m fond of Dudley and he’s fond of me; we travel about and have fun.”
“Lucky people.”
“Also, I’m a very good secretary and manager. So it isn’t altogether a case of a wealthy older man buying himself a dumb blonde toy.”
“I can believe that — and I like your frankness.”
“Just to get us off on the right foot, Jake-o.”
I took the drink she held out to me and watched her make herself a small one. A social gesture, not the drink of a real drinker.
“I wish you’d warned us you were coming. Dudley will be so disappointed.”
“Isn’t he here?”
She shook her head. “He went off to Miami earlier today. He’s seeing some people down there on business. He left me here to take care of some details and correspondence before I join him.”
I felt a pang of disappointment.
She touched my hand and said softly, “I’m sorry, Jeremy.”
“Well—” I lifted and dropped my shoulders “—I guess it was a childish notion when you get right down to it — the urge to surprise him.” I tossed off the Scotch.
She took my glass and set it on the bar. “A very nice notion, I’d call it.”
We drifted across the room to the door. She offered her hand in a farewell gesture. “I wish I had more time, Jake-o. But Dudley does have the habit of leaving me to pick up the last-minute bits and pieces. My schedule is tighter than strangulation.”
“Tell him I came by, Amanda.”
“Of course. He’ll write you immediately, I know.”
I plodded disconsolately to the car, got in, and was about to turn the ignition key when I realized I’d been ushered out so fast I hadn’t found out where Uncle Dudley was staying in Miami. After all, I was on vacation — why not join him there?
I got out of the car and walked back to Charnot. I was about to press the bell when I heard Amanda’s voice, sharply raised.
“Yes, you do owe me an explanation, Dudley! You’ve told me a dozen and one times that if Jeremy ever shows up in person to tell him you’re away, get rid of him. You’ve literally ground it into my brain. Why? Those letters you write are so filled with warmth, I should think you’d want to—”
A male voice grunted something I didn’t quite catch, but it was enough to break her off.
“Under the circumstances, it is too my business!” Amanda said.
The male voice inched up a grim level. “Amanda, I don’t owe you an explanation or a damned thing else. You’re beautiful, but that’s a plentiful commodity. If you like the good life we lead together, get off my back!”
Her voice dropped to acquiescence while I stood dumb. What was going on? What did Uncle Dudley have to hide from me?
I grasped the doorknob, turned it, and after the barest hesitation, opened the door.
Amanda spun to face me so quickly her gossamer-blonde hair brushed about her cheeks and she almost tripped on the expensive luggage, old airline stubs dangling from their handles, that she — or Uncle Dudley — had taken from a nearby closet in the few minutes since I’d left.
“I should ask you—” I began.
I glimpsed a frightened flicker in her eyes as her gaze speared past my shoulder, then heard the rustle of his movement. He used a heavy brass lamp, scooped from the table beside the doorway. The blow almost jarred my eyes from their sockets.
I came out of it with a gremlin soldering my ears together and the taste of burned Scotch in my throat. I crawled, groaning, across the thick russet carpet, grappled with the edge of a chair, and pulled myself up.
I turned my head and studied the scene groggily. They’d closed the door on the way out. The baggage was gone. The brass lamp lay where it had fallen. I squinted at my watch — I’d been out for about an hour.
I thought of the old baggage checks on the suitcases and garment bags and it gave me a hunch.
The small but modern Asheville airport was briskly busy. People queued at the ticket counter, moved around the spacious waiting room, sat reading.
Through a rift in the crowd I caught the glint of sunlight on bright blonde hair. I moved aside, people off an incoming flight brushing past on their way to the baggage room.
Amanda and a strange man were standing on the further side of the waiting room near the tall windows that gave a view of the landing field and the jumble of mountains beyond.
Somewhat aloofly, Amanda was gazing at the scenery outside. The man kept glancing at the bank of time-zone clocks on the northern wall. He was clearly fidgeting for a flight due to be announced shortly.
He was tall, thin, and slightly stooped, with the look of a mournful hound dog. His hair was grey and thin on his narrow skull. He was wearing expensive blue slacks and a mottled sports jacket, but he looked a little like the boondocks despite the cut of the clothing.
He said something. Amanda nodded without looking at him. He moved across the lobby and I eased over to let the flow of people shield me from his sight. When he reached the open archway leading to the ticket booths, he turned right, out of sight.
I followed quickly. Around the ell, a door was swinging shut. It carried a simple message: men.
I pushed inside. He was alone, standing at one of the washbasins lifting a pellet from a pillbox and chasing it down with water from a paper cup.
As he lifted his head, my image spread across the mirror behind him. His movement stopped as if his chin had hit an abutment. He clutched the edge of the washbasin, his already grey face a shade more ashen.
“Hi,” I said. “It’s me — Jeremy. And since Amanda knows you as Dudley Gillam, you must be my uncle.”
His head dropped.
“Who are you, actually?” I asked. “Could it be—” I caught my breath. “Who was buried in Yuma those years ago? Hardtimes Calhoun? Or Dudley Gillam, with a death certificate made out in the name of Calhoun?”
He turned to face me, his mouth twitching. “I swear to you, he died of natural causes, Jeremy. I wouldn’t have harmed a hair on your uncle’s head. He was the best friend I ever had.”
There was a stretch of silence, broken only by the hiss of a leaky latrine.
“I guess it took some thinking about, that morning you found Dudley Gillam dead in the camper.” I said. “First the idea, then wrestling with it, then giving in. You knew he had only one relative, a nephew named Jeremy Fisher. You knew all about Jeremy from Uncle Dudley. Dudley was a no-ties wanderer, and there didn’t seem to be a single obstacle in your way. All you had to do was bury him as Hardtimes Calhoun in a town where no one knew either of you and take his place. Once you mastered his simple signature, his pension checks, his bank account, all his earthly possessions were yours. You could keep on writing the never-seen nephew the kind of letters Dudley had always written. Keep one jump ahead of the nephew and you were safe for life. Am I getting it fairly close?”
He raised bloodshot eyes. “Almost dead on the nail head, Jeremy.”
“What then, Hardtimes? Where did the money start coming from — the big money?”
“Piece of life, part of living,” Hardtimes said. “I guess I buried the hard times right there in Yuma. I’d had nothing but hard times from my cradle until I dug that grave, but when I wheeled out of Yuma in that camper pickup I left it all behind. I felt like a new man — like a cocksure Dudley Gillam — and I acted like a new man.”
He turned. It wasn’t a suspicious movement. The single thing he dreaded, the only thing he had had to fear, had happened. He ran water, pulled down a paper towel, and wiped his grey face.