‘You a friend of his, mister?’
‘No, I’ve been-’
‘What you want here, mister?’
‘I told you, Mrs. Emery, I’m trying to find Roy Sands.’
‘I don’t know where he is, I don’t ever want to know where he is, that Army filth. We sent him packing, and he went, too, with his tail down like the dog he is-You listen here, I hope you never find him, I hope the good Lord put him down in hell for what he done to my little girl.’
‘Mrs. Emery-’
‘No, now you get out of here, I don’t want you here.’
‘Please, it’s important that I-’
‘Get out of here!’ she shouted. ‘You get out of here!’
She backed away, still clutching the sweater at her throat, a kind of wildness in her faded eyes now. I stood looking at her, indecisive; then I heard pounding steps behind me and Holly was there, the rubber mask pinched and tight and the vacuous pits radiating molten light in their depths.
‘What’d you do?’ he said. ‘What’d you do to Mrs. Emery?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do anything to her.’
‘Get out of here!’ the woman screamed at me. ‘Get out of here, go away, you, don’t you come back!’
‘You better do what she says, mister,’ Holly said softly, but his big hands hooked and curled at his waist and I knew that if I tried to linger, to reason with Mrs. Emery, he would jump me. Things could be very bad then, in a lot of ways. It was her property, after all.
I raised my hands, palms outward. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m going.’
‘Go on, then,’ Holly said.
I backed off a couple of steps and turned with the hairs on the nape of my neck prickling. But he did not move from beside her. I walked away, slowly, and got into my car. I looked up at them, then, and they were still standing by the door to the white frame house, both of them looking down at me, this Holly with his jawlike hands still curled and Mrs. Emery still clutching her sweater at her throat.
I swung the car around and went over the platform, thinking: Poor Diane, poor genius. Maybe I can understand why death for you was preferable to coming home…
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
So all right.
My suspicions were confirmed, and it did not make me feel very good that they had been. I hoped that I would not have to tell Elaine Kavanaugh-trusting, loving Elaine Kavanaugh-that her fiancé had been the father of Diane Emery’s child in Kitzingen, Germany, and that it was apparently because of him she had committed suicide by hanging. If I could locate him, I knew I would say nothing to her; what point was there in releasing skeletons, in destroying individually created sainthood, if you could preserve happiness and a kind of love that had a shaky but potentially supportive foundation? Well, I had to find Sands, that was the simple fact of it. The prospect of having to tell Elaine what I knew, of having her drag it out of me as she would surely do, was painfully depressing. It was bad enough to be poking into other people’s lives, but when you had to air their dirty linen in front of them, as the old saying goes, it reaffirmed the grim comment Eberhardt had once made to me when I was still on the force: of all the grim messengers on this earth, a cop is the grimmest-a kind of Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse carrying news of death and tragedy and terror into the homes of those who pay his salary…
I got my mind off that track-some track- and back onto what I now knew of the activities of Roy Sands. He had definitely come here to Roxbury after leaving San Francisco on the nineteenth of last month; and on the twentieth he had visited the Emery farm, presumably for the purpose I had conjectured in Kitzingen: a lingering guilt at having been responsible for Diane’s death, and a slim hope that confession to her parents would give succor to his disturbed soul. But the Emerys had driven him away, offering him no forgiveness, no understanding.
And then?
Well, he had apparently left Roxbury, by one means of transportation or another, and gone directly to Eugene, Oregon, for some as yet unexplained reason. Had he done that the same day he visited the Emerys-Monday? It would not appear so, since he had checked into the Eugene hotel late on the twenty-first, Tuesday, and had sent the wires to Hendryx, Rosmond, and Gilmartin on that same evening.
After that-blank.
If Sands had spent the night of the twentieth here, he would not have had much choice of location; aside from the Redwood Lodge, where I was now staying, I had noticed a small hotel on Main Street and nothing else- although there may have been some kind of accommodations on one of the side streets. I ought to be able, then, to determine, with no problem, whether or not he had spent that particular evening in Roxbury. After that, I would just have to see what developed, what my instincts told me. I had this feeling, a prescience of sorts, that said the answer to the disappearance of Roy Sands was in this village-that the final solution to the whole affair could be had right here, with just a little digging, a little perseverance. There was no foundation for that feeling, and yet it was there and it was demanding.
I drove back to the Redwood Lodge and stopped at the office and talked again to the guy who looked like Frank Lovejoy. His name was Jardine, I discovered, and he was the owner of the motel; when I told him what my job was and asked him about Roy Sands, he was agreeably co-operative.
‘Sure,’ he said, ‘I remember him clear enough-Roy Sands. He came in on foot, with just a single suitcase. It was raining a little that day, and he came shuffling down the road looking kind of wet and forlorn. Must have just got off the one o’clock bus from Eureka, I remember thinking at the time. Let’s see, I rented him cabin number three, I think it was. Only stayed the one night.’
‘He was alone?’
‘Oh sure, alone.’
‘Did he say much to you?’
‘Come to think of it, he asked me for Coachman Road. Same as you did a while ago.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Not as I can remember.’
‘What time did he leave the next morning?’
‘I couldn’t say,’ Jardine answered. ‘He was gone, key in the cabin door, when Frances- that’s my old lady-went in at ten.’
‘Then you didn’t see him leave?’
‘No.’
‘Isn’t it a little unusual for somebody to check out that way, without turning the key in to you here?’
‘Not if they’ve paid in advance, like he did.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Can you tell me where the bus station is?’
‘Don’t have one, exactly. Greyhounds stop at Vanner’s Emporium, two blocks back on Main.’
‘Is there a police station in Roxbury?’
‘Well, yeah.’
‘Where would I find it?’
‘In the City Hall. Same block as Vanner’s Emporium, one street north. State Street.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Sure,’ Jardine said. ‘Glad to oblige.’
I went to Vanner’s Emporium first, and a very old man with the look and actions of a centenarian told me that he didn’t remember selling a ticket to anybody who looked like Roy Sands, but maybe he had, since his memory wasn’t so good here the past couple of years. He also told me that there were buses to Eureka every other day-Monday, Wednesday, Friday, at 2:00 p.m. You could make connections there for Eugene. Buses south or east? Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays to Redding, departing 1:00 p.m.
I walked down the block a couple of doors to a café and had some coffee and watched nightfall enfolding the ancient, monolithic redwoods. Apparently Sands had not gone to Eugene by bus; he had spent the night of Monday, the twentieth, in Roxbury, and there were no Grey-hounds out to Eureka and eventually Eugene on Tuesday. He could not have gone to Redding on the 1:00 p.m. Monday bus; that was the one he had come in on, according to what Jardine at the Redwood Lodge had told me. So even if there were some explanation for his heading south to Redding instead of west to Eureka for the transfer to Eugene, he could not have gotten by bus to Redding to do it. Still, he had been in Eugene on Tuesday night, the twenty-first, to send wires and to check into the Leavitt Hotel; he had to have gotten there somehow.