“You have a good memory.”
“A thing like this sharpens up the memory.”
“Did you ever see him with the girl?” I asked them.
The boy answered: “I did, once, at the beach. He was trying to teach her to use his surfboard. She wasn’t doing too good at it.”
“Where is the beach?”
“About a mile up that way.” He pointed north. “There’s a reef that makes pretty good breakers for surfing. He was camped near there.”
“But you don’t know who he was, or where he came from?”
They both shook their heads.
“Can either of you pin down the date you saw him drive through?”
Jack Gayley leaned on the side of his truck and looked out across the moony sea. “Deputy Carstairs asked us that. It isn’t possible to place it for sure. I think it was about two months ago, give or take a week. What do you say, Sam?”
“Couple of months ago.”
“What were you doing when you saw him?”
“Getting ready to close up. We were late that night because of an emergency call we had. A guy from Candad had a blowout on the Terranova road and we had to go out about eleven o’clock and change his tire for him. He didn’t even have a jack in his car.”
“Anyway,” Sam said, “you sold him a new tire.”
“Do you keep a record of your tire sales, Mr. Gayley?”
“Sure, I keep duplicate sales slips on everything like that.”
“Dated?”
“Yessirree.”
“Let’s go back to your place and see if we can find that particular sales slip.”
He nodded briskly. “I get your point. Maybe we can put a date on it, after all. Let’s see, it was a General tube-type black-wall.”
I followed the tow-truck back to Medicine Stone and had two cups of coffee while the Gayleys went through their garage records. They found the sales slip; it was dated November 2.
“Does that mean anything to you?” Jack Gayley said.
“Yes. I don’t know what.”
Except that someone was lying. According to my witnesses, the cab-driver Nick Gallorini, the apartment manager Alec Girston, and the late Stanley Quillan, Phoebe had been alive in San Mateo for at least another week. I was sure it wasn’t the Gayleys who were lying.
On my way through Terranova I stopped at the hospital, a flat-roofed one-storied building on the southern outskirts of town. The front door was unlocked, but there was nobody in the dim little lobby or behind the information desk. I started down a softly lighted corridor, and a nurse materialized in front of me.
She was a big woman who used her bigness to block my way. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m a friend of Mr. Carl Trevor’s. He was brought in tonight with a heart attack.”
“You can’t see him. Nobody can see him.”
“I know that. How is he doing?”
“As well as can be expected. He’s resting comfortably.”
“May I talk to his doctor?”
“Dr. Grundle has gone home. He’ll be called if there’s any change, I can assure you.”
“Is Dr. Grundle a heart specialist?”
She answered tartly: “I’m not authorized to discuss doctors’ qualifications.”
“You can give me a yes or no.”
“No then.” She made an impatient movement “I can’t stand here talking. I’m the only R.N. on duty.”
She sailed away under full spinnaker. I found a phone booth in the lobby and a dime in my pocket, which I used to place a collect call to Trevor’s house in Woodside. His wife answered on the first ring:
“Of course I’ll take the call.” Her voice was a controlled screech. “What is it, Mr. Archer? What has happened?”
“The thing you were afraid of. Phoebe is dead. Your husband had to identify her, and it was a bad exp–”
Her voice cut in on mine: “He’s had another coronary. Is he dead?”
“Nothing like that. He’s in the Terranova hospital, doing all right. But you may want to get his own doctor to him.”
“Yes. I’ll call Dr. Wallace right away.”
There was silence on the line, which seemed to need filling. I said:
“I’m sorry about this, Mrs. Trevor.”
“You have reason to be, Mr. Archer.”
She hung up on me.
Chapter 22
It was a rough night, and it got no smoother. About three o’clock I pulled into the north side of Boulder Beach, where motel neons hung their cold lures on the darkness. I turned off the highway towards the college area. The campus lay like a city of the dead under ectoplasmic fog rolling up from the sea. The moon had a halo.
On the second floor of the Oceano Palms, light filtered through the drapes of the apartment which Phoebe Wycherly had shared with Dolly Lang. I didn’t want to see Dolly just yet. I knocked on Mrs. Doncaster’s door.
She answered with surprising speed, almost as though she’d been waiting for my knock. Her voice came thinly through the panels:
“Bobby? Is it you, Bobby?”
I knocked again, more softly. The door opened a few inches on a chain. Mrs. Doncaster peeped out over the brass links.
“May I come in?” I said. “I have news for you.”
“Is it about Bobby?”
“Yes. It concerns your son.”
She unhooked the chain and stepped back, swallowed up by the darkness. “I’ll turn on a light. I’ve been sitting here in the dark.”
She switched on a standing lamp. In a worn flannelette robe, her hair down in braids which hung limp on her limp breast, she looked old and defenseless. She said in a hushed voice which tried magically to deny what it believed:
“Bobby has been in an accident?”
“You could call it an accident. Please sit down, Mrs. Doncaster. We have things to talk about.”
She backed into a chair under the pressure of my eyes. Her breath came out as she sat down:
“He’s been killed.”
“Bobby isn’t the one who’s been killed.”
“Tell me what happened. I have a right to know.”
I sat down near her on the piano bench. “You may know more than I do about what happened. Phoebe Wycherly’s body was found in the sea near Medicine Stone, north of here. We made the identification tonight. Her car had been pushed or driven over a forty-foot cliff with her body in it.”
Mrs. Doncaster looked up at her husband’s photograph. The moustached man in the black frame smiled at the edge of the lamplight. In the full glare of the light, she blinked as if I’d slapped her across the eyes.
“What has this to do with my son?”
“He was seen driving her car through Medicine Stone the night of November the second. You told me he spent that entire weekend at home in bed.”
“He did.”
“We both know he didn’t.”
She swallowed. “I may have been mistaken. It’s possible it was the weekend after that he had the flu.”
“Are you ready to change your story?”
She nodded dully. Her braids twitched like dying gray snakes on her breast She fingered one of them as she spoke:
“He went off by himself that weekend. He never told me where. He phoned me in the morning from the bus station – asked me to go down there and pick him up. Which I did. The poor boy looked like the wrath of–” She glanced up at her black-framed icon: “The wrath of gosh.”
“How long had he been gone?”
“Just the one night.”
“Did you ask him where he spent it?”
“Of course I asked him. I asked him over and over again, if he was with that girl – with Phoebe. Over and over again he denied it” The enormity of the situation silenced her. She wrung her hands, and said in a breaking voice: “I did my best for him. I did my best to bring him up without a father’s guidance. What can you do when they lie to you?”