She was holding a drink in her right hand, a whiskey sour in a stemmed glass. As she let him into the house, Carver looked closely at her. She didn’t appear at all sloshed.
“Want one?” she asked.
He said that he did and sat down in the cool living room. Beyond the sheer curtains over the wide window, the still-bright evening continued to simmer. The only intrusion from outside was the whisper of the sea. Everything was neat and in place, clean, as if she’d dusted and straightened the room, the house, while he was gone. A life in order, at least on the surface.
He wondered how she was now, how what had happened played on her mind while he was away. Sometimes there was a delayed reaction to the kind of information he’d thrown at her. Carver felt miserable about what he’d done. Doing the tough but essential tasks in this world exacted a price. Someone once said that sooner or later every man had to shoot his own dog. Carver felt as if he’d been shooting his own dog all his life.
Edwina returned with another whiskey sour, handed it to him, then sat down across from him in a low chair. She said, “Who’s dead?”
“Two people,” Carver said. “Man and a woman. A car accident on Highway 75.”
“How does that concern you?”
“I saw them when I was in Solarville. They were staying at the Tumble Inn.”
“Do they have anything to do with Willis?”
“I’m not sure. My name was written on a slip of paper in the woman’s briefcase. They were both Disney executives. Her name was Mildred Kern; the man was David Panacho.” He watched Edwina’s face as he spoke; she gave no sign that she recognized the names.
“Maybe the Kern woman saw you in Solarville,” Edwina suggested, “found out you were a private detective, and wrote down your name with the intention of hiring you someday. Were the two lovers?”
“Possibly. They appeared as if they might be, but I can’t be sure. And Solarville is the kind of out-of-the-way place two employees of the same company would go for a romantic tryst if they didn’t want corporate gossip to affect their careers.”
“It could be that one or both of them are married,” Edwina said. “You might eventually have been contacted by the woman and asked to follow a spouse, to learn about another affair in order to temper a divorce settlement.”
“Or follow a child or a business associate or a mother or father or find something that was stolen… maybe a black bird. I’ve thought about the possibilities. It’s a futile exercise. The woman is dead, so we’ll probably never know what she was doing with my name written down, what she intended.”
Edwina sipped her drink deliberately, then slowly lowered her glass. He watched her, concerned, wondering. She looked as if she felt fine, as if crush had led to bounce, but you never could tell about people. And he needed to be sure about her. He parted his lips to speak.
“I’m all right,” she said, before he could ask.
He smiled and tapped the cane on the blue carpet. It made no sound.
“Really,” she said, smiling back. “I have wounds, but they’re healing. This is the other world with different, sweeter songs, isn’t it?”
“It can be if that’s what you want.”
“I do want it that way,” she said.
He believed her, but he wasn’t so sure she could bring it off. Not by herself, anyway. He hoped Desoto was right about her surprising him with her strength.
Outside, some sort of bird wheeled close to the window and screamed, as if it wanted in. Like madness circling. Edwina winced at the sound. Carver decided he wanted her with him. He wanted to help her, to protect her, even if she did think she’d made the necessary painful adjustment and had managed some kind of peace with herself. He wished he could be sure about her.
“We’re going back to Solarville,” he said.
“When?”
“Unless you can’t make it, when we’re done with these drinks. We’ll drive by my place so I can get a few things, and we can be in Solarville within a few hours.”
“I can make it,” she said.
She finished her drink and placed the glass on a table by her chair. There was a steady calmness about her now, a sureness of movement and a directness in her eyes. Carver didn’t know if that was good or bad. The ongoing disillusionment she’d suffered since Willis’s disappearance had to have taken a serious toll. He knew it was important to keep her oriented, stable.
She apparently felt the same need for orientation. “You think Willis is in Solarville,” she said. “Why?”
Carver finished his own drink, then he sat back, toying with the damp, cool glass. “Willis pulled out of Sun South early,” he said. “Franks found out about the time-share scheme only because the bank contacted him, and that happened only because Willis drew virtually all the money out of the secret account. Willis had the opportunity to steal even more money from Sun South customers without any real danger of discovery. Which means he probably left when he did because he had enough money to suit his purpose.”
“Which is what?” Edwina asked. The bird made another pass and screamed again, louder, as if it desperately wanted something. Carver wished it would hunt up a worm.
“To make even more money,” he continued. “It has to be a drug deal. And it probably had to be financed by a certain date, which also helps to explain why Willis abruptly pulled out when he had slightly more than the nice round figure of a hundred thousand dollars. The red-penciled area on the map hidden in his apartment is swampland just south of Solarville. And it’s in Solarville that Willis’s old friend and fellow dreamer Sam Cahill is living beyond his means and selling backwater real estate. I think Willis and Cahill are partners who needed the hundred thousand to make a drug buy, possibly to take place when the Malone brothers receive a shipment. It could be that the drugs will be smuggled in by plane and dropped into the red-penciled area of the swamp, then picked up and sold to Willis and Cahill.” Carver stopped handling the glass and set it aside. “Which means that Willis Eiler must be somewhere around Solarville, waiting with Cahill for the deal to be consummated.”
Edwina sat back and seemed to think about what Carver had told her, finding it easier to digest than it would have been the day before, when she hadn’t known that Willis Davis hadn’t really existed, that he was an act, a production, Willis Eiler.
She said, slowly, “There’s something I have to tell you. Something it’s past time to tell.”
“There’s no need for any kind of confession,” Carver said. But he suspected there was a need, in Edwina.
“Because it isn’t required, I want to tell you. I was married for five years to a husband who beat me. Badly. Systematically. It took a broken collarbone and blood transfusions finally to convince me I had to leave Larry.” She laughed softly, deep in her throat, and shook her head. “Sounds dumb. The battered-wife syndrome. Classic, huh?”
“Classic,” Carver agreed, watching her with a neutral expression.
“The trouble was, when I left Larry I found that what he’d done to me went with me. At first I didn’t know what to do. I was terrified being alone. I’d hole up in my apartment; the walls seemed to scream at me. I learned how lonely someone could be. After a while I tried the singles bars. I started going out with men, too many men, looking for a lover who didn’t exist, looking for him in a lot of lovers.”
There was no apology in her voice when she said this. Carver liked that.
“Finally I realized what was happening, how hopeless it was. I quit craving love, sex, men, almost everything. I was repulsed by what I’d become; I thought hard about suicide. A year of analysis helped to pull me out of my depression. And my work helped. I went into real estate as much for therapy as to make a living; that’s why I got so good at it so fast. Still I had problems, with men, sex. I didn’t want to get involved; I was afraid.” She bowed her head slightly, not looking at Carver.