She set me up with the multiple listings for March through June of two years back. My window was kind of big, but that might make it easier to crawl through. She led me to a private little room and brought me a big cup of coffee.
“Sam says you’re looking into the Mary Lou thing?”
“That’s right.”
“My niece went to school with her. They were friends. She was a cute little girl. I remember her smile, because it was so happy looking, and funny, too, because her two front teeth fell out and left a gap. She was a real doll, a real angel.”
I nodded, but didn’t say anything. Her warm blue eyes were gray now, and I could not mistake the ferocity in them.
“Think she’s alive?” she asked.
“I really can’t say, Ms. Butler.”
Her face turned accusing, then askance, then judgmental, then resigned. And, finally, for reasons I would never know, forgiving. “Ya’ll let me know what else I can get you. ’Kay?”
An hour later I’d found all the listings for homes with detached units. Four were in a moderate price range, and three of them were sold by men. None of their names matched the sellers in Orange County, the ones that Johnny was just about finished checking out. I got that funny, embarrassing feeling in my guts that told me I’d been following a trail that was about to disappear into nothing.
Katie Butler read each one that I’d marked.
“Now, I knew this fella — Al Jeeter — and he sold because he wanted to move back to Virginia, where he grew up.”
“How old was he?”
“Oh my... late sixties, I’d say.”
“What about the next one?”
“Lindy Dillard? Don’t know him, but I do know we sold the house. I can get the paperwork if you want. Sometimes, escrow documents have the age of the seller and buyer. Here, let me just get them all for you.”
“Forget Wanda Grantley,” I said.
“Pretty easy to do,” said Katie.
“Why’s that?”
“Not my kind of people, those two. Be right back.”
I waited in the lobby while she went through her files. I could see her hard red hair past the counter when she knelt at a file cabinet. I drank another cup of coffee and thought about Donna and how surprised she was that I was leaving. She was suspicious, but she held her questions. I thought of Melinda and Penny. I thought of the pictures that Wade had of me, and the trail that led to I. R. Shroud. I thought of the ranger, Stefanic, and wondered if our boy had been there. I thought of The Horridus, waiting, watching, planning. Would Johnny work the dating services again, try to find a common point? Or would he let Ishmael run the show now, forget about me and my big ideas? I sighed. Here I was, a million miles away, working a case that was no longer mine, escaping one miserable swamp of problems for another. I suddenly felt tired and stupid, tracking down obscure leads for a department that didn’t want me around in the first place.
“Okay,” said Katie, sitting on a chair beside me. “Jeeter was sixty-eight, about like I guessed. Lindy Dillard was fifty-two. If I remember right, it was a relocation for him. I’m really not sure. This last one, Bevaro, the escrow papers say he was forty-six.”
I wrote down the ages of each seller in my notepad, as my mind drifted off to other times and places: my honeymoon with Ardith on Grand Cayman; Matthew and me chasing blue lizards over white dunes on vacation in New Mexico — don’t worry, Ardith, the sun isn’t going to kill him; Donna Mason astride me just one morning ago and her faintly southern voice filling that little dawn-filled apartment with something I hope is love. It’s amazing how a man — no matter what he’s done — still wants love, and can convince himself that he deserves it.
Nice as Katie Butler was, nice as Sam Welborn and the rest of Wichita Falls seemed to be, I wanted out of there. I wanted to be back home where I could scream.
“Forget Wanda, then?” Katie asked.
“Umm?”
“Wanda Grantley, the other seller. That listing was out in Hopkin, anyway. Two towns over. Widow. Says here late fifties, but she looked eighty.”
I felt eighty. “You said she was married.”
“I most certainly did not, Mr. Naughton.”
“You said ‘those two’ weren’t your kind of people.”
“I know I shouldn’t be so quick to judge.”
“What two people, though, if she was a widow?”
“Her son.”
I did the math. I woke from my reverie, a little excited. Finally, a nibble. “He’d be in his late twenties, early thirties.”
“Full grown, anyway. Probably somewhere that age. Living with her.”
“In the second unit?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Hardly ever saw either of them out and about She had some older daughters, used to come around. Trashy women, if I have to say so. The mother — Wanda — tiny little thing, about as friendly as a rattlesnake. Now I heard, and this might not be true, but I was told she married something like six or seven times. I can’t say for sure, though. They all could have been decent folks, I guess. But you hear things. I just know they were real private people. Didn’t talk to the neighbors, kept to themselves. Had some money, but lived kind of low. Got no idea where they went to. You know, that place of theirs didn’t sell until last year. They were asking too much. Then, the man who bought it, it was for his daughter so she’d be on her own, well she got married anyway and moved out of state. So now it’s for sale again. Slow market. Buyers’ market, like I was saying.”
“So nobody’s lived there since the Grantleys?”
“No, not unless some freeloaders broke in and squatted it. We put a lock box on it, but that happens sometimes.”
“Here, let me take down that address, and the month of sale.”
“You already did, Mr. Naughton. You all right?”
“Yeah. Tell me how to get there, will you? And how about the key to that lock box?”
Hopkin was about twenty miles southwest, off of Highway 277. Birchwood was two turns off the main route, to the north, then west again. It was a long straight road with mailboxes every hundred yards or so. The asphalt was gray and the gravel on the shoulders almost white, and the sumac growing down to the shoulders was dark green in the spring light. The houses sat well back from the street, under canopies of trees and hedges and sagging power lines. The houses had porches and the porches had swings. Nice houses once, I thought, but sliding downhill now, neglected and alone as old people.
The Grantley place had a rusted mailbox with the metal flag up to signal outgoing parcels. The weeds had grown up around the stanchion and the house was hardly visible through the trees. I passed it once, then doubled back and eased into the driveway. I lowered the window, killed the engine and sat there. The house was clearly vacant. I could see through the glass of one of the windows, straight to a blank interior wall. The other front window had a shade drawn down most of the way. Nothing on the patio. The “For Sale” sign leaned back like an outfielder watching a home run. The lawn was dead except for the green on the sides, where a fresh crop of weeds had grown. The weeds climbed over a pink crenelated divider and spilled onto the walkway. The house was painted gray and the paint was starting to peel. Cicadas trilled from the black recesses of a huge elm tree and a mockingbird sang an insane melody to himself.
I got the house key from the lock box on the garage door. Through a chain-link fence I could see the second unit in the back, overhung by a big walnut tree. Back on the porch, the screen door creaked as I held it open and worked a rusty key into a rusty lock.
The first thing I smelled inside was bacon. Then dust, mildew and old carpet. The living room was the first thing you walked into. It was small and square, with a doorway leading to the kitchen and another to a hall. The fireplace was brick, with a mantelpiece of painted wood. There were three bedrooms, all small and dark in the eternal shade of the big trees outside. The wall-to-wall carpet was a pale blue. The kitchen had a little cheer to it — yellow tiles on the counter and yellow linoleum with white flecks in it. The wallpaper was yellow and white. The flooring was dark and warped up where the refrigerator had stood. The only furnishing in the whole place was a small end table with a phone on it. I picked up the earpiece and got nothing but silence and the muted cicadas and mockingbird, still at it in the trees outside.