“Or she sleeps late,” he said.
“Yeah, or that. Or she’s not in there.”
The edge of the curtain trembled.
“She’s there, Darcy. Let me do the talking.”
“Like at the bar?”
As soon as I jumped down from the truck the sun slapped my skin. The air was dusty. The path to the door was dry grass, the kind that had had any moisture fried out of it. I followed in Wallinsky’s wake. He knocked.
She didn’t open the door. I could hear her inside, not walking around but breathing loudly.
He knocked again. “Claire?” And then, “Claire! Come on, open up.”
She opened it, and suddenly there she was. Standing with one hand on the frame, she had her other hand on the edge of the door as if afraid of it being shoved open. Cool air wafted through the doorway. She was tall but almost childlike in her slightness. Her skin was smooth and well-cared for. Her thin blonde hair was caught back in a ponytail neither at the top of her head or the nape of her neck, but the middle of the back as if she’d grabbed a rubber band and carelessly pulled the hair into it. The pale legs of a natural blonde protruded from shorts and her T-shirt had Chinese characters across the front.
But it was her expression that struck me. I couldn’t keep myself from staring. Her mouth was firm, pressed in annoyance. Her pale brown eyes peered directly at Wallinsky, but something in the pull of her brow gave them a look of terror completely at odds with the lower half of her face. She seemed undecided whether to slam the door in anger—or run.
“Have you seen the news?” Wallinsky asked.
“No.” She was staring at him the way I wanted to stare at her, to examine her. But the fear in her eyes was more pronounced.
“A woman in San Francisco jumped off a building, onto the freeway.”
She said nothing, just kept staring.
I didn’t correct Wallinsky’s assumption about Karen’s death. “The only personal possession in the place she was staying was your book.”
“Damn!”
“I can understand it’s a shock, but why would she—”
“Oh, damn. You’re reporters, aren’t you?”
“No, no.”
“Yeah, that’s what they said before when they were all over this place like ants, banging on the door, peering in the windows, parking all over the lawn like they owned it.” Her tone was sharp, her shoulders hunched in, but her face was all fear.
“We’re not reporters.”
“That’s how it was before, when Aunt Maddie died. They came like that, like an invasion, cars and trucks and cameras. Like a sandstorm squeezing in through the cracks around the windows.”
“I work in the movies. I do stunts.” That almost always gets people.
But it didn’t snag Claire Cesko. She wasn’t thinking about the woman who died, and she sure wasn’t paying attention to me; her whole focus was on Wallinsky. “You’re not a reporter? But I know you? You look familiar.”
What else hadn’t he told me?
“Maybe.” He was playing for time.
“The delivery boy at the grocery. You weren’t very good, were you? You brought the wrong order here twice.” She eased backward warily, her hand tightening on the door. “It was a long way to come with a mistake.”
Wallinsky hesitated.
“You were putting cans on the top shelves, pulling the old ones in back up to the front where people would buy them.” She was smiling but her brows were pulled down even farther in suspicion or fear, as if even the parts of her own face couldn’t decide how she felt about him.
I stepped in front. “He was a jerk.” I glared back at him. “And he’s still a jerk.” To her, I said, “There are no reporters. Not yet. Only us and the question why your new book was so important to that woman. She didn’t even own a saucepan.”
“Some people like to read recipes. They’re comforting. Cookbooks make good gifts for all sorts of people.” She said this last bit as if it were from a script she’d memorized.
“You could be right. But, on the chance there’s another reason, maybe she was—Karen Johnson—a friend.”
“I don’t know a Karen Johnson.”
I wanted to describe her, but how? Blonde, but she undoubtedly had had some other shade. Nice looking, but not natural, with easy-to-spot evidence of face work. “She talked about stepping off a hundred-foot pole.”
Claire started. She was looking past me at Wallinsky; his face had gone white.
“You know it, the koan?”
“That’s crazy,” she snapped. “Anyway, I don’t have friends. I’ve never had friends. I live way out here.”
“What do you do?”
“Do? I do what my aunt did, I work. People think writing cookbooks is pulling recipes out of a box and copying them. But it’s not easy to come up with something now. Food’s been around a long time, you know. To create something new, something that’ll make people want to try it, it’s not easy, and it damned well doesn’t happen on the first try or the seventy-fifth try. It’s . . .”
“Frustrating,” I offered.
“Damn right, it is.”
“How do you do everything? The cooking, the shopping, the gardening?” I asked. “You’ve got to have help.”
“Your aunt had help,” Wallinsky added.
“She had to. She had publication deadlines. She had to grow more—different—vegetables here.”
“And she must’ve had help in the house.”
Claire let out a bitter laugh. “Me.”
“Just you? You were a kid,” I said, feeling for her. “And the migrant help, what about them?”
She grabbed the doorknob, ready to slam. “You’re one of those damn lawyers. Don’t you know what a statute of limitations is? Besides, my aunt is dead! Just leave—”
He ignored her, pushing himself forward.
“Stop it, Wallinsky!” I shoved him aside.
“Hey, I—”
“Get away from her!”
He jolted back.
“Damn it, get away!” I shouted at him. “I only wanted help finding a lead on Karen Johnson and here you are terrifying Claire, who’s only trying to help me.” I turned to her. “I’m sorry. I know it’s been hard for you and we’re the last thing you need.”
Her hand was still on the knob. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Wallinsky walking slowly back to his truck.
“Please. Something connects Karen Johnson to you.”
“No!”
“To your aunt, then. Look, if I’ve discovered that, you know the police will. They’ll be here asking the same questions. Think! Karen Johnson was
probably in her early forties, so she’d have been college age when your aunt died.”
College age. A college girl.
“My aunt didn’t have friends. I have to work all the time just to do the book, but she worked all the time because that’s how she was. She didn’t care about anything else. She cooked, she thought cooking, she wrote, she publicized. She could have been Julia Child, could have had her own TV show. She was driven.”
“She must have driven you, too.”
“Not just me, everyone. She didn’t have friends. Ask in town, see if you find one person she ever invited here, a single friend.”
“How about Edie?”
“Edie thinks she was a friend?” she asked, clearly amazed.
“She—”
“All I’ve ever wanted is to live like a normal person, to go to the store, the laundry, the movies. But people stare. People—you!—show up at my door. Go away! Leave me alone! I don’t know this person you’re asking about. And my aunt didn’t. I’ve spent too much of my life already getting over my aunt’s murder. Isn’t that enough for you?” She slammed the door.
I trudged back to the pickup, suddenly drained. Wallinsky was sitting in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead. Every bit of his shirt was damp. I walked around to the driver’s side and climbed in. I knew the answer, but I put a hand on his arm and then said, “Sonora Eades. She’s Karen Johnson, isn’t she? How long have you known that?”
He swallowed. “Can’t be sure. But age’d be right.”
I watched him as he wrestled with what was obviously a difficult thought. For the first time, I sensed, he’d be speaking the truth.
“D’you think . . . Was that always her plan, all these years, to jump?” he said, finally.
“She didn’t jump. She was pushed, murdered.”
He snapped open the glove compartment, rustled through stuffed envelopes, shut the door, then opened it again and sat back as if realizing what he was looking for was something that would act as a denial of her death. “What did this Karen Johnson look like?”
“People change. But about five eight. The little finger on one hand was twisted so the nail faced away from the others.”
“Shit.”
20
I DON’T KNOW how long I sat in the truck staring out the dusty windshield into the brown grass of summer. Sweat coated my face, ran down my back. I could have asked him to switch on the air conditioner; I didn’t. Karen Johnson a murderer? A murderer with a knife? It wasn’t possible, not the woman in the blue linen shell, not the person who laughed about Gary’s lack of exercise, not—“She saved a kid from being hit!”
“What?”
“Hit by a car. Not long after I met her.”
You can’t stand to believe anything bad about people you like.
“A carving knife’s so Lizzie Borden!”
Wallinsky didn’t answer and I was glad.
The keys hung in the ignition but I didn’t touch them. Eventually I got out and walked back to Claire’s door, knocked.
No answer.
“Claire,” I shouted. “This is important.”
Still no answer.
Sweat glued my hair to my neck, ran down under my arms. It was so hot I could barely breathe. “Claire! I’m not a reporter, but trust me, there will be reporters here soon and you don’t want them taking you by surprise. You need to hear the news from me first.”
The door stayed shut. No sound came from inside. But I was betting she was right on the other side of the door. I said in a normal tone, “Sonora Eades is dead.”
The door snapped open. “I don’t—Okay, come in and sit down.”
I stepped inside, appreciative of the suddenly cool air.
She motioned toward a ladderback chair at a round oak table. With her blonde ponytail at the odd, off-center spot in the back of her head, and her skinny pale legs sticking out of her shorts, she looked like a kid sent to the table to do the homework she’d been putting off all vacation. Her face had flushed but was already losing color, and that wariness I’d noticed before in her eyes seemed like a default expression. After all she’d been through I could hardly blame her.
Karen Johnson had been here? In this doorway? Brandishing a knife? How could that be? How could she talk about us having dinner then steal a police car?
The room had an old-fashioned feel, as if Claire had changed nothing since her aunt’s death. Or maybe she’d just never had the interest or attention to give to redecorating. I could picture Madelyn Cesko busily at her six-burner stove. The image I had was some version of what I remembered from that cookbook of hers Mom once had. Was the murder, in fact, the reason it’d disappeared? Mom thinking there was something creepy about it—and who could blame her?
Claire interrupted my thoughts. “What’s your name?”
“Darcy, Darcy Lott.” I said. “I met Sonora Eades just before she died, in San Francisco, two days ago. She plunged off a building onto the freeway.” The memory of her boneless face on the morgue trolley blocked out everything. “It wasn’t an accident . . . or suicide.”
“But why does that give you the right to try to shove your way into my house?”
It was as if we were inhabiting parallel universes. I had to remind myself she might have a very different interest in the death of the woman who’d ruined her life.
“You want some herb tea?” she unexpectedly offered.
“Do you have black?” What I needed was a drink, or else Renzo’s espresso. English Breakfast was hardly going to resuscitate me. “Do you grow your own herbs?” I asked, although I thought I knew the answer.
Still, I was surprised when she said sadly, “My aunt did. I should. I’ve kind of let things get away from me. For a long time I just couldn’t face doing anything she did. It was too painful.”
I watched her from behind as she fiddled at the stove. It was a sitter’s back, buttocks already flattening so that her shorts sagged at the back and jutted out at the sides. She probably wouldn’t grow fat but her pale skin would sag and wrinkle from lack of tone. What did she do with her time out here day after day? Spend it like her aunt, cooking, planning to cook, and nothing else?
Once she’d poured the boiling water into mugs and put the kettle back, she seemed to be moving the mugs without purpose. But her shoulders tightened and she kept her back to me.
The stringed labels were hanging off the side of the mugs when she put them in front of us. The pale water would probably stay so. No aroma wafted up, as if the tea had been in the cabinet for years. “Thanks!”
Claire looked surprised—as well she might. Without pretence of drinking, she put her own cup down. “How did you meet Sonora?” she asked abruptly.
“The thing is, I liked her,” I said, and waited for the explosion.
It didn’t come. Instead, she stared at me, with an odd expression, and then lowered her eyes. “I liked her, too,” she admitted. “I never say that to reporters or anyone; it’d just cause trouble. When she came
out here the first time and Aunt Maddie didn’t have time to be bothered with her, she hung around and talked. I didn’t get much chance to talk to anybody back then, so it was real nice for me. She was a few years older than me and I was impressed she had this summer job, going up to strangers’ doors in a strange town, asking questions, when I hardly even ever went to town without Aunt Maddie. I never worked in the garden on my own, either. I always let her tell me what to do. I was like a child . . . I—” She turned away from me. She sounded like she was crying, making me hesitate to come any nearer. “It was all my fault. The whole
thing
was my fault. Sonora would have gone away, gone to someone else’s house and probably it would have all been okay. But, see, I wanted her to come back. So I told her I could convince Aunt Maddie to answer her questions, that she should come back in a couple days. If I hadn’t . . .”