Honeymoon With Murder (12 page)

He picked up the phone.

Annie welcomed the thick, heavy afternoon heat. She
liked
humidity, the sprinkle of sweat beading her face, the moist caress of the air. She passed the closed field kitchen, the odor of vegetable soup overborne by the scent of soap as Red Cross volunteers scoured their pots and pans. She’d missed lunch while talking to Adele Prescott and Mavis. Cabin 7 was next, but she had to have some sustenance and time to sift through what she’d learned. Dust rose in lazy spirals as she marched briskly along the grey dirt road. The sharp fragrance of the pines was as welcome as the shade from their silvery umbrella crowns. As the road curved, she left behind the muted activity of the search headquarters and glimpsed the shiny tin roof of Jerry’s Gas ’N Go, the two old-fashioned gas pumps, and a plate-glass window.

A window that overlooked the road, the road that was the only access by land to Nightingale Courts.

Annie broke into a trot.

A bell jangled as she pushed open the door to the combination country store and gas station. An enormous woman in a pink gingham dress sat on a high stool behind the cash register. She faced the window. The small, wooden-floored store was crammed with well-stocked shelves. Refrigerator cabinets lined one wall.

“Found Ingrid yet?” She had a high, sweet voice.

The clerk, Shirley May Foley, knew all about the murder, the search, and Annie.

But she shook her head regretfully when Annie asked if any cars had passed around midnight.

“Can’t help you there. Sure wish I could, but we close at eleven, and I was in kinda a hurry last night, so I can’t speak
to after, say, eleven-twenty My boys, Beau and Bobby Joe, was coming to town to go huntin’ today with their pa. So I hurried home to get started bakin’. I can say we only had one car after ten last night, and it was a reglar. You can’t miss the lights—or the noise, either. That Webb man’s car went by about eleven.”

That confirmed Webb’s story, that he’d driven home from Parotti’s—Annie stiffened, like a dog on point. What was it Webb had said? Jesse had received a phone call and left about the same time. How long would it take for him to get to the Courts from the bar on his bike? Maybe five minutes. That meant Jessed arrived at his cabin around five or so minutes after eleven. Ingrid had called for help at midnight. Fifty-five minutes during which Jesse was murdered, then Ingrid was abducted. Ingrid had to have been removed in either a car or boat. It was unrealistic to think an abductor could carry her for any great distance. There had been so much noise and confusion last night that a resident abroad in a car
could
have returned unnoticed during the melee. As for a boat, Jesse’s was missing. Annie’s head whirled. The obvious inference, at least to Posey, was that Ingrid had escaped in it. But if the murderer had taken it, with Ingrid as a captor, didn’t that mean the murderer
couldn’t
be a resident of the Courts? If so, how had he returned? But he could have taken Ingrid in the boat to a hiding place and had either a car or bicycle waiting there. Annie wished she were better at chess or the kinds of thought problems that went: If one boat traverses two miles in three hours and a second boat, etc. She sighed.

Shirley May clucked sympathetically. “Sure sorry I can’t be more help.”

“You’re the only one here at night?” Annie asked.

The big woman nodded cheerfully. “I work from three to eleven. Course, we have a garage boy, changes oil, things like that, but he got off at five.”

“I don’t suppose,” Annie said with little hope, “that you saw anyone walking by around eleven?”

“Why, honey, anybody could slip among those pines, if they had a mind to.”

“How about a boat? Did you hear any boats?”

“Don’t hardly ever hear boats. You got to understand, the back storeroom’s between me and the sound.” Shirley
May leaned forward, her triple chin resting on an ample bosom, her china-blue eyes wide. “They got any idea who’s behind all this?”

Annie wasn’t going to dignify Posey’s suspicions by repeating them, and Shirley May would hear all that soon enough. “Not really.”

“Well, I think I know. You just come here and look at
this.”

She heaved her bulk off the high stool and presented a battleship-broad back to Annie as she moved heavily down the center aisle toward a door marked
EMPLOYEES ONLY
.

Annie followed into the storeroom and past cartons and crates to a back door and steps leading down to a patch of concrete.

The clerk pointed a fat finger at a small mess of ashes.

Annie looked at her in bewilderment.

“I think it’s a
cult
, that’s what I think. Now, nobody has no call to burn nothin’ here. And this mess wasn’t here Saturday night. But it was here this mornin’. I saw it first off, when I drove in. There’s my car.” She pointed just past the ashes to a rusted old Chevy.

Feeling it was expected, Annie crossed the oil-stained concrete and stared down at the remnants of a small blaze. Obviously, someone had set some brown paper afire. There was a curl or two that had survived and a dark stringy ash that might have been twine. She looked past the concrete. A dusty path led to a rickety pier that poked out through the marsh to deeper water.

It seemed to Annie quite an unlikely site for cult activities. “Well,” she gently suggested, “I don’t see why the, uh, cult would gather here—”

“If they didn’t want to fire this whole shoreline, they sure had to!” Shirley May disagreed aggressively. “This here’s the only patch of concrete till you get to town.”

Which was true. If it mattered.

“And everything’s dry as tinder right now, we had so little rain lately. Why, they didn’t have no
other
place, if they were from around here.”

Enthused, Shirley May found an empty box and upended it over the ash pile. “Maybe this’ll turn out to be real important. Now, you tell the search folks.”

They parted as firm friends, Annie purchasing a king-size (48 oz.) cherry-root-beer ripple delight and a Giant Baby Ruth, a prospective late lunch. As she strolled down the road, she decided a reasonable investigator couldn’t expect to strike the kind of conversational gold that always seemed to befall P.I.’s like Lew Archer and Cheney Hazzard. Rounding the bend, Nightingale Courts came into view. Madeleine Kurtz looked her way and began to wave energetically.

Max scowled and tapped his pen on the legal pad. “No, I didn’t get through to your mother. However, I left a message for her to call you, so I imagine you’ll be hearing from her later today.”

“You’re sure she reached San Francisco?” Ruth Jenson’s question was sharp.

“Yes, no doubt about it. Her plane ticket was used, and she checked into the St. Francis Wednesday morning.”

“I don’t understand it….”

Max could think of no tactful way to inquire whether Ruth’s mother had a penchant for picking up strange men for anonymous retreats. But her daughter would be the last to know, anyway.

“Perhaps she’s gotten involved—uh—with a client. Too busy to phone you. Or maybe she forgot. All of us forget things sometimes.”

“You don’t know my mother very well, do you?” The question wasn’t hostile, nor was the voice. In fact, Max rather liked Ruth Jenson’s voice. It was level, brisk, pleasant. She continued, and there was no hysteria, only a quiet conviction, “Something’s happened to her.”

“Oh, now, Mrs. Jenson, surely that’s leaping to conclusions unwarranted by—”

“No.” The simple negative had the finality of a dirt clod dropped on a coffin. “You see, my dad was killed in a plane crash.” A thin breath. “Ever afterward, Mother and I have always called each other whenever we had to fly. Oh, I know it’s crazy, but we had to know, had to know at once that the flight was safely past. I was out of town Wednesday, but I left on my answering machine. When I got home
Thursday, I listened to my messages. Nothing from Mother. I called her house Friday, but there wasn’t any answer. I called the gallery and all Alan knew was that she left town Wednesday.”

“Maybe she thought she’d called,” Max offered. “Or your machine didn’t pick it up. Or she didn’t leave a message for some reason.”

“I appreciate your trying to find her, Mr. Darling.” He was being dismissed. “At least, I now know she reached San Francisco. I’ll call the police there. You see, I know something has happened—Mother is extremely responsible. She never breaks a promise. She wouldn’t make me worry—not if she could call. So, I’m certain she can’t call.” For the first time, he heard the ragged edge of tears.

Her chances of being taken seriously by the San Francisco police ranked right around zero. Max didn’t tell her that. Instead, he said, “You might get a private investigator there to look into it. It’s a big city, and the police probably have to have more to go on than you can give them.”

In a moment, her voice once again firm and controlled, she said, “I will. And thank you, Mr. Darling.”

After he hung up, Max doodled restlessly on his legal pad. He’d thought this would be a quick call, marking an end to this distraction from his efforts to find out more about the residents of Nightingale Courts. Instead, he was growing increasingly anxious about Betsy Raines.

Ruth Jenson had had every reason to expect a telephone call that never came.

Was she wrong in a daughter’s estimation of her mothers character? Had Betsy Raines looked for love in all the wrong places?

His legal pad looked like a war zone, slashes, cross marks, arrows, circled names (Jesse Penrick, Ingrid Jones, Ophelia Baxter, Duane Webb, Adele Prescott, Mavis Beeson, Tom Smith), and now heavily inked question marks boxing Betsy Raines.

He glanced down at his watch. Almost four. He wished Annie were here. Although her thought processes were often something on the order of Mexican jumping beans (erratic but interesting), he felt in desperate need of a
Watson to bounce his thoughts off of, then maybe the day’s work wouldn’t seem quite so fruitless.

Hell, he didn’t even know where Annie was! He began to feel aggrieved. Why wasn’t
somebody
(besides Laurel) evincing any interest in his efforts?

He didn’t believe in sulking.

He believed in action. Once again, he lifted the telephone receiver.

Annie took another big bite of the candy bar—mmh, sheer delectable energy and to hell with blood-sugar levels—and stared at the note Madeleine Kurtz had given her.

Henny was busy, that was for sure. But what good she thought she was accomplishing—Annie shook her head and reread the message:

My dear chap! Oh, my dear chap! I am once again reaffirmed in my simple faith in facts. I abhor imagination; I just believe in evidence
.

Reggie Fortune, of course, H. C. Bailey’s plump, youthful-appearing, bighearted sleuth, who enjoyed all the good things of life, including his Rolls-Royce.

In a more humdrum mode, the note continued:

Traced Jesse’s activities Saturday morning. Appeared at Shangrila Travel Services about 10
A.M
. Requested information on round-the-world cruises, departed with handful of travel brochures,
NEVER KNOWN TO TAKE ANY JOURNEYS.
Such a departure from routine must be significant!

Annie drank deeply of her slushy from the Gas ’N Go. Henny was really reaching, although it did cast a different light on Jesse. It was the first fairly normal thing she’d learned about him. But, much more significant, in her mind, was Adele Prescott’s interesting revelations about Jesse’s propensity to play cruel jokes.

Annie finished the last bite of candy and began to walk toward Cabin 7. The more she discovered about the
residents and their tangled relations, the more certain she felt that the answer to this murder lay near, very near.

Max was beginning to feel thwarted. Very thwarted. No word from anybody and no way to find anybody, meaning specifically Annie and Henny. Finally, he left messages at the command table for each to get in touch with him. What were they doing?

From the mailboxes, Annie learned that Tom Smith lived in Cabin 7. She realized, as she knocked, that no one had mentioned Smith, and so far as she knew, she hadn’t met him. What was he doing when all the excitement erupted last night?

When the door opened, she smiled. “Mr. Smith. I’m Annie Laurance. Darling.” She’d master it one of these days. “I’m a friend of Ingrid’s. May I talk to you for a moment?”

His pale face stared at her with no change of expression. It wasn’t deliberately unpleasant. It was simply devoid of reaction. When she had almost decided he wasn’t going to let her in, he said dully, “All right.”

He held the door for her. When she was inside, he turned and walked to a worktable and sat down. He picked up a miniature accordion and bent toward it. The room smelled of cloth, leather, paste, cigarette smoke, glue, metal, wood, paint, turpentine, and, faintly, underscoring them all, the unmistakable scent of marijuana. An entire wall was covered by shelving filled with every kind of assorted material. Another wall held shelf after shelf stacked with miniatures: tiny cracker barrels, ironing boards, wash tubs, canned goods, minute telephones, 1870 typewriters, dairy products, furniture of all American eras from colonial to art deco, hats, musical instruments, figures from an America that existed now only in yellowed photographs (Oliver Wendell Holmes as a private in the Fourth Battalion Infantry, Tallulah Bankhead in a flappers dress, Franklin Delano Roosevelt straining to stand with canes in the well of the House of Representatives), petite
street cars, a wooden oil derrick, Model-T Fords, everything necessary to recreate a Lilliputian vision of the past.

It was as if she weren’t there. Annie cleared her throat. “Do you fill orders, or just make what you want to?”

He was absorbed in pasting tiny white keys. He bent over his work, his fingers moving with delicate precision. He was a spare man with once-reddish hair, now greying and thinning, pulled back tightly into a pony tail. His worn blue work shirt opened at the throat to reveal a knobby neck. The shirt showed signs of neat darning. He put the last sliver of ivory in place, then looked up at her, not so much hostile as uninterested.