Mudlark (23 page)

I waited. I had said more than enough.

After a moment, he sighed. "When my grandparents were killed, the state patrol called me at my
apartment in San Francisco. I'd divorced Cleo the year before and I was living alone. It was the classic
middle-of-the-night phone call. My first reaction was straightforward disbelief.

"I flew north at six-thirty the next morning, still hoping I'd wake up and find out it was a nightmare. I
rented a car in Portland and drove to Kayport. Somewhere around Clatskanie--that's about halfway along the
highway to Astoria--I started to believe what the officer told me."

I was watching his face. He had an inward, remembering look, and sweat gleamed on his forehead.

"And then my emotions just shut down."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean I couldn't feel anything at all. My senses were working overtime, and my physical reactions
were sharp. It was a rainy winter day, cold and overcast, and the road was dangerous in the mountains. Slick. I
drove fast, but my timing was excellent. Everything worked but my emotions."

I sipped and tried to visualize the drive. We had brought a U-Haul truck along the same road.

"I behaved awfully well when I got to Kayport," Tom continued. "Everybody said so. I made the funeral
arrangements, and I said the right things to Aunt Caroline--Grandma's sister. I came to the house here, hoping I'd
thaw out, but I just went up to my old bedroom and had a nice, dreamless eight-hour sleep. When I got up, I walked
around the house, trying to remember, trying to force myself to feel something, even nostalgia. I walked on the
beach for a couple of hours in a driving rainstorm, and I felt cold and wet, all right, but I didn't feel sad or happy or
sick or grieved or even angry."

"That must have been terrifying."

He looked at me. "It would have been, if I'd been able to feel terror." He turned his mug slowly. "When
they held the funeral service three days later, I was still frozen. I put on a decent suit and tie and got to the Reilly
Funeral Chapel at exactly the right time. There was an organist. My grandfather's lodge master delivered the
eulogy. My grandparents were cremated. The funeral parlor set up a reception after the funeral, with coffee and
cookies and the Methodist ladies pouring. Aunt Caroline and I stood at one end of the room. People came up and
shook hands. They said how awful it was and what a blessing my grandparents didn't suffer, and so on."

"People say dumb things at funerals."

He went on as if I hadn't spoken, "A lot of people showed up. All the LaPortes, of course, and half the
population of Shoalwater, even some of the summer people my grandfather had worked for as a handyman. I met
Clara that day. Grandpa had installed her deck the year before. What surprised me--no, not surprise, I wasn't up to
feeling surprise."

He frowned, groping for words. "What was intellectually interesting was that the McKays came. My
grandfather was the last of the senior branch of the family. There were all the McKays from the Enclave, from the
cadet branch, paying their respects and saying polite things. I remember thinking I should have been
touched."

"What happened?"

"Quentin and Bob and Annie came up together. We shook hands, and Annie said she was sorry. I said I
thought her dad had done a nice job. That was tactless of me. She doesn't like to be reminded of her father's
profession. However, I was so out of touch with my own feelings I was deaf to anyone else's. Then Bob said,
'Anything we can do?' And Quentin cleared his throat like a bishop. He said, 'You'll be wanting to unload the old
McKay place, Tommy. I'll take it off your hands.' He's pompous the way lawyers are sometimes, so he probably
phrased the offer less directly."

"What an appalling thing to say."

"Yeah, and Quentin didn't mean well, either. I stood there gaping at him. My mind raced, as if it had
shifted gears, and I knew why they'd showed up. They'd come because they saw an opportunity to pick up a piece
of desirable real estate cheap. And to rid themselves of a social embarrassment. Me."

"Then what?"

"I must have turned green or something, because I can remember Annie asking me what was wrong.
Then I let fly. I hit Quentin smack on the point of his chin with a long, solid right. He went down. Annie was
shrieking. Then I turned around, marched out the door of the funeral parlor, and walked home, all the way from
Kayport to Shoalwater. By the time I got here, I was feeling everything I was supposed to feel, and the police were
waiting for me."

I took a long swallow of cold coffee. "Maybe I'm reading what you said backward, but it sounds as if
Quentin McKay did you a favor."

"You're right. He also jolted me into moving north. It took me the better part of a year to realize that."
He fiddled with the mug. "An emotional freeze wasn't a new thing with me, though. I should have known what to
expect. For almost two years after Tet, a good year after I got out of the army, I had no emotions except for an
occasional burst of anger. It wasn't safe to feel anything, so I suppressed my feelings. It's a very dangerous state of
mind, Lark."

"Yes, I can see that. The feelings were there, hidden, and they could sneak up on you."

His mouth eased, and he took a reflective sip of coffee. "Funny thing. I've never been able to feel grateful
to Quentin for the 'favor.' I spent two nights in the county jail before he decided to drop the charges."

I sat for a while digesting the story. "Were you in an emotional deep freeze the night Cleo was
killed?"

"No." Outside, the wind had picked up, but it sounded half-hearted. "Was that what you wanted me to
say?"

"I just wanted to hear your version. Now you can tell me about Cleo."

"One narrative a night. For two I charge double." He spoke lightly, but his jaw was set. I had been
pushing him hard.

"My mother is a writer. She says the truth of a story lies in the way it's told."

"She must be uncomfortable to live with."

I stared. "Thomas, my friend, I am not a murder suspect. I probe, you wince, not vice versa."

"Do you think I killed Cleo?"

"You asked me that earlier. No. She didn't surprise you with her offer. The Historic Trust business
proves that. And I think you're a happy man, or you were until somebody dumped her body on your doorstep.
You're doing what you want to do where you want to do it."

"She was threatening my base of operations."

"Not very seriously, from the sound of things. Was she vindictive?"

"She could be." He brushed a wing of black hair from his forehead. Bonnie was going to have to haul
him to the barber. "Cleo was a superb businesswoman. If she could dislodge me from my house with minimal effort
and make a profit, she'd go for it, but she wouldn't pursue a vendetta at all costs. By the time I filed for divorce, I
knew her mentality, so I gave her an edge in the property settlement. We had stocks, equity in a very expensive
condo, a trendy car, some antiques. I let her have the condo and the BMW. We split the rest. She thought she'd
made a score against me."

"Didn't she?"

He shrugged. "When I decided to move up here and write full time, I had enough left to set up a trust
fund. It keeps the taxes and insurance paid on the house. I did all right."

"Why did you divorce her? You said you loved her."

"We had a basic disagreement about children. I wanted them and she didn't. I could have adjusted to
not having kids, but she lied to me before we were married, and afterward she kept delaying. When she hit
thirty-five, she finally admitted she didn't want a family, had never wanted one."

I wanted a family. I felt a stab of resentment. Cleo could have had what I wanted.

Tom said, "There were other problems, but I couldn't live with deception."

"What were the other problems? Infidelity?"

He hesitated. "I got the impression that she didn't enjoy sex. She used it to manipulate people, including
me, but she wasn't promiscuous. And she hated Shoalwater. The LaPortes made her uneasy. They teased her, and
she didn't have much sense of humor. I think she was also racist."

"Racist?"

"She grew up in small logging towns on the Oregon coast and probably internalized the local prejudices.
Native Americans were trendy when we first married, though. She used to talk about My People at cocktail parties.
At first I didn't mind. I was always proud of my Nekana relatives. But being paraded as an ethnic specimen got
old."

"You weren't raised traditionally, were you?"

"No, and I was always conscious of being a mixture. My grandfather saw to it that I thought of myself as
a McKay." He smiled. "Not, you understand, in the Enclave sense of the term. Grandpa collected rascally anecdotes
about his forebears. He liked to tell them wherever they'd cause his cousins maximum embarrassment. At political
gatherings, for example."

I eyed him. "He must have been uncomfortable to live with."

Tom grinned. "
Touché.
Grandpa was contrary on principle. I spent six months at the
height of puberty being embarrassed by the old man, but I got over that fast. Mostly I got a kick out of him. And I
respected him. He taught me a lot."

"But Cleo didn't appreciate him."

"No. Grandpa refrained from sarcasm in her presence, but I could see he didn't like her. She patronized
my grandmother. Sooner or later, that would have caused a flare-up. We didn't come up here very often while the
marriage lasted, but we came often enough for Cleo to scope out the real estate opportunities. When I heard that
her husband's company had bought the resort site, I felt as if I'd let the enemy in the back gate."

"Who do you think killed her?"

He shook his head. "I don't know. My best guess, and it's probably prompted by wishful thinking, is
Donald Hagen. He could have hired the arsonist-sideswiper, but if he killed Cleo and set Kevin Johnson off, who
planted Bonnie's bag of dead sea gulls?"

I thought about that. "Not Kevin. Are you saying that the carpetbag was symbolic and the other crimes
weren't?"

"The carpetbag feels different. And why would Donald Hagen persecute Bonnie, if his motive was
jealousy? The shooting incident doesn't make any sense at all, if Hagen had the coolness to dump Cleo's body
where it would implicate me, and if he was thinking far enough ahead to hire Kevin. The shooting was
impulsive."

"I think Hagen was on coke when he shot at Jay."

His eyes narrowed. "I suppose that might explain why he confused Jay with me, though I still find the
stupidity incredible."

"I found the whole incident incredible." I was scratching at the edge of insight. "Maybe not incredible.
Faked. There was something phony going on, as if he were playing a role and doing it sloppily, without attention to
detail."

"That's interesting. He could have killed Cleo, hired Johnson to harass me and my friends, then staged
the shooting to persuade everybody he was just a distraught widower out to avenge his wife's death."

"It hangs together." I felt a stir of excitement.

"But Bonnie got the carpetbag before Cleo was killed. I hadn't met Bonnie then, or you and Jay and
Freddy. Neither had Cleo. Why would Hagen bother to harass innocent bystanders?"

I sighed. "We're going in circles. Maybe what we have are half a dozen separate crimes with as many
criminals."

Tom carried our mugs to the coffee pot and refilled them. "I can buy two criminals, but I balk at
six."

"We know Donald Hagen took a shot at Jay, and I'm pretty certain the pickup I saw today was the one
that tried to run me off the Ridge Road. That's two criminals for sure."

He set my mug at my elbow.

"I take cream."

"Sorry." He retrieved the creamer and set it and a spoon on the table.

"Thanks." I dolloped more powdered plastic into my cup and stirred. "Suppose Hagen is just a
grief-stricken widower who made a little mistake with his target. Suppose the real killer, the mastermind,
is Bob McKay." I didn't believe Bob's alibi. Annie was just covering for him.

"Cousin Bob." Tom looked thoughtful. He was warming his hands on the mug of hot coffee.

"The man is a scuzz and a drunk."

"And Annie said he started drinking hard a week ago. After Cleo died or before?"

I warmed to the theme. "So he had an affair with Cleo, and she told him it was all over. He killed her in a
fit of jealousy then dumped the body near your property."

"On my property," Tom corrected. "I own the accreted land."

"The what?"

"The peninsula is one of the few places on the west coast where the shoreline isn't eroding. Silt from
the Columbia washes up on the beach. When Grandpa was growing up, the
Mollie McKay
lay well offshore
on a shoal."

"Aren't there times you can walk around the wreck on firm sand?"

He nodded. "On a minus tide. The beach is technically a state highway. It extends to the mean high
water mark. Every ten years or so, the state moves its property line west, and people who own beachfront get
another chunk of dune. My land is two lots wide on the highway, but it extends west almost a third of a mile."

I whistled. "Valuable."

"It will be if the dunes adjoining Cleo's resort are rezoned to allow for multiple-unit structures."

"You could build a motel west of your house."

His mouth twisted. "I won't."

"But another owner might."

"You've got it."

The phone rang as I was taking in the implications of what Tom had said. Maybe he had underestimated
the deviousness of Cleo's offer. His house was probably worth only $75,000 on the local market, but the land had a
much greater potential value. I picked the receiver up on the third ring to prevent the message tape from kicking
in. "Hello?"

"Hi, Lark." It was Bonnie. "I just wanted you to know I have a telephone. The nice man installed it this
afternoon. I bankrupted myself talking to my parents. They want me to move back to L.A. where I'll be safe."