Second Chance (10 page)

"In Kirsten's case . . . ?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said. "Obvious1y it
depends on the next few days. She has a fresh insight into her
problems. She's regressed at the moment. But if she can channel what
she's learned."

'The man was being vague, and he knew it.

"It's difficult for me to talk about this,"
he said apologetically. "You do know that Kirsten is my
patient?"

I nodded.

"Let me just say that I'm not without hope."

"That's swell, Doctor, but hope's not going to
help me find her."

He smiled. "It may help her find herself."

Louise Pearson came back into the room. All three of
us turned toward her, and she flushed prettily, as if she was
embarrassed by the attention.

"Phil would like to speak with you now, Mr.
Stoner," she said.

"All right."

"We'll talk again," Sacks said, as if my
hour was up.

I walked out into the hall. Louise led me to a closed
door
at the end of the corridor. She paused
outside.

"Phi1's suffering from certain health problems,"
she said.

"Your mother-in-law told me."

"She shouldn't have," Louise said. But I
had the feeling that she was relieved that I knew.

She knocked at the door, and Pearson said, "Come
in."

The woman patted me on the shoulder. "I'd like
to speak with you again before you leave."

I nodded and went into the room.

It was a study lined with bookshelves and mullioned
windows. Pearson was sitting on a leather wingback chair in the
center of the room, behind a glass desk with brass-sawhorse legs.
Even at a distance I could tell that he was in bad shape. His face
was drained of color, except for the dark circles beneath his eyes.
His hand trembled when he waved me toward a chair in front of him.

"I'm glad you're here," he said.

"I'm afraid I don't have anything to report
yet."

He nodded stupidly. His blue eyes had lost their
piercing intensity. His speech was dulled too, as if he were heavily
tranquilized.

"The police . . . ?"

"I reported Ethan and Kirsten as missing
persons. That's all the police know."

I thought that would please him, but it didn't.

"I've given you the wrong impression," he
said, looking pained. "I do that sometimes."

He tried to draw himself up in his chair, grimaced,
and slumped back again.
 
"I
want you to find my children. I don't care what it costs or what it
takes. I was wrong to react the way I did last night. I was thinking
of myself, of my own feelings. You know now that my first wife,
Estelle, committed suicide. The thought of having that tragedy
dredged up again and publicized . . . it unnerved me."

"You don't have to apologize."

"I feel that I do. I feel that I owe you an
explanation of why I withheld certain facts about Kirsten and Ethan.
It was not because I don't love them. On the contrary, I'm afraid
that I've loved them too much." The man blushed furiously, as if
his love for his children was shameful. "When you lose someone
you hold dear, when you lose that person to irrational violence, you
hold even more tightly to those who are left behind. I have done that
to my children. In trying to protect them I have smothered them. Now
I'm afraid that it's my fate to lose them too—to lose all that I
love."

Pearson's lips trembled violently.

"It is my failure as a father that I was trying
to conceal from you," he said with effort. "It was my
failure as a husband that made me a coward."

I shouldn't have said anything at all. But I did. "I
think you may be shouldering too much blame."

He shook his head. "You don't know. The children
do."

This time I didn't answer him.

"You have a plan of some kind?" Pearson
asked.

"To try to find the man from the newspaper
before Ethan and Kirsty do. The police will be looking for their car.
We'll notify local hotels, hospices, and hospitals. Someone should
spot them soon."

"Good. I've canceled my appointments for the
week. I'll be here if they decide to come home."

"Do they have any special friends in town?"

"I don't think so," Pearson said. "At
least I don't think Kirsty does—she's always been so shy. I haven't
seen Ethan in some years."

Pearson stared forlornly at his desk, as if he was
struck by the pathos of what he'd just said.

"Find them, Mr. Stoner," he said heavily.
"Bring them back. Give me the chance to make amends."

"
I'll do all I can,"
I told him.

* * *

After finishing with Pearson I went back down the
hall to the living room. Sacks and Cora Pearson had left, and Louise
Pearson was sitting alone by the fire. She stood up as I came through
the door.

"Thank you again, Mr. Stoner," she said
warmly. "For everything."

"I'm working for you. No thanks are necessary."
I

"Thanks anyway for sticking with us, especially
after the mixed signals I gave you yesterday. I was very wrong about
Kirsty. I thought she was recovering. Maybe she would have if Ethan
hadn't shown up. He's always had a powerful effect on her, although
he's never managed to talk her into doing anything this stupid
before."

From the disgust in her voice, it was obvious that
she had had her fill of her stepson long before Sunday night.

"Ethan's given you trouble in the past?"

"He's been nothing but trouble," Louise
Pearson said wearily. "He's never forgiven Phil for Estelle's
death. And he never will, in spite of Phil's efforts to bribe him
back into the family."

"Your husband gives Ethan money?"

"Since he was a kid. It's all that's left
between them—the blood money that Phil gives him every month."

"Why do you call it blood money?" I asked.

She smiled. "I meant the term loosely, though in
some way I suppose Phil is compensating Ethan for Estelle's death.
And keeping this stupid obsession alive."

"Has Ethan ever been in trouble with the police
before now?"

"He hasn't the guts for that," Louise
Pearson said with crude satisfaction. "Ethan's not much of a
doer, but he's a ferocious, bullying talker. Witness how he twisted
Kirsty around his finger."

"I don't think it was Ethan alone that led
Kirsten to this," I said. "She's had a rotten year. And
last week an important relationship went awry."

"What kind of relationship?"

"A romantic one."

The woman looked surprised. "She was having an
affair?"

"
She was trying to. There's some question about
whether she succeeded. The man . . . he's an older man. A teacher at
the university."

"You didn't tell Phil that, did you?"
Louise Pearson said with alarm.

"No. I didn't tell him much of anything. He
didn't look as if he could take it."

"He can't," Louise Pearson said flatly.
"Especially that."

The woman took a step closer to me and I caught her
sweet, powerful scent again.

"Mr. Stoner, if things should go wrong, please
call me. I mean, before you talk to Phil. He'll need careful handling
if Kirsten and Ethan land in real trouble."

She handed me a piece of stationery with a phone
number on it.

"That's my private number here at the house.
I've got a fairly busy social schedule. If I should be out, an
answering service will know where to find me."

I told her I'd call when I had some news.

Leaning forward hesitantly the woman kissed me
lightly on the cheek. It wasn't meant to be provocative, but it had
that effect on me. It must not have felt right to Louise Pearson
either, for she pulled away at once.

"I'm sorry," she said, reddening. "I'm
feeling a little frail at the moment. And then I'm a physical sort of
person, anyway."

"It's all right," I said. "I liked
it."

She laughed feebly.

"Go," she said, waving her hand down the
hall to the front door. "Before I make a fool out of myself."

12
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From the Pearson house I drove downtown to the main
branch of the Public Library on Vine Street.

The first-floor periodical room was relatively empty
that early on a Monday morning—a couple of earnest-looking college
students, a few old-age pensioners, and two or three bums, who'd come
in out of the cold and fallen asleep on scattered benches, their
shopping bags of belongings rolled up for pillows. I skirted the
snoozing bums and got a brief workout running down a fleet-footed
librarian, who kept turning corners in front of me as I tracked her
through the stacks. Once I ran the woman to ground I asked her for
advice on where to begin looking for Ethan Pearson's photograph.

"If the article you're interested in was from a
paper purchased in the Ft. Thomas area, you should begin with the
Kentucky Post" she said. "It has the largest circulation in
that part of northern Kentucky. You should also try the Louisville
Courier-Journal and the Cincinnati Enquirer; ofcourse. Many northern
Kentuckians read the Enquirer."

"Do you keep back issues in circulation?" I
asked.

"For seven days, then they're recorded on
microfiche."

She pointed me to the newspaper stacks and told me to
come back if I needed to use a microfiche machine. I found the
Wednesday, December 16, edition of the Kentucky Post and read through
it slowly. The court news was in the local section, but there were no
photos or paragraphs on released felons. I tried the Courier-journal
next, without any luck. Then the Enquirer. Ethan's mystery man wasn't
there—or if he was I wasn't seeing him.

I was very tired, and concentrating on the newsprint
was maddeningly difficult. I was worried that the fatigue would cause
me to overlook something—and even more worried that Ethan's photo
didn't exist. If that was the case I'd have nothing to go on, save
the chance that the Volare would be spotted by the cops. That is, if
the Pearson kids had come back to Cincinnati, which was no ironclad
cinch.

I sat, brooding, at the library table for a full
minute, before it dawned on me that the photo didn't have to be in
Wednesday's papers. Ethan could have spotted the picture in an older
newspaper—a paper from the day before or the day before that. Or it
could have been that he'd gone down to the library like I had, and
combed through months of back issues. Years of them.

That way lay madness.

I dragged myself to my feet and returned to the
stacks. The Tuesday the 15th and Monday the 14th editions of the Post
were the last two papers on the shelves. Anything before them meant
sitting in front of a microfiche machine for hours.

I tried the Tuesday paper first and found nothing.
Then I tried the Monday paper—and got lucky. On the fourth page of
the Monday the 14th Post, the court news page, there was a tiny
mugshot of a middle-aged black man. According to the paragraph
beneath the photo his name was Herbert Talmadge, and he'd been
released from Lexington the week before on parole, after serving
thirteen years of a twenty-to-life sentence for the rape and murder
of a Kentucky nurse. The killing had occurred in Newport in December,
1976, and it must have been particularly brutal or they wouldn't have
printed Talmadge's picture. Talmadge was clearly a bad character, and
that bothered me. But the newspaper picture itself, the tiny mugshot,
was just as unsettling. I sat there and stared at it dumbly for a
full minute, wondering whether my lack of sleep and the general
weirdness of the Pearson case were combining to unhinge me. Simply
put, Herbert Talmadge had the same face as the man in Ethan Pearson's
drawing—the same V-shaped goatee, the same pointed chin, the same
peppery hair and slanted, menacing eyes.

Even allowing for the crudity of a ten-year-old's
drawing skills, the resemblance was close enough to give me a feeling
of déja vu. It must have scared hell out of Ethan Pearson. What I
couldn't imagine was where a ten-year-old kid had run across the
likes of Herbert Talmadge. He had to have seen him somewhere, because
the likeness he'd drawn was just too damn close to be coincidental.

I made a dozen copies of the article on a Xerox
machine. Then I found a phone in the lobby and called Al Foster at
CPD.

"I need another favor, Al," I said. "Get
me a last known address on an ex-con named Herbert Talmadge. He just
did thirteen years in Lexington for rape and murder."

"This have something to do with your missing
persons?" he asked.

"It might."

"I'll see what I can turn up."

"One more thing?"

"We're here to serve and protect you, Harry."