Second Chance (16 page)

The very fact that Kirsty and Ethan had found
Talmadge galled me. They'd found him, and I hadn't. All they'd had to
go on was the newspaper article in the Post; and yet they'd found him
in less than a day, while I was chasing blind leads and making time
with Louise Pearson.

I didn't understand how it had happened, how the last
chapter of Kirsten's life might have ended up being written by a man
with no connection to her own past, a man with no real connection to
Ethan's past—save for the brief moment that the boy might have seen
him in the hospital ward where his father had once worked. And yet
they'd all wonmd up in that clearing above the river like they were
holding communion for the dead mother. For the second time in two
days I had the weird feeling that there really was a sinister
fatality at work in the Pearsons' lives, leading them on to violent
death.

When I got to the office I picked up the phone and
started making calls. I went back through the people I'd talked to in
Chicago one by one. Art Heldman at the university. Jay Stein. Marnee
Thompson at the girls' apartment. And Hedda Pearson at her
end-of-the-road motel. Not one of them had ever heard of Herbert
Talmadge. Not one of them could explain how Kirsten or Ethan had
known where to find him. The only thing I managed to learn was that
Kirsty had in fact bought underclothes from Milady's Shop in the
Kenwood Plaza in Hyde Park.

"Why is that important?" Marnee asked
uneasily.

"
What's happened to Kirsty?"

I didn't tell her what I knew. I didn't tell any of
them about the abandoned car and the bloody underwear. Not even Hedda
Pearson, who had a right to know. I just didn't have it in me to
speak the truth.

After finishing the Chicago calls I ran through my
local connections again. Al Foster at CPD. The Kentucky cops. The
State Patrol.

By eleven-thirty I'd run out of people to call. I
felt like I'd run out of luck too, like poor Kirsty and her brother.
Then Lee Wilson, the manager at Ethan's Ft. Thomas motel, phoned me.
And things began to change.

The Blue Grass Motel and Motor Court was on Hidden
Fork Road, about fifteen miles south of the city off I-471. It was a
well-tended place in spite of its out-of-the-way location. The
stucco-and-glass office building looked newly painted. The dozen
stucco cottages arrayed in a semicircle behind were just as
fresh-faced and neat. A heart-shaped swimming pool sat to the side,
covered with a tarp for the Winter.

I parked in a space by the pool and caught a whiff of
stale chlorine as I walked over to the office building. Wilson was
waiting for me inside—a dapper, balding man in his mid-forties with
the pink, prissy face of a toady.

"You must be Mr. Stoner," Wilson said as I
came up to the counter. "I'm Lee Wilson, the proprietor here."

He held out his hand and I shook with him.

"I woulda called you sooner about this, Mr.
Stoner, if I'd been on duty last night. I left your message with Roy,
my clerk, but he didn't bother telling me until today. That's the
trouble with hired help—you can't trust them to follow up on
things."

Wilson laughed mechanically. And when I didn't laugh
he stopped laughing too, as if he didn't think it was funny either.

"If I hadn't been going through the receipts, I
doubt as I would have seen it. Right there in black and white in the
registration book."

I had the feeling that this one went through the
receipts every hour on the hour. But I pretended it was the blessing
he wanted me to think it was and asked to see the book. Wilson
glanced down at the open register on the counter-top, scanning it
critically as if he were totaling figures. His eyes stopped on a line
midway down the page, and he pinned a linger to it like he was poking
Roy the clerk in the eye.

"Here it is."

He swiveled the book around to me, using his linger
as a fulcrum.

I glanced at the book, at the line above Wilson's
finger.

"Ethan Pearson" was written on it in
longhand, along with a check-in time of four p.m. Monday.

"Why did Ethan bother to sign in?" I asked,
looking up at Wilson. "I mean he lives here, doesn't he?"

"We like to keep track of our guests," the
man said stiffly.

"We always ask our semipermanent residents to
sign in fresh if they been away for more than a day or two. Saves us
some problems and them some potential embarrassment. I mean lights
come on in somebody's cottage when they're supposed to be out of town
. . . well, you can see my point."

I glanced at the polished wood letterboxes behind the
counter. Most of the cubbyholes had room keys dangling from them. But
a few had notes and letters in them.

"Did Ethan pick up any messages when he checked
in?"

"I asked myself the same thing this morning,"
Wilson said with a self-congratulatory smile—the amateur detective.
"But Roy says there weren't no letters. Ethan did get a phone
call, though. And I believe he made one himself."

There was a PBX to the right of the letterboxes, an
old-fashioned switchboard with a dial receiver at the base and a
headset and plug-in lines. Like everything else in the place it was
shiny and neat.

"No way to know who was calling in, is there?"
I asked Wilson.

He shook his head, no. "Roy said it was a woman,
and the call came around eleven-thirty. That's all I can tell you."

"Do you know who Ethan phoned?"

The man smiled triumphantly, as if he'd caught me in
a little trap of his own devising. "Got the number right here,"
he said, pulling a piece of neatly folded paper out of his shirt
pocket. "Don't know who it is, but I got the number."

"When did the call go out?"

The look of triumph faded a bit. "Ain't exactly
sure of that. Sometime before he left, I reckon."

"He left again around midnight?"

Wilson nodded. "Like I told you on the phone.
Right around midnight. 'Least that's what Roy told me."

The man gave me a conspiratorial look. "He had a
woman with him," he whispered. "And it wasn't his wife."

"Did Roy tell you what she looked 1ike?"

"A young girl. Brown hair, glasses. She stayed
in the car, Roy said, when the boy signed in."

It sounded like Kirsten, but it didn't have to be
her. I studied the man for a moment—his prissy face. "Think I
could take a look in their room?"

Wilson pretended to be shocked. Or maybe he wasn't
pretending. He took himself fairly seriously.

"It would save me calling the cops," I
said. "Getting a warrant."

The man's shocked look deepened momentarily.

"I guess I could show you the room."

I took out my wallet, pulled two twenties out, and
laid them on the counter. "For your trouble."

That swayed him. "We'l1 go on down there right
now. Just let me put the ‘Closed' sign in the window."

He picked up the twenties and started to turn away. I
caught him by the shirt sleeve and he burped with fright, as if he
thought I was about to arrest him for taking a bribe.

"The phone number?" I said, rubbing my
fingers together.

Lee Wilson smiled with relief. " 'Course,"
he said, handing me the square of paper. "Don't want to forget
that."

19
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Wilson walked me down to the Pearsons' cottage,
unlocked the door with a passkey, then backed away discreetly, as if
he was leaving me alone with the casket. I pushed the door open and
looked inside.

The motel room was dark, except for the arc of
sunlight coming through the door. The sun lit up a slice of carpet,
the top halves of two unmade beds, and a comer of blank white wall.
What looked like fast-food wrappers were scattered on the sheets of
the nearest bed. A tin ashtray glittered on the pillows of the far
bed. The room stank of cigarette smoke and stale grease—like the
smell of Kirsten Pearson's bedroom in Chicago. I flipped on a table
light and
went inside, closing the door
behind me.

It was a tiny room. Just the two twin beds. A
nightstand between them. The lamp table by the door. A wooden
bureau-desk on the far wall across from the bed. A door to a bathroom
beyond the bureau.

I'd been expecting a few personal items. Photographs.
Mementos. Books. But the only artifact in the room was the cheap oil
painting of a farmhouse that Lee Wilson had hung above the beds. How
Ethan and his wife could have called that spare, denuded place home,
I couldn't imagine.

I went through the room carefully, starting with the
bureau-desk. There was a phone on top and a pad for messages. One of
the sheets from the pad lay crumpled up at the foot of the desk
chair. I picked it up and smoothed it out. Someone had written the
word "Small" on it with a capital S, followed by a slash
mark and the number 5. A phone number was printed underneath:

Small/5
555-1543

I wasn't sure what "Small/ 5" meant. It
could have been a dress or blouse size. If so, maybe the number was
for a clothing store. It wasn't the same phone number that Ethan had
dialed the night before—that was certain. The one that Wilson had
written down for me was 555-8200.

I pocketed the sheet of notepaper with the cryptic
message on it and turned to the bureau drawers. There were still a
few items of clothing in them. Some men's underwear, a couple of
tank-top T-shirts, several loose unmatched socks. A pair of boy's
pajamas for David. One of Hedda Pearson's blouses, neatly pressed and
wrapped in a Brockhaus Dry Cleaner's paper band. I checked the size
of the blouse, but it wasn't a small and it wasn't a 5.

I wondered if Kirsten Pearson wore a size 5.

I went through the nightstand drawer next and found a
Gideon Bible, a passbook from First National here in the city, and a
Greater Cincinnati phone directory with a pencil stuck in the Yellow
Pages. The passbook was in the name of E. Pearson—a savings account
with deposits made to it every three months for over ten years, from
the time Ethan was about fourteen to less than a few weeks before he
disappeared. The deposits were always the same—a thousand
dollars—and the entire amount was always withdrawn a month or so
after it had been put in the account. It was undoubtedly a record of
the "blood money" that Louise had told me about—Phil
Pearson's pathetic attempt to buy his son's affection and to assuage
his own guilt. It was the only item in the room that connected Ethan
with his family, a bankbook that the boy hadn't even thought to take
with him.

I put the book back in the drawer and opened the
phone directory to the page marked by the pencil. It was a page full
of RNs' ads and listings. One of the ads had been circled—The
Medical Pool with an address on Oak Street near the city hospitals in
Clifton. Very near Rollman's, too.

I started to jot The Medical Pool listing down when I
realized that it was the same number that Wilson had given me. The
same number that Ethan had called the night before. 555-8200. For
some reason Ethan had phoned a nursing agency.

I went through the bedclothes and looked under the
beds, but aside from a few wilted french fries I didn't find
anything. The cigarette butts in the ashtray were Winstons, Kirsty's
brand.

The bathroom was next. There was no medicine cabinet,
just a flat mirror over the vanitory, a towel rack across from that,
and a shower stall on the right. Someone had used the shower fairly
recently, because there were fresh waterspots on the tile and long
brown hairs in the drain. The plastic trash can by the vanitory had
several Kleenex in it. I wouldn't have noticed the tissues if a few
of them hadn't been stained with blood. There was also a small smear
of
blood in the porcelain washbasin, as if
Ethan had knicked himself shaving.

I stopped at the motel office on the way out. Wilson
was back at work, going through the books again with a vigilant look
on his face. I pitied poor Roy the night clerk. His mistakes were
Wi1son's meat.

"Thanks," I said to the man, handing him
the passkey.

"
Por nada
,
as our friends south of the border say."

I forced a smile.

"When does your clerk, Roy, come back on?"

"Tomorrow afternoon," Wilson said
despairingly. "I just can't be here all the time."

"Ask him to give me a call, will you? And, of
course, phone me if Ethan comes back."

"Will do," the man said with a grin and a
Boy Scout salute.

He held the salute a
moment too long. When I didn't return it he dropped his hand quickly
and wiped it on his pants leg, as if his fingers were wet with
embarrassment.

* * *

As soon as I got back to the office I took out the
crumpled piece of notepaper and called the number on it, 555-1543. I
was half expecting to get the women's wear department at K mart—some
clerk who could explain the "Sma1l/5" notation. But if it
was a K mart they were damn busy, because no one answered the phone.