Second Chance (27 page)

"A woman come by the office, 'bout ten o'clock
Monday night. She was wearing a nurse's outfit."

"Wilson didn't mention that."

"I didn't tell him is why. Don't tell him
everything that goes on 'round here. No reason to."

"What did this woman look like?"

"Didn't see her face. She had on dark glasses
and a scarf 'round her head. But she was a good-size woman with blond
hair."

It sounded like Rita Scarne.

"What did she want?"
"She
left a package for the kid. Just an envelope with some papers or
something in it. I rung his room and he come picked it up a few
minutes later, after the nurse done left."

"What was she driving, this nurse?"

"An old-make Pontiac. Real beat up."

"You're sure of that?" I said, thinking of
Rita's Audi.

"Hel1, yes I'm sure. Saw her again last night.
'Bout three a.m."

I didn't say anything for a second. "You saw
this same car last night? Wednesday morning?"

"Same car, same woman," he said. "That
boy must have given her his key, 'cause she went in his room and come
out and drove off. Out the back way, 'round past the pool."

"Did you see her face this time?"

"Nope. Is the boy sick or something? Got him the
flu, maybe? Man could catch his death in this kind of cold."

I didn't say it out loud,
but that was what Ethan had caught all right, and Kirsty too.

* * *

It took me thirty minutes to drive to The Bluegrass
Motel. Stenger was waiting at the desk in the office. Tall and lean,
with lax black hair combed straight down across his forehead and a
scraggly moustache like a pencil scribble above his sullen mouth. He
wore an open-collared white shirt with a plastic name tag pinned to
the pocket. Elroy. It cost me forty dollars to get Wilson to give me
the passkey to Ethan's bungalow. Stenger came a good deal cheaper.
Ten bucks and he slid the key across the counter with his forefinger.

"Figured you'd be interested in that nurse,"
he said, congratulating himself on his big score.

"You figured right. This package of papers the
woman dropped off? on Monday—you didn't happen to look inside, I
did you?"

" 'Course not," Stenger said, feigning
outrage. "I don't pry into nobody else's business and I expect
no man to pry into mine. She left that package for the Pearson boy
and said to tell him it was from Rita. And that's exactly what I
done."

"You didn't happen to catch the license number
of Rita's car, did you?"

"Nope."

"Not this morning, either?"

Stenger drew back as if I was asking for the world.

"You're damn lucky I saw her at all—way she
come sneaking 'round the back entrance that early in the morning."

"You're sure it was three?"

"Sure I'm sure. Love Boat just come on
Nineteen." He nodded behind him at the grey, fulgent eye of a
portable TV, sitting on the manager's desk. "Saw her reflection
in the tube. That white uniform?"

"
She the only one who paid Ethan's room a visit
this week?"

"
Just her and you, far as I know."

"No cops?" I said skeptically.

Elroy Stenger drew back a step farther. "What'd
cops want 'round here?"

From the way he said it, I figured he was in a better
position to know than I was. Talking about cops killed off the little
hospitality the ten dollars had bought me. Pocketing the bill Elroy
turned his back on me and flipped on the TV.

"Just drop that key on the counter when you're
through," he called out as I left.

I walked down the tar driveway that led from the
office to the cottages. The drive ran past the heart-shaped swimming
pool and behind the cottages to the highway. There were no overhead
lights along the way, so it was just good luck—or Elroy Stenger's
persistent nosiness—that had led him to discover his early morning
visitor.

Whoever she was, she
wasn't Rita Scarne, who had been sitting dead in her car at three
a.m.

* * *

There was no police seal posted on Ethan Pearson's
motel room door—Stenger had been right about that. For Parker,
Foster, and the Ohio State Patrol the case had apparently ended at
first light with the discovery of Rita's body. No one had even
bothered to make a routine check of Ethan's room. I fit the key in
the lock and pushed the door open.

At first glance the place looked the same as it had
on Tuesday afternoon. The fast-food wrappers on the bed. The tin
ashtray on the pillow. The phonebook sitting where I'd left it on the
dresser. Hell, there wasn't that much that could have changed. And
yet Carla Chaney, or someone else, had taken a huge risk to revisit
that room. I wanted to know why.

I went through the place again. The bed, the bath,
the nightstand, the bureau. And that's when I found it. Ethan's
bankbook, the one listing his father's regular thousand-dollar
deposits to the savings account at First National, was missing from
the bureau drawer. As far as I could tell it was the only thing
missing.

I sat down on the comer of the bed and stared
stupidly at the bureau. There was no sense to it—to someone risking
her life to steal a dead boy's bankbook. There had been no money in
the savings account—I'd checked. The last thousand-dollar deposit
had been removed two weeks before Ethan disappeared—the money had
always been removed several weeks after it was deposited.

I reached over, picked up the phone, and dialed the
desk. Elroy answered.

"You gotta pay for any calls you make," he
said immediately, as if he could see the money coming out of his
ten-dollar bonus.

"I'l1 pay," I said. I took my notebook out
of my jacket and flipped through it imtil I found the number for The
University Inn in Evanston.

"Long distance gonna cost you extra," Elroy
said after I gave him the number.

"Just dial the fucking thing."

I got The University Inn's version of Elroy Stenger
after a couple of rings. He put me though to Hedda Pearson. I hadn't
been sure that the woman was still at the motel. But she was there
all right, still holding vigil in that little room, still waiting, as
she told me she would wait, for Ethan to return home.

"Is there news?" she asked nervously. "Have
they found him?"

"Not yet."

Hedda Pearson laughed a terrible laugh. "They
think he's dead, don't they? And for what? For some neurotic, oedipal
fantasy."

"Ethan's story about his mother may not have
been as fantastic as we thought."

Hedda Pearson sucked in her breath as if I'd slapped
her.

"Is that what you called for? To tell me that I
don't know my husband? That I couldn't tell truth from fantasy?"

"
I called because I need to know about Ethan's
savings account at First National—the one his dad deposited money
to every three months."

The woman laughed wretchedly. "Are you insane?
First you say this absurd story of Ethan's is true. Then you ask me
about imaginary bankbooks."

I stared down at the bureau, at the empty drawer.

"You're telling me that you don't know anything
about a savings account or a passbook?"

"Yes. That's what I'm telling you. There was no
savings account. No money from Ethan's father. He wouldn't have
accepted money from his father if it had been offered. Don't you know
that?"

I told the woman I would call her when I had word
about her husband. But from the sound of her voice when she hung up,
I knew that she would just as soon never hear from me again—or
anyone else who took Ethan's fantasies seriously. She'd been more
upset by the possibility that she'd been wrong about them than by the
possibility that he was dead. But then his obsession had given form
to her life for the past four years—it had shaped her relationship
to Ethan. Without it she lost her identity as his victim.

After hanging up on Hedda Pearson I phoned Al Foster
at the CPD and asked him to do me another favor.

"I need a check run on a savings account at
First National Bank, under the name of E. Pearson. I'd like to know
who actually owns the account, who deposits to it, and who
withdraws from it."

After that morning's scene with Parker I'd expected
him to say no—especia1ly to the bank inquiry, which would require a
court order. But he didn't.

"I'll see what I can do."

"Why so cooperative?" I asked curiously.

"Let's just say that things aren't working out
exactly as expected at this end."

"You want to explain that?"

"When the time is right," Al said.

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After Al hung up I sat in the motel room for a little
while longer, thinking about the missing bankbook that hadn't
belonged to Ethan Pearson. Someone must have given it to him on
Monday night—probably the nurse who had come to the motel. The
nurse who wasn't Rita Scarne. Presumably the same woman had returned
on Wednesday morning, after the boy and his sister were dead, to take
the book back. Roy Stenger claimed the nurse had her own key to the
motel room, but I didn't know whether to believe him or not. He was
pretty damn corruptible when it came to passkeys—that was how I'd
gotten in. The only other way  Carla—or whoever the nurse
was—could have gotten a key was to take it off Ethan Pearson's dead
body in Talmadge's apartment. Or off Ta1madge's body on Tuesday
morning. Whether Carla had done all that or not, it figured that the
account book had something to do with Stelle Pearson's death. Finding
and punishing their mother's murderer was all that Ethan and Kirsty
had been interested in.

I picked up the phone again and told Roy to dial
Dayton information. Rita Scarne's sister, Charlotte, had mentioned
bankbooks with money in them—part of the grim inheritance that Rita
had left her on Wednesday morning. I wanted to know whether they
connected to Ethan's missing account book.

I got Charlotte's number from information and had Roy
dial it.

"This  is Stoner, Charlotte."

"Yes," she said stiilly. "I recognize
your voice."

"I need to talk to you about Rita."

It took her a while to speak. Given my part in the
tragedy of her sister's death, I understood why. "What about
Rita?"

"You mentioned some bankbooks that she gave you.
I'd like to have a look at them."

Charlotte Scarne took a deep breath and let it out
slowly.

"I think maybe you should," she said,
sounding relieved.

"Why do you say that?"

"There was an article in the Daily News
today—about Rita and those children you were looking for. The
Pearson children. It said they were presumed dead and that Rita might
have played a part in their murders."

"No one's completely sure."

"It's horribe," the woman said, shaken. "So
horrible."

At first I thought she meant the accusation itself,
but she didn't. "Mr. Stoner, I think Rita did kill them."

"Why?"

"The bankbooks. The
ones that you're talking about. Some of them have Ethan and Kirsten
Pearson's names on them."

* * *

I didn't put it together until I got inside the
woman's house, past the frozen ice on her stairs—ice that still
bore my footprints and Rita's—past the frozen, accusatory stare on
Charlotte Scarne's face when she answered the door. The black bag was
already sitting on the dusty table in the center of the dusty sitting
room. I went straight over to it while Charlotte hovered nervously in
the hall. There were four bankbooks inside the bag, two in Ethan's
name, one in Kirsty's, one in Rita's. I looked at the ones with
Ethan's and Kirsty's names on them first—passbooks for three
savings accounts at three different Cincinnati S & L's. City
Bank, Constellation, and First National. The one from First National
bothered me—it looked like the same book I'd found in Ethan's motel
room.

"When did Rita give you this book?" I said
to Charlotte.

"Last night. You were here, don't you remember?"

I let that pass and took a look inside the other two
books. Like the one I'd found in Ethan's drawer they'd been deposited
to at three-month intervals for almost a decade—thousand-dollar
deposits, circulated among the three accounts so that one of them
always had money in it every month of the year. The cash was
regularly withdrawn a week or two after the deposits were made. I
only had to glance at the single passbook with Rita's name on it to
see where that money had gone. The books balanced perfectly. Every
pemiy from the three Ethan and Kirsten Pearson accounts had ended up
in Rita's name. One  hundred and twenty thousand dollars, paid
out over ten years in one thousand dollar monthly increments.

It helped explain Rita's fancy house and car. It
helped explain a lot of things.