The Cavanaugh Quest (21 page)

“Did you beat her?”

“Oh, yes, but she’s improving, she really is.”

“Look, is Ole there? I couldn’t get him at home or the office, so I thought maybe he dropped in on you.”

“No, I haven’t seen him today. I really don’t suppose I will because this is his boating night. He goes out on the St. Croix on his cruiser one night a week, with some of his cronies—tonight’s the night.” She sniffed water in her nose and the towel muffled her voice. “What did you want to see him for?”

“Just some questions about the club, some people he knew in the old days. Loose ends—nothing important.”

“I’ll bet, nothing important …” But she wasn’t sounding unfriendly, just neutral.

“Look, Kim,” I said, trying to ingratiate myself just enough, “maybe I could talk to you. You’re right, it is important. Or it might be. You never can tell, you might remember something Ole said if I hit the right switch.”

“You know,” she said slowly, after a moment’s hesitation, “you sound suspiciously like a man who hasn’t stopped poking around in other people’s lives. Ouch!”

“Ouch what?”

“I don’t know, I lost my rhythm today, started hitting my forehand badly. I picked up a blister, first one since last January—I got into some bad habits then, too. It’s like a golf swing getting out of square, damn it. Anyway, I just peeled it back … Does sucking it help?”

“Beats me,” I said. “Look, it’s not your past I’m poking into, and I’d certainly rather talk to you than Father Boyle and the rest of the Wild Bunch … it’s you or them. Have mercy.”

She laughed, high, clear. “Do you remember, you threatened to ask me for a date the first time we talked. Is that what you’re doing now?”

“Almost.”

“Well, I must be interested,” she said. “I read your book yesterday, the one about the Caldwell murder. It was hard to find, I finally got the paperback at Savran’s on the West Bank. I also picked up six of your father’s Fenton Carey stories at Shinder’s, they must have a dozen different titles. You’re quite a family. It’s scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. C?” She didn’t offer an opinion, holding that back in the reservoir of her remoteness.

“So I get another interview?”

“Sure, if you’ll buy me a lemonade. I’ll meet you in an hour at the Cheshire Cheese, in the Sheraton-Ritz. Bye.”

I caught myself reflecting that I was making headway with her and that snapped me to. What the hell did I mean by headway? What made me think in those terms, that I was trying to get someplace with her? She was a difficult woman with a curiously undefined past, open to misinterpretation, and without known antecedents. It didn’t make any sense. Except that the simple fact of her existence was a gauntlet, a challenge to break through her reserve.

At six o’clock we were sitting on white wrought-iron chairs at white wrought-iron tables on one of the little balconies dangling above the Sheraton-Ritz swimming pool. Sheila was down below with a long-handled squeegee pushing puddles of water toward the drains, then moving the featherweight lounge chairs back against the wall. The sun was angling into Kim’s eyes; her sunglasses were conservative in shape but constructed of hundreds of layers of delicately shaded colored plastic. The shadows of the balcony supports were long, slicing across us like penciled streaks. She sipped her lemonade through a straw, a bright red cherry floating on top of the ice cubes.

“Watching her reminds me of the job I used to have at Norway Creek,” she said. “I can remember evenings just like this, putting a terry-cloth jacket over my swimming suit, cleaning up and rearranging once everybody was gone.” She looked over at me, smiling thinly. I couldn’t see her eyes. “It was such a long time ago, going on twenty years ago. There was a time, wasn’t there, when the very idea of something happening twenty years ago was inconceivable. Now it’s turning out to be pretty conceivable after all. I used to have a kind of net for fishing stuff out of the pool, leaves and tennis balls and sandwiches … Labor Day weekend, that was always the last really busy time of summer, and then it wouldn’t be long until we drained the pool for good. Long time ago.”

“Billy,” I said. “I suppose he’d be mowing the golf course.”

“That’s right. Another life, light-years away.”

“But only a couple of miles from where we’re sitting. Space and time, two entirely different stories. Sometimes I think people never get very far away from where they start after all.” The lemonade was watery, not sweet enough. No taste, from some frozen concentrate; lemonade was like a lot of things they didn’t make the same anymore.

She wasn’t afraid of silences and she didn’t seem to mind my watching her. She was wearing a gray linen dress with a camel-colored sweater around her shoulders. She wore a turquoise necklace and the gold tank watch with the sapphire on the winding stem caught the sunlight. Her arms and legs were tan and bare.

“The past really does interest you,” I said.

“It’s always changing,” she said. “You’re right, it intrigues me. History of any kind.”

“But you won’t discuss your own history.”

“Not interesting at all.” She pursued her lips as if to elaborate, then didn’t, and sucked on her straw. She sat there, relaxed, but composed, drew her sweater about her as the sun ducked lower. Sheila lowered the umbrellas on the tables, scraped chairs along the cement. “What is it you wanted to talk to Ole about?”

“The man I mentioned before, Carver Maxvill. Did I mention him to you?”

“I don’t recall.”

“Well, has Ole ever said anything about him? Try to remember, Carver Maxvill …”

“I don’t have to try. He’s the man who disappeared a long time ago.” I nodded. “I’ve heard Ole mention him, not recently, but in a conversation. We talk a great deal and I suppose the disappearance of a man you know is the kind of thing you might bring up in one context or another. I can’t remember when, it was casual, you know … just a reference.”

“Did he ever suggest why? Or give a character description, maybe about drinking or chasing women? Anything that comes back to you …”

“No, I’m sure not.” She took off the sunglasses and focused her searching eyes on me. Her headband, holding every dark hair right where it was supposed to be, matched her turquoise necklace. She folded her long arms beneath her small breasts, which rose so slightly beneath the pale linen. “Look, Mr. Cavanaugh”—and she made a point of the formality—“what is it you’re after now? Whenever I begin to trust you, think you’re a nice, slightly nosy fellow, you start coming on again with all this picking around in the refuse.” There was so little overt charm in her; in that respect she defied femininity, the wiles and stratagems. It appealed to me but, as a product of my own times, I was pitched off balance by it. Which, when you thought about it, wouldn’t have been such a bad stratagem.

“I’m leveling with you,” I said. “I’m not digging around in your life, I’ve told you I’m not.” I didn’t know if that was true but I pretended. “But I am still kicking around in the ashes of the old hunting and fishing club. I am, I am, I am … I admit it. But I don’t know why it should bother you … Kim.” That last was a sort of tentative afterthought I immediately regretted; her sympathy was not to be won quite so easily and I knew it.

“But why, why, why?” she mimicked, without a smile.

“Because it’s a mystery.” I waited. “Because Tim Dierker is dead and Carver Maxvill’s name scares hell out of everybody and scrapbooks and newspaper files are being swiped. I’ve waited for a pattern to form, the indication of another presence, a person on the other side … I’ve waited, I’ve talked the ears off people and I’ve listened hour after hour, I’ve tried to tie things together, get a feel for what’s going on beneath the surface. Today, this afternoon, down in a room like Jack Benny’s vault, I got convinced—”

“And how did that come about?” She liked substantive talk, not shy smiles. I got a glimpse of white teeth.

“Somebody has gone to the trouble of stealing a file from the newspaper morgue. First time in twenty years or so, according to the keeper of the files, that one has left the room at all, let alone been stolen. It fits into a pattern, it makes an assortment of facts and suppositions take a shape, because it was the file of clippings about Carver Maxvill. Why and who … it’s a mystery, kid, and the sap is rising.”

A laugh bubbled out and she winked. I swear she did. “Oh, he is, is he?” She touched my hand for an instant and quickly leaned back. “This fascination with mysteries, it runs in your family, I assume?”

“My father’s the expert. I’m a critic who happened to write a book about a murder.” It was perceptibly cooler; gooseflesh prickled on her long dark arms.

“But Fenton Carey is a newspaperman. Perhaps he’s your ideal—are you trying to live up to your father’s expectations?”

“No, I’m more in the tradition of Steve Wilson of the Illustrated Press.”

“Never heard of him.”

We drove the few blocks to the riverbank and ate dinner at the Fuji-Ya, where you sit on the floor and hope your socks don’t have holes in them. We watched nighttime come to the river, hiding the junk piles and warehouses and drunks across the little dam and rapids. The food was fine, shreds of this and that steamed before your wondering eyes and shrimps that seemed mysteriously to have exploded. You weren’t hungry an hour later either; you were hungry the moment you finished eating. But there was the plum wine, a good deal of it. We drank glass after glass, eyes meeting fretfully, talking in spurts separated by lengthy, calm silences.

“You said you didn’t want to disappear,” I said. “How’s it coming?”

“Very well, thank you. Each day I’m more aware of my own existence.”

“History. You’re going to teach?”

“Law school,” she said. “That’s the scheme at present. I’ve got the right kind of mind for it, organized, analytical, daring when I think I can pull it off. Courtroom work, at least the idea of it appeals to me.”

“To have gone so far, that appeals to you, too. I’m beginning to know you. You’re proving all sorts of things. You’re way beyond validating your own experience.” I sighed into my plum wine and she held up her empty glass.

“I never, ever do things like this,” she said. “You may not believe that, but it’s true. I can’t remember ever, in my entire life, going out to eat and drink with a stranger, on the spur of the moment. I’m a planner, a plotter, and besides that I’ve had almost no opportunities.” Our wine was replenished. “It is fun, I really can’t deny it. It’s not me, but then behavior can change, even if your nature can’t.” She smiled openly for the first time, her nose crinkling and her large eyes squeezing together. She put her hand over her mouth, somewhat surprised at herself. I hoped she wasn’t going to frighten herself and come to earth.

“How did you come to Norway Creek?” I said.

“I’ve told you, I don’t like to talk about my past …”

“Where are you from?”

“A little town up north—now that’s it, no more, or you’re going to become Mr. Cavanaugh again.” She stared off through the glass wall into the night and I leaned back against the bamboo or whatever it was. Lights flickered on the far shore, past the black river. But she went on. “I’m a different person from the one I was born.” She hiccuped quietly. “I don’t want to sound like a fanatic, but I look on myself as reborn, dating from the moment I realized that I had better be the most important person in my own life, not in someone else’s life … I’ve truly changed the course of my life, more than most people, I’ve decided to get somewhere. I care what I think about me. I know what I was and what I am, I know what people have said about me … and I have made myself not care what they say.” She took a long swallow of plum wine and I blinked. The wine was getting to my eyes and the base of my well-worn skull. I was hot; but I knew I should be paying attention to the recitation. “You’ve already talked to Darwin McGill and Anne, they must have given you a clue or two to some of the stages I’ve gone through, surely Darwin had a story to tell …”

“Yes,” I mumbled, “he told me about one incident …”

“He ripped my blouse and brassiere off,” she whispered, her eyes flat, the sparkle suddenly extinguished. “He stood there looking at my breasts, grunting like a pig, and it shocked him when I wouldn’t be frightened by him, or ashamed, or try to cover my breasts. He grabbed me and I felt his erection against me and I just chilled him … I was the sort of girl then, or in the position then, that men thought they could have, handle, use … I had to work hard, I had no money, no status, I was nobody … but that’s only the way it seemed to people like Darwin McGill. And he discovered he was badly mistaken. Did he tell you that?”

“Indeed he did. You taught him a lesson, no doubt of that. He tells me he’s dying, by the way.”

“I’m desolated,” she said tonelessly, her glass newly full.

“Are your parents still living?”

“Absolutely none of your business. And I’m going to feel terrible in the morning.”

We went outside and walked slowly toward the river. The cool breeze took the punch out of the night, the change that had been building. I put my arm around her shoulder.

“And Anne told you I’m frigid, didn’t she?”

“She said she thought you might be. Or that you think you are.”

She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”

“We’re kindred spirits,” I said lightly.

“What do you mean?”

I turned her around and we walked beneath the dimly glowing windows of the restaurant where the kimonos passed quietly.

“That’s why you’re willing to talk to me. You sense that we’re alike. Somewhere, like an electronic probe plunged into our brains, we’ve been wounded. I know where it happened to me, when, how, and why. About you, that’s something else again …”

“Oh,” she said as we were getting into the Porsche. She was wrapped up in her own life; she didn’t care about mine and I didn’t blame her for that. She was, or seemed to be, utterly egocentric, private. Her control; it wasn’t necessarily a sham, but it was a calculation, a conscious effort. Envying it, I admired her. We drove in silence back to Riverfront Towers. I pulled into the curving drive. The doorman waited inside, secure.

“Are you up to giving me a tennis lesson?” I asked. “Season’s almost over. There’s not much time left I’m going away for a holiday …”