“What about insurance?” Joe demanded. He was a little too flabby, too paunchy, and there were dark hollows under his eyes.
“I’d like to see your wife,” Charlie said pleasantly. He glanced about the room, spartan in furnishings, very clean. Very dull. The walls were painted light green, a tan rug was in front
of a tan sofa, a television and VCR in the middle
of the room, two wooden chairs with cushion seats, a coffee table with nothing on it. A Venetian blind covered a picture window that was almost the full width of the room.
“She’s taking a nap,” Joe Eglin said. “What’s this all about?”
“I represent the insurance company trying to make sense out of the affair at the Dworkin school,” Charlie said easily, as if not very interested in any of this. “We’re reviewing claims associated with the Dworkin sisters and their school. We want to get the matter behind us, and you and your wife’s names came up. You know, it all sounds insane to me, but I wasn’t here. There’s a memo with your names, but we can’t find a claim. Did you file one?”
Joe Eglin moistened his lips. He nodded toward a chair. “You want a beer, or something?”
“No, thanks.”
“We haven’t filed yet. I’ve been waiting to see if she snaps out of it.”
Charlie shook his head. “Mr. Eglin, I want to level with you. I heard in town yesterday that your wife is dead, that there isn’t any Mrs. Eglin. No one’s seen her in four years. You don’t let anyone in here. You see where that leaves me? I mean, if I go away and next week you show up at the office with a woman, what
does that prove? Did your wife ever have finger
prints made? Of course not. Why would she? I really do want to see her today, Mr. Eglin.”
Joe Eglin’s fists balled and he took a step toward Charlie, then another. “Get out!”
“Sure,” Charlie said. “But, Mr. Eglin, consider. I have the company backing me. If I say in my report that I agree that there is no Mrs.
Eglin, where will that leave you if ever you want
to collect her life insurance, for example? Five thousand, isn’t that it? Not a fortune, but on the other hand, if she does die, you’ll need it for the funeral and all.” He went to the door and stood with his hand on the knob. “I wonder what it would take to get J.C. Crandle out here poking around. Is there a death certificate anywhere on file?”
“Wait a minute,” Joe Eglin said. He was
sweating heavily. “Give me a minute. You know
about her?”
“I heard something.”
“Yeah, I bet. Wait a minute, for Chrissake!” He rubbed his hand over his face. “Okay, she’s not right in the head. The doctor would have put her in a hospital and I wouldn’t let him. I can take care of her. But now… . It’s been four years and she doesn’t get any better. Did you come out here to offer a settlement? Is that it? How much?”
“I want to see her,” Charlie said.
“A lawyer. I need a lawyer. A settlement, that’s it, isn’t it? I can sue the pants off you and your fucking company!”
Charlie shrugged and turned the knob. “I’ll go have a chat with Crandle, let him get a warrant or whatever it takes.”
“Wait a minute!” Joe Eglin yelled. “You can see her! She’s sleeping. I have to get her up and dressed. Five minutes! Wait five minutes, damn you!”
Charlie waited thirty seconds, then followed him through the living room down a short hall and paused outside a door. He could hear Joe Eglin muttering on the other side. Silently he turned the doorknob and opened the door.
A naked woman was standing in a bedroom, her face toward the door where Charlie stood. Joe was trying to get a robe on her. She was totally without expression, neither resisting her husband nor helping, just standing like a flexible doll. Her hair was unkempt. There was a dark bruise on one side of her face, red marks on her breasts. She was pregnant, six months at least. Her stare was vacant, her face empty. Except for her swollen belly she was desperately thin.
Charlie turned and walked away, no longer trying to be silent. Behind him he heard a hoarse oath, and then choking sobs. He left the house, drove carefully through the chickens and ducks that roamed onto and off the road, to the gate in the high fence, and let himself out.
“Christ!” J.C. Crandle muttered, regarding Charlie with hatred. “Let it rest, why don’t you?”
“That girl belongs in a hospital where they can help her, if there’s any help for someone like that. She doesn’t need what she’s got.”
“Okay. Okay. When does it stop? When the hell does it all stop?”
Charlie shrugged. They were in Crandle’s office. Maria’s medical report was on the desk, the police report beside it. Joe and Maria had gone to the school to deliver two turkeys the day the eleven year old girl had dived off the cliff. Maria had waited in the car while Joe made the delivery. When he returned, she was holding her head, moaning. At his touch, she started to scream. Dr. Crandle had given her a shot to put her to sleep. He had reassured Joe; she was tense, hysterical, she needed to rest and she’d be fine. When she woke up, she started to scream again. Another shot, and by then the trouble had begun at the school. Maria screamed for three days, when she wasn’t heavily sedated. Then she woke up and did not scream. An appointment had been made for the following week; Joe did not keep it. No one at the office had seen Maria again.
Charlie got up and rubbed his eyes. He simply wanted to collect Constance and drive away from here, away from the spiraling madness that seemed without end.
Constance looked alarmed when she saw him. “What happened?” she asked, and took his hand.
“Bad day. Tell you later. What did you come up with?”
“Not enough,” she said regretfully. “Look, I told Byron we’d meet him for a drink, but not dinner. Okay with you?”
He kissed her. “My psychic wife.”
“And if you’d rather not even have a drink with him, I sort of covered that in advance, too. I said I’d check and either we’d meet him in the bar at six thirty, or he should not count on seeing us.”
Charlie laughed. “What the hell. Let’s go have that drink and then duck out for dinner. I’m curious about Wonder Boy and his methods that exclude the really interesting cases.”
She looked as though she wanted to comment, then held back. “Okay.” She started to go into the bathroom, and at the door she paused and said, “But I have to agree with Byron. I just don’t see how any of that mess at the school has anything to do with the fire at the hotel weeks later. It just doesn’t make any sense.”
That was the problem, he thought grumpily. It made no sense. And yet, he also thought, there was a link. They just hadn’t been able to find it. There had to be a link. Someone had taken those bodies to the hotel; they didn’t just get up and walk there by themselves. And they had to be the music teacher and the groundskeeper, who was also missing. Old man Barlow thought so, and so did he. There had to be a link. And most important, why had poor Mrs. Eglin screamed? And screamed and screamed.
Chapter 7
The most interesting
thing that came out of
the social hour with Byron Weston, Constance de
cided, was his apology to Charlie. That had been completely unexpected. They had been chatting, the three of them, in the polite way people do when they are mildly antagonistic without obvious cause. Byron had been talking about his training efforts, what his team looked for, how they handled people who wanted to be left alone.
“You have to assume that the ones who need help most are often the last ones to look for it,” he said, making rings on the tabletop with his dripping glass. “I thought you were needling me about my two worst failures here,” he said, glancing from Charlie back to the intricate patterns he was making. “I’m sorry. I was snappish.”
Charlie was surprised and wary. “J.C. Crandle and Maria Eglin?”
Byron nodded. “He’s a murderous impulse looking for a place to happen. He gave me the bum’s rush when I approached him. And I truly didn’t know about Maria Eglin for almost a year. I never even saw her, just her husband.” He grimaced and stopped playing with his glass. “I should have known about her. There were hints. He was said to be brutal; she’s young, a newcomer to this area, friendless. But in spite of all that, I dismissed her. She just didn’t fit the pattern. She didn’t know anyone at the school, no friends, no children, no reason to feel guilt over not doing anything. My God, they live miles out in the country. I made a decision that her mental collapse was independent of the other events, a coincidence. Maybe I was wrong. I just don’t know. But we have to make those decisions all the time. You draw the boundaries and work within them, or nothing can get done.”
“She’d be the first case, in my boundaries,” Charlie said.
“But how? She never even got out of the car. He made the delivery, left her in the parked car, and came back in five minutes at the most.” Byron shook his head.
“I didn’t say I like having her inside instead of outside the boundaries,” Charlie protested. “If it’s your job to turn over rocks, you probably will find a hell of a lot of things you’d rather not, but you keep turning those rocks.”
“But it’s not your job anymore. Why are you still turning those rocks?”
“Because I’m the best there is,” Charlie said, perhaps too bluntly. “And I learned a long time ago to let the facts determine the outline, not the other way around.”
Byron glanced at his watch, finished his drink, and stood up. “I have to go,” he said. “I wish I didn’t. I assume Constance pumped me and the others today at your request. I hope you find whatever it is you’re looking for, Charlie. I really do.”
“He’s all right,” Charlie said after he and Constance were alone again.
“Of course,” she said in the tone that meant I told you so.
He laughed. “I know this little dive down the road a piece. Best steamer clams on the coast, good dark beer. How about it, kid?”
While they worked their way through two buckets of clams, she filled him in on the details she had gleaned from Byron and his group. None of the people they were treating connected the fire with the other troubles, or the hotel with the school. “Of course,” she admitted, wiping her hands finally, “that isn’t as meaningful as it might seem. Patients often follow where the therapist takes them, and if the therapist didn’t make such a connection, that path was probably closed. It’s all unconscious, on both sides.”
He grunted, looked in the bucket, picked up another clam, then put it back with a sigh. “It would sink me,” he said. Over coffee he told her about Maria Eglin.
Furiously she cried, “What’s the answer? People knew she needed help! They had to know it. They just butted out!”
“There isn’t any,” he said. “Answer. No complaints, no problems.”
When he paid the bill, the waitress in the red pants said, “Hear about J.C.? He went out to Joe Eglin’s place with his deputy and beat the daylights out of Joe. Put him in the hospital, so they say.”
Charlie thanked her, complimented the food, and wondered: Would that be enough to placate J.C.’s murderous impulse? He doubted it. He took Constance back to the motel. The next day they drove down the coast, stopping here and there, wandering in the rain through the redwoods, beachcombing in drizzle, sunning themselves in Malibu. One week later at breakfast she said, “Let’s go home.” He was as ready as she.
Constance pushed newspapers to one side of the kitchen table. She propped up her chin in one hand, tapped the fingers of the other on the tabletop, staring off through the glass back door past Charlie, who sat opposite her. They had been home for two weeks.
“No good,” she said with finality. “Not a mention of the hotels that burned until after the fact. But, my heavens, one cryptic, non-informative story after another about strange happenings—suicides, murders, disappearances, madness, accidents… . I keep wondering what the reality of those situations really was.” She held up a few of the papers. “In Orick,” she said, “the papers were full of the stories of the mad sisters, the insanity at the school, but not a word about Maria Eglin. The doctor’s suicide is given a paragraph of non-news reportage; the woman who drove off the cliff is labeled a one car accident victim; the guy who walked out to sea is called the victim of a freak wave. That’s in a place where we know pretty much what was going on. Without more information than in the articles, anyone would take them all at face value. Why not? And there’s nothing really strange there, if you take them at face value.” Charlie started to speak and she held up her hand. “I know. I know. Thoreson’s afraid of a leak if we start asking too many questions. I’ve been thinking about it, and it might get out if you nose around, but I can do it. There are state statistics, state agencies that keep track of insanity, admissions to hospitals, private doctors’ new patients. I’m going to make some phone calls.”
“I think we’re putting together a pretty comprehensive list of mayhem and altogether weird happenings,” he said, leaning back in his own chair across the table from her. But that was part of the problem; they had not been searching for mayhem and weird happenings. They had been looking for something to link the fires. The papers had been arriving for the past ten days; motel records had started a bit later, enough to keep them busy for the next month. But he felt her dissatisfaction. Too long. Too chancy. And worst of all, no paper had printed a line about the hotels until after the fires, but every community had had more than its share of madness and violence. That bothered him most of all.
“Two things are wrong with this method,” she said. “First, we don’t have a control group. We’d need sister towns, at the very least. Maybe things like these happen all the time everywhere.
Boys Hole Up in School and Set Off Explosives
. Boys have done things like that in a lot of places, when they saw a chance of getting
away with it. And this one:
Farmer Kills Neigh
bor’s Cattle
. How many other farmers have killed their neighbor’s cattle? We don’t know.”
“And this one,” he said dryly. “
Mother
Throws Three Children out of Seventh floor Win
dow, Leaps after Them.
”
“Even that sort of thing happens. Anyway, we
need controls. And the other reason is that too many things just won’t make it to the newspapers. If the mayor’s wife turns into a kleptomaniac, that won’t get in the papers. They pay off the bills and quietly take her away for a rest. Or if Mrs. Croesus develops a phobia about dirt and germs and won’t eat, you’ll never see that in the news. A nice vacation in a beautiful hotel like setting, that’s how they’ll take care of that. If a highly regarded man becomes a flasher overnight, or turns his house into a bordello, or does anything short of murder, chances are you’ll never know about it. Accidents, disappearances, actual murders, they get reported, not the lesser things. And sometimes the people responsible for the lesser things are just as deranged, just as desperately in need of help, just as likely to commit mayhem eventually if they don’t get help.”
He shrugged. “You win. What bothers me is that there’s no one pattern. People are going nuts in a hundred different ways. Nothing you can pin down, nothing to connect any of that with the hotels.”
“No problem about the madness,” she said, dismissing it. “That’s how insanity works. There are some physical conditions that result in certain syndromes, but functional disorders take too many different forms to look for any one pattern. What I see a lot of in these stories is what my colleagues tend to call paranoid schizophrenia. That’s to make sure they cover all bases.”
“And you wouldn’t call it that?”
“The term is too loose to mean much. Schizophrenia means cut off from reality, and paranoia, you know, feelings of persecution, deeply held feelings, but still… . See what I mean? Descriptive, but then what? Not very long ago the good family doctor would say something like, oh yes, you have the grippe, and he would describe the symptoms, what to expect in the days to follow, and everyone was reassured somehow. Descriptive. Now we say things like schizophrenia and use drugs, shock treatments where they’re still allowed, and everyone’s reassured somehow. It’s mostly descriptive, and the treatments are elephant gun mentality at work. Not many people get cured, although some get better. And no one can say for certain what the cause is. We have ruled out some things—demons, possession by spirits, original sin, an evil nature of the victim. We suspect diet, vitamin deficiencies, hormonal imbalances, a genetic accident. Too many things are suspect. And none of them would fit this pattern, if there is a pattern. Why acute onsets in places so widely separated? It just doesn’t make any sense. I’m going to make some phone calls.”
Even if there was no pattern in the nut cases, Charlie brooded after she left, there was in the arson fires. One person had started them all; even a rookie could have spotted that much if his attention had been directed to it. Upstairs room, gasoline, forced entrance, between one and three in the morning. One firebug, busy as a little bee.
When Constance returned to the kitchen an hour and a half later, she found Charlie on his hands and knees backing Brutus up into the corner under an antique maple hutch. Charlie was muttering: “John Daniels, Carl Larson, John Lucas, Carlton Johns, John Carolton—” He looked up at her and scowled. “That damn cat snitched my cheese for the last time. I’m going to catch him and rub his nose in the plate and then heave him into the next county. Brutus, you’ve had it.”
The gray cat Ashcan had come in to watch; he approached Charlie, sniffing at his hands, and started to lick one. “Out, damn it! This is our final showdown, you asshole!”
Ashcan rolled over and rubbed his cheek against Charlie’s arm. Brutus gave a leap, cleared both Charlie’s outstretched hands and Ashcan, and sauntered into the living room, flicking his tail disdainfully. Charlie sighed and began to haul himself up from the floor. He scowled harder at Constance, who had started to laugh; she quickly stifled it and turned her back. Her shoulders continued to shake.
“Well?” he snarled, taking the empty plate to the counter.
“I have spies at work. It’ll be a couple of days.
Who are the men on your roll call?”
“One man,” he said. “Bet you five it’s one man.”
She shook her head. “Betting is against my moral principles. Besides, I always lose. Tell me.”
“He’s on the motel lists. Always checks in a day or two before the fire, always gone the day after. Drove a 79 black Malibu until last year, when he had an ‘84, black again. Always has the right state plates on the car, but that’s easy enough to arrange. Pays cash for a room. Lists his business as real estate appraiser. People go nuts; he shows up and burns down a hotel. People stop going nuts. Enough?”
She nodded, then asked, “What’s a Malibu?”
“Never mind. Just take my word for it—there’s a zillion of them out there on the roads. Who’s cooking tonight?” His expression had gone innocent suddenly.
“You are. Charlie, assuming you’re right, how would he know where to go? That is, if the madness and arson are connected. Not from the newspapers. We can’t do it.”
“I was wondering that same thing,” he said with a touch of smugness. “You have sources, state shrinks, and so on, but you know who else has sources, just as good, or better even? Insurance claims people. Who goes into a hospital without insurance these days? No one, let me tell you. So who pays? You and I every other policy holder on earth. And who keeps the records? Health insurance companies. Sore Thumb thought he had a leak, and so do I. Someone has access to that information, you better believe.”
“It would be in their computers,” she said, looking past him, thinking.
“Yep. If you know how to go about it, if you have your own little handy dandy computer at home, if you have a modem, you too can scan the lists, arranged in any order you call up, by area, dollar amounts, diseases, accidents, or illnesses, whatever you want.”
He went to the pantry and opened the freezer. “You remember those steaks we had over on the coast? Cajun style? Blackened steaks, they called them. Dijon mustard, garlic, and lots of cayenne, wouldn’t you say? Anything else?” He came back with a butcher’s package. She was walking out of the kitchen. “Hey, where are you going?”
“I’m going to close doors so smoke won’t fill the house, and I’ll bring the fan from the attic. Open the exhaust before you start this time, will you?”
While the steaks were thawing, he called Phil, who was back from Bermuda. He told Phil he wanted the computer printouts of claims and listened patiently to the many reasons why that was impossible, and then he said he also wanted the list Phil had mentioned of other hotels at risk. He moved the telephone away from his ear and winked at Constance.
When Phil subsided, Charlie said kindly, “And you just take it easy, old buddy, and get well.”
“Charlie, about those claims, you know it’s probably illegal to give that out. Unethical, for sure; illegal, probably. Sore Thumb will have a coronary. And speaking of Sore Thumb, he’s driving me batty. Did you tell him to do something highly immoral and possibly illegal to himself?”