Kate Wilhelm - Barbara Holloway 11 Page 3

  Now he’s a political figure with political enemies and a carefully created image to protect.” Getting to her feet, she regarded him for a moment.

  “He won’t listen to me, of course, but someone needs to head him off. They’ll make this his Chappaquiddick moment if he stirs it up. How much do you have invested in him?” she asked as she walked to the door. “I’m going to the theater.”

  At eight-thirty the next morning, Chloe was wakened by the sound of the landscape crew. She pulled a light cover over her face.

  Out front, Petey started the lawn mower while Hal got 30

  to work on the foundation shrubs, and Netta took her tools around the house to the back flower border. There wasn’t a lot to do this time of year, deadhead flowers, get rid of the rare weed that appeared, stir up the mulch a little.

  Netta had worked her way through half of the border when she straightened and glanced at the house. She frowned and took a step or two closer, then dropped her pruner and ran to the deck.

  Robert McCrutchen was sprawled half in and half out of the doorway, his head covered with ants. He lay in a pool of blood, dry and crusted. It was ringed with ants.

  Netta screamed again and again.

  4

  “Sometimes, when I wake up, I’m afraid to move,” Darren said softly that Sunday morning. “I’m afraid to open my eyes. I’m afraid it’s been a dream, you’ll be gone.” He stroked Barbara’s hair gently, then kissed her eyelids.

  “I’ll pinch you every morning,” she said, just as softly.

  “I’ll miss you terribly the coming weeks. I’ll call as often as I can,” he said.

  Barbara could hear pots and pans clanging from the kitchen, and smiled. “I think you’re being signaled.”

  “He used to have a police whistle. I’m glad he lost it.” Reluctantly, Darren got out of bed. It was six-thirty, and Todd was more than ready to leave.

  They had packed the truck the night before, leaving nothing to do that morning except have breakfast and be on their way. Very quickly it seemed, they were all walking out to the truck, which, outfitted as a camper, would be home for Darren and Todd for much of the coming three weeks.

  32

  Barbara refrained from hugging Todd. She was sure fifteen-year-old boys did not want to be hugged. Darren kissed her lightly on the lips, climbed into the truck, and they were gone.

  She watched until the truck was out of sight, went back inside and said to the big tiger-striped cat, “It’s you and me, pal. Get used to it.” Nappy rubbed against her ankles.

  Late Sunday afternoon one week later Barbara found Frank on a chaise on the back porch, with an open book on his lap. He appeared to be dozing.

  Thing One and Thing Two came over to sniff her legs warily, suspicious of the alien cat smell she carried these days. She sat at the table and helped herself to iced tea.

  Without opening his eyes, Frank said, “I’m not asleep.”

  “I thought you were reading something that instantly caused a case of dozing.”

  He heaved himself a little more upright and put the book aside. “Far from it. It’s a book to be taken in small doses. A damn fine book.”

  She craned her neck to see what he had been reading.

  It was The American Myth Stakes.

  “What do you think of it?” she asked, indicating the book.

  “He makes his case,” Frank said. “He’s sharp, and he makes his case point by point. I haven’t finished it yet, and maybe he’ll falter, but I doubt it.”

  “Well, it seems that a lot of people don’t share that opinion. The demonstrations have gone from ugly to uglier,” Barbara said.

  “A lot of people prefer to live in their own dream world,” Frank said drily. “Just the idea of waking up to reality is too frightening to contemplate. And reality is 33

  what they have to face if they read the book with an iota of comprehension.” He swung his legs over the side of the chair and replenished his own glass of tea. “Have you been following the McCrutchen case?”

  “Hard to avoid it,” she said. “Anything else in the news these days? Our own homegrown saint, getting more virtuous day by day from all accounts.” She glanced swiftly at the book, and the author’s name. “Ah,” she said, making the connection. “Etheridge. He seems to be in rather a spot, doesn’t he?”

  “He does. He’s getting the bum’s rush toward an accusation. And apparently for no reason other than what he’s written and said. Ideas. Half the world’s trying to kill the other half over ideas,” Frank said.

  In his voice there was a quiet fury that she seldom heard, and she was surprised at its intensity. “Maybe there’s more evidence than what’s been handed out to the media,” she said.

  “Maybe, but I doubt it. All we keep hearing about is what he’s written, and he’s damned and doubly damned for it each and every time.”

  Lucy McCrutchen felt adrift that afternoon. The shock of Robert’s death had subsided, leaving a residue of de-spondency she could not shake. She felt strangely out of place in the house she had lived in for forty years, until Mac’s sudden death two years before. Now she was a guest in the guest room, trying to make sense of her son’s death, of what she had to do about the house, of how she felt about Chloe… She could not follow any one thought to a conclusion, but veered from one to another, back, in a hopeless loop.

  She was sixty-seven, slightly built, with dark hair shot 34

  through with silver. When it all turned, she would be like a silver fox, Mac had said once. Theirs had been a good marriage, passionate for many years, and later one of comfortable companionship. But he had put in far too many hours in surgery, with patients, at the office. Little golf or vacation time had been allowed for, and it had caught up with him in the form of a fatal heart attack two years earlier. After forty-four years of marriage, it had been hard for Lucy to adjust to a new life, and she had found that she had to get out of this house, away from everything familiar for a time. She had gone to her sister in Palm Springs. Robert and Chloe had given up their town house to live here during her absence, and she had become the outsider.

  She had never breathed a word about the scene she had witnessed on the deck the night of Robert’s party and had managed to put it out of mind, most of the time at any rate.

  But he had brought it back from quiescent memory to active nightmare by having that police file in his possession when he was killed. Why? It seemed that the only explanation for having that file was connected to David’s arrival.

  The night of the party, had David driven that girl home, as he had offered? No one had seemed to know when anyone else left that night. Should she have told what she witnessed? The question had tormented her then, and now it was back.

  The fear for her son had been overwhelming. Had Robert gone to his room, fallen asleep as he claimed?

  Chloe said she followed him to his room and took off his shoes. Lucy had never believed that. Chloe was not one to show that kind of consideration. But why would she have thought it necessary to lie?

  Lucy was haunted by the fear that Robert had gone out 35

  after the girl, and that Chloe knew or suspected as much.

  Now the fear had returned with as much force and dread as before. She had accepted, seized on, she corrected herself, she had seized on the police conclusion that a transient, probably one on drugs, had committed the murder.

  She and Mac had known Robert was promiscuous as a boy, and a womanizer as an adult, but they had never discussed it. She felt certain that Robert had been as great a disappointment to Mac as he had been to her, in spite of his successful career and his likely prospects for even greater achievements. Mac never once said as much, but Robert’s public success faded in light of his private failings, in her eyes. He had become so malleable to managers, advisers, whoever was more powerful than he was, that she doubted he had believed in anything he cham-pioned. Very early she had deliberately turned her back on the positions he took publicly, refused to com
ment, even to talk about him in any but the most general terms, but his marriage had been too close to ignore. The marriage was a charade, a travesty, a marriage in name only, with a wife who seemed content to pretend all was well.

  Lucy did not understand Chloe, and had never been able to develop any affection for her, in spite of all her good intentions. And now Chloe was a widow in Lucy’s house, and she had to decide what to do about that. The loop started its paralyzing round again.

  In spite of everything, she thought wearily, Robert had been the child in her womb, the infant she had adored, the son she had loved beyond all reason. In spite of everything, that was the underlying fact.

  There was a soft tap on her door, and she said, “Come in. I’m not sleeping.”

  Amy entered. “I thought you were resting,” she said, 36

  glancing at the bed, which had not been touched. “You didn’t even lie down, did you?”

  Lucy shook her head. “I can’t seem to rest, or even sit still. It’s all right. It will catch up with me and I’ll sleep a week.”

  “Not here,” Amy said. She walked to the window and stood gazing out. “You should just go back to Aunt May’s place. There’s nothing you have to do here now.”

  “But there’s so much,” Lucy said, thinking of Robert’s clothes, papers, personal things, all to be sorted, stored, given away, something.

  “Nothing you have to do,” Amy repeated. “I’m going to my apartment to get some things, and be I’ll back later tonight. I’ll stay here with Chloe and help take care of things. I can do my work from here as well as anywhere else.”

  “Where is she?” Lucy asked.

  “In her room.” Amy’s voice was without inflection.

  “Will you make your reservation, or should I do it for you? A flight tomorrow?”

  Lucy rubbed her eyes. “God, I don’t know.” Amy turned to face her, a silhouette against the light. “It’s a lot for you to have to cope with,” Lucy said. “It’s asking too much of you.”

  “Mother, no one asked me. It’s okay. I’m fine. And,” she added slowly, “someone has to stay here with Chloe.

  Not you.”

  After a moment Lucy nodded. “I’ll make the reservation.” It would be good to be out of this house, back in Palm Springs with her sister, May, she thought. May had kicked her husband out when he admitted to a long-standing affair with a woman twenty years younger than May, and the two sisters got along well.

  37

  Lucy crossed the room to her daughter and embraced her. Amy was a godsend, she thought, as she often had before. Tall, with broad shoulders for a woman, but slender and muscular, more like her father than like Lucy.

  Her hair was dark and curly, and her eyes so dark blue they sometimes looked black. “Thank God I have you,” Lucy said. All these single women, she thought with a pang. Me, May, now Chloe, Amy. Amy and her live-in boyfriend had separated a year before. All these single women, those philandering men.

  Amy kissed her cheek and drew back. “I’ll tell Travis I’m leaving. There’s plenty of food in the fridge, or you can order something in, whatever. It’s probably going to be pretty late when I get back. Don’t wait up. At least try to get some rest,” she said.

  Amy found her nephew in the family room in front of the television. She doubted that he had been paying attention to it, for the sound was muted and he was staring at the sliding door when she entered. That was the doorway where his father’s body had been discovered.

  She sat down in a chair near him. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Yeah, sure,” Travis said.

  He was wearing jeans and an old T-shirt. His feet were bare, and suddenly he was the kid she had always known, not the strange young man in a uniform who had attended the funeral.

  She told him her plan to go to Portland, collect a few things, make some arrangements there and return later.

  “I’ll stay down here and help Chloe out for the next few weeks,” she said.

  He nodded. “That’s good. I wish I could stay. The army makes decisions for me these days.” He sounded bitter.

  38

  She stared at him, taken aback. “I thought you liked it.”

  “Dad made the arrangements, you know, pulled some strings, whatever it took, and then told me. I wanted to go to medical school, but I was headed for West Point.”

  “Can you get out of it?”

  “Sure. In six more years. I talked to a lawyer, that’s what he told me. They don’t let go once you’ve signed that piece of paper.” He laughed, but it sounded suspiciously like a sob. “I’m government property.” Time was doing a strange dance of speeding up incredibly fast, or stopping altogether, Amy thought, driving to Portland. This was Sunday, and a week ago, on Monday morning David Etheridge had called her and told her that Robert had been shot dead. It seemed like only hours ago, yet a lifetime ago. Simultaneously instant and distant. A disconnect in her brain. She had thrown on clothes, put a few things in a backpack and left within minutes of the call. She had returned to her own apartment for a very brief time only to pick up something suitable for a funeral, a few clothes to get her through the week.

  Thank God she had not seen Robert’s body, she had thought many times that week. By the time she arrived at the house, the police were there and a screen had been put up around the end of the deck. Chloe had been in a state of shock, white-faced, eyes wide with horror, and she kept mumbling about ants. Sitting at the kitchen table with coffee at hand, suddenly she had screamed and jumped up, rubbing her arms, shaking her hair, screaming that ants were all over her. Amy had put her to bed and called her doctor. It was a nightmare scenario, the shocked garden worker shaking on the deck with one of the men holding her hand, Chloe screaming in the kitchen, police everywhere.

  39

  David had called Lucy to tell her, afraid she would hear it on a newscast. He had not called Travis—he hadn’t known there was a Travis—and Amy made the call when she arrived. Henry Elders had been hovering, making coffee, trying to be useful. He went to the airport to pick up Lucy later in the day, and again to pick up Travis. She had felt both grateful for his help, and at the same time a thought had persisted that he was just a nosy, interfering old man with nothing to do except get in the way.

  Resolutely, she focused on what she had to do at her apartment—pick up more clothes, her laptop, the job she was working on. She would clean out the refrigerator, stop the newspaper delivery, put a hold on mail, call a friend or two.

  It was after eleven when she pulled into the driveway in Eugene again. It looked as if every light in the house was on and she didn’t want to talk to anyone, not right now. She had stopped for a coffee, and carried it and her purse inside with her, leaving everything else for later.

  She was very tired, she had realized driving back down on I-5. Emotional fatigue, she thought, dredging up the phrase from a long-ago class in psychology. As enervat-ing as strenuous physical activity. More, she decided.

  She continued through the house to the deck.

  She had intended to sit beyond the house lights, in the chair her mother had used the night of Robert’s graduation party, but she saw light streaming from the apartment and, on the deck there, she could see David seated. Slowly she walked over to join him.

  “I never did thank you for taking charge last week,” she said in a low voice. “I’m grateful you were here and that you knew what to do. Thanks.” 40

  “It’s been a tough week,” he said. “Sit down, Amy.

  How are you holding up?”

  “I’m okay. Mother and Travis will both leave tomorrow, Lawrence will go back to Salem, I hope, and things will quiet down. I’ll hang around for a week or two.” Lawrence Tellman was chief of staff at Robert’s Salem office. He had arrived on Monday evening and he and Nick Aaronson had assumed command of publicity, appointed a spokesman and, as soon as the police gave them the go-ahead, had taken charge of Robert’s study, packing up official papers, doing whatever th
ey needed to do.

  Lawrence had said he would take care of the Salem office and the apartment, and he had assured her that anything of a personal nature would be packed up and shipped to them.

  Amy sipped her coffee. “David, do you know why Robert had that old police file? Jill Storey’s murder?”

  “No,” he said quietly.

  She waited, but he left it at that. Slowly, feeling she was on shaky ground, she said, “You know what they’re saying, that because you turned up now, Robert was reminded about something he had overlooked before, something concerning you, and that he might have wanted the case reopened.”

  It seemed a long time before he responded. “I read the newspapers, too. I know what they’re saying.”

  “Have you considered a lawyer? I think you need someone to intercede before this gets even worse.” David laughed. “What’s your job? What do you do these days?”

  “I work for a company that does computer-assisted architectural plans. I do family houses.”

  “Ah. You draw the lines that connect the joists and such, but sometimes the lines can lead you off the page.

  41

  I had nothing to do with Jill’s death, and nothing to do with Robert’s,” he stated.

  “I hope the police will accept that,” she said in a low voice.

  “We’ll see.”

  “I was talking to Travis earlier, and I realized he’s just about the age you were then—you, Robert, Jill, all of you, twenty-one, twenty-two. You all seemed so grown-up to me, so sophisticated. Now, looking at Travis, I see a kid, uncertain, awkward in ways, groping for something. My point is that you could really be in trouble.

  Robert was about the age that Travis is now, and he could have been as confused as Travis is now. He could have seen or heard something that he misinterpreted. Or something else made him go after that file. Whatever it was, just by bringing it home when you turned up again puts you in danger.”