The Mysteries Page 10

  He stopped and turned, frowning. “I'm not in love with her. I was, but she left me. That was years ago. It's over.”

  “Even if she didn't want to leave you? Even if she was taken against her will?”

  “Stop trying to make this my fault, OK? I didn't let her go. Anything I could have done to get her back, I would have. Six months later, she called Laura, remember, not me. She didn't even mention my name. We're history.”

  “So, you're going to leave her to her fate just because she hurt your feelings?”

  His scowl deepened. “I made time to come and see you. I didn't have to. I've told you everything, for all the thanks I get.”

  “Have you really?”

  “If you've got something you want to say, just say it.”

  We both shifted uneasily on the pavement, bristling at each other like a couple of dogs, each wanting to be at the other's throat, both wary of the consequences.

  “Hugo!”

  The voice, clear as a bell, made him forget about me. I saw a tall young woman charging across the street at us, a wide grin splitting her narrow face. She was a young amazon, nearly as tall as I was, and strong and athletic-looking. She threw her arms around Hugh and gave him a smacking kiss.

  “You told me you'd be locked in the editing room all day. Liar!”

  He wrapped his arms around her, smiling sheepishly. “I shouldn't be here now. I had to meet someone.”

  She looked at me with clear grey eyes shining out beneath arched brows. Although not a great beauty like Peri, she was a very attractive young woman. “Hello, someone.”

  “Ian Kennedy.” I held out my hand. She took it in a firm, tennis player's grip. “Fiona McNeill.”

  “Mr. Kennedy's a private detective,” said Hugh. “Working for Laura Lensky.”

  Something in her eyes shut down. “Looking for Peri?”

  Hugh pulled her firmly away from me. “Come on, walk me back to work.”

  “I've got your number,” I called after him. Childishly, I hoped it sounded like a threat. “I'll have more questions later.” Neither of them turned to look back at me. I watched them go, leaning on each other, clinging together, Peri's discarded lover and her replacement trying to make a life together.

  I wondered if Hugh still dreamed about Peri as I dreamed about Jenny, wondered if he ever passed a single day unhaunted by loss and regret. The passage of time was meant to heal all sorrows, but for some, I thought, centuries would not be enough. It was said that people still felt pain in amputated limbs, that the mind never really adjusted to the loss. It was the same on the rare occasion when another person became part of your life. After she left, you learned to limp along, you made new friends and pretended life was just dandy, but at night you'd wake up in agony, feeling pain in your phantom limb, a pain no one could explain or heal.

  The afternoon had grown steadily more overcast and humid, and the air felt about as wet as it could possibly get without actual rain. I took a deep breath of the city's damp, odorous exhalation, and continued walking down the street until it doglegged into Golden Square.

  Number 23 was part of an eighteenth-century brick terrace, four stories high, that lined one side of the square. It had a large display window to the left of the front door, and it was immediately obvious that the ground-floor property was empty. A sign fastened to the black iron railings in front advertised a business property to let. I went up to the railings and peered over the spikes. The basement windows had security bars across them, and although there were net curtains still hanging inside, they hid nothing, for there was nothing to hide. There was a black metal door without an outside handle, and a very visible alarm box attached to the top lintel. The metal stairs leading down to the basement area were practically as steep as a ladder, clearly not meant for regular use. The gate in the iron railings was locked shut as Hugh had told me. He hadn't mentioned the windows.

  I straightened up and wandered over to the door, which was set in an archway of white stone, with a fanlight above. The one modern touch was a grubby plate with buzzers to operate the entry intercom system. There were seven buttons, but only three occupants listed: a film production company (two floors), a publisher, and something that went by the initials IMP.

  High in the wall to the right of the doorway was an old Greater London Council blue plaque:

  THESE

  TWO HOUSES

  WERE THE

  PORTUGUESE EMBASSY

  1724–1747

  THE

  MARQUESS OF POMBAL

  Portuguese Statesman

  Ambassador

  1739–1744

  lived here

  I wandered back to the front window and gazed inside at the empty space. Then I peered over the railings again at the veiled windows below. I assumed that basement and ground floor were treated as one property. I wondered when the last tenants had moved out and how long they had stayed. Had they felt it haunted? My own reflection in the dusty glass looked as dim and wavering as a ghost, but I couldn't believe there were any ghosts inside. I didn't feel anything weird about the place, no strangeness hanging over it or emanating from it. Not that I'd know—I don't have that sort of sensitivity, much as I'd tried to develop it over the years.

  I got out my notebook and jotted down the name and number of the letting agency. I knew it would be easy to talk my way inside and have a good sniff around the basement; I just didn't know if there was really any point.

  I felt jittery, anxious, and my mouth was dry. With regret, I thought of the beer I'd left behind in the noodle bar. I turned away from Number 23 and crossed over to the tree-lined square. I sat down on a bench and recalled Hugh's description of his mental state after drinking Mider's wine, his comment that everything had seemed intensely significant and meaningful.

  That was how I felt now, and it worried me.

  There's always the temptation, when you've heard only part of a story, to finish it in a way that makes sense to you—even if it's not true. I had to remind myself that I didn't know enough about Hugh and Peri yet to make assumptions. I had to resist that slide into the past.

  I sat down on that bench meaning to think about Hugh and Peri, but very soon I was thinking again about Jenny.

  9. Jenny

  Sometimes people want to disappear.

  Sometimes they just leave, for reasons which you would never understand.

  And sometimes, of course, you have to let them go. It's the stalker, rapist mentality that refuses to accept a lover's decision to end it. That was why I was wary of accepting missing person cases from husbands or wives of the vanished. I preferred reuniting parents with lost children, or vice versa.

  I'd had an English girlfriend once who called me Holden. According to her, I was just like Holden Caulfield:

  “Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean, if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all.”

  I'd told her that was crazy, that being a private investigator specializing in missing persons had nothing in common with being “a catcher in the rye,” and she was just confused by my goddam American accent and all.

  And yet I'd never forgotten her teasing comment; maybe there was something to it.

  It was true that what I liked about my job was when I managed to restore families and bring people who cared about each other together again. I also liked solving mysteries. What I didn't like was finding out that people were dead and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

  Before I became a private investigator I had a job in information systems technology. I went to work in Chicago, straight out of college, which was terrific, but all too soon the comp
any transferred me to Dallas. I hated everything about that place until I met Jenny Macedo.

  I'll never forget the first time I saw her. I was feeling hot, bored, and alienated at a party full of strangers, to which I'd been dragged by somebody I worked with. I went into the kitchen for a beer, and there she was, this tiny little woman in a tight red scoop-necked top, with a mass of shiny black hair curling around her lively face. She seemed child-sized, barely five feet tall, but she had the most fantastic, womanly figure, and a wonderfully dirty laugh. I couldn't stop looking at her; it was like she was in color, and everyone else was just black-and-white. I was smitten from that first moment and, amazingly, she seemed to feel something similar for me.

  I wasn't sure at first: she had a mouth on her, sharp and sarcastic, and she was so scornful of my every opinion that I thought she must despise me. Only the fact that I didn't want to go back into the living room, where some satanic heavy metal band on the stereo made the walls vibrate, kept me standing there trying to impress her, and trying not to stare too obviously down her shirt. Anyway, I soon found I preferred being insulted by her to exchanging banalities with anyone else. Eventually I plucked up the courage to ask her out.

  Within a month of our first date we were living together. I bought her a diamond ring. We became officially engaged. This was it, I thought, the rest of my life, side by side with this woman—and I was happy.

  Jenny wanted a big wedding. She had very definite ideas about what she wanted, and how to ensure that it was affordable (her parents would help out, of course, but she didn't expect them to foot the entire bill), and all of this was going to take some time to plan, so we set a date well into the future. Long before we got there, Jenny's mother became seriously ill. The wedding plans were put on hold, and somehow, after Mrs. Macedo died, Jenny didn't have the heart to go back to them. Perhaps it would be better to have a quiet ceremony, with just family and a few close friends. After all, we'd been living together for more than two years now; what was the big deal about marriage?

  I agreed to whatever she wanted. All she had to do was set the date. But she never did. And, as time went by, we fell into a rut. We got along fine. But romance and passion were things of the past. I began to wonder about missed opportunities, and I fantasized about other women. Not that I actually did anything—I still loved Jenny and didn't want to lose her. But I was restless. My job was both demanding and boring—a deadly combination—and life with Jenny, once an escape, had become just another set of routines.

  Our snug little life was too snug. The two-bedroom apartment that had seemed so spacious when we first moved in was packed to the gills with stuff. Jenny's job, like mine, was with computers, but her private passion was weaving. Her rugs, tapestries, and cushions were everywhere. And from the craft fairs where she displayed her work, she'd brought home things by other artisans: bowls and vases and pots for plants, stained-glass hangings, wind chimes, and hand-turned furniture and ornaments and little boxes until there was hardly room to move.

  One day I said we needed more space.

  Jenny, in her practical way, said we should buy a house.

  Not for the first time, she pointed out what a waste of money it was to rent when we could be buying. I'd resisted the idea before, but now it began to seem inevitable. She had all the arguments on her side, and I'd even admitted I wanted to move.

  “Well, maybe we should get married first,” I said.

  Jenny looked at me. Her brown eyes looked almost black, and she wasn't smiling. “If that's your idea of a proposal, you can stick it up your butt.”

  “Say what? I proposed years ago! You're the one who kept changing her mind.”

  “I didn't change my mind.”

  “I'm glad to hear it.” I took her hand. She let me hold it. I said, “Run away with me. To Vera Cruz. We could get married down there.”

  She didn't smile, exactly, but her mouth and eyes relaxed. “And come back to this, after?” With her free hand, she made a small, circumscribed gesture, careful not to brush a potted plant or knock over a bowl or a vase. “Weren't you saying you wanted more space?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We have to find a house, Ian. After that, we can go to Mexico.”

  “After we buy a house, we won't be able to afford to go anywhere.”

  She took her hand away and tucked her hair behind her ears. “We will so. We can use my rug money for the honeymoon. I've been saving it up.”

  I knew, of course, that Jenny sold her rugs and tapestries at craft fairs. Back at the beginning, which was when I'd last paid attention, she'd barely made enough from them to pay for her materials, but gradually she had gained a reputation as an artist. She'd attracted a following. The rugs and tapestries she wove by then were nearly all commissioned pieces, and I was surprised at how much she was able to charge for them.

  I was surprised, too, when we started discussing finances, by how much she'd managed to save over the years. We both pulled in roughly the same salaries, we each had a car, and we split the rent and utilities right down the middle. I didn't think I had any particularly expensive habits, and yet I had less than six thousand dollars in the bank. She had much more.

  But as soon as we started to look at house prices, Jenny's savings shrank in significance. Even burdened with loan repayments of more than twice what we were currently paying in rent, we couldn't afford to live in any of the areas I'd be willing to consider; instead, we were consigned to the hell of the “starter home” in some soulless little subdivision in the outer circles of suburbia.

  Jenny went through real estate ads in the paper while we lay in bed, and read me the details of whatever she thought sounded like a possibility. I vetoed nearly all of them, sometimes on practical grounds (too far to commute), sometimes political (I refused to live in a place called White Settlement), but most often out of personal prejudice: against Baptists, rednecks, gated communities, or bad design.

  Eventually my invention flagged, and I couldn't think of anything convincing to say against a visit—“Just to look, Ian”—to a model home in a brand-new subdivision called Apache Springs.

  The highway turnoff was identified by a billboard featuring a fantastic vista of misty green hills and tumbling waterfalls proclaiming WELCOME TO APACHE SPRINGS! Needless to say, there were no actual hills or waterfalls anywhere in sight, just empty prairie land in the process of being parceled up and tamed to meet the needs of the overflow from the city.

  Newly laid streets gleamed beneath the searing sun. Half-finished houses reared up out of the raw, churned earth. There were no trees or grass anywhere, although a brilliant green carpet of Astroturf had been carefully laid in front of the two model homes.

  Nothing else was finished, but these buildings demonstrated the two styles of house on offer: the “ranch” and the “villa.” The ranch was one story, the villa had two. Either could have three or four bedrooms, two or three baths. Both were timber-framed and clad in a pale composite stone, and had probably been thrown up in about eight weeks.

  We were met by a woman who introduced herself as Dawney. She was straight out of the TV version of Dallas with her big-shouldered power suit and even bigger hair. She showed a lot of gum when she smiled and she spoke with a slow, Western twang.

  “Notice the cathedral ceiling in the entrance, y'all. Such a lovely feelin' of space! And how about that chandelier? Mind, it don't come with the house—like all the fittin's and furnishin's here it's just to give y'all an ideal of a real home. Everybody always likes to customize their own home, o'course. Y'all can get a chandelier just like this one down at the Home Depot, if y'all like it, though.”

  Ideal. I wanted to grimace sarcastically at Jenny, but she was gazing raptly at the boring light fixture.

  The living room, too, was an ideal. In fact, it was perfection, of a sort. The walls were a pale neutral shade (“Linen” perhaps, or “Biscuit”), and the furniture was restrainedly modern and minimal apart from the one comfy couch overburdened w
ith cushions. Bowls of potpourri released a spicy, almost Christmassy scent into the air, and there was something by Bach tinkling quietly in the background. On the walls hung arty black-and-white photographs of London and Venice. There was no hint here of the dull Texas landscape baking outside. This room, with blinds carefully slanted down to keep out the scorching sun, could have been anywhere in the world. It was all in the best possible taste, and it all spoke to the higher aspirations, not to the lowest common denominator as in too many other sales pitches. You were invited to imagine yourself living in this room, this house, being the sort of person who was artistic and musical and very, very tidy.

  I saw the yearning in Jenny's eyes, and my heart was like a lead weight in my chest.

  “Mmm, very nice, but Apache Springs is really out in the middle of nowhere, isn't it?” I said.

  Dawney never missed a beat. “Not at all, not really, not for long now,” she said, crinkling her eyes and flashing her gums. “This is one of the fastest growin' areas in the whole entire state. It's attracting lots of families, too, lots of young couples just like y'all. Prices are still low, but you want to get in now, while you can, because they are set to ex-plode! And Apache Springs is right at the very epicenter of the boom.

  “Did y'all notice all the buildings going up alongside the highway? A lotta business is coming out here now, taking advantage of the low, low property taxes. There's talk about a new shopping center. We've got good family values, too: There's a Baptist church five miles away, and also a Pentecostal, and one or two others not far away. And a brand-new elementary school is set to open next year, just three miles from here!”

  “Oh, that's wonderful,” I said. “I won't have to go far to get myself educated. Thanks for the advice.”

  Dawney blinked. “I meant if y'all had children . . .”

  “Well, we don't. As a matter of fact, we're not even married. I'm more interested in bars and liquor stores than I am in schools and churches. This isn't a dry county, is it? How far do you have to go to get a drink around here? And you were talking about churches, but you never mentioned the Church of Satan. Isn't there anything around here for devil worshipers?”