Blunt Darts (3 page)

I looked at myself in the rear-view mirror. Meade would happen to Bonham someday, at which point I’d probably no longer be allowed to use its firing range.

Valerie signaled a turn onto a private, gravel road, then pulled past it to a stop. She stuck her head out the window and swiveled a hopeful face back toward me. I waved her on. Ms. Jacobs frowned and crunched some gravel on the shoulder as she accelerated out. I checked my watch. It was a shade after four, so I made the turn and weaved slowly upward through the trees.

As I approached the Kinnington house, it appeared more modest than I’d expected. White colonial, with thin black shutters framing the smallish downstairs windows. No modern glass walls punched through here.

I swung around a wide circular drive with a small, nonspitting fountain in the center, pulling past the fountain so that the Merc was headed out again. By the time I closed the car door, the main entrance to the house was open and a middle-aged black woman stood at the threshold, frowning at me.

“Hello,” I said, “I’m—”

“I don’t want to know your name. I don’t even know you’re here. Mrs. Kinnington is upstairs. Follow me.”

Maybe, I thought, it’s my breath.

The central staircase was beautifully maintained, with a polished, curving mahogany handrail atop off-white pickets. The steps were also mahogany under a narrow, Oriental runner. I glanced left and right as we climbed. On one side I could see a living room with a large portrait of a young army officer over the mantel. On the other side was the corner of a dining room. Polished hardwood floors and no wall-to-wall, only old, tasteful Orientals. A natural product of old, tasteful money.

At the top of the staircase was an invalid lift, a chair that would slide mechanically up and down on a floor-and-wall track. Through clever coloring, the track itself was almost invisible.

We turned right, then left. There appeared to be a similar wing on the other side of the building. I realized that the house was a good deal bigger than it appeared from the driveway.

We entered a robin’s-egg-blue bedroom that must have measured thirty-by-thirty feet. Sitting on a love seat, with a beautiful silver service on a low table in front of her, was a double for the late actress Gladys Cooper. A double except for the eyes, which were flinty-hard and so dark that there was no way to tell where the pupil stopped and the iris began. On one side of Eleanor Kinnington rested a pair of metal braces; on the other was a Princess phone the color of the walls.

“Good afternoon, sir,” she said. “Thank you, Mrs. Page. That will be all.”

I half-turned, and the woman shot me a look that indicated she was sorry her name had ever been mentioned in my presence. She closed the door behind her.

“No need to worry about Mrs. Page,” Mrs. Kinnington said in a tone she probably believed to be pleasant. “She and I have an understanding. Please, sit down.”

The least delicate-looking chair in the room had apparently been moved from a now-bare corner to a conversational distance from her. I took it.

“Will you have some tea?”

I declined.

Mrs. Kinnington settled back with hers. “You look younger than I expected,” she said from behind her teacup.

“It’s the booze,” I replied. “Acts as a preservative.”

She sniffed a smile at me. “So, early-middle-aged and impudent. Well, that’s probably just the combination I require. Has Miss Jacobs fully informed you of what has happened?”

“Miss Jacobs has told me everything she believes is important.”

A better smile this time, and the teacup was replaced on its saucer. “Then why don’t we begin discussing what I feel is important?”

“Fine. Just so it doesn’t interrupt our train of thought later, my fee is two-hundred-and-fifty dollars per day, plus expenses.”

“I trust then that you intend working on no other cases save this one?”

“By some frantic telephoning, I was able to clear my calendar.”

Exit her smile. “Continue.”

“Second, the chances of one investigator finding one boy two weeks after he’s vanished, even assuming he hasn’t been kidnapped, are very, very slim.”

“He hasn’t been kidnapped.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“There has been no ransom note, and Stephen packed before he left.”

“Both good reasons, Mrs. Kinnington, but I’m afraid the lack of a ransom note would be consistent with packing if someone were trying to give the impression that the boy had skipped on his own.”

She broke eye contact and retrieved her teacup. “Could we please refer to my grandson as ‘Stephen’ rather than … ‘the boy’?” she said softly.

“Of course.” A sincere emotion? Yes, all the more because while the voice changed, the face, more easily controlled, did not.

“I’m certain Stephen packed himself, because items are missing that another person, even his father, would never have thought to take.”

I let her reference to the judge pass for the moment. “Examples?”

“Before we go any further, I really must give you some insight about Stephen. He is an exceptionally gifted child. He was reading at age three. I had feared so that his mother’s behavior and the shock of her death would crush his talents. But if anything, his unfortunate home life seems to have spurred him onward. His teachers and I, recognizing his abilities, have given him more and more advanced materials to study and absorb. Given a few months of intensive study, I daresay he would be a better lawyer than—but, I digress. The point I wish to make is that Stephen has the emotional and intellectual courage to strike out on his own. He would know exactly and concisely what he would need, and that is what he packed.”

“Toward … ?”

“Until my stroke, three years ago, I was an active camper. The judge despises the outdoors and would feign illness when he was younger to avoid accompanying my late husband and me.

“Stephen, however, seemed born with a love for the outdoors. He would walk the property here, approximately seventy-five acres, endlessly, as one season changed into another, observing the wildlife and plants. After my stroke, he would come in each day and describe to me what he’d seen and heard and touched. Stephen became terribly interested in the wilderness, and with my help, he and I selected numerous books and items from L. L. Bean, Abercrombie, and other catalogs to prepare a wilderness-survival kit for him.”

“And that’s what he took with him?”

“Yes and no, Mr. Cuddy, which is my point. What is missing is not his whole kit, nor a random sampling of all the items he had. What he took were only the lightest components and the barest necessities. My memory is still perfectly sharp, and I’m sure only his hand or mine could have selected so carefully the items that are missing.”

“Could you make a list of those, along with the clothes Stephen was wearing and the clothes that are missing?”

Mrs. Kinnington reached her hand down between the cushion and the couch and handed me a small envelope. “It’s all in there.”

“Do you have a recent picture of him?”

“The best one is also in the envelope. I would appreciate your making copies and returning the candid to me as soon as possible.”

“I’ll do that.” I opened the envelope and scanned the list. It was written on rose-colored stationery with her name embossed on the top. The handwriting, now shaky, once must have won penmanship awards.

Then I studied the photograph. It showed a black-haired boy, whittling but looking up at the lens. The body was right, but the face was somber, joyless, and somehow not … young.

“How long ago was this taken?”

“About six weeks. Stephen disappeared on Tuesday, June twelfth. The photograph was taken by his father, which explains Stephen’s expression.”

I slipped the photo back into her envelope. “Mrs. Kinnington, you don’t speak as lovingly of your son as you do of your grandson. Was the judge the reason Stephen ran away?”

“I don’t believe that is necessary for your task. Regardless of what my grandson’s reasons were for leaving, I am convinced Stephen’s father had nothing directly to do with his departure. Accordingly, I don’t wish you to speak with the judge nor even allow him to become aware that you are pursuing the case on my behalf.”

I cleared my throat. “Mrs. Kinnington, that’s probably not possible. I’ll have to ask some questions in this town about Stephen, and that fact is bound to get back to the judge. Aside from you and him, I can’t think of anyone who would hire me to look for Stephen. Your son’s bound to add it up.”

She fixed me firmly. “Nevertheless, I do not wish you to do anything that would specifically lead him to that conclusion.”

“Mrs. Kinnington, I will do what I believe is best for finding Stephen. If that isn’t acceptable to you, I’ll walk right now. No charge.”

She blinked and sighed. “Please do your best, then, to honor my wishes.” Barely a murmur.

“I will.”

I mentally reviewed the topics I had wanted to cover with her. Two remained.

“I have only a few more questions for now, Mrs. Kinnington. One is about Stephen’s ‘hospital’ time after his mother died.”

The eyes sharpened again with her voice. “That was years ago. What could it possibly have to do with his disappearance now?”

“Frankly, I don’t know. But it seems to me something must have happened to cause Stephen to take off. Perhaps that something isn’t a new occurrence but rather a recurrence from those days.”

She sighed again.

“What kind of … hospital, Mrs. Kinnington?”

The period appeared to be as difficult for her to discuss as it must have been for Stephen to experience. “I had very little to do with that. I was out of the country when Stephen’s mother died, and the judge’s actions were
fait accompli
by the time I got back.” She adopted the hard tone again. “I distrust psychiatrists and other so-called ‘mental health’ professionals. I believe that love, not analysis, is what Stephen needed. In any case, however, the name of the sanatorium was Willow Wood.”

So, “Willard” committed his son alliteratively to “Willow Wood.”

Mrs. Kinnington continued. “It’s in the Berkshires near Tanglewood. I don’t recall the town, but I doubt it would do you any good to visit the institution itself. I’m sure the judge would have sealed things up tightly to avoid any adverse publicity.”

I thought it over. She was probably right about the sanatorium being a dead-end.

Then I recalled something a doctor once told me when I was visiting Beth in her hospital. “I’ve heard a psychiatric institution usually does follow-up treatment on a released patient. Since Willow Wood must be a hundred miles from here, do you recall any local psychiatrist seeing Stephen after he was sent home?”

“Yes. …” Mrs. Kinnington regarded her teacup for a moment. “Yes, I do. He was in Brookline. A Jewish surname—Stern? No. No, it was Stein. Dr. David Stein.”

I nodded. “Could you call him and authorize Dr. Stein to speak with me about Stephen?”

“Mr. Cuddy, I want one point to be absolutely clear,” she said, again hardening her voice. “I will not have those days reopened. The judge and I would agree on that, though he for selfish reasons of publicity and I from concern about Stephen. Is that understood?”

“Mrs. Kinnington, if your concern for Stephen is so strong, I would think you’d want me to reopen anything I had to in order to bring him home safely.”

She locked eyes for another moment, then relented once more. “This is all so … difficult to deal with. We had all thought him to be … Very well. I do appreciate your point. I will call this Dr. Stein.”

“By ‘this Dr. Stein,’ do I take it you never met him?”

“That’s correct. I’ve a vague recollection of speaking to him once, on the telephone.”

“In that case,” I said, “could you give me a brief letter of introduction, preferably on some of your letterhead stationery?”

“Certainly,” she swiveled and scooped up her walking braces in her right hand.

I extended mine. “Do you need some help?” I asked.

Mrs. Kinnington shook her head as she maneuvered the braces to the sides of her chair. “Never ask someone in a wheelchair, which I was, or on braces if they ‘need some help.’ Psychologically, we can’t answer ‘yes’ to that question.”

“Well, then, can I give you a hand?”

She rewarded me with her faint smile. “Better. But no, thank you.” She levered herself up to a standing position. “I prefer to have tea at a tea table and to write letters at a desk. This way, please.”

Mrs. Kinnington’s legs moved stiffly in lockstep with the thrust of her shoulders and braces. She stopped at a Governor Winthrop model, which looked to my untutored eye to be made of curly maple and therefore probably even more antique than the rest of the place. She lowered the drawbridge writing surface, revealing a stand with fountain pen. Mrs. Kinnington eased into the chair, leaning her braces against the wall, out of the way but within reach.

“Now,” she said, tugging open a shallow drawer and removing another sheet of the rose-colored stationery, “what shall I write?”

I slowly dictated a form of authorization and release, which I had seen often enough at Empire to know by heart. It authorized Dr. Stein to reveal Stephen’s confidences and to allow me to review medical and hospital records, releasing him from liability if he did so. Mrs. Kinnington signed it and handed it to me.

“Is there anything else?” she said.

“If you would also call Dr. Stein to let him know I’m coming?”

“Certainly.”

I put the letter and the envelope in my breast pocket. “One last thing, Mrs. Kinnington. Given your knowledge of what Stephen knows about the wilderness, do you have any ideas about where he might go?”

She looked up and smiled wanly. “We maintained a veritable atlas of topographical maps of the Eastern seaboard in his room, to plan or simply fantasize about future trips. They are all still there, which probably means he found a way to copy one before he left.” An eyebrow shrug. “My grandson could be anywhere.”

I nodded. “I can reach you by telephone here?”

“During the day, yes. If you need me at night, please contact Miss Jacobs and have her call me. I will then call you when everyone else is asleep.”