No Time to Wave Goodbye (17 page)

Pat nearly laughed and said, “Are you kidding or serious?”

“I’m serious,” Emily said. “I never knew people measured coffee.”

Pat smiled, the crooked, boyish look awakening a face that seemed to have aged twenty years in just days. Looking at his father, Vincent was reminded of Walter Hutcheson’s frosty-gray ponytail. How could Vincent have suspected Walter, the simple, good-hearted old hippie? Bryant Whittier must dye his hair, Vincent thought then. He was between the ages of Vincent’s parents. He had to have some gray, not a full head of chestnut cut like old pictures of Ronald Reagan.

That didn’t mean he was a psycho, though.

“It’s a teaspoon of grounds for every cup,” Pat told Emily. “And you have to make sure the water’s ice cold and if you really want it good, you rinse out some eggshells and put them in with the grounds.”

“Why?” Emily asked.

“I have no idea,” his father admitted. “My ma said to.”

“Here. Here it is!” Emily said suddenly. “Now we know for sure. No part of that phrase or those words was in the first or final cut.”

“Emily, let’s get married,” Vincent said.

“Okay. Let’s see how this works out first.” She stood up and kissed Vincent on the cheek.

“Emily, when I call his wife, Claire, can we tape it somehow?” Vincent
asked. “Will you stay, like a witness? You don’t have to be back in Vancouver till like … tonight?”

“Tomorrow is good.”

“I’ll get you the best hotel room in town.”

“It’s okay. I can just stay here if you have a sleeping bag or a futon. Your dad can teach me to make coffee.”

Vincent said, quietly, “Okay.”

“The recording. Like a wiretap?”

“Sure.”

“You don’t have equipment. All you can do is put a regular microphone with a cup on the receiver. I think it’s illegal.”

“Not if you have the consent of one of the parties in the conversation,” said Rob.

“How do you know that?” Vincent asked.

“Former life,” Rob said, rummaging for one of his dozen tiny digital recorders. “Here. Just press the button when she picks up. Use my phone. All it says is Robert Brent.”

“I can’t call her right now,” Vincent said. “The sun is barely up.”

“Aw, go ahead,” Rob told him.

The rain dripping from the evergreens outside the house was the consistency of a child’s slush drink. Claire Whittier wondered if she’d be warm enough. She wore trousers with a pair of tights under them and her travel raincoat and Jackie’s black ballet flats, with her walking shoes in her small satchel. Because Bryant was so thrifty and the cost of flying out of Los Angeles was less than from San Francisco—at least for this trip—Claire would take a car service all the way from Durand to L.A., saving, from what Bryant had said, the cost of two more nights in Tuscany. It would also save him the trouble of coming back from his meeting to their home. Bryant said he would not live in California if there were no San Francisco and would not live near San Francisco if there were not a civilized small town such as Durand; he loathed the southern part of the state. Still, it was a long drive for Claire, even
though she wouldn’t be at the wheel. She had two novels in her carryall. She might sleep. Claire had not slept well lately. Not even her customary pills had helped.

When the phone rang, Claire jumped, startled.

It was her neighbor, Laura Pool, who would be caring for the dog, Macduff, and bringing in the mail while they were in Italy. Claire had been unable to tell her friend Laura exactly how long they would be away; Bryant hadn’t been specific. But he was rarely able to be absent from the office for more than two weeks. Claire had asked Gary, their longtime caretaker, to drive up to the summerhouse. If the weather turned nice in the coming weeks, as it surely must, Gary would air it out and check for any winter damage or bats in the eaves. Bryant would be eager to go up there when they arrived home, perhaps at Blaine’s spring break.

“Claire, did you turn on the television this morning?” Laura said.
“The New York Times
has a story about this kidnapper’s letter. It’s online.”

Claire asked, “The kidnapper? Of the Cappadora baby?”

“Yes,” Laura told her. “It might be real or it might not. I know how you are with computers. I’ll just print it out and pop over.”

Shivering, Claire decided to drape a black shawl she had left up in her bedroom over her trench coat. Running back down, she opened the door for her neighbor, noticing, as she did, a postcard that had fallen through the mail chute with a few business envelopes and catalogs.

“Brrr,” said Laura. “I moved to California for the sunshine. This is not what I was promised.”

“Don’t be a simp,” Claire told her. “By now, most years, it’s beautiful. This is the longest winter I can remember.”

“Anyhow, here’s the story.” Laura stood beside Claire as Claire read the article and the text of the letter. “I think the person sounds intelligent. But so did the Unabomber,” said Laura.

“I think it’s interesting that he says, or she says, that the baby will be returned safe. And that what the person wants is to make a point.”

“In a pretty roundabout way,” Laura said.

Not for a lawyer, Claire thought.

At that moment, a cold drop landed in the dark cradle of her stomach. “Thank you, Laura, for everything,” said Claire.

The women hugged. Then Laura stroked Claire’s hair. “This must make you think of … Jackie. All the police questioning and the false leads. People are writing in online that they think this is a confessor, too. Probably works at the library. But I do hope what he says is all real.”

After Laura left, Claire looked at the postcard. It pictured the underwater state park in La Jolla. But it had been mailed three days earlier, from Chicago.

What a fool he thought she was, so unobservant as to miss a postmark. She got out her mobile phone to call him, knowing that in ordinary times, he’d be up, doing a brief workout with his workout cords. But his voice mail picked up.

Claire left the phone anchoring the slip of paper from Laura’s printer on the front hall table and walked down the hall to Bryant’s office.

She had gone into Bryant’s office before, of course, but not often.

It had been one of Mother Whittier’s admonitions—which, according to Bryant’s sister-in-law Jeannie, amounted to a manual of operating instructions—that the two best things a woman could do to preserve a long marriage to a Whittier man were never to work outside the home and always to honor the man’s private space.

Claire braced herself hand to hand in the doorway, scanning Bryant’s rows of glass-fronted barrister’s bookcases, his costly but austere displays of photos of Jacqueline and Blaine and of the four of them together—up at their summerhouse in the San Juan Diego mountains.

There were others of Bryant and Jackie alone, skiing up at the few acres of vacant land that were once owned by Bryant’s lumber-baron grandfather, where Claire had never gone, where he and his brothers went to hunt.

There was a photo of them here, at home in Durand, outside the front door, under the very eaves that were dripping now, next to the lilacs, on the day of Blaine’s high-school graduation. All of them were arranged in neat and matching silver frames.

Bryant’s personal files were in a walnut cabinet. His desktop computer was turned off; his tray of fountain pens and sharpened pencils was set perpendicular to the hinges. An enormous weight seemed to force Claire back, toward the safety of the rest of her calm and familiar house, to her neatly packed suitcase in the foyer and her umbrella at the ready. Back where things were manageable and familiar. Her breath came in gasps and she thought she might become light-headed if she did not sit down.

But she went on. She went inside.

Slowly, she drew open the center drawer of Bryant’s massive kidney-shaped desk, which had been his father’s. The key to the filing cabinet was labeled, one of several keys hanging from small tassels on a flat holder built into the drawer’s commodious interior. With freezing hands, she picked up the key and opened the filing cabinet and then, quickly, before she could change her mind, she extracted the file of American Express statements for the past six months and other files—two labeled
KIDNAPPINGS.
These were both stuffed with clippings from newspapers and computer printouts describing cases that dated back two or more years. All of the cases had ended badly, Claire noticed, as she skimmed. Some were horrifying. She gathered them up and placed them one on top of the other in stacks.

She looked back at anything that might interest her and found another curious file. It was labeled
MALAYSIA, WORKING AND LIVING.
Still another had a tab that read
MALAYSIA, RETIREMENT.

Claire smoothed the credit-card statements out on the desk in front of her.

There was a payment in early February to something called Small Shelters, a substantial charge, $9,600. Bryant had made many purchases from a website called ChildFair, which were enumerated on the bill from last month and the previous month as Supplies, Equipment,
and Notions. He had purchased a true off-track vehicle, a big one, made by Land Rover, a car that cost $85,000. On Bryant’s desk, in a sturdier cardboard, was an amended copy of their will, leaving the houses and their contents to Blaine and/or her descendants. Claire’s stomach churned audibly, the slice of toast and cup of tea she’d consumed two hours earlier suddenly threatening the base of her throat. The document before her on the desk transferred both the houses and their contents to Blaine immediately if Bryant or Claire should relocate outside the United States or otherwise be incapacitated by illness, institutionalization, or any circumstance that would prevent their administration of their home and finances. A sum of money had been transferred to an account in Blaine’s name to complete her college and set her up for the first year afterward. The balance was in trust.

The vacant mountain acreage, higher up and deeper into the San Juan Diego range than their second home, would be donated to the Nature Conservancy. Some years earlier, Bryant had bought his brothers’ share of the inherited and undeveloped land.

Bryant had forged Claire’s spidery signature.

On everything.

From the second long drawer, to her left as she sat in Bryant’s chair, Claire pulled out the big leather-bound checkbook. There were many checks made out to cash over the past month, in sums that Claire believed were unlike Bryant’s usual prudence—$35,000, $25,000, $14,000—and the notations in the margins were “services rendered” and nothing more.

She stood to reach for a leather binder embossed with the initials JBW. In it was a single sheet of paper. It read,
Jacqueline, my bird, my angel, Jacqueline, my hope, my heart, my prism, my mirror. I avenge you with my every breath.

Claire’s cell phone rang and again she jumped. Suddenly, it seemed that she was part of an alien landscape, a child in a haunted house.

The ID said Rob Brent. She didn’t know a Rob Brent.

Claire said, “Hello?”

“Claire, it’s Vincent.”

“Vincent.”

“I hoped I could talk to Bryant.”

“He’s … not here, Vincent. He’s at a business meeting in Los Angeles.”

“Claire …”

“I was to meet him at the airport.”

“Which airport?” Vincent asked.

“LAX.”

“Are you going on a trip?”

“Vincent, I assume this is about the letter to
The New York Times.
I’m sure that’s good news. I know it is. I hope it is.”

“Claire,” Vincent asked gently, “where are you and Bryant going?”

“It’s our twenty-fifth-anniversary trip. To Italy. We went there on our honeymoon. I’m not sure what to do now. I haven’t left home.” Claire’s voice trembled; her stomach was now rampaging, like an empty cage with a wild bird released into it blinded—whirling and crashing against the sides. “Vincent. I’ve found some … things.”

“What things?”

“I don’t think I should really talk about this without Bryant.”

“Claire, I need to talk to you in person.”

Claire said, “Yes. But Vincent, you must know, Stella is really fine. She is fine. I am sure of it.”

“Did he tell you?”

“No,” Claire said. “I’m afraid I can’t speak anymore now, Vincent.” Claire put down the phone and when it began to ring again, she turned off the ringer and absently opened her novel. The words might as well have been the katakana that Blaine studied in her Japanese class. Claire’s eyes blurred with tears she wiped at with the heels of her hands.
My bird, my angel, my prism….
Claire phoned the car service and canceled. She turned back on the heat that she had lowered because they would be gone and wrapped herself in a thicker shawl that was tucked on her closet shelf.

She thought of the gladsome childhood she had known and how, sadly, there was no love lost between her husband and her father, who
considered Bryant pretentious. Bryant no longer permitted Claire to invite the Putnams to her home. She had believed that, after Jacqueline was lost, there would be a thaw born of a family’s mourning. It had not yet happened. But Claire cherished her single trip each year to Chicago. She played game after game of cutthroat bridge with her quiet brother, who taught creative writing at the University of Illinois. Each time she witnessed how erudite and jovial, active and companionable, her parents still were in their eighties, she thought of how she and Bryant might have been … if life had taken a different turning.

Now forty-four years old, Claire had never had a major illness, not even a twinge of arthritis.

She had years of hours and days and months that would gradually accrete … become years, and decades. What was to become of her now? She went into the kitchen and turned on the electric kettle.

Claire heard a soft knock at the door. Passing to the front door, she glanced out the window and was not surprised to see Sarah Switch, the young woman who was the sheriff of Cisco County.

“Come in,” Claire said, putting out her hand. “Hello. I think we’ve met.”

“Yes. At the library ball. I’m afraid I wasn’t the belle of the ball, but I tried. I’ll bet you know why I’m here,” said Sheriff Switch.