The Cavanaugh Quest (41 page)

I
STOPPED AT A DRUGSTORE
on the corner and went to the telephone booth back behind the flea-and-tick spray. The book hung by a chain and appeared to have been chewed on by something with very big teeth. But there was a P. Wilson with the same address as the one in the hospital’s records. It had been a long time at the same address. I went back out on the corner and wiped my face as best I could but the sweat got under the bandage and felt as if fire ants were building a nest. A black kid was leaning against a fire hydrant with a portable radio blaring soul at his ear; he watched me from milky caramel-tinted eyes. I walked over to him.

“Hey, how’s it goin’, man?” he said, rocking his head to the music. “Whatcha lookin’ for, man?”

I gave him the address and he said it was only five minutes from where we stood. He gave me explicit directions and I thanked him; he gave me the peace sign and smiled and I wondered why he was so friendly. Friendly people always surprise me. I passed a filling station and popped for a Coke, drank it in the shade watching cars lined up at the gas pumps, a sign of the rotten times. Nixon was a crook, gas was seventy-five cents a gallon, and Ford was a lackey. There were rats crawling around beneath Minnesota’s answer to the nastiness of urban sprawl. Bodies were piling up back home and Kim Roderick had quite a surprise in store for her. It had been a long day and the sun was burning a hole in my back as I set off again. The day wasn’t done yet.

The row houses must have dated from the turn of the century and leafy old trees threw the street into deep, moist shadows. A tiny green patch of grass lay between a wrought-iron fence and the brick housefront. A Boston fern sat alone and regal in the window, lace curtains at the side. I pushed the doorbell. I saw a movement behind the leaded glass and an elderly woman in a voluminous housecoat opened the door.

“Mrs. Wilson?” I said. She nodded, head forward, leaning on a white cane. She wore tinted glasses, heavy costume rings on gnarled, crooked fingers. I told her I’d come from Minneapolis to ask her about her sister, Rita. She nodded again and beckoned me into the dark hallway, on into an old-fashioned parlor. She didn’t seem surprised. She sat down in a Leatherette recliner and motioned me to a straight chair.

“I knew you were coming,” she said, her voice high and almost musical, like a child’s. “I’ve been expecting you.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why? How could you?”

“Oh I’ve always known you’d turn up,” she said, leaning back, her face tilted slightly upward. She was blind or nearly so and she had no fear of a stranger. “Something about Rita. I’ve always known I hadn’t heard the end of Rita. It’s just like Donald, my husband, Donald Wilson—I’ve always known that someday, out of the blue, I’d hear about Donald … he was a sailor, a navy man, he went off almost forty years ago and never came back. The Depression got to him, the responsibility of a wife, and he just shipped out one day. I’ve lived alone ever since. Waiting, you might say. And then little Rita, she’s my younger sister, you see, she went off, too. I never knew how they did it, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure it out—I’d have just gone off myself, too, but I never got the hang of it, how you do it. Seems funny now but there was a time when it wasn’t funny at all …” She smiled tentatively, squeezing the handle of her cane. “So what have you got to tell me about little Rita, Mr. Cavanaugh?”

“When did you last see her, Mrs. Wilson?”

“That last time she came to Chicago, of course …” She paused, head cocked to one side, listening for the echoes of her past. “The year before the war, 1940 that would be … when Shirley was born. I never saw her again.” She gave me a vague, good-natured smile, long removed from the battle. “I’ve been alone ever since. My eyesight began to go about ten years ago … thank heavens, Rita had sent me some money and I’ve been able to make ends meet. It was such a shock, Rita going away and leaving me with no relations at all … but she’d taken good care of me. Tell me, Mr. Cavanaugh, has she sent you to me? Is Rita all right? I’ve always thought she was out there somewhere … very bad, a very pitiful woman …” She turned to me again, expectantly, the smile timid, like an animal in a shrub.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Rita hasn’t sent me. I’m very sorry. That’s not why I’ve come.”

“I guess I didn’t
really
think you had,” she said, the grin fixed. “I was just … hoping. Just had a feeling.” She hooked the handle of the cane over the arm of the chair, folded her hands in her lap, the fingers stroking the bright knobby rings. The light outside was dimming as the sun dropped and the large trees cut out the rays. An air conditioner hummed in the next room. The room was neat, uncluttered, dusted. Her chin sank toward her chest. Hers was the smile of the just.

I was exhausted and felt myself sinking back against the hard wooden chair. I wiped sweat off my forehead. A car screeched to a stop outside, honked, roared away. I looked at the old woman, struck by how everyone seemed to be so alone. It was the human condition, I supposed, but I’d never been more bleakly aware of it than I had in the last couple weeks. It had begun with the loneliness of Larry Blankenship’s death and it had just kept growing—the sense of loss. People just kept vanishing; others were left behind, and life struggled on as best it could. Patricia Wilson couldn’t see me. I watched her in the dusky early evening, trying to imagine her as a young woman, wrapped up in her sister coming to Chicago to have her babies.

“Well,” she said suddenly, emerging from her reverie, “why did you come? You’re still here, I can hear you breathing …”

“I wanted to ask you about Rita’s babies, Mrs. Wilson … we’re trying to trace them, trying to get some identification cleared up. They went through an orphanage, went their separate ways … Whatever happened to them, as far as you know? Have you ever heard from them?”

“No, no, I never have. Rita wasn’t much for keeping up, letter writing and such. Not her style.”

“Was Ted the father? Of both of them? Is that possible?”

“Oh, now, I don’t want to speak ill of absent friends,” she said primly. “People lead their own fives. I only met this Ted once, he was much older than Rita or me, and he seemed to be in bad health … wheezing and coughing all the time. Didn’t look strong enough to father any children, but appearances can be deceiving, can’t they?”

“But didn’t Rita ever confide in you, let slip some clue? It’s very important to know if someone else was the father … someone Rita may have loved?”

“Let me think,” she murmured, “let me try and recollect … Rita was a high liver, a risk taker, don’t you know? She was never satisfied with her lot in life, not even as a child, that was why she was willing to marry an old wreck like Ted, for what she hoped would be his money … but the joke was on her, Ted never really made much and poor Rita was always looking for a way out—she was a very warm, friendly girl, hot-blooded, too, if the truth’s to be told. She always had an eye peeled for something better, she had a roving eye. She met my Donald once and she looked him over pretty carefully … and I saw him looking her over, too, I wasn’t blind then, but there was no time for them to misbehave. But she was always looking for a way out of the north country … she didn’t know how to go about it, though. And she had me as a model, I got out and look what it got me, a sailor named Donald Wilson who went away—”

“So there were other men in her life? Somebody besides Ted Hook?”

“I told you, I can’t malign the memory of my poor little sister.” She peered at me, perplexed, as if she could see. I figured she didn’t get the chance to talk much about her past: Who’d want to listen? She was alone. So I waited for the urge to communicate to get the better of her. “But the truth is the truth, isn’t it, Mr. Cavanaugh?” I said it was. “And the truth is that Rita was only as good as she had to be, she had a feel for things, sensitive and like that, y’know? I think she liked the menfolks, that’s the truth of it, cross my heart.”

“What do you think happened to her? Really.”

“Went off with a man. What else? Let’s face it, that’s what Rita would do, isn’t it?”

“Are you sure she never let on about who the father might be? Who fathered the children? Who she ran off with? Try to remember, Mrs. Wilson … it’s not going to hurt Rita now. But it’s important to some other people. Try.”

“Let’s see, once in ’32 and once in ’40 … well, she never let on to me, not directly, but he was a swell, a high-class fellow—I got that impression from her, she was sort of sly about it, little hints here and there, and there was the money she sent me … it had to come from somewhere, didn’t it? And I always thought to myself that she had a man. It seemed to me, from the kind of a twinkle she had, that it was all part of a plan that was going real well … for instance, she was never upset about those babies, never acted like she didn’t want them, she never said she wanted an abortion, nothing like that …”

“She must have run off with the father,” I said.

“Stands to reason,” she said tiredly, the high voice not used to all the talking. “I don’t have any facts, mind you, but it stands to reason, the way I see it. It must have been a real love affair, real romantic—why, it started and lasted all those years, until ’44 and who knows how long after that?”

It was dark outside. I stood on the stoop and thanked her for her time and her trouble. She smiled her empty smile and as I watched, it faded.

“Rita’s dead,” she said, bitterness surfacing at last like garbage on a pond. “I feel it, I know it. Rita’s dead. She’s been dead for a long time. I’ve always known that. I lied to myself, people do that, don’t they?” Her false teeth clicked in the darkness, where she spent all her hours. “Thank you for talking with me, listening to me.” Before I could answer she’d closed the door. A threatening breeze rustled the parched leaves. There was rain in the air, the smell and feel of it. It was a quiet street and I headed back toward traffic, my perspiration soaking my clothing, cooling as I walked. There was nothing left to do in Chicago.

I grabbed a sandwich at a joint near the university and caught a cab to O’Hare in time to take the 11:30 flight back to the Twin Cities. The cabin was hot and sticky and my eyes burned. My head ached. My stomach was jumpy and I felt groggy from what I realized I had learned. Or thought I had learned. The cabin was dark while most of the passengers yawned and trusted their lives to fate. I got a gin and tonic in a flat plastic cup, wiped my dirty face with a white napkin that came away gray and smudged. I closed my eyes, took a long sip of the drink, and dared to think for the first time all day.

Larry Blankenship was born in 1932, orphaned in 1944, when he appeared at the Sacred Heart Orphanage in Duluth and went subsequently to the Blankenship family in. Bemidji, where he picked up his new name. Those were the facts.

Larry had brought a little sister with him to the Sacred Heart Orphanage, a girl of four or five who could therefore have been born in 1940. She was left behind in the orphanage when Larry went to Bemidji. She was Kim’s age, just as Larry was the same age as Kim’s never-found male cousin. Those were the facts.

Ted Hook had said that both of his household’s children, born in 1932 and 1940, a boy of his own and Rita’s and a girl born to Rita’s sister in Chicago, had been placed in an orphanage in Duluth—the Sacred Heart Orphanage, acknowledged by Kim herself. There are crucial moments when possibilities become likelihoods and I was staring at one. There was no hard proof and I knew it, but I’d have wagered a good deal that Larry Blankenship had begun life as Robert Hook, that he and Kim were brother and sister, that there had not been a threesome at the orphanage at all. It fit so handsomely and its facets fired back the kinds of reflections you’d expect in a murder case. Surely Kim and Robert were in fact the son and daughter of Rita Hook, not cousins; little Robert and little Shirley, born eight years apart at Merrivale Memorial Hospital in Chicago while Patricia Wilson paced the hallway outside, thankful for at least the fleeting contact with her risk-taking younger sister who was no better behaved than she had to be. There had never been another boy who became Larry Blankenship, who had also had a little sister … No.

The question of the father took on added significance as I sucked the crescent of lime and listened to the powerful throb and roar of the jet engines. Ted had assumed that the son was his and Rita’s, the daughter Patricia Wilson’s. He had been fooled on the daughter; why not on the son, as well? Could the father of one also have been the father of the other? Could Carver Maxvill have been the father?

If I could have considered it as a puzzle, from a safe, objective distance, I might have been fascinated. But I loved the little daughter … who had become the wife in an incestuous marriage, which had produced a child who was spending her life in an institution because her parents had been brother and sister …

I had another drink and looked out into the moonlit night, occasional clusters of lights blinking at me from the Wisconsin countryside below. If I had been an observer once, even until today, I wasn’t anymore. Kim was part of these murders, part of the vast, improbably, immensely human pattern. I remembered the beginning of it, the suicide in the lobby and the birdlike woman telling me that Kim Blankenship/ Roderick was a murderer … Well, the information had been inaccurate but it was all tied together somehow and Harriet Dierker had known it.

Time had damaged Larry and Kim (Robert and Shirley, if you prefer; to me they were Larry and Kim), had torn them apart, disguised them, hurled them back at each other a quarter of a century later. By then, with only the Norway Creek Club members in common, they were strangers … Norway Creek—she had worked there and Larry had gone to work for a member and gained entry through the front door. They were strangers when they met, Norway Creek their only common ground. The thought bedeviled me, the irony of Norway Creek’s being involved in such goings-on. I was naive to be shocked by that, of course, but the club was like the city, wrapped carefully in a cloak of rectitude and morality and proudly proclaimed goodness, as if morality were something you conferred on yourself cosmetically, to hide your sins.