The Deepest Water (19 page)

“As soon as he stipulated the name of the school,” she said, “we knew the name of our benefactor. Xuan had talked about him to us, and about us to him. We knew. Father Jean has honored the promise he made to keep our benefactor anonymous; he has never mentioned his name, but there was no need. When Father became ill they set up a trust fund in a bank here in San Francisco, and the money is funneled through it anonymously. Now, some of our own people are starting to contribute, not merely with money, but volunteer workers, even volunteer teachers; in time the school will grow and thrive. A memorial to your father, and to my sister.”

15

On Sunday night Felicia Shaeffer had dinner with her daughter Sara, Sara’s husband John, and their three children. Sara was an executive secretary for a group of attorneys, John worked in the city building-permit department, and they both took their positions, their responsibilities very seriously. Their children took their jobs as grandchildren seriously also, she thought, suppressing a sigh, as she listened to the youngest, eight-year-old Sylvie, play a tortured piano piece. Dinner had been exactly correct, broiled skinless chicken breasts, some weird potatoes in a casserole with fat-free sour cream, green beans that had been heated but not really cooked—and at this time of year everyone, except Sara, knew you had to cook them; God alone knew how far they had traveled, how long ago they had been picked. Everything measured, calories counted, so many grams of fiber provided down to the salad sprinkled with lemon juice and dry-roasted sunflower seeds. All very healthful. Sara, like her father before her, did not believe alcohol was good for you, and served none, not even wine with dinner. At nine o’clock Felicia yawned widely and said old people like her belonged in bed along about now. She escaped.

Back in her own one-bedroom jail, she petted her two dogs affectionately, then went to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of wine. How on earth had she managed to bring up such… she groped for a word, found it…
puritanical
children? What had she done wrong? It was the damn pendulum effect, she thought glumly; she was of the sixties’ live-and-let-live generation, they were the new pure, holier-than-thou generation. She pitied them, hoping the pendulum had found its farthest reach by now, and soon would start back again.

Daisy and Mae were eyeing her anxiously, doing their dance, wanting to go out, needing to go out after hours inside. At home she could open the door and let them out when necessary, but here she had to bundle up, put them on leashes, walk with them. It wasn’t as if they ever stayed out a minute longer than they had to, they were house dogs, after all, but they were used to the freedom of choosing when to go outdoors. And so was she, she thought, looking about the tidy little apartment with distaste.

“All right, girls,” she said then, and got her heavy jacket from the closet. She pulled a stocking cap over her head, over her ears, added warm wool gloves, and they were ready. Actually she needed some fresh air to clear her mind. A visit with her perfect children and theirs always left her feeling strange, an alien among weirdos. Tonight she had no intention of going to bed any time soon; she had some heavy thinking to do. A brisk walk first would help.

On Monday Willa would come by after work, and Abby had called to say she wouldn’t be there at all, not until Tuesday. That was fine, Felicia had decided; there were things she had to do before she talked again with Abby.

At the same time that Abby was leaving the room of the dying priest on Monday, Felicia was opening her door to admit Lieutenant Caldwell. “Come in, come in,” she said. “Back off, girls, down.” Both poodles were sniffing his legs with great interest; they retreated and sat down, keeping their eyes on him. “I’m glad you could come yourself. Detective Varney is very pretty, but she certainly is young, isn’t she?”

He smiled and nodded. “Young and pretty, and a very good detective. But your message said you wanted to see me, so here I am. You have something for me?”

“Let me hang up your jacket,” she said. “Do you want coffee?”

“I’ll keep the jacket, and coffee would be good. Never turn down coffee, that’s my motto.” He was wearing jeans with boots, and a windbreaker over a sweat shirt. He looked as if he planned to go undercover on the Eugene mall, or, more likely, infiltrate a lumbermen’s association meeting.

“That’s a long drive from Salem,” she said, motioning for him to follow her to the kitchen.

“One hour twenty minutes.”

She nodded, suspecting that few details escaped his notice. The coffee was made; she poured two cups, pointed to the sugar and cream on the counter, but he used neither. They returned to the living room where she sat in her rocking chair, and he on the couch; in the small room he was almost close enough to touch.

“So tell me what you have,” he said.

“Last week Willa Ashford, Abby, and I worked at putting Jud’s novel in order. Abby found the missing pieces, and we included them. Have your people found those parts?”

“We recovered everything on his hard drive,” the lieutenant said.

“And they didn’t help your cause,” she murmured. “Have you made any headway at all, Lieutenant?”

“We’re tying up loose ends, running down leads, the usual thing.”

He was being cautious, giving nothing, and being very patient. She had noticed how people divided themselves, those who were patient with an old woman in a rocking chair, and those who began fidgeting, eager to get away, on to other things. She was glad he was a patient man; what she had to say couldn’t be rushed.

“Are you a reader?” she asked. “Have you read Jud’s other novels?”

“I don’t do much fiction,” he said. “Biography, history, that’s my speed. I haven’t read him except for the new novel, and I admit that we’re not at all certain we have it in the proper order.”

She nodded regretfully. “Then there must be parts that don’t make much sense, continuing motifs that appear in all the works, characters and subplots he comes back to now and then. I suspect that you’re more oriented to the concrete, to details, and his work is very nuanced, things hinted at, shapes lurking in the background, the kind that, if you turn to examine them, they’re gone, but you know they’re there again as soon as you stop trying to focus on them.”

He nodded. “It’s a puzzling book.”

“Take that blond man, for instance,” she said then. “What the pilot saw was long blond hair, ear studs, and cash in hand. If you had seen that man, I imagine your description of him would have included his height, weight, color of his eyes, whether he had moles, good or bad teeth. Most people don’t collect real details at all, a general impression is all they retain.”

He was watching her closely over the rim of his coffee cup. He set it down and leaned back. “You recognized him finally?”

“No, no. I didn’t mean to give you that idea. I think that when you find him, you’ll learn that he was going home to a family crisis, a wife in labor, something of that sort. Out on the desert somewhere, or up in the mountains. I tried to turn him into someone I might know,” she added. “That’s what I do, start with someone real, and begin making changes, a longer nose, or shorter, hairier, prettier or uglier. But I couldn’t make him into anyone. He’s a stranger who was on a mission of his own that night, I’m afraid.”

“I doubt that you asked me to come around to tell me you don’t know who he is,” Caldwell commented dryly.

“No, I didn’t. I hoped you had read Jud’s other books by now, so that you’d have a bit of understanding about the section I want to talk about. Jud was a very complicated man, Lieutenant. Very complex, and smart. He did a smart thing when he created the resort for his background. It allowed him to bring the world to his doorstep, you see. Sometimes playfully, farcical even, sometimes very seriously. He satirized politicians mercilessly, Hollywood charlatans who channeled Indian spirits, aging stars, people of all sorts. He had fun with them. They aren’t likely to recognize themselves, because, like most of us, they look at the surface, or more likely they see the face they want to show the world, and that isn’t how Jud painted them in his work. I think he saw people from the inside out, and then created just enough surface details to give them a sort of reality. A different way of seeing.”

“You think you recognized some of the people he was writing about?”

She nodded. “Some, quite a few actually, once I caught on to what he was doing. I extracted some pages from the novel for you to read, if you will. Not a lot, just ten or fifteen pages at most. Would you do that?”

“Now?”

“Yes. Then we can talk about them.” She had the pages on the table at her elbow and picked them up to hand to him. He stood up, came and took the pages reluctantly, then sat down again, began to read. He was only skimming, she knew. He had read those pages before probably and made no sense of them, and he didn’t expect to make sense of them now. Watching him, she was not surprised when his expression changed to one that was not exactly angry, but was no longer the placid, neutral one he had worn before.

“Fill me in,” he said. “What are you getting at? That’s Matthew Petrie he’s talking about? Is that it? And what’s the nonsense about the mud bath?”

She shook her head. “That’s why it would have been helpful if you had read the other novels,” she said. “I’ll try to tell you as briefly as I can about the mud bath first. In the first novel Link’s father owns the resort, a piss-poor sort of place that he begins to fix up, to renovate. There’s a hot springs on the property, and some basalt basins with little pools of water that seep in from the big hot pool. He bulldozes the trail to the big pool, but then he has all this dirt to get rid of, and he decides to create the mud bath from one of the smaller pools. So the customers then can take a mud bath, go up through the next several pools, and by the time they reach the largest hot pool, they’ve been washed clean of the mud. A good idea, but it doesn’t quite work out the way he planned. The warm water combines with elements in the dirt and makes a mud bath with a terrible smell, sulphurous, not enough to be dangerous, but very unpleasant.”

She smiled faintly. “This was one of the recurring themes that Jud had fun with,” she said. “You see, the boy’s father, in the novel, I mean, is a well-intentioned man, a bit inept, whose plans often go awry. He finds it was much easier to dump sieved dirt into the basin than it is to get it out again, and finally he makes another trail to the big hot spring, and simply hopes that no one will come across the pool of mud. But to his surprise stories begin to circulate about the mud bath. Some say it is rejuvenating; most say it’s simply soothing, relaxing. A few try it and find that the stench of the mud clings to them no matter how hard they scrub to rid themselves of it. Over the years the mud bath becomes a draw in itself.”

She was gazing at the lieutenant fixedly; he had taken off his jacket and tossed it down on the couch, and he was going to become impatient, she knew, yet this part had to come first.

“One of the properties ascribed to the mud bath was that it had the power to wash away one’s sins, restore grace, or innocence. Now Link, the protagonist of all the novels, was a child when the mud bath was created, he watched it being made, and he believed none of the stories, and of course his father was a non-believer, but the stories were there, and people came to put the mud to the test. A kind of dark baptism, if not blasphemous, then at the very least a perversion, I guess.”

“Mrs. Shaeffer—”

She held up her hand. “I’m getting to those pages I asked you to read, Lieutenant. But you had to know some of the background first. In the novel, Link’s mother dies when he’s a young boy, and his Aunt Sookie takes her place in his heart. She has a son, Buster, a few years younger than Link, the man who appears again in those pages. The boys never were close, and Buster left when he was about twenty or so, and now, a middle-aged man, he’s come back. But we learn his history; he is a big-time gambler who poses as a successful and respected real-estate developer. But he’s really a gambler.”

“Petrie,” Caldwell said. “Mrs. Shaeffer, before you go on I have to tell you we located him, one of the loose ends we’ve tied off, and he’s out of this. Accounted for. Nowhere near Oregon.”

She shook her head. “Let me finish. See, Matthew Petrie was the kind of gambler who might put two dollars on a horse, and then jump up and down, yell, get all excited over the outcome of the race. The character Buster is nothing like that. He could put down half a million and never twitch an eyelash outwardly, regardless of the outcome. Different breed of gambler altogether. So, anyway, he comes back, and he has a deal for Link that is irresistible, he says. He will double his money for him in thirty days; all he needs is seventy-five thousand dollars to get it off the ground. Link tells him no, and Buster begins pressuring him for the money.”

She motioned toward the pages on the couch by the lieutenant. “Well, you read it, you know the kind of pressure he began to exert. His mother, long since impoverished, and quite old, has no money; Link is Buster’s only hope.

“Finally, in real desperation, Buster confesses that he gambled and lost to a syndicate that has sent collectors after him; they’ll kill him if he doesn’t pay up. It would kill his dear old mother for that to happen, he says.

“Link considers his Aunt Sookie, and he knows she has the will of an iron horse, and then he recalls an incident from his and Buster’s childhood, when Buster took Link’s marbles and lost them to the village hotshot player. He says, ‘You’re still playing with someone else’s marbles, aren’t you?’

“Soon the collectors come looking for Buster, and he runs up the trail to the mud bath, and jumps in to hide. They go up the main trail to the hot spring, fail to find him, and they leave. When Buster next turns up, no one can stand to be near him, the stench is so bad. And he can’t rid himself of it.”

She smiled again. “I imagine when you came to that part, it bewildered you, since you didn’t know the history of the mud bath.”

“Now that I know the story,” Caldwell said slowly, “I have to confess, Mrs. Shaeffer, I’m still bewildered. You know who he was talking about, writing about? This character he called Buster?”