"U" is for Undertow (46 page)

“Is that the special of the day?”

He shook his head. “Oh no, you’ll want to steer clear of that.” He peered over his shoulder to make sure she wasn’t in eavesdropping range. By then she was at the bar chatting with William while she kept a close eye on us.

Henry put a hand to his mouth, in case she’d recently learned to read lips. “She’s serving calf’s-liver pudding with anchovy sauce. It comes with a cup of souse’s soup, made with sauerkraut.” He paused for a moment while he crossed his eyes and then pointed to his plate. “This dish is stuffed cabbage and it’s not half bad.”

“Got it,” I said.

He paused to study me. “How are you doing? I haven’t seen you for days.”

“Go on with your dinner. Let me grab a glass of wine and I’ll fill you in.”

“I can wait,” he said.

By the time I reached the bar, Rosie had disappeared and William had poured me a glass of bad wine. I said, “Thanks. Would you ask Rosie if I could have the stuffed cabbage? It looks fabulous.”

“Sure thing.”

I returned to the table, wineglass in hand. Moments later Rosie appeared with my dinner plate. Henry and I spent the next five minutes in companionable silence while we ate. When it comes to food, neither of us fools around. As a reward for cleaning our plates, Rosie brought us each a slice of chocolate-poppy seed torte that reduced us to a state of moaning satisfaction.

Henry said, “Now, tell me what’s going on. When you walked in, your expression was so dark I didn’t dare ask. Is the misery about family or work?”

“Work.”

“So skip that and bring me up to date on the family saga.”

“I can’t remember what was going on when we last spoke. Did I tell you I had dinner here with Tasha? This was a week ago.”

“News to me.”

“Wow, you really are behind.”

“Matters not,” he said mildly. “What’d she want?”

“Nothing. Surprise, surprise. She handed over a batch of letters she came across when she was cleaning out Grandfather Kinsey’s files. Some were letters Grand wrote to Aunt Gin and some she sent me. I haven’t read all of them. I mostly skipped around, but I picked up enough to know she was doing her best to maneuver Aunt Gin into surrendering custody. You can imagine how well that went down. Aunt Gin apparently read the first and sent the rest back unopened. Grand retaliated by hiring a private detective to spy on us.” I paused, correcting myself. “Well, ‘retaliated’ might be too strong a word. She wanted proof that Gin wasn’t a fit guardian.”

“By fair means or foul?”

“That’s about it. Her hunch was that Aunt Gin was gay and she figured if she could prove it, she’d have enough leverage to bring her to heel. Didn’t work out that way.”

“This was all in the letters? I can’t believe she’d spell it out.”

“She was too clever to do that. Among other things, Tasha came across invoices from the PI Grand hired. I drove to Lompoc yesterday and talked to him. He’s a nice guy though not inclined to confide. Dang. I had to pry the information out of him, but he finally told me what she was up to. He persuaded Grand that Aunt Gin was straight, which was always my perception. Grand dropped the matter and that was the end of that.” I lifted a finger. “I do harbor a tiny flicker of doubt. On a hunch, I asked him if he’d lie about it. I was curious if he was fudging for my sake, trying to make Aunt Gin sound better than she was. He deflected the question and responded with something else. I’m not saying he lied, but there was
something
he wasn’t saying. It may not mean anything, but I’m not a hundred percent convinced.”

“Not much in life is a hundred percent.”

“You have a point.”

“So now what? I’m assuming this precludes your going to the big family do at the end of May.”

“Probably. I haven’t decided yet.”

Rosie appeared at the table to collect our dessert plates, and we set the subject aside until she’d gone off to the kitchen with her tray.

“Now tell me about work. Last I heard, you were asking William for a bar rag to clean off a dog tag that smelled like dead rat.”

“Oh, man, you’re really out of date and I apologize. Not to put too fine a point on it, but to all intents and purposes, I’ve reached a dead end.”

I started with Diana and Ryan’s revelation about Michael Sutton’s birthday celebration at Disneyland and then went back in time and talked about my drive to Peephole and the conversation I’d had with P. F. Sanchez, who’d eventually given me the information about the veterinarian who’d put his dog down. I went into some detail about the shed at the rear of the clinic where euthanized animals were left for pickup by animal control. I also told Henry about Deborah Unruh and the four-year-old, Rain, who’d served as the “practice child.” I went on to fill him in on Greg and Shelly, and my interview with her son, Shawn, who’d assured me the two of them weren’t involved in the kidnapping scheme because they’d left the state by then and were working their way north to Canada. The recitation took the better part of fifteen minutes, but I felt I’d summed it up admirably, even if I do say so myself.

Listening to the story as I relayed it to him, I could still see a certain logic in play. My prime assumption had been wrong, but there were pieces that still intrigued me, even at this late date. Ulf, the wolfdog. The similarities between the two crimes. The ransom demands that totaled forty grand. I couldn’t see the links, but they had to be there.

Henry seemed to take it all in, though I have no idea how he managed to keep the players straight. Once in a while he’d stop me with a question, but in the main, he seemed to follow the narrative. When I finished he thought about it briefly and then said, “Let’s go back to the conversation you had with Stacey Oliphant. What makes him so sure the kidnappers were amateurs?”

“Because they asked for chump change, to use Dolan’s words. Both thought it was odd to ask for fifteen grand when they could have asked for more. Stacey figured if they’d been professionals, they’d have ramped up the demand.”

“Must not have been chump change to them. If they were rookies, fifteen thousand might have seemed like a fortune.”

“Not that the money did them any good. Patrick photocopied the bills and then marked them . . .”

Henry frowned. “How?”

“Some kind of fluorescent pen he used in the export side of his clothing business. Deborah says the marks would have popped out under a black light, which a lot of kids had back then. She also says none of the money ever surfaced, at least as far as she’s heard.”

“They must have figured it out.”

“That’d be my guess.”

“Which is probably why they tried again,” he said. “If they discovered the bills were marked, they couldn’t risk putting the cash in circulation so they got rid of what they had and tried again. Only this time they snatched Mary Claire instead of Rain.”

“Oh, shit. I hope that’s not true. That would mean Patrick set the second kidnap in motion. If the money had been clean, they might have been satisfied with what they netted the first time and let it go at that.”

Henry said, “I’ll tell you something else that just occurred to me. Suppose when Sutton stumbled into the clearing, the two weren’t digging the hole to bury a child. What if their intent was to bury the tainted money?”

I stared at him. “And they buried the dog instead? How’d they manage
that?”

“Simple. One stays in the woods to keep an eye on the site. The other goes off, steals the dog’s corpse, and brings it back. They drop the mutt in that hole and hide the money somewhere else.”

“How’d they know about the dead dog?”

“Beats me,” he said. “You told me yourself that a couple of hundred people could have known about the shed and the pickup routine.”

“All this because they were worried the little kid would blab?”

“Why not? I’m just brainstorming here, but it makes sense to me.

Didn’t you tell me Patrick packed the money in a gym bag he tossed on the side of the road?”

“Right.”

“So picture this. They leave Rain asleep in the park. They’ve counted the money so they know it’s all there. Once they get home they discover the bills are lighting up like neon. Either they meant to dump the cash or their intention was to get it out of sight until they felt it was safe to spend. Once the little kid appeared, they decided it was too dangerous to leave the money in that spot.”

“The dead dog’s a bit melodramatic, don’t you think? Why not just fill in the hole?”

“They were setting up a cover story to explain what they were doing in the first place. Sure enough, the police exhume the dog and that’s the end of it. No big mystery. Someone’s buried a pet. Might have taken twenty-one years, but it shows you how wily these guys were.”

“ ‘Were’? Nice idea. Like maybe they’re dead or in prison.”

“One can only hope,” he said.

 

 

 

When I got home I decided to let Henry’s suggestions percolate overnight. I’d been overthinking the whole subject and it had only served to confuse instead of enlighten me. Meanwhile, something else had occurred to me. I realized I might have a way to find out if Hale Brandenberg was being honest about Aunt Gin’s sexual orientation. It didn’t matter one way or the other, but I’m a stickler for the truth (unless I’m busy lying to someone at any given moment). There might be evidence at hand.

I went up the spiral stairs to the loft. I have an old trunk at the foot of the bed that I use for storage. I cleared the top and opened the lid, removing neatly folded piles of winter clothing I’d packed away in mothballs. From the bottom I hauled out a shoe box of old photographs that I dumped on the bed. If Aunt Gin had a “special friend” whose existence Hale was trying to conceal, I might find glimpses of her in pictures taken at the time. Aunt Gin had socialized with a number of married couples, but she also had gal pals.

Snapshots tell a story, not always in obvious ways but taken as a whole. Faces appear and disappear. Relationships form and fall apart. Our social history is recorded in photographic images. Maybe someone had captured a moment that would speak to the issue. I sat on the bed and picked through the pictures, smiling at the photos of people I recognized. Some I could still name. Stanley, Edgar, and Mildred. I blanked on Stanley’s wife’s name, but I knew the five of them played card games—canasta and pinochle. The kitchen table would be littered with ashtrays and highball glasses, and they’d all be laughing raucously.

I found shots of two single women I remembered—Delpha Prager and one named Prinny Rose Something-or-other. I knew Aunt Gin had worked with Delpha at California Fidelity Insurance. I wasn’t sure where she’d met Prinny Rose. I studied their photos, with Aunt Gin and without, in groups where one or the other appeared. If there were secret smiles between them, surreptitious glances that might have been picked up on camera, I couldn’t see the signs. I suppose I’d imagined arms thrown over one another’s shoulders, hands slightly too close together on a tabletop, an intimate look or gesture neither was aware she’d revealed. I didn’t see anything even remotely suggestive. In point of fact, there wasn’t a single view of Aunt Gin making physical contact with anyone, which was confirmation of a different kind. She was not a touchy-feely person.

I did marvel at how young she looked. While I was growing up, she was passing through her thirties and forties. Now I could see she was pretty in a way I hadn’t seen before. She was slender. She favored glasses with wire frames and she wore her hair pulled up in a bun that should have looked old-fashioned, but was stylish instead. She had high cheekbones, good teeth, and warmth in her eyes. I’d thought of her as schoolmarmish, but there was no evidence of it here.

I came to an envelope sealed with tape so old and yellow it had lost its sticking power. On the outside she’d written MISCELLANEOUS 1955 in the bold cursive I recognized. My interest picked up. I withdrew an assortment of snapshots. I appeared in the first few photographs, age five, my expression bleak. I was small for my age, all bony arms and legs. My hair was long, bunched up on the sides where bobby pins held the strands back. I wore droopy skirts and brown shoes with white socks that sagged. By that Christmas I’d been living with her for six months or so, and apparently I’d found nothing to smile about.

The next photograph I came to generated an exclamation that expressed my surprise and disbelief. There was Aunt Gin enclosed in the arms of a man I recognized on sight, though he was thirty years younger. Hale Brandenberg. She had her back up against his body, her face turned slightly as she smiled. His face was tilted toward hers. The next five pictures were of the two of them, mostly horsing around. In one they played miniature golf, clowning for a photographer who might have been me since the tops of their heads were missing and I could see the blur of a finger inadvertently covering a portion of the aperture. Another photograph had been taken in the gazebo in the hilltop park so popular with my high school classmates. There were two snapshots of the three of us, me sitting on Hale’s knee with a snaggletoothed grin. I was probably six by then, in first grade, losing my baby teeth. My hair had been chopped short, probably because Aunt Gin got annoyed having to fiddle with it. Hale looked like a cowboy movie star, clean-shaven, tall, and muscular, in a flannel shirt, blue jeans, and boots. I didn’t remember his being in our lives, but there he was. No wonder he’d seemed familiar when I first laid eyes on him. Furthermore, it occurred to me that Aunt Gin had been just about my age, thirty-eight, when this late romance blossomed.

I understood why he was so sure about her sexuality and why he was so well acquainted with her parenting skills. I had a hundred questions about the two of them, but now was not the time to ask. Maybe at a later date, I’d take him out for a drink and tell him what I’d discovered. For the moment, I returned the snapshots to the tattered envelope, which I set to one side while I put the remainder in the shoe box and repacked the trunk. I hardly knew what to think about my discovery. Hale might have been a stand-in father to me if he and Aunt Gin had stayed together. She didn’t set much store by marriage and she probably wasn’t suited for a long-term relationship. But she’d been happy for a while, and in those few images, I could see that I’d been happy as well.