Second Chance

by Jonathan Valin

  SECOND CHANCE

  The Harry Stoner Series, #9

  Jonathan Valin

  TO KATHERINE, AS ALWAYS, AND TO DOMINICK, AT LAST

  Copyright © 1991 by Jonathan Valin

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form

  without permission in writing from the publisher.

  First ebook edition © 2013 by AudioGO. All Rights Reserved.

  Trade ISBN 978-1-62064-328-0

  Library ISBN 978-0-7927-9360-1

  Cover photo © Laur-Kalevi Tamm/iStock.com.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  MORE HARRY STONER EBOOKS

  SECOND CHANCE

  1

  TWO ROADS diverged in a wood, and I . . . I took the one to the right, which put me back on Camargo Pike, heading south.

  I’d been driving through Indian Hill for better than ten minutes, trying to find a little side street called Woodbine Lane. The woman who’d phoned me early that snowy Sunday morning had said to watch for an antiques shop on the left-hand side of Camargo. An antiques shop—like a gas station in the sticks. With the snow blowing and the tires skating along the frozen blacktop I’d had trouble staying on the road, much less finding her antiques shop.

  It would have helped if the side streets had been clearly marked, but the only signs in that rich, Byzantine neighborhood were planted along the main drag. Everything else was private property—unnamed access roads that ran screaming off into the woods the moment they spotted you, tar drives that turned their backs behind gateposts or rested their elbows on hedgerows and glared through the brambles as you drove by. Nothing as mundane as a name on a mailbox. Not that I could have seen a mailbox in the snow. It had started falling as soon as I left the office. By the time I got to Indian Hill, it was as thick as smoke from a grease fire.

  After emerging from the woods onto Camargo for the third time, I swallowed my pride and went looking for an open gas station or convenience store with a phone booth—and got absurdly lucky. Six miles down the pike, almost at the corporation limit, I spotted a gabled building that looked like a converted residence. If there was a sign saying “Antiques” in one of its windows, the snow had covered it up. But there was a parking lot in front and an access road to its left.

  I took a chance and turned left onto the unmarked road. A half-mile farther on an estate house squatted in a grove of pine trees—English-style country home, all mullioned windows and snow-dappled slate, big-eyed and brindled as a cow. I pulled up in a drive to the right of the house, parked the rusty Pinto beside a new Mercedes with a physician’s plate, and sat there for a moment, listening to the wind howl and wondering whether I had the right address or whether the folks inside were already on the phone to the Indian Hill cops. The lady who’d called that morning had said her name was Pearson, Louise Pearson. She hadn’t mentioned that she or her husband was a doctor.

  As I sat there brooding, a tall woman in a dark blue Icelandic sweater and khaki slacks stepped out the front door of the house. She peered at me for a moment through the blowing snow, hugging her arms to her breasts against the cold. I got out of the car and waved at her.

  “Mrs. Pearson?” I shouted.

  She said something that was swallowed by the wind, but I could tell from her expression that I’d lucked on to the right spot. I hustled across the snowy yard, through the door, and inside.

  The woman smiled knowingly as she closed the door behind me. “You had trouble finding us, didn’t you?”

  “A little trouble.”

  “You don’t have to be polite about it,” she said with an abrupt laugh that made me smile too. “Everyone has trouble finding us. In this weather it must have been murder.” She held out her hand. “I’m Louise Pearson.”

  “Harry Stoner,” I said, shaking with her.

  I had realized that she was tall, but up close Louise Pearson’s size and build were startling. She was a statuesque woman in her late thirties—big-breasted, big-hipped, with short curly brown hair and a tan, sportive, square-jawed face, a little wrinkled by the sun around the eyes and at the corners of the mouth but strikingly attractive in a no-nonsense way.

  “Come into the living room and warm up, Mr. Stoner.”

  I followed her down a hall into a large, fussy living room. The walls were covered in pale grey watered silk, the moldings painted a deeper grey. The furniture was cozy English—chintz couches, Queen Anne tables and sideboards. On the far wall a wingback chair sat in front of an open fireplace. Louise Pearson patted the back of the chair as if she’d put it there especially for me.

  “Sit,” she said.

  I sat.

  “Can I get you something to drink? Coffee or brandy maybe?”

  “Coffee would be good.”

  There was a silver service set on a sideboard behind her. She walked over to it and poured coffee into a blue china cup. “I’m really sorry to call you out on a miserable day like this,” she said over her shoulder, “but we’ve got this . . . situation. At least Phil thinks it’s a situation.” She turned back to me, the steaming coffee cup in her hand. “Maybe he’s right.”

  She said it dubiously, as if that wasn’t often the case.

  “Phil is?”

  “My husband,” she said, handing me the cup. “He should be back any minute—he had an emergency at his office.”

  “He’s a physician?”

  “A psychiatrist.”

  Louise Pearson walked over to the fireplace and leaned up against the mantel. Behind her in a far corner of the room a large tinseled Christmas tree flickered like a loose bulb.

  “Drink,” Louise Pearson said in her peremptory way.

  I drank.

  The woman was altogether too ripe and sturdy for lace and chintz. I wondered if she’d inherited the house from someone else, if she’d stepped into that cozy room from a more robust kind of life—a life among men. That was the way she talked, as if she was used to handling men, parrying them, fending them off. It amused me to speculate about her in that way—it was a sure sign that I found her attractive.

  Between the fire and the coffee I slowly warmed up. I started to smell things again: the fresh cut pine of the Christmas tree, the cedar logs on the fire, the coffee. And something else. Something sweet and sensual that I didn’t place until the woman came closer to me, and I realized it was her scent.

  “I don’t mean to sound cynical about Phil,” Louise Pearson said, drawing a chair up across from mine. “It’s just that most psychiatrists tend to read portents into normal behavior, even their own behavior. Believe me, it can be grueling to have your inner life constantly analyzed and second-guessed like a parlor game. I know Kirsten, my stepdaughter, feels that way.” She t
urned her head to look at the fire, and her hair caught the light and turned reddish gold. “Kirsten’s the reason we called you.”

  “She has a problem?”

  The woman smiled sadly. “The world is Kirsten’s problem,” she said. And then, as if she didn’t like the melodramatic sound of that, she added: “She was badly wounded by life with her mother—her real mother, Phil’s first wife. Those childhood years left Kirsty . . . well, they’ve made her an emotional cripple. She and her brother, alike. Phil’s tried his best to make it up to both of the kids—to give them a fresh chance. So have I. But even loving parents can’t erase the past or control the future. I’m not at all sure it’s a good idea to try—or to hire someone else to.”

  I said, “You don’t think I’m needed, do you?”

  The woman shrugged noncommittally. “I don’t know if you are or not, Mr. Stoner. I don’t know if Kirsty can use anyone’s help. Without trying to minimize her neuroses, which can be pretty damn disabling, I tend to think that the more time she spends on her own the better. I’m sure Phil will have a different view of it, but that’s the way I feel.”

  As if on cue, a tall handsome man with black hair and beard stepped into the room. There was half-melted snow in his hair and on the shoulders of his overcoat.

  “Is that the way you feel?” he said to the woman.

  Louise Pearson stiffened in the chair. “You could have announced yourself, Phil.”

  “And spoiled your spiel?” He laughed, brushing the snow out of his hair and beard as he walked over to the fireplace. “I love to hear you talk psychology, Lou. You know that. It turns me on.”

  Smiling expansively, he came up and extended a hand. I shook with him. Like his wife, Pearson made a tall, imposing figure, although he looked older than she did up close, and worse for wear. His tan skin was heavily lined and deeply grooved at the cheeks. His eyes were a brilliant blue, nervously, almost shockingly alert. For a second I found it difficult to hold his stare. It was as if he was looking for something I didn’t have.

  “Phil Pearson,” he said

  “Harry Stoner.”

  “Good,” he said, dropping my hand. He clapped his own hands together loudly and said, “Good,” again.

  “I guess you’ll want to take over now, Phil,” Louise Pearson said, rising from the chair. “That’s the way it usually works, isn’t it?”

  For a split second the man looked crestfallen, as if he was losing his audience in the middle of a speech. “You don’t have to leave, Lou.”

  “Oh, I think I do.”

  She smiled at me warmly. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Mr. Stoner. I’m sure we’ll talk again.”

  She walked out of the room, leaving her husband staring blankly after her. The woman’s exit effected an immediate change in Pearson’s manner. He stopped smiling. He stopped talking, too. In fact he didn’t say another word until he’d unbuttoned his topcoat, draped it on the sideboard, and poured himself a cup of coffee from the silver server.

  “Not everyone shares my sense of humor,” he said in a subdued voice. “I can be abrasive at times.”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t feel like coddling a grown man. He looked chastened by my silence, as if I’d boxed his ear. Then he looked resentful. I started to get the feeling that this wasn’t a grown man, after all.

  Pearson sat down across from me and took a sip of coffee while he collected himself. “Living with a psychiatrist can be tough,” he said after a time. “My wife’s had her fill of me recently. Of me and my kids. You know what they say about psychiatrists’ kids, don’t you? Like ministers’ lads.” He smiled pastily. “Has Lou told you about Kirsten?”

  “She said that you were having a problem with her. She didn’t tell me what that problem was.”

  “Of course, she wouldn’t,” he said quickly. “The kids are my responsibility, after all. I think we can agree on that.”

  He glanced quickly at the door, as if he was hoping Louise was listening in as he had been listening to her. In spite of the friction between them, the man seemed lost without his wife.

  “Has Kirsten run away, Dr. Pearson?” I said, trying to put him back on course.

  He sighed. “Not exactly. I’m really not sure what’s happened to her, if anything.”

  “Then why call me?”

  “Why call you?” he echoed. “I’m worried, that’s why. My daughter has serious emotional problems, as Lou may have told you. They were severe enough to put Kirsten in a hospital this past summer. She returned to school this fall, to the University of Chicago. But I’m not sure she was ready to be on her own again.”

  “You have reason to think she’s not doing well?”

  “There have been signs,” he said vaguely.

  “What kind of signs?”

  The man shifted uneasily in his chair. “At the moment, I’m concerned that she hasn’t come home for the holidays.”

  “Concerned enough to hire a detective?”

  “Yes.”

  “Couldn’t Kirsten have gone to visit a friend over the break, Dr. Pearson? Kids often do that.”

  “I talked to her myself on Wednesday of last week, and she said she was planning to fly home Thursday afternoon. Since then I’ve been in touch with her roommate, her therapist, the airlines, and several university officials—not one of them knows where she’s gone. Not one.”

  “Your daughter’s problems,” I said delicately, “are they . . . are you worried that she may have become depressed?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “Have you contacted the police in Chicago?”

  “I haven’t been able to bring myself to . . . ” His voice dropped to a whisper. “No, I haven’t called the police.”

  A peal of feminine laughter rang out somewhere in the house. It made Phil Pearson start in his chair. He glanced toward the hall almost desperately, as if he longed to be near his wife again—to make it up with her.

  “I may be overreacting,” he said, looking quickly back at me, looking to see if I’d caught his mind wandering. “Still I’d feel better if you could find Kirsten.”

  “I can try,” I told him.

  “Good,” he said, rubbing his hands together nervously. “Good.”

  2

  AFTER FINISHING with the Pearsons I went to my apartment on Ohio Avenue, packed an overnight bag, called the airport, and booked a seat on Delta for two p.m. I would gain an hour on the flight, so I figured on arriving at O’Hare about the same time that I’d left Cincinnati. Pearson had promised to call Kirsten’s roommate, a girl named Marnee Thompson, to let her know I’d be coming. He said he’d contact the university too, although I didn’t expect him to find anyone home on a Sunday afternoon during Christmas break. Before I left his house, he gave me duplicate keys to Kirsten’s apartment in case the roommate was out.

  In spite of the Brent Spence traffic and the inevitable slowdown at the cut of the Ft. Mitchell hill, I managed to get to the Delta terminal by one-thirty. The snow had stopped falling by then, and the temperature had risen enough to turn the roadside ice to slush. I’d been worried that the bad weather might delay the flight, but the attendant at the Delta booth said the only delay would be on the Chicago end—at O’Hare.

  With a half hour to kill I walked down to one of the boarding area bars and ordered up the usual round of artillery. It was a short flight, so I settled on two double Scotches, straight up. If they didn’t kill the preflight jitters, I promised myself a third shot on the plane.

  “You said two doubles?” the bartender asked.

  “I don’t like airplanes,” I told him. “I don’t understand them. And I don’t want to discuss it.”

  He served up the booze and left me alone.

  Pearson had given me a photograph of his daughter, a high school snap. I dug it out of my coat pocket and took a look at it between swallows of Scotch. Kirsten was a studious-looking, half-pretty girl with dark brown hair and her father’s blue piercing eyes. If I’d known more
about her, if Pearson had been more forthcoming about her “problems,” past and present, I might have been able to make something specific of the vaguely hostile, vaguely damaged look of those eyes. But Phil Pearson had kept his daughter’s history to himself—at least enough of it to make it next to impossible for me to personalize her. The girl in the photo could have been anyone’s troubled daughter. Given the fact that I hadn’t liked the man, I decided it was better that way.

  ******

  The flight to Chicago was mercifully short. We arrived at O’Hare about forty minutes after we took off and were backed up on the ground for another forty minutes. I didn’t understand the guy sitting next to me, who kept complaining about the long wait on the runway.

  “We’re on the ground!” I finally said to him. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  It was two-thirty central time when I got out of the terminal and caught a cab to Hyde Park. It had been snowing heavily in Chicago, and the traffic on the Eisenhower was bumper-to-bumper all the way to the Dan Ryan. By the time we got to the 51st Street exit it was a quarter of four.

  I said to the cabbie, “It took longer to get from O’Hare to the south side than it did to fly from Cincinnati to Chicago.”

  “What are you going to do,” he said philosophically. “It’s Christmas, and this ain’t Cincinnati.”

  Kirsten Pearson’s apartment was on 54th Street near Blackstone. The building was a three-story brownstone tenement, the third in a dismal block of brownstones. The stained facades of the tenements, the dirty snow, the bare bent maples planted in the sidewalk boxes, reflected the raw grey of the winter sky. A few months of that kind of weather would have left me feeling just as raw.

  The outer door of the Pearson girl’s apartment house opened onto a tiled vestibule. The framed-glass inner door was locked, but I could see through it into a wainscoted lobby with a dark wood staircase leading to the upper floors. The vestibule smelled like dust and heat and cat piss. I could have used one of the keys that Pearson had given me, but I didn’t want to startle anyone. So I pressed an intercom button on the side wall.