by Earl Emerson
“I don’t have to believe it.”
“I’m just…worried that you’ll think I’m going hooly-gooly. Father can convince people of just about anything. I have this terrible vision of us going in together and coming out separately, you going to your car and me being dragged away by three men in white.”
“Nobody’s going to drag you away. Not while I’m around.”
The battered Volkswagen bug was an odd contrast to the ritzy Crowell homestead. It stood in front of the door like something a stray dog had dragged up and chewed ragged. The Mexican maid answered the door.
“Hi, Pilar,” Melissa said, striding in past the stunned woman. “I’ve come for my daughter. Go get her, please.” Mouth open, the maid didn’t know how to react. She gaped at Melissa, then at me, then Melissa, and finally turned to Muriel Crowell when she marched into the room.
Muriel Crowell spotted me first and zeroed in on me.
“You!”
“Good morning,” I said jovially.
“Pilar! Call the police!”
“Hello, Mother.”
“Melissa!” Though she had been standing beside me, incredibly this was the first time her mother had noticed her daughter. “Where have you been? We’ve been worried sick. You’ve kept us worried sick. Where were you?”
“I’ve come for Angel.”
Stupidly, her mother said, “Angel?”
“You know the one,” I said. “Blonde hair? About this tall.”
“You don’t have to talk to me like that.”
“Where is she?” Melissa asked.
Muriel Crowell organized her thoughts and attempted to take charge. “She’s only in the other room. Don’t get into a tizzy. We’ve been watching her for you.”
Melissa bolted from the room past her mother. Muriel Crowell gave me a jaundiced look of pure chagrin and said, “I suppose you’re responsible for this?”
“I’d like to think so.”
“Angus will have something to say to you.”
“I’m looking forward to it. I brought a pen. I’ll take notes.”
“Smart aleck. Do you know what you’re doing? Do you think she’s capable of raising a child?”
“Don’t you?”
“Of course not. Melissa is barely capable of taking care of herself.”
“Whose fault would that be?” I asked, eyeing Muriel Crowell. The question hit her like a spear, impaled her with the sheer force of its logic.
“We can raise the child,” she said feebly. From the other room, bubbling laughter erupted, mother and daughter, then playful shrieks as sharp and as shrill as the breaking of mirrors. Muriel Crowell spoke louder, straining to counter the happy sounds from the other room, as if to drown them out with her own strident and cheerless truths.
“Where’s Melissa been hiding? Angus has been worried sick. I suppose she ran off with some man?”
“Where is your husband?” I asked.
Muriel turned her eyes fearfully upon me. “Angus will get you for this. Angus will make you pay. Don’t think he won’t.”
“Pretty serious business,” I said. “Getting a mother back together with her daughter. Think they’ll put me in the clink?”
“Smart aleck!”
Peals of laughter erupted from the other room before Melissa came through the doorway carrying Angel in her arms, Angel’s tiny wan arms wrapped around her mother’s neck. Soberly, the blonde tot looked around at the grown-ups and spotted me.
“Mommy. Mommy. You got the nice man.”
Melissa looked at me and hugged Angel. “Yes. I’ve got him for a little while.” Then she turned to her mother. “Muriel, where’s Angus?”
“You’ve never called me anything but Mother before,” Muriel Crowell said, looking to me for some sort of social support. I grinned like an imbecile on his first pony ride.
“You’ve never been a mother. I’ll call you Muriel. Where’s Angus?”
“Your father’s going to blow his stack when he hears you talking this way. He’s going to blow sky-high.”
“That would be in character,” said Melissa. “Where is he? Out prospecting?”
“He took the Winnebago to Monroe. He needs a three-day weekend now and then. Your father works awfully hard. Harder than you’ll ever know.”
“Cut the bullshit…” said Melissa. Her mother’s face fell like a bum cake. “Honestly. He treats you worse than an old shoe and you talk about him like he’s a saint or something. You oughta have your head examined.” Mrs. Crowell looked around the room, finally turning on me.
“You!” she said. “If it weren’t for you, none of this would have happened.”
“Sure,” I said. ‘And I work parttime with the Easter Bunny striping eggs.” Angel giggled but cut it off when she read the mood in the room, displaying remarkable instincts for someone her age.
“I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when Angus hears about this,” Muriel Crowell warned, as we went out the front door. The maid shuddered in the corner, crossing herself repeatedly like a mechanical mannequin gone mad.
“Good-bye, Mother.”
“When Angus hears about this, you’re both going to be sorry you were ever born.” The maid nodded rapidly and crossed herself several more times. The last thing I saw through the closing door was her head bobbing -up and down. ?
Chapter Twenty-four
“WILL YOU COME TO MONROE WITH ME SO I CAN TALK TO my father?” Melissa asked timidly, leaning in and strapping Angel into a seat belt in the back seat. “Is that too much to ask?”
“I wouldn’t miss it for all the bullets in Texas.”
“It’s a long drive,” she added, twisting around and focusing her pale blues on me.
“If you’re trying to talk me out of it, tell you right now, I get car sick,” I said. She shrugged, unsure of my meaning, and unsure of herself. She didn’t know what she was trying to do. “Until you shake this thing, I’m yours. Today, tomorrow, next week. I’m here for the duration. Don’t doubt it.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Initially, because Kathy asked me. But I got caught up in it. I want to help you. I want to see Angel in her right place. And I have some selfish reasons.”
“Such as?”
“I want to find out who smacked your aunt with that ketchup bottle. I want to know who strangled your psychologist with her own brassiere. If I hang around long enough, I might get lucky.”
We drove to Ballard and dropped Angel off with a jubilant but nonetheless subdued Burton. The child was reluctant to give up her mother so soon after their reunion, but Melissa bribed her with the promise of a pack of gum when she returned. I had forgotten how uncomplicated a child’s world was.
Monroe was maybe an hour from Seattle, north and a bit east, nestled just under the foothills of the Cascades. It was a tiny town, famous locally for the prison on the south side of the village. It wasn’t until we were almost there that Melissa spoke.
“Kathy said you thought the two murders were connected. But how could they be?”
“For one thing, if you had done it,” I said, “that would connect them.”
“Me?” She started laughing. “I might kill myself. It never occurred to me that anybody would ever think I’d kill someone else.”
“Or Barton. You discount him too easily. I’ve seen people more mild-mannered than Burton kill. When the provocation becomes right, almost anybody can kill. There’s also your mother. She hated your aunt. Then there’s some hired muscle your father paid, a guy named Holder. Your friend Bledsoe might have had his fingers in it. Was he with you all the time during the past few days?”
“Rome? I don’t know where he was. I can’t even remember where I was moet of last week.”
“Or your father. He might have done it.”
The pretty blonde in her ponytail and trim blazer touched my arm and said, “Do you know why I have to speak to my father? Why Helen Gunther told me I had to confront him?”
I liked the
gentle feel of her hand on my arm. I liked it too much. I’ve got a notion.”
“What? What is it? What do you know?”
“I’d rather you told me.”
Melissa squirmed in her seat. “Would you think I was crazy if I said I saw my father kill somebody when I was a baby?
Maybe she was crazy. I glanced over at her. “No. Of course not.”
“Well, I did.”
“A baby? People don’t normally recall things that happened before they were two. How old were you?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know. I suppose I was two and a half. Three?”
“That would make it about twenty years ago, wouldn’t it?”
“Twenty-two years ago.”
She spoke rapidly, gulping her breath between sentences. The confession was a boulder rolling downhill now and she didn’t want to clam up until it was all the way down.
“I guess I was three. Daddy used to take me up poking around in the mines with him. He had a lot of friends in those days. We used to go up with all sorts of people. One time, we went up with this man. All I remember is that the man had a bottle and he was drinking. He was a big man, almost as big as my father. There was a lot of yelling. We were inside the mine. I don’t know which mine. Just a mine. The only light was a lantern and it was spooky. They fought. Daddy began socking the other man. Then he picked up a big piece of timber and hit him over the head with it. A lot of times. I was so terrified I wet myself.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“I’ve never forgotten that night.”
“Do you remember anything else about the struggle, or the man?”
“All I remember is the inside of the mine. It was near Christmas. I began having terrible nightmares. And every time I brought it up, or tried to, Daddy would yell at me. lie used to scream at me all the time. Thinking back on it, I don’t know which of us was the more terrified. Him, fearing that I might blab what I had seen, or me, thinking I really had imagined it all and afraid of what he would accuse me of next. For years, I thought I had imagined it.
“Daddy deliberately played games with me, trying to destroy my credibility. And he did. Oh, how he did. Even I used to wonder about myself. He was always forcing me into situations where I had to lie or take the consequences. I remember when I was about six, he used to leave candy lying around the house, tell me not to take it and then watch from the other room. Sometimes he’d let me take it, and sometimes he’d catch me. If he caught me, he always did it when we had company. It was only when I grew more mature, that I realized he did it all purposely.”
“Your father seems to be someone who always has to be in control.”
“He played psychological games with me the whole time I was growing up. When I was sixteen, he gave me a car for my birthday. One of those little European two-seater sports cars. Along with the keys, he handed me a list of rules. I could drive to school, but I was expected to be home twelve minutes after it let out. He actually drove from school and timed it so he would know how long it took. He would have had the maid time me. I knew he was going to be insufferable. I took the keys and threw them out into the sound. Outwardly, it was a generous gift. Actually, it was another way to catch me doing things wrong. His scheme was always to dangle something I wanted very badly in front of me, then tie so many rules to it there was no way I could obey them all. Of course, he got mileage out of my throwing the keys away, too. He was always telling everyone I had mental problems. And what made it worse was that nobody ever seemed to see my side of it. Inevitably, it became an all-out war.”
“What about your mother?”
“You’ve seen her. He owns her, lock, stock and barrel. Whatever Angus Crowell thinks, Muriel Crowell thinks.”
Staring straight ahead at the highway, the memories pulled her pale cheeks into long, sorry pouts. The look on her face made her seem three years old, the image of her daughter.
It was quite a bit longer before either of us broke the silence. Melissa directed me to drive through the town of Monroe and into the foothills. Before we cleared the burg, though, we had to stop for fuel. As I stood jawing with a gas jockey who couldn’t have been older than fifteen, Holder drove past on the main drag, heading in the opposite direction. He did not see us. Ile was driving a brand-new Toyota Celica. It looked like the sort of car that might belong to a girl friend. I had every reason to believe our destination was the same place he had just departed.
I tipped the gas jockey and drove away while he twisted his baseball cap sideways and stood gawking at the blonde in my passenger seat. He was in love, was trying to memorize the vision before it faded. I looked over at pretty Melissa sitting ramrod-stiff in the worn, faded Volkswagen seat.
“He owns old mining claims all over the Northwest,” she said, feeling my eyes on her. “He tramps all over the country on weekends. Mother thinks he prospects; but I don’t believe it. I think he’s just out catting.”
A side road diverted us north. After a few miles, Melissa told me to slow down while she scanned the woods to our left. It took three miles of slow hunting before she spotted the narrow dirt path that led off the two-lane highway.
Immediately after we turned into the overgrown path, a logging truck roared down the highway behind us, its trailing vacuum rocking the bug. It was the first vehicle we had seen in more than five minutes. I could not even remember how far back the last house had been Ten miles, maybe.
Melissa must have been reading my mind as she got out of the car and walked up the overgrown path toward a fork in the road. “It’s really in the boonies, huh?” she said.
“It seems like the ‘Leaving Seattle’ sign was only a minute ago.”
I got out and followed her to the fork. I was a city boy and I knew it.
“One of these winds down to the river,” said Melissa. “The other one goes up to the mine. I can’t remember which is which. I was only here a couple of times. Dad liked to come up by himself and I did my best not to get caught alone with him.”
It wasn’t difficult to tell which trail was wide enough to allow a Winnebago to pass. There were ruts in the uppermost trail and it had had the trees and high brush hacked away six months ago to accommodate something large and cumbersome. The tall, wet grass was bent over. Someone had driven it since the last rain. Judging by the condition of the packed soil, I would have to guess the last rain had been yesterday sometime, or maybe even two days ago, though the land undoubtedly remained soggy up here for weeks at a crack.
“That way,” said Melissa, spotting the same bowed and wet grasses I was looking at. “I think that’s the way to the mine shaft.”
“How far?”
“I don’t really remember. Quite a ways, I think.”
We got back into the car. Out of curiosity, I noted the distance on the odometer as we bumped along on the rutted trail. In several places we saw freshly sheared branches like broken bird wings high above the road where the Winnebago had been too wide for the path. We plowed through two separate places where it looked as if the motor home had bogged down. It was a bumpy 3.2 miles to a clearing beside the road. Melissa asked me to park in it. There was no motor home in sight. And no sign of her father.
“He used to camp right here. I guess he parks it up closer to the shaft now. It might be best if we walked the rest of the way.”
We got out and stretched our legs. The ground up here was higher, drier and sandier. The stands of trees had been thick since we’d left the highway and even though at least half of them were deciduous and stripped by the winter, I doubted if one could see more than a hundred feet off the road. Anything could have been out there watching us. Or anyone.
Around a bend, the trail opened up into a pasture about the size of an infield in a ballpark.
The Winnebago sat plunk in the center of the virgin dew-spotted grass. Angus Crowell was nowhere to be seen, off somewhere sorting butterflies. Melissa, who had been leading me up the road, stopped and turned to me. Her face had the blank,
drugged look rd seen two days ago when I’d first met her in Tacoma. For a moment I thought she was suffering a relapse, reverting to a doped-up tramp before my eyes. But she gritted her teeth and pushed on.
I scanned the motor home for signs of life. Nothing. The drapes were uniformly pulled closed, the doers all sealed. It might have been sitting two hours, or two months.
“He’s watching us,” said Melissa. As far as I could telland I was pretty good at that sort of thing nobody was in any sort of position to be watching anything.
“Don’t get paranoid,” I said.
“You don’t know him. He’s watching. I can feel it.”
We had climbed in elevation since leaving Seattle, but I could not guess how much. A saucer-shaped cloud hovered a few hundred feet over a mountain behind the clearing. At least an Easterner would call it a mountain. Native Westerners would term it a hill. It was steep and craggy and rigidly picturesque, and I imagined there was at least one man-sized hole drilled into its bowels. The mine.
I let Melissa rap on the rear door of the Winnebago. It was her gig. I was only the support unit. The more small things I let her handle, the more able she would be when it came to the big crunch.
Nobody answered the door. She knocked again, getting the same negative results. Melissa heeled around brusquely and scanned the woods and mountain behind us.
“He could be anywhere,” I said.
“No,” said Melissa, turning back to the Winnebago and rattling the door. “He’s right here.” She knocked a fourth time and a fifth. I began meandering around the clearing. Anybody observing the tightness in her neck and shoulders, anybody with half a gift for interpreta-tion would think Melissa had gone loopy. She had that awkward stiffness, the stiffness of the blind, the adult retarded, the crazed, the damned.
At the edge of the woods, I stumbled onto an ancient debris pile grown over by weeds. Embedded in the grass and dirt were old rusted pick heads, forgotten iron wheels and broken shovels. The mine probably hadn’t been active since the war, maybe even long before that. I wondered whether Crowell ever found traces of what he was looking for up here. I heard a noise behind me. The rear door to the Winnebago had been opened from the inside. By golly, Melissa had been right. He had been burrowed in there all along.
