Ray Elkins mystery - 02 - Color Tour

by Aaron Stander

  She turned left up Ray’s long, steep drive. Shooting him a quick glance she said, “You’re going to have fun plowing this.”

  42

  Sue helped Ray out of the car and tried to get him to sit in the wheelchair. He insisted on hobbling into his house on crutches. He was happy to be in his own place. As if on cue, the sun poured through the skylights above the kitchen, brightening the airy interior. She followed him with the wheelchair and finally settled him into it, carefully elevating the leg with the heavy cast.

  “Where did the table come from?” Ray asked, looking at a long, folding table covered with neat stacks of papers and folders standing next to the far wall.

  “It’s mine,” said Sue. “I bought it at a garage sale last year. I needed a place where I could organize materials. You don’t have enough flat surfaces, just that little table you eat at. That and your kitchen counter and I knew better than to stack anything there. I organize in piles, you organize in,” she paused momentarily, choosing her words carefully, “more non-linear ways. Like swirls, maybe.” She gave Ray a wry smile. “The exception is your kitchen, where everything has a place.”

  “Okay,” he said, glancing at the neatly organized materials on the aluminum table. “Tell me what I’m looking at.”

  “It’s just the next iteration of what I had set up in the office. Everything is in categories, starting with the murder scene, then everything we’ve collected on Allen and Dowd. Vedder is here,” she pointed to another stack. “Then there are print copies of the notes and related materials from each person we’ve interviewed. Also, the material from the Medford fire.”

  “What’s all this fanfold?” Ray asked, pointing to a stack of green and white computer paper near the end of the table.

  “That’s the output of plate numbers from Leiston’s security booth. The start date is three days before Ashleigh’s death and the end date is yesterday. The data has been exported to a spreadsheet. Using the videotapes from the security booth, Gary Zatanski had his men correct omissions and errors in the original log.”

  Ray fanned the tall stack of papers, useless information until plate numbers were connected to vehicles and drivers. “So, what’s happening with this?”

  “I’ve got Veitch working on this. Good thing we hired a geek deputy. He’s checking the accuracy of the faculty and staff list we got from Zatanski. Then he’s going to do a first run on those plates. We’ll see if anything interesting pops up. I’m having him organize this data with a timeline showing Ashleigh’s murder and the Medford fire. After he gets done with the first set of plates, he’ll broaden the analysis, looking at the other plate numbers, but then it gets real complicated. There are hundreds of additional numbers.”

  “When is this all going to be done?”

  “He should have the first piece completed this afternoon. The next part will take a lot of time. He’s got to retrieve the info on each plate number and then key into his database the vehicle type and owner.”

  “And we have no way of knowing who actually was driving the car,” Ray said.

  “There’s that,” answered Sue, giving him a knowing smile. “Sort of like going to the casino.”

  “But even there you hit occasionally.”

  “True,” she agreed. “Other than this plate thing, I’ve looked through everything several times. I’ve carefully reviewed the notes from each interview, the autopsy reports, and all the crime scene material. I keep expecting that something is going to jump off the page, that I’m going to make this gigantic cognitive leap and identify the killer.”

  Noticing that Ray was starting to nod off, she said, “You look like you need a nap.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “No, you’re almost asleep in the chair. We’ll get you in bed, and I’ll run out to find you something interesting for dinner.”

  43

  Ray was floating in a dream just below consciousness; it was an opium delusion. In waking moments he had been thinking about his dreams, how they differed as his system absorbed different opiates. The drugs took the edge off the pain and made it tolerable, but the relief came with a price. The drug dreams were bizarre, sometimes frightening, like a remote area of his brain had been opened, unleashing unknown demons. In the dream Ashleigh was in a kayak on his right. They were paddling toward South Manitou Island. He was listening to her, having difficulty hearing her over the din of the wind and waves, but catching her meaning from her tone. Her conversation was punctuated with laughter, which had a joyful, musical quality. Ray glanced over at her, her auburn hair highlighted by the sun.

  They neared the island and paddled along the steep rocky shore, looking for a place to land. They found a ribbon of sand in a protected cove and turned their boats toward the beach. Ray released his spray skirt, positioned his paddle on deck behind him, and prepared to pull himself out of the cockpit. As his bow hit the beach, he came out of the boat, sitting on the deck, one leg in the shallow water touching the bottom, the other resting in the boat.

  As he looked over at Ashleigh, the world went gray—they were cloaked in dense, cold miasma. As she disappeared from his view, he could hear the panic in her voice. He jumped from his kayak and moved in her direction, splashing through the shallow water, but he couldn’t find her. Ray stopped and listened, he could still hear her, there was fear in her voice, she was calling to him for help. He thought she said “father.” Then there was only silence. He stood helplessly, staring into the gloom.

  He woke with a start.

  “Didn’t mean to wake you,” said Sue, peering into his bedroom from the open door, amused by the pile of books on his nightstand—a worn copy of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, an early Michael Connelly mystery, a collection of Judith Minty’s poetry, Jim Harrison’s newest novel, and a book on Inuit kayaks. “I was checking on you.”

  He looked at his watch. “I didn’t plan on going to sleep; I was trying to read. Must be the drugs.”

  “The drugs, the trauma, the kind of non-sleep you get in the hospital where people are messing with your body at all hours of the day and night. As I remember them, Dr. Feldman’s instructions were to take it easy, keep your leg up, listen to some good music, read, and not think about work for several weeks.”

  “You did get my dinner?”

  “Yes,” she responded. “Portobello mushrooms with goat cheese and roasted red peppers on a freshly baked sourdough roll.”

  “And tea?”

  “Yes, chamomile with honey, lemon, and some chopped ginger. Michelle knows how you like it. Do you want me to bring you a tray, or do you want to sit at the table?”

  Ray sat up and slowly slid his legs over the side of the bed. “I’ve been here long enough, I’ll come to the table. Give me a few minutes.”

  By the time Ray emerged from his bedroom, Sue had the food set out on the table, a simple rectangle of solid black walnut supported by an elegant central base. She helped him into his chair and took the crutches.

  “What’s that?” he asked pointing to her plate.

  “That’s a cheeseburger with gorgonzola and bacon, cottage fries, and a Diet Coke. I made two stops.”

  Ray gave her a look and moved his head from side to side. “You won’t always have that load of hormones to protect you.”

  “But I do now, so I might as well enjoy it.”

  “Anything happen while I was unconscious?”

  “I’ve got the first run from the plate numbers.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  “Haven’t looked at them. It’s our first task to enjoy dinner; then we will look at plate numbers.”

  Ray watched Sue inhale her cheeseburger with great enthusiasm.

  “Is your sandwich okay?” she asked, noticing that Ray was picking at his food.

  “Nothing tastes quite right. I don’t know if it’s my sense of smell or taste—or both.”

  “You’ve been under anesthesia, and you’re on pain pills. It will take a while to wash all the chemicals out o
f your system.” She finished her dinner and waited patiently as Ray sipped his tea. “Are you done?” she finally asked.

  “Yes. I want to look through the material you brought.”

  “Ray, we can do this tomorrow,” said Sue as she rose to clear away the remains of dinner.

  “Let’s do it now.” Ray pulled himself up and stood in the background, rocking back and forth on his crutches as he watched her sort through the pile of folders on the aluminum table. She identified and removed two folders from the stack, and laid out the pages from each one sequentially.

  The photo of Ashleigh and her mother slid out of one of the other folders. Ray picked it up and looked at it carefully. He quietly put it back in the folder, hoping that Sue wouldn’t comment. Although they were close friends and colleagues, he wasn’t ready to talk to her about this. Not yet.

  “This is what we have,” she said, turning toward Ray. “Here,” she pointed to six sheets on the left, “are the plate numbers recorded from the day and evening that Ashleigh and David were killed. In this column you’ll see the name of the person to whom the vehicle is titled.”

  Ray moved to her side. He pulled a pair of reading glasses from the pocket of his robe and looked at the columns of fine print. “Only a few of these are identified by owner.”

  “Remember, I told you that we’re starting with Leiston employees first, then adding the others later.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  “I just had a few minutes to skim through these. Look at the names. Most of these are staff people who are coming to or leaving work. Remember, there were lots of parents visiting and a soccer game that Saturday, which probably accounts for the enormous number of unidentified plates. As you can see, this will take time, and I’m not sure it will yield anything.”

  “And this other pile?”

  “That’s from the night of the Medford fire. Six in the evening till six in the morning.”

  They both scrutinized the two sheets. “Lot of action between seven and seven-thirty,” said Sue.

  “Probably the kitchen staff was going home,” said Ray. He pointed to a name, “Who’s that?”

  Sue ran her finger down a list of names. “That’s McAndless, the English teacher. Left at nine, back at nine forty-five. Looks like a milk run.” Sue scanned the bottom of the list. “The Warrington’s Toyota left the school about… ”

  Ray, following her finger, completed her sentence, “Five in the morning.”

  “When did it return?” Sue asked

  “Don’t see it,” said Ray.

  “No, it’s not there,” she agreed. She ran a pencil carefully down the page.

  “But Warrington was at the fire. I saw him, I talked with him. I wonder where he was going at that time?”

  “Maybe it was his wife. That’s something I’ll follow up on tomorrow,” Sue replied.

  44

  A security detail under Sue’s direction watched the exterior of Ray’s house; Sue also organized Ray’s colleagues and friends to be around the first few days after he came home from the hospital. Nora Jennings, now ensconced in the village with her friend Dottie, was two minutes from his hilltop home. With her dogs Falstaff and Prince Hal in tow, Nora was a frequent visitor in the late morning and early afternoon. Her main responsibility was to see to his lunch. A volunteer at the village library, Nora filled part of her time organizing and shelving Ray’s large collection of books, many still in boxes from his move the previous summer.

  Ray was drinking tea in the late morning when Nora came to his side with a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses.“Ray,” she said in a tentative tone as she placed the book in front of him, “This photo fell out when I was shelving this book. I hope it wasn’t being used as a bookmark.”

  Ray took the photo from her hand and looked at it carefully. The color was faded, like a half-forgotten dream, but the subject of the photo and the place were instantly recognizable. A young woman in a black two-piece bathing suit was in profile, the expanse of Lake Michigan and the Empire dune the backdrop. He remembered the day, he remembered walking the beach with her, their picnic on a ridge overlooking Otter Creek. Holding the photo closer, he looked at her face for a long time. A tremor ran through his body, he could hardly breathe. He had first seen Allison’s photo when he and Sue searched Ashleigh’s apartment. That photo was of a slightly older Allison, a woman with an almost adolescent child. The photo in his hand was of the person he had known for a few fleeting days one August.

  “Are you okay, Ray?” Nora asked, sensing that something was horribly wrong, fearing that he was having a stroke or a heart attack.

  “Yes,” he finally responded.

  “Can I get you something, some more tea, perhaps?” “I’m fine,” he responded in a thin voice.

  “May I?” she asked, lifting the photo from his hand and slipping her glasses on. “I remember her, she was a friend of our daughter.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “Oh, Ray, that was a long time ago. She was one of Jeannie’s up north friends, not someone from home.” She paused a long moment. “Her last name was, let me think, Ashton. Yes, Ashton. I met her mother a few times at parties. She was a niece of Mrs. Howard; they stayed with her. They lived out west somewhere, Oregon or Washington.

  “Her name?”

  “Which one, the mother or the daughter?”

  “The daughter?”

  “Her first name, she went by a nickname, something with a “y” ending. Buffy or Taffy or… ”

  “Allie,” suggested Ray.

  “Allie, yes, that’s it. Her given name would have probably been Allison or Alicia, maybe Alice. But I can’t remember anyone ever calling her anything but Allie. The picture, Ray, why do you have her picture?”

  Ray hesitated as he considered what he wanted to divulge. “I met her one summer. We dated for a few weeks. She was in graduate school at Berkeley. She gave me that book, and I must have put her picture there. But that was so many years ago.”

  “You gave me start a moment ago,” Nora said. “You looked so strange.”

  “It’s the medicine,” said Ray. “It makes me feel queasy.”

  While Ray had welcomed Nora’s company, now he wanted her gone. He needed some time to think, to gather things, to search for answers. He had been blocking his memories of Allison, not wanting to deal with the emotions the memories might evoke.

  “Nora, I’m exhausted. Maybe you and the guys could leave me for a while. It’s hard for me to sleep when anyone is here.”

  “Are you sure you are okay?”

  “Yes. I couldn’t sleep last night, and I think I’ve finally crashed.”

  “How about lunch, Ray? It’s almost time. I’ve brought fixings for Welsh rarebit and a Caesar salad.”

  “Maybe if you came back in a couple of hours.”

  “My guys were hoping for leftovers, but we’ll do that.”

  Ray waited a few minutes after Nora left, then rolled his wheelchair into the third bedroom. One side of the floor was littered with boxes containing personal things—notes, correspondence, and memorabilia—from the last thirty years, most untouched since the move. As he looked at the clutter he remembered there was no apparent order. The more recent accumulations were stored in computer paper boxes, regular shapes and sizes, the tops neatly sealed with transparent packing tape. The things from his twenties were in a motley collection of cardboard containers, deepening shades of brown suggesting relative antiquity.

  Handicapped by his lack of mobility, Ray struggled to see the contents of the boxes from the confines of his wheelchair. Finally, in frustration, he set the brakes on the chair and carefully slid to the floor. Scooting in a crayfish-like manner, dragging the heavy cast behind, he moved from box to box, tearing open the flaps, leafing through the detritus of decades long past: graduate school notes, snapshots, brochures, prints, and maps from his travels around Europe and England.

  Finally, he found what he was looking for, a small paper carton. He car
efully removed the contents: letters and cards from the years he served in the military and later when he was in graduate school. He laid these out on the floor around him, stopping to examine and read some of them. Then it surfaced, a small envelope addressed in a delicate hand. There was no return address, just a faded California postmark.

  He removed a single page of stationery.

  Dear Ray, Thank you for a very special time. Perhaps we will meet again in the future. Enjoy your last year in Europe. Love, Allison Ray piled the rest of the letters and cards in the box. He put the letter back in the envelope and slid it into the pocket of his robe. He struggled into the wheelchair. Once back in the kitchen, he abandoned the chair for a pair of crutches. From Sue’s carefully arranged table of documents, he retrieved a copy of Ashleigh Allen’s birth certificate. Ray checked the mother’s name, Allison Ashton. “Allison,” he said softly. No father was listed.

  Ray hobbled into his study and slipped into the chair next to his computer, waited impatiently for the computer to boot, then opened a calendar program. He clicked on the “view date” icon, entered Ashleigh’s birth date, and printed the calendar for that month and the preceding 10 months. He carried the papers to the kitchen and laid them out on the counter.

  Ray looked at the date of the postmark, September 4, a few weeks after she had left, and did the math. He closed his eyes and let the memories come streaming back.

  They had met the third week of August on the beach. He was home from Europe, on a month-long furlough, before he went back to serve the last year of his enlistment. Through an unexplained twist of fate, he had been assigned to a military police unit in Germany; most of the people he had trained with had gone to Vietnam.

  Allison told him she was visiting relatives in the area. Ray remembered her deep tan, rich blue eyes, and the swirl of her long auburn hair. When he first met her, there was an unopened copy of Joyce’s Ulysses on the sand next to her towel. He used his limited knowledge of Joyce as a gambit to start a conversation. He learned that she was staying with her aunt and that she had gone to Sarah Lawrence and was now a graduate student in English at Berkeley.