Cyanide Wells

by Marcia Muller

  “Sev Quill knows I’m Matt Lindstrom.”

  “I asked him not to tell anyone, and he won’t. Where’d you come up with your alias, anyhow?”

  “Johnny Crowe’s the deckhand I mentioned. I figured if anybody here wanted to check on whether such a person used to live in Port Regis, he’s in the directory. And he said he’d cover, claim to be subletting his place from me.”

  “This Millie Bertram, your alleged publisher—who’s she?”

  “Owner of the Port Regis Hotel.”

  “She was well coached.”

  He was as clever and devious in his own way as Ard was in hers. And Carly herself had her moments. Perhaps together she and Lindstrom could outwit her missing partner.

  “Okay, Matt,” she said, “grab a cup of coffee and let’s get started on Ard’s papers.”

  Saturday, May 11, 2002

  She stood naked on the threshold of the gold-and-cream ballroom, and one by one the beautiful, formally attired people turned to stare. Silence fell, punctuated only by the tinkling of the crystal chandeliers. She turned to flee, but the doors had become a solid wall, barring exit. As she searched frantically for a way out, a woman behind her said, “She is not one of us,” and a man agreed, “Definitely not one of us.” Then the others began chanting, “Not one of us, not one of us—”

  Carly jerked up from where she was slumped on the wide armrest of the chair. Her shoulder throbbed, and her neck was stiff. She blinked, looked around, saw sunlight streaming through the windows of Ard’s office. Looked down and saw she was swaddled in one of the afghans from the living room. Her reading glasses hung over one ear.

  The dream…

  She hadn’t had it in more than two decades, since she willfully banished it during her senior year in college. But now it was back in vivid detail, reminding her of her humiliation…

  Don’t go there. Not today. You have to stay focused.

  Focused on what?

  Oh…

  The events of the previous night returned to her in a painful rush of memory. She groaned, put her hands to her face, winced at the tenderness in her neck. After a moment she looked around, saw a note propped on the keyboard of Ard’s computer, extricated herself from the afghan, and went to read it.

  Carly:

  I’ve finished the manuscript and gone to fix my landlady’s leaky pipe. (I really do fix stuff in exchange for cheap rent!) Didn’t want to wake you. I’ll call or come by as soon as I can. “Johnny”

  She crumpled the note and tossed it in the wastebasket, anchored her glasses atop her head, and went to the kitchen for coffee. The maker was still on, and the dregs of the carafe she’d brewed last night had distilled to sludge. She ran water into it and, while it soaked, got out the cleaning supplies that she’d need to remove the evidence of Ard’s latest betrayal.

  An hour later—after purging the hallway, taking a quick shower, and dressing—she was back in Ard’s office looking for the manuscript Crowe had been reading while she’d examined the legal pads and index cards full of notes. It was neatly stacked in a tray on the workstation. When she picked it up, its slenderness surprised her, and she flipped to the last page, numbered 130. Less than half the amount of pages Ard had led her to believe she’d written, and even at twice that number she’d’ve had trouble meeting her July first deadline.

  At what page had Ard told her she’d rather she didn’t read any more until the book was done? One hundred, and that had been over six months ago. Yet nearly every night she proofed her day’s work after dinner. Where had those pages gone?

  Carly moved to the file cabinet and scanned the disks in their holder: financial records, copies of stories going back to when she worked for the paper, correspondence, idea files—but nothing beyond page 130 on the manuscript, working title Cyanide Wells. Strange. Ard was paranoid about losing her work in case of a crash; she put it on disk every day.

  My God, has she been sitting here for six months, staring at a blank screen? Proofing the same pages night after night? Are those one hundred thirty pages all she has to show for two years’ efforts? Granted, she had to do a lot of research, but…

  Ard must’ve been hopelessly blocked and afraid to admit it. But why? Because she was afraid of botching her first book—one that she considered a memorial to their murdered friends? Because it meant so much to her? What was it she’d said a few weeks ago?

  “Reality’s starting to interfere with the writing. I have nightmares about that morning.”

  And Carly had replied, somewhat unsympathetically, “You’re bound to come face-to-face with reality. The book’s a fact-based account.”

  Ard had given her a look whose meaning she couldn’t decipher and had gone back to proofing what she claimed was the current batch of pages.

  Now Carly returned to the armchair and located the stack of legal pads containing Ard’s handwritten notes. Some had slipped to the floor; another was mashed down the side between the cushion and the arm. She smoothed out its rumpled pages and—

  “Carly?”

  She started, looked around. Lindstrom, back from the plumbing wars.

  “Sorry for just walking in on you,” he said. “I left the door unlocked in case you were still asleep when I got back. Hope that was okay.”

  “That’s fine. We always left our doors unlocked before Ronnie Talbot and Deke Rutherford were killed. Our friends felt free to just walk in.”

  “But that changed.”

  “Yeah, it did. Everything changed.”

  “In what way?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “I do.”

  “Why? Ard’s your ex-wife; I’d assume it would be painful to hear about her new life, particularly because…”

  “Because she made that new life with a woman?”

  She nodded.

  He went over to the computer, examined the screen saver. “Roses,” he said, “she’s always loved them.”

  Biding his time, because whatever he wants to say has to be said just right, or we’ll lose the connection that’s growing between us. And he wants that connection because he’s still unsatisfied with what he’s found out about Ard’s disappearance.

  He turned the desk chair around, sat facing her. “You know, I was thinking about her new life the whole time I worked on the plumbing. And I concluded that Ardis Coleman is no longer Gwen Lindstrom. She’s someone else entirely, the evolution of a woman I once loved but probably didn’t know. In a sense we reinvent the people we love to our own specifications, and that’s what I did with Gwen.”

  “Then why’re you here now? Having realized that, you could’ve walked away.”

  “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s because I like you. Or I feel for your little girl. And even though I didn’t know Gwen, I loved her very much. I suppose I care about the woman she became.”

  “Or maybe you still want that confrontation. To tell her what a despicable woman she is.”

  He shook his head. “Doesn’t seem important now. The woman you describe is troubled, needs help. It occurred to me while reading her manuscript that what she did yesterday may be less related to me than to a disturbance brought on by having to relive your friends’ murders. Maybe if you tell me more about the circumstances surrounding them, we can figure out what’s happening with her.”

  A good man. A kind, thoughtful man. Possibly better than his Gwen, my Ardis, deserved.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Where would you like me to begin?”

  “Wherever you care to.”

  “Well, Ronnie and Deke were closer to Ard than me, although we were friends, too. Deke was a painter, very innovative and talented. Ard met him when she interviewed him about a big show he was having at a San Francisco gallery. Ronnie inherited the mill before he met Deke, and put its management into Gar Payne’s hands, claiming he didn’t have a good head for business, but I think that was just an excuse to get out, because a few years later he took over as Deke’s manager and did
a great job. He dealt with the galleries, arranged for the shipping of the canvases, handled their finances and investments.”

  “Gar Payne—that’s the mayor?”

  “Right. The mayor’s job is only part-time. Of course, when Ronnie sold the mill, Gar had to go back to trying to peddle the unsold lots in the Meadows. As you witnessed on Thursday, he’s been cranky ever since.”

  “Is he just a salesman there or the developer?”

  “The developer, along with a partner, Milt Rawson. Only about half the lots have been sold in the ten years since they bought and subdivided the land, and there’ve been problems with the homeowners’ association over how the place should be run.” Lindstrom gave her a questioning look, and she added, “Don’t ask. The Meadows is a hotbed of petty intrigue. Too many affluent people with too much time on their hands. But why’re you so interested in Payne?”

  “When the two of you were arguing at the paper, I recognized his voice. He’s the man who made an anonymous phone call to me and told me where to find Gwen.”

  “Gar? Why would he do that? And how did he know about you in the first place?”

  “That’s what I’ve wondered. Is it common knowledge that Ardis was married before she came here?”

  “Only her close friends are aware of that, and most of them don’t know your name.”

  “And Payne’s not one of those friends?”

  “Hardly.”

  “Then how…? Well, no use speculating on it now. You were telling me about Ronnie and Deke.”

  “Right. Ard hit it off with both of them, and pretty soon they were in and out of here all the time, as we were at their house near the Knob.”

  “I thought the Knob was in the Eel River National Forest.”

  “It is. Ronnie and Deke’s house backs up on the forest—very secluded, on nearly a hundred acres that Ronnie inherited from his father.”

  “Ardis’s newspaper accounts made the two of them sound like special people.”

  “They were.” She pictured Ronnie delicately removing a painful foxtail from the nose of Gracie the cat. Deke, doing his campy Toulouse-Lautrec impersonation. Ronnie, picking up and comforting Natalie after she took a tumble from the pony he kept for the enjoyment of friends’ children. Deke, producing with a flourish his “world infamous” chorizo enchiladas. Ronnie, in a ridiculous pink bunny suit at their annual Easter egg hunt. Deke, clumping the seven miles from his house to theirs on snowshoes to bring them a sackful of candles and emergency rations during an unusually severe winter storm.

  She said, “They were caring. Loyal. They’d go out of their way to help a friend—or a stranger. In all the time I knew them, I never heard them exchange a harsh word.” She paused. “Of course, we all know appearances can be deceiving. Ard and I have never exchanged a harsh word in public, but at home they fly.”

  Lindstrom seemed to prefer to let the comment slip by. He said, “Okay, the murders. I’ve read both the newspaper accounts and the account in Ardis’s manuscript. They’re quite different.”

  “Well, the facts are the same, but the newspaper accounts are controlled; she let her professionalism take over. But she deliberately made the book’s version emotional. Too much so, in my opinion. I suspect she was working something out through the writing.”

  The morning she discovered their friends’ bodies, Ard had called her, gasping for breath, her words practically unintelligible. Carly wouldn’t have been able to figure out where she was, except she’d mentioned at breakfast that she planned to stop by to deliver a load of the zucchini she’d overplanted. “Even if Deke and Ronnie aren’t crazy about the stuff, I’d rather share the bounty with friends than be forced to sneak around leaving it in strangers’ parked cars and mailboxes,” she’d joked.

  When Carly arrived at the spacious redwood-and-glass home in the shadow of the Knob, she found Ard lying on the front lawn beside a pool of vomit. Ard was more coherent than before, but her words were punctuated by sobs and dry heaves. “The house was…too quiet. It felt…weird. I called out to them, then…went looking. They’re in the bedroom, both shot in the head, and the blood…”

  Carly went inside, verified what Ard had told her, and—when her hands stopped trembling enough to dial—called the sheriff’s department.

  By the time the first deputies arrived, however, Ard was on her feet and had pulled herself together. When they emerged from the house, grim-faced and shaken, she had her notebook and tape recorder in hand and set about covering the biggest story in the history of the Soledad Spectrum. Carly watched in awe; she’d always been aware of a core of strength in her partner, but Ard’s erratic behavior and emotionalism usually eclipsed it. That day Ard proved the often-cited principle that extreme circumstances often force a person to call upon the better side of his or her nature.

  “Carly?” Lindstrom said.

  “Oh. Just remembering. Anyway, after that day everything changed. The gay and lesbian communities here had always kept a low profile, but suddenly we felt targeted. Those of us who never locked our doors installed deadbolts and alarms. We were even more circumspect than usual in public places. Our hetero friends felt the need to shield us. I even found I was self-censoring my editorials about the crime. The only bright light was Ard, who’d been the most traumatized by the killings. She wanted our readers to understand Ronnie and Deke’s situation, the situation of every gay person in this county. And she illuminated it beautifully in her stories, by making the reader see the two of them as human beings rather than just gay victims.”

  “My landlady says she’s ‘no fan of faggots,’ but that the series gave her some understanding of their problems.”

  “Well, that’s progress of a small sort, isn’t it?”

  “I guess. How did the paper winning the Pulitzer affect things?”

  “Well, the prize brought a lot of attention to the county and made some people proud. But it pissed off the small-minded folk who thought it branded the place as a hotbed of homosexuality. And the gay community still locks its deadbolts and sets its alarms.”

  “Is it common knowledge you and Ardis are partners?”

  “You can’t hide something like that in a place like this.”

  “People sure hid it from me. The staff members at the paper brushed off my inquiries about her, and Sev Quill cited your dictum that employees’ professional and personal lives are to be kept separate.”

  She smiled. “Well, sure. That’s because of the memo from me that they all found on their desks the morning you started work. From the first I felt something wasn’t quite right with you, so I warned them to be on their guard. Even after I spoke with your Millie Bertram I had my reservations.”

  “And here I thought I was such a good actor.”

  “Well, you aren’t all that bad. And you’re good-looking, even if you do seem to be having a permanent bad-hair day.”

  Carly customarily worked in her office at the paper on Saturday afternoons, and she decided, in the interest of keeping Ard’s flight a secret, that today should be no different. She and Lindstrom could continue their conversation there behind a closed door, so she told him to follow her into town.

  When she was passing the Mercantile, however, her plan abruptly derailed. A crowd clustered around the old well in the park across the street, and two men were leaning over its high stone wall. Her newswoman’s instincts kicked in, and she pulled her truck to the curb. Lindstrom pulled in behind her. Without waiting for him, she hurried across the street and into the park, asked a man on the fringes of the group what was going on.

  “Looks like some kid’s fallen into the well and drowned.”

  Natalie!

  The response was irrational because by now Natalie was probably far away from here, and there wasn’t enough water in the well to drown a mouse. Still, adrenaline coursed through her as she pushed forward. One of the men at the well straightened and turned. Timothy Mortimer, an old drunk who frequented the park’s benches. She recognized the other m
an by the green-and-blue wool stocking cap whose tassled tip hung over his face as he stared downward: a shabbily dressed newcomer who had moved into the town eyesore, the Golden State Hotel, a few weeks ago. He’d taken to hanging out with Timothy, who also lived there.

  Now Timothy’s red, bleary eyes focused on her. “You all right, Ms. McGuire?”

  “What’s happened here?”

  “Looks like there’s a dead kid in the well. Me and Cappy’re tryin’ to—”

  “Let me look,” Lindstrom said. He shouldered Timothy aside and leaned over the wall. The man called Cappy straightened and glared at him.

  “That’s not a child down there,” Lindstrom said, his voice echoing. “It’s a backpack. Green, I think.”

  Like Nat’s backpack. Why…?

  Lindstrom turned, and his eyes met hers. She nodded slightly. He frowned, unsure of her meaning, but said, “If somebody’s got a heavy rope, I can get the pack out.”

  “There’s one in my van.” Will Begley, owner of the Mercantile, said.

  Matt peered up at the peaked roof that sheltered the well. There was, Carly knew, an iron bar anchored between its supports, which was once used to lower and raise a bucket. He reached up, tested it, then came over to her.

  In a low voice he asked, “What is it?”

  “Natalie’s backpack is green with purple trim.”

  “I see. Well, if this one is hers, you’ve got to tell the sheriff’s deputies.”

  “But then I’ll have to tell them what Ard did. And that I destroyed the evidence of it. I don’t know why she would’ve put the pack in the well, but I sense it’s part of a plan.”

  He considered, eyes moving from side to side. “Okay, I’ll deal with it.”

  Will Begley returned with the rope, helped Lindstrom secure it to the bar, held it fast as he climbed down the thirty-some feet to the well’s bottom. He was there some time before he climbed back up and heaved the pack over the wall. Carly knelt to examine it.