Down in the Valley (Vic Daniel Series)

by David Pierce

  After a while she woke up and produced some peanut-butter and honey sandwiches from her pack and we ate those. Then she produced a deck of cards and we played gin on the little table that comes down from the back of the seat in front. Can you believe the poor thing had never heard of the technique of fishing for a card that you needed, like throwing a ten of spades you didn't need, trying to lure the ten of hearts out of her, which you did need? Pathetic. True, she beat me two games out of three, but hell, anyone can win if they get the cards. Then, I don't know, maybe it was the train, trains are not only conducive to musings but can also invite or allow confidences much like candlelight does. Or perhaps it was being away for a while in a temporary limbo, like on a ship. She was trying to remember some boring card trick someone had once taught her and the cards spilled all over our laps for the umpteenth time and I tickled her, accidentally, I can assure you, picking them up.

  'You know, sometimes you're almost human,' she said. 'But the rest of the time, forget it. What's your problem, anyway, aside from being huge? Me, I was a bed wetter.'

  'Well, I wasn't,' I said. 'I haven't wet a bed in months.' Then, to my surprise, I found myself telling her about it, or part of it, anyway, and I never tell anyone anything. It must have been the train.

  I told her that one Saturday night when I was sixteen and Tony was fourteen, we were living in Davenport then, I'd come home from a movie and found Tony behind the wheel of a strange car right in front of our house. He was drunk as a skunk. He had the car door open and was throwing up in the street. I was the older brother, see, the bad one. He was the younger brother, the good one. Although I didn't want to believe it I guess I knew by then that Pop was dying, he died later that year from the type of emphysema you get from handling asbestos board all your life although they didn't know what it was then.

  'Hey, they probably didn't even know what germs were yet when you were a kid,' Sara said.

  'Me and Pop didn't get on too well. I was a goof-off at school and a smart-ass at home, when I could get away with it. Tony got the good marks. Pop liked him. I got Tony up the stairs and into bed without anyone seeing us and figured I'd better move the jalopy he'd stolen as it wouldn't be too smart leaving it right in front of our house. I'd just gotten it started up when the cops came. So what was I going to do? Tell them Tony had been joyriding, not me? I shut up, which is what you should do once in a while instead of making uncalled-for jokes about my advanced years. I shut up. It turned out Tony had hit someone, some half-blind old lady, and put her in the hospital. I got sent for two years to a farm down south near Springfield that was part of the juvenile reform system. If you ever should want to know anything at all about weeding raspberry bushes, ask me. Or hoeing melons.'

  'OK,' she said. 'How do you hoe a melon?'

  'The hard way,' I said. 'With a hoe that's too short for you. Ah, what the hell, it was all a long time ago, I don't know why it still matters.'

  'Me too,' she said. 'It was just as long ago for me and it still matters. So then what happened? Come on, come on.' She dug her knuckles in my arm a couple of times. I pretended it hurt.

  'Ouch!' I said. 'Cut it out. They got me a job, what do you think happened? I was on probation for a year, I sorted mail. Then I got a job as a bouncer at a rock club, or what passed for a rock club in Davenport.'

  'Bet you were a good one,' she said. 'Being big and dumb.'

  'Adequate,' I said. 'Then after a while my goody-goody brother takes an exam and becomes a police cadet. No problem, top of his class and all that. Then after a while I get offered a more or less respectable job as a sort of chauffeur – bodyguard for this kid who used to sing at the club but had started to make it; he was pretty good, too, but I had to be licensed to get insured so I put the squeeze on Tony to pull my sheet so I could get legal again. Then after a while I hit this Hell's Angel monster during a riot at some dump in Baton Rouge, I hit him with his own chain and he fell off the stage and hit his head and was in a coma and when he came to his lawyer claimed he'd suffered brain damage and I claimed he never had enough brains in the first place to damage and I got three years this time in the Louisiana penal system. They didn't have any raspberry bushes or melons but that's about all I can say for it. Course when I got out the employment agencies weren't exactly clamoring for my services so I started working repos with Charlie the Fish. You know that thing that cops do when they question someone, you see it in the movies all the time, one guy plays the good guy and his partner the bad guy, Mutt and Jeff they call it in Chicago, well me and Charlie had our own system. I played the bad guy and he played the worse.'

  'Then what?'

  'Then I came to California and lived happily ever after.'

  'Want a Coke?' she said. 'My treat.' She went off to get them. At train prices I figured that would leave her with about twenty cents out of her almost ten dollars. Serve her right. I used the Coke to wash down a Demerol, as my leg was starting to act up. Then I took a nap.

  'Hang in there, kid,' I told her just before I dropped off. 'You're doing good so far, considering.' She slurped the last of her Coke as noisily as possible, a nuisance to the bitter end.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  We weren't far out of Modesto, Sheriff Gutes' old manor, when Sara started getting jittery again. She made me go over the whole conversation with Mrs Lillie and became even more convinced she was her real mom. I still wasn't sure but I didn't think so.

  'But don't they always do that?' she said, shaking my arm. I donm't know when she'd decided the best use for me was a walking punching bag. 'I mean, a woman goes to the doctor, "I have this friend who's in trouble," she says, but it's her really, isn't it? I mean I understand if she wants to get a look at me first to see I'm not a total freak.' I didn't bother saying (a) Mrs Lillie didn't want a look at her and (b) she was a total freak. So I looked out the window instead to see if there were any cows or horses to count. There weren't so I counted illegal workers in the tomato fields instead, there were plenty of those.

  'They grew a lot of poppies around here til the turn of the century, did you know that?' an old geezer in the seat across the aisle from me said.

  'No,' I said.

  'And eucalyptus,' he said. 'Know what they used them for?'

  'Feeding silkworms?'

  'Railroad ties,' said the old-timer. After a moment he added, 'Hunt's. Hunt's owns all them tomatoes. Know what he uses them for?'

  'Yes,' I said. 'Watery catsup.'

  We changed over in Stockton to an air-conditioned (like my office was soon to be) bus and shortly thereafter were heading north up the Interstate again. My ward alternated between moods of depression and bursts of energy. During one of the latter she wanted to talk about why a mother would ever give her child up, let alone dump it somewhere like a dead cat in a bag. She wondered where her name came from, was there a tag on her bootie saying, this is Sara, please care for her and love her? I did see her problem; it wouldn't make it any easier to get together with her mom whoever she was if Mom was still riddled with guilt and Daughter furious with blame. I told her about Timmy's mom – a young girl, liked a good time, had a mentally defective child, no husband to help, what would have happened if she hadn't taken off and left Timmy with her friend, probably an institution. Did Sara really imagine all mothers gave up their children for selfish reasons, surely some of them at least must be thinking of the child, too, even putting the child first. Little Sara brightened at this line of reasoning; all in all she was going pretty good for an airhead, and the occasional toot of weed she snuck in the washroom that she thought I was too square to notice didn't seem to hurt either. I was only surprised she didn't roll up right there in her window seat and offer the old geezer across the aisle a bit or pass the roach back to the couple behind us who spent the whole trip loudly playing Yatzie.

  Sacramento is only about fifty miles from Stockton so we weren't on the bus long; it was coming up to noon when we found ourselves outside the bus station in the old, downtown area of t
he state capital. We weren't expected at Mrs Lillie's until later so we took a stroll, saw the newly restored legislature in all its finery, sat in the adjoining park for a while, watched the winos at their sad play, had some lunch, Sara surprisingly eating twice as much as me and you know I don't stint myself when the dinner bell rings, then strolled back near the station where I'd spotted a car rental agency.

  Davis is a smallish town some fifteen miles west of Sacramento out Highway 80. It would be even smaller if the University of California–Davis, with its well-known vet school, wasn't situated there. We turned off 80 and found Chestnut Drive by asking directions of one of the millions of cyclists who seemed to have their own private bike lane on every street in town, it looked like rush hour in Canton. We found Mrs Lillie's house, a modest affair with an avocado tree in the front yard. Across the wide street a large, empty park waited in the noonday sun for mad dogs or Englishmen.

  I parked in front of the house and we sat there a minute getting our nerves up.

  'I'm gonna puke,' Sara said.

  'Don't give me that shit,' I said kindly. 'By the way, I've seen something highly suspicious.'

  'What?'

  'There are no chestnut trees on Chestnut Drive.'

  'I'm still gonna puke,' she said.

  'Take a deep breath instead.'

  'Do I look OK?' She poked at her multicolored mop and straightened her sun visor.

  'Terrific,' I said. I licked one finger and ran it nervously over my arched eyebrows. 'How about me?'

  'I'm scared, Vic' She grabbed my arm with both her hands.

  'I knew you'd chicken out,' I said. 'That's why I didn't want to bring you.'

  'Up your ass, buster,' she said, clambering out of the car. I hadn't even bothered trying to talk her into waiting outside for me, to have come all that way and be so close and to be made to wait was too mean even for me. So I got out and followed her up the flagstone path by the driveway. She started out confidently enough but then slowed up and stopped. I took her hand and pulled her the last bit.

  'Don't forget, act ladylike,' I whispered to her and received a small grin in return.

  The door was opened just as we got to it by a pleasant-looking woman in a nurse's uniform. She was frowning with worry. Sara was squeezing my hand and staring down at her boots, she couldn't bear to look.

  'Sara?' the woman said. 'Sara?' Sara snuck a look at her. 'I'm Doris Lillie, I was a friend of your mother. God almighty, you look just like her.'

  Mrs Lillie's eyes began to water. Before we all broke into tears out there in the yard, I said, 'Should we come in, Mrs Lillie? I'm Victor Daniel, the large but kindly investigator who you telephoned.'

  She apologized and bustled us in. I didn't like it. What I didn't like was Mrs Lillie saying, 'I was a friend of your mother.' I know it could have meant she had been a friend at one time and they just weren't friendly anymore but it more likely meant something else.

  Mrs Lillie led us down a hall past two bedrooms and a bathroom to the small, crowded sitting room at the back of the house. Through the picture window I could see well-tended rows of beans, carrots, onions and lettuce and a row of my old favorite, gone but not forgotten, raspberry bushes. Sara did well, she kept herself together until we were sitting down on what looked like a do-it-yourself sofa, then she put it to Mrs Lillie.

  'Where is my mother, please?'

  Mrs Lillie looked at me for help; I didn't have any.

  'She's dead, dear,' she told the girl gently. 'I'm terribly sorry.'

  Sara burst into tears. I pulled her into my shoulder, I mean there are times you just don't fuss about what wet mascara will do to almost new suede.

  'I knew it,' she said, her voice muffled. 'I knew it.'

  'Sure you did.'

  'I did! I knew it all along! Or else she would have gotten in touch with me.'

  'Sure she would have, babe.' I held her skinny frame until her tears shuddered to a stop, then Mrs Lillie took her off to wash her face and I got up to sneer out of the window at the raspberries. Be damned if I didn't see a row of melons too. Then I sneered at a large, framed photograph that shared a side table with a rubber plant and a silver dish full of mints, an expensive studio shot complete with back lighting of a handsome glamor boy in a naval lieutenant's uniform. Then I stole a mint and, as there were still noises coming from the bathroom, peeked into a manila folder that was on the coffee table in front of the sofa. I assumed Mrs Lillie had put it there in preparation for our visit. Inside were some old photos of her and what had to be Sara's mom as student nurses, then the two of them at a graduation ceremony and a handful of assorted other holiday snaps, several of which had glamor boy in the middle of the two girls. After a quick look I put them away again, it was none of my business now, if Mop-Head wanted to tell me about it she would, if she wanted to hug her secrets to herself, why not?

  The girls came back freshened up, Sara pale but calm. When Mrs Lillie went into the kitchen area to put the water on for coffee, I asked the kid how she was doing. She made an 'up yours' gesture with two fingers so I guessed she was doing all right. I told the ladies as they had a lot to talk about I'd take myself out for some air, about two hours' worth, if that was OK with them. They didn't put up any protests so I left.

  I sat under a tree in the park for a while, watching two teenage lunatics play Frisbee in the 90-degree heat, got an orange Popsicle from a passing ice-cream truck, then followed my unerring sixth sense or maybe seventh and wound up in the nearest bar. Home is the hunter.

  When the appointed two hours were up I made my way leisurely back to Chestnut Drive. Although I wasn't lost I stopped yet another cyclist to ask for directions as she was so mouth-watering, so incredibly cute, she was that cheerleader I never did meet at college because I never went to college and I probably wouldn't have met her even if I had, her eyes were blue, her hair was sun-streaked blond, her legs were tanned and her T-shirt damp and tight.

  'Second on the right, sir,' she told me. Sir – that'll learn me, but probably it won't.

  When I got back to the house I rang and was let in. Sara was ready to go; she had the manila folder tucked tightly under one arm.

  'Hubby not home yet?' I asked Mrs Lillie.

  'He's out of town,' she said shortly. The house had felt like he was out of town a lot.

  Doris Lillie and Sara hugged each other at the door. Mrs Lillie and I shook hands.

  The piece of junk I'd rented wasn't too hot as I'd parked under the avocado tree, but it was hot enough. When we got in I asked Sara, 'What now, kid? Want a bite to eat, want to stay here for the night?'

  'I want to go home,' she said in a low voice. 'Please.'

  'Sure, babe.'

  'I just phoned home. Mom said she was glad I phoned and to come right on home.'

  'You got it, kid.'

  We passed a hospital on the outskirts of Davis, I'll be damned if it wasn't St Mary's. I didn't bother pointing it out to the twerp. In a minute or two we were back on 80 East heading towards Sacramento.

  'Can't we fly?' Sara said after a while. 'I want to go home.'

  Oh, Jesus, I knew it was coming, I just knew it, I felt sick already. But all I said was, 'Sure, babe, no sweat,' just like any other wonderful, tender and considerate human being would. I patted her head – well, she'd patted mine once – she had it halfway out the window to get the breeze like dogs do but cats are too stupid to do.

  'You're not really afraid of flying, hot stuff like you?'

  'You kidding?' I laughed. 'I was just thinking of you, I was just thinking a few peaceful hours on a train up here might help you to get your wooly head together.'

  We picked up 5 again, followed the Sacramento River south for a bit, then out east to the airport. Air-Cal got us on a flight almost immediately despite my prayers that the God-damned runways might be fogged up or something. They even accepted my credit card without demur. I had never flown before. There, I've said it. All my life I'd avoided it by one ruse or another and some o
f the ruses were masterpieces. I don't know where the fear came from in the first place but it sure came. However, it is funny what you can do when there's no possible way out or when you really want to. I once knew a guy, Rickey, Rickey the hairdresser, called Henri de Paris when he was working, who had a complete, absolute, pathological fear of driving a car. He couldn't have driven to his mother's funeral and he was a total Mommy's boy. So he met a girl one night at a party in the Valley right near where he lived. She phoned up the next morning to ask him out to her place in the wilds of Topanga Canyon for the day. He took one driving lesson, rented a car and got there a half hour early. As for flying, hell, it wasn't that bad once you threw up the beer from that bar in Davis and the bar sausage and the pickled eggs and a Hot-Stik or two and the bar nuts and the peanut-butter and honey sandwiches from the train and God knows what else. And a guy can always drop a couple of Demerols and never look out of the window and it only lasted an hour, but I will add this – it'll be a mighty cold day when I do it again, and I don't mean next Christmas.

  Sara was pretty quiet during the nightmare flight until we were about ten minutes out of LA and then it came out in a flood. Her mother was a colleen called Mary Heather McBride who had left Dublin age seventeen to go and live with an aunt and uncle in Oakland. Aunt and uncle had promptly placed her in a Catholic nurses' training college in San Francisco where she shared a room with her best friend Doris. Sara showed me a picture of the two girls together, the one I'd already seen, both girls smiling proudly in their new uniforms and student nurses' starched caps.