Caroline's Daughters (28 page)

He is not, though, accepting of Fiona. He laughs in an unpleasant way, he says, “That might be your idea of a good time, but not mine. No way.” And he turns and quickly leaves the room.

As Fiona thinks several things: one, she has never seen Stevie quite so unpleasant before; and two, this is her first experience of being disliked (she thinks).

“H
i, Jill. My name is, uh, John. I guess you don't remember me, it's been quite a while—” “Who the hell are you? Who gave you my number?”

“Well, actually Buck—”

“You're crazy! I don't know any Buck! I'm not Jill—” She slams down the receiver so hard that the instrument falls to the floor, then she grasps at the kitchen counter where she was sitting when the phone rang. She holds the cold white marble as hard as she can, but still she is trembling, violently, she cannot control this seizure, these chills. All her veins feel swollen with cold, her forehead could explode. Oh, how dare that John call? She could really kill Buck, the vile, the sleazy betrayer.

Still cold, Jill stands trembling in her kitchen, and then runs into her bathroom, where she vomits into the toilet. Then crawls into bed. To cry.

That terrible episode was a few weeks ago—two weeks? three? Jill is deliberately losing track of time. Of everything she can. Losing track.

She has now left town, and is staying in a quickly rented house in Stinson Beach—not in Sea Drift, she hates Sea Drift, all those expensive design-controlled houses jammed together. She is in a house just past the slummy part of Stinson, the
calles,
dead-ends
where seedy old hippies live (the sort of people Sage might know, shabby old Sixties radicals), or just plain poor people. Jill's house is right between all that mess and Sea Drift. Belonging to neither.

A wonderful house: if she were not feeling so crazy, so persecuted (still), she could be happy in this house, Jill thinks.

It is not on the beach but somewhat back from it, in an area of wild grass, and sand. The roof slants sharply upward, the rear wall is two stories high, a huge-paned window that gives a view of hills, mostly green, deeply crevassed and scattered with trees. Just below the hills is a wide lagoon, a quiet dark stretch of water surrounded by dark, high rushes, from which large strange birds emerge, to flap across the surface, or else to soar up, suddenly skyward, and out to sea.

Jill spends a great deal of time simply gazing out at that view, at those shadowed, gently sloping hills, at the peaceful lagoon, at flights of seabirds. In that way she absorbs some peace, she believes; a slightly different rhythm enters her blood.

She has told her office that this is a leave of absence, not bothering to ascertain whether or not that leave was granted. She only let fall a few resonant, relevant buzz words; she mentioned overload, super-stress and a possibility of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

She has not called in.

She makes indeed very few phone calls—and Jill has thought of the extreme contrast in that way between now and then: her record, she thinks, was the day or, rather, the hour in which she made forty calls, forty calls in an hour. This is hard for her to believe but she kept score, that day, a running score on her notepad.

Anyway, these days very few calls. A few to her mother, Caroline, just to say that she is okay. She really likes Caroline, even if they are so different, even if Caroline can be a considerable pain. Even if Caroline is her mother.

And a few to Fiona, about whom she has feelings vaguely similar to those that she harbors for her mother. She is attached to Fiona despite rather than because of their being sisters; Fiona is more like a friend, a somewhat combative, somewhat rivalrous, basically affectionate friend.

And sometimes she calls Noel. He always threatens to come out to see her, but so far he has not. Mainly, Jill understands, because Sage is still in New York.

Jill knows a lot about this odd paralysis that seems to afflict married men when their wives are out of town. The guy, no matter how habitually he strays, is then seemingly pinioned to his house, his home. Even when there are no practical considerations like small children, or pets. The best way to keep husbands at home is to leave them there, has been Jill's longtime deduction, now once more proven by Noel.

Sage has not told anyone just why her stay in New York is so prolonged, as far as Jill knows (she might have told Portia but no one has spoken to Portia). Sage mentions work and treatments for her arm at some hospital there—both quite credible to Jill, and to Caroline, whom Sage calls regularly. But not to Noel, who insists that Sage has always said she can only work at home, in her studio (the studio that he built for her), and that really nothing could be the matter with her arm. He suspects, he tells Jill, that something is going on between Sage and “that dealer guy with the funny name.” Meaning Calvin Crome, whom Sage has indeed mentioned to Caroline.

Jill, who has not said this to Noel, does not think so; he is only judging by his own motives, what would most likely keep him in New York.

If Sage were having a relationship in New York, and that is how Sage undoubtedly would put it, she would most likely call Noel and tell him right out, “Noel, I'm having a relationship with my dealer, Calvin Crome. I want a divorce, but when I come home we can talk about it.” That would be Sage's style, that awful Sixties “openness,” that stupid talk-about-it school of thought.

And so there is Noel, consumed with jealousy, and probably staying home for more or less that reason. Thinking that Sage might show up. Afraid to leave. It's fairly funny, really, Jill finds.

When she is not meditating on the eastern view, Jill takes long walks, in a number of different directions, and with different ends
in view. She goes to the beach, just up and over a sandy ridge, past a small grove of cypresses, wind-bent and strange, like weird sculptures. And then just ahead is the rough blue Pacific, with uneven lines of foam (like giant crazy coke lines, Jill has thought), striations of darker, almost purple water, out in the depths.

Arrived at the beach, she can take either direction: to the right, up past Sea Drift and all those crowded-together, over-priced houses, to the end of that spit of land, the channel separating Stinson from Bolinas, where Portia might or very well might not be.

Or, in the other, leftward direction, back toward the town of Stinson Beach, past the shabby
calles
of the relatively poor to the several crazily expensive houses up on stilts, there on the sand. (Earthquake fodder, Jill has thought of those houses.)

Every night, for the sunset, Jill takes one or the other of those beach walks, choosing more or less at random.

More practically, each morning she walks from her house into town, about a mile and a half, to shop for whatever she plans to eat that day. And for the newspaper; she does not turn on the radio for news, and there is no TV.

But even during these scenically diverting and energetic walks, always a new and changing landscape through which Jill walks very fast—still she is aware of a heavy, almost dizzying apprehension which has been with her, like a strong and resistant virus, since the first revelation of Buck Fister's address book. When she saw her name among his “friends.” Her fears are very imprecise, nonspecific, and thus worse: she fears that anything at all could happen now. It is not exactly that her imagination pictures further headlines, “Buck Fister Names Young Lawyer as Former Call Girl. Daughter of—Graduate of—Sister of—” On the other hand, sometimes she does imagine exactly that, and when the phone rings she imagines just such a message.

Or, maybe she does in fact have a virus? Could she conceivably have AIDS, in some early form? She has meant to go and get herself tested but always she has managed to put it off. She is uncertain as to first symptoms, other than those terrible dark blemishes, Kaposi's something. But those come later, she thinks.

Of course she does not have AIDS, but she does not feel well at
all, she feels constantly fearful, menaced. Ill-prepared for whatever should happen next.

The general store at the crossroads is sometimes crowded. Jill is always afraid that she will see someone there she knows, from somewhere—even Portia, from Bolinas—and she will have to explain or invent an explanation for her presence in Stinson Beach. To say where she is staying, all that. As a defense against such a person, such inquiries, she has taken to wearing her large dark shades, and a dumb-looking flowered scarf that she found in the house, covering her hair. And she hurries through her tiny list of purchases: lemons, bran, eggs, frozen Weight Watchers' pizza, frozen W.W. zucchini lasagne. (Noel would die if he knew what she ate out here, Noel the big gourmet cook.) And then at the checkout stand a
Chronicle
. Generally she scans the headlines for a minute while her bill is being added up, and often that is as far as she gets with the paper until dinnertime.

Thus, it is there at the checkstand of the Stinson Beach general store that Jill learns of Buck Fister's death. His killing. Murder.

PROMINENT REAL ESTATE BROKER SLAIN OUTSIDE SO-MA CLUB
.

Instantly certain that Buck is the broker in question (and why? it could have been someone else, some one of hundreds), Jill drops her eyes to the story. And yes, it was Alberto “Buck” Fister (Alberto? Buck is/was Italian? that is surprising, somehow)—well known, highly successful though recently under Grand Jury investigation for alleged involvement in a prostitution operation—who was shot at close range by an unknown assailant or assailants as he left the new club, Heavy Duty, on Folsom Street, in the early hours of yesterday morning. Mr. Fister had come in and gone out alone. There were no witnesses. He had a drink at the bar, had talked to no one. It was the bartender's impression that he was meeting someone there who did not show up. A mother, Mrs. Rosette Arnold, of Elko, Nevada, listed as the sole survivor. No friends were available for comment. Dead on arrival at Mission Emergency Hospital.

“That'll be twelve seventy-nine.”

“—what?”

“Twelve seventy-nine. Oh, and seventy-five for the paper. You want the paper?”

“Yes.”

“Out of twenty. Thank you, and have a nice day. Say, don't forget your groceries!”

The public beach is a short two blocks from the store, from the crossroads at the entrance to town, and it is there, in the women's room provided for picnickers, that Jill repairs with her paper, and with the groceries she almost forgot.

In her booth, seated on the closed toilet seat, she reads and rereads that item, as though closer scrutiny might yield further information. Which it does not. No witnesses, no clues. The bartender's name was Clancy Barnes. No suggestions as to motive.

Anyone at all could have wanted Buck dead, including me, thinks Jill. Or, it could have been what they call a random killing, the kind we all dread for ourselves, just a wrong-place wrong-time death. Some crackhead driving past and not liking your face—and who in his or her right mind ever liked Buck's face, all those mean little features crowded into the middle of the circle of his head, especially those tiny pig eyes. A pig's face, and now a dead pig.

But suppose it turns out not to have been Buck after all? That quite irrational fear, which she knows to be irrational, nevertheless sweeps through Jill's heart, like a chilly wind. Suppose this is all an elaborate plot for Buck's escape, a plot contrived by Buck himself, so that he can show up somewhere very far away, having evaded both the Grand Jury and all the local people like herself who wished him dead? All the whores, like her.

But that is mad, truly mad. It must have been Buck.

Refolding her paper, Jill stands up and walks quickly out of that building, out into the manzanita thickets that thrive in that low-lying sandy area of the park, out through the thickets to the open beach.

On the sand she stops and for several minutes she simply stands there, breathing hard, as though she had run, her paper still clutched to her side.

The air is fresh and cool, faint smells of gasoline fumes from the highway mingle with beach smells of salt, and dead fish. As foghorns blend with the sound of a bulldozer, from a building site farther up
the beach. Fog, massed and gray, obscures the western horizon, as, closer in, gray waves curl and foam at the edge of the beach.

Would anyone imagine or believe that she had anything to do with this, with this careful murder of Buck? Jill finds that she does not believe for an instant that the killing was random, if anything it seemed very well planned indeed, what the papers like to call a gangland killing. On the other hand, it is crazy to fear that anyone might in any way connect her, accuse her of having done it. For one thing, she actually is innocent, she only wished him dead, and she has not been so foolish as to say so; no one knows how much she hated Buck, how she wished him dead.

Except Noel. When she told Noel about the tricks, of course she also mentioned Buck, in an accidental way—and Noel, along with being so incredibly, wildly turned on by the very idea, Jill doing it with strangers in strange hotel rooms, for money—along with all that terrific excitement and a part of it, maybe, was Noel's white-hot rage at Buck, street-Irish anger, turning Noel into a fighter, glaring, eyes on fire. Like a dark little rooster: Jill now remembers this secret thought that she had of Noel, her private smile as he ranted and swore at Buck. (Cocksucker, motherfucker—funny that these are the worst things men can find to say about each other.)

And once Buck's address book was more or less published in the paper, Jill did tell Noel how she hated Buck, could kill him. How she wished that she had never known him.

No one, though, aside from Noel knows any of this.

Looking back down the beach to her left, eastwardly, the San Francisco direction, Jill is seized then with a strong, urgent need to get back to the city, not to her own place but just to somewhere in town. Away from here, no matter that she has paid for two months more. She is still a lot richer than most people are, she might as well spend the money.