Cyanide Wells (19 page)

“Jesus.” When the initial shock had subsided, he moved past the women, into the front room. Sank onto a butt-sprung recliner and ran his hands over his face, as if he could wash the moment away. He looked up, saw that Sam had disappeared. Carly came into the room and sat down on the sofa.

She said, “Sev Quill was routinely monitoring the sheriff’s calls this morning when he heard a one-eighty-seven, code two. Homicide, urgent. He rushed over to Westport to get the story, and phoned me from there so I could tell Production to hold space on the front page. As soon as I heard the victim’s name, I decided to drive over there, too.”

“And?”

“I talked with Rho Swift, who’s handling the investigation. Lewis checked in on Thursday night. He pretty much stayed in his room, with the Do Not Disturb sign out. Yesterday morning, Monday, the maid got concerned because she hadn’t seen him, and used her passkey. Lewis was lying on the floor, fully clothed, with a gunshot wound to the head. The autopsy’s not scheduled till tomorrow morning, but Rho thinks he was killed sometime on Saturday.”

“Did anybody at the motel hear the shot?”

“No. He was at the far end of an isolated wing—a room he requested after looking at two others—and there weren’t many other guests.”

“Does Rhoda know what kind of gun he was shot with?”

“I suppose, but she didn’t tell me. I do know they dug a wild-shot bullet out of the wall above the bed.”

“What kind of handgun do you own?”

“Handgun?”

“When you warned me off Ardis after you found out who I was, you said you owned a handgun and weren’t afraid to use it.”

She looked down at the floor. “I lied.”

“You don’t own a gun?”

“I hate the things. I just said that to scare you.”

“Does Ardis own one?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“It’s the one thing about her I
am
sure of. She’s even more afraid of guns than I am. Ronnie Talbot had a weapons collection that he inherited from his father, and she was always after him to get rid of it, even though it was stored inside locked cabinets in the library, where nobody could see it.”

“Okay, did you tell Rhoda Swift about Lewis’s relationship to Ardis and Natalie?”

“No.”

“Carly, that’s obstructing a homicide investigation.”

She looked up at him, eyes agonized. “I know that. But Ard could not have done this. She could
not.
”

He let it go for the moment. “So you came over here to tell me about the murder.”

“I called, and Sam said you’d be back late. I decided to wait for you.”

Wait for him, further involve him. He’d’ve been better off driving straight through San Francisco to the airport on Sunday.

He asked, “Does Sam know any of this?”

“She knows about the murder, and that I’m upset, but she thinks this is newspaper business.”

He closed his eyes. Secrecy, lies, threats, fear—and now murder. What had become of the life he’d built for himself—the life that was clean, and his alone?

He said, “I think you should tell Rhoda Swift everything. Put it in her hands and let the sheriff’s department deal with it.”

No reply. When he looked at Carly, she had drawn her knees up to her chest and was hugging them, her face conflicted. “I found something,” she said in a small voice. “In the ashes in our bedroom fireplace.” She reached into the pocket of her corduroy shirt and extended a small, charred piece of paper to him.

He studied the words that were scrawled there:
…mine, and I got the right…

“So what do you think this means?” he asked.

“I think Lewis somehow found out where Ard was and wrote her, making a claim on Natalie. She probably didn’t respond, so he came up here. I think he was the person who was watching her, who had been in the house.”

“But he was staying in Westport, south on the coast.”

“Yes, because as a black man, he wouldn’t stand out so much there. He could’ve been a tourist, or one of the people working in the service industry. Cyanide Wells, even Talbot’s Mills, is too lily-white for him to escape notice. But Westport’s not all that far from here. He must’ve called Ard, demanding to see their daughter, so she ran. She was probably far away when he was killed.”

She wanted to believe. As he had once wanted to believe. Gently he said, “She was at the Talbot house on Friday night.”

“But that was only a stopover. It was empty when I went there on Saturday.”

“Yes, and Saturday’s when they think Lewis was shot.”

Carly stood and turned away from him. He saw her arm move as she brushed at her eyes. From behind she looked fragile, a stick figure. “Why are you doing this?” she asked.

“Because we have to face the possibility that she killed Lewis. We won’t know what she did or didn’t do until she chooses to come forward.”

“Cold comfort to help me through the night, Lindstrom.”

“I doubt I’ll get through very well myself. Why don’t you grab that blanket, and I’ll come sit with you. We’ll weather this together.”

She hesitated, then took up the brightly colored throw that was folded on the back of the sofa. He moved over beside her, propping his feet on the coffee table while she turned off the overhead light. She sat, her body rigid; the throw barely covered both of them, so he gave her the larger part. Although she didn’t speak, he could feel the swirl of her emotions.

“Not long till morning,” he said. “Then we can do something.”

“What?” Her voice was flat, bleak.

“Something,” he said firmly, and tucked the throw around her shoulders.

Gradually the tension seeped out of her, and her breathing became deeper. Her head tipped to the side and rested against his upper arm. The in-and-out rhythms of her sleep soothed him, but they also brought an odd, measured clarity to his thoughts.

Bad as the aftermath of Gwen’s disappearance had been, over the past years he’d built a foundation of certain things he relied upon and took to be true. He’d thought it a foundation more solid than what had sustained his previous, largely unexamined life, but apparently he’d been wrong; in the space of one anonymous phone call it had been undermined, as surely as the sea undermines a badly constructed bulkhead, and the events of the subsequent weeks had battered at it with the force of a severe winter storm.

Now it, and he, were poised to crumble.

Carly McGuire

Tuesday, May 14, 2002

C
arly looked down at the stack of notes in Donna Vail’s neat handwriting and sighed. That morning she’d asked Vail to drop her other work and look up two items for her, but now, at close to five, she was disinclined to deal with the reporter’s findings. Instead of reading them, she pushed her chair away from the desk and leaned against its high back, closed her eyes, and listened to the day winding down at the
Spectrum.

Voices calling good-bye. Car doors slamming in the alley. Engines starting, tires crunching. The gradual cessation of phones ringing. And then…peace. The building, a former assay office, was solid; back here in her office, normal street noise didn’t carry. Only the creaks and groans that were evidence of age intruded, and they were reassuring, reminding her that some things lasted.

She’d spent most of the day in Santa Carla—when, at twenty-four hours before press time, she should have been here tending to her newspaper—following up on the scant information Donna had found on Noah Estes. The task had been an easy one: Make contact with people; ask the right questions; give them her full attention. A good reporter’s technique, and one particularly suited to a person who disliked having the focus on her. But it had also taken its toll, and now she was tired.

The information Donna had gathered about Noah Estes was bare bones: He’d died of pneumonia in a Santa Carla nursing home, Willow Creek, in 1981, his ninety-eighth year. Carly had called the home and made an appointment with the administrator, a Mr. Tompkins, claiming the paper was interested in doing an article on the Estes clan. The facility was an attractive low-rise complex on extensive landscaped grounds where a line of willow trees bordered a small stream. Inside, the usual unpleasant odors of such institutions were masked by some substance that must have been added to the air filtration system; the staff were courteous, and what few residents she saw seemed well cared for. Carly had always been biased against nursing homes, and she couldn’t help but react with cynicism to Willow Creek; it was targeted to the well off—no Medi-Cal or Medicare patients need apply. But she found herself liking Mr. Tompkins, a small man with neatly manicured hands, whose puppy-dog brown eyes radiated compassion.

Instead of taking her to his office, Tompkins led her outside to a teak bench by the side of the stream. “I knew Mr. Estes well,” he told her. “His father—stepfather, actually—was one of the original cyaniders up at the Knob.”

“That would be John Estes?”

“Yes. He came out from Denver at the turn of the twentieth century and later married a widow, Dora Collins. Noah was her only child by her first husband, who was killed in an accident at the mine. John was manager there until they shut down operations in the early thirties. He adopted Noah, and he and Dora had four more children of their own. They raised the family in a big house that they built out near the Knob. People who knew them claimed Noah was always John’s favorite child, and possibly that’s true, because his stepfather left him the Knob property when he died.”

“You’re something of a local historian, Mr. Tompkins.”

He smiled, lines crinkling at the corners of his eyes. “Many of the people who reside here are descendants of old county families. I like to listen to and tape-record their stories; you can learn a lot from the elderly. Someday I plan to publish a volume of oral history.”

“I’d enjoy reading it. This property near the Knob—is it now part of the national forest?”

Tompkins looked surprised. “You don’t know? It’s…Well, I’m getting ahead of my story. Noah Estes went to the Colorado School of Mines, like his adoptive father, and also became an engineer. He worked all over the world—South America, Australia, South Africa—but he made periodic trips back here and eventually returned for good, a wealthy man with an Australian wife and five children. They settled on the land John left him. Noah had a reputation as a gentle person with a concern for the environment—unusual in one who made his fortune in mining—and I can attest that it lasted throughout his final years.”

“When did he come to Willow Creek?”

“In nineteen seventy-five, the year I started here.”

“He was ninety-two then. Why didn’t one of those five children, or grandchildren, take him in?”

“He wouldn’t permit it. Mr. Estes was fiercely independent. He’d had a good life and didn’t want to get in the way of his children and grandchildren enjoying theirs in turn. Living here didn’t curtail his enthusiasms, though; he was quite active until his last two months and took great pleasure in reading—mostly about the environment—and in advising our landscapers. Much of what you see around us is due to his input.”

“D’you know where I might find any close relatives of Mr. Estes?”

“They’re scattered all over the county. I have an address for a granddaughter, Sadie Carpenter. She’s the relative who visited him most regularly. I’ll ask the receptionist to give you the information.”

“One more question, Mr. Tompkins: You seem to think I should know the Estes property near the Knob. Why?”

“Well, my dear, what happened there was the basis for your paper’s Pulitzer-winning series. Shortly before he moved into our facility, Noah Estes sold the land to Ronald Talbot. His son, Ronald Junior, inherited it. He, of course, was one of the men who died there.”

Sadie Carpenter lived on Second Street, in the old part of the county seat, several blocks before the inevitable sprawl of tracts began. When Carly called to ask for an appointment, using the same excuse for wanting to talk about Noah Estes that she had with Mr. Tompkins, Mrs. Carpenter expressed pleasure at the possibility of an article on her family but said she could only see her between one-thirty and two.

“I’m a confectioner,” she explained, “and my assistant and I have to turn out three large batches of chocolates today.”

The house, pink clapboard with frothy white trim, was perfectly suited to a candy-making operation, but the thin, angular woman who greeted Carly didn’t look as if she’d sampled many of her wares. In the fragrantly scented living room a tea service was set out, its centerpiece a two-tiered plate of chocolates. Mrs. Carpenter poured and urged Carly to partake, selecting a large nougat for herself. So much for appearances.

After sampling a truffle and pronouncing it wonderful, Carly said, “Mr. Tompkins at Willow Creek says you’re the family member who visited Noah Estes most often.”

“That’s correct. Granddad outlived all his children—a few of his grandchildren, too. I was the only relative living here in town, although the others visited when they could. We all loved him; he was a remarkable man.”

“Tell me about him.”

“Well, he knew more about horticulture than anyone. He’d studied the geology and ecosystems of the area and until his mid-eighties sat on the boards of a number of environmentally concerned nonprofits. In a way, those seem strange interests for him; after all, his career was in mining. But after he retired, he regretted the destruction that most of his projects had caused, and was determined to make up for it. And living in the shadow of the Knob must have been a constant reminder of how people lay waste to the land.”

“The Knob was turned over to the National Parks Service when?”

“In the fifties. Denver Precious Metals had been carrying the land as a tax write-off up to then.”

“Why didn’t your grandfather follow suit and donate the adjacent property, rather than sell it to Ronald Talbot?”

“Primarily because he was afraid of what might become of it, given the Nixon administration’s record on the environment. And then there was Watergate and Nixon’s resignation, the uncertainty of what our political climate would evolve into. Granddad felt the land was better off in the hands of an individual whose stewardship he could trust.”