Cyanide Wells (3 page)

Canada…

Most people led one life. They might move from place to place, marry and divorce and remarry, change careers, but the progression was linear, and they basically remained the same persons from birth to death. Until fourteen years ago Matt, also, had been one person: He’d enjoyed an overprivileged childhood in Minnetonka, a suburb of Minneapolis; learned boating from his father, an accomplished sailor, at the family’s cabin near Grand Marais, on Lake Superior; attended Northwestern University, majoring in prelaw while studying photography under a master of the art in nearby Chicago. When photography won out over the law, his teacher recommended him for a position at small but prestigious Saugatuck College in his home state. The pay was also small, so his parents offered to loan him the money to establish his own commercial studio. Two years later he married a journalism student who had taken a course from him, pretty Gwendolyn Standish. Life should have been good.

Yet it wasn’t. After their marriage, Gwen’s personality changed, so much that she seemed like two persons encased in one skin. Caring and passionate, withdrawn and cold. Cheerful and optimistic, depressed and pessimistic. Open and filled with confidence, closed and filled with self-doubt. Eventually the negative side overwhelmed the positive, and despite Matt’s assurances that he would do anything to save the marriage—counseling, therapy, walking barefoot over hot coals—she insisted on a divorce.

Even the divorce hadn’t ended what he now thought of as his first life, though. That was brought on by her disappearance and its aftermath.

Suspicious minds…

The words echoing from the jukebox meshed with his thoughts. The first hint of suspicion had come during the call from the Wyoming sheriff, Cliff Brandt: “I take it you can account for your whereabouts during the past two weeks.” And he’d too quickly replied, “Of course I can! I was here in Saugatuck, teaching summer classes.” Too quickly and also dishonestly, because of an ingrained fear of the authorities that stemmed from his older brother Jeremy’s arrest and eventual conviction for dealing cocaine in the mid-seventies; Matt was thirteen at the time and had watched the officers brutally subdue Jeremy when he attempted to resist them.

In truth, Matt had been nowhere near Saugatuck during those two weeks. The summer of 1988, a drought year, was the hottest and driest Minnesota had experienced since the 1930s. Matt’s temper grew shorter with every July day, and he found it difficult to maintain focus on his work. So he closed down the studio, turned his summer classes over to a colleague, and went on a solo driving and camping trip designed both to escape the heat and help him put the failure of his marriage in perspective. It was his bad luck that the trip, which ended in Arches National Park, on Utah’s Green River, took him home through Wyoming along Interstate 80 at approximately the same time Gwen’s car was abandoned by the side of a county road north of there.

Sheriff Brandt found that out, of course, when he called the college to verify Matt’s alibi and then checked the paper trail of credit card and gas station charges. His department lifted Matt’s fingerprints from the abandoned Toyota (which he had occasionally driven) and inside Gwen’s purse (where he had occasionally placed items of his own too large for his pockets). The Lindstroms’ property settlement showed that Matt had consented to pay Gwen half the value of his photography business. And, most damning, Matt had lied to the sheriff during their first conversation. Brandt, unable to produce any trace of Gwen, seemed determined to prove Matt a murderer.

Eventually, of course, Brandt had given up. Even in Sweet-water County, Wyoming, he had more pressing matters to attend to, and the district attorney convinced him that no-body cases were difficult to prove in any jurisdiction. But by then, the damage had been done.

The police in Saugatuck watched Matt’s every move; he was repeatedly stopped for nonexistent traffic violations, and it became common for him to see squad cars cruising past his house and place of business. Gwen’s disappearance and his possible involvement were worked and reworked by the media. Initially friends and neighbors were supportive, but after a while they stopped calling him. Halfway through the fall semester, a television show, which both described in sensational terms his romantic involvement and marriage to a sophomore and raised questions bordering on the libelous about her disappearance, prompted several students to withdraw from his classes. In the spring the college’s governing board unanimously decided it would be advisable that he take a year’s sabbatical without pay; if the “regrettable situation” was resolved before the year was up, his pay would become retroactive.

And yet there remained no trace of Gwen.

By the anniversary of her disappearance in July, Matt’s former friends were crossing the street to avoid him. Requests for his services at weddings, anniversary parties, and bar mitzvahs dropped off sharply. New mothers no longer brought their babies to his studio for their first portraits. Engaged couples took their business to his competitor across town. At Christmastime he shot a photograph for only one customized card: an elderly woman and her “family” of three toy poodles. The dogs yipped and snarled and peed on the carpet, and when the woman was leaving, she told him she’d only come there because she couldn’t get an appointment with the other photographer.

At least, Matt thought, his competitor had a clean rug.

He stubbornly hung on in Saugatuck, however, living off his savings. It was his home; he’d done nothing wrong except stupidly lie to a Wyoming sheriff. Sooner or later he would be vindicated.

When his savings were about to run out, he phoned home to ask for a loan; his mother agreed but then called back the next day.

“Your father and I have discussed the loan,” she told him, “and we have come to the conclusion that it’s time we stopped spoiling you. Look what happened to your brother because of our indulgence: He’s down in New Mexico, taking drugs again.” When Matt started to protest that Jeremy was in Albuquerque working as a counselor in a program for troubled youth, she cut him off. “No, hear me out. Your father and I know you couldn’t have killed Gwendolyn. We didn’t raise you that way. But the negative publicity has made it very difficult for us—”

Matt hung up on her.

Still, he remained in town, selling off cherished possessions and then the photography business. With some of the proceeds he hired a private investigator to look for Gwen; the man delivered sketchy reports for a month and then ceased communication; when Matt called his office, he found the phone service had been discontinued.

Then, three weeks after the second anniversary of Gwen’s disappearance, a chance encounter in the supermarket ended his first life.

He was in the produce section, filling his cart with the vegetables that had become staples of his diet now that he could no longer afford meat, when he looked up into the eyes of Gwen’s best friend, Bonnie Vaughan, principal of the local high school, a heavy but attractive woman with long, silky hair and gray eyes. Eyes that now cut into him like surgical instruments.

“So you
are
still here, you bastard,” she said in a low voice that was more unsettling than if she’d shouted.

“Bonnie, I—”

“Shut up, you murderer!”

The words and her tone rendered him speechless.

“We know what you did,” she went on. “And we know why. You’d better get out of Saugatuck before somebody murders
you!
” Then she whirled and walked away.

Matt stared after her. Bonnie had always been a gentle, caring woman: She tended to her friends’ homes and pets while they were out of town; she could always be counted on in an emergency; she brought thoughtful, handcrafted gifts when invited to dinner. The last time he’d seen her, eleven months after Gwen disappeared, she’d hugged him and said he had her full support. If the hatred that had infected the rest of the community could also infect a woman like Bonnie Vaughan, he wanted nothing more to do with Saugatuck—

“Hey, mister.”

Matt started and focused on the woman who had spoken. He’d been so deeply mired in his memories that he hadn’t noticed her come into the bar. She was in her early twenties, too thin, with long brown hair that could stand a washing, and an unhealthy grayish pallor to her skin.

“Buy me a drink?” she asked with a tentative smile.

He didn’t want company, particularly her brand of company, and his expression must have said so, because her smile faded.

“Listen,” she said in a different tone, “I’m not selling anything, if that’s what you’re thinking. I just need somebody to talk to.”

Something in her voice convinced him she was telling the truth. Besides, her earnest, pleading expression made him feel sorry for her. Maybe listening to her troubles would help him keep his own pain at bay.

“Okay.” He motioned at the chair opposite him. “What’ll you have?”

“Whatever you’re having.”

He took his empty mug to the bar and ordered a round. As he was paying, the bartender said in a low voice, “Be nice to the kid. She’s going through a bad time.”

He nodded and went back to the table.

“Thanks, mister.” She raised the mug in both hands and drank.

“You’re welcome. I’m John.” As in Johnny Crowe, the name that he’d borrowed for the journey, with his deckhand’s blessing. “What’s yours?”

“Sam. Short for Samantha. Thanks for not making me drink alone.”

“Drinking alone’s no good.”

“But you were.”

“Yes, I was. So tell me about yourself, Sam.”

“What d’you want to know?”

“Anything you care to reveal. You said you needed somebody to talk to, and you seem upset.”

“Yeah, I’m upset. Got every right to be. My father…died last week.”

“I’m sorry, Sam.”

“Not as sorry as I was for Dad. He had it rough there toward the end. Twenty-one years with the mill, and they laid him off. No severance pay, and then they told him we had to be out of the house in thirty days. Dad sweated all his life for the company, and that’s how they repaid him. He worked his fingers to the bone for them—and us.”

“Who’s ‘us’?”

“Me, my brother, and my mom. My brother got out, joined the army. I don’t even know where he is now. Mom died two years ago, cancer. I was all Dad had left.”

Matt took the empty mug from her hands and went to the bar for a refill. Sam was hurting, that was for sure, and a few beers seemed poor comfort. But he wasn’t used to comforting others, especially strangers; that particular activity had never been a part of his life, except for the brief time he’d been married to Gwen.

When he went back to the table, Sam was sitting very still, eyes focused on a beer sign depicting a mountain meadow. The tilt of her nose was delicate, her cheekbones and forehead high. She’d’ve been pretty if she weren’t in a disheveled, grief-stricken state. Matt set the beer in front of her, and she nodded thanks, keeping her gaze on the sign.

She said, “I’m thinking maybe I’ll get out, too.”

“And go where?”

“Anyplace there’s a future. Everything’s dying here—the mill, the town. Pretty soon it’ll just be a wide spot on the freeway for people who want a cheap motel and the kind of crap I serve up at the Chicken Shack.”

“I noticed one of the mills is closed.”

“Yeah, and the other one’ll close later this year.”

“Environmental regulations causing that?”

“Not really. Talbot’s never relied on old-growth forests, like Pacific Lumber up in Scotia did. No, what happened is, it got sold. Ronnie Talbot, the last of the family that owned it, he didn’t give a rat’s ass about the business. He was a faggot, and all he wanted was a lot of money so he could live high on the hog with his lover. This Portland company bought it, and they’re letting it fail so they can get the tax write-off.” Her lips curved up in a malicious smile. “At least Ronnie didn’t get to enjoy the money. Three months after the sale was final, somebody shot him and his lover at their house over by the Knob. Killed them both, right there in their bed.”

That afternoon at the library, Matt had read the
Soledad Spectrum
’s Pulitzer Prize–winning series on the murders in a secluded home east of Cyanide Wells with more than usual interest. Many of the accounts had borne Gwen’s assumed name. In a way, it hadn’t surprised him; she was a talented reporter, and it was the logical thing for her to be doing here.

Sam’s use of the word “somebody” didn’t jibe with the published accounts, though. “I thought they caught the guy who shot them.”

“Well, Mack Travis confessed to it and hanged himself in his jail cell, but nobody here believes he did it. There was evidence that he’d been in Ronnie and Deke’s house that night, but Mack was always a couple of cards short of a full deck, and he was the type who’d confess to anything if anybody gave him half a chance. He had a peculiar relationship with his momma, if you know what I mean. Confessed because he thought the cops had him dead to rights, then offed himself because he didn’t want to shame her.”

“That paper over in Cyanide Wells won a Pulitzer for their coverage of the murders, didn’t they?”

“Uh-huh. Biggest thing that ever happened around here—of the good kind, I mean. I liked those articles. I’m no fan of faggots, but that Ardis Coleman, who wrote most of the stories, actually made me understand how lousy their situation is in a place like this.”

“You ever meet her?”

“Me? Do I look like somebody who hangs with Pulitzer Prize–winners? I’ve seen her in the supermarket, is all. And, of course, I used to read her.”

“Used to?”

“She quit the paper right after they won the prize, is writing a book about the murders.”

Evidently had been writing it for close to three years now. She’d probably never finish it, let alone get it published. Gwen had lacked the ability to handle large projects; she agonized over term papers but was able to knock off a good newspaper article under extreme time pressure. But if she wasn’t working for the paper, how was she paying her bills?

“Mister…John, what d’you think I should do?”