Greely's Cove (3 page)

“We getting a little squeamish in our middle age, Chief Bromton?” asked Putney snidely. “I thought you were a seasoned cop, big guy. You
know
why we do autopsies. As for the suicide note, I’d like to run it by the questioned-documents examiner in the Seattle crime lab. It’s scrawly enough to raise a question about whether it’s really Lorna Trosper’s handwriting, and on top of that, I’m a little confused about the content. A professional opinion wouldn’t hurt.”

Stu was on the verge of pleading, something he detested and almost never did. “Dave, Al, I
knew
Lorna Trosper. My wife was one of her closest friends. I—we loved her. If there was the slightest chance that she died because of foul play, I’d be screaming for an autopsy, and I’d be pounding on somebody’s desk in Olympia to get the State Patrol in here with a homicide team.”

“The Patrol’s probably thinking about opening a branch office here”—Putney chuckled derogatorily—“since you’ve been keeping them so busy looking for your missing citizens. Death investigation might become the major industry of Greely’s Cove! Disappearances, suicides—all you need now is a bona-fide homicide, Stu, and you’ll have it all!”

The chief ignored the crack. “Look, guys, I
know
Lorna killed herself, and I’m satisfied about the reason. My oldest buddy—her former husband, who still loved her a lot, by the way—is on his way here from back East to take care of the arrangements. Spare me the ugliness of telling him that Lorna’s body is in Seattle, being sliced open and chopped to pieces in a medico-legal autopsy. Can you do this for me? For old time’s sake?
Please?
”

Against their better judgment, after trading long and leery stares, Putney and Lonsdale acceded to the chief’s request. They affixed their signatures to official forms, certifying their findings that Lorna Trosper died by her own hand.

And they ordered no autopsy.

Mitch Nistler’s mind swam upward toward full consciousness, upward toward light and sound, guided by Dr. Hadrian Craslowe’s strong and reassuring voice.

“... three, four, five—you are nearly awake now, Mitch—six, seven, eight...”

He was ready to break through, and he was glad. The sleep of hypnosis was never a refuge for him, never a place of warmth and rest.

“... nine, ten. There, now. You’re fully awake. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

Mitch blinked several times, but he doubted that he was fully awake, for Dr. Craslowe’s face was still hazy and indistinct. Ripples of distortion floated through his field of vision.

“Why don’t you have a sip of water?” offered the doctor, and what Mitch saw next assured him that he was not yet fully awake but still tied with dream threads to the hallucinatory world below.
(Below?)
An antique crystal pitcher ascended from its spot at the far end of the ebony table and glided through the air to the good doctor’s strangely deformed hand. The old man poured water into a long-stemmed glass and handed it across the table to Mitch.

The cold water jolted him to full alertness, and he became aware of the horrid taste in his mouth.
What in the hell have I been eating?
he wanted to croak. Even before guzzling the water he had felt full, as though having just devoured a huge mound of rotting meat. The hellish taste coated his tongue and throat, extended up into his nasal passages. He tried unsuccessfully to flush it away with water.

“You’re experiencing the taste again, I see,” said Dr. Craslowe, smiling his craggy smile. “Nothing to worry about, I assure you.”

Mitch Nistler gulped a little more water, then set the glass aside. “It’s more than a taste this time,” he gasped, nearly gagging. “There’s a
smell
with it.”

“Hardly abnormal, dear boy,” said the doctor in his broad.

British accent. “Taste and smell are closely affiliated senses. You are merely experiencing a psychosomatic artifact of the hypnotic experience. It’s rather common, actually. The sensations won’t last long.”

Mitch wanted to believe him, but the taste, the smell, and the lump in his gut gave no signs of leaving. Once he had gotten food poisoning—years before, while doing hard time in Walla Walla. A friend of his, who worked in the prison cafeteria, had smuggled three pounds of roast beef into the cell block and stored it unrefrigerated under his bunk. Mitch had shared in the “feast” late one night and had awakened hours later with cramps, chills, and an ugly taste in his mouth. He’d known that only one thing could cure his agony: throwing up, which he did in the uncovered toilet that occupied a corner of his tiny cell. He had clung to the toilet bowl like a drowning man to a rock, flinching and trembling throughout most of the night, wishing he were dead.

He wanted to throw up now, but he fought the urge with deep breaths.

“Well, I suppose that will be all for today,” said Dr. Craslowe, rising from his huge, wing-back chair. “I’ll see you next week, then?”

Mitch fought down another wave of nausea and steadied himself against the edge of the massive ebony table. These sessions were taking their toll. Each one seemed to produce a stronger “psychosomatic artifact,” or whatever the hell the doctor called the demon in Mitch’s mouth. He felt sick and weak, and he wanted the sessions to end, even though Dr. Craslowe was treating him without charge.

To make matters worse, the treatments were not working: Mitch noticed no softening of his hunger for alcohol, which the therapy was supposed to cure. As a matter of fact, he fully intended to duck into Liquid Larry’s on his way back to the mortuary for a triple threat (three shots of gin in a beer mug, over ice, topped off with tonic), after which he would crunch down a roll of Breath Savers in order to hide his boozy breath from old Matt Kronmiller’s nose. Kronmiller was the mortician, Mitch’s boss. Today especially, Mitch would need the jolt of a triple threat—to deaden the horrific taste in his mouth and purge himself of the dark unease he was feeling.

“Shall we say Saturday, as usual?” pressed Dr. Craslowe, donning his thick, steel-framed glasses, enlarging his watery gray eyes. “The weekends are best for me, I daresay.” He rendered his craggy smile again, and Mitch caught a glimpse of ancient dentures. “My regular patients demand the lion’s share of my time during the week, I’m afraid”—meaning that he reserved weekdays for those who could pay, Mitch figured—“and Mrs. Pauling has asked for Sundays off.”

As though on cue, the doctor’s assistant glided into the room, carrying Mitch’s anorak. She was a lithe, olive-skinned woman with almond eyes. Nearly as tall as the doctor himself and young enough to be his granddaughter, she carried herself rigidly erect. Unlike the doctor, she seemed never to smile.

Mitch Nistler struggled with himself. If he could just find the strength to utter the word
no,
he would be free. He desperately wanted to see the last of this sunless mansion called White-leather Place, where the doctor lived and practiced. He wanted to be free of Craslowe, whose unsettling eyes and long face suggested impossible
oldness,
though the actual wrinkles and folds marked a man in his midsixties or not much older. A simple “
No!
” would deliver him of hypnotic jaunts into the chilly well of the subconscious, from which he always emerged with vague fears and, lately, a putrid taste in his mouth.

But the “
No!
” would not come. Mitch’s tongue confronted it, tripped over the
n
sound, and got no farther.

“Are you all right, Mr. Nistler?” asked Mrs. Pauling in her middle-class English clip. Her strong hand clamped around his elbow, shoring him up. “You seem a bit off-balance.” Her voice seemed full of genuine concern, perhaps even pity.

“Nonsense,” said Craslowe. “He’ll be right as rain in a moment. He’s had a particularly lively hypnotic confrontation, that’s all. Isn’t that so, Mitch?”

Mitch gazed into the doctor’s avuncular face as the latter helped him into his anorak. The smile never wavered. It beamed kindness and concern and confidence; but more than anything else, it conveyed authority, ancient and incontestable, not to be denied.

“Yeah,” said Mitch hoarsely. “I’ll be right as rain.” He dropped his shivering gaze to the Persian carpet beneath his feet and wished with every cell in his scrawny body to be out of this house, away from its dusky antiques and smothering tapestries. He craved sunlight, the smell of rain, a clean breeze. He craved distance between himself and Whiteleather Place.

“So, it will be Saturday next, I presume,” said Craslowe, helping the little man with the zipper of the coat, squaring him away.

“Saturday next,” agreed Mitch Nistler.

Seconds later he was out the door and down the walk of the looming Victorian mansion, climbing behind the wheel of his rusting ’73 El Camino. The engine burbled to life, and the rear wheels of the half-car/half-pickup truck sprayed rock chips into the clumps of yellowing shrubbery as he roared away.

Behind the front door of Whiteleather Place stood the doctor and his helper, staring into each other’s eyes, searching and reading, scarcely needing spoken words.

“Will he be all right?” asked the raven-haired Mrs. Pauling at length, breaking the silence.

A smile—this one was anything but avuncular, from impossibly old lips. “Oh, yes, Ianthe, he will be all right. In fact, he will do nicely. Nicely indeed.”

“Then you have chosen well?” she asked, her almond eyes brimming with sadness.

The doctor’s smile grew broader, darker. “Chosen well, yes. And very soon I’ll have the proof of it, I daresay.”

A few minutes after noon on February 8, 1986, the day after Lorna Trosper died, a Boeing 737 ascended from National Airport near Washington, D.C., and set out for the city of its birth—Seattle. After a journey of more than seven hours, with intermediate stops in Minneapolis and Billings, it touched down in a perfect instrument landing at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, a short drive south of the massive Boeing manufacturing complex. Carl Trosper got off the plane and, since he had checked no luggage, went directly to the Avis counter, muscling along his expensive leather carry-on bag. He used his American Express Platinum Card to rent a metallic-brown Olds, which he picked up in the subterranean rental car terminal. Minutes later he was on Interstate 5, northbound for the Washington State Ferry Terminal in the heart of Seattle.

By now the winter dusk had deepened to night, and the Saturday rush hour was in full swing. The ferry terminal was clogged. Weekenders who lived on the west shore of the Puget Sound were homeward bound after a day of shopping and frolicking in the city. Carl Trosper fell into the long, slow-moving queue for the ferry to Bremerton, feeling alone amid the throng, listening to the thrumming rain and swishing windshield wipers, thinking sadly of the countless times he and Lorna had waited together in this very spot for the ferry.

He followed the taillights of the car ahead of him into the cavernous maw of the huge vessel, and a crew member directed him to a spot near the bow, meaning that he would be among the first to get off on the Bremerton side. He cut the engine, locked the Olds, and climbed the stairs from the parking deck to the passengers’ lounge. A glance at the nearly deserted observation deck told him that
that
was where he wanted to be, despite the chill and steady beat of winter rain, a place where he could think and reflect—alone. So he turned up the hood of his blue Henri Lloyd parka and leaned against the cold rail, face into the wind, eyes slitted against the rain. Through the soles of his boat shoes he felt the churning of huge engines as they imparted their energy to propellers, and the ferry began to move. The
whoot
of a powerful whistle sliced through the sharp air, announcing departure, and the rush of excited waters came to his ears.

So it’s come down to this, has it, Old Carl?
said the voice in his head—his father’s voice, from the depths of a long-dead boyhood. His father had always called him “Old Carl,” even when “Old Carl” was an infant with fat, unflawed cheeks and bright red hair.
So it’s come down to this, has it? You bugged out on your pretty young wife, leaving her to handle Jeremy alone, and she couldn’t make a go of it without you.

No, it wasn’t like that at all. We broke up because that’s what we both wanted. Jeremy had nothing to—

The
lie.
Once again, the
lie.
The same one he had told his mother when his divorce became final, the one he had told himself so often. The same smelly, implausible falsehood he thanked God his father had not lived to hear.

Jeremy had nothing to do with it.

The ferry, engorged with motor vehicles and human beings, lumbered away from the docks, away from the sting of auto exhaust and the clamor of the city, into the blackness of the Puget Sound. The rain slackened, and strings of jewel-like lights popped through the mist from the opposite shore. Carl glanced at his watch: just thirty-five minutes to Bremerton.

So it’s come down to this, has it, Old Carl? The big-shot political consultant—or whatever you call yourself these days—is coming home, wearing his fifty-dollar haircut and his oh-so-casual yachting clothes, to bury his pretty little wife, who killed herself because he deserted her.

For the love of God, Dad, cut it out!

For a horrible moment Carl worried that he had blurted the words aloud. A young couple had come through the doors of the passengers’ lounge onto the observation deck, carrying Styrofoam cups of hot chocolate, braving the weather for a little privacy. He stole a quick look at them: They were leaning over the rail, faces close together, cooing to each other, paying him not the slightest heed. The ferry slowed, honked its arrival, and insinuated itself into the pier, nudging the dock and halting. The ramp clanked into place; car engines gunned in anticipation of freedom; and the wave of a crewman’s hand caused the ferry to disgorge upon the floodlit shore. Greely’s Cove lay less than twenty-five minutes away, a leisurely drive northward on Highway 16.

The night was velvety black, for the sky was without its moon.
A new moon,
Carl had read in the
Minneapolis Tribune
during the long flight from Washington, D.C., so the night would have been dark even without its thick blanket of rain clouds. The town of Greely’s Cove began to materialize from the darkness on both sides of the highway. Amberish streetlights peered through the dank branches of pines and cedars. Traffic signals flashed yellow in all directions, since traffic was nearly nonexistent despite the early hour. Neon signs announced Safeway, McDonald’s, and Gunderson’s Chevrolet-Subaru. Carl knew every streetlight, every sign, every crack in the cement sidewalks of Greely’s Cove, for here he had launched his life. Here he would make his new beginning.