I AWOKE, MISSING her.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring out the window at the night. Moonlight was on her neck, arms, breasts, sending glints of silver through her hair. Her nipples were erect in the cold. It was a hell of a sight, but I felt like a voyeur, looking at her without her knowing.
I sat next to her, our knees almost touching the wall beneath the windowsill. The town and the valley were bathed in eldritch light.
“He was a rotten son of a bitch,” Kayla breathed.
I had no answer to that.
She leaned a shoulder against mine. Her skin was cool. “When I was fourteen,” she said, “he came on to one of my girlfriends. Well, came on isn’t quite right, but…something.”
She spoke to the empty night, not looking at me.
“I never told anyone. By then he was married to his second wife, Anne. I didn’t like her very much. That’s one reason why I didn’t say anything, to her or to anyone. I didn’t want to cause trouble. And, I guess, there wasn’t all that much to say.”
A lone pickup truck rumbled along the highway fifty feet away, taillights and engine sounds fading, then gone.
“Her name was Suzy Evans. It was just the two of us. She was my best friend. Sometimes I’d sleep over at her place, or she would sleep over at mine. Dad—Jonnie—cupped her breast in a hallway one night as they were passing, squeezed gently. She was in a nightgown. Not flannel. Something filmy, like sheer polyester. It was way late. We didn’t think he was still up.”
“She didn’t think it was an accident?” I asked.
“No. She said he…reached out and grabbed. Squeezed her for a second, then smiled and kept going. Didn’t say a word.”
Another fourteen year old. “She never said anything to anyone, either?”
“Not that I ever heard. Maybe she thought no one would believe her. But she never came over again, and I never went back to her place. After that we drifted apart. I guess I didn’t believe her myself, not completely. I mean, my own father. It was so…weird. If it were true, it would have been unbelievably stupid of him, and I’d never thought of him as a stupid man. Disingenuous at times, but not outright stupid.”
I took her hand. Moonlight and cold night air bathed our bodies.
Kayla sighed. “I guess it was true, though. Probably was.”
I still didn’t tell her about Clair Hutson and the alleged attempted rape of Sarah Jean. No reason to. Kayla already knew more than she wanted to about Mayor Jonnie.
“Makes me wonder…” she murmured, letting the thought float away in a sigh.
“What?”
“Given how my father was, if…if maybe I have a half-brother or half-sister somewhere.”
“Victoria,” I said. It was out before I could stop it. It must have been on my mind, ever since Emmaline told us about Jacoba’s rape.
“What?”
“Nothing.” I closed my eyes at my stupidity. Too late. Too damned late.
“Victoria. You said Victoria.”
“It’s just a name.”
“You say names? They just pop out? Who is Victoria, Mort?”
Maybe I had to tell her, I didn’t know. Victoria had said she was Edna’s granddaughter. Maybe she was. Edna only had one child, Jacoba, who had been knocked up by either Jonnie Sjorgen or Dave Milliken. Maybe Jacoba had given birth to Victoria. But if Jacoba had never returned to Reno, why would Victoria have come back? Or was she lying? Maybe she was a scam artist. I wouldn’t have trusted her or her kid, Winter, with a roll of nickels.
Kayla grabbed my jaw and yanked my face toward hers. It hurt. “Who is Victoria?”
So I told her about my impromptu visit to Sjorgen House, being discovered by Winter outside, then Victoria, then my lengthy pseudo-conversation upstairs with Edna afterward.
“Victoria,” Kayla breathed. She looked at me. “You know a lot about what’s going on, Mr. Angel, sir.”
“That’s impossible, since I don’t have the slightest idea what’s going on.”
“You knew about Jacoba. Now I find that you know this woman, Victoria. And her daughter.”
“I stumble over trivia. It doesn’t amount to anything. Nothing adds up.”
It might have, though, if almost forty years hadn’t elapsed between the rape of Jacoba and the decapitations. I’m not the swiftest pigeon in the flock, and as a private eye I might have trouble finding my hand in my pocket, but even I saw that long-ago connection between Jonnie and Dave. I could feel its energy, feel it humming somewhere out there in the dark, renewed, resurrected and alive, like Frankenstein’s monster during an electrical storm. Or maybe not. It might’ve been my imagination that was over-heated and running wild and free. It does that.
“Victoria,” Kayla said, testing the name. She put an elbow on the windowsill and rested her chin on her hand, staring out at the night.
“I don’t like her,” I said.
“She might be my sister, Mort.”
“Half-sister. It’s possible,” I admitted.
“I might be an aunt, too. Half-aunt.”
Meaning Winter. I hadn’t told her about Winter in the hallway, her attempted seduction, or whatever it was. “Or you might not,” I told her. “Those two might be swinging from branches in Milliken’s family tree.”
“Uh-huh, but it’s intriguing all the same, Mort.”
“There are some things you’d be better off leaving alone.”
“What are you not telling me?”
I wanted her to keep the hell away from Victoria and Winter. I wanted that very much, so I told her what Winter had done in the hallway as I was leaving.
“In bra and panties, huh?” Kayla said when I was finished.
“A thong, actually. One of those things made out of dental floss.”
“Did she look good?”
“She looked dangerous, like a cobra. She wanted something.”
“You, probably.” Kayla rested a hand on my thigh. “Might mean she’s got good taste. And you didn’t answer the question. How’d she look? Pretty?”
“Like a spider, Kayla. Like she hadn’t had her quota of flies for the day.”
“So she hit on you. She could’ve done a lot worse, Mort.”
“She’s nineteen or twenty, for God’s sake.”
“So she’s a little precocious.”
Which rhymes with ferocious, and I could tell I wasn’t getting through. How do you explain the expression you see on someone’s face, in their eyes?
“Let it go, Kayla, please?”
“Just like that?”
“Yes. They’re not nice people.”
For a while she didn’t answer. “I’ll think about it.”
“You do that.” I lay back down, pulled the blanket over me. A moment later Kayla eased under the covers and snuggled up next to me again.
We lay like that for a while, neither of us sleeping. Outside, a coyote howled and others joined in. It sounded like mourning, a chorus of death. Kayla shivered. I felt goose bumps on my own arms.
“Why’d you leave Ithaca?” I asked.
She was silent for a while. I waited. After half a minute she said, “Someone broke into my house.”
“In Ithaca?”
“Yes. I own my own place. An old, two-story clapboard under great big maples. It’s very upstate New York, with creaky floors, hissing radiators, the whole bit. I love it. The mortgage isn’t too bad, but I rent a room anyway—to another teacher at the college, Kristen Hawes. She’s my age. Alone, the place feels too empty.
“Anyway, Kristen was gone. Is gone. To Arizona until college starts up again at the end of the month. She has parents in Phoenix.
“Jonnie was missing, and reporters started following me around, wanting interviews. If it had only been Jonnie maybe it would’ve been just one of those things, but with two of them gone, the mayor and the district attorney, well…it got totally crazy. I started staying indoors, dashing from school to my car to my house. Finally, I gave up going to the college. I was using the dance studio there to keep in shape and work on new routines for the fall semester. I thought about coming back to Reno, but not very seriously. It was such a long drive and what could I do there? I hadn’t seen my father in three years. Then, Friday before last, I got home late. I’d gone to a movie. It was dark. The sun had been down for hours. Inside the house…”
A shudder went through her.
“What?” I asked.
“Kristen has a hamster, Rocky…”
Again she stopped. A single warm tear landed on my chest.
“She loved him. Rocky. A lot,” Kayla said. “He was this bitty, innocent thing. I was taking care of him while she was gone. He was…pinned to a wall in the kitchen. With an icepick. Someone had…cut him open, disemboweled him and left him hanging there.”
A chill went through me. Kayla lay in my arms, crying silently. I held her. Other than that, there wasn’t anything I could do but wait.
“It was horrible,” she said after a while. “Just…the thought of anyone doing something like that to a helpless little creature. I took him down. He was dead. I put him in a plastic bag. Then I heard a noise upstairs, overhead in my bedroom. Like a footstep. It might’ve been boards creaking like they do sometimes, I don’t know, but suddenly I was terrified. I still had Rocky in the bag. I grabbed my purse and ran out to my car and took off.”
“But not to the police?” I said.
“No. I mean, I started to. That was my first thought, and maybe I should have. But…I don’t know, I started thinking about how this would make things even worse, there in Ithaca. My dad had become big news and now this. I pulled over in the dark beneath some trees and thought about it, finally decided I couldn’t face any more of it. I was sick and tired of being followed around. It had been on my mind that I should come back to Reno, what with my father missing and all. A few reporters had asked why I didn’t seem to care—as if they cared, the bastards. All they wanted was a story. If I’d gone to the police they would have connected me with Jonnie and that incredible mess going on in Reno. I would have been on national TV by morning. The very thought of it made me sick.”
“So you headed west and drove all the way to Reno without a break.”
“There were headlights,” she said.
“Headlights?”
“Behind me. I looked back as I drove away from my house. I saw lights come on. They stopped when I pulled over, then started up again when I did. In a streetlamp I saw a dark van. Whoever it was followed me around Ithaca for a while until I finally lost them. But the point is, I had to lose them, Mort. The way the van kept after me, it couldn’t have been an accident, two cars happening to be going the same way, through all the turns I took.”
“Probably a reporter.”
“Maybe. But I didn’t get that impression at the time, and, well, it got worse.”
“Worse?”
“I saw the van again in West Almond. That’s like eighty miles west of Ithaca.”
“Same one?”
“I’m sure of it. At least fairly sure. I was getting gas at a station and I saw it down the street, parked at the curb. A dark van, engine idling. I could see exhaust. When I left, it followed. Its headlights looked exactly the same, Mort. I mean, the same shape, everything.”
Another chill passed through me.
“I saw it again,” she said. “At least I thought I did, behind me on the freeway in Pennsylvania, maybe a quarter mile back. So I took the next exit, switched off my lights, and turned off the road behind a building. It was after one in the morning. There was no traffic at all. This dark van came down the off ramp after me, moving quickly. But then it stopped at a stop sign and waited a while, too long, as if the driver was looking around, then it took off, fast, like it was hunting me.
“I was scared to death after that,” she said. “My father was missing and here was this van, following me around. I didn’t think I could sleep, and I didn’t have enough money for a room. All I had was twenty or twenty-five dollars and that Citgo card. So I drove the whole way, no motel—which was awful toward the end, I was so tired.”
“Did you ever see the van again?”
“No. I mean, I saw lots of dark vans, but none of them stayed behind me like that. I kept thinking about it though, seeing it pulling up behind me again, as if the person inside knew exactly where I was headed. I was on Interstate 80 almost the whole way. The worst was when it got dark again, that second night, from Iowa most of the way through Wyoming. What happened to Rocky—”
I held her, imagining a faceless person in a dark van, tracking her across much of the continent. It felt surreal.
“I buried him in Indiana,” Kayla said. “In a field at a rest stop.”
She fell silent. Outside, another coyote howled.
I didn’t say anything, and Kayla had run out of words. We lay in each other’s arms in the shallow bowl of the bed, warm, away from the world, away from reporters and prying eyes, and in that silence I drifted off to sleep so smoothly that I have no sense of when it happened.
* * *
We stayed in Austin most of Sunday, leaving only when the sun was low in the west, which promised a much cooler ride through the desert back to Reno. Breakfast at the Toiyabe Cafe, green-chili-and-Swiss omelets for both of us, a late lunch at Carol’s Country Kitchen. Quiet strolling amid the weathered buildings, leisurely shopping at local arts-and-crafts shops and miniature sidewalk bazaars where locals haggled with a small handful of tourists over prices. Over Kayla’s objections I bought her a silver-and-turquoise necklace at Eve’s Craft Shoppe, because they took MasterCard and it’s only plastic, and because the thing looked great on her. I had fun. Even before putting on the necklace she turned a lot of heads, including mine.
We were in the relative coolness of the International, resting our feet and having Cokes at the bar, when the day’s news came on TV. The usual wail and moan, a train derailment here, unrest and riot there, things you can do nothing about and that do not enhance your life in the slightest to know. Most of it is nothing but voyeurism in a silk suit, like the Sjorgen and Milliken murders for example, in which no progress had been made. All it got was a ten-second mention.
Then a story out of Honolulu: the University of Hawaii had hosted a North American-Asian Karate Championship. Diana Mobley from Savannah, Georgia, had won the coveted Open Division and was all smiles, raising a trophy belt over her head on the victory platform, short honey-blond hair still frazzled from her efforts. Beside her was a stone-faced Korean woman. Jeri DiFrazzia had taken third place, and fourth place went to a French Canadian gal whose name I didn’t catch because I was staring open-mouthed at Jeri.
Jeri. She’d taken third.
I pointed. “That’s Jeri, there. Few inches shorter than the others.”
“Jeri?”
“DiFrazzia. My boss.”
Kayla stared. “Oh, my God.”
Yeah. That’s what I thought, too.
“She’s very pretty, isn’t she?” Kayla said after a few seconds. “Gorgeous, even.”
Yes, she was. Sweat, disgusted frown, and all.
* * *
We didn’t get back to Reno until after midnight. My house was still standing, not necessarily good news since it’s insured and it could use a new roof, new carpet, better insulation. We showered together, which was great fun, held each other for a while, then slept. In spite of all the talk and all the touching and all the innuendo, we still hadn’t made love.
Why? Hard to say. There might have been something in the talk and the touching that was enough. Anticipation is sexy. It charges the air, and charged air is worth a lot all on its own. Slam-bam takes the edge off before there’s an edge worth taking off.
Or, maybe our timing was off. Or Aphrodite was on sabbatical. Or the image of Jonnie raping fourteen-year-old Jacoba Woolley was still a dark specter gliding through our thoughts, leaving behind a damper that would have put out a forest fire.
Lots of reasons.