Kiel vanished on his tagline. I could hear him stomping up a flight of stairs and then a door slamming. His man cave, perhaps, where he gnawed on raw alligator and brooded over how little recognition his wife and bipolar daughter gave him.
Shirley tracked him with her eyes, her expression malevolent. After he shut his door, she heaved herself to her feet and led me silently to the front of the house.
I handed her one of my cards, urging her to phone me if there was something else she could tell me about where Sonia might have last seen Matt Chastain. The graveyard Sonia was obsessed with could easily be a metaphor for her own buried hopes; perhaps Matt had talked to her there, kissed her, done something that made her feel that a particular spot was sacred.
“It was over thirty years ago, so I don’t remember.” Shirley pushed open the outer door. “Anyway, everyone was confused. What was real, what was imaginary, how could I know? I wasn’t there.”
“What happened?” I said. “What went so wrong with the experiment that Matt Chastain felt he had to run away?”
“Nate doesn’t confide in me.”
I would have believed her more readily if she hadn’t swallowed a sly smile before answering.
“I don’t know anything about this kind of work, but something going wrong with an experiment—was there an explosion? Were people hurt? Or did something your husband worked on make people sick?”
She looked startled, even alarmed. “I don’t know, and anyway, I just told you, it was a long time ago.”
“But your daughter must have seen something, if it terrified her so much that she had to cover the memory with the protective story that Chastain had died or been killed.”
“My daughter,” and she again invested a shocking amount of venom in the two syllables, “was sneaking out of the house and trailing around after poor Matt. Dr. Chesnitz says the most likely scenario is that she flung herself at Matt, who rejected her. She was fourteen, overweight, not the kind of girl anyone would respond to, let alone a young man in his twenties. Chesnitz says that in Sonia’s mind Matt had to be punished by death. Thinking he was murdered helps her blot out the memory of the rejection and turn him into an idealized figure who was in love with her.”
“It sounds like a convenient theory,” I said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” She thrust her head forward in her signature turkey move.
“Keeps anyone from asking too many questions about what really happened, or where, or how.”
She started to bristle, but I interrupted to ask if her sons kept in touch with Sonia.
Her expression darkened. “I wouldn’t know. They couldn’t take Nate, his bullying and his moods. Stuart went to school at Bowdoin, out in Maine, never came home after his sophomore year, and Larry, he went to college in Oregon and stayed out on the West Coast. If they talk to Sonia, that’s something you’d have to ask them.”
“It must be hard to have them so far away,” I said, trying to infuse some sincerity into my voice.
“That’s my business,” she said roughly. “Don’t you have to be someplace else?”
I suppose I did. I stepped outside but stopped to say, “If it wasn’t Matt Chastain you thought Dr. Cordley should know about, who was it?”
Shirley smiled in a wolflike way that showed all her teeth, which were stained from coffee or cigarettes or maybe the fuzzy orange stuff on her kitchen counter. Even a fantasy lover would have brought more comfort to her daughter than that smile. She shut the door on me without speaking.
“I hope your dog mother never looked at you like that,” I said to Peppy when I got back into the car.
Peppy licked my ear sympathetically. An hour with the Kiels made me feel as though I needed a bath in some kind of fumigation sink, the kind where they pummel your body with steam jets. As a substitute I spent an hour in the open air with my dog.
We left the car a block from Gertrude Perec’s house and ran to a nearby park. This one had winding paths that led down to the south side of the river. Peppy flushed a rabbit and jumped in and out of the water. I ran along the river’s edge, letting cool air and motion empty my mind. By the time we returned to the car, I was feeling easier, almost as though I’d had five hours of sleep instead of four, almost as though I’d spoken to my own mother instead of Sonia Kiel’s.
“You stink,” I told Peppy, who grinned at me happily, “but at least it’s a good honest stench.”
I climbed into the passenger seat to look up Matt Chastain, Kiel’s errant graduate student, leaving the door open so I didn’t have to breathe quite so much rotting dog. If Sonia had been fourteen when Chastain vanished, then he’d disappeared in the early eighties, before everyone’s history had been digitized.
I searched news stories and law-enforcement databases but didn’t find any reports of a public-health disaster involving Kiel or Chastain. Whatever had happened, I guess it had bruised Kiel’s sensitive ego more than anything else.
I also couldn’t find any trace of a Matt or Mathias or Matthew Chastain as a cell biologist, although there were dozens of men with that name scattered around the country. It would be a waste of my time and the client’s money for me to start calling them just in the hopes of finding a person who could tell me where Sonia had seen Emerald Ferring a week ago: Were you a graduate student in Kansas in the 1980s? Do you remember where Sonia Kiel saw you the last night you were in town?
I’d left my cashmere blazer on the seat while Peppy and I ran. I put it back on, ran a comb through my hair, and walked up the road to Gertrude Perec’s house. She might have been at the market or the hairdresser or serving in the Riverside Church soup kitchen, but this was my lucky day: lights were on in the back of the house, and she answered the bell within a minute of my ringing.
“Hello,” I said before she could speak. “I’ve just come from Dr. Kiel’s. I know you know that Sonia is in the hospital, since you called to tell him the news. Perhaps you even know that I found her last night in time to get her emergency help.”
“Yes.” Her voice came out in an uncertain whisper. She cleared her throat and tried to speak more firmly. “Dr. Kiel told me.”
“You called him to tell him—warn him—that I had visited you but that you had protected his identity from me. So he returned the favor by calling you just now to tell you I’d found him anyway?”
She nodded. “Because of Sonia.”
“Sonia is such a convenient whipping boy, or girl, isn’t she?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Perec’s tone became belligerent.
“Whatever goes wrong, from Matt Chastain’s dying, or disappearing, or whatever he did, to the grotesque relations between Shirley and Nathan Kiel, can be offloaded onto Sonia, who’s not able to fight back.”
“Fight back? That’s all she’s been doing her whole life. If she could behave herself—”
“When she was fourteen, someone not only diagnosed her with a mental illness but started medicating her so heavily that I doubt she could remember her own name in a well-lit room on a sunny day. Thirty years down the road, I have no idea how much or how little she can possibly remember or know from that time. That’s why I need your help.”
I hadn’t meant to get off on such a confrontational foot. Of course Gertrude Perec didn’t want to help me—she wanted to protect Dr. Kiel. I was an enemy; I’d saved the wicked Sonia’s life.
Gertrude started to close the door on me, so I said quickly, “Sonia told me she’d seen Emerald Ferring and August Veriden—you remember, those are the people I’m trying to find—walking on Matt Chastain’s grave.”
“You spoke to her?” Gertrude poised the door between open and shut.
“Only very briefly. I’m trying to find out where Matt Chastain is buried. Or where Sonia thinks he’s buried.”
“What . . . what did Nate—Dr. Kiel—say?”
“Tell me about the experiment that went so badly that Chastain ran away. Do you know where he ran to?”
“I . . . I was Dr. Kiel’s secretary, not part of his experimental team.”
“Yes, of course. But he clearly relied on you. I’m sure you knew at least the outline of what was going on.” I was almost leering with the effort to seem warm and fuzzy. It was keeping the door open but not making Gertrude more forthcoming.
“It was a long time ago, more than thirty years. I’ve forgotten the details.”
This was so nearly identical to what Shirley Kiel had said that my mouth had opened with a sarcastic comment at the ready when the kaleidoscope turned in my brain and two pieces of glass lined up over each other: 1983, when so much happened—the protest at the silo, the birth of Cady Perec, the death of Jennifer Perec, the disappearance of Matt Chastain.
“Your daughter, Jennifer. Is Matt Chastain Cady’s father? If he is, why don’t you want Cady to know? Surely not because of some long-forgotten science—”
“You know nothing.” Her face shriveled and turned white, transparent, like a petal from a dying narcissus. “You come from up north, you think you’re smarter than us small-town folk, but you know nothing.”
She shut the door on me. I lingered on the stoop, wondering if I should go in to make sure she hadn’t collapsed. After a moment, though, I saw a light come on in the room behind the porch where I’d sat yesterday. The house was too stoutly built for me to hear anything—such as the phone call I assumed she was making to Nathan Kiel—but she was probably okay.
I walked slowly back to the car, trying to make sense of the story. Shirley Kiel said Sonia had stalked Matt. Say Sonia had seen him with Jennifer Perec, seen her own romantic daydreams ripped apart. What would she have done? Had the psychotic break her parents claimed? And then had she attacked Matt? No, more likely she attacked Jennifer. I felt something cold in my stomach, like a large glacier—had she killed Jennifer? Was the car in the Wakarusa a cover-up for that?
And where had Chastain been when Jennifer died? Was he glad not to be saddled with a baby? No one knew he was Cady’s father, so he could slide out of town, away from Nathan Kiel’s wrath, away from fatherhood. Maybe he’d changed his name and become CEO of a pharmaceutical company. Or he’d dropped off the grid and was living under a viaduct with a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 to keep him warm.
Nothing I could imagine made any sense. It wasn’t really my business either. My business was to find Emerald Ferring and August Veriden. I repeated that to myself about a dozen times as I drove over to the Hippo for another nourishing cortado.