No great feat of detection. The Sanctum party had been in the papers.
“Did Barnard ever try to talk to you again?”
“Never.”
And he’d never recorded his talk with Marvin D’Amato.
“Did you warn Lowell that Barnard might be snooping around?”
“No! I told you, I had nothing to do with him after he gave me the . . . bag.”
“Did Barnard’s showing up make you suspect anything about Lowell’s story?”
“Why should it? I figured her cheap father had finally decided to spend some money on her.”
Her arms were across her chest like bandoliers.
“Five thousand dollars, Gwen. Just to avoid bad publicity?”
She tried not to look at me. I waited her out.
“Okay,” she said, “I thought it was possible she’d OD’d or something. What was I supposed to do? Whatever happened to her, she was gone. Nothing I did would bring her back.”
“Was Karen into drugs?”
“She smoked a little pot.”
“What kind of dope was floating around the party?”
“Pot, hash, mushrooms, acid, you name it. People were tripping out, taking off their clothes, going off together into the woods.”
Meaning if there’d been a burial it would have had to be far enough away. . . .
“Was Karen the type of girl who’d get into that kind of thing?”
“Who knows? She wasn’t wild, but she wasn’t any nuclear scientist either. Being at that party was the biggest thrill of her life. There were movie people all over the place.”
“But you never saw her go off with anyone specific.”
“Nope.”
“Not with Lowell?”
“No one. I wasn’t looking at who was with who. I was spooning out designer slop and trying to keep it off people’s cuffs.”
“What about Tom?”
“Working the bar. People were putting it away; he never even stopped for a break.”
“Why’d you go to Aspen?”
She frowned, as if thinking. “ ’Cause of Best. He was driving us crazy, showing up every day on our doorstep. And we were tired of seeing Marvin’s sour puss.”
“Why Aspen?”
“Tom had a buddy who spent the winters there, teaching skiing. He’d inherited a house just outside of Starwood. He got Tom a job tending bar at one of the lodges. I found a position at a fur shop. It was good to be away from food.”
“I still don’t see how you got from there to here.”
“Hard work and luck. Tom’s buddy needed some cash fast. The house was all he owned. It wasn’t much, just a little place—”
“Why’d he need cash fast?”
Tugging. “He got busted.”
“For what?”
“Drugs,” she said, reluctantly.
“Are drugs what drew you to Aspen?”
“No! He was busted, not us! Check the police records there: Greg Fowler. Gregory Duncan Fowler III. He got busted for selling cocaine and needed bail money, so he signed over the house to us.”
“For how much?”
“Thirteen thousand. He kicked in two of his own and put down bond on a hundred and fifty thousand bail.”
“Lowell’s three and ten of your own?”
“That’s right.”
“Not bad for a house in Aspen.”
“The house wasn’t as big a deal as it sounds. It was a shack, really. A hunting shack. Tom and I didn’t even want it, the plumbing and electric was all shot. But Greg begged us. He said real estate was starting to take off and we’d be doing each other a favor. We lived in it while Tom fixed it up—he’s good with his hands. The real estate did go crazy, all these Hollywood types flying in, buying up land.
“Our house was right next to this big parcel owned by a producer—Sy Palmer, he did Flying Angels, on TV? He really wanted our land so he could build riding stables, and he paid us seventy-five thousand. We couldn’t believe it. Then we found out we needed to buy another house or pay lots of taxes, so we used the seventy-five to make a down payment on a bigger place, lived in that, fixed it up, sold it for three hundred thousand. We couldn’t believe how well we were doing. Then I got pregnant.”
Her glance at Travis was full of tenderness and torment. He continued to roll the can.