“What am I gonna doooo?” she wailed into my right ear.
“You might think about getting married,” I suggested helpfully.
“I caaaan’t.”
“Of course you can, Vera. People do it every day.”
“I’m too old and too tall and he says he wants kids.”
I could feel a laugh bubble up, but I resisted the urge to make a flip remark. I said mothering-type things, “There, there” and “It’s all right.” Remarkably, it seemed to work. Within a minute, she calmed down to a series of hiccups and sniffs. She let out a big sigh and then blew her nose noisily on a piece of shriveled Kleenex she found in her jumpsuit. She pressed the tissue to her eyes and then she did a quick burbling laugh while she checked her makeup. “When I saw you and Neil with your heads bent together last night I wanted to kill you.”
“Yeah, I caught the look. I just wasn’t sure what it meant,” I said.
“And right about then, Mac started making his speech and next thing I knew you were gone. What was that about?”
I filled her in on (some, but not all of) my night’s activities and then quizzed her on hers.
She spent the next few minutes detailing the portion of the banquet I’d missed. Neil had slipped over into Dietz’s chair while Mac finished his speech. After-dinner drinks arrived. She was so upset with Neil because of his apparent interest in me, she started tossing down brandies and the next thing she knew, the two of them were back in her room making love. She started laughing again. “We didn’t even make it to the bed. The maid came in to turn the sheets down and there we were grappling on the floor. We never even heard her knock. It turned out she was a patient of his at the clinic where he works. You know how you do when the phone rings and you’re on the pot? He sort of scrambled to his feet and hobbled off to the bathroom with his trousers down around his knees.”
“Vera, if I laugh now, I’ll end up peeing in my pants.” I gave her a quick pat and headed straight to the nearest stall, relieving myself while I talked to her across the top of the cubicle. “What happened to the maid? She must have been mortified,” I said. “Her own doctor with his bum hanging out of his pants? My God.”
“She was out of there like a shot and that’s when he proposed. He started screaming it was my fault. He said if I’d marry him we could grapple on our own floor without all the interruptions-”
“The man’s got a point.”
“You really think so?”
I flushed the toilet and emerged. “Vera, do me a favor. Just marry the guy. He’s a doll. You’ll be deliriously happy for eternity. I promise.” I washed my hands and dried them, grabbing up my shoulder bag. “Dietz is waiting for me. I gotta go or he’ll think I’ve been kidnapped. I get dibs on maid of honor, but I won’t wear dusty rose. Let me know when you set the date.” When I left, she was staring after me with a dazed look on her face.
As I passed California Fidelity, I caught sight of Darcy at the file cabinet behind the receptionist’s desk. She was barely moving, apparently intent on cooling her fevered brow against the cold metal of the cabinet top where she’d laid her head. I detoured into the office. She managed to raise her eyes without moving her head. “Vera chew your ass out?”
“We’re fine. She’s getting married. You can be the flower girl,” I said. “I need to know what you were talking about when I mentioned that Agnes died. You said it was weird. What was weird?”
“Oh, I wasn’t referring to her death,” Darcy said. “That’s the name of a book.”
“A book?”
“Agnes Grey. It’s a novel by Anne Bronte, written in eighteen forty-seven. I know because it was the subject of my senior thesis at UNLV.”
“You went to college in Las Vegas?”
“What’s wrong with that? I grew up there. Anyway, I was a lit major and it was the only paper I ever wrote that netted me an A-plus.”
“I thought the name was Charlotte Bronte.”
“This is a sister. The youngest. Most people only know about the two older ones, Charlotte and Emily.”
A chill tiptoed over me like a daddy longlegs. “Emily . . .”
“She wrote Wuthering Heights.”
“Right,” I said faintly. Darcy went on talking, waxing eloquent about the Brontes. I was sifting back through Agnes’s account of Emily’s death, the hapless “Lottie” who was simpleminded and couldn’t remember how to get in and out the back door. Was her real name Charlotte? Could Agnes Grey’s real name be Anne something, or was that strictly a coincidence? I moved back toward the corridor.
“Kinsey?” Darcy was startled, but I didn’t want to stop and explain what was going on. I didn’t get it myself.
When I got to my office, Dietz was just hanging up the phone. “Did you talk to Rochelle?” I asked, distracted.
“It’s all taken care of. She’s hopping in her car and heading straight up. She has a friend who runs a motel on Cabana called the Ocean View. I said we’d meet her there at four. You know the place?”
“As a matter of fact, I do,” I said. The Ocean View had been the setting of my last and most enlightening encounter with an ex-husband named Daniel Wade. Not my best day, but liberating after a fashion. What had Agnes told me about Emily? She was killed in an earthquake. Down in Brawley or somewhere else? Lottie was the first to go. Then the chimney fell on Emily. There was more, but I couldn’t remember what it was.
Dietz glanced at his watch. “What shall we do till she gets here? You want to pop by your place?”
“Give me a minute to think.” I sat down in my client chair and ran my hand through my hair. Dietz had the good sense to hold his tongue and let me ruminate. At this point, I didn’t even want to have to stop and bring him up to speed. Could Emily’s death have been the event that precipitated Agnes Grey’s departure from Santa Teresa? Had she actually been here? If the name Agnes Grey was a phony, then what was her real name? And why the subterfuge?
“Let me try this on you,” I said to Dietz. I took a few minutes then to fill him in on Darcy’s remark. “Suppose her name really wasn’t Agnes Grey. Suppose she used that as a cover name … a kind of code. …”
“To what end?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think she wanted to tell the truth. I think she wanted someone to know, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it. She was terrified about coming up to Santa Teresa, I do know that. At the tune, I figured she was nervous about the trip-unhappy about the nursing home. I just assumed her anxiety was related to the present, but maybe not. She might have lived here once upon a time. I gather she and Emily were sisters and there was a third one named Lottie. She might have known some critical feet about the way Emily died. …”
“But now what? At this point, we don’t even know what her real name was.”
I held a finger up. “But we do know about the earthquake.”
“Kinsey, in California, you’re talking eight or ten a year.”
“I know, but most of those are minor. This one was big enough that someone died.”
“So?”
“So let’s go to the public library and look up the Santa Teresa earthquakes and see if we can find out who she was.”
“You’re going to research every local earthquake with fatalities,” he said, his voice flat with disbelief.
“Not quite. I’m going to start with January six or seven, nineteen forty . . . the day before that box was packed.”
Dietz laughed. “I love it.”
23
the periodicals room at the Santa Teresa Public Library is down a flight of stairs, a spacious expanse of burnt-orange carpeting and royal blue upholstered chairs, with slanted shelves holding row after row of magazines and newspapers. A border of windows admits ample sunshine and recessed lighting heightens the overall illumination. We traversed the length of the room, approaching an L-shaped desk on the left.
The librarian was a man in his fifties in a dress shirt and tie, no coat. His gray hair was curly and he wore glasses with tortoiseshell frames, a little half-moon of bifocal in the lower portion of each tens. “May I help you?”
“We’re trying to track down the identity of a woman who might have died in one of the Santa Teresa earthquakes. Do you have any suggestions about where we might start to look?”