G is for Gumshoe (28 page)

“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 Brontë, 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 Brontë.”

“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 Brontës. 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 time, 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 fact 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.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 lens. “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?”

“Just a moment,” he said. He consulted with another of the staff, an older woman, and then crossed to his desk and
sorted through a pile of pamphlets, selecting one. When he returned he had a local publication called
A Field Guide to the Earthquake History of Santa Teresa
. “Let's see. I can give you the dates for earthquakes that occurred in nineteen sixty-eight, nineteen fifty-two, nineteen forty-one—”

“That's a possibility,” I said to Dietz.

He shook his head. “Too late. It would have been before nineteen forty if that newspaper has any bearing. What other dates do you show?”

The librarian flipped the booklet open to a chart that listed the important quakes offshore in the Santa Teresa channel. “November four, nineteen twenty-seven, there was a seven point five quake, but that was west of Point Arguello and the damage here was slight.”

“No casualties?” Dietz asked.

“Evidently not. There was an earthquake in eighteen twelve that destroyed the mission at La Purisima. Several more from July to December nineteen oh-two . . .”

“I think we want something after that,” I said.

“Well then, your best bet would probably be to start with the big quake in nineteen twenty-five.”

“All right. Let's try that.”

The man nodded and moved to a row of wide gray file cabinets, returning moments later with a box of microfilm. “This is April first through June thirtieth. The quake actually occurred on the twenty-ninth of June, but I don't believe you'll find a newspaper reference until the day after.” He pointed to the left. “The machines are over there. Use the schematic diagram to thread the film.”

“If I find something I need, can I get a copy?”

“Certainly. Simply position that portion of the page between
the two red dots on the screen and press the white button in the front.”

We sat down at one of four machines, placing the spool on the spindle to the left, slipping the film across the viewer and attaching it so that it would wind onto the spool on the right side of the machine. I turned the automatic-forward knob from off to the slow speed position. The first page of the paper came into view against a background of black. The edges of the pages were ragged in places, but for the most part the picture was clear. Dietz stood behind me, looking over my shoulder as I turned the knob to fast forward.

Days whipped across the screen in a blur, like a cinematic device. Now and then, I'd halt the process, checking to see how far we'd gone. April 22. May 14. June 3. I slowed the machine. Finally, June 30 crept into view. The big earthquake had occurred at 6:42
A.M.
on June 29. According to the paper, the severity of the quake was such that the concrete pavement buckled and street signs were snapped as if they were threads. The reservoir broke and sent a flood of mud and water into Montebello. Gas and electric power were shut off immediately and in consequence, there was only one fire, easily contained. Many buildings downtown were badly damaged, the streetcar track was snapped, the asphalt pavement sank six inches in places. Residents slept outside that night and many cars were reported on the highway heading south. In all, there were thirteen fatalities. Both the dead and injured were listed. Sometimes ages and occupations were specified, along with home addresses if they were known. None among the dead seemed remotely related to the tale Agnes Grey had told me.

I was hand-cranking the machine by then, stopping the film at intervals so that we could scan each column. A prominent widow had been crushed to death when the walls of a hotel toppled in on her. The body of a dentist was removed from the ruins of his office building. There was no mention of anyone named Emily. “What do you think?” I said to Dietz.

He made a thumbs-down gesture. I rewound the microfilm and took it off the spindle. We returned the box of film to the main counter, consulting in low tones, trying to figure out what to try next, if anything. Dietz said, “What year was Agnes born?”

“Nineteen hundred, as nearly as we can tell . . . though there's some question. It might have been nineteen thirteen.”

“So she would have been somewhere between twelve and twenty-five in nineteen twenty-five. If you figure her sister was in a five- or six-year age range of her, she could have been any age from six to thirty.”

“We didn't see a female earthquake victim even close to that,” I said.

Dietz lifted his brow. “For all we know, Emily was the family dog.”

The librarian approached, smiling politely. “Find what you were looking for?”

“Not really,” I said. “Would you have anything else?”

He took up his field guide with patient interest in our plight. “Let's see here. Well . . . it looks like there was an aftershock to that nineteen twenty-five earthquake. Here . . . June twenty-nine, nineteen twenty-six . . . exactly one year later to the day. One fatality. The only other
earthquake of note would have been November four, nineteen twenty-seven, but there were no fatalities recorded in that one. Would you like to take a look at the one in 'twenty-six?”

“Sure.”

We went back to the same machine, repeating the process of threading the film. Again, we flew through the calendar, time flashing by in a whir of gray. As we reached the end of the reel, I slowed the machine, hand-cranking my way from day to day, scanning one column at a time. Dietz was leaning over my shoulder, making sure I didn't miss anything. I was losing hope. I thought it was a good theory—hell, it was my
only
theory. If this didn't pay off, we were out of luck.

I read about Babe Ruth, who'd just hit his twenty-sixth homer of the season back in Philadelphia. I read about some woman whose six-year marriage was annulled when she found out her former spouse was still alive. I read about Aimee Semple McPherson's stout defense of her alleged kidnapping at the hands of strangers . . .

“There it is,” Dietz said. He put a finger on the screen.

I let out a yelp and laughed. Six library patrons turned around and looked at me. I put a hand across my mouth sheepishly. I peered at the machine. It was like a gift—such an unexpected pleasure—lines leaping off the page. The article was brief and the style faintly antique, but the facts were clear and it all seemed to fit.