New Title 1 (19 page)

Rosamund never did visit him in prison.

me—"

One day, I got authorization to go up to the Office of Technical Services, which is where the Agency keeps all of its James Bond devices, and a very friendly old chap spent an hour with me bringing me up to speed on devices for tapping phones and photographing documents and new ways to plant bugs. Most people don't realize this, but the Agency employs a good number of cabinetmakers, leatherworkers, woodworkers and general carpenters who do nothing but devise better ways to conceal electronic bugging devices. When the old man finished telling me about his department, he said, "There's only one thing we haven't come up with yet."

"And what's that?"

"Some way for you agents to occupy your time while you're on a stakeout."

How true.

I gave Jane Avery a ten-minute head start and then I drove over to the McNally block and parked at the far end, between two cars, so I'd be less conspicuous.

Her police car sat right out in front of the McNallys'. As I drove by, I'd seen both of them in the lighted window, behind the gauzy cover of sheer white curtains.

Jane had been in there more than an hour.

As for me, I now had time to brush up on my three favorite sports: thumb-twiddling, sighing and keeping the cheeks of my backside from going to sleep.

Oh, yes, and one other sport: playing guess the Sears house.

Around the turn of the century, a lot of Iowa people bought house kits from Sears. These weren't little shacks, either, the homes from these kits. In fact, the most popular in-town model was the Dutch Colonial, a two-story job with a gambrel roof and authentic reproductions of "Colonial sidelights" flanking the front door.

There were probably three or four hundred Sears houses still standing in Iowa, which said something about the quality of craftsmanship in those days.

Unfortunately, I didn't see any Sears houses on Eve McNally's block, no matter how hard I looked, no matter how many times I lifted my binoculars and checked them out.

Maybe the owners had done what the Mesquakie Indians used to do, before the white man came. They made houses from reed mats that lasted about seven years, which was also the time it took to exhaust the firewood in a given area. So the Mesquakies never, as it were, sought a home-improvement loan; they just moved on to a new area where they built new houses and started life afresh, members of a truly mobile society.

Jane Avery came out just as I was starting to rub my backside, prickly numbness having started to overtake it.

I slid down in the seat, figuring her lights would sweep across my door when she pulled out. As they did.

After a flash of headlamps, there was just darkness again. I pulled myself up, opened the door and walked across the street.

It was misting now, a chill spray that reminded me of lying with Jane on her bed. I smiled.

At the door, Eve McNally peered out through the dark glass before turning on the porch light. An aged yellow lamp above my head came on. It had probably chaperoned teenagers back in the days of Benny Goodman and swooning over Sinatra. After recognizing me, she shook her head, waved me away.

From inside my jacket, I took a number-ten white envelope that was folded inside my shirt pocket. The envelope contained nothing more exciting than some notes I'd scribbled down about my biplane. But Eve McNally didn't know that.

I held the envelope up and pointed at it importantly.

She was nice enough to fall for it.

It was an awful trick to play on a woman whose daughter had been kidnapped—she was likely hoping against hope that the envelope contained word of Melissa—but I didn't have much choice.

She said, "What's in the envelope?" Her words were muffled by the glass and the dusty door curtains.

"You need to let me in first."

She shook her head again.

"I've got news," I said.

A kind of frenzy overtook her. "News? Of Melissa?"

She looked confused a moment—should she let me in or not?—and then she made her mind up.

The inside door was jerked open.

All that separated us now was a screen door. I tried the handle. She had the door latched.

"What news?"

"I lied. I shouldn't have gotten your hopes up that way."

"You lied? You lied?" She sounded hysterical. "About having news? You are really a dirty sonofabitch, you know that?"

"I am. Yes, I am. I'm really sorry."

"I thought—"

"I know what you thought. And I apologize again. I know you don't believe this but I'm trying to help you."

"Oh, sure you are."

"Just let me in a moment. Please."

"You didn't need to lie to me," she said, then surprised me by quietly lifting the latch and stepping back.

She went in and sat down on the edge of the couch and stared forlornly at the floor.

She was close to the end-table lamp so I could see her face now, the bruises, the cuts above her right eye, most likely the result of a ring scraping her as she was being punched.

I went over and sat next to her on the couch. At first I didn't know what to do or say. I still felt bad about having raised her hopes.

She was staring at the floor as if she were in a coma. Most of the room was in darkness; we were in a little ring of light.

I slid my arm over her shoulder and said, "You need a friend."

"I just want my daughter back."

"I know. And I really do want to help."

"You don't know how bad I wanted to tell her everything."

"Jane Avery?"

"Uh-huh."

"So you didn't tell her anything?"

She shook her head. "I couldn't. Just like I can't tell you anything."

"Including who beat you up tonight."

"Melissa'd be dead for sure, if I told you that." Then she turned and looked at me and said, "But there's one thing."

I didn't say anything, just let her come to it in her own time. She wore a faded KISS T-shirt that made her sad little breasts seem very vulnerable. The shoulder of the T-shirt had splotches of dried blood on it.

"I found something tonight, going through his stuff."

"Your husband's?"

"Right. You want to see it?"

"Of course."

"I would've told her but she's the law. And you're not, right?"

"Right. I'm not the law."

"I'll be right back."

She vanished into the darkness. I heard her opening a drawer in a room off the hall that divided the small house in two.

She returned, carrying a single sheet of paper.

She handed it to me, then took her place again on the couch. "Any idea what it is?"

"Not yet."

325 River Street, S.E.

The numbers and the rent receipt had been Xeroxed on one side of a sheet of plain white paper.

"Does any of that mean anything to you?" About midpoint in her question, she winced and touched a delicate fingertip to her puffy lower lip. She'd been hit pretty hard.

"Well, Lawlor Avenue and River Street are Cedar Rapids addresses."

"That would make sense, I guess."

"Make sense how?"

"My husband goes to Cedar Rapids a lot. Whenever he wants to hit a lot of taverns."

"You have a Cedar Rapids phone book here?"

The towns around Cedar Rapids were now treated by the phone-company folks as satellites—if not suburbs—of Iowa's second-largest city.

She walked over to a small desk, rattled around in the middle drawer, and brought forth a phone book which she carried over and handed to me.

I turned to Taverns and went down the list. Though there were roughly seventy-five taverns in and around Cedar Rapids, none of those listed were on either Lawlor Avenue or River Street.

"No luck," I said.

I set the phone book on the coffee table and then turned back to her.

"Every time I lie down and close my eyes and try to sleep, all I can see is Melissa. I just keep imagining all the things that might be happening to her. All the things I've read about in the papers over the years—"

I took her hand. "She's going to be all right, Eve. You've got to keep saying that to yourself. Over and over and over. You've got to believe that."

She smiled her sad smile. "You should've been a doctor. You've got a nice manner."

"I don't suppose you've changed your mind about telling me who beat you up tonight?"

"No. I'm sorry."

"Just the way you talk about it, I know it wasn't your husband."

She said nothing, obviously not wanting to answer my question either way.

I stood up and told her where I was staying and said she could call me there any time, night or day.

"Do you think those addresses have anything to do with Melissa?"

"There's no way of knowing without checking them out."

"Would you even consider doing that?"

I nodded. "Tomorrow morning, I'm going to take a plane up for a short ride. Then maybe I'll drive into Cedar Rapids and see what I can find out."

"You really are a nice guy."

"Thanks. You're going to get Melissa back and she's going to be fine," I said, reaching the door and turning around again.

In one of his books, Graham Greene noted that despair is a serious sin, and the older I get, the more I understand what he meant. All we have, when all else has deserted us, is faith and hope. It was enough to bring our species from the sea millions of years ago, and it's enough now to take us to the stars.

"You don't want this?" she said, holding up the paper with the figures on it.

"No. Don't need it. Thanks. And I'll say a few prayers for Melissa tonight."

"I'd appreciate that."

I nodded and left.