Rainbow's End (36 page)

“Why?”

“That's what we're trying to work out.”

“Were they friends? Let me see their pictures again.”

Jury brought the photos out again. “We don't even know that, but there's reason to believe they met over here. Both of them from the U.K., it wouldn't be unusual for them to strike up a friendship, however slight. They both booked rooms at the La Fonda. At least for a couple of days.”

After studying the pictures for a moment, she said, “It's hard because so many people come along Canyon Road. Maybe somebody else saw them. Who else did you talk to?”

“The lady who has the shop next to the Silver Heron—Bartholomew.”

What Mary thought of Sukie Bartholomew was fairly clear from her expression. About Nils Anders she was considerably more enthusiastic. “He's nice. He says I'm a soliton.”

“A
what
?” Jury laughed.

“A soliton. It's one of their words. It means ‘self- . . .' ” She cast about for a definition. “It's like ‘self-dependent,' or something. Anyway, somebody that can take care of themselves.”

“I can believe it. I get the impression that your sister wasn't intimate with many people.”

Mary shook her head. “She wasn't. With Dr. Anders, mostly. I don't know why she liked Sukie. And there's Malcolm; did you talk to him?”

“Yes, I did.”

Disdainfully, Mary said, “He says he's an actor. That's when he's not being a painter. And they're
always
making movies around Santa Fe. If I see Robert Redford one more time I'll throw up.”

“I saw some shooting going on in the plaza. Is that the same film?”

“Probably. Most of it's going on over at Rancho del Rip-off. That's a kind of dude ranch ten miles away.” She paused. “What about Dolly? Did you talk to her?”

The question was too casual, Jury thought. He hadn't brought up Dolly Schell yet, avoiding it because of its potential for causing her pain. “Your cousin. Yes, I did.”

“She went to England to—identify Angela.” Her voice was bitter, but she didn't look at Jury. Suddenly, she slid down and looked under the table. “Sunny's asleep.”

“He's a pretty quiet dog.” Jury would pursue the Dolly question later.

“Unless he gets riled.”

“What riles him?”

“Well, I don't think he'd take to anyone coming after me with a club or an ax. He walks up and down Canyon Road and people kind of disappear into doorways.” Her little headshake, her tightening of the mouth told him what she thought of that. “Can you believe it? They think Sunny's a coyote.”

She pronounced it “ky-yote.”

“He does rather look like one, Mary.”

Exasperated, she said, “He does not. Have you ever seen a coyote with that kind of silvery eyes?”

“No, but I've never been eye-level with one, either. Where'd you find him?”

“Walking around” was her vague answer.

“Him? Or you?”

Impatiently, she said, “He was out in the desert, just a puppy, nosing around a buzzard skeleton. I guessed he was hungry, so I gave him my ham sandwich.”

“What were you doing in the desert with a ham sandwich?”

Oh, he was just too much, the tight little mouth indicated. “Probably the same thing he was.”

“Looking for buzzard skeletons?”

“Nooo.” Her mouth was a circle around the long, drawn-out syllable. “I always go there on Saturdays and take my lunch.”

Still she didn't say what she “did.” Maybe nothing. A soliton? He smiled. “You should be . . . I don't know . . . at the cinema with your friends. That's what I used to do on Saturdays.” Had he? He could think of no Saturdays . . . but, yes, hadn't there been an Odeon? Down the King's Road, or was it the Fulham Road? He thought he saw himself standing outside, reading the adverts, the posters. . . .

She was staring at him, or glaring. Mary Dark Hope seemed to favor the latter. She looked, looked away, glanced back and away, the opportunity for barbed ripostes seeming so plummy, she simply couldn't decide on the best one and gave up.

Jury smiled slightly, now dimly aware as to why he was being an arsehole (in his own eyes, also), for he was presenting himself as a target. If you'd just lost someone you greatly loved (and there was no doubt in his mind that Mary loved her sister), it would be a relief to have some big booby—especially a policeman booby—sitting across from you and at whom you could take potshots.

“Anyway, it's not a real desert. It's a painter's desert. It's not real anymore.” The tone was no longer sarcastic, but sad.

He watched this child in her coal-black clothes, so resistant to ordinary childish activities, and wondered if it was matter-of-fact Mary instead of a more spiritual Angela who had (in the words of Nils Anders) “run the show.” She was so down-to-earth, so unethereal, Jury wouldn't have been surprised to see not shoes but roots at the end of her long, straight legs. Images ran together in his mind; those so-called Saturdays with friends—had there been those? The Odeon cinema down the street (the King's Road, yes, he thought for sure now); the park where he helped Amy do her watercolors. . . . Perhaps it was that remark about the “painter's desert” that had brought this back. . . . Jury looked up.

Mary's face actually wore a look of startled concern, and her clear eyes were clouded over, as if he were, against her will, slipping away. . . .

But all she did was to shove her plate back and say “I'm done” and look around the room as if they could all go home now. She slid down again, reached to grab Sunny's lead.

Jury could feel the dog shaking itself awake and together. Sunny's head appeared out from under the table. He regarded Jury with his silver eyes.

 • • • 

THE PASTRY FIX
didn't last long for Mary, and around nine they stopped for dinner outside Chama in a rustic little restaurant offering no particular cuisine. They ordered steaks and french fries with side orders of green chile and posole. He asked her, during the meal, about Dolly Schell and the Schells' relationship to the Hopes. He kept it as neutral as he could. She answered calmly, giving him no information that Dolly herself hadn't, and kept on cutting up her steak.

They ate largely in silence, but there was no strain to the silence. It just was.

The steak was good, but the posole with green chile Mary said was not very authentic. Rosella could do much better. When they finished, she insisted on taking the steak bones—one for Sunny (who'd been left in the car this time), and one for whatever strays they might see along the road. There were always strays, she said, and now there'd be dead dogs since they'd crossed from Colorado into New Mexico.

She was right. They hadn't driven more than five miles when their headlights caught a stray dog along the side of the road looking ghostly gray, its yellow eyes pricked by the beams. Mary told him to stop so that she could toss out the bone.

And she was right about the dead dogs, too. Two hours later, they passed a dog, a large dog lying dead by the road. “That's one,” Mary said, grimly.

The moon was up, a full moon, huge and yellow, sailing ahead of them. Looking at it and almost without thinking, Jury said, “We used to call that a bomber's moon.”

Why was he talking about the War? Such an event to Mary Dark Hope must seem as remote and irrelevant to her experience as a landing on the moon up there. Dusty and dull as some bloody old history book. So he was a little surprised when she repeated the phrase.

“Bomber's moon.” She appeared to be considering this.

“There were blackouts; London was utterly dark.”

“So if the moon was really bright, the bombers could see their targets.”

“Yes.”

“Did you go down in air-raid shelters?”

“Yes.”

Again, she seemed to consider. “Did you ever get caught before you could get there?”

It took Jury a few moments to answer this. “Yes. A few times.” He added, “Especially at the end of it.”

Mary Dark Hope leaned her head back against the seat, the moon apparently forgotten now.

He was wrong about that, though.

She said, “When you were a kid, it must have all been awful real.”

In her mouth, it sounded as if the reality had grit. Had muscle, as Nils Anders might say.

Then she said, “It's not like that anymore. It's a movie moon.”

Ten miles later, the other side of Española, between there and Tesuque they saw another dead dog, one that looked like an Alsatian, lying off on the shoulder. And only two miles farther on, another one.

Jury said, “That's three. My God.”

“Land of Enchantment,” said Mary Dark Hope.

The movie moon sped away, ahead.

After Bethnal Green, the journey back to Long Piddleton and Martha's
boudin blanc
had restored his spirits; now, the pleasure of his late breakfast was augmented by the absence of his aunt. She had got into the practice of turning up at early and unwelcome hours, but there was no sign of her now as Melrose lifted the silver domes on the sideboard and saw the buttery eggs and the succulent sausages. It was nearly ten o'clock when he began filling his plate and getting that creepy feeling one does when one feels watched. He turned from the lavish sideboard and stared out of the window. It was Momaday. Really, the man simply must stop
lurking.

Melrose set down his plate, went to the window, and cranked it open. “What are you
doing
out there, Momaday?”

Mr. Momaday touched the brim of his cap, greeting Melrose as if they always exchanged information through the window, and said, “Got a message, m'lord.”

Ruthven and Martha, his wife, who couldn't get out of the “my lord” habit, had unintentionally indoctrinated Momaday.

“Message? From whom?”

Momaday's answer was oblique. Melrose knew it would be. “Well, ‘twas give me by some boy come up from t'village.” The man looked all around, crafty as a spy.

“Where—oh, listen. Go round to the kitchen, will you?” Melrose was freezing there in the chill air cutting through the casement window. It also annoyed the life out of him that he was being called away from his sausage on a Momaday goose chase.

The kitchen, redolent as always with the voluptuous, spicy smells of that day's meals, was inhabited by Martha, floured to the elbows, and Ruthven, eating a wedge of toast before a small grate.
Naturally, Melrose's appearance made Ruthven snap to attention, and to get to the kitchen door before Melrose did. The butler did this without appearing to hurry at all. Both of them, Ruthven and Martha, sniffed Mr. Momaday into the room.

It was hardly surprising, thought Melrose. After all, the two of them had been with the seventh earl and the countess long before Melrose was born. They had served as the nucleus of a sizable staff—maids, tweenies, chauffeurs, gardeners—and took it in stride that it was now left to them to run the place alone, with the help of a couple of cleaning women from the village. The old gardener, Mr. Peebles, had finally retired (making official, Melrose said, what he had actually done years before), making way for Momaday.

But this delivering messages to His Lordship was definitely treading in Ruthven territory. Melrose took the several-times-folded piece of dirtied paper from Momaday, posing the question: “Well, why wasn't the message delivered to you, Ruthven?”

Momaday tread on the butler's toes further by answering for him: “Warn't here, were he?” He managed to insinuate that the moment His Lordship's back was turned, Ruthven was out on the tiles.

“It was necessary,” said Ruthven stiffly, “for me to go into the village, to Jurvis's, to pick up the saddle of lamb. And Martha was visiting her cousin.”

The message was from Dick Scroggs, telling him that Mr. Jury had called the Jack and Hammer, not being able to get an answer from Ardry End. It went on to tell him that Mr. Jury desired him to ring Inspector Lasko in Stratford-upon-Avon.

It desired him, if the truth be told, to
go
to Stratford-upon-Avon.

 • • • 

“WHY DON'T
we have a fax machine?” asked Melrose of Ruthven later that same morning, and in an uncharacteristically pugnacious manner, as if it were all Ruthven's fault. “We
don't
,” he continued, looking round at the deficient butler's pantry, which did double duty as an office, “even have a computer.”

“We've only just acquired the typewriting machine, my lord.” Ruthven added, “Which seems adequate for our purposes.”

Melrose was not sure he liked the sound of that, since “our purposes” meant the typing up of
Gin Lane
, a task that Ruthven had
undertaken with alacrity. He loved sitting with rolled-up shirtsleeves at the antique walnut writing desk, his accounting and inventory books shoved aside, typing away with abandon. He had become extremely proficient with two fingers. He kept Melrose's handwritten pages locked away in the desk (for reasons neither of them could fathom) and was now reviewing His Lordship's notes relative to his recent London trip. Melrose had written up some of them and would simply dictate the others.

Dictation usually required Lou Reed pounding away in the background of the sitting room. For some reason, this made Melrose's creative juices flow. He was especially fond of the rendition of “Marshal Law,” which he would often play when Agatha was sitting on the sofa like an old gray seal, stuffing in fairy cakes and drinking tea.

 . . . I'm the marshall in this town . . .

would conjure up further visions, visions of Clint Eastwood, someone else Melrose liked. Whereas Lou Reed could send Agatha screaming away, Clint Eastwood was the apotheosis of dark and bedeviled Silence. When Clint stood there before the fireplace mantel (stood, that is, in Melrose's imagination), his silence was so palpable, took on such shape and substance, that Melrose could further imagine dust-cloths dropping over chairs and sofas, especially over any place Agatha sat, covering sofa and its occupant, so that as she continued to talk, her mouth moving under the covering, darkening as it sucked in air, ghostly and muted. And if Melrose's imagination was not quite up to this Special Effect, Clint would simply take out his gun and shoot her. That happened sometimes.