39

W HEN WE LEFT THE DUCANE HOUSE, O’CONNOR FOLLOWED ME HOME again. It wasn’t that late, about nine o’clock. The lights were on, so I figured Mary and my dad were still up. I invited O’Connor in. He declined. I felt noble for offering.

Once inside, though, I was glad he had declined, not because my dad was in bad shape, but because he and Mary were laughing. Recently, Dad hadn’t laughed all that often.

“Glad to see you’re having a good time here,” I said.

“I was remembering the camping trip.”

We had gone camping together a lot, but “the camping trip” always referred to one adventure in Joshua Tree National Park. On that trip, I was about ten, Barbara fourteen. Barbara and I had caught a bad case of contagious giggles, and infected my parents with them. After three warnings from the ranger, the whole family got kicked out of the campground for laughing too loudly after curfew. Just as we were getting in the car, the ranger asked in a pleading voice, “What was so darn funny?”

It broke us up again. In fact, for some time after that, all you had to do was say “Joshua Tree,” and we’d lose it.

The truth is, I don’t have the slightest idea what the original joke was, or even if there was one. If there was and I heard it again, I suspect I wouldn’t be more than mildly amused. The laughter itself wasn’t really what mattered. What mattered was that all our lives, from that moment on, there was that time in our memories of our family so closely drawn together, a one-of-a-kind something that happened over nothing.

My father looked at me now and took my hand. “Call Barbara,” he said.

“Now?”

“No, tomorrow. Arrange to have lunch with her. Something. Just the two of you. Don’t mention me. Don’t ask her to come here.”

If he hadn’t mentioned Joshua Tree just before he asked, I probably would have made excuses. But I knew what he was remembering, what he wanted of me, and so I agreed that I would.

So I left a message for Barbara. I specified that I wouldn’t be asking her to talk about or take care of Dad. Sister time.

I walked Mary out to her car and thanked her again. After she left, I had an odd sensation of being watched. I looked around, but couldn’t see anyone.

I went back inside and called Barbara again.

I didn’t hear from her.

It didn’t bother me much, because the next few days were wild ones.

40

W HEN SHE FIRST SAW THE PHOTOGRAPHS ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THIS morning’s Express, the woman who had once been known as Betty Bradford became so alarmed, she threw the paper in the kitchen trash. Her husband came downstairs as she did and teased her as he retrieved it, telling her she was becoming absent-minded. “Just because it’s Saturday doesn’t mean I don’t want to keep up with the world,” he said.

She laughed it off, told him she didn’t know what she had been thinking. She was a convincing actress. All the world had been her stage for fifteen years.

She had become the woman in the part she played. A respectable woman.

How she loved that word, respectable.

She hadn’t been able to eat breakfast at all. From the moment he took the newspaper in hand until the moment he left to take the boys to Little League, she worried that he would see her photograph and ask questions. Twenty years, a few pounds, and a change in hair color-was that enough to keep a man from recognizing a photo of his wife?

Now, several hours later, while he took the boys to their swimming lessons, she stood stock still at the kitchen sink, staring out through her greenhouse window, her hands in yellow rubber dishwashing gloves. The warmth of the sudsy water came through the gloves, and she enjoyed the plain, everyday feel of that.

She looked out at the front lawn, looked out at her neighborhood. A good neighborhood. One where they thought the problem kid was the long-haired boy who played in a band. He wasn’t a problem. He smoked a little dope with his friends once in a while and played his guitar too loud, but he was a sweet kid at heart. He wasn’t going to do anyone any real harm. They should all keep an eye on the quiet, sullen boy who lived three doors down.

She knew how to spot a troublemaker.

She had been one.

She didn’t like to think of it, but there it was, right in the paper. She glanced over at the place where it lay on the counter, stained by coffee grounds that had been in the trash, and quickly looked away from it, looked back to the sunny day just beyond the window. She thought about a little box that held something she had stolen from a powerful man, something she had nearly thrown away a half a dozen times. Maybe, she thought, she should throw it away now.

She told herself that even if he learned the truth, her husband would love her, would stand by her.

She didn’t really believe it, though.

She had known only one man who had stood by her, accepted her as she was. A tough man who was, all the same, gentle with women, gentle with her. Who had helped her to find her way from being a wild and restless thing into being a woman. Not some silly mimicry of womanhood, but something real. Just by respecting her.

But that man had died in Mexico. His name was Luis-she had stopped calling him Lew, the anglicized version of his name, not long after they had become lovers.

“Luis,” she whispered now, “what am I going to do?”

41

O N SATURDAY, THE CORONER MADE A SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT. HE WAS placed in the embarrassing position of admitting that further examination of the bones had shown them to be those of a small dog believed to be Katy Ducane’s pet. Lefebvre later told me that he had talked his partner, Matt Arden, into being the bearer of bad news. I had a feeling Arden was often the ambassador for Lefebvre.

Woolsey blamed an assistant for the error. The Express and the rest of the fourth estate did not go easy on Woolsey, but it would have been worse if he had tried a cover-up.

Max stayed in touch over the weekend, calling me a couple of times each day, usually just to ask if I had learned anything new. I gave him my home number, and he called me there a few times, too, always careful not to call too late. More than once, I got the feeling that it was more difficult for him to be “possibly-the-kidnapped-one” than “not-the-kidnapped-one.”

The reward was published. Lots of calls came in, both to the paper and to the police. I didn’t see a lot of promise in those made to the Express.

One call, from a woman, might have been an exception. Within a moment after she asked if I was Irene Kelly, something made me believe she knew something. Exactly why I was so sure she wasn’t another crank, I can’t say. Maybe it was her nervousness, when other callers had been cocky, more eager to know about the conditions attached to the reward than to tell me anything. She said she didn’t want the reward money. She just wanted to talk to me. Just me, not the police. She sounded upset. I found myself praying I could keep her on the line long enough to get her to tell me her phone number. But she hung up before I could respond with more than, “I’d love to hear whatever it is you have to say…”

I stayed off my phone for two hours, hoping she’d call back. I pissed off everyone near me because I used their phones instead. That was all I got out of that.

On Monday, I learned that the Baer house was sold-apparently over the weekend-but the real estate agent would not reveal the name of the buyer to me. Telling her I would eventually see it on county property records did not make the least impression on her.

I talked O’Connor into going over more of his notes from 1958 with me. We talked about the property records for the area near the cabin where Gus Ronden’s body had been found. He mentioned that Katy Ducane, Lillian and Harold Linworth, and Thelma and Barrett Ducane owned cabins not far from Baer’s. Katy’s was then bequeathed to Jack Corrigan. Helen owned it now.