S is for Silence (Kinsey Millhone 19)

She moved in behind me, perhaps seeing the house as I did. “Believe it or not, my mother did what she could to pretty things up. Lace curtains for the living room, throw rugs, doilies for the furniture-stuff like that. One of the last fights I remember, my dad went berserk and tore down one of her precious lace panels. I don’t think he could have done anything worse. That’s how they were, always going to extremes, pushing each other over the edge. She tore down the rest, ripped them off the rods and threw them in the trash. I could hear her screaming she was finished. Done. She said he destroyed everything beautiful she tried to do and she hated him for that. Blah, blah, blah. That was a couple of days before she left.”

“Did it scare you? The fights?”

“Sometimes. Mostly I thought that’s just how parents behaved,” she said. “Anyway, the upshot is I’m a chronic insomniac. Shrinks have a field day with that. The only time I remember sleeping well was when I was a little kid and my parents went out. It must have been the only time I felt safe, because Liza was in charge and I knew I could trust her to take care of me.”

“You remember anything else from those last few days?”

“A bubble bath. It’s the little things that get you. I was sitting in the tub and she was on her way out. She stuck her head in the door… that little yappy dog in her arms… and she blew me a kiss. If I’d known it was the last one I’d ever get, I’d have made her come back and kiss me for real.”

4

Daisy took an alternate route on our return to Santa Maria, swinging north in a wide loop that, according to the map, encompassed the townships of Beatty and Poe. In point of fact, I didn’t see either one. I squinted, saying, “Where’s Poe? The map says it’s right here close to a little town called Beatty.”

“I think those are company names. Poe, I don’t know about, but there’s a Beatty Oil and Natural Gas. If there were ever towns in those spots, they might’ve left the names on the map so the area won’t seem so desolate.”

The surrounding countryside was flat, entirely given over to agriculture: fields of lettuce, sugar beets, and beans as far as the eye could see. The air smelled of celery. Bright blue port-o-potties stood like sentinels along the road. Cars were parked along the berm adjacent to some fields. Wooden crates were stacked high on flatbed trucks, and migrant farmworkers bent above the rows, harvesting a crop I didn’t recognize on sight, flying by as we were at sixty miles an hour. The road made a wide curve north. Oil rigs dotted the land and in one section, there was a small refinery that threw off an odor reminiscent of burning tires. In sections, I could see a line of stationary boxcars that must have stretched for a quarter of a mile.

I looked past her through the driver’s-side window. Tucked in a stand of pines, a grand old stone-and-stucco house sat close to the road, abandoned to all appearances. The architecture had elements of English Tudor with a touch of Swiss chalet thrown in, the whole of it incongruous in the midst of tilled and untilled fields. The second story was half-timbered with three gables punctuating the roofline. “What the heck is that?”

Daisy slowed. “That’s why we came this way. Tannie and her brother, Steve, inherited the house and three hundred acres of farmland, some of which they lease out.”

Two massive stone chimneys bracketed the house on each end. The narrow third-story windows suggested rooms reserved for household servants. A magnificent oak had been planted at one corner of the house, probably ninety years before, and now overshadowed the entrance. Across the road, there was empty acreage.

The yard was completely overgrown. Weeds had proliferated and once decorative shrubs were close to eight feet high, obscuring the ground-floor windows. Where there had been a gracious approach, defined by boxwoods on both sides of a wide brick path, the passage was now close to impenetrable. Someone was using a small tractor to clear the overgrowth near the road, piling it in a mound. The brush closer to the house would probably have to be hacked away by hand. Daunting, I thought.

“Catch the back side,” she said as we passed.

I shifted in my seat and glanced over my shoulder, looking at the house from another angle. A wide dirt-and-gravel lane, probably the original driveway, now doubled as a frontage road with a service road splitting off to the right. I was guessing that the service road intersected one of the old county roads that was rendered obsolete once New Cut Road went in.

On the back side of the house, most of the third-story windows in the rear were missing, the frames and timbers charred black from a fire that had eaten half the roof. There was something painful in the sight and I could feel myself wince. “How’d that happen?”