The road was narrow, and new shoots of foliage reached out to touch the sheriff's jeep, just a kiss of leaves in passing. As Cable Babitt traveled toward the coast highway, the dense forest was left behind, and he had a broad vista of town and sea and sky. He turned to the silent man beside him to make one more attempt at an actual conversation.
"I hear the Army gave you a real fine education-a damn master's degree in forensic science. They must think a lot of you, son. I'm surprised they let you go without a fight." This was doubly surprising in wartime, when the military was strained and stretched thin, when National Guardsmen much older than Oren were pressed into active duty. "Your commanding officer didn't say why you quit. I had the feeling he didn't know."
A station wagon sped past. The name of a news program was printed on a sign anchored to its roof. Oren Hobbs turned in the passenger seat to watch this vehicle heading back toward the judge's house.
"Reporters," said the sheriff. "Those guys are from a local radio station, and the signal's pretty weak." He pointed to the sky and a low-flying helicopter with station call letters boldly printed on the bottom. "Now that's the outfit that worries me. They broadcast statewide."
"Turn around," said Oren. "Take me home."
"Bad idea, son. But don't worry. I'm the one who called Ad Winston. He'll look out for your dad and Hannah. Nobody handles reporters better than Ad does."
"The judge doesn't even like him."
"So what? Henry Hobbs is like royalty around here, and Ad would never miss a chance to do that old man a favor. It's better if you stay away from the media. You know that, right?"
"I know I'm the prime suspect."
"Son, you could confess right now, and I'd still put you to work."
Oren Hobbs was stunned and quiet for all the time it took to point the wheels of the jeep toward the county seat. In sidelong vision, Cable kept an eye on his passenger as the younger man struggled with the logic of this proposition-the absolute lack of legality, not to mention common sense.
"You know I can't help you," said Oren. "You laid it out yourself back at the house. You told me-"
"What I said back there-that was for my deputy's benefit."
High school grudges were long-lived, and Dave Hardy would never forgive Oren for beating him bloody and senseless in front of half the town.
Isabelle Winston, Ph.D., stood upon a wooden deck that encircled her mother's retreat, a tower room at the top of the lodge. The crisp, cool air was filled with spraying birdseed, loud caws, whistles and trills, and the rush of wings. Hungry birds landed at feeders hung all around the railing, and the sated ones took flight.
The ornithologist ignored them. Birds were not her passion today.
Her binoculars were trained on a helicopter landing in the Hobbs meadow. She could easily identify her father, Addison, as he crossed the tall grass, one hand extended to greet the reporters piling out of the aircraft. Overhead, a private jet was making a descent at the county airstrip. More media? Of course. First the local radio station had created a serial murder from the bones of one lost boy, and now the circus had come to town.
She moved around to the other side of the tower and set the binoculars on the railing, startling a cowbird into flight and a high whistle of wee titi. She looked through the eyepiece of a telescope, one of three that were permanent fixtures of the deck. This lens was focused on the town of Coventry. Her mother, a gifted amateur naturalist, did more than note the passage of birds.
Isabelle looked back at the sleeping woman on the other side of the glass wall. How many years ago had that bed been moved up here? When had the tower room become Sarah Winston's whole world?
Turning back to the telescope, Isabelle shifted it, and kept the sheriff's jeep in sight until it made the turn onto the coast highway, carrying Oren Hobbs away. Keeping track of Oren had once been the schoolgirl hobby of summer vacations. And now that he was out of sight, her interest in voyeurism faded. She opened the sliding glass door and stepped inside.
The tower room offered shade from the midday sun but no greater sense of privacy. The northern and southern exposures were floor-to-ceiling panes of glass, and there were no curtains. The walls, east and west, were made of plaster and covered with framed drawings from her mother's sketchbook. There were also photographs taken by the judge's youngest son, Joshua Hobbs. They pictured the early birthday balls, a time when her mother had looked forward to that annual event. By Addison 's account, the festivities of later years had been stressful. On those nights, Sarah Winston had been allowed no alcohol until the last guest had departed, and then her own private parties would become drunken stupors lasting for days.
This morning's stress had been resolved not by the bottle but with sleeping pills.
Sleeping beauty.
In her middle fifties now, the woman lying on the bed was greatly changed by time. But in repose, wrinkles smoothed, the good bones of a fabulous face could still be seen. Her eyes fluttered open, so blue, so wide. "Belle?"
"Yes, Mom, I'm here." Isabelle reached down to stroke her mother's hair. Once, the blond tresses had been natural, so silky. Now they felt coarse. "It's after one. You must be starved."
Her mother sat bolt upright on the bed. "Is it true? I wasn't seeing things?"
"You were right. Oren Hobbs came home. I ran into him in town this morning."
More accurately, she had chased him down with a very fast car and an old grudge.
Oren Hobbs stood by the window and looked out on the Saulburg street. This town seemed like a bustling metropolis compared to his lethargic Coventry, where a dog on crutches could outrun every car. Behind him, a fly buzzed round the room, and Sheriff Babitt's fingers drummed on his desk blotter.
"Pull up a chair, son."
Oren was more inclined to leave, but the judge had raised him to be well mannered, and so the gentleman in blue jeans and cowboy boots accepted the invitation to sit down. By his posture, no one would guess his military background, for he slouched low in the chair. By outward appearance, he had shaken off twenty years of soldiering, as if that part of his life had been lived by someone else. This might well be the day after Josh had gone missing, the last time he had sat down to a conversation in the sheriff's private office.
"So," said Cable Babitt, "we have a deal? This is an old cold case, and I don't-"
"It never was a case. You wrote my brother off as a runaway."
"The hell I did." The sheriff spun his chair around to unlock a drawer in his credenza. When the chair swiveled back again, the man held a stack of files in his hands, and he settled them on the desk. "There must've been a thousand people combing the woods for Josh. And I'll bet you not one of them ever saw that boy as a runaway."
To be fair, a search of the forest had gone on for a solid month, long after all hope of finding Josh alive was gone.
"It's always been an open case." The sheriff slapped one hand down on his pile of paperwork. "This is it, all the files. There are no copies. Now this is a one-way deal. I don't share anything with you. But everything you find, Oren-you bring that straight to me."
No copies? Active files should be in the hands of a case detective. The sheriff had at least five of them to cover a county this size. Why would this man shut out his own investigators?
"I'm a civilian now," said Oren, "and a suspect. What you're suggesting is against-"
"Son, this is between you and me. It's not like I'm gonna give you a deputy's star."
As if the sheriff might be only half bright, Oren carefully measured out the words, "I'm-the-prime-suspect."
"Oh, hell, I never thought you had anything to do with Josh's disappearance, and neither-"
"When I was seventeen, you asked me for an alibi."
"And your alibi's one thing that isn't in these files. It was a good one. I believed it… but I never put it down on paper." He tapped his temple. "It's all up here. So I guess you're working for me. Now that it's a homicide investigation, you might need that old alibi."
"I never-"
"No, Oren, you never said a word. Someone else came forward to account for your time that day. You wouldn't tell me a damn thing when you were a kid. But now you'll work this case for me."
A gang of ravens made an assault on the bird feeders surrounding the tower room, and the flight songs of smaller birds were fading in the distance. The ravens had no song. They croaked.
Cr-r-ruck and pr-r-ruck.
"I don't see Judge Hobbs. He must've gone inside." Sarah Winston handed the binoculars to her daughter and then bowed her head to look through the eyepiece of a telescope. "I see your father. He's in the middle of that crowd of reporters."
"The sheriff asked him to handle the media. That's his job today." Father was not Isabelle's preferred name for Addison, but all of the four-letter names disturbed her mother.
More reporters had joined the feeding frenzy below, where Hannah Rice was chasing a station wagon off the grass. When another helicopter descended to the meadow, the housekeeper threw up her hands and retreated to the porch.
"Oh, Christ," said Sarah, one eye to the telescope. "You see that yellow Rolls-Royce? That's Ferris Monty's car. You remember him, don't you?"
Yes, Isabelle had a vivid recollection of Monty, though he had only come to dinner once, never to be invited back. His yellow Rolls pulled into the judge's driveway. It was a beautifully restored vintage model. She loved the car, but the little man behind the wheel revolted her. She had never shaken off the first impression of him formed in her childhood. "Wasn't he a real writer once? I think I read something of his when I was in college."
Her mother nodded, never lifting her eyes from the telescope. "Thirty years ago, he was a literary star on the rise. But he turned out to be a one-trick pony."
This slur was charity. The man had de-evolved into a celebrity muckraker, a writer of gossip columns and exposes in the form of true-crime books. As a frequent guest on television, he was known to millions of viewers who had never read nor even heard of his one good piece of art.
"So he still keeps a house in Coventry?"
"Oh, yes," said her mother. "And he's still the only one in town who's never invited to my birthday ball."
Isabelle imagined that the gossip columnist left a trail of slime instead of footprints as he walked toward the Hobbs house. The first reporter had spotted Ferris Monty, and now they all ran toward the slander man like children who have heard the calliope music of the ice cream truck. She focused on Monty's face. The pasty white blot in her lenses was capped with a thatch of black that might have been made of fur or feathers. "He still has the same bad toupee. He should give it a name and buy it a flea collar."
Monty was holding court with the crowd of reporters, and a war of egos was predictable. Her famous father would not enjoy sharing the spotlight with another celebrity.
The sheriff only listened for a few seconds and then said, "Thanks, Addison," and slammed the telephone receiver down on its cradle. "One more thing, Oren. Stay the hell away from Ferris Monty."
"Who is he?"
"He's famous," said the sheriff, as if this might help. It did not. "Well, maybe he only shows up on TV in California. Ferris's trade is gossip. If you see a chubby little jerk, white as bug larvae, that'll be him. You might remember his yellow Rolls-Royce."
Oren nodded. He never forgot a classic car. "It belonged to one of the summer people."
"And now he lives in Coventry year-round." Cable Babitt gathered up his file holders-all but one-and locked them away in his credenza. Then he picked up his car keys and sunglasses. "I'll be gone for a while."
When the door had closed on the sheriff, Oren glanced at the remaining folder that had been overlooked. It would be rude not to open it-since the sheriff had gone to some trouble, all but decorating this file with a neon arrow and then providing time and privacy to read it.
The name on the first page was not familiar, though, according to the sheriff's notes, this man had been a citizen of Coventry for years before Josh had vanished. William Swahn was identified as a former police officer from Los Angeles, wounded in the line of duty after barely one year on the job. Disabled, he had been pensioned off at the tender age of twenty-one. Today this ex-cop would be in his late forties.
Penned in the margins were the sheriff's updates, noting that the man was not licensed as a private investigator, though Swahn had conducted many interviews around town, all of them related to Josh's disappearance. Handwritten words at the top of one page described him as uncooperative, refusing to divulge the name of his client. A margin note listed the most likely client as Oren's father. This would make sense from Sheriff Babitt's point of view. The relatives of crime victims commonly hired private police when a case went cold.
Oren recognized the address on Paulson Lane, a house so well buried in the woods that lifelong residents of Coventry might be unaware of it. That property was well beyond the means of an ex-cop on a disability pension.
Was Swahn bleeding his client dry to make the mortgage payments?
No one looked up as Oren passed by the desks in the outer room. Apparently the deputies and civilian staff had been told not to interfere with him. Once outside the building, he stepped into the street to flag down a ride. A woman stopped. Whenever he had occasion to hitchhike, it was always a woman who stopped for him.
Ferris Monty led his flock of reporters through the town on foot. As a favor to Addison Winston, he had taken on the job of keeping his fellow jackals away from Judge Hobbs.
He was more than happy to do whatever Addison asked of him. For the first time in twenty-five years, he had hopes of receiving an invitation to Sarah Winston's birthday ball. It was a gala event that cost the moon and made the society pages, a night when the famous and the infamous danced with the local folk until dawn. Ferris Monty had the distinction of being the only Coventry resident ever to be disinvited. Each year, he received a formal card that bore the printed script of his uninvitation, and it was always bordered in black like a funeral announcement.
The reporters gathered around him on the sidewalk, and he preened for the handheld cameras. "The dead boy's photographs can be seen in a number of places around town. We'll start here." He led them up the steps of the Coventry Bank, a modest two-story landmark that dated back to the mill-town days. In the small lobby, a triptych of photographs hung on the wall. Ferris pointed to an image of himself standing in line to make a deposit more than twenty years ago. "This is me when I was young and beautiful."
A reporter said, "So you knew Joshua Hobbs personally."
"Oh, yes. In fact, I liked these photographs so much I bought a set of prints from the boy."
"What was he like?"
"Very sensitive. An artist." He shrugged to say, You know the type.
The day he had purchased those custom prints, there had been no conversation. Joshua Hobbs had been edging back toward the door from the moment of his arrival. Without a word, the young photographer had handed over the pictures and held out his other hand for the check. Ferris had blinked but once, and the boy had vanished.
A few weeks later, following a second, more permanent vanishing, Ferris had begun his comeback book, the story of a tragedy in a small town. It had opened with descriptions of townspeople, haggard and tired, marching past him in the streets, homeward bound after another fruitless day of searching the woods for a lost child.
Outside on the street again, a reporter broke into Ferris's reverie and pointed toward the library. "Any pictures in there?"
"I couldn't say. No one in Coventry ever goes to the library." And, lest they find this fact too intriguing, he marched them down the sidewalk with a lie of something more interesting at the other end of the block. As they walked, his mind was on the abandoned manuscript in his desk drawer, and he was already planning his rebirth as a serious author.
Ferris opened the door to a tourist-trap restaurant and the din of luncheon conversations and tin silverware. He ushered his charges inside, where more examples of Joshua Hobbs's work were hanging on the walls above the heads of the patrons. However, Ferris was not featured in any of these pictures, and he never even glanced at them. He was looking at an interior vision of literary prizes, love-struck critics, and the naked adoration of readers waiting in line for his autograph on the book-tour circuit of his imagination.
A reporter stood before him, asking, "Mr. Monty, did the sheriff have any suspects when the boy disappeared?"
Here, Ferris had to pause, needing a bit of time to weigh his invitation to the birthday ball against everlasting life on the bestseller list. His unfinished manuscript contained his best writing. Twenty years ago, the book had been so promising, but it had no finish.
Until now.
"Mr. Monty? Any suspects that you know of?"
With this prompt from another reporter, Ferris Monty went careening down glory road. His lost muse was found and coaching him from the ether when he said, "There was one suspect… Joshua's brother. Oren Hobbs was seventeen years old at the time. You'll have to ask the sheriff why the boy was never arrested."
The reporters were waiting on his next words, tensing, extending microphones toward him and all but levitating off the floor. Then one of their number asked, "Any theories about that, Mr. Monty?"
"Oren's father was a sitting judge in those days. I'm sure the old man's influence had something to do with it. In any case, the boy was allowed to leave town, and he's been gone for twenty years. But that old miscarriage of justice was rectified this morning. The sheriff took Oren into custody only minutes before you arrived at the judge's house."
How gratifying to see the press corps scatter like cockroaches, reporters and cameramen scuttling off to their vehicles to hunt down the sheriff in Saulburg for their next sound bite. However, Ferris was writing this scene in his head, and it had yet to play out in real life. The reporters were still standing there, staring at him.
"Well, what are you waiting for?" He waved both hands, his fat fingers fluttering to shoo them on their way.
Oren Hobbs walked the last half-mile to Paulson Lane and stopped by a postbox with no name, only a number stenciled on the side. All of the homes in this area were set well back from the road and hidden by dense foliage. William Swahn's house was still in hiding when Oren came to the end of the long driveway. Thick vines camouflaged the high stone walls and reached up to a slate roof. What passed for a front porch was a Grecian portico supported by columns thick with ivy, and its marble steps and floor were veined with encroaching moss.
He stood before an oak door with a small, square grille of ornate iron at its center. There was no outside furniture, no chairs that might invite a visitor to stay awhile. There had never been anything inviting about this place.
He remembered it well.
Twice a week, he had come here with Josh when they were still in elementary school. The judge had sent them to this address on Good Samaritan duty. In those days, an old woman had resided here, and the boys had been charged with the mission of verifying that she was still alive and well and possessed of all her faculties, neither raving nor starving.
Oren pressed the doorbell. The ringer was loud so that the former tenant could hear it from every corner of her house. He waited for the new owner and listened for sounds of movement within. The householder was certainly at home. A car was parked in the driveway, a Mercedes. What else? It was the unimaginative choice of Coventry, and the previous tenant had also owned one.
The Hobbs boys had never been allowed inside the house. Oren and Josh had always spoken to the elderly woman through the iron filigree at the center of the locked door, rather like an interview with a cloistered nun. They had never seen her face, only her backlit shadow in a frame of light that made a square halo about her wispy unkempt hair. One morning, she had not come to the door, and they had reported this to the judge. In the afternoon, the boys had been told that the old woman was dead.
The current owner must be stone-deaf. Oren pressed the bell again, and this time he leaned on it, listening to the shrill ring reverberating throughout the house. After one full minute of this, a small square panel opened in the center of the door, and a shadowy head was outlined there behind the iron grille. Seconds ticked by. Evidently, no hello was forthcoming.
"Good afternoon," said Oren. "Sorry to disturb you, sir."
"Apology accepted," said the shadow man, and the panel was closed.
Oren waited for the massive front door to open-and he waited. Two minutes passed before he pressed the bell one more time-and for a long time. When the panel opened, he said, "I need to talk to you, Mr. Swahn. It's about Josh Hobbs." The panel was closing, and he rushed his words. "Wait! Please! I'm not a reporter. I used to be a cop-like you."
"I hate cops." The square panel closed with a slam.