Edited for Death (20 page)

“Hmmmm,” Phil says, looking at me with a touch of irony. “Like now? There are three murders. There may be three suspects. Let’s see.

“One, we have Ben Nevell. I doubt he’s been up here since the 1960s. I can’t see him leaving San Francisco and if he did it would be for Paris or something. I also just can’t see him wielding the “blunt object’. I think he’d be more the gun or poison type.

“Two, Royce. Well, he’d certainly have the opportunity. He’s here all the time and he’d know all the blunt objects in the hotel. He doesn’t feel right, though. Three people are a lot to bump off just to keep the hotel solvent. Also, having two bodies found in the hotel isn’t good PR.

“Three, there’s Henry Blomberg. He’s not always here, he’s usually not even in the country. Plus, for someone who saw way too much murder in his life, I don’t picture him waving around a baseball bat or a fireplace poker.”

Phil picks up the poker beside our fireplace and does a fencing lunge. His balance is just a tad off, though, and he tips sideways onto the loveseat.

“Well, you brought your laptop, you can do some research tomorrow. I plan to spend time in Stewart’s room and the attics. I want to look at those diaries and journals. I’m not sure you’re interested.”

We move into the bedroom, shedding clothes as we go. When he finally enters me, it’s as though he fills me up and makes me complete.

“Oh, God, Amy, you are a very sensuous woman,” Phil says.

I almost giggle. Of all the adjectives I think describe me, sensuous is far down the list. “Thank you. I never felt sensuous until you came along,” I say. “I’m not sure what you do, but I’m sure I like it. I like it a lot.”

As I drift off to sleep with Phil’s chest as a pillow, images of death and paintings are so jumbled I don’t even try to keep them straight.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The smell of fresh coffee forces my eyes open to a room of morning sun.

“Good morning,” Phil stands over me, waving steam from a cup of coffee. “I asked them for a tray of coffee for us. I didn’t take the
Times
, I decided we don’t care.”

My waking-up grumpiness evaporates as I remember where I am and who I’m with.

“I don’t know how you do it,” I say, trying not to grab the cup. “I’m usually bad at waking up. Even Heather tells me she hates waking me up.”

He’s already showered. His hair still shows damp spots and he’s wearing jeans, a striped shirt and deck shoes without socks.

“I’m pretty cheery in the morning,” he laughs. “I figure that I’m glad I made it through the night alive.”

“Do you believe in monsters under the bed?” I say as I sit up and wrap a towel around me. “Something from your past that might come to get you in the dark?”

“No, no, it’s just kind of a kid’s superstition, I guess. I don’t often use that as a seduction line.”

“Were you planning to seduce me this morning? Before or after coffee?”

His eyes crinkle. “Actually, I thought I’d put the seduction on hold until tonight. After last night, though, I’m not sure who’s the seducer and who’s the seduced.”

I feel a blush start. I like that Phil calls me sensuous, but don’t want to be pushy. I’ve never thrown myself at a man and very seldom, even in my marriages, initiated sex, although I’m always a willing partner. This affair with Phil is different from any relationships I’ve had. He’s a friend. And he’s known me for most of my adult life. And he’s seen me through two marriages. He’s also more sophisticated than most people I know, making me feel I might pull another faux pas like I did with Henry.

“Hmmmm, we’ll see tonight,” I say heading for the bathroom. “Don’t drink all the coffee before I’m out of the shower, please.”

“Well, don’t take a half-hour shower,” he says and sticks his tongue out.

Downstairs, Royce is on the phone with a seating chart in front of him. To give him some privacy, outdoors we watch the town come to life. Cars move slowly down the main street, looking for, what? A diner? An antique shop? A place for the kids? Two mini-vans from a senior citizen’s facility are unloading passengers. The morning air is cool, but it’ll heat up by afternoon, maybe a little less than yesterday but warm enough to make the evening pleasant.

Royce suddenly bursts through the doors.

“I’m sorry, that was a bitch of a reservation. What are your plans for dinner? We may be full.”

“I made reservations at the River Run,” acknowledging his concern. “Don’t think that’s a slur on you, but Phil has never been and with this heat ...”

“No, no, not at all. Are you going to be around for the day?”

“I want to spend time in Stewart’s rooms and in the attics,” I say. “Sheriff Dodson said they were going to take the tape down yesterday.”

“They did, late yesterday afternoon. And if you want to go up into the attics in this heat well, that’s OK by me. Open the windows so you get a little cross-breeze. It’s stuffy up there and there’s no insulation, just the rafters.”

“Do you want to come up with me, or...” I ask Phil.

“I thought I’d spend the morning with you and then take off this afternoon, as things heat up upstairs.” He grins at me.

Will he be a help? It’s going to be hard explaining to him what I’m looking for, since I don’t have an idea. My search is going to be more of a sense of something missing than a discovery of what’s there. Trying to prove a negative is always difficult, as I constantly tell my photographers to stop them shooting empty acreage to illustrate a proposed building.

“Come on, then.” I make for the stairs at the back of the kitchen.

“Stewart wasn’t very tidy. He wasn’t a slob, he just didn’t put things away. Or he wasn’t organized. He was a careful historian and archivist, though. Kept a supply of white cotton gloves in his desk. His bedroom is neat. Probably the hotel staff kept clothes picked up, sheets and towels changed, dusted and vacuumed.”

I open the door and stop.

“Oh my God!”

It looks as though someone took a giant whisk to the shelves. Books knocked off the shelves and replaced haphazardly, stacked up sideways, crammed in backwards. The document boxes are on the floor, their tops pulled off, their contents riffled.

“Well, not tidy is one way to describe this,” Phil says sardonically. “I’m guessing from your reaction that it wasn’t quite like this yesterday morning.”

“It wasn’t. I don’t know how we’ll ever find out if anything was taken.”

I close my eyes, try to mentally catalog the shelves and boxes. On the long wall, two of the bottom shelves were stacked with labeled boxes. Above them, one shelf contained stacks of magazines and journals. The top three shelves on the long wall and all of the shelves on the other wall housed books. Stewart hadn’t followed any Dewey Decimal System, but he had tried to keep like volumes together. Now the individual published accounts of the Gold Rush are on the floor, mixed with Civil War histories, interspersed with sailing, geology, exploring the west, the rise of the Iron Curtain states and the fall of the British Empire.

“If we can straighten the shelves out, I may get an idea of how much is missing,” I say. My latex gloves are packed, so I grab a pair from the desk drawer and move to a shelf. Phil takes the bookcase on the other wall and starts picking books up, shelving them spine-out. Three-quarters of an hour later, I’m ready to begin with the document boxes.

I want to keep the journals, diaries and papers in their correct boxes, which means at least skimming each one. I take the World War II first because there’s more material, leaving the earlier journals to Phil. This collection seems to be primarily diaries written by Robert and William Calvert—a serious violation of military protocol—both of whom were in the Army. If captured, diaries could give troop, movement or battle plans to the Nazis.

It was unusual for both brothers to join the Army because the elder Calverts had no other children. But many brothers joined the service, and sometimes even served together, during the war. In addition to Robert’s and William’s diaries, which recorded reactions about the terrain they were in and personal reflections, journals written by the elder Calverts and letters back and forth were preserved. It doesn’t look like anything is damaged, but it’s clear that all this material had been sorted and stored by date. The notebooks that Robert and William used for their diaries are mixed with tissue-thin V-Mail and censored letters home, meaning I have to read some. Both of the younger Calverts were writers.

William had finished two years at Cal and Robert was still in high school when Pearl Harbor was bombed and William volunteered for the Army. In his diaries, William wrote about the strangeness of boot camp at Fort Ord, wrote about learning to shoot in the sand dunes ringing Monterey Bay, wrote about learning to march in the foggy mornings and to find his way around the camp at night in the blackouts. In his letters, he wrote about learning to eat Army food and complained that he missed the hotel cooking, about learning to make a bunk and reminisced about the maid making his bed at home, told how the coastal fog obscured all the stars that he saw in the Sierra.

Their parents’ journals were filled with fears for his safety and hopes that the war would end before he was sent overseas. Their letters to William were chatty, telling of daily events at the hotel and recapping news about Marshalltown.

Half way through 1942 archives, the tenor changed. William was tapped as a possible OCS candidate and sent to German language school. Robert, a senior in high school, wrote long letters to his idolized older brother.

As we’re finishing lunch, Henry Blomberg comes in, deep in conversation with Royce. Phil raises a hand and catches Henry’s eye and the older man nods to Royce and walks over to us.

“Good afternoon my dear,” Henry says to me and turns to Phil. “How have your labors been this morning? I’ve had a wonderful tour.”

Phil smiles. “Well, Amy did have me laboring, but it was a labor of, maybe not love, but certainly interest and curiosity. We’ve been tidying up in Stewart Calvert’s rooms. It seems as though someone didn’t like the way he was filing his books.”

I look astonished. Why is Phil being so open and chatty with this man whom we’d just met? Stewart is a probable murder victim and I believe his belongings were ransacked, probably, possibly, by someone involved. Besides, what business is it of an elderly Jewish German if someone is tearing apart the rooms of a California historian? Phil is acting decidedly un-Phil like.

“Are you planning to labor some more this afternoon?” Blomberg asks.

“I think Amy is going to go back to the mines, but I’m open for other suggestions.”

Open for other suggestions? This is not like the Phil that I’ve known for years; that Phil is decisive, organized, carries around a day-planner in his head and can guide people to the correct (his) decision with a minimum of effort and discussion.

“I’ve always wanted to see if there was much left of Mokelumne Hill,” Blomberg says. “I know it was one of the richest towns in the Mother Lode, was founded in 1848 and was the county seat of Calaveras County for about 15 years.”

“That’s quite a bit,” Phil says. “I just know the name on a map. Is there some specific interest?”

“It’s one of those habits I’ve developed over the years, looking through old records and tracing families. It’s a lot easier in Europe where people stayed in the same place for generations. In the states, and particularly on the West Coast and in the Gold Rush areas, people moved around so much that it’s hard to track them. Plus, a lot of these towns caught fire. I think Mokelumne Hill burned down two or three times and then, with the San Francisco earthquake and fire, well it’s a really intricate puzzle and not always one that I can solve.

“People have been moving west for a long time and a lot of them came to lose their past; to reinvent themselves.”

He’s right, I realize with a start. One of the quirks about the Calverts is that when they hit California, they stayed put. That, coupled with their family trait to write and keep diaries and letters, makes tracing their history relatively easy.

“If you wouldn’t mind the company, I’d like to go with you this afternoon,” Phil says. “I’ve never been down that section of Highway 49. Can we leave now? I know Amy has plans for us for dinner tonight.”

Phil gathers up his stuff and they walk out together, leaving me wondering what’s gotten into Phil. Is he just tired of my company? Maybe he doesn’t like the quirky search I’m on and thinks it’s a waste of time. Whatever it is, I’m determined to keep reading, keep looking, until it’s clear that I’m either skidding down a dead end or I find some answers to Stewart’s death.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The sun hasn’t baked the attics yet. By later in the afternoon, it’ll be stifling even though I open two of the grimy windows. Layers of dust coat most things stored here. In the areas around the chimneys and one of the windows at the side of the space—the one that Stewart fell from—the fine, silty dust sweeps into long feathery trails. Smudges of fingerprint powder mark the window’s frame, sill and glass. I squinch up my eyes, thinking I can see footprints in front of the window, but imagination is what I see.