Impact (16 page)

The hint that Carol had a swinging sex life received further confirmation in the bedroom. Secreted within the pages of an atlas was a set of surprisingly artful photographs of Carol in the nude, posed in a wooded glade, the sun highlighting her best features, which were her breasts and sculpted shoulders, shadow camouflaging her worst, which were her heavy legs. The subject was obviously relishing the display; the photographer was obviously familiar with the rudiments of erotic art. Nevertheless, Carol was more alluring in her clothes than out of them.

All of which was interesting, but none of it told him where she was, which left him without a clue but not without a guess.

After closing the atlas, he rejoined Brenda in the living room. “I've done everything I can think of to do,” Tollison began as he tried to come up with a gentle way to broach the idea that had just come to him. “Except filing a report with the police or hiring someone to track her down.”

Brenda nodded, her mind elsewhere, as it increasingly was. “How's Jack?” she asked idly, as if she had read his mind and hoped a digression would divert him.

He saw no reason not to discuss the situation, since the whole town was doing so anyway. “Still in a coma, last I heard.”

“Is he going to be a vegetable?”

Brenda's eyes contained a glint he chose not to fathom. “They won't know till he regains consciousness and they can test his motor functions. I get the impression that anything at all is possible, from complete recovery to a horror story.”

“How's Laura holding up?”

He shrugged. “Okay, I think. Money's going to be a problem. Jack doesn't seem to have had any disability insurance. His whole financial setup was a mess—I can't find more than eight hundred dollars cash on hand, and there's ten times that in unpaid bills. Social Security is all they'll have till the crash litigation is settled, and that won't kick in for six months. If Jack's income was as sketchy as people think, even the disability won't amount to much.”

“Laura will be a little trooper, I'm sure.”

“That's not very charitable, Brenda. Jack's situation is terrible for her.”

Brenda's smile twisted bitterly. “To say nothing of Jack.”

“Come on, Brenda. For God's sake.”

Her eyes would not acquit him. He knew she didn't know it all, but he was afraid she knew enough.

“Let's get back to Carol,” Tollison said quickly. “The only things we know for sure are that she apparently left here voluntarily, and took some clothing and toiletries with her but not her car. I've talked to all the travel companies I can think of and all the friends on the list you gave me, and I haven't come up with anything. I didn't come up with anything in here, either,” he added.

“So we give up? Is that what you're suggesting?”

He hesitated before voicing the idea that had materialized a moment earlier. In the middle of his caution, Brenda broke her silence. “I think Spitter may know.”

The shift confused him. “What?”

“I think Spitter knows where she is. You know how he is—Carol's the only person he likes who's halfway normal. I think she told him where she was going so he wouldn't get worried when she didn't come see him for a while. Usually, he gets agitated if he doesn't see her for even a day or two, but this time he hasn't been upset at all and it's been two weeks.”

“Did you ask him to tell you where she was?”

Brenda closed her eyes. “Of course.”

“And?”

She shook her head. “He just gritted his teeth and got that look in his eyes.”

Tollison knew that look. He had seen it on men he had defended in San Francisco, the suggestion that the world was owed a debt payable only in belligerence.

“Where's Spitter now?” he asked.

“Home.”

“Let's go see him.”

She shook her head. “It won't do any good. He doesn't like you any more than he does me.”

He stood up. “At this point we should try anything.” Though her look was skeptical, Brenda didn't protest when he pulled her to her feet and drove her to her own small home, the one she shared with Spitter.

Brenda unlocked the door, then led him to the living room. As they regarded each other silently, Tollison wondered what he would unearth if he searched this house as thoroughly as he had her sister's.

Spitter was nowhere in sight. Brenda called his name and received no answer. “He's probably in his room,” she said, and started for the rear of the house.

Spitter's room was a former utility porch that had been converted both to meet his needs and best his predilections. The door was a plank without a lock, the floors slick linoleum rather than absorbent carpet, the walls unpainted plywood that could withstand whatever missiles Spitter sent their way. The window was screened from the inside, as was the light in the center of the ceiling. If the effect was institutional, the result was an odd emancipation—Spitter rarely was attracted to any other portion of the house.

Tollison knocked and waited. After a second he heard a creak of bedsprings. He knocked again. “Spitter,” he called. “It's Keith Tollison. I need to talk to you. About your Aunt Carol.”

Tollison treated the resulting mumble as an invitation. When he looked at Brenda, she shrugged and went away. At his push, the door opened inward, to the resistance of a spring.

The lights were off. His back to the door, Spitter was curled in a semicircle on the bed, head wrapped in arms and hands, ears plugged by the tendrils of a Walkman. Tollison closed the door and said hello.

Spitter curled into a tighter ball, his camouflage pants tightening across his bony buttocks, the collar of his field jacket bunching at his neck. His jump boots rubbed against each other, making the only sound in the room more audible than the leaking whispers from the Walkman. “Spitter,” Tollison repeated. “I've come about Carol.”

“What about her?” Spitter mumbled from behind a forearm.

“I was wondering if you knew where she was.”

Spitter didn't answer.

“I just wanted to make sure you knew, because if you didn't, I was going to tell you.”

“I know, so don't worry.”

“Good.”

In the ensuing silence, the boy wriggled within his baggy clothing. “She told me it was a secret.”

“It is. We're the only ones who know. You and me.”

Spitter straightened his legs and rolled toward his visitor, then sat on the edge of the bed and tugged the headset off his ears.

As always, Tollison was surprised at Spitter's age. His lagging mental development led Tollison to regard him as an adolescent, but as he gazed through the cowl of oily hair at the sallow skin, the reluctant eyes, the spotty stubble of his beard, Tollison remembered Spitter was almost twenty-five. Doctor after doctor had said Spitter was not violent, not a threat to others or to himself, not subnormally intelligent, but in every minute of his day he looked capable of terrible assaults upon a world that seemed to incense him.

A high school dropout, Spitter was enough his father's child that he was a valued mechanic at the local Chevron station, his love of engines so enormous he would haunt the garage into the wee hours, until the owner sent him home. Much of the time he was joined by two men of indeterminate age who worked as grave diggers at the local cemetery, or by a covey of prepubescent admirers whose parents doubtlessly saw Spitter as Fagin reincarnate.

As Tollison schemed to lure the boy into a meaningful admission, Spitter looked around the room. “You don't know where she is; you're trying to trick me,” he charged suddenly.

“Yes I do,” Tollison said.

“No you don't.” Spitter seemed on the verge of tears. “If you know so much, why don't you
prove
it?”

“Okay, I will. I'll write the place Carol went on a piece of paper. If I'm right, you have to give me your comic book.”

He pointed to a particularly outrageous example of the genre, one of many scattered throughout the room, this one opened to a page on which a helmeted man mounted on a soaring Pegasus was attacking a futuristic tank with a lance tipped by a diamond the size of a fist “Okay?”

Spitter glanced at the book as covetously as if it were his flesh and blood. “If I win, I get the comic book,” Tollison repeated, “and if I lose, I give you five dollars.”

His world made simple by the final phrase, Spitter nodded.

Tollison reached into his coat and took out his pen and a business card. On the back of the card he wrote
Los Angeles
, and after a moment, just
LA
.

His nerves playing a variation on the theme he felt while awaiting a jury verdict, Tollison folded the card and handed it to Spitter.

Spitter read the words. His quick glance at the imperiled magazine told Tollison all he needed to know. He picked up the comic, ruffed through it quickly, sighed, then tossed it casually to Spitter. “I've read that one already.”

The young man clasped the comic to his breast, a tear trickling from his eye. Tollison clapped him on the shoulder. Spitter didn't say a word as Tollison left the room, his earlier guess confirmed.

Brenda was on the couch, leafing through a month-old
Newsweek
, waiting. He sat beside her and took her hand. “Carol went to LA,” he said without preamble.

“LA? Are you sure?” The question was tranquil, the connection not yet made. “Why would she go down there?”

“It doesn't matter.”

“What do you mean it doesn't matter? We have to talk to people. We have to—”

Grasping for a euphemism but finding nothing but a line as straight as a spear, he said, “If Carol went to LA, there's one possibility we have to consider.”

“What's that?”

“That Carol was on that plane.”

“What plane?”

“The one that crashed.”

“No.” The rebuttal was quick and savage. “That's not possible. She wasn't even
in
LA, so she wasn't on that
plane.”

“She told Spitter that's where she was going.”

“I don't care. I'd know if something like that happened to her. I'd
know
it.”

He almost believed her. The link between Brenda and her sister had always seemed to have roots in ESP. Each often knew what the other was thinking, where the other was, what the other was in need of. Tollison had observed enough instances of casual telepathy to believe that Brenda's welling sorrow over the past week meant that, contrary to her protest, in some crevice of her mind she sensed her sister was dead.

“We should call the airline,” he told her. “The last I heard, they'd only identified two thirds of the bodies.”

“Don't be absurd. If Carol was on that plane, they'd have
some
record of her.”

“Maybe, but maybe not. What if she used a false name?”

“Why would she do anything that ridiculous?”

“What if she got involved in something criminal? You know the guys she hangs out with. She could be running dope for them or something.”

Brenda wrenched away. “You son of a bitch. How
dare
you—”

He hurried on. “Okay, what if she was traveling with a man? A married one? What if they snuck off for a week of fun and games and the plane crashed on the way back? If they were trying to cover their tracks, the airline might not have any record.”

“Are you trying to say she was with Jack Donahue?”

The thought hadn't occurred to him. Its reach momentarily diverted his attention. “I'm just saying someone,” he continued absently. “Anyone.”

“Carol wouldn't give Jack Donahue the time of day.” Brenda crossed her arms against the possibility. “Fingerprints. They would have checked the fingerprints by now. I read they've got a dozen pathologists working on the identifications.”

“There was a fire, Brenda. Fingerprints can burn off; dental work can melt; baggage can burn to ashes.”

She lowered her head to her hands. “So what do you think we should do?”

“Go over there.”

“Where?”

“The warehouse where they took the personal effects of the passengers. It might not come to anything—they obviously don't have a lead that points to Carol, or you would have been notified. But we have to make sure there's nothing in that stuff that indicates she was on that plane. We look, and hope to hell we don't find anything.”

The exposition of the idea made it inconceivable to her. “I won't do it.”

“I wish I could do it for you, but you know I can't.”

“It must be
horrible
in there.
Grotesque.”

“We have to do it, all the same.” He reached out his hand.

“Now?” she asked, eyes wide, hand darting out of reach.

Tollison nodded slowly, then grasped her wrist and pulled her to her feet. She rose hesitantly, as though he were a stranger tugging her toward the dance floor, a stranger about whom she'd heard bad things.

He put an arm around her shoulder. “It's time we did something. You're falling apart with the uncertainly. I am, too.”

“What if it's true, Keith?” she asked softly, gripping his arm. “What if she's so broken and smashed no one knows who she is anymore?”

Her words pummeled her features, leaving them wrenched and bloated. He pulled her close and whispered. “If that's what's happened, we'll have to deal with it. I'll help you any way I can. We may not be everything to each other, but we're still something. I'll be there whenever you need me.”

“I don't know if that's enough anymore, Keith.”

“I know. But who else is there?”

Her response was leaden. “No one. Not for me.” She found his eyes. “There is for you, though. Isn't there?”

“There was,” he admitted, his usual evasion suddenly unthinkable. “I'm not sure there is anymore.” He paused “Let's go do what we have to do.”