Mask Market (19 page)

“If it’s about the business, that was closed when—”

“No, sir,” I said, politely. “It was a private matter.”

He stared into my face, nakedly searching. Came up empty.

“Look, Mr…. Logan, is it? I don’t know any—”

“My brother’s name was Burke, sir. And the matter he handled for you concerned your daughter. Do you think we could…?”

I
nside, the cottage looked like a lot more money than it had from the road. The peaked ceiling must have gone up fifteen feet, with massive beams running across; a series of skylights cut into one side flooded the room with pale northern sun. The furniture looked like it was wall-to-wall antiques, but, for all I know about stuff like that, it could have been a collection of three-dollar bills. A serious-looking woodstove occupied one corner, the cast-iron ducting showing it was used to actually heat the house. The stone fireplace that took up most of one wall must have been put there for entertainment.

“Coffee?” he asked.

“No, thank you.”

“Tea? Hot chocolate?”

I could see he wasn’t going to engage unless I gave him time to put himself together. “Hot chocolate sounds great, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble,” I told him.

“Nothing to it,” Preston said, leaving me alone in the living room. I could hear the sounds of glass and metal in what I guessed had to be the kitchen.

Enough time passed for him to have called the cops, if that was what he was going to do. But I didn’t think so; he wouldn’t have let me in if he didn’t want to hear what I had to say first.

“How’s that?” he said, handing me a heavy white china mug.

“Smells perfect.”

“It’s store-bought,” he said apologetically, as if I had been expecting him to produce something more authentic.

“Just about have to be, right? I’ve never been up here before, but I can’t believe the cocoa bean would survive this climate.”

“Yes,” he said, seating himself in a rocking chair covered by a white horse-blanket with red diagonal stripes. “Now, can you explain the whole thing to me, please? I’m a bit confused as to what you’re doing here”—smiling to take the edge off his words.

“My brother and I had different fathers,” I told him. “His name was Burke.”

The expression on his face told me he was ahead of me, but I went on, a man explaining his mission.

“We weren’t close,” I said. “Different lives, different coasts. So, when I learned I had been appointed the executor of his will, I admit I was surprised. I flew in from Portland—Oregon, not Maine—and the lawyer who had handled the will gave me an envelope. Inside, there was a list of my brother’s cases—apparently, he was some sort of private detective—and, well, I suppose you’d call them a list of last requests. Things he wanted me to do.”

“He wanted you to finish his cases?”

“Nothing like that,” I said, smiling to show how absurd the idea was. “I’m not a private detective, I’m a small businessman.
Very
small—I own a motor court on the coast, me and my wife. What Burke wanted me to do was, well—I’m not sure how to say this—kind of, maybe, check on how his cases turned out. It seems most of them involved children. I guess he wanted to know they came out okay. In the long run, I mean.”

“Why do you call him that?”

“Call him…what?”

“‘Burke.’ It seems strange to call your brother by his last name.”

“Oh,” I said, chuckling. “I see what you’re saying. Well, that’s what I always called him—a private thing, just between us. He always called me ‘Logan.’”

“I always called him Mr. Burke.”

I shrugged, as if to say my brother’s ways were a mystery to me.

He rocked gently in his chair. “So your brother’s records indicate he did some job for me?” he said.

“That’s right. There isn’t a lot of information there, but, whatever he did, it concerned your daughter. Beryl, right?”

“I had a daughter named Beryl,” he said, planting his feet to stop the rocker from moving. “But you’re going back a very long time. She’s a grown woman now.”

“So everything turned out for the best?”

“That’s what your brother wanted to know?”

“I
guess
so. He left…bequests to several of the children on his caseload. Not very much,” I said, holding up my hand as if to disclaim any big-bucks potential, “but…Well, like I said, we weren’t close. I couldn’t begin to tell you what was in his mind. He left some property he owned to me, and his car—that’s it, sitting out there in your driveway—too. But all the rest of his estate, and, like I said, that wasn’t much, he wanted divided up among five people. From the instructions he left, I could tell they were all old cases of his.”

“And you started with my daughter?”

“Actually, I’m
finishing
with your daughter. The other bequests have all been disbursed.”

“Well, as I said, Beryl’s not a child anymore. So why not just go straight to her?”

“That is what I did, for the others,” I said. “It took me a while—I don’t have to be a private detective to know that some women change their names when they get married. And the only addresses I had were for the parents, anyway.”

“I haven’t lived at the address Mr. Burke had for me for many years.”

“I found that out when I tried to visit. Luckily, your number was listed.”

“So why didn’t you just call?” he said, a flash of color showing under his grayness.

“I don’t believe this is the kind of thing people would take seriously if they heard it on the phone. With all the con men and scam artists running around today—you’d be amazed at what you learn, managing a motel—how would
you
have reacted if a stranger called and said he had money he wanted to give to your daughter?”

He nodded, but didn’t say anything.

I took a sip of the hot chocolate. “I couldn’t find a Beryl Preston in any phone book—I used the Internet to search. So I thought I’d drive up, answer any questions you have, and you’d tell me how to get in touch with her.”

He cupped his mug closely, as if warming his hands.

A minute passed.

“You think I’m nothing now, don’t you?” he said.

A
beam of sunlight bent itself through the skylight, standing between us like the third rail on train tracks.

“I don’t understand,” I said, buying time.

“This house, the land it sits on, the furniture you see here, it’s mine. Truly my own. I never knew what that felt like, back when I was…back when I first met you.”

“Me? I—”

“I wasn’t just a dog on a leash,” he said, bitterness etching his thin voice like vitriol on glass. “Not just an actor playing a role, either. I
ran
the company, even if I didn’t own it.”

“I don’t know what—”

“You know what my strength always was? My secret strength? I was a good listener. I paid attention. A person’s voice, it’s like an instrument. You can hear if it’s out of tune, whether it’s under stress. The FBI even has machines now, for listening to voices. It’s supposed to be better than a polygraph. I’ll bet it is.”

I sat back on the couch, waiting for whatever he was going to come at me with.

“Feel free,” he said, pointing at a shallow brass bowl on a coffee table made from a cross-sectioned piece of timber, varnished to a high gloss. “That’s an ashtray.”

“I don’t smoke,” I said.

“Gave that up when you had the plastic surgery, did you?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Your voice,” Preston said, two fingers on his chin in a smug, pedantic pose. “It’s completely distinctive. I’d know it anywhere. I couldn’t be sure at first; maybe not smoking changed it a bit. But there’s a special…timbre to it. As if every word you say is wrapped around a threat.”

“You’re the one doing all the talking,” I said, just barely loud enough to carry across the room.

“Perfect!” he said, happily vindicated. “That’s it. That’s it, exactly.”

“S
he always blamed me,” he said, an hour and a half later. “And she would never tell me what I’d done wrong.”

“When did that start?”

“I…don’t know, exactly. It seems it was ever since she was a little girl. It was so…bizarre. I mean, I loved her so. She had to know that. No matter what she did, I always forgave her. The way she talked to me sometimes! My wife said I should put her over my knee, for being so disrespectful, but I never did, not once.”

I didn’t like the way his face morphed when he said “my wife,” but my own face showed him nothing.

“She was in trouble all the time?” I guessed.

“
All
the time,” he agreed, misery and mystery swirling in his voice. “She was smart; my goodness, was she smart. Her teachers said she could be anything she wanted, but she never applied herself, not to anything.”

“She went to public school?”

“
And
private school.
And
a residential facility…for troubled teens. Nothing made a difference.”

“That time I brought her back…?”

“She just ran away again. Not from us, from that…program we sent her to. The last resort. When she ran from there, she just disappeared. Fifteen years old, you wouldn’t think she would have the wherewithal to survive on her own.”

“Why didn’t you—?”

“What? Hire a man like you again? What good would it do? Beryl made it clear that she was
not
going to stay with us. A lawyer told us we could have her locked up—have her declared a ‘person in need of supervision,’ I think he called it—but that would just mean a state facility instead of a private one.”

“You never saw her again?”

“Oh, certainly I did. I’ll never forget that day. It’s an easy date to remember: nine, nine, ninety. Her eighteenth birthday. She drove right up to the house—the one in Westchester. Actually, I don’t think she drove herself; I had the sense that someone gave her a ride, and was waiting for her outside.”

“Did she—?”

“I asked her how had she managed to be on her own for all that time. She laughed at me. It was a nasty laugh. I can
still
hear it: ‘You think I was the only one to run away that night, Daddy?’

“I didn’t know what she meant, and it must have shown in my face. She told me she ran away with one of her teachers. I hadn’t heard—nobody told me about any such thing. She thought that was hilarious. ‘She didn’t run away from school, Daddy,’ she said. ‘She ran away from her husband.’”

He sat there, his expression stunned, as if hearing Beryl’s words again.

“I couldn’t…believe it for a minute,” he finally said. “What my daughter was telling me.”

“That she was gay?”

“No! I would never have cared about such a thing. Beryl knew that. We used to have very frank discussions. I talked to her about all the things I was supposed to: sex, drugs, drinking…. It wasn’t that Beryl was gay, it was that she
wasn’t,
do you understand?”

“She was just using that teacher to support her while she was on the run?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice trembling at the memory. “Using her, that’s right. And Beryl was proud of it, like it was a new game she had learned, and she was already the best at it.”

“That’s all she came to tell you?”

“No. That just came out,” he said, looking down at his lap. “What she came all that way to tell me was that I was a spineless coward.”

“Because…?”

“I don’t
know,
” Jeremy Preston said, wretchedly. “When I asked her what she was talking about, she just laughed that nasty little laugh of hers again.”

“W
hy are you really looking for her?” he asked, later.

“I ran across some information—more like a rumor, actually; I can’t speak for its accuracy, considering the source—that she might be in danger. This was in the middle of another case, nothing to do with her. Or you. But I remembered her from that time when I brought her back. And I thought…I’m not sure what I thought. I guess I just wanted to be sure she was safe.”

“So why did you come here with that story of yours?”

“She’s changed her name,” I said, flatly. “There’s a lot of reasons people do that. But in my business it usually means they don’t want the family’s brand on them.”

“You mean, you thought
I
was the reason?”

“No way to know,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.

“I didn’t know she changed her name. What does she call herself now?”

“Peta Bellingham,” I told him, watching his face for a tell.