available and would see him, so he was expected. The woman at the lobby desk drew an X through one of the squares on a grounds map, doing it with a smile and a flourish as if it were the location of buried treasure. “That’s Mrs. Crandall’s unit,” she said. “Number forty-one West. She doesn’t have many visitors, you know. She’ll be delighted to see you.”
Not exactly true at first. Mona Crandall wasn’t smiling when she opened the door to Number 41 West, and at first she didn’t seem particularly welcoming. But he won her over without making any effort other than to be polite. Reserved until she’d had time to take his measure, and then almost eager for his company. But not because she cared very much why a private investigator from San Francisco was visiting her, even though he’d made it plain in his call that his business concerned her two sons. Like a lot of the elderly in circumstances such as hers, she was starved for human contact and some friendly attention.
She was in her midseventies, on the frail side. Needed a walker to get around. Blue-rinsed hair that had had a recent styling and alert brown eyes. She’d been watching a talk show on television; as soon as she let him in, she moved over and switched the thing off.
“I keep it on for noise,” she said. “Mostly what they have on these days is garbage.”
“Except for old movies.”
That earned him her first smile. “Except for old movies,” she agreed.
She asked him if he drank tea. He said he did. No trouble at all to make him a cup, she said, and he let her do it, sensing it would hurt her feelings if he declined. While she was in the kitchenette, he took in the surroundings. The unit wasn’t much larger than a studio apartment-small sitting room, smaller bedroom, bathroom, kitchenette. Furniture crowded the sitting room, leftovers probably from the home she’d shared with her late second husband. Television wasn’t her only interest or recreation; a bookshelf was filled with well-read paperbacks and there was a stack of library books on the table beside her chair. Her body may have been wasted, but her mind wasn’t.
When the tea was ready he went out and got his cup to save her making two trips with the walker. Another smile. And they were ready for business.
She didn’t know what had been happening to her sons. They hadn’t told her and the only newspaper she read was the San Francisco Chronicle. “A terrible thing like that and I have to hear it from a stranger,” she said. Concern in the words, tempered by bitterness. “Cliff and Damon don’t call or visit very often,” she said. “Keep to themselves. I haven’t seen my grandchildren in over a year. They’re all right? The stalker hasn’t done anything to them?”
“No. Only to your sons. And their father’s grave.”
“Why, for heaven’s sake? What possible reason?”
“No idea yet. It doesn’t seem to stem from anything they did, their business or personal relationships.”
“Well, they were always good boys. Honest, hardworking. They seem to be good parents, too.”
“But not such good sons.”
She sighed. “They blame me for the divorce. Breaking up our family, leaving their father to raise them alone. They worshiped him, you know.”
“Yes.”
“I tried to explain to them, when they were grown up, tried to tell them the truth. But they wouldn’t listen.” The lines tightened around her mouth. “Lloyd told them over and over that it was my fault, all my fault. That I was the cheater, not him. He poisoned them against me with lies.”
The way Andrea had poisoned Joshua. Love your mother, hate your father. Love your father, hate your mother. Toxic damage that becomes so deeply ingrained over the years, it can never be undone.
“Cliff called me a spiteful liar to my face,” she said. “I suppose I should be grateful they visit me as often as they do.”
Grateful, no. But she’d been left with that much, at least. Andrea’s poison had been lethal; Joshua was dead to him, no possibility of resurrection.
He said, keeping his face blank, his voice neutral, because this wasn’t about him or his pain, “It must be very difficult for you.”
“At first it was. Not so much after I met Wally, my second husband. He was such a good, faithful man. But now that he’s gone and I’m alone… Yes, it’s difficult. But I won’t beg, not even for my grandkids. I didn’t beg Lloyd Henderson and I won’t beg his sons.”
“How do you mean, you didn’t beg Lloyd?”
“To stop cheating on me. I asked him, I threatened him, but I wouldn’t beg.”
“That’s the real reason you left him?”
“Yes. I stood it as long as I could, for the sake of the boys, until I couldn’t stand it anymore.”
“A lot of women?”
“Almost from the beginning. One after another after another. He couldn’t leave them alone. I gave him as much of myself as any man could want, and it wasn’t enough. He had to have more, he had to have different.”
Lloyd Henderson, pillar of the community.
“When that woman from up north came to the house,” Mona Crandall said, “that was the last straw. A person can take only so much humiliation. Only so much.”
“What woman, Mrs. Crandall?”
“One of his bitches. No, that’s not right, I shouldn’t call them that. They weren’t bad women, most of them. He could be so attentive, so charming. I let him seduce me before we were married, why shouldn’t they let him seduce them?”
“When was it this woman showed up at your house?”
“Twenty years ago. She was the reason I left Lloyd.”
“You said she was from up north? Where, exactly?”
“Mendocino County. Some town I’d never heard of.”
“Near your husband’s hunting camp?”
“I don’t know. I never went there with him and the boys. Hunting, fishing… I never liked killing things. Lloyd did. He made the boys like it, too.”
“What did she want, this woman?”
Mona Crandall didn’t seem to hear the question. Her eyes were distant, fixed on the teacup, as if the past were visible to her in the dark liquid. “He never wanted me to go with him. Took his women there, I knew that. All those weekends… it wasn’t always his men friends he went with, it was his women, too.”
Runyon waited until she blinked and focused on him again, then repeated his question. “What did the woman want, Mrs. Crandall?”
“Lloyd. She wanted him. She said she was in love with him, pregnant by him. He’d made promises to her, she… oh, I don’t remember everything she said. It was a shock, you know. Being confronted with his cheating like that, so suddenly and right in my face.”
“What did you do?”
“What could I do? Sent her away, sent her to him at his office. He was furious when he came home-furious with me, as if I was at fault. We had a terrible fight. That was the end for me. I left him the next day.”
“Do you remember the woman’s name?”
“No. It was such a long time ago.”
“If she was pregnant, do you know if she had the child?”
“No. What does it matter now?”
“It may have a bearing on what’s been happening to your sons.”
“After more than twenty years?” The bitterness returned to her voice. “Lloyd has been dead… what is it, five or six years now? Cliff and Damon didn’t tell me when he died, I had to find out from a friend here. I wouldn’t have gone to his funeral anyway, but they should have told me. Don’t you think they should have told me?”
“Yes. I do.”
“Past sins catching up. Is that what you’re saying?”
Runyon nodded. “Past sins,” he said, and let it go at that.
He finished his tea, refused a second cup. The refusal put a brief sadness in her eyes; she’d hoped he would stay longer. But she didn’t make an issue of it. She’d been left alone so often in her life, by loved ones and strangers alike, that she’d come to accept it and the pain that went with it as her lot.
He was at the door when she said abruptly, “Mr. Runyon.”
“Yes?”
