stake. He was trying to figure out a way to minimize the divorce’s impact on his holdings. I’ve been advising him how to do that.”
“You mean you’ve been advising him on a way to hide his assets.”
Barkley shrugged, turned his eyes back on the road.
After about a mile, he braked and made a sharp right turn into a graveled driveway. Clumps of dry grass stubbled the ground to either side, and ahead, tucked under tall pines and backing up to a rocky hill, stood the cabin. It was small, of stone and logs, with a wide porch running along the front and a dormer window peeking out from under its eaves. Barkley pulled the car up near the steps.
I got out and climbed to the porch. It was refreshingly cool there. Barkley followed, taking out a set of keys, and opened the front door. The interior of the cabin was even cooler.
The main floor was one big room: kitchen with a breakfast bar separating it from an informal dining area, sitting area centering around a stone fireplace. Rustic furnishings, the kind you expect in a vacation place. Stuffed animal heads on the walls; I could feel their glassy eyes watching me.
“Worthington’s a hunter?” I asked.
“What? No, the place came furnished.”
A spiral staircase led up to a loft. I climbed it, found two bedrooms with a connecting bath. In the larger of the two, the bed was unmade, the blanket and sheets tangled. In the bathroom, towels were draped crookedly over their bars; a silk robe in a red-and-black floral pattern lay on the edge of the tub.
I thought about the vacation place Hy and I owned on the Mendocino coast. At the end of every visit, we took time to tidy it, so we’d be greeted by a clean home when we returned. Tom Worthington claimed he had left the cabin on the morning of July thirty-first-apparently delegating the clean-up to Darya. Darya was due back at her shop in Mammoth Lakes on August first, and she probably would have wanted to go home and get settled in the night before, but there was no sign she’d been preparing to depart. I went down to the kitchen. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink, and a trash receptacle was overflowing. Barkley stood at the counter, his back to me, looking out a greenhouse window.
“Poor hummingbirds,” he said. “Their feeder’s empty. I think I’ll fill it.” He reached into a cabinet next to the sink as I went back to the living area.
There were two grass-cloth place mats and pewter salt and pepper shakers on the table, and the chairs had been neatly pushed in. The cushions on the sofa in front of the fireplace were rumpled, but I saw no books, magazines, or anything else of a personal nature. There were no knickknacks, photographs, or pictures on the wall.
I decided to take a run up Highway 395 to Mammoth Lakes, in Mono County, right away. I’d speak to Adams’s employee there. Then, in the afternoon, I’d drive down to the Inyo County jail in Independence.
When Jeb Barkley dropped me off at my rental car, I called the office and asked Mick to start background searches on Tom Worthington’s son and daughter. Then I phoned Darya Adams’s employee, Kathy Bledsoe, and made an appointment to meet her at Adams’s shop, High Desert Mementoes. As I drove northwest on 395, I reviewed what I knew of the woman.
Kathy, according to Mick’s files, was an artist, in her midthirties, around Darya’s age. She’d enjoyed some success selling her landscapes through a gallery in Mammoth Lakes. For a number of years she’d been employed as a ski instructor at one of the area’s resorts, but had quit in order to devote more time to her painting; it must have been the right move, for a review of a showing of her works at the gallery last year predicted that her career was due to take off.
Mammoth Lakes struck me as an upscale community for Mono County. Hy owned a ranch to the north, near Tufa Lake, that he’d inherited from his stepfather, and I was accustomed to the small towns and open countryside of that area. But here you had good motels (presumably equipped with all the amenities my operatives would find desirable), a variety of restaurants, and shopping centers. A lot of shopping centers. I located Darya Adams’s establishment in one of them, not far from 395. Its windows displayed a better class of merchandise than usually found in tourist shops: obsidian sculptures, lava rock, dried desert plants, coffee-table books. The sign on the door said the shop was closed, but when I tapped on the glass, a slender, dark-haired woman admitted me and identified herself as Bledsoe.
When we were seated in a small office behind the selling floor, she said: “Truthfully, I don’t know what I can tell you that might help Tom. I mean, I was just here minding the store when Darya…Well, I just don’t know.”
“Basically I’m after background. I take it you knew about Miz Adams’s relationship with Mister Worthington?”
“Knew about it? I introduced them.”
“Tell me about that.”
“Tom was a friend of my former husband’s. They’d known each other forever, fished together. About two years ago, I had an opening at the Lakes Gallery…I’m a paint er, landscapes, mainly. Tom was up skiing and came to the show. Darya was there, too. They hit it off, and the rest, as they say, is history.” Her dark eyes clouded. “A good history, until last week.”
“The relationship was harmonious, then?”
“Very. Darya never mentioned so much as a harsh word.”
“So she was open about it with you?”
“Of course. Why d’you ask?”
“I’ve heard she tried to keep it a secret.”
“From people who had no business knowing, yes. But not from me.”
“Was Tom planning to divorce his wife?”
“Eventually.”
“And Darya had no problem with the delay?”
Kathy Bledsoe smiled faintly. “If anything, she was in favor of waiting. Darya was very independent… she’d had to be, since her husband…a marine…was killed on a military training exercise when she was twenty-three. Darya loved Tom, but I sensed she was having trouble getting used to the idea of giving up some of that independence. The cabin was a sort of compromise for them, a place where they could give living together a trial run.”
“Have you ever been to the cabin?”
“Only once. The boutique was closed because some repairs were being done, and Darya wanted to go down to the cabin because she had an appointment with a plumber who was going to install a new hot-water heater. But she didn’t want to be there alone, so she asked me along. I had a good time.” Bledsoe’s eyes filled with tears. “God, it’s so damn’ unfair!”
I waited till she’d gotten herself under control, then asked: “Why didn’t she want to go alone? Because of the isolation?”
“No. Her house here is fairly isolated, and she’d never had a problem with that.” Bledsoe frowned. “Now that you mention it, I remember thinking it strange at the time. She seemed on edge the whole time we were there.”
Interesting. “Think about that weekend. Did anything unusual happen? Anyone drop by, or call, besides the plumber?”
She thought, shook her head.
“Did Miz Adams ever mention a man called Screamin’ Mike?”
“I’m sure I’d remember if she had.”
“Anyone else in the area?”
“No.”
“But you’re sure she was on edge that weekend.”
“Yes, I’m sure. Darya was afraid of something or someone down there.”
Tom Worthington was a handsome man. Even in the jail jumpsuit, his eyes shadowed and puffy from lack of sleep, his gray-frosted dark hair tousled, he would have turned female heads. We sat in a little visiting room, guard
