'Why not?'
'Club soda?' she asked Pendergast.
'No thank you, this will be sufficient.'
The waitress bounced off again.
D'Agosta turned back. 'Well? Any luck?'
'One moment.' Pendergast plucked out his cell phone, dialed. 'Maurice? We'll be spending the night here in Sunflower. That's right. Good night.' He put away the phone. 'My experience, I fear, was as discouraging as yours.' However, his alleged disappointment was belied by a glimmer in his eye and a wry smile teasing the corners of his lips.
'How come I don't believe you?' D'Agosta finally asked.
'Watch, if you please, as I perform a little experiment on our waitress.'
The waitress came back with a Bud and a fresh napkin. As she placed them before D'Agosta, Pendergast spoke in his most honeyed voice, laying the accent on thick. 'My dear, I wonder if I might ask you a question.'
She turned to him with a perky smile. 'Ask away, hon.'
Pendergast made a show of pulling a small notebook from his jacket pocket. 'I'm a reporter up from New Orleans, and I'm doing research on a family that used to live here.' He opened the notebook, looked up at the waitress expectantly.
'Sure, which family?'
'Doane.'
If Pendergast had announced a holdup, the reaction couldn't have been more dramatic. The woman's face immediately shut down, blank and expressionless, her eyes hooded. The perkiness vanished instantly.
'Don't know anything about that,' she mumbled. 'Can't help you.' She turned and walked away, pushing through the door to the kitchen.
Pendergast slipped the notebook back into his jacket and turned to D'Agosta. 'What do you think of my experiment?'
'How the hell did you know she'd react like that? She's obviously hiding something.'
'That, my dear Vincent, is precisely the point.' Pendergast took another sip of club soda. 'I didn't single her out. Everyone in town reacts the same way. Haven't you noticed, during your inquiries this afternoon, a certain degree of hesitancy and suspicion?'
D'Agosta paused to consider. It was true that nobody had been particularly helpful, but he'd simply ascribed it to small-town truculence, local folk suspicious of some Yankee coming in and asking a lot of questions.
'As I made my own inquiries,' Pendergast went on, 'I ran into an increasingly suspicious level of obfuscation and denial. And then, when I pressed one elderly gentleman for information, he heatedly informed me that despite what I might have heard otherwise, the stories about the Doanes were nothing but hogwash. Naturally I began to ask about the Doane family. And that's when I started getting the reaction you just saw.'
'And so?'
'I repaired to the local newspaper office and asked to see the back issues, dating from around the time of Helen's visit. They were unwilling to help, and it took this--' Pendergast pulled out his shield. '--to change their minds. I found that in the years surrounding Helen's visit, several pages had been carefully cut out of certain newspapers. I made a note of what the issues were, then made my way back down the road to the library at Kemp, the last town before Sunflower. Their copies of the newspapers had all the missing pages. And that's where I got the story.'
'What story?' D'Agosta asked.
'The strange story of the Doane family. Mr. Doane was a novelist of independent means, and he brought his extended family to Sunflower to get away from it all, to write the great American novel far from the distractions of civilization. They bought one of the town's biggest and best houses, built by a small-time lumber baron in the years before the local mill shut down. Doane had two children. One of them, the son, won the highest honors ever awarded by the Sunflower High School, a clever fellow by all accounts. The daughter was a gifted poet whose works were occasionally published in the local papers. I read a few and they are, in fact, exceedingly well done. Mrs. Doane had grown into a noted landscape painter. The town became very proud of their talented, adopted family, and they were frequently in the papers, accepting awards, raising funds for one or another local charity, ribbon cutting, that sort of thing.'
'Landscape painter,' D'Agosta repeated. 'How about birds?'
'Not that I could find out. Nor did they appear to have any particular interest in Audubon or natural history art. Then, a few months after Helen's visit, the steady stream of approving stories began to cease.'
'Maybe the family got tired of the attention.'
'I think not. There was one more article about the Doane family--one final article,' he went on. 'Half a year after that. It stated that William, the Doane son, had been captured by the police after an extended manhunt through the national forest, and that he was now in solitary confinement in the county jail, charged with two ax murders.'
'The star student?' D'Agosta asked incredulously.
Pendergast nodded. 'After reading this, I began asking around Kemp about the Doane family. The townspeople there felt none of the restraint I noticed here. I heard a veritable outpouring of rumor and innuendo. Homicidal maniacs that only came out at night. Madness and violence. Stalking and menace. It became difficult to sift fact from fiction, town gossip from reality. The only thing that I feel reasonably sure of is that all are now dead, each having died in a uniquely unpleasant way.'
'All of them?'
'The mother was a suicide. The son died on death row while awaiting execution for the ax murders I spoke of.
