I got behind him in line with my four cans of albacore tuna.
While he emptied his cart, he looked back at me for an instant and in that instant he knew I recognized him. He turned his eyes back to his unpacking, his back to me.
While the clerk was putting his groceries in plastic bags, I paid for my tuna and followed him out to his pickup.
“Conrad Lonsberg,” I said.
He said nothing, just piled his bags in the back of his pickup truck.
“Adele Hanford,” I said as he opened the door of his pickup and started to get in. He stopped, turned his head, and looked at me. He knew how to stare someone down. He had obviously had a lot of experience. We were a good match. I had a lifetime of patience and since he didn’t close the door and drive away I was sure this contact was not over.
“You’re Fonesca. Adele’s description was nearly perfect,” Lonsberg said, one hand on the trailer railing. “I thought she was engaging in a little creative hyperbole. Where is she?” he asked, his voice now low. I thought he was trying to keep himself in control, battling something. Rage, disappointment?
“That was my question,” I said. “I’m looking for her.”
“Why?”
“It looks like she ran away from her foster home,” I said. “Her foster mother is a friend. Adele is… I’m sort of responsible for her.”
“Flo Zink,” said Lonsberg, now tapping his left hand on the truck’s door. He kept looking at me and then made a decision. “Adele says you’re a private investigator.”
“I’m a process server.”
“What do you do not for a living?” he asked.
“Brood, watch old movies, think too much about the past,” I said.
He nodded in understanding. A fat woman with a full shopping cart wheeled noisily past us giving us both a glance. Lonsberg pressed his lips together, thought, looked away and then back at me.
“Follow me,” Lonsberg said, getting into his pickup and closing the door.
I got into the Cutlass and followed him out of the parking lot and down the Trail. Seven minutes later I pulled behind him at his gate. He leaned out of his open window and waved for me to get out of my car. I did. The passenger side door of his pickup opened. I got in next to him. He looked at me, pushed a button on the dashboard, and watched as the gate swung open. We drove in. He pushed the button again and the gate closed behind us.
I don’t know what I expected to see, probably one of the three-story ultra-modern white concrete designer houses with wide windows, decks, and normative palm trees.
We drove toward the only house on the three- or fouracre property, a reasonably modest one-story wooden building with a covered porch hovering over a trio of white wicker chairs and a wicker table. The house wasn’t small, but it wouldn’t go for more than one hundred eighty-five thousand in the current market in any other location. The grounds were green, the road we went down unpaved and narrow. To our left, however, was the Gulf of Mexico. The view and the expanse of beachfront would put the property in the two-million-dollar range. Along Lonsberg’s beach, birds strolled and waves rolled in. There were four plastic beach chairs not far from the shoreline facing the water. A sand pile about three feet high was in the process of giving itself up to the tide.
Lonsberg parked in front of the house and got out.
“Don’t worry about Jefferson,” he said as I got out too.
“Jefferson?”
At that moment I learned who Jefferson was. A gigantic dog of a dozen breeds looking like a hairy version of the Baskerville hound bounded around the house heading toward us. No, amend that. He was heading for me and barking. Jefferson knew how to bark.
“No,” Lonsberg commanded gently.
The dog hesitated, put his head down, and kept moving toward me, slowly now, growling.
“Here,” Lonsberg called a little louder. The dog ran to him. Lonsberg put out his hand and the dog gave it a sloppy lick. Lonsberg patted the dog’s head. Jefferson closed his eyes in ecstasy.
“He won’t bother you,” Lonsberg said, moving to the back of the pickup and handing me a bag of groceries.
Lonsberg picked up the other bag and headed onto the low porch. Jefferson still seemed particularly interested in me. He stood there watching as we entered and followed us inside after Lonsberg opened the door. I felt the big dog nudge past me.
Jefferson might not bother me but he was a significant distraction.
I followed Lonsberg through the hallway, past a room to our left filled with books and bookshelves, a sofa, and two very old overstuffed chairs, one with a matching hassock. The sofa and chairs were a set. They looked as if they had been bought by someone’s great-grandmother who had recovered them a century ago with blue and red flowers against a background of what might have once been yellow but was now a worn-out off-white.
A glimpse of another room on the right as we moved to the sound of Jefferson’s claws ticking against the wooden floor revealed an office with a desk, more bookcases, a row of file cabinets. The desk was clear except for a computer and a printer.
A few doors were closed. The kitchen was as big as the two rooms in which I lived and worked, which means it was an average-sized room with a wooden table in the middle surrounded by four chairs. Lonsberg put his bag on the table. So did I. Jefferson moved quickly to sniff at both bags. I could now see that Jefferson had jowls and large teeth. I had known Jeffersons in the past. He was a drooler.
“Have a seat,” Lonsberg said, putting his groceries into cabinets and the refrigerator.
I sat waiting. Jefferson decided to sit next to me and regard my face with his head tilted to one side.
“Do the police know you’re looking for Adele?” he asked, stacking his cans in a cupboard.
“No.”
He shook his head as if that were solid and solemn good news. Then he turned, wiped his hands on his pants, and sat across from me.
“What do you see, Fonesca?” he asked.
“See?”
“Me, what do you see?”
“A man, lean, healthy-looking, good head of hair, serious, judging whether or not he’s going to tell me something.”
“What do you know about me?” he asked.
“Famous writer, haven’t published much. Man who likes his privacy.”
“Have you read anything of mine?”
“Fool’s Love, long time ago. I’m rereading it,” I said.
Jefferson moved close to me and rested his head on my lap.
“What do you think of it? The book?” Lonsberg asked, hands folded on the table.
“It’s a classic, great book,” I said.
“What do you think of it?” he repeated.
“Does it matter?”
“Yes,” he said.
“So far, it’s not my kind of book. Maybe when I really get into it…”
“It was a fluke,” Lonsberg said. “I was a kid who thought he could write. It was short, easy. I expected nothing to happen, except that I’d keep working in my father’s drugstore in Rochester, marry Evelyn Steuben, have children, go to pharmacy school. The book happened to hit the right agent and the right publisher at the right time. Teenage girl rebels, sets off on her own, learns the truth about people, the good, the bad, grows up fast, gets swept up in the anti-Vietnam business, moves in with a cello player old enough to be her grandfather. Controversy on that one. Publicity. Big success. Fonesca, the book is second-rate. Too short. Too easy with answers. It’s smart-ass wit and a few good observations.”
“I think it’s better than that,” I said.
“So does most of the world,” he said. “I don’t.”
I wondered why this famous recluse was giving me the thirty-second biography and interview he wouldn’t
