sofa, as if he didn’t wish to be there, and sat down. A few seconds later, a blond Lab followed, settling itself at his feet.
Okay, this was probably not some setup Kev Daniel had engineered. Tiegs was as he’d described himself, and he certainly didn’t look dangerous. Tomorrow, on the pier, I’d hear his story.
Thursday
“I wanted to talk with you because my conscience has been troubling me,” Sally Timmerman said. She sat opposite me in a booth in the lodge’s restaurant, clutching a coffee cup with both hands. She’d pushed aside her plate of half-eaten French toast.
“Something you told me about Laurel that was untrue?” I asked.
She nodded, brow furrowed. The frown seemed unnatural; hers was a face made for smiles.
Timmerman had called my room fifteen minutes ago, saying she was downstairs having breakfast and working up the nerve to ask me to meet her. When I’d entered the coffee shop she was drowning her plate in syrup, but now it seemed she’d lost her appetite. I, on the other hand, was looking forward to the scrambled eggs, hash browns, and bacon strips I’d ordered. A full breakfast is a rarity for me, but when I do have the meal, I eat heartily and cast aside any guilt about cholesterol.
Sally said, “After I heard about you being shot at on Saturday night, I got scared for you. I mean, I hadn’t realized looking for Laurel might put you in danger. And then I thought that because I… Well, I didn’t exactly lie, but I withheld something from you, and I was afraid that your not having all the facts might put you in more danger. On Monday I tried to call you here, and they said you had left, so I thought, ‘Okay, that’s it. She’s gone, let it go.’ But I couldn’t, so yesterday I called your office and they said you were back down here.”
It looked as if she were trying to strangle the coffee cup. I put a hand on her arm and said, “I understand. Why don’t you relax and tell me about it?”
“Okay.” Deep breath. “You were interested in the relationship between Laurel, Josie, and me. I said I lost touch with Josie after she dropped out of college to get married, but that wasn’t exactly the way it happened. I stopped dealing with her after she came down for a visit about a year later. I caught her in bed in the house Laurel and I still shared-with Laurel’s fiance, Roy Greenwood.”
“Did you tell Laurel about this?”
“No. Josie threw on her clothes and left-acting like it was my fault for coming home at the wrong time-and Roy pleaded with me not to tell. Said it was a stupid mistake, they’d been drinking wine, and Josie came on to him. I told him I’d keep it to myself if he promised never to see Josie again.”
I sensed there was more, waited.
“Roy kept his promise-I thought. He and Laurel married, had the girls, seemed happy. Laurel couldn’t understand why he disapproved of her spending time with Josie, but I did. Or at least I thought I did until five years before Laurel disappeared, when I got together with an old friend from San Jose State who had recently run into Josie in a restaurant in San Francisco. You can imagine how I felt when she said, ‘Wasn’t Roy Greenwood engaged to Laurel Yardley in college? Strange that he’d end up with her cousin.’”
“So Roy had been seeing Josie all those years?”
“Maybe not all of them, but at some point they’d started up again. I confronted Roy, and at first he denied it, then he admitted he was seeing her and again begged me not to tell Laurel. The man cried, actually cried, and Roy was not a very emotional person. So once more I said I wouldn’t tell, if he’d break it off with Josie.”
“Did he?”
“He did not. I caught on to what was happening about a year before Josie died, when Laurel was telling me about phoning Josie and a man answering. She said, ‘I could’ve sworn to God it was Roy, but it turned out to be Josie’s new boyfriend. Isn’t that the strangest coincidence, that she’s dating a man who sounds exactly like my husband on the phone!’ After that, I checked with Roy’s office, and found out he supposedly was in San Francisco at a dental convention that weekend.”
“Did you tell Laurel?”
“No, but I confided in my husband. He advised me to keep quiet, said that I didn’t have actual proof, and that telling Laurel would only hurt her and the girls, possibly destroy their family. It wasn’t easy, but I did as he said. Then Laurel went up to San Francisco to be with Josie when she was dying. I couldn’t stand the idea of her tending to a woman who had betrayed her in the worst way anyone can. The idea of Laurel emptying Josie’s bedpan and washing her and feeding her, and Josie thinking she’d gotten away with something-that was more than I could bear.”
When Sally didn’t go on, I said, “And?”
“And I called Laurel at Josie’s. Told her everything I knew. She didn’t want to believe me. Finally I yelled at her. I said, ‘You may as well face it, your husband’s been banging Josie ever since college.’ Laurel accused me of lying. I can remember her exact words: ‘You’re making it up! You’ve always been jealous of my friendship with Josie, and now for some reason you want to hurt me.’ And she hung up.”
So it had been Sally whom Melissa Baker had overheard Laurel talking to through the airshaft in the Fell Street building.
Sally said, “The next day, Roy called to tell us Josie was dead. He came right out and asked me if I’d ever told Laurel about his relationship with her. I said no; I couldn’t bring myself to tell him what I’d done. And he said it was best to let it go, let Laurel remember Josie as a good friend. Jim and I didn’t go to the funeral, and after that I saw Laurel around town, but we never spoke. Then, a year later, she was gone.”
I reconstructed what had happened: Laurel ended her phone conversation with Sally, looked up, and saw Josie. Although she had accused Sally of lying, she must have known her friend had no reason to make up such a story; she may have suspected Roy’s infidelity for some time and chosen to ignore it, but she couldn’t any longer. So she confronted Josie, asked if what Sally had said was true. And Josie…?
A truth-telling session at the top of the stairs? An admission of an ugly betrayal? Hands raised in anger? A shove that would quickly kill a terminally ill woman?
Sally Timmerman was watching me. “I did a terrible thing, didn’t I?”
“I’m amazed that you kept silent as long as you did.”
“That was terrible, too. I’m an awful person.”
“No, Sally, you’re not. You’re just human, like the rest of us.”
After leaving Sally Timmerman, I went back to my room to make some phone calls. Adah was in a meeting. Patrick still wasn’t available at either the agency or home, but Orrin Anderson, the retired prison official, answered his phone on the second ring.
“DOC told me you’d be in touch,” he said. “I remember Mrs. Greenwood very well-and not only because she disappeared under mysterious circumstances. She was one of the best teachers we had during the time I directed the educational programs at the Men’s Colony. Delightful and genuinely interested in her students. She could be warm, yet maintain the appropriate distance that was necessary for any young, attractive woman who taught there.”
“Do you recall a convict named Kevin Daniel, who took her classes?”
“DOC told me you were interested in him, so I’ve had time to refresh my memory. He was a young man from an affluent family whose alcohol abuse had resulted in the death of an elderly woman. He adjusted well to the prison routine, and over his time there took a number of classes, mainly in the arts.”
“Can you describe Mrs. Greenwood’s relationship to Mr. Daniel?”
Anderson was silent for a moment. “She was closer to him than to the other students. He showed considerable artistic talent, and she took an interest in him, critiqued extra work that he brought to her. On the basis of her introduction, he actually sold two watercolors through a small gallery here in San Luis.”
“And you weren’t concerned about this closeness?”
“Initially I was. But after a talk with Mrs. Greenwood, I decided that she simply wanted to see talent rewarded.
