Yeager could be the person who orchestrated all of this.”
O’Connor sighed. “Doubtless this has occurred to Lefebvre as well. But so far, there isn’t a thing anyone can do to prove that.”
“My guess is that the Baer farm was kind of a hideout for this gang, and had been for years.”
“Prohibition was long over by 1958,” O’Connor said.
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean smuggling was over. Or that criminals didn’t have a use for an out-of-the-way place.”
“Maybe.”
“Think about it-Gus has come back from killing Rose Hannon and handing the child off to someone. Bo Jergenson arrives and says he’s left a reporter at a hideout, where a double homicide was about to be covered up. Gus must have been rattled; he leaves a knife and his bloody clothes at his house. Of course, he thought he’d be able to go back to get them. He had a busy, busy night. He killed Bo, and maybe one or both of the other two, and then took off for the mountains. Or…maybe the other two are buried near the cabin, too.”
“Betty Bradford and Lew Hacker haven’t been seen or heard from in twenty years,” O’Connor said. “It’s not likely they’re alive. We would have heard from them after Lily and the new Max Ducane offered that reward.”
“I’m not so sure they’re dead.”
“Why, because of that phone call you got the other day?”
I shrugged. “A hunch. Maybe not a good one. I don’t know. Anyway, that night, or soon thereafter, Gus is dead. The only people left on the master-mind’s team are the murderer from the Sea Dreamer and the one who killed Katy and Todd in the Buick.”
“I can think of two people who are loyal to Mitch and wouldn’t have minded doing a night’s work like this,” O’Connor said.
“Eric and Ian? How old were they?”
“In their twenties.”
I thought about Eric holding Kyle over the railing. “I wonder if Ian and Eric know how to scuba dive.”
Barbara and Kenny never came by the paper.
I had Tuesday off and spent most of it taking my dad in for chemo and catching up on household chores and errands.
O’Connor called me at nine o’clock that evening to tell me that when he came home, my sister and Kenny were sitting close to each other on his living room couch. O’Connor wasn’t happy about finding them together, and neither was I, but we agreed there wasn’t a thing we could do about it.
When I told my father about it, he asked me if I had so few worries, I needed to borrow some from Barbara.
No. I had plenty of worries of my own.
I worried that my time with him was too short to waste with anything other than staying at his side. Nothing worried me more.
I worried that Mary would feel that I had trespassed on her kindness too often.
I worried that I’d never figure out what really happened that weekend in 1958, and more people would be harmed.
I worried that if I didn’t find something solid to back up all my great theories, I’d be covering a PTA fund-raiser by the middle of next week.
I worried that O’Connor and the other men in the newsroom were just humoring me.
I worried that someone really was following me all those times I felt watched, and I worried that no one was following me and I was losing my mind.
I worried that I liked Frank Harriman, the cop in Bakersfield, more than was healthy, because at the end of each day, no matter what else had occupied my mind, I found I had an urge to make a long-distance call to him, to ask if he was seeing anyone, to ask who was meeting him for coffee at the end of the shift these days, and-just to talk, to see if talking to him and listening to him still made me feel comfortable, at ease, in a way no one else seemed to make me feel at ease.
I didn’t make the call.
43
M Y MYSTERY WOMAN CALLED EARLY ON WEDNESDAY MORNING. “The boss had a cabin up near Arrowhead,” she said, and gave an address. “Maybe they took the baby up there. I don’t know.”
“Who was the boss?”
She ignored the question. “The cabin was in Gus’s name. Gus Ronden.”
I took a chance. “Betty, where’s Lew?”
There was a long pause, then she whispered, “Luis died in Mexico.”
She hung up.
She had spoken those last few words with grief in her voice-and pronounced his name in a way that suggested she might speak Spanish.
Lew Hacker had meant something to her. Luis. I wondered if “Hacker” was also an anglicized version of a Hispanic name. It wasn’t surprising that Luis might have found it easier to be Lew in the 1950s. Mexico. Had the two of them made an escape there?
I looked through everything that had been published about Gus Ronden. Nothing mentioned the exact address of the cabin, or even the road it was on. O’Connor had the address in his notes, from when he had gone to look up property records all those years ago. But it had never been in the paper. Whatever doubts I had that the mystery woman was Betty Bradford vanished.
I was making calls to find out if Ian Yeager was scuba-certified, when O’Connor told me Lefebvre was on the other line, asking for me. I took the call.
“I’m in your friend O’Malley’s office on the construction site. You might want to come out to the farm,” Lefebvre told me. “Bring O’Connor if you’d like.”
I told him we’d be there right away.
Before we could leave, Max called. O’Connor rolled his eyes when I motioned for privacy, but he stepped away.
“Want to explore the inside of Griffin Baer’s former home?” Max asked.
“You know I do. But it was sold this past weekend.”
“I know. I bought it.”
“You-what?”
“I wanted to tell you earlier, but thought I had better wait until it was official.”
“Wow…I thought… did you decide against living in Katy’s house?”
“You said it-Katy’s house. I don’t think Lily would be happy if I changed anything in it, and I don’t think I’d be happy if I kept it as a museum.”
“I can understand that. I drove by the Baer place the other day and saw it from the outside.”
“Come by and see more of it. Bring a flashlight-the power won’t be on until Friday.”
“Can you give me a couple of hours? I was just heading out.”
“No problem. I’ll go on over and open some windows to air the place out. It’s a beautiful house. And the view-well, wait until you see it.”
I hung up and stood there in a daze. O’Connor came back over and said, “Much as I hate to disturb your daydreams about your rich Romeo, we are keeping Lefebvre waiting.”
“I doubt he’ll wait for us. Listen, I’m going to drive separately. I’m meeting Max later.”
I saw a look come into his eyes, and his lips tighten across the front of his teeth. His hand clenched, then opened. But he didn’t say a word.
“Thanks,” I said.
