with you about.”
“Didn’t I leave a card?” I asked.
“Not that I know of.”
It was an oversight. As a penance, I scrawled both my home and cellular number on it in addition to the office one. After all, if the super-intendent of schools couldn’t be trusted with an unlisted phone number, who could?
Chapter 13
Max Cole lives on Bigelow Avenue North, a gracious, gently winding, tree-lined street that curves around the base of what’s known as Upper Queen Anne Hill. I used several sets of steep stairway sidewalks to make my way up to Bigelow from the school district office on the lower part of the hill. The cold but invigorating climb left me feeling a little winded but quite virtuous by the time I topped the last set of stairs and came out on the snow- covered street.
Max’s house, which I learned had once belonged to his parents, was a stately old Victorian set back behind a pair of towering, winter-bare chestnut trees. I walked up onto the covered porch and rang the bell. A miserable- looking Maxwell Cole, wearing a flannel robe and carrying a huge red hanky, answered the door. His unwaxed handlebar mustache drooped feebly, his eyes were red and runny. Obviously he had caught himself a dandy of a cold.
“Hi, Max,” I said cheerfully. “I just happened to be in the neighborhood. How’re the sick, the lame, and the lazy?”
He wasn’t exactly overjoyed to see me. “What are you doing here, J. P.? Can’t you see I’m sick?”
Actually, I could. There was only a frail hint of the old mutual antagonism in his voice. Feverish and haggard, he was too sick to carry off his customary obnoxiousness with any kind of believability.
“Just doing my job, Max, that’s all. I’d like to talk to you about Marcia and Pete Kelsey, if you have a minute. May I come in?”
“Suit yourself,” he said gruffly, pulling open the door with one hand while he used the other to stifle a sudden fit of sneezing. As I walked past him, the thought passed briefly through my mind that he was probably contagious as hell right then and I’d most likely end up with a case of pneumonia for my trouble. I accepted his reluctant invitation in the manner in which it was given and went on inside.
Max led the way into a spacious but overly furnished living room. The place was full of things that looked to me like genuine antiques, quality antiques. The only problem was there were far too many of them. And the room was boiling hot. Max had the thermostat set so high that it was sweltering in there.
He took a seat in an easy chair in front of a huge empty fireplace. Dropping my coat and gloves at one end of a chintz couch, I put as much distance between us as I reasonably could, settling at the far end of it and facing him across the wide expanse of an ornate, marble-topped coffee table.
“Wanted to have a fire in the fireplace this morning,” he grumbled, “but wouldn’t you know burning restrictions are in effect today? This is the kind of weather when you want to have a fire in the fireplace.”
That was true. I didn’t mention to him that this was exactly the kind of weather when everyone wanted a fire in his respective fireplace and that was precisely why it was a problem. Besides, had the room been any warmer, I would have died of heat prostration. I said a silent prayer of thanks for all those busy little environmentalists who had made burning restrictions possible.
“I’m sorry to disturb you when you’re sick, Max,” I began, “but I really do need to get some background information from you regarding this case. You’re pretty much the only one I can turn to so far. I understand you’ve known Pete and Marcia Kelsey for some time.”
Much to my surprise, Maxwell Cole slapped the sodden hanky over his face and burst into great lurching, choking sobs. It was several long, noisy minutes before he was able to speak.
“It finally hit home this morning that she’s really gone,” he mumbled miserably at last. “Yesterday, I was like in a dream, a fog. It wasn’t real somehow, but today…”
The day before when I had encountered him in front of the Kelseys’ house, I had very much doubted the veracity of his claim of family friendship, but there in that suffocatingly hot living room, with unchecked tears rolling down his pudgy cheeks and dripping from the ends of his sagging mustache, the depth of Maxwell Cole’s grief was undeniable. As Max’s story spilled out, I found myself missing the old familiar antagonism. His friend’s death had taken all the fight out of him, and in spite of myself, I felt a certain grudging sympathy toward the man.
“From fifth grade,” he added brokenly. “That’s how long we were friends. Her family came to Seattle from southern Utah, someplace around St. George, I believe. They moved to the Hill the summer Marcia and I were between fourth and fifth grades. She liked to read and so did I. We met at the library branch up on Garfield Street. We both had permission to check books out of the adult section. All summer long we passed books back and forth. Marcia always turned down the corners of the sexy parts. She was a lot better at finding them than I was.”
He smiled sadly, tugging with both hands on the wispy ends of his drooping mustache as though hoping to massage them into some kind of order. It didn’t work.
“We were like that,” he went on. Max crossed two fingers and held them out in front of him for a moment to show me what he meant before letting them fall limply back into his lap.
“I never had a sister,” he said, “and Marcia never had a brother. We were both only children. She was like a sister to me.”
“You stayed friends from then on?” I asked.
“More or less. You know how kids are. We had a big fight during eighth grade. I can’t even remember now what it was about, but we didn’t speak for most of that year. We patched things up once we got to high school, though. We were in journalism together, and our senior year we were coeditors of the KUAY.”
“That what?”
“The KUAY,” he repeated. “Queen Anne High’s weekly newspaper. That’s where I first got interested in journalism. Chris was there too. He did sports.”
“Chris?” I asked. “Who’s he?”
“Chris McLaughlin. Her first husband. You didn’t know about him?”
“No.”
“Well,” Max said firmly. “Christopher McLaughlin was a creep, the absolute scum of the earth as far as I’m concerned. I never could see what she saw in him other than sex maybe. He seduced her early on, the night of the junior/senior prom, as a matter of fact. She told me about it at the time, we were that close, and I worried that maybe she’d get knocked up. Of course, that was long before anyone knew she was a Downwinder.”
“A what?”
“A Downwinder. Haven’t you ever heard of them?”
I shook my head. “They’re the people who lived downwind from the Nevada Test Site during the late fifties, when they were still doing aboveground nuclear testing,” he said.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Marcia was staying out on her grandparents’ ranch when they set off a particularly dirty test. Unexpected winds blew the radioactive crap right across her grandparents’ land. Both grandparents eventually died of cancer. The doctors later attributed Marcia’s sterility as well as her female difficulties to that, although nobody’s ever proven it in court. You know how that goes.”
Max paused for a moment, then hurried on. “Anyway, that’s why it was so wonderful when Pete showed up with a ready-made family.”
“You said Chris McLaughlin was her first husband. What ever happened to him?”
Maxwell Cole snorted derisively. “Who knows? Who cares? Marcia left him in Canada and came back home. Good riddance, as far as I’m concerned. Her folks were absolutely delighted to think she had finally come to her senses and left the creep. They helped her get an annulment-that cost them a pretty penny-and they also helped Marcia get back into school at the university. They weren’t wild about Pete to begin with, but they got along fine with him eventually. If it hadn’t been for him, they probably would have missed being grandparents altogether.”
