Читать книгу Suspicion - Janice Macdonald - Страница 9

SCOTT STOOD IN THE cereal aisle at Von’s trying to remember whether Ellie ate Cheerios or Rice Krispies. He picked up the Cheerios, dropped the carton in the basket and then, in a fit of indecision, set it back on the shelf. Maybe she didn’t even eat cereal. Why, he asked himself, hadn’t he paid more attention? His ex-wife’s voice supplied the answer. Because you don’t pay attention, period, Scott. You’ve never been there for me, and you haven’t been there for Ellie for God knows how long.

He dumped both the Cheerios and the Rice Krispies into the basket and moved on down the aisle. Things were about to change. Ellie’s two-week visit wouldn’t be long enough to completely mend the rift in their relationship, but it was a start. He’d spent the morning cleaning and vacuuming his apartment, bought new sheets and a set of dishes and made a list of all the things they would do while she was on Catalina—a glass-bottom-boat ride, snorkeling, horseback riding in the interior. It was going to be a good visit.

His cell phone rang as he wheeled his basket to the cash register. Laura. His ex-wife had called every day since he’d arrived on the island. Some days she called twice. Usually—within earshot of Ellie, he was certain—she’d start with a list of his various transgressions and shortcomings and then she’d put Ellie on the phone. By that time, not surprisingly, his daughter was hostile and surly.

“Ellie, I know you want to go to Spain,” he said now. They’d had this conversation before. “But I don’t have the money to send you. I didn’t go to Europe until I’d graduated from college.”

“You could afford it if you still worked at the Times.” Ellie’s voice was full of indignation. “You didn’t have to quit.”

Phone shoved between his head and shoulder, Scott unloaded the basket.

“It’s not my fault you wanted to go live on some stupid island,” Ellie continued.

“You’re going to love it here, El.” Scott tried to divert her. “It’s really beautiful. We’ll go swimming, snorkeling. I’ve already bought you a bike.”

“I might not come.”

His hand froze around a can of green beans. “What do you mean? It’s all set up.”

“Mom wants me to go to Cleveland with her to see Grandma.”

He took a breath. “Is that what you want to do?”

“I don’t know.” She sighed. “Mom gets kind of lonely. I feel bad for her.”

He finished unloading the groceries, pulled out his bill-fold and waited for the cashier to ring up the total. He recognized Laura’s tactic, but he had little taste for making Ellie a pawn in her parents’ game. Better just to back off.

“Fifty-two fifty,” the cashier said.

He fished out a twenty and a ten, then realized that was all the cash he had. As he wrote out a check, he tried to remember exactly how much he had left in his checking account. The shopping expedition in preparation for Ellie’s visit had pretty much blown his monthly budget.

“Listen, Ellie,” he told his daughter, “I’m going to be disappointed if you don’t come, but I’ll leave it up to you to do what you think is best.”

“Sure, Dad,” she said listlessly. “Whatever.”

After he’d carried the groceries to his apartment, he headed back to the Argonaut and the letter he’d been trying to write to the people of Catalina. His thoughts kept drifting to Ellie and the obscure feeling that by not insisting she come to Catalina, instead of accompanying her mother to Cleveland, he’d somehow let her down.

More trouble still was the vague sense of relief he felt now that the trip was in doubt. While he loved Ellie unreservedly, the fear of not being able to pull things off and failing somehow to make her happy was a weight on his shoulders. He got up from the desk, poured a mug of coffee and sat down again. She’d told him once that he “sucked” as a dad and maybe she was right. Retreat and distance came easily to him, a little too easily. Qualities that probably didn’t do much to reassure his daughter.

He looked up from his musings to see Ava Lynsky standing in the doorway. She looked different, though, her hair or something. It took him a moment to realize it wasn’t Ava. Actually, she looked like a less-vivid version of Ava. Same build, same fine bone structure, but her hair was short and choppy, and in contrast to Ava’s Snow White coloring, this woman had the tanned complexion of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors. Her feet were clad in hiking boots and she wore jeans and a sleeveless cotton shirt.

She glanced around the cramped offices of the Catalina Island Argonaut, where undelivered stacks of last week’s newspaper vied for space with the mountain bike he’d just acquired, the small brown fridge where the previous publisher had kept her peppermint schnapps and a precarious mountain of boxes still to be unpacked.

“So you’re the new publisher, huh?” She stuck out her hand. “Ingrid Lynsky. You met my sister this morning. My father asked me to pass on a message to you. He’s supposed to give you a tour this afternoon?”

“At four,” Scott said.

“Don’t look for him before five,” Ingrid said. “My father overcommits. If he has enough time in the day to do four things, he’ll try to squeeze in six. Everybody is inconvenienced, but hey, that’s Dr. Sam for you.”

Scott scratched his ear. He could still hear Ellie telling him he sucked. “You’re not a member of the Dr. Sam fan club?” he asked Ingrid. “I thought everyone on Catalina subscribed to it.”

Ingrid laughed. “Oh, did I give you the wrong impression? I’m sorry. Dr. Sam’s a saint. Most people have to take a boat to the mainland. My father can walk.”

Scott looked at her.

Ingrid looked straight back at him, her gaze steady and unflinching. “Anyway,” she said, “just so you know, he’ll be late.”

“HOPE YOU’RE NOT expecting to make any money with that paper,” Sam Lynsky said as he pulled his Jeep back onto the road. He’d breezed into Scott’s office at five-thirty with a convoluted tale about being stopped a dozen times as he tried to get away from the hospital and everyone wanting a minute of his time. “The Argonaut’s never turned a profit in forty years. How come you bought it?”

“Escape,” Scott said before he had time to think about it. “Things on the mainland were getting ugly.”

Dr. Sam rounded the curve of Abalone Point and headed toward Pebbly Beach. “No family?”

“Divorced.” Scott glanced at the doctor, a youthful-looking sixty-year-old with white hair curling from under a red baseball cap, neat mustache and a clear blue steady-eyed gaze. “I have a fourteen-year-old daughter.”

“You going to make enough to get by?”

“I’m counting on the newspaper to provide some revenue.” He’d seen the publisher’s account books. Maybe not much by Lynsky’s standards, but he could get by. “And I’ve got some freelance assignments lined up.”

He rested an arm on the window ledge. If his head weren’t full of Ellie, he’d enjoy this tour, he thought as they turned onto Wrigley Terrace Road. Avalon Bay was behind them now, and the grey-green mountains that ringed Catalina filled the view through the windshield. The wind off the ocean felt bracing.

“That’s the old William Wrigley home up there on your left.” Lynsky waved his arm at a palatial white structure nestled in the hills. “Built in the 1920s as a summer home. Before that the Wrigleys would come over in June and stay at the St. Catherine’s Hotel. The story goes, Mrs. Wrigley woke up one morning and said, ‘I would like to live there.’ It’s a hotel these days, but when I was a boy… Hold on.”

Scott grabbed the Jeep’s roll bar as Lynsky executed a sudden hairpin curve. The doctor’s driving was a tad hair-raising.

Lynsky glanced at Scott and laughed. “You think that’s bad? In my great-grandfather’s days, before the Bannings started building real roads, they’d run stage coaches from Avalon over to the Isthmus. Six horses, galloping down the summit, hooves flying. Wooden wheels.” He shook his head. “We’re too soft these days. Want everything too easy. Where’s the challenge? Where’s the spirit? You said you’re divorced?”

“Right.”

“How long were you married?”

“Fifteen years.”

“I was married,” Dr. Sam said, “nearly forty years. Not a natural state, though, marriage. Society forces you into it, but it’s not natural. Used to have a collection of toilet paper until my wife got rid of it. Toilet paper from every country I ever visited and barf bags, empty, of course, from every flight I ever took. She threw them all out. Sorry I ever got married,” he said.

“Wouldn’t do it again, huh?”

“‘Thus grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure…’” Lynsky steered the Jeep across a stretch of brush-filled terrain. “‘Married in haste, we may repent at leisure.’”

Lynsky careered around a bend, sending Scott slamming into the passenger door. He gave up on trying to take notes. Between the doctor’s driving, his nonstop monologue and conversational threads introduced, then left dangling, he felt disoriented. Now the harbor was a dizzying drop-off to his left and they were hurtling along a mountainous ridge road, then down a canyon and up again to a view of the Pacific spread out like a blue silk sheet far below.

“Congreve.” Lynsky stopped the Jeep and they both climbed out and stood at the edge of the cliff, looking out. “The Old Bachelor. He also wrote, ‘I could find it in my heart to marry thee, purely to be rid of thee.’”

Scott decided to mull that over later. The vista below him was one he’d seen in the postcard racks in town. The glittering ocean, the yellow wildflowers that dotted the steep slopes, the landmark red roof of the Casino and the familiar white bulk of the high-speed Catalina Express. What the postcards didn’t capture was the dusty sun-warmed smell of sage and eucalyptus, the subdued hush of waves, the cries of seabirds.

“Won’t find a more beautiful place anywhere else on earth,” Lynsky said after a while. “You look at the mainland over there—” he gestured at the faint bluish outline of the Southern California coastline “—and feel pretty damn lucky you’re over here.”

Scott nodded. He’d mailed a postcard to Ellie that morning. After he’d dropped it off at the post office, though, it had occurred to him that picturesque scenery was unlikely to be a selling point to a teenage girl whose notion of paradise right now was all about shopping malls and cosmetic counters.

“There’re a lot of good people on the island,” Lynsky said after they were back on the road again. “Most of them, in fact. We’re a fairly law-abiding lot. A tourist now and then who has a few too many Wicky Whackers or Margaritas and starts making a nuisance of himself, that’s about the worst of it.”

“Suits me,” Scott said.

“You’re daughter’s fourteen, you said?” The doctor turned to look at him. “Difficult age. Suddenly you’re not a hero anymore and you can’t do a thing that’s right.”

Scott watched palms and eucalyptus and other low scrubby trees he couldn’t name fly past as the Jeep tore down another canyon. Tell me about it, he thought.

“Of course, I say that and my daughters are thirty-four and we still don’t see eye to eye. Ava’s doing okay.” Lynsky wiggled a hand. “Lost her husband three years ago, but she’s engaged to a fine man now. Attorney here in town. Got a few things in her own life to work out, but Ed’s good for her.”

Scott recalled Ava’s telling him about stamping her foot to get what she wanted and felt a stab of sympathy for the fiancé.

“Ingrid, Ava’s twin, has taken a vow of poverty,” Lynsky was saying. “Doesn’t believe in working for a living. Dropped out of medical school with one year left to go. She’s quite content to live on whatever she grows—lettuce and beets, she tells me, but who knows what else. Lives behind some horse stables on the other side of the island.” He shook his head. “I can’t figure her out.”

Scott felt vaguely defeated. If Dr. Samuel Lynsky living on an idyllic island, loved by everyone—a man who’d actually written a book on raising children—had problematic relationships with his daughters, what were his own odds? He wanted to ask the doctor what went wrong. What would he do differently?

They were headed back into town now, Dr. Sam nimbly maneuvering the Jeep through narrow streets of equally narrow houses that rose in tiers from the harbor, dodging the ubiquitous golf carts, most of them driven by tourists who rented them from stands along the seafront.

“Las Casistas over there—” Lynsky nodded at a development of pink, adobe-style cottages “—used to be housing for the island’s workers.” He leaned an elbow on the window frame. “Don’t get the wrong impression about what I just said. Ingrid’s okay. Ava is, too. Diana’s death hit them both pretty hard.” He looked at Scott. “You know about that?”

“A boating accident, I heard.”

“Three months ago. Took the boat out for a sail. Bad timing all around. I was getting over flu, and Diana had been having dizzy spells. I went below to take a nap, and when I woke up she was gone.” Lynsky pulled off his cap by the brim, replaced it a moment later. “Coast Guard, helicopters. Everyone out there looking for her. Nothing.”

“I’m sorry,” Scott said. The words seemed inadequate, but he’d never been very good at offering condolences. “How are you managing?”

“I’m fine.” Lynsky pinched his midriff. “Overdosed on casseroles for a while. People couldn’t do enough. Still can’t. Lot of talk about creating some kind of garden in Diana’s name, inlaid tiles, that sort of thing. The mayor’s asked Ava to design it.” He glanced at Scott. “You’ve met Ava?”

“This morning. She showed me some of her work.”

“Paints decorative tiles. Catalina tiles are world-famous. Ava refuses to even discuss any kind of memorial. Since Diana died we can’t spend two minutes together without a battle.” He cleared his throat. “Body’s never been found—that’s part of the problem. Good chance it never will, I’ve been told. Meanwhile, life has to go on.”

“Difficult to find closure, I would imagine,” Scott said, then cringed at the words. Closure. One of those pop psychology terms people say that mean absolutely nothing. Tie everything up in a neat little package and then move on. Lynsky pulled up outside the Argonaut office, and Scott grabbed his canvas backpack from the floor behind him and stuck out his hand. “Thanks for the tour, Dr. Lynsky.”

“Got a business deal for you,” Lynsky said. “You might as well accept, because you’re not going to support yourself with that paper, I don’t care what old Aggie Broadbent told you about the thing turning a profit. She just wanted to unload it.”

Scott watched the doctor leaf through a manila folder of papers he’d removed from under the front seat.

“You know much about the Lynsky family?” Sam asked, still riffling through papers.

“Some. I stopped by the Island Historical Society yesterday.”

“So you probably know my family owned this island years ago. Not for long. It changed hands a few times before it was deeded to the state around 1900. Diana was putting everything into a book before she died. I want it finished.” Lynsky stuck the folder back under the seat. “Need to sort through her papers before you see them, but if you’re interested, the book should solve your money problems. What do you think?”

“Sounds interesting,” Scott said. “What do your daughters think about it?”

“They don’t know anything about it,” Lynsky said. “And I don’t know that they need to. They get their hands on Diana’s papers and it’ll be yak-yak-yak. Stirring up things that don’t need to be stirred up, and the book will never get written.”

“Won’t they want to see the papers?”

“You want to write this thing or not?”

“I’m just asking,” Scott said.

“You let me deal with my daughters,” Sam said. “You do a good job with the book, they’ll be thrilled. A year from now, they’ll have forgotten all about the papers.” He fished under the seat, produced another file. “I’m going to give you a check right now,” he said. “Just to get things going.”

“Hold on a minute, Dr. Lynsky.” Things were moving a little too fast. “You don’t want to talk about this some more, see some samples of my writing?”

“Nah.” Lynsky was scrawling his name across the check in a bold black hand. “And it’s Sam.” He held out the check. “You worked for the L.A. Times. That’s good enough for me.”

Scott ignored the check. “I’d like to think things over first.”

“Suit yourself.” Lynsky dropped the check on Scott’s knee. “Might as well deposit this while you’re doing your thinking. It’ll tide you over when the advertising drops off. Meet me for breakfast at the Beehive tomorrow. Around eight-thirty. I’ll bring some things to get you started.”

“YOU SITTING DOWN?” Lil asked Ava later that afternoon when she called with the information on the cottage. “Guess who the owner turned out to be?”

“No idea,” Ava said.

“Your dad,” Lil said. “Seems he bought it back a few years ago, no idea what he intended to do with it. It’ll make things easier for you, I should think.”

Not necessarily, Ava thought as she walked up to the hospital to see her father. A volunteer in a pink smock was sorting through a stack of National Geographic magazines when Ava poked her head around the door of the hospital auxiliary office.

“Your father?” she said. “Let me think a minute. I saw him early this morning making rounds and then…” She paused and smiled. “You know your dad—doing ten things at the same time. Now what was it he said he had to do? Something about dropping by the Argonaut…”

“If he comes back in the next hour or so, please tell him I need to talk to him. I’ve got some things to do in town, so I’ll meet him back here.”

“All right, honey, I’ll tell him.” The volunteer peered at Ava. “You doing better?”

“Fine, thanks,” Ava said. Maybe she’d just get a billboard made up. Don’t ask. I’m fine. Fantastic. Never been better.

“Keep busy. That’s the best thing you can do.”

“Absolutely,” Ava agreed.

“Bring that dog of yours back. Everyone got such a kick out of him in that cape. It’s so heartwarming to see how animals raise people’s spirits.”

Ava smiled. Henri was a participant in the Pets Are Therapy program. For an hour every week Henri was stroked, petted and fussed over by the half a dozen or so hospice patients. They fed him treats, rolled balls across the floor and laughed at his shameless grandstanding. At the end of the hour, the patients looked happy, Henri seemed happy, and as Ava walked him back into town, she always felt…well, happier.

“How’s your sister?” The volunteer’s smile had cooled slightly. “Still living out by the horse stables?”

“Ingrid’s fine, too.” Tomorrow, she would try to go through the whole day without using the word fine. “She’s happy working with the horses, not dealing with people all the time. Listen, I need to get going.”

“Sure, honey.” The volunteer gave Ava a quick hug. “Take care, sweetie.”

As she left the hospital and walked down Avalon Canyon Road into town, Ava considered the merits of Ingrid’s solitary existence. No need for constant reassurance or pretending to be something you weren’t. If Ingrid felt morose or out of sorts, she just dug in her garden or rode horses until she was in the mood for human contact again.

Hands in the pockets of her denim jacket, Ava turned onto Sumner—past the tiny house and summer rentals that had once been tent sites owned by her grandfather—and onto Crescent, now thronged with tourists disembarking from the Catalina Express.

She stopped to look at a dress in the window of Island Fashions, a clingy pistachio-colored shift that would look great if she could lose the ten pounds she’d gained in the past two months. A minute on the lips, forever on the hips. Diana’s voice, taunting her. You should see me now, Mom, she thought. In the window she could see the reflected parade of passersby. A small stout man separated himself from the rest. He’d spotted her.

Too late to pretend she hadn’t seen him, she turned to smile at the mayor of Avalon. A sixtyish man in a tropical shirt, with a bald head and plump pink face and chins that dissolved into his neck. A sweetheart, but she couldn’t look at him without thinking of a melting ice-cream cone.

“…so hard for you,” he was saying now. “The council thought that one of your beautiful art pieces would be a fitting tribute to your mother.” He patted her arm and made room for a couple of straw-hatted tourists. “No pressure, though. We’d never want to do that. How you doing, anyway, honey?”

“Fine. Busy of course.”

“Well, that’s good.” His eyes lingered on her for a moment. “You know Muriel was just saying this morning—she runs the grief-counseling program at the hospital, you know—anyway, she was saying that all most people really need is someone to listen to them.”

Ava kept smiling. “It’s great that they have someone as dedicated as Muriel.”

“She’s a good listener,” the mayor said. “A real good listener.”

“Tell her I said hi,” Ava said.

“Will do. And, Ava, you take care now. And when you’re ready to think about that piece for your mother, bless her soul, you just give me a call.”

“Right,” Ava said. She crossed the road and walked along the seafront, killing time until she returned to the hospital to meet her father. A crowd of little girls in pigtails and Crayola-colored clothes were giggling and hitting each other with their backpacks. She caught the eye of one of them and winked. She kept walking, past the signs hawking rides in glass-bottom boats, past Olaf’s ice-cream store, past the guides hawking tours of the Casino and Jeep excursions into the interior. It was hard to walk through Avalon without running into someone she knew, but she’d discovered that if she kept her head down people were sometimes reluctant to approach her.

Which suited her just fine. Anything to avoid The Look. People had started treating her differently after Rob died. They’d smile and chat, but there was a new solicitousness in their voices. A caution, as though they were dealing with a convalescent who might relapse. They’d peer into her eyes as though to make sure someone was really there. Now, since her mother’s death, it was happening again.

She hated it. They meant well, but she hated it. Either she avoided people completely or, when that wasn’t possible, she became so impossibly bright and chipper that she was always expecting someone to rap her on the head and say, “Knock it off. We know you’re hurting. Just admit it.”

But she couldn’t. Instead, she’d breeze around doing her happier-than-thou schtick until she couldn’t stand herself anymore. Then she’d go home, wrap herself up in an old afghan her grandmother had knitted, pig out on whatever was on hand—amazingly, ice cream was always on hand—and fall asleep watching a cheesy movie on late-night TV. Then wake up hours later, screaming because she’d seen her mother’s face again staring up at her from beneath the water. I’m not happy, Ava. I haven’t been for some time.

BACK AT THE HOSPITAL, she found her father in his small office, just off the main corridor, waiting for the next patient. Dr. Sam Lynsky III wore a gold paper crown and a white lab coat over jeans.

“That place was falling apart when your grandmother had it,” he said after she told him about the cottage. “It needs to be torn down.”

“I can fix it up.” Ava folded her arms over her chest, ready to do battle. “Don’t give me a hard time about it, Dad. What’s it to you if I want to live there?”

“Ava, I am rattling around in a two-million-dollar property that was and still is your home. It’s lonely and unwelcoming and far too large, and I’d like nothing more than to come home in the evening to my daughter’s company—both my daughters, but I realize that’s asking too much. I can’t imagine how it could be a question of privacy, but—”

“It’s full of Mom,” Ava blurted, exactly the kind of reasoning she hadn’t intended to use. “Maybe it doesn’t bother you, Dad. Maybe you’re getting on just fine without her, but I can’t take it.”

“Ava.” Sam leaned back in his chair. “Your inability to deal with your mother’s death is hardly a plausible reason to buy a ramshackle piece of property. At some point, you’ll need to accept what happened. In the meantime, there are any number of other houses on the island.”

“Maybe so,” Ava said. “But I want that one.”

“Jerry the pharmacist is going to sell his place.” Sam had emptied a canvas briefcase onto the consulting-room floor. “Got the information in here somewhere… Oh, here’s something you might be interested in.” He tossed a brochure at Ava.

Ava glanced at the glossy ad for a Los Angeles gallery. “Dad, what does this have to do with Grandma’s cottage?”

“Nothing. Just pointing out the sort of marketing you need to do. Never going to get anywhere painting three tiles a week. Need to think big.”

Ava fumed inwardly. Her father kept digging, papers flying all around him. He wasn’t a large man, but with his extravagant gestures and nonstop barrage of words, he always seemed to make a room feel too small.

“Jerry’s house would be a smart buy,” he said. “Now where did I put that piece of paper?”

He continued to shuffle through papers as he told her what a wise investment the pharmacist’s house would be. Her father had bought and sold plenty of real estate in his life, and he could be quite persuasive on financial matters. In fact, as she listened to him, she found herself thinking that maybe the pharmacist’s house was indeed the way to go. On the verge of saying she’d take a look, she stopped herself. Sam eventually wore everyone down. This time he wouldn’t prevail.

“Dad, just give me an answer on the cottage. I don’t feel like sitting here while you turn everything upside down. Lil said I could move in—”

“Hold on a minute.” He stopped to examine a piece of paper. “Asthma Foundation holding some fancy-schmancy conference in L.A. Waste of time and money. What they should do—”

“I don’t give a damn what they should do.” In one move Ava scooped up all his papers and shoved them back in the bag. “I want Grandma’s cottage.”

“How are you going to pay for it?”

“I have money.” She felt her face color. She knew, as her father certainly did, that she had money from Rob’s insurance and in her trust fund. Although work was picking up, her commissions were by no means steady and she barely scraped by on what she made.

“Big commission?”

“Dammit, Dad, why do you have to make everything so difficult? The place is empty, I could move in tonight and rent it until the buy closes.” She saw him wavering. “Come on. I really want the cottage.”

“A lesson in life,” her father said, “is that we don’t always get what we want.”

The intercom on his desk buzzed to indicate a patient was waiting. “I’ll let you know,” he said. “I might decide to tear the place down.”

Ava left, slamming the door behind her, and walked back down the hill into town. He’d let her have the place, she knew that, but not before he’d made a huge and unnecessary production of it. Not so long ago she’d loved him so unreservedly it frightened her. Lately everything he did irritated her. And then she’d feel guilty. Guilt and irritation, an endless seesaw. And the irony was that all he was doing, all he’d ever done, was be himself. How her mother had stood it for forty years, she had no idea.