Silence

7

TILL LOOKED OVER the copy for the ads as he walked away from Jay Chernoff’s office. “Eric Fuller has been accused of the murder of Wendy Harper. Persons having information about this matter may contact Mr. Fuller’s attorney, Jay Chernoff, c/o Fiske, Chernoff, Fein, and Toole, 3900 Brighton Way, Beverly Hills, CA 90210.”

The second ad was an attempt to use Till’s name to reassure her this wasn’t a trap. “Wendy Harper, Eric needs your help after six years. Please get in touch with Jack at Till Investigations, 11999 Ventura Boulevard, Studio City, CA 91604.”

The third ad purported to be from Eric. “To Wendy Harper: I’ve been accused of your murder. Please call me so we can prove you’re alive. Love, Eric.” She would still remember that address because the house had once been hers too. This ad was a bit of a fraud because Eric knew nothing about it yet.

The difficult question had been where to place the ads. Till had noticed six years ago that Wendy Harper was one of those people who read the New York Times whether she was in New York or Solvang, California. Till had noticed a hundred times over the years that fugitives seldom changed small habits that struck them as safe. The ads would run in the New York Times in rotation beginning in two days.

The Los Angeles Times seemed to him to be another obvious choice. Wendy Harper had once been a part of the food scene in Los Angeles, and the restaurant she and Eric had owned together was more popular than ever. Till guessed that she checked on the restaurant from time to time, or read about people she had known. Jay Chernoff had suggested the Chicago Tribune, just because it was the big regional paper for the center of the country. She and Eric had gone to college in Wisconsin, so the Midwest might be an area where she would have felt comfortable enough to settle.

In about two weeks the ads would also run in Gourmet and Saveur, on the theory that a person who had made her living in restaurants might still read about food. Till also remembered that Wendy had mentioned something she had read in the New Yorker, so he added the magazine to the list.

The advertisements were going to be spectacularly expensive, but Till had talked Chernoff into including them in the cost of Eric Fuller’s defense. And unless they could prove that Wendy Harper was alive, there was no defense.

Till had been in Chernoff’s office for much of the day, and now rush hour was beginning and his progress north and east was slow. He had one other stop to make this afternoon, and it was one he longed for and dreaded at the same time. As Till drove, he wished he were visiting Garden House for a different reason.

Till had always liked to think that Holly had thought of the name because that was the way her mind worked. She was not always cheerful, because her life had never been easy, but she took delight in things that were good or beautiful. She named them and she pointed them out to other people whenever she saw them.

Garden House was a two-story residence in South Pasadena, a vintage Craftsman bungalow with a big front porch and an old, established garden with bleeding heart and flowering shrimp plants that had gone out of style, and bright orange Joseph’s Coat roses on trellises. The lawn was always a bit overtrodden and dusty, because there was always something going on out there—a badminton net had been up all spring, and before that one of the kids had decided it was a good spot for a horseshoe pit. Till had to remind himself not to call them kids aloud, because that irritated Holly. They were adults. Holly was twenty-one already, and she could cook and drive a car, and she had been almost self-supporting for three years. Till smiled to himself. That was better than he had done during his first three years in the detective business.

Whenever Till visited Garden House he drove around the block once, doubled back to be sure he had not been followed, and then parked his car in a different spot at least a block away and walked. He had been a homicide cop for a long time, and now he often took cases that left people angry with him. He had always dreaded the possibility of leading anyone to Garden House, and he knew that beginning today, his precautions would need to be more elaborate: He had just made sure that a potential killer knew his name. He took a last glance behind him as he walked up the sidewalk to the porch and rang the doorbell. Even though Till and the parents of the five other kids had formed a trust that paid for Garden House, the idea from the beginning was that it belonged to the kids, and the parents were guests.

The door swung open and there was Bob Driscoll, his face already in a grin. “Hi, Jack,” he said, his voice loud and happy. “Come on in, Jack.” He pulled the door open wide, and Till followed him into the living room.

“Hi, Bob. How have you been?”

“Great. Just great. I got a different job. It pays a lot better than the car wash. I’m working at this little organic vegetable store on Foothill called Darlene’s Farm. Come in and see us. You’re here to visit Holly, of course.”

“Sure am. Seen her around?”

“Not in a while. She and Marie went to buy groceries. And Nancy, maybe. Yeah. I think the three of them went. Holly, Marie, Nancy. Hey! I bet you could stay for dinner. They were going to get some stuff to make an Italian dinner together.”

“No, I don’t think so, thanks. I just dropped by for a little visit with her. You know I have to see how my little girl is.”

“She’s great, Jack. You’ll see.” He sat quietly for a moment. “And how about you? How have you been?”

“Not so bad, I think. I’m pretty much always the same. How are your parents?”

“I saw them last week. They’re getting old, but they’re still happy.”

As Till looked at Bob Driscoll, he could not keep himself from seeing the distinctive features of a person with Down syndrome—the rounded head and body, the slightly protuberant eyes and small nose. The young people who lived in Garden House all resembled each other more than they resembled their relatives. It was as though Garden House were a family. The young people also seemed to share things that were more fundamental, a set of attitudes and mannerisms that they picked up from each other, and an outlook that often made them seem to him to be like half-wise, unspoiled children. But they were no longer children.

The birth had been in December. During the pregnancy, Rose had decreed that the baby would be Christopher if it was a boy, and Holly if it was a girl. Her obstetrician had not seen any reason to insist on amnio, because all was going well, and Rose was healthy and twenty-four. There had been no warning that something had happened on chromosome twenty-one, and that Holly had Down syndrome.

By the next December, Rose had already walked out on them, and Till was making his first Christmas celebration for his only child, Holly. Her first birthday, on the tenth, had been a quiet two-person affair, with Holly asleep at seven, and he had resolved never to let any celebration be quiet again. Every birthday and every Christmas after that had been big and boisterous, with the house full of people. Till had noticed with satisfaction that since Holly had come to live at Garden House, her three birthday parties had been long, raucous, and messy.

He heard the car come in the driveway, then a couple of doors slam. He stood to look out. Holly and the two other girls were laughing and chattering as usual, and then, as though she had felt his gaze, Holly looked toward the house. “Dad!”

He came out onto the porch. “Hi, Holly. Can I help with the groceries?”

“Sure. I was looking to see if Bob and Randy would help, but I see they’re hiding until all the work is done.”

“That’s how men are,” he said. “I warned you.”

“You’re not that way, Jack,” Marie said.

“That’s because Holly trained me.”

“Hello, Jack,” said Nancy. “Long time no see.”

“I was here on Wednesday, Nancy.”

“I know. I just like to say that.”

“Okay, then.” He lifted some of the grocery bags, went inside with the others and set the bags on the counter.

When their arms were free, Holly threw hers around his neck and they exchanged their usual exuberant hug. “Can you stay for dinner?”

“I don’t think so tonight. I’m in the beginning of a hard case, and I’ve got to do some things tonight. But thanks. I really just dropped by because I wanted to talk to you a little.”

“Really? How come?”

“Because I like to talk to you.”

“That’s because you love me,” she said. “It’s good.”

“I know.”

“Come on, then,” Holly said. “Let’s go for a walk while we talk.”

“Okay.”

She called to the empty doorway to the hall, “Don’t stand there, Bob. You can start the water boiling while I talk to Dad.”

Bob emerged from the hallway, unabashed. “Okay.”

Till and Holly walked out across the porch, down the steps to the sidewalk and strolled up the street past more old houses, all of them refurbished during the past few years. Till said, “How are things this week, Holly? I know it didn’t go too well last week.”

“It’s better. Work has been more fun since I got Nancy hired. We’ve been doing a big cleaning to get ready for the summer sales. We may even paint the place. Mrs. Fournier and I are thinking it over.”

“Sounds ambitious.”

She looked over her shoulder. “We’re far enough from the house now to talk. What’s up?”

“It’s this case.”

“You got it today?”

“Not really. It’s something that happened six years ago. You were about fifteen then. I don’t know if you remember. I was gone for a bit over a week. You stayed with Grandma.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I remember staying with Grandma a few times. Usually you just had a girlfriend and you were sleeping with her.”

He smiled uncomfortably. That was part of it, too. To Holly there didn’t seem to be any special categories of things that weren’t for discussion. “It’s possible,” he said. “But this was something else. It took over a week. It was a girl who was hurt and scared. I took her far away and taught her how to stay hidden from some bad men.”

“Good for you, Dad. You’re the best!”

“Well, it may be that I’m going to get in trouble for helping her hide. I found out that an innocent man—an old boyfriend of hers—is being accused of killing her. So I had to go to the District Attorney’s office and admit that I took her away and she’s living somewhere else.”

“Why?”

“So the DA would tell the police to let him go.”

“Couldn’t you just tell the police yourself? They know you.”

“No. It had gone too far for that. There’s going to be a trial.”

“So you told, and saved him. Now what’s the problem?”

“I may have to go away myself, because of it. What I did to make this girl hard to find wasn’t all perfectly legal. I helped her get false identification papers and so on. I helped her to lie.”

“Are you going to jail?”

“I don’t know.”

“When will you know?”

“Sending me to jail would take a long time. They would have to charge me and then have a trial, and I would get my turn to tell the judge why I did it, and show that I didn’t mean any harm, or really hurt anybody.”

“So you probably shouldn’t worry yet.”

“That’s exactly right. It may never happen. I’m only telling you about it right now because that’s always been our arrangement, our deal. You and I tell each other things as soon as we know them.”

“What can I do to help you?”

“Nothing yet. Maybe if I do have to serve some time, you can store some of my stuff for me.”

“I would visit you. too. And write you long letters.”

“Thanks, honey. I knew I could count on you to think of something nice to do.”

They were walking around the block, and Till could see the back of Garden House between the two houses behind it. He watched Holly staring at the house, as though she were deciding what to plant next, or what color to paint it.

He wondered what her mother would think if she could see her and hear her. Holly was visibly a person with Down syndrome, but she was also beautiful and strong. He wished that Rose could have foreseen the possibility that someone could be all of those things at once. Rose had been living in Florida for twenty years already, remarried for eighteen of them to Dr. Timothy Zyrnick. It had always seemed strange to Till that she had married a doctor. He had never been able to tell whether Dr. Zyrnick knew about Holly. In the letters Till had sent her over the years—usually once a year—he had never asked, and in her replies, she had never mentioned anything that passed between her and her new husband. Till had enclosed pictures of Holly at first, but then one of his letters got an answer asking him not to. A few years later, Rose asked in a letter that he stop writing to her and allow her to go on with the new life she had built. She had added that if she and her husband moved, she would keep him informed in case there were some legal or medical reason for his knowing. Since then she had moved about three times to houses in fancier-sounding neighborhoods around Naples. She’d never had any more children.

He walked along beside Holly, made the last turn toward Garden House, and felt a deep sadness. He had a lot to do this evening, but he hated stopping for ten minutes, having a quick conversation, and then leaving her.

She looked at him slyly. “It’s spaghetti, you know. You can always add enough of it to the boiling water to invite another person.”

He put his arm around Holly’s shoulders and squeezed. “Okay. Now that you’ve coaxed me, I’d love to stay for dinner.”