Bindlestiff

Chapter 17

It was a little better than an hour’s drive to Sonoma, forty miles northeast of San Francisco, and my watch said eleven-fifteen when I got to the big, tree-shaded plaza in the middle of town. It’s a pretty place, Sonoma, located at the lower end of the Valley of the Moon and surrounded by wooded hills, orchards, farmland, and vast acres of vineyards. Although the wines of the Napa Valley to the east are more prominent, a lot of people who know about such things say that the Sonoma Valley produces wines of equal if not superior stature. There are a trio of wineries within the city limits of Sonoma, in fact, one of which, Buena Vista, has the distinction of being the first winery in California; it was founded in 1832 by a Hungarian named Agoston Haraszthy, who selected and imported thousands of cuttings from the finest vineyards of Europe and who was responsible for creating the type of wine called zinfandel. I knew all of that because I had spent a fair amount of time up here over the years. If I ever moved out of the city, which wasn’t likely, Sonoma was the place I would come to.

I turned right in front of the city hall. As early as it was, there were a lot of people out and around-picnickers in the plaza, the inevitable tourists wandering around gawking at the place where California’s independence from Mexico had been declared in 1846 and at the Mission San Francisco Solano de Sonoma, and the other old frame and adobe brick buildings that flanked the square. Church bells echoed in the distance. The air was warm and heavy with the smell of growing things and, faintly, of pulped grapes: this was the time of year the crush takes place. All in all, a pleasant small-town Sunday morning. Except that Harry Runquist wasn’t enjoying it, and Hannah Peterson, wherever she was, probably wasn’t either. And for a parcel of reasons, neither was I.

Runquist had told me he lived on East Napa Street, half a dozen blocks from the plaza. I found the place within a couple of minutes: a big, old, twenties Victorian with a lot of gingerbready trim on the front porch and windows that had leaded-glass borders. The number, 618, was plainly visible on one of the fancy porch columns. A huge carob tree shaded both the front lawn and a realty company’s FOR SALE sign jutting up near the sidewalk.

I made a U-turn at the next corner and came back and parked in front of the house. When I got up on the porch I saw that there was a pumpkin sitting on a table to one side; even though Halloween was still better than three weeks away, it had already been carved into a jack-o’-lantern. There was a screen door, with the main door behind it standing wide open. From somewhere inside I could hear a steady clacking, clattering sound-the kind a toy or model train makes.

I pushed the doorbell button. The train sound quit almost immediately, and a few seconds later a guy materialized in the dark hall within and looked out at me through the screen. I said, “Mr. Runquist?” and he said, “Yes,” and unlatched the screen.

He was in his mid-thirties, medium height, medium build, with a lot of curly brown hair and a saturnine face that was homely in a pleasant sort of way-the kind of face women like because it has strong masculine characteristics. But there were deep hollows in the cheeks now, and beard stubble flecking them, and his eyes were bloodshot. He’d been drinking-I could smell wine on his breath-but he was sober and pretty strung out. He couldn’t seem to keep his hands still.

“Thanks for coming,” he said. “You made good time.”

“Traffic wasn’t bad for a change.”

“Come on in.”

The room he led me into was smallish and had probably been referred to as “the front parlor” fifty years ago. It was a comfortable room: old heavy furniture, a tiled Victorian fireplace, built-in shelves laden with books, and rattan blinds drawn over windows in the front and side walls. An archway to the left opened into what had been intended as a dining room; now, though, it was empty of furnishings and contained only a massive model train layout. The model had been built on sheets of plywood that took up most of the carpet in there-an intricate configuration of tracks, dozens of miniature cars and locomotives, depots, loading platforms, crossing signs, lighted signal lamps, semaphores, a bunch of other scale-model accessories, and a bank of control switches.

Runquist saw me looking at the layout and said dully, “O-gauge stuff: American Flyer, Ives, Lionel… you know anything about model railroads?”

“No, I’m afraid not,” I said. “I heard you running it when I came up.”

“It helps keep my mind occupied.”

“Are you in the railroad business, Mr. Runquist?”

“No,” he said. “I’m a winemaker-Vineland Winery, up near Glen Ellen. My grandfather founded it. Model railroading’s just a hobby.” He passed a hand across his face. “Hannah’s a train buff, too. That’s how we got together. Met at a party, found out we were both buffs.. she helped me build part of the layout.”

I nodded, remembering what Hannah Peterson had told me about her father’s passion for trains rubbing off on her. “Have you known Mrs. Peterson long?” I asked him.

“Almost a year.” He glanced at one of the chairs, started toward it as if he intended to sit down. Then he changed his mind and pawed at his face again. “I could use a glass of wine,” he said. “Would you like one?”

“It’s a little early for me, thanks.”

“Me, too, usually. But I’ve been so damned worried about Hannah… Come on, we’ll talk in the kitchen.”

I followed him out into a big, old-fashioned kitchen bright with morning sunshine. A rear porch opened off of it; it had been made over into a kind of dining area, with a long table set under windows that overlooked the back yard. The yard contained a walnut tree, a pepper tree, and plenty of shrubs; and near the back fence was something I hadn’t seen in years-a shake-roofed gazebo.

“Nice place you’ve got here,” I said as Runquist opened the refrigerator.

“Yeah,” he said. “Too big for me, though.”

“You live here alone, do you?”

“Ever since my divorce two years ago.” He took out a bottle of white wine, poured some into a glass, put the bottle away again. “My ex-wife got custody of our daughter; took Monica back east to live with her mother. I got the house.”

He sounded bitter about it. But it was none of my business, so I didn’t say anything. I was thinking about the jack-o’-lantern on the front porch. Runquist must have carved it for himself, for some sort of nostalgic reason; that, coupled with the model train layout, told me a good deal about what kind of man he was. I already knew what kind of woman Hannah Peterson was, or thought I did, and I wondered if he had made a mistake falling in love with her. She had doubtless made a lot of men unhappy in her life, men who saw only her beauty and her superficial charm. Because I found myself liking Runquist, I hoped he wasn’t going to be just another name on the list.

He drank some of his wine, moved restlessly to one of the windows and stood looking out into the yard. “Too many memories here,” he said, half to himself. “I should have moved out long ago.”

“Is that why you’ve got the house up for sale?”

“Part of the reason. Hannah’s selling her place, too. We bought some land up in the mountains east of Glen Ellen and we’re building a house on it. We’re going to be married when it’s finished.”

“Oh,” I said, “I see.”

He nodded. “We’ve both had offers since we put the houses on the market, but they’ve been too low. Things in real estate are tight right now-” He broke off. “To hell with real estate,” he said. “It’s Hannah we should be talking about.”

“When was the last time you saw her, Mr. Runquist?”

“Friday evening, at her house. She called me at the winery that afternoon, after the Oroville police notified her of her father’s death, and I went over to be with her. She was pretty upset. She’d never been close to her dad, but finding out he’d been murdered… that hit her hard.”

“It’s a hell of a thing, all right.”

“She told me about seeing you, trying to convince you not to go up there hunting for him. Maybe you should have listened to her; maybe it would have been better for all of us if you’d stayed out of Oroville.”

There was no censure in his voice, only anguish. He wasn’t blaming me. If she’d told him she thought I was a homosexual it did not seem to matter to him. And if that was the case I liked him for his tolerance, too.

I said, “Her father would still be dead, even if I’d stayed away. And Raymond would have got away with murder a second time.”

“I know,” Runquist said. “But Christ, what if Raymond did come down here after Hannah? What if he’s responsible for her disappearance? What if…” He didn’t finish the sentence, but I knew what he was thinking. He tilted his wine glass again; his hand was a little unsteady.

“I still don’t see how that’s possible,” I said. “What reason could Raymond have for harming Mrs. Peterson?”

“I don’t know. All I know is, she’s missing and she shouldn’t be.”

“How long did you stay with her on Friday?”

“Until about six o’clock.”

“Why did you leave her then?”

“I had a meeting scheduled here at my house; I’m chairman of the committee for this year’s Sonoma Wine Festival. I wanted to cancel it, but Hannah said no, she’d be all right.” He turned from the window and began to pace. “The meeting broke up about eight o’clock. I was just about to telephone Hannah, but she beat me to it. She said she’d had a call and she had to go out, but her car was out of gas. That’s happened to her before; she’s always forgetting to fill up when she’s low. She knows I keep a five-gallon can in my garage and she wanted me to bring it over.”

“Did you?”

“Yes. Right away.”

“How did she seem?”

“Even more upset than earlier. Frantic, almost. She said she had to be somewhere and she was already late.”

“That’s not much to get frantic over.”

“I know. I tried to get her to tell me where she had to go, who she was seeing, but she wouldn’t say. Hannah can be… well, she can be stubborn sometimes.”

Yeah, I thought, I’ll bet. “I don’t suppose she said anything about the phone call either?”

“No. As soon as I poured the gas into her tank, she drove off.” He frowned, as if he’d just remembered something. “There was a sleeping bag in the back seat,” he said.

“Sleeping bag?”

“Yes. I noticed it just before she drove away. She’s not the kind to go out camping, not Hannah. It must have belonged to her late husband. But what was she doing with it in her car?”

I shook my head; there was nothing to be gained by trying to answer questions like that. “Was that the last time you saw or spoke to her?”

“The last time, yes.”

I pulled one of the chairs out from the table and straddled it with my arms resting on its back. “She called me, too, on Friday night,” I said, “and left a message on my answering machine. I don’t know what time-she didn’t say-but it had to have been before eight-thirty. That was when I got home from Oroville and checked the machine.”

Runquist quit pacing. “Why would she call you? You live in San Francisco; how could you do anything for her that I couldn’t?”

Another rhetorical question. I said, “All she said was that she wanted me to get in touch with her right away and that it was important.”

“Did you try to call her that night?”

“No. I was tired and I thought it was only that she was upset about her father. I called twice yesterday; no answer either time.”

Runquist finished his wine, went immediately to the refrigerator and emptied the bottle into his glass, and started to work on that.

I asked him, “Are you sure Mrs. Peterson hasn’t been home since Friday night?”

“Not positive, no. But I called again at ten-thirty that night and she wasn’t there. I should have gone over and waited for her but I didn’t. I didn’t go to her place until yesterday morning, after I tried calling twice more and still didn’t get an answer.”

“You have a key to her house?”

“Yes. We’re engaged, I told you that.”

“I’m just asking, Mr. Runquist.”

“Her bed hadn’t been slept in,” he said.

“Was everything in order inside the house?”

“As far as I could tell, it was.”

“Did you check to see if any of her clothes or other belongings were missing?”

“Yes,” he said. “Everything was still there. Her suitcases, too-I made sure of that.”

“What did you do then?”

“Talked to her neighbors. None of them had seen her. Then I came back here and called everyone I could think of that she knows; none of them had seen or talked to her either. That was when I started to get scared. I even drove up to the house we’re building in the mountains. When she still hadn’t turned up by six o’clock I went to the police. I told you on the phone what they said.”

“Did you check her house again this morning?”

“Before I called you,” he said. “Her bed still hadn’t been slept in, and nothing had been touched.”

I got up from the chair. “It might be a good idea if I had a look at the house,” I said. “Would you mind going over there with me, letting me in?”

“No, of course not. Anything you want.”

He finished his wine, plunked the glass down on the table, and led me out to the front porch. The jack-o’-lantern grinned at us from the table-an incongruity in the bright Sunday morning sunshine. It made me think, in spite of myself, of witches and goblins and things that went bump on dark nights.