Burn

35

Beth was eating a tuna salad sandwich and drinking a glass of lemonade when Carver entered the cottage. She gave him a sideways glance, then took a vicious bite of sandwich and chewed.

“Chips would be good with that,” Carver said.

“Don’t make feeble small talk, Fred.”

“OK.”

He limped over to the sofa and sat down, leaning his cane against a cushion. “McGregor came to see me. Marla accused Brant of trying to run her down, told the law, and when they tried to pick up Brant he bolted. Marla’s gone, too. She’s afraid of Brant and left a note saying she was clearing out of the area until he’s caught.”

Beth stopped chewing and swallowed. “She left a note, but nobody actually saw her leave alone and by choice?”

It intrigued Carver that Beth’s mind was working the same way as McGregor’s, but he thought he’d keep that to himself.

“How do you know Brant didn’t abduct her?” Beth asked.

“Before I came here, I let myself into her house. Indications are that she packed and left of her own volition, taking her toothbrush and probably a bar of soap. Her car is gone. And her typewriter’s gone. Brant wouldn’t have let her take that with her.”

Beth nodded, then sipped some lemonade. Carver saw what looked like a sprig of parsley floating among the ice cubes in her glass. Well, maybe they always made lemonade that way where she’d grown up in the slums of Chicago.

“What about you?” he said. “You doing OK?”

He saw her fingers stiffen, then relax. It was still no good talking about the baby, about what, if anything, she’d decided. Carver felt a hot coal of anger start to glow in his gut. It was up to her, sure. She was the one who was pregnant. What was he, only the father. Damn it, he should have some say in the matter!

But he knew that if he were a woman he’d think differently. Beth was the one who had to carry the child to term or had to undergo an abortion. Beth was the one who carried the fear and burden of a previous pregnancy that ended tragically. And Beth was the one who had to live with her decision in a blood-and-body way Carver could only guess at.

His flush of anger had left him, and he felt ashamed. “Whichever side of the fence you come down on,” he said, “I want you to know it’s all right with me. We’ll be OK.”

She swiveled down from the stool at the breakfast counter. She was wearing a cream-colored shirt with net sleeves and faded Levi’s, and had her hair pinned back. Not much makeup. She slid her feet into her white leather sandals, then bent gracefully and fastened the straps. Carver, who almost always wore shoes without straps or laces, wished he had that kind of mobility.

“I’m going to walk along the beach for a while,” she said.

He thought she’d invite him to accompany her, but she didn’t. She didn’t say anything else as he watched her stride across the room and walk outside into the hot night.

The wooden screen door slammed behind her like a gunshot.

Early the next morning, Carver drove the Olds along the curved main street of Brant Estates to where cement trucks were pouring driveways for framed-in houses in a cul-de-sac. Five of the bulky, dusty, and mud-caked trucks were lined up, waiting their turn. A dozen laborers and cement finishers were hard at work, either spreading and smoothing the freshly poured cement or using hammers and pry bars to remove wooden forms from driveways poured within the last few days.

Wade Schultz was standing off to the side watching the proceedings, his red hard hat tucked beneath his arm like a football. He had on jeans and a white T-shirt with a breast pocket stuffed with one of those plastic pocket protectors full of pens and pencils. A cigarette pack was rolled into the left sleeve of his shirt, forming a neat rectangular lump on his shoulder, as if some sort of transmitter or receiver had been surgically implanted beneath his skin.

When he saw Carver approaching, he casually plopped his hard hat on his head, as if preparing for trouble.

“Seen Joel Brant this morning?” Carver asked.

“No,” Schultz said, turning his head to watch a gravelly mass of concrete slide down a metal chute into a driveway. Immediately, two muscular laborers began shoveling it out to the sides and up against the wooden forms. There was a metallic chunk! each time their shovel blades slid into the wet concrete. “Mr. Brant’s not gonna be in today. The sales office over there is where you might wanna go. You are interested in buying a house, aren’t you?” he said sarcastically. Apparently Schultz and Nancy Quartermain had talked.

“Right now I’m interested in talking to Joel Brant. It’s only seven-thirty. How do you know he won’t show up here today?”

“He told me last night on the phone. In fact, he said he was gonna be gone for a while. Left me instructions to keep this job running on schedule.”

“He say where he was going?”

“Didn’t say he was going anywhere. Just said he wasn’t coming here.” Schultz touched a hand to Carver’s arm and motioned for him to step aside and make room for one of the huge mixers to maneuver in close so its swinging steel chute could reach the shallow driveway excavation. “Look at that,” he said, pointing to a spot on the other side of the driveway. “Some asshole was riding around here on a motorcycle this morning. Left ruts across this yard, and tire marks on concrete that hadn’t set yet on a driveway down the street.”

Carver looked and saw deep tread marks from an obviously heavy motorcycle. He wondered if Achilles Jones had stolen another Harley. “Anybody see the cycle rider?”

“Naw, but it’s sure obvious he was here. Or maybe there was more’n one of ’em. I never checked to find out. Don’t make much difference now.”

“If Joel Brant contacts you again,” Carver said, “tell him he needs to phone Fred Carver immediately.”

“Sure.” Schultz began waving his sunburned arm in a wide circle, signaling for the mixer to ease back closer to the driveway. The truck’s diesel engine roared and its air brakes hissed and squealed as the driver worked the vehicle backward in a series of lurches, no more than a foot each, eyes glued to Schultz’s hand signals in the side mirror.

“Don’t wait by the phone, though,” Schultz said when the noise of the truck had subsided. The sound of the laborers hammering away the wooden forms seemed strangely soft and distant after the din of the truck. “Mr. Brant talked like we wouldn’t be in contact again for quite a while.”

Carver nodded his thanks to Schultz, then left him to supervise the creation of driveways.

A few minutes after he’d turned onto the highway, on his way to talk with Willa Krull, a Del Moray police car passed him traveling fast in the opposite direction. It was likely that Wade Schultz was going to be interrupted on the job again, and one of the first things he’d tell his questioners was that Carver had already talked to him.

That would make McGregor more unhappy.

And even happy, he was a man to avoid.