Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 102, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 618 & 619, October 1993

No Connection by Suzanne Jones

© 1993 by Suzanne Jones

A sunny college town at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, Boulder, Colorado, is not only the home of author Suzanne Jones but the setting for her latest story. “As always,” she tells us, the story derives from her interest in “why people behave as they do, even if the behavior is sometimes self destructive...”

Paul noticed her right away. She was as incongruous in the coffee shop as if she had black, brown, or yellow skin. Boulder doesn’t have very many members of minorities, the largest concentration of whom may be found on the very successful football team at the University of Colorado. No, she was as Waspish as the rest of the clientele who were enjoying the smell of freshly ground coffee and the warmth of the shop. It was mostly the way she was dressed on a snowy day that had been, unfortunately, all too common in Boulder that particular winter.

She stood awkwardly just inside the door in her long cloth coat and pants which were crumpled over the tops of low-heeled shoes, not snow boots. Her head was uncovered and her hair was a nondescript color, something between light brown and blond. Her face was pale and drawn, the skin stretched tightly over bone. Good cheekbones. He couldn’t tell the color of her eyes; she had dropped them to count the coins in her hand as she stepped forward into the line for coffee. It was a shop in which one served oneself from clean and shiny containers which offered a variety of brews, from French vanilla coffee mocha to dark Colombian to something called a Denver blend.

He would not have kept watching her except that Sandy was prattling on again about how well her interview had gone, and how sure she was that she was going to be the next Paseo girl, doing a series of auto commercials for a Denver television station. She probably would get the role. From time to time Paul glanced at her to simulate interest. Sandy was a very attractive blonde, tall and leggy, and her cheeks were currently flushed prettily from the cold and her enthusiasm for her own apparent good fortune.

The woman had gotten her coffee and was looking around a little shyly and discovering no place to sit — it was very crowded, as it usually was on a weekend, and very few chairs were provided. It was a shop that sold coffee by the pound and the machines dispensing the various flavors existed primarily for purposes of sampling. She put a plastic cover over the cup in her hand and prepared to take it with her.

Idly he watched her progress through the door and back into the cold. Through the window he saw her approach an older-model car.

“Paul, where are you going?”

He was out of his chair and the coffee shop in a moment.

The woman had fallen to her hands and knees and was staring in misery at the large brown stain smoking on the dirty ice and snow.

“Are you all right?”

He carefully knelt on his bad knees beside her, afraid to do more than ask. She should know if she were badly hurt or not.

“Paul?”

He could hear Sandy behind him.

“The coffee,” the woman said desperately.

He helped her to her feet. He could see now that she was younger than he had at first thought, probably only a year or two older than himself. Despite the bulk of her coat, she seemed very thin. She steadied herself on the side of the car, which he noticed was filled with luggage and boxes.

“I’m all right,” she said.

She didn’t look all right. She looked paler than ever and was holding onto the car, which had Texas plates, as though it were a tree in a high wind.

“Don’t go away,” he said. “I’ll get your coffee—”

He turned before she could make an objection and hurried back into the shop. Sandy followed.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked, momentarily distracted from recounting her triumph of yesterday in the studio.

“What does it look like I’m doing? Mission of mercy.”

“Really, Paul.” Sandy’s disapproval was clearly expressed by her tone.

He paid for the coffee and returned to the woman, who had managed to unlock the car and was sitting sideways in the front seat, brushing the snow from her pants. There was a small tear in one knee. The gloves she was wearing were cotton, and though it was now snowing only lightly, it was a very cold January day, and the cloth could offer her hands little protection. He realized that his discomfort had less to do with the cold than with her poverty. The quality of the expensive parka he was wearing now embarrassed him.

He handed her the coffee, and she sucked at it greedily. After a moment, she looked up at him, and he met her eyes with a sense of shock. They were green, green the way the sea is green before it breaks into deep water. He could see the tears of pain in them.

“Thank you,” she said. “You’re very kind.”

“The least I could do for a fellow Texan.”

Paul was starting to feel cold. Sandy had already retreated to the interior of the coffee shop.

The woman had dropped her eyes and continued to drink the coffee, but made no move to swing her legs inside and close the door of the car.

“Drive straight through?” It didn’t look to him as though she could have afforded a night in a motel.

She nodded. “I am... relocating,” she said. “Boulder is prosperous these days. Texas is not.”

Her soft voice had more of a southern accent than the nasality he associated with west Texas, so it surprised him when she told him she was from San Angelo and had come to seek employment in Boulder. He doubted what she had told him. A woman her age was more likely to be running away from something than uprooting herself to seek an opportunity as vague as “prosperity.”

He really was getting cold now. He glanced at the coffee shop and saw Sandy watching them through the window.

“You have a job here?”

“No, I’m looking. Will be looking,” she amended.

Paul stamped his feet against the chill and dug into his parka pocket.

“Here’s today’s paper,” he said. “For the classifieds,” he explained. “I’m finished with it. Look, I have to get back.”

“Thank you,” she said, looking at him again with her arresting eyes as if she were faintly puzzled. “You’ve been very kind.”

“I hope you like it here,” he said and turned away, back to the warmth of the coffee shop and to deal with Sandy’s displeasure. She had driven up from Denver to spend the weekend with him, and he supposed he should be more attentive.

“Finished playing Galahad to the homeless? I’m surprised you didn’t offer to let her move in with you.”

“I doubt she would have accepted the invitation,” he said and realized that he thought that was probably true. Her voice had been educated, cultured. He didn’t know any homeless people, but he didn’t think they routinely sought Boulder in the winter. Or looked and sounded like that. “Lighten up. Like they say, ‘A good deed a day keeps the chaplain at bay.’ ”

“You just made that up.”

To mollify Sandy, he very carefully did not look in the direction of the parking lot again, and by the time they had finished their coffee and made their purchases and left, the car with the Texas plates was gone.

He didn’t see the woman again until the next weekend. Sandy had landed the job representing the car dealership and had declined to come up. There were a dozen things she said she had to do before beginning a new job.

He hadn’t pressed her. He and Sandy had been involved, lived together off and on, for two years, and he was very much aware that it was time either to ask her to marry him or to let them drift apart. Past time really. But he kept putting it off. He found her an agreeable enough companion, no more selfish than many girls her age, and she came from a good family — her father was a state senator whom Paul liked very much. The senator had a fine sense of humor and seemed to have no more expectations in a son-in-law than Paul could satisfy, even though Paul was almost ten years older than Sandy, his second daughter. Paul owned his own business and was reasonably successful, but he had reached his late thirties without feeling the necessity of a wife and family. From what he had read and what Sandy and his mother had told him, this made him a severe risk as a marriage partner. The older he got, the less flexible he would become, or so he had been told. After all, he didn’t want to wind up all alone in life, did he?

Actually, he didn’t mind very much being alone. He wasn’t sure he was ready to endure the invasion of his privacy on a twenty-four-hour basis. He hadn’t found it very tolerable the few times he had tried it. So he kept putting off asking Sandy to marry him.

Besides, he had read somewhere that you couldn’t be really lonely anyway until you had loved hopelessly, desperately. As though that should reinforce his reluctance to marry Sandy or anyone else.

He had gone to the library that Saturday to return books which were sadly overdue. He was sure if he had kept track over the years he would have been better off buying books than using the library, since he invariably forgot when he should take the books back.

She was sitting in one of the reading areas, going through the newspaper.

“Settled in yet?” he asked.

Startled, she looked up at him with her wonderful eyes.

“Oh, hello.” She didn’t quite smile, but she didn’t seem unfriendly.

“I’m the guy from the parking lot—”

“I remember,” she said. “You bought me coffee and gave me your paper.”

He dropped into a chair beside her.

“How’s the job hunt going?”

“Not very well, I’m afraid. There aren’t many jobs and the competition for them is fierce.”

She was looking better. There was some color in her cheeks, and she was wearing some makeup. He thought her lashes were definitely darker; her mouth with color on it was larger, fuller than he remembered. But sitting there with her coat thrown to one side, he could see she was very thin.

“What do you do, or would do?”

“Office work, I suppose. A little typing, filing—”

“Can you use a ten-key?”

“Yes, but I’m a little rusty.”

“If you haven’t yet eaten, let me buy you lunch. It’s possible I might have something for you. My girl — that is, my office manager — is going out on maternity leave shortly, and I have to find a replacement for her. We make prestressed concrete products. I can’t pay a great deal—”

“I’ve discovered that no one in Boulder has to pay a great deal.” She smiled. “Fine. Yes, I’d be delighted to have lunch with you. My name is Margaret Detweiler.”

“Paul Honecker.” He was relieved she hadn’t taken offense at his calling Mac his “girl.” He knew Mac would have savaged him for doing so. He wondered how many other violations of EEOC he could pile up over lunch. He wasn’t used to interviewing people. Fortunately, he didn’t have to very often. He just sent them to Mac, who took care of replacing what little turnover they had at the plant.

He took her to lunch at Tom’s Tavern, which he assured her had the best hamburgers in Boulder. Over lunch she told him she was recently divorced and was just coming back into the job market after not working for several years. She had no children. She had some letters of reference but they testified more to her character, she was afraid, than her capabilities in the office. Her experience was limited to having helped her husband for a few years when he had first set up his practice. He was a CPA, and she had some familiarity with tax problems and the various forms required by the government to operate a small business.

She spoke slowly and carefully, as though she were unused to speaking about herself. She accepted his offer of a beer, but she didn’t finish it. She ate, however, with great enthusiasm and readily accepted his offer of coffee and dessert.

He asked her to come to the plant on Monday to meet Mary MacPherson, “Mac,” whom everyone who worked there, he most of all, was afraid of being without for the next six weeks. Mac would have the final say on her replacement since it was she who would have to do the training.

He drew her a map. The plant was on the Foothills Highway to Lyons about five miles north of Boulder on the right-hand side of the road. She could see the piles of concrete products from the road, mostly the cisterns. She couldn’t miss it. If it was a clear day, she could follow the cyclists. The hilly stretch of highway between Boulder and Lyons was popular for both racers in training and recreational riders.

“What do you think?” he asked Mac after her interview of Margaret Detweiler on the following Monday.

Mac shifted uncomfortably in the chair behind the metal desk in the trailer that functioned as an office for them both. She was a very large woman who was also very pregnant.

“I liked her. She has a degree in history from the University of Texas, fat lot of good it’ll do her. She seems intelligent, and hopefully that means she can learn quickly. On the down side, she doesn’t have much experience, is an awful typist, but not too bad on the ten-key. I don’t think she’d know double-entry bookkeeping if she fell over it, but then neither do I. Anyway, that’s what you pay Ron for every week. She’s a helluva lot better than most of those bimbos who’ve been dragging in here for the past two weeks. I say, let’s give her a chance but not dwell on it if she’s a mistake.”

She shoved a single sheet of paper at him.

“Here’s her application.”

He took it and glanced over it.

“It doesn’t even say how old she is,” he complained.

“You’re not allowed to ask.” Mac glared at him with that look that said, You don’t know anything. He was fairly accustomed to it.

He helped himself to the lotion from the bottle she kept on her desk. The skin of his hands was always cracked and sometimes bleeding from the work and the cold. This was no white-collar job he had fashioned for himself. Fortunately, the plant was now in its slow period; the timing of Mac’s pregnancy was miraculous. By the time business picked up in the spring, Mac should be ready to come back to work.

He tossed the application back on her desk.

“You’re the boss,” he said, feeling as pleased with himself as Willie looked when he brought an especially succulent field mouse through the cat door and into the living room.

“She doesn’t have a phone, but I told her to call me back late this afternoon. Let’s get her started right away. I don’t know how long this kid is going to stay in the oven, and if Maggie doesn’t work out, we’re going to have to scramble for a replacement.”

Paul thought that Mac should know. She was experienced in these matters. She was Catholic and already had two at home.

“Maggie?”

“That’s what I call her. She said she answers to almost anything.”

He left Maggie in Mac’s capable hands and drove to Texas. It was his mother’s birthday, and she was attaining an age that required the obeisance of her only child. He drove because he hated to fly and liked to drive. Actually, flying terrified him. And he liked driving at speed. He had been a downhill racer after a stint in Nam, qualifying for CU’s ski team before he wrecked his knees.

His mother lived in the hill country north of Austin, and if he really pushed the Porsche he could make it in just under fifteen hours. Mile after mile of land lying hard and dry beneath the cold sky slipped by until the ground began to roll under scrub brush and cactus. At this time of year it was a long barren haul, but he had long ago ceased much to notice the country through which he was driving. He found his thoughts going back to Maggie Detweiler, his new hire.

What kind of life had she had that had disappointed her enough to abandon it?

At some point in his dash across west Texas he was almost surprised to see the city limits sign of San Angelo. Yet this was the route he always took when he drove to his mother’s. He tried to remember what was on Maggie’s application. What was the street?

Rialto. That was it. And the number?

He tried to concentrate. He was curious to see the place that she had fled. He supposed her ex-husband still lived there.

403. It was the last three digits of his matriculation number at the University of Colorado, where he had collected a degree in mechanical engineering when he wasn’t spending his time on the ski slopes.

He slowed the car through the old town, which lay tiredly under a pale sun. This was the place she said had been her home for so many years. He turned on Rialto and drifted down it until he found the number.

It was a street of large old houses that had once reflected the pride and prosperity of their owners. No longer. Paint was peeling, porches were sagging. Some windows were boarded.

403 Rialto did look more prosperous than the rest. The paint was good, the yard was neat. There was a sign in the window: Rooms by the month or by the week.

There was a woman in the yard, bundled up against the cold, frowning at some plants with plastic sacks over them. She stared at him when he rolled down the window to get a better look.

“Help you?” she asked.

He switched off the engine, got out of the car, and stretched. It seemed as cold as Colorado with the wind blowing as hard as it was, though there was no snow whitening the stiff grass.

“I think I must be mistaken. I thought someone I know used to live here. Maggie Detweiler?”

“Might have lived here. She do something she shouldn’t?”

He saw now that the woman’s face wore its lines with borderline hostility, her cheeks blotched pink with the cold.

“Not that I know of. She’s just gone to work for me in Boulder. She said she used to live here. I’m on my way to Austin. I thought I’d stop by.”

She nodded as though that were a perfectly normal thing for him to do. She spoke as if she were used to giving references. “Did live here. For almost two months. Nice woman. Glad she found work. Seemed real respectable. Very quiet.”

The woman shivered against the bitter wind. She said she didn’t think Mrs. Detweiler could find work in San Angelo. Things were really tight there since the oil bust. One day she just picked up her mail, packed up, and left. Didn’t owe any rent though. No, she had no idea where she was from. Mrs. Detweiler didn’t talk about herself.

The woman seemed to want to talk to him further, but a gust of frigid air drove her scuttling back to the warmth of the house, and he gratefully slipped back behind the wheel.

He was puzzled and a little angry. Margaret Detweiler had lied on her application for employment. She had listed no address previous to the one in San Angelo. He’d have to talk to Mac about her when he got back.

A week later he was sitting across from her.

“And I’m telling you I don’t feel so good these days, Paul, and I doubt you’ve got time to replace Maggie.”

“Oh, come on, Mac. She lied. For all you know she’s a serial killer, a felon wanted in three states.”

“Or maybe her ex-husband is harassing her,” Mac said. “There are all kinds of reasons why she might not want to be entirely candid. She did use the same name—”

“I don’t believe this,” he said irritably. “Just look at the way she dresses. That was a cashmere sweater she had on this morning. Those clothes are expensive.”

“So they are, but they’re not new.”

“They were new once! She’s hardly your average office worker.”

“Well, neither am I. It seems to me she’s just someone fallen on hard times, and hasn’t given you the satisfaction of complaining about them. I like the woman, apart from the fact that she drinks more coffee than all the rest of us put together, and I’m not having you roar back in here with a burr under your blanket and run her off!”

“Burr under—”

“Oh, it’s the unwholesome influence of working around a Texan. You know what I mean. There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation. Why don’t you just ask her when she comes back from making the deposit instead of being sulky?”

“I intend to.”

“Do it by yourself then. I’ve got a doctor’s appointment this afternoon, and I’ve got to get out of here. But I don’t want to come in tomorrow morning and find this desk empty. You be nice!”

Mac then left, less because she wanted to be early for her appointment, he decided, than to avoid being in on the interview with Margaret Detweiler. Which was not like Mac, who usually thrived on confrontation.

The drivers and loaders had also departed. The afternoon was snowy and further work could be put off until tomorrow when it was supposed to be sunny and mild.

He asked Maggie to come in and sit in the chair across the desk from him.

He told her about going through San Angelo on his trip to Texas. She said nothing, gazing with her wonderful eyes out the window at the empty yard in which new snow was being whirled about in a gusty wind.

When she continued to say nothing as he went over the importance of a work history, or failing that, a personal history, he became irritated. “So you admit you lied? You hadn’t lived in San Angelo forever—”

She looked at him then. “Who lives anywhere forever?”

“I mean, where did you live before?” He felt he was losing his concentration and control of the conversation.

“That is not relevant to my working here,” she said softly. “I am no criminal. I am fleeing no bench warrant.”

He felt helpless in the face of her implacability.

Then she looked unhappy and seemed to regret his distress. She rose and came around the desk. She looked down at him and took his hand as though he were the one at a disadvantage, the one who needed comfort.

“You have been very kind to me,” she said and held the back of his rough hand against the softness of her sweater.

After a moment he got to his feet, pulled down the shade, and locked the door.

Later, after she had gone, he realized that he had done one of the monumentally stupid things in his life, and he thought he surely was going to be made to regret it.

Though he dreaded seeing her the next morning at work, she was as collected and impersonal as ever. And Mac was delighted with him on finding that she was still there.

He left work that afternoon thinking he had gotten away with one and was very pleased with himself. He fed Willie, fielded a couple of messages from Sandy that said she would be in touch, turned on the television, and then felt very much alone. He felt his loneliness as though it was so much empty space stretching away on all sides of him. It made him unhappy and restless.

He drove by the house in which Margaret Detweiler said she had taken a room, then stopped and asked her to dinner. Afterwards he took her back to his house, where he ignored other messages from Sandy. Maggie said she had paid for her room until the end of the month, but seemed pleased that he had asked her to stay with him. She said that she thought there would be fewer complications if she did not.

He had to leave the Porsche off for servicing after his trip to Texas and asked her to give him a ride to and from work the next day. Mac wouldn’t be coming in again. She said she was due at any moment, and even the short ride out of town to the plant, she asserted, could be hazardous to herself and her incipient offspring. Maggie was now in charge, although Mac’s help was only a telephone call away.

Maggie picked him up at the service center in her old car, which was very clean inside and uncluttered except for a cheap plastic holder for cups which straddled the hump of the transmission. She confessed that she drank coffee constantly, continually, as much and as often as she could afford. Free coffee at work was a substantial benefit as far as she was concerned, though it didn’t obviate the need for making a pot as soon as she got up.

The day was as warm and sunny as predicted, and as was predictable, they passed a number of cyclists on their way to work, even though it was only a little before nine in the morning. They saw one in an orange jersey pulling away from a pack of five.

“The orange flash on the zebra-striped bike,” Paul said. “You can almost set your watch by him. Out in the morning, back by three.”

“So Mac has said. I guess the racers have to take advantage of what good weather they have. You wonder how they earn a living.”

“That particular guy is a semi-pro,” Paul said, “and still in school, I think. He was written up a few months back in one of the national magazines. Prototype of the new American cyclist. A good bet to make the 7-Eleven team.”

She nodded and sipped her coffee, putting the cup into its holder with a graceful motion as they swung into the plant. He had never seen her make an awkward move after that first day in the parking lot.

Later in the day, she asked if they might leave a bit earlier than they had planned to pick up his car. She said she had some errands she had to run. Dick Hanson, Paul’s foreman, said he’d lock up the office for her.

So they left the plant a few minutes before three. He teased her about the omnipresent cup in her hand, and she told him that certainly she was an addict, but that except for increasing the risk of pancreatic cancer, it was a relatively harmless vice.

She seemed very gay to him that afternoon, very lighthearted, and it pleased him to be with her.

It was a wonderful day to live in Boulder. The sun was bright on the snowy fields, the sky was clear and very blue, the road was dry. Ahead of them, slowly pumping up the hill, was the cyclist in the orange jersey. It was perfect Boulder, he thought. They could put it on a calendar.

Maggie was drinking her coffee. As she reached down to place the cup in the holder, it toppled to the side. She gave a cry as the coffee spilled across his feet and grabbed for the cup, wrenching the steering wheel with her other hand as she ducked her head.

What happened next was very clear to him, although he didn’t remember the sound the cyclist made as the car struck him at fifty miles per hour. Paul saw a flash of orange, the windshield shatter, then saw the cyclist cartwheeling down the slope, feet still in their metal shells, locked onto the pedals, until he and his bicycle slammed into the barbed-wire fence at the bottom.

Somehow Paul helped her keep the car upright until they could bounce it to a stop at a crazy angle on the side of the hill. He got out and scrambled down over the icy rocks to where he could see that the wire had almost decapitated the cyclist. There was more blood than he thought possible melting the snow under the fence, and the man’s closed gray face beneath the helmet already possessed the look of secret knowledge that Paul had seen on other dead. He didn’t touch the body, but painfully made his way up the slope where he could hear Maggie being sick.

Then other cars stopped, and a police car, and finally an ambulance.

She was arrested immediately, probably, Paul thought, because of the sight of the slaughter on the fence, even though the cyclist had almost certainly been dead when he hit it.

He called his lawyer, who arranged for bail. Vehicular homicide Paul thought a very serious charge for someone who had spilled a cup of coffee. But a death had been the result of that, and the Boulder court was very sensitive to the large cycling population, which had been outraged at the accident.

In the end, Maggie was sentenced to thirty days in jail, a sentence which the judge suspended in return for forty hours of community service. Paul’s lawyer told him that she had been lucky. It could have been far worse had Paul not been there for her as her employer, and had she had a prior record.

Maggie had that pale, haunted look that he hated while she was going through the maw of the legal system, but once it was over, she seemed to become herself again, growing stronger and more confident each day. “Community service,” she reported, at this time of year largely consisted of picking up trash blown about the city and county. She performed this estimable service on weekends and three evenings after work.

It was while she was finishing her sentence that Dick threw his back out and couldn’t attend the Concrete Conference in Houston as planned. Paul’s foreman’s tickets were paid for, as was his room, and fees for the conference. Paul grudgingly agreed to go. There was too much information concerning new products and applications of same to let it go until next year. He would have to fly. There wasn’t time to drive; besides, he had spent enough hours recently on lonely roads.

Fortified with Dramamine and a few scotches, he got through the flight and spent the next two days being inundated with information. His hotel room was piled high with handouts; catalogues, articles, and advertising of all sorts. After days crammed with meetings, cocktail parties, and banquets, the organizers planned a break in the schedule, freeing the participants for a day of needed relaxation and sight-seeing. Since Paul had seen all he had ever wanted to of Houston in years past, he rented a car and drove to Corpus Christi.

He drove south mainly to be driving, and it felt good to be out of the hotel and on the road again, but he also drove because he wanted some time to think over the events of the past month, about which he had become uneasy.

By now Maggie was spending most of the time she wasn’t patrolling the county for litter with Paul. In the last few weeks she had seemed more relaxed and open to him, showing an interest in scores of things he had not paid much attention to before, being clever, being alive, being Maggie. She was a beautiful woman and a generous lover, and Paul thought himself very lucky.

Except for his unease.

He had seen Maggie time and again put down that coffee cup in the car without spilling a drop. It troubled him enough to cause him to drive south to Corpus Christi, which the article in the Boulder newspaper had listed as the home of Bobby Cremmins, the cyclist who had died.

He didn’t know what he expected to find there. He had talked to Cremmins’s roommate in Boulder, who had said he didn’t really know very much about him. Cremmins didn’t have any close friends that he knew of in Boulder. He had divided his time between training and the business school at the university. He had no girlfriend in particular. He was very “focused,” his roommate had said. The roommate expressed no sorrow or regret at Cremmins’s death. He said he thought Cremmins’s parents were dead but that he had an uncle in Texas. He didn’t think they corresponded much. Paul had left him uneasier than ever.

Paul had gone to the library and looked up the article that he had remembered in the national magazine. It wasn’t very long or very informative. Cremmins had grown up in Corpus Christi, gone to the University of Houston, and come to Boulder to train while he attended CU’s business school. The article was short and described Cremmins as ambitious and dedicated to his sport.

From what little information Paul had amassed, Bobby Cremmins didn’t seem like a very likable fellow. He supposed few really dedicated types were. Not a reason to get himself killed. Besides, Maggie could hardly have had time to meet Bobby Cremmins in Boulder, let alone know him well enough to be offended by him. If there was any connection between them, it would have to be in Texas.

He found several Cremminses in the Corpus Christi telephone directory. Two were out, and the third had never heard of Bobby Cremmins. Not knowing what else to do, he drove by one of the addresses in an older neighborhood of small houses more than a mile from the gulf, yet having the damp, slightly decayed look that comes from living near a large body of salt water.

A. Cremmins still wasn’t home, but one of the neighbors was and told him that Al Cremmins operated the service station a few blocks away. From Al Cremmins, who was busy trying to resuscitate an older car, and who was not especially communicative, he learned that Bobby Cremmins had been his nephew and an arrogant S.O.B.

He asked Al Cremmins if he knew Margaret Detweiler, but the man shook his head in dismissal and went back to work on the car, which looked sorely in need of his services.

Paul looked in the telephone directory under CPAs and found one Edward Detweiler. It was a name he hadn’t really wanted to find. It disquieted him. He looked at it a long time before he punched the number. He was able to make an appointment with Detweiler that afternoon on a “tax matter.” Paul thought that at this time of year the man probably didn’t have time for personal matters.

He ate a tasteless lunch, drove part way to Padre Island under a lowering sky the color of ashes, then went to his appointment with Edward Detweiler, who suggested that he call him Ed.

Detweiler’s offices were impressive, with a lot of plants and glass, and were staffed with mostly harried-looking men in shirt sleeves and a few intense young women hunched over adding machines and computers. Detweiler himself was no longer young. Paul would have put him at least ten years older than himself, but he was a well-dressed, handsome man with steel-rimmed glasses and a full head of graying hair which he wore a little longer than was fashionable. He greeted Paul in a private office and closed the door, to simulate, Paul supposed, confidentiality in tax matters, even though the work would doubtless be assigned to one or more of the industrious young people in the next room.

“I confess I don’t have any tax problems, Mr. Detweiler — Ed. I’m really here to see you about Margaret.”

“Margaret?” The man leaned forward. “Is she all right? Nobody here has heard from her in months. Where is she?”

Paul was disconcerted. He didn’t know what he had expected from Detweiler, but it was not the genuine concern the man was projecting across his expensive desk. And Paul was at a loss as to how much he should tell Maggie’s ex-husband.

“She’s fine,” Paul said. “She has a job, and she’s doing fine.”

The man leaned back, nodding as if relieved. “What is your interest in Margaret?” he asked.

“I’m her employer. I’m curious about her. She just appeared on our doorstep one day—”

Paul explained about his attending the conference in Houston, his free day, trying to make his inquiries sound as natural and casual as possible.

“Why did she leave Corpus?” Paul asked.

“Her daughter died.” The man looked at him as though he needed to have Paul understand. He made a steeple of his fingers. He had beautiful hands, long and well shaped. His nails were polished.

“Karen was in the hospital a long time, over eleven months. She was unconscious the whole time. The press called her the Sleeping Beauty, but she wasn’t; she wasn’t even pretty after a while. Her face had lost its character. Everyone told Margaret to let her go. But Margaret wouldn’t let her go. She went every day to the hospital. Every day for eleven months.” He paused, as if remembering.

“She divorced me because I didn’t share her obsession. I couldn’t. No one could. ‘She’s not your daughter,’ she would say. She wasn’t, but Karen was like my daughter. I married Margaret when Karen was twelve. Karen’s father had been a colonel in the army and died in Viet Nam. Colonel Jack Brand. Karen never forgot him even though she was only five when he was killed. Wouldn’t let me adopt her. Wouldn’t hear of it. Wanted to keep her own name and so forth. A stubborn girl, much like her mother.”

“What happened?” Paul asked. “Why was Karen in the hospital?”

He wondered how far he could go without exciting any hostility in the man, but Detweiler seemed willing enough to talk about his family’s tragedy to a stranger.

The man waved his hand. “Auto accident. She had been to a party. There had been a lot of drinking. Her date drove them from the party even though he probably shouldn’t have. She scarcely knew the boy. He said Karen made him pull over so that she could drive. Then they were going too fast for conditions. It had been raining. That’s what the report of the officer on the scene said. Hit a tree.”

He shrugged. “Karen becomes comatose, a vegetable, and this other kid walks away. It was terrible for Margaret. Then some idiot cop told her that he thought Karen had been the passenger in the car and not the driver, and that the boy had changed places with her and put her behind the wheel after they hit the tree. Because he had been drinking, you see. Thought so because of the nature of Karen’s injuries and so forth. Karen did have a broken neck and any movement might very well have severed her spine. Well, it was severed. But so what if it were true? There were no witnesses to the accident. There wasn’t any way to prove it. Do you think it made us feel better to suspect that the boy Karen was with might have aggravated her injuries? The police questioned him and let him go.”

Paul was cold. He thought the air conditioning must be on even though it was a blustery day in late February.

“Dumb cop.” Ed Detweiler pronounced sentence on the man.

“The insurance money ran out, Margaret paid out her own money until she didn’t have any left, then they moved Karen to a veteran’s hospital where she died a few days after she was taken off life support. Should have done it much earlier, but Margaret wouldn’t stand for it. She can be a very obstinate woman. Then it was out of her hands.”

“Margaret left Corpus?”

“Right after Karen’s funeral. Threw some things in a car and took off to I don’t know where.” He hunched forward as if he were pleading a case. “We all still care about Margaret, all her friends care what happens to her. But nobody here has heard from her.”

“And the boy? What was the name of the boy Karen was with in the accident?”

As if he didn’t know. But he had to hear it, didn’t he?

“Not likely to forget, am I? It was Cremmins. Bobby, I think. He’s a bicycle racer. Was a racer, I should say. I read the other day where he had gotten himself killed. Local paper carried the blurb. I think he still has an uncle who lives here.”

Paul thanked Ed Detweiler and drove back to Houston. He went through the motions of another day of the conference, collected all the collectibles, then took a Dramamine and flew back to Denver fortified with many scotches.

Maggie picked him up at ten o’clock that night at the Boulder motel where the shuttle from the Denver airport had deposited him. By then the things that had been so clear to him on the plane had become very confused. Sometimes he thought that she had used the time in San Angelo to put a buffer between herself and Corpus Christi. Probably to get a driver’s license with a San Angelo address, so that there would be no obvious connection between her and the cyclist. Or sometimes he thought that it could have been a place in which she meant to begin a new life. But then again, he was afraid that she had used him, had made him her witness, her accomplice to murder. Or had she? Could it have been an accident?

Before she undressed him and put him to bed he told her he had been to Corpus Christi and that they had to talk. But when he awoke the next morning feeling awful, mostly because of the drugs and drink, but partly because Willie was battering him in the forehead, she was gone. Her clothes were gone, her cosmetics were gone. There was no note.

She was not at the rooming house. She was not at the plant.

He remembered later that when he had returned home that day he had drawn himself into a ball in the middle of the living room, feeling the emptiness stretch out on all sides of him, seemingly forever. The sense of loss was crushing, the punishment completely out of proportion to his crime.

Which was what? He had gone to Corpus Christi.

She had spilled a cup of coffee.

It was almost a year later that the telephone rang sometime after midnight, creating the sense of alarm such calls always engender. It was he who answered it.

“I wanted you to know that I’m all right,” she said.

He fought off sleep. There were a hundred things he had dreamed he would say to her if he ever heard from her again. They vanished before the reality. He had worried about her. Worried that he would pick up the paper one day and read that another woman on the side of the road had fallen victim to some random predator. Or that she was injured and needed his help. Or wanted him and couldn’t reach him. Or—

“I did worry,” he said. “We never talked. You just left.”

“I either had to go or stay there forever,” she said. “Somehow, staying forever didn’t seem very fair. Anyway, I like it here even though it rains a lot. I’m with someone who is very kind to me. I just wanted you to know.”

He stared at the receiver after she had broken the connection.

“Who was that?” Sandy asked sleepily. “Was that her?”

He slid down beneath the covers but he was no longer sleepy. He put his hand over his wife’s abdomen where he could feel the baby move. Willie stirred irritably at the foot of the bed.

“Yes,” he said. “She’s all right. That’s why she called.”

“Good,” she said. “Finally.”

She said it as though she had been expecting the call, and he supposed she had. He had shared with her his concern for Maggie, the woman she had seen on that snowy day, and who had worked for him, had been in the accident, and then had disappeared. He sometimes wondered how much she had guessed about their relationship.

“I always wondered if she knew the guy.” He heard her yawn, her voice furry on the edge of sleep. “You know, the one that was killed? Even though it was an accident. They were both from Texas, and I thought maybe that’s why she left Boulder the way she did.”

He drew his wife to him and told her the lie he had practiced over and over during those nights in which he had felt the margins of the space around him spread out beyond imagination, and which he had come to believe.

“No,” he said, “I don’t think so.”