Fidelity

23

Ted Forrest awoke knowing it was late. He could see that the level of the sun was high, that it must be at least ten. He also knew that something had come to him during the night while he was asleep, some idea, some decision. He got up and went into the bathroom. He had not brought any of his toiletries into the guest suite, but the guest bathrooms were always stocked with toothbrushes and razors and combs. He showered and wore the bathrobe from the suite to walk down the hall to the master suite.

When he entered the bedroom, he saw that the maids had already been here. They had made the bed, emptied the clothes hampers, opened the curtains and replaced the flowers on the table. He was aware of these things, and he liked reliability and efficiency in service people. He detested their opposite.

Forrest took a moment to look in the mirror on the way to his closet. If someone had asked him why, he would have had to say it was to be sure he looked the same. It was not that he would have changed, but that he had so many things on his mind that he wondered if they showed. He went into the dressing area of the big closet and dressed in a pair of gray, unpleated pants that had a simple, informal look, a plain blue oxford shirt, and a black cashmere sport coat. He packed a single small suitcase with the things he might need over a period of a couple of days.

He finished his packing, went to the little wall safe where he kept a few good watches and some cash, and took out a thousand dollars for pocket money. He heard footsteps in the bedroom and stood still, preparing himself. He had been trained since he was a small child to exert control over his feelings. This moment was no different from that second when he stood ready with his tennis racket in his hand and his knees flexed and waited to read the green flash of ball coming off his opponent’s racket to streak over the net. Until he knew which way to move, any move was wrong.

She came in and stood six feet away, as always. “You’re packing.”

“Yes.”

“Are you leaving me?”

“I’m going away for a day or two.”

“To get away from me?” She was physically rigid, as though her sense of outrage had tightened her into paralysis.

“To get away.”

“Is that all you’re planning to say to me?” she asked. He could see that her eyes were tearing, and it intrigued him. She must be crying for herself because she felt insulted. Her brain was filled with impressions of undeserved injuries inflicted on her by an uncaring world. She never seemed to be aware that she had done things to precipitate them, and she was always certain she knew what other people were thinking. She was never right.

He exerted self-control. “I hadn’t been planning to say anything to you. I delayed my trip so I would be available for your event last night. It’s over, and now I’ve got things to do. Good-bye.”

He picked up his suitcase, but she held her position, blocking the door to the bedroom. He turned and walked through the bathroom door into the hall. He moved along the hall and down the stairs quickly, hoping to deny her the time to deliver some angry comment, or at least to be far enough away not to hear it distinctly.

Ted Forrest got to the foot of the staircase, across the foyer, and out the door. He shut it behind him quietly so she would not be certain which way he had gone, then walked down the gravel path to the garage. He put his small suitcase in the trunk of the BMW and left the trunk open.

He went through the door to the back room of the garage. When the building had been the stable, that side had been the front of the building, where the carriages and tack had been kept, and the horses had been led around to be hitched. Now it was the workshop, where the gardeners stored their mowers and blowers, the pool man put spare filters and chemicals, and the caretakers stored tools and supplies. Along the back wall there were three workbenches, and above them was a shelf with a row of paint cans in shades matching each room in the house for touch-ups. Forrest took two unopened halfgallon cans of mineral spirits, placed a strip of duct tape over the cap of each to prevent subtle leakage, and set them in his trunk in a plastic leaf bag. Then he took a battery-charged electric drill and a set of bits and put those in, too.

He started his engine, pulled down the long driveway, and out onto the road. He turned off his cell phone and put it into his pocket. He didn’t want to receive calls and create a record of which repeater towers had relayed the signals to him. After a moment he took the phone out again. It would be wise to make one call before he left the area. He dialed the number with his thumb. “Hi. I’m afraid I had to go out of town unexpectedly. I won’t be anyplace where I can be reached by phone, so don’t call. I’ll get in touch the second I get back. Erase this. ‘Bye.”

He turned off the phone again and put it into the glove compartment, so he wouldn’t be tempted to use it on the daylong drive. Maybe he would buy Kylie a present while he was gone. It would have to be small enough to be paid for plausibly by her paycheck from Marlene’s. Of course, the present would depend upon whether she followed his instructions about the message he had just left. He had the four-digit code she used to replay her messages, and he sometimes used it to listen to them. Usually what he heard was vapid voices of fourteen-and fifteen-year-old girls asking whether she was going to this or that, and what she was going to wear. In the past sometimes she had saved a message of his so she could replay it and listen to his voice on her cell phone after she had gone to bed. Later tonight he would check to be sure she had erased his message.

He drove to the Golden State Freeway, pulled onto the southbound entrance ramp, and accelerated into the stream of traffic. He drove steadily for two hours before he stopped outside Bakersfield at a large complex where rows of trucks sat idling at the back of the lot, went into the restaurant and ate steak and eggs, then pulled into the gas station and refilled his tank. Down the road in the suburbs, he stopped at a Rite Aid drugstore and bought a box of wooden kitchen matches and two cans of charcoal starter.

The drive from Bakersfield seemed longer than he had anticipated, because from here on the traffic grew gradually thicker and slower. There were long-haul trucks in the right lane, then recreational vehicles as big as buses beside them, and then the left lanes full of SUVs and pickup trucks fighting for inches, passing each other for illusory advantages or for spite. It was dangerous and tiring, and Ted Forrest didn’t want to get into an accident or be pulled over by a highway-patrol officer, so he tolerated a spot in the middle lanes.

He came down Tejon Pass out of the hills into Castaic and the Santa Clarita Valley, places that had barely existed twenty years ago, but now were so choked with houses and strip malls and chain restaurants that they were beginning to seem dirty and worn out and unbearable. Then he was past the Cascade, the long, open sluice at the end of the aqueduct that in the 1900s had turned the San Fernando Valley into a garden and the backers and their friends into millionaires. A few minutes later, Forrest was in the northern part of the valley, fighting the real traffic toward the city of Los Angeles.

He was getting closer to his destination a few feet at a time, and the impatience and frustration invited him to think about why he was working so hard to get to a place where he didn’t want to be. He had made a small mistake in Los Angeles eight years ago, and now, in order to fix things, he had to come back to complete a missing step. But the underlying problem was the nature of women. He struggled to obtain them, only to find that what he got had changed into something he had never wanted.

The human species had evolved so that the females matured earlier than the males. They seemed to grow and ripen steadily until they reached near perfection at about the age of fourteen. They were not exactly at their physical zenith at that moment, but they were on the verge of it, still getting better every day, and still not showing any deterioration of any kind. Their skin was luminous, their hair thick and shiny, the whites of their eyes really white. Their waists seemed impossibly thin, and their breasts and buttocks were round and firm.

When they got older, all of that began to change. Having a physical relationship with a woman over thirty was a compromise. It was like eating fruit that was just a bit too soft. It might not be bad enough to throw away just yet, but it was past its peak, and a man tended to catch himself letting it lie untouched in the bowl and reaching for newer fruit. Their skin lost some of its elasticity and began to crease around the eyes and mouth. Their hair turned dull. They put on weight. If they stopped eating and did hard, punishing exercise each day, they began to look like skinny men. If they chose surgery and injections, they became nightmare creatures, with smooth, fishlike faces that had bloated mouths and wide, staring eyes.

They started out sweet-tempered and curious and pliable at thirteen, but within a decade they became spoiled and wised up, cynical and stupid simultaneously. A woman who had been told she was beautiful from the time she was fourteen became a monster of overconfidence and self-congratulation by the time she was twentyfour. She was psychotically suspicious of others and lenient with herself. She allowed herself to dignify whatever selfish nonsense she felt as though it were a philosophy, but she turned what he felt into a crime.

He had kept his feelings from causing trouble until the annual harvest festival in Mendota nine years ago. It was the first day of the festival, when they introduced the Harvest Queen and her court. The Harvest Queen was a pug-nosed girl with vacant eyes and a smile that had grown stale because it had been on her face sunrise to sunset since she was three and learned she would be rewarded for it. The one to look at was one of the princesses named Allison Straight.

She had dark brown hair with reddish highlights and huge green eyes. Her petite, curved body was the sort that drew the eyes away from the tall, greyhound-thin princesses around her, and her mouth had full Cupid’s-bow lips. Even in her princess gown, what she evoked was not cold, empty elegance, but fecundity. A stranger to the small towns of the Central Valley might have marveled that she was not the one who had been chosen Harvest Queen. She had the magnetic quality that some actresses had: a singularity that served to remind the eye that beautiful women didn’t all look like sisters. The best looked as though they had arrived from an undiscovered country on the other side of the earth.

Allison Straight wasn’t queen because she didn’t come from a well-established local family, didn’t have a father who owned the Chevrolet agency or served on the town council. Ted Forrest had been born in the vegetable country. He had seen so many of these contests that he always looked at the whole court with little interest in which child of the local merchants had been chosen queen.

He had stood around for a time being important while the notables had found their way to him. These events were organized and operated by boosters’ groups, and these people always wanted to ensure that Ted Forrest continued to sponsor their civic improvements. On this occasion, the one who took charge of him was a woman named Gail Hargrove. She was the former president of the chamber of commerce, a four-time councilwoman, and before that, a member of the board of education. She was a tall blond woman with a helmet of stiff hair and a lot of makeup who was as sexless as a civic-renovation project.

She conducted him to a big table where the local wines were being sampled in tiny plastic cups, and got him a real glass of the special cabernet that had reached its peak this year. She took him to see bins of exotic strains of white asparagus, broccoli rabe, radicchio, Japanese eggplant. She took him to see the architects’ model of the new municipal-refurbishment plans, and compared them to the concept drawings that had been done in elementary-school classes under the title “City of the Future.”Just when Gail Hargrove began to run out of other sights to show him, a bright flash distracted them. She took him toward the flashes, where she showed him the Harvest Queen and her court, who were on display across the room. They were on fake Louis XV armchairs from Zinsser’s Furniture, posing for group portraits.

Allison Straight caught his attention instantly. He felt the same sort of certainty he had felt when he had seen Caroline at about the same age twenty years earlier. She was simply the most attractive human being he had seen in years, a natural miracle.

Gail Hargrove seemed to notice the effect that Allison had on him, but maybe she was simply acting on some protective instinct around young girls by spelling out how young they were. She said, “Our queen and her court are particularly lovely this year, aren’t they? Whatever they’re giving them in the school cafeteria seems to be having wondrous effects.”

“Very pretty,” he said without much enthusiasm. He had to be careful around women like Gail Hargrove.

Part of her status in the town depended upon her reputation as a graceful and skilled ambassador to the powerful. Despite his tepid response, she seemed to believe she had figured out what interested him, so she offered him a closer look. The photographer had exposed enough film, and he was folding his tripod and putting equipment in padded cases, so she took Ted Forrest by the arm and led him to the girls.

They had little notion of who Ted was. One or two probably knew the name Forrest because they had seen it engraved on plaques on public buildings and parks; the others were ignorant. But they knew who Gail Hargrove was, and they saw her defer to Forrest and treat him like a visiting potentate. They all perked up as they had been trained to do, looked him in the eye, and gave him nearly identical good-student smiles-all but one, whose smile was distinctly different.

He surprised everyone by going down on one knee, bowing his head, and saying, “Your majesty, I’m deeply honored to be admitted to the presence of such a gracious queen and her beautiful princesses.” Gail Hargrove and the rest of the civic boosters laughed and applauded, and when the noise died down a bit, she introduced the girls.

The queen was Rebecca Sanders, the daughter of the plant manager for the packing and canning plant owned by a supermarket chain. Forrest said to her, “Say hello to your dad for me.” He was not surprised when he heard the names of three of the six princesses were Milton, Keller, and Cole, all names he knew. He said something friendly to each. Two of the others were Martinez and Garcia, and he said merely, “Very pleased to meet you,” as though it were true. Gail Hargrove, with a small-town politician’s delight in showmanship, saved Allison to the very end.

When Ted Forrest heard the name, at first he felt cheated. If she had been from a family he knew, he might have been able to contrive a way to visit her at home. If she had been from a family with business ties to his holding company or his water interests, he might at least have had some excuse to run into her. But he had never heard of anyone named Straight. He said, “Straight. That’s such a familiar name. Do I know your family?”

She gave him the mischievous look he thought he had detected earlier. “It’s only familiar because everybody you meet says they’re straight, even if they’re not.”

Ted Forrest laughed, the other girls joined him, and a half second later, the adults laughed nervously, too. But Gail Hargrove was not amused, and she didn’t pretend to be. After a moment, enough people noticed it and the irreverence was strangled. Gail Hargrove restored her frozen smile, took Ted Forrest away, and showed him the Japanese cucumbers and Chinese eggplants. After a minute or two, she had recovered enough to launch into her pitch for his support in the municipal-redevelopment effort.

Ted Forrest listened attentively, but did not say exactly how much money he was likely to give, or for which portions of the project. He had learned over time that his status diminished when agreement was reached. He also wanted an excuse to stay longer. He had at first planned to drive home at four o’clock, but he decided to stay for the evening’s fiesta. Ted Forrest had noticed that in order to obtain what he wanted, usually all that was required was patience and alertness.

Between the day’s events and the fiesta that began at seven, there was a lull, and he used the time to call for a room reservation, not in Mendota, but along Route 180 outside Fresno. He also drove to a liquor store and bought a quart of vodka, then stopped at a pharmacy for a flat white plastic bottle designed for a woman’s travel kit. He filled the plastic bottle with vodka, put the bottle in his coat pocket and locked the rest of the vodka in his car trunk, then went to the party.

The fiesta was held in the same few blocks downtown that the police had cordoned off for the earlier events. Mariachi bands strolled the sidewalks playing. There was a stage at the far end of the main street where two Mexican dance troupes performed folk dances in alternation. There was a beer tent run by a local bar, a wine-tasting tent run by a confederation of wineries, with the profits split in some unnamed formula with charities. If a person could make it past the crowds around those two tents, there was a long row of open booths where hot food was for sale.

Ted Forrest endured a couple of hours of the chatter of the town politicians and businesspeople. He knew that their patience and stamina weren’t as prodigious as his, and they drank more than he did. As they each expressed their bid for his support of some specific part of the renewal project, then ran out of words, fell silent, and finally wandered off, he waited. The time came when he was free.

He sauntered along the edges of the fiesta, scanning the crowd. He found the queen and her court, surrounded loosely by a swirl of people their age, slipped into the group, and asked the queen to dance with him.

They danced something like a Mexican polka to the music from the stage for a minute or two, and he handed her off to a boy she had been talking to. The boy seemed to have mixed feelings about dancing, but had no time to think of an excuse not to. Ted Forrest took the hand of the princess who was standing nearest, danced with her, and then handed her off to another boy. He had started a trend. Either the other boys were less afraid to dance, or the girls were more insistent, but he noted that most of the other princesses were dancing by now, so he moved to Allison Straight. As they began to dance, he guided her into the center of the court so it was clear he was simply showing the shy kids how to have fun. But he said to her, “You’re the most beautiful girl in the county.”

“You know that, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Then thanks.”

He tried again. “You seem much more sophisticated than the others. Have you traveled, or are you some kind of prodigy?”

“Kind of what?”

“Prodigy. You know, like a genius.”

She laughed hard, collapsing against his chest. “Oh, my God,” she said.

“You didn’t hear me wrong, did you?”

“So much for being a genius. But it’s not just me, it’s this band. It’s so loud.” She leaned against his chest again, then pulled back and patted his sport coat. “What’s this?”

He leaned close and said into her ear, “I brought a little vodka to get me through this.”

She looked up at him, her eyes excited. “Can I have some?”

“How old are you?”

She looked disappointed. “Busted. I’m sixteen.”

“If you think that’s old enough, then so do I. When this dance is over, go get some juice or a soft drink. It goes best with fruity ones, like orange.” He looked around. “Meet me by that row of trees at the edge of the park.”

“That’s no good. Couples go in there to fool around.”

“Where, then?”

“Don’t you have a car?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“Then we can go there. Where did you park?”

“Up the street and around the corner behind the hardware store.”

Her eyes ignited with excitement. “Perfect. I’ll meet you there in, like, five minutes.”

She was there in three. They sat in the car and he poured some vodka into her orange juice, and they talked. Within a half hour, he had heard about how her father had left when she was four, and about her mother’s inept attempt to raise her, which she saw as comical rather than tragic. Her mother was working tonight. She was a secretary at a dentist’s office during the day and a waitress in a bar at night. The more Ted Forrest heard, the better he liked Allison. After an hour of talking, he kissed her. She stared at him for a few seconds as though she were trying to be sure she had not imagined it, then a few more to decide how she ought to feel about it, and then kissed him back.

It seemed to Ted Forrest that it was only a few minutes after that when he began to see small groups of people walking along the street, getting into cars to go home. He said, “I think we ought to get out of here.”

She slouched low, held her hand beside her face and said, “I can’t let those people see me with you like this.”

“Get down and stay low while I drive past them.”

She crouched on the floor in front of the passenger seat, and he drove out of the lot and past a steady stream of pedestrians. “This is so great,” she said.

“Uh-oh,” Forrest said. “There are police cars ahead. Stay low.”

She stayed where she was as he drove past the policemen who were standing beside their cars and watching for people who appeared to be driving under the influence. He drove out onto Route 180 and increased his speed warily. When he was outside of town and had spotted the sheriff’s-department car waiting for speeders beyond the second overpass, he said, “You can sit up now.”

She got up and looked out the window at the dark farmland around her. “Where are we going?”

“Want to go home?” he asked.

“Not really.”

“Well, if you’d like to talk some more, the only place I can think of where it’s safe would be my hotel.”

“Fine.”

They stayed at his hotel until just after one, and then he drove her to the small one-story house on the edge of Mendota between the carpet warehouse and the Greek restaurant. She was inside and in bed before her mother came home from work.

After that, Allison Straight was his. At times he wondered if she was the girl he was supposed to have met instead of Caroline. He and Allison each lived two lives. She continued from day to day as one of the poorer girls in the high school, whose mother couldn’t afford to buy her clothes as nice as the ones her classmates wore. But when she was with Ted Forrest, she had a wardrobe that was like an actress’s. She would look in fashion magazines, and he would take her to buy the clothes in Los Angeles and San Francisco. They had to be kept in the closet in the apartment he had rented in San Francisco: There was no place to wear them in Mendota, and no way to explain them if there were.

He also rented a place nearby in Fresno where they could go together without worrying too much about being seen. He told the managers of both of his apartment complexes that he had a teenaged daughter who lived most of the time with her mother, and that he was out of town much of the time. If anyone saw Ted Forrest and Allison at the apartment and wondered, the landlord could satisfy his curiosity. Forrest did everything right. He took her to San Francisco for wonderful weekends. They went to plays and concerts and ate in restaurants, always as an indulgent father and his daughter.

That summer he hired her for an imaginary job in public relations at Forrest Enterprises. She told her mother that she was working during the long, unhurried summer days they spent together. He added her name to the payroll so she received a regular paycheck in the mail that her mother could open and deposit in the bank.

Ted Forrest was in love with Allison Straight, and he built a separate reality that he and she could visit for limited periods of time. He made sure their time together was always exciting and new, and that it included a taste of luxuries she could never have experienced in any way other than being with a rich man. It was a terrible thing-the tragedy of both their lives, really-when the whole affair ended. It had left him changed, he was sure-sadder forever, more guarded and less trusting.

That was nine years ago, and here he was, still trying to recover from it. He drove slowly, moving ahead one yard at a time, then stopping again to wait as he made his way into Los Angeles. He was tired and he had time to kill, but he didn’t want to rent a room and leave a record that he had been here. He parked in the lot of a shopping center and went to a twelve-screen movie theater.

He watched two films. By the time the second was over, he was hungry. Forrest chose to eat dinner at a small Chinese restaurant in a strip mall. He had a theory that Chinese people had trouble distinguishing one average-looking Caucasian from another, but they had always been too polite to admit it in public. He paid for his dinner in cash, then drove around the San Fernando Valley for an hour making sure that he could find the exact addresses that he would need later.

He stopped at a supermarket, bought a box of thumbtacks, a set of writing pads with cardboard covers, and a box of candles. Then he went to another theater and watched his third movie of the day.

When he walked out into the warm night air, it was after midnight at last. He drove to Philip Kramer’s house in Van Nuys. He looked and found there was no car in the garage. He wondered whether Jerry Hobart had succeeded in taking Emily Kramer out to kill her, and simply had not reached him yet because his telephone had been turned off. He thought for a moment and realized it didn’t matter. He still had to do what he had come here to do.

He walked around the house and found a big window in the back that had a glazier’s sticker on it, and a lot of white streaks and dirt that had not been cleaned off it. He felt the edge of the glass and confirmed his theory: The putty was still wet. He had a penknife on his key chain, so he opened it and scraped away as much of the putty as he could reach, then slipped the blade in beside the glass and pried it out carefully. He removed the big pane from the frame and leaned it against the side of the house, then stepped inside.

He was surprised to see that so much furniture had been piled in the living room. The room looked like a warehouse. He set down his bags and went through the house with his flashlight. The upstairs had been stripped, and all of the furniture removed except three beds that had been dismantled and left lying on the floor in one room. He judged that Mrs. Kramer must be in the process of moving away.

Ted Forrest set about assembling his primitive devices. First he would put a thumbtack through a piece of cardboard and into the bottom of a candle so the candle would stand up. Then he placed candles in the corners of all of the rooms. The candles would provide delay. Then he went through the house adding fuel. In most places, he soaked the floors and walls with fire starter, then placed stick matches and crumpled writing paper at strategic places where a candle flame would eventually reach them. In the living room, he poured kerosene on all of the wooden furniture, the walls, and the floor, and then set six of his candles around the room. Next he picked up his bags of equipment and set them outside, took a box of stick matches, and went through the house lighting the candles, one by one. The last ones he lit were in the living room near the piles of furniture. Finally he stepped out of the empty window frame. He leaned the big sheet of glass against the frame so it would keep any breeze from blowing in and extinguishing his candles.

Then Ted Forrest drove to the office building where he had gone to meet Philip Kramer eight years ago. There were only two places he could think of where Kramer might have hidden the file, and in a few hours both would be in ashes.