Serena appeared to brace herself. “What did you find out?”
“He died of a heart attack, Serena,” Kinley said flatly, “and unfortunately, there was nothing in any report to indicate a reason why he was in the canyon.” He shrugged. “As to the files that were taken from his office, I really don’t have any idea about that.”
“All right, then,” Serena said coolly.
Kinley touched her shoulder, “Sorry, but there just wasn’t anything to go on.”
Serena pulled away from him slightly. “I understand.”
“So, the thing is,” Kinley added hesitantly, “I thought I’d just do one more thing.”
Serena looked at him quizzically. “What?”
“Talk to Dr. Stark,” Kinley told her. “Sometimes the written autopsy’s not the whole story, especially in a case like this, where there’d be no reason to look for anything strange. It’s a long shot, but when you talk to people, they remember things.”
Serena smiled appreciatively. “Daddy told me that he wanted you to have something of his,” she said finally. “I have it in my car.” She motioned him forward. “Come with me, I’ll get it.”
Kinley followed her to the car, then stood by silently as she opened the glove compartment and withdrew a thick book. It was a large book.
“It’s in here,” Serena said as she opened it.
Inside, Ray had pressed a small piece of brown forest vine.
Kinley picked it up and held it gently.
“He gave it to me a week ago,” Serena said. “He wanted me to tell you that since you never made it there, he went and got it for you.”
Kinley smiled softly, remembering their first adventure together.
“He never let anything drop,” Serena said.
“No, he didn’t,” Kinley said, his eyes staring with a sudden unexplainable distance at the vine, as if his mind were drawing him away once again, reminding him of the perils of too much feeling. “Ray never forgot anything.”
EIGHT
The coroner of Cherokee County was also one of its oldest citizens. When Kinley had first noticed his signature on the autopsy, he’d doubted it could be the same Dr. Joseph Stark who’d treated his sudden asthmatic attacks as a boy. But as the door to Stark’s office opened, and he saw the old man rise slowly from behind his desk, he instantly recognized the dark eyes that had stared down at him in his youth. They were quiet eyes, but piercing as well, and Kinley had never really forgotten the curious way they’d seemed to watch him distantly from the other end of the long black stethoscope. Now, as the door swung open and Kinley stepped inside the doctor’s office, he realized that they had changed very little. Stark’s hair had gone silver and the skin of his face had slackened and turned pale, but the dark eyes seemed eternal, beyond the grip of time.
“Little Jack Kinley,” the old man said, his voice now trembling slightly, the full lower lip pulled rudely downward at the left, so that Kinley realized that he must still be recovering from a stroke.
“Hello, Dr. Stark,” Kinley said gently as he approached the desk. “It’s good to see you again.”
The eyes widened slightly. “Are you still a sufferer, my boy?”
Kinley looked at him quizzically. “Sufferer?”
“From those terrible attacks you used to have,” Stark explained. “The asthma.”
Kinley shook his head. “No, not anymore. I guess I finally outgrew it.”
Stark looked pleased to hear it. “Not uncommon with that disorder,” he said, “but I’m sure you know that as you grow old, you may come to be afflicted again.” He shrugged softly. “The nature of things. Nothing to be done.” He tried to smile, but the effort seemed to exhaust him. “Nature is not benign. We only like to think it is.” He leaned back in his chair and folded his small hands over his old-fashioned white lab coat. “You are lucky to be alive, my boy,” he said, almost wonderingly. “Do you remember that night?”
“What night?”
“So hot,” Stark added. “A summer night.”
Kinley shook his head.
“It was the first time I saw you,” Stark said. “The attack, the one that was so bad. You were turning blue. You were holding your breath.”
“Holding it?”
“You wouldn’t try to breathe,” Stark explained. “You were too exhausted.”
Again, Kinley shook his head. “I remember lots of attacks, but not that one.”
“You must have been about three years old,” Stark told him. “And you were suffocating. Turning blue, like I said. It was terrible, the worst case I’d ever seen.” His eyes took on a grave sense of concentration, as if memory were a pressure in his head. “The old woman brought you in. I thought you were already dead. We tried an injection, but it didn’t work. You wouldn’t breathe, so I thought of something else, one last try. We put you in a car and drove as fast as we could. Your grandmother held your head out the window as we drove, so the air would be forced down into your lungs.”
Kinley stared at him curiously. “I don’t remember that,” he said quietly, as if, for once, his mind had deserted him, an unexpected vacancy he found disturbing, as if he’d been betrayed. For a moment, he tried to recall the incident Dr. Stark had described, but found that his mind would not retrieve it for him, but simply left it like one of those fearful voids ancient cartographers had indicated on their maps: Terra Incognita. “I don’t remember that particular attack,” he said again.
Stark nodded contentedly. “Well, that’s the glory of childhood,” he said quietly. “You can forget such evil things.” He shrugged helplessly. “Old men, on the other hand, we are doomed to remember everything.” His head drifted slightly to the left, as if an invisible support had suddenly given way, and allowed the great white hill to shift. “Death was very close to you that night.”
“Yes, I suppose it was.”
Stark made a lunging motion with both hands, as if grasping for something invisible in the air. “Death was snatching at you,” he whispered, “just like that.”
Kinley stepped back reflexively, as if away from the grasping hands. His mind raced backward, gathering in the days and nights of his long affliction, but always returning empty of this particular brush with death. He fought to return to the present. “Actually, I came by to talk to you about another death.”
Stark nodded but said nothing.
“The autopsy you did on Ray Tindall’s body.”
Stark motioned toward the chair in front of his desk. “Please, have a seat.” He smiled delicately. “There’s no rush. I only have a little bit of my practice left. Most people prefer a young doctor.” Again, he shrugged. “The nature of things.” He lifted his slightly trembling hands. “They prefer a steady grasp.”
Kinley sat down. “In the report, you’re pretty clear about the cause of Ray’s death,” he began. “That it was caused by a heart attack.”
“Yes, I am,” Stark said. “There wasn’t much room for doubt. It was massive. As massive as I’ve ever seen.”
“Were you Ray’s doctor?”
Stark nodded. “Yes, I was. All his life, I don’t think he ever went to anyone else.” Once again he lifted his hands. “They were still good enough for him.”
Kinley kept his eyes on Stark’s face. “His heart, you knew it had problems?”
“Oh, yes, certainly,” Stark said. “I’d known it for a long time.”
“How long?”
“In specifics, for several years,” Stark said. “In general, since he was born.”
“Since he was born?” Kinley asked. “What do you mean?”
“I knew his father, and Ray was like him,” Stark explained. “You inherit that sort of thing, you know, maladies of the heart.”
“So his was a congenital condition?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“And you’d been treating him?”
“As much as I could.”
“What do you mean?”
“Not all patients are t
he same,” Dr. Stark said. “Not all of them care about themselves.”
“And Ray was like that?”
“Toward the end, he was,” Stark said firmly. “I had warned him time and again that he needed to slow down. He was a smoker, and toward the end, he drank too much, as if he were trying to make things worse.” He shook his head. “But even if he’d done everything I told him, took all my advice down to the last thing, I’m not sure it would have mattered in the end.” He shrugged. “The fact is, Ray Tindall was born to die pretty much when he did, and that’s something not much can be done about.” His eyes filled with a grim wonderment. “Every chromosome has a death certificate written on it.”
Kinley was not so fatalistic. “Was he taking any medication?”
“No,” Stark answered. “Just the opposite. He was doing everything wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“Well, besides the smoking and drinking, he didn’t need to be doing anything strenuous,” Stark said authoritatively. “And look where they found him? Way down there at the bottom of the canyon.” He shook his head with exasperation. “He didn’t drive a car down there, you know. He had to have walked all the way.” He looked at Kinley pointedly. “And you used to live up there, you know what that canyon’s like.”
Kinley leaned forward slightly. “Did he mention that he was going down there to you?”
“Absolutely not,” Stark said. “If he had, I would have just pulled out a pistol and said, ‘Here, Ray, just shoot yourself. It’s the same thing, and it’ll save us all the trouble having to hunt for you.’”
“And he knew that?” Kinley asked. “How dangerous it would be for him to go down there?”
“Sure, he did,” Dr. Stark said. “I’d told him a hundred times that he ought to stay away from anything strenuous.” He took in a long, slow breath. “In a way, Ray killed himself. Or at least, he might as well have. And he knew it, too.” He shook his head wearily. “But what can you do with a man like Ray Tindall? Nothing. Just tell him not to do something, then sit back and watch him do it.”
“Do you have any idea what he might have been doing down in the canyon?” Kinley asked.
The old man eased himself forward and firmly planted his elbows on the top of his desk. “Sometimes there are no answers for things like that,” he said. “I’ve been coroner for a long time, and I’ve seen a few things I never could clear up.” He tapped a single index finger at the side of his head. “The questions, they stay up here,” he said quietly. “Always up here. Night and day.” The eyes grew curiously intense, shining toward Kinley like two small gray lights. “You wonder what happened,” he said very softly, almost in a distant whisper, as if he’d suddenly sunk into a daze. “But it’s not for you to know.”
• • •
He was tossing uneasily on the sofa in the front room, his mind locked in a vaporous half-sleep of floating shadows, when he heard someone’s knock at the door. He rose sluggishly, his head still heavy as if filled with water, trudged to the door and opened it.
Lois stared at him from behind the gray metal veil of the screen. “I need to talk to you,” she said edgily. “Right now, Jack.”
Kinley opened the door and stepped aside to let her pass.
She walked directly into the living room, then spun around to face him. “What is this I hear about your staying around to look into Ray’s death … or is it his life you’re looking into?” She drove her right fist into her side. “What exactly are you looking into, Jack?”
Kinley tried to focus on her slender frame, but his eyes kept blurring, as if trying to block a clearer view. “You want something to drink, Lois?” he asked, stalling for time, waiting for his mind to regain its old control.
“Drink?” Lois asked. The offer seemed to strike her like a slap in her face. “No, Jack, I don’t want a goddamn drink. I want to know what the hell you’re up to. What is it? Tell me right now. I’m not leaving until you do. Other people may be intimidated by you, but I’m not. You need to understand that, Jack. I knew you when you were a wheezy little boy, and I want to know why you’re sticking your nose in Ray’s business.”
Kinley walked into the living room and eased himself down on the sofa. “I was just checking a few things for Serena,” he said wearily.
“Yes, she told me that much,” Lois snapped. “What about, exactly?”
“How he died,” Kinley said with a shrug. “What he might have been doing before that.”
Lois let out a quick, exasperated breath. “I knew it. You want to solve something. The big-time writer’s having a mid-life crisis. It’s not good enough just to write about a crime, you’ve got to solve one.”
Kinley rubbed his eyes, and suddenly she seemed to walk out of the blur, tall and slender and wired for explosion.
“There were a few things that were bothering Serena,” Kinley told her. “I thought I might help her clear things up.”
“Like what?”
“Well, for one thing, what Ray was doing in the canyon,” Kinley said. “Nobody seems to understand that.”
“Nobody?”
“Well, Serena, for one.”
“And did you find that out?”
“No.”
“All right, what else?”
“Well, according to Serena, somebody went through Ray’s files after he died.”
Lois looked at him knowingly. “Yes, someone did, Jack,” she said hotly. “Me. I went through his files. Who did you think it was, some deranged killer?”
Kinley’s eyes fell upon her steadily. “You went through Ray’s files?”
“Yes, and I took what I wanted.”
Kinley leaned forward slightly. “What did you take, Lois?”
Lois hesitated a moment. “I don’t want you snooping into Ray’s life,” she said. “I have good reasons for that, believe me. Just don’t do it. It won’t help Ray, and it certainly won’t help Serena.”
“What files, Lois?” Kinley demanded evenly. “I’m not doing this for the fun of it. If there’s no reason for me to stay in Sequoyah, believe me, I’ll be out of here tomorrow.”
She looked at him snidely. “Still too good for it, huh, Jack?”
Kinley said nothing.
“That’s what Ray thought, you know,” she added. “That you were too good for it.”
“Let’s just say, I’ll go as soon as I can,” Kinley told her.
Kinley’s last words seemed to assure rather than irritate her, and Kinley watched, astonished, as she calmly sat down in the large wooden rocker opposite the sofa.
“Look, Jack, Serena worshipped Ray,” she said. “Absolutely worshipped him. I don’t want anything to ruin the way she always thought about him.”
“She said they’d grown apart during the last month or so,” Kinley said. “That’s one of the things that’s bothering her.”
Lois nodded. “Yes, I know.”
“She needs to know why.”
Lois looked at him imploringly. “She can’t ever be allowed to know that, Jack.”
“Do you know why?”
“Yes, I do,” Lois answered. “It’s the same reason I want you to go home and let this whole thing drop.”
“What is it?”
“Serena’s precious, oh-so-perfect father was having a love affair, Jack,” Lois said. “It’s what brought on the divorce a few months ago. We never told Serena. Ray really insisted on that. He was willing to give up everything for that.” She shrugged. “Not that the marriage was ever such a great thing. It wasn’t. But I loved him. He was a complicated man. I always knew that. But considering the pickings around here, Ray was the best thing around.” She shook her head. “Anyway, when I found out he was dead, I came here and quickly snatched the files that might have had any reference to her, any letters, notes, anything.” She smiled sadly. “Ray was such a pack rat, I knew he’d keep anything she ever gave him, and that he’d probably file it under her name, so I took all the files that had her initials in them.”
&nb
sp; “Which were?”
“Well, her full name is Sarah Dora Overton,” Lois said matter-of-factly. “So those were the files I took.”
“S, D and O,” Kinley repeated.
“That’s right,” Lois said. She smiled grimly. “But, as it turned out, there was nothing about her in any of them. In the S file there was nothing but just old pictures of the town. Sequoyah, I mean. Ray fancied himself a sort of town historian, you know.”
Kinley nodded.
“And the O, that was just a bunch of newspaper clippings.”
“What about D?” Kinley asked.
Lois shrugged. “That one was empty.”
Kinley nodded. “So there was nothing about this woman in any of the files?”
“No.”
“So where is it?” Kinley asked. “The stuff about her?”
For a moment, Lois appeared off-balance, her own doubts rising, despite all her efforts to suppress them. Then her old resolve once again asserted itself, and her face grew very solemn. “I don’t know, Jack,” she began. “And I don’t want to know.” She glared at him determinedly. “It’s enough that they’re not here for Serena to find out about it all. And if you keep this up, this looking into Ray’s death, you’ll probably find out where his precious little love notes are, and when you do, Serena will find out about everything, too.” She leaned toward him, her face softening almost to a look of pleading. “Please, don’t do that, Jack,” she said. “Serena thinks her father was a perfect man. Let her think it.”
“Where does she live, Overton?”
Lois hesitated.
“It’s easy to find out, Lois,” Kinley told her.
Lois stared at him silently.
“Look, maybe she can put it all to rest,” Kinley told her. “Maybe she can tell me where everything is. It’s even possible that he’d gone down to the canyon to meet her. If she can clear a few things up, then I can do the same for Serena.”
Lois still appeared doubtful. “Would you be that careful?” she asked.
“I’m not here to destroy a father’s reputation,” Kinley said firmly. “Particularly Ray’s.”