A Stranger in My Grave Read online

  “Oh, but I did. I was crazy about it. I just wasn’t competent enough. I couldn’t handle the children. I felt too sorry for them. I was too—personal. Children, especially children of families who reach the point of going to the Clinic, need a firmer and more objective approach. The fact is,” she added with a grim little smile, “if I hadn’t quit, they’d probably have fired me.”

  “What gave you that idea?”

  “Nothing specific. But I got the impression that I was more of a hindrance than a help around the place, so I simply failed to show up the next time.”

  “The next time after what?”

  “After—after I got the impression that I was a hindrance.”

  “But something must have given you that impression at a defi­nite time or you wouldn’t have used the phrase ‘the next time.’”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  He thought, You follow me, Daisy baby. You just don’t like the bumps in the road I’m taking. Well, it’s not my road; it’s yours. If there are potholes in it, don’t blame me.

  “I don’t follow you,” she repeated.

  “All right, let’s skip it.”

  She looked relieved, as if he’d pointed out to her a nice, easy detour. “I don’t see how a little detail like that could be impor­tant when I’m not even sure I was working at the Clinic at the time.”

  “We can make sure. They keep records, and I shouldn’t have any trouble getting the information you want. Charles Alston, the director, is an old friend of mine. We’ve had a lot of clients in common—on their way up they land in his lap; on their way down they land in mine.”

  “Will you have to use my name?”

  “Of course. How else—”

  “Can’t you think of any other way?”

  “Look, Mrs. Harker. If you worked at the Clinic, you must know that their file room isn’t open to the public. If I want infor­mation, I ask Mr. Alston, and he decides whether I get it or not. How am I going to find out if you were working on a certain Friday or not if I don’t mention your name?”

  “Well, I wish you didn’t have to.” She pleated a corner of her gray jacket, smoothed it out carefully, and began all over again. “Jim said I mustn’t make an—an exhibition of myself. He’s very conscious of public opinion. He’s had to be,” she added, raising her head in a sudden defensive gesture, “to get where he is.”

  “And where is that?”

  “The end of the rainbow, I guess you’d call it. Years ago, when he had nothing at all, Jim made plans for himself: how he would live, the type of house he would build, how much money he’d make, yes, even the kind of wife he would choose—he had every­thing on the drawing board when he was still in his teens.”

  “And it’s all worked out?”

  “Most of it,” she said. One thing hasn’t, and never will. Jim wanted two boys and two girls.

  “What, if I may ask, was on your drawing board, Mrs. Harker?”

  “I’m not a planner.” She fixed her eyes on the projector again. “Shall we continue with the newspaper?”

  “All right.”

  He turned the crank, and the headlines of the next page rolled into view. Gunman John Kendrick, one of the FBI’s most wanted men, was captured in Chicago. California had nine traffic deaths on Safe Driving Day. The Abbott murder trial was still going on in San Francisco. A woman celebrated her 110th birthday in Dublin. High tides were demolishing several houses at Redondo Beach. In Sacramento the future of the State Junior College was discussed by educators, and in Georgia 2,000 students rioted over the racial ban in the Bowl game.

  “Any bells ringing?” Pinata said.

  “No.”

  “Well, let’s try the local news. The American Penwomen gave a Christmas party and the Trinity Guild a bazaar. The Bert Peter­sons celebrated their thirtieth anniversary. The harbor dredging contract was O.K.’d. A Peeping Tom was apprehended on Colina Street. A four-year-old boy was bitten by a cocker spaniel and the dog ordered confined for fourteen days. A woman called Juanita Garcia, age twenty-three, was given probation on charges of neglecting her five children by locking them in her apartment while she visited several west-side taverns. The city council referred to the water commission a petition concerning—”

  He stopped. Daisy had turned away from the projector with a noise that sounded like a sigh of boredom. She didn’t look bored, though. She looked angry. Her jaw was set tight, and blotches of color appeared on her cheeks as if she’d been slapped, silently, invisibly, hard. Her reaction puzzled Pinata: did she have a grudge against the city council or the water commission? Was she afraid of biting dogs, Peeping Toms, thirtieth anniversaries?

  He said, “Don’t you want to go on with this, Mrs. Harker?”

  The slight movement of her head was neither negative nor affirmative. “It seems hopeless. I mean, what difference does it make to me whether a woman called Juanita Garcia got probation or not? I don’t know any Juanita Garcia.” She spoke the words with unnecessary force, as if Pinata had accused her of having had a part in Mrs. Garcia’s case. “How would I know a woman like that?”

  “Through your work at the Clinic, perhaps. According to the newspaper account, one of the conditions of Mrs. Garcia’s two-year probation was that she get some psychiatric help. Since she had five children and was expecting a sixth, and her husband was an Army private stationed in Germany, it seems unlikely she could afford a private psychiatrist. That leaves the Clinic.”

  “No doubt your reasoning is sound. But it has no connection with me. I have never met Mrs. Garcia, at the Clinic or anywhere else. As I told you before, my work there was concerned entirely with the children of patients, not the patients themselves.”

  “Then perhaps you knew Mrs. Garcia’s children. She had five.”

  “Why do you keep harping like this on the name Garcia?”

  “Because I got the impression it meant something to you.”

  “I’ve denied that, haven’t I?”

  “Several times, yes.”

  “Then why are you accusing me of lying to you?”

  “Not to me, exactly,” Pinata said. “But there’s the possibility that you may be lying to yourself without realizing it. Think about it, Mrs. Harker. You overreacted to the name….”

  “Perhaps I overreacted. Or perhaps you overinterpreted.”

  “That could be.”

  “It was. It is.”

  She got up and walked over to the window. The movement was so obviously one of protest and escape that Pinata felt as if she’d told him to shut up and leave her alone. He had no intention of doing either.

  “It will be easy enough to check up on Mrs. Garcia,” he said. “The police will have a file on her, as well as the Probation Department and probably Charles Alston at the Clinic.”

  She turned and gave him a weary look. “I wish I could convince you that I never in my life heard of the woman. But it’s a free country; you can check everyone in the city directory if you like.”

  “I may have to. You’ve given me very little to go on. The only facts I have are that on December 2, 1955, there was snow on the mountains, and you ate lunch at a cafeteria downtown. How did you get downtown, by the way?”

  “I must have driven. I had my own car.”

  “What kind?”

  “An Oldsmobile convertible.”

  “Did you usually drive with the top up or down?”

  “Down. But I can’t see how all this is important.”

  “When we don’t know what’s important, anything can be. You can’t tell what particular detail will jog your memory. For instance, that Friday was a cold day. Maybe you can remember putting the top up. Or you might have had trouble starting your car.”

  She looked honestly bewildered. “I seem to remember that I did. But that ma
y be only because you suggested it. You say things in such a positive way. Like about the Garcia woman—you’re so sure I know her or knew her.” She sat down again and began repleating the corner of her jacket. “If I did know her, why have I forgotten? I’d have no reason to forget a friend or a casual acquaintance, and I’m not forceful enough to make enemies. Yet you seem so positive.”

  “Seeming and being are two different things,” Pinata said with a faint smile. “No, I’m not positive, Mrs. Harker. I saw a straw and grasped it.”

  “But you’re holding on?”

  “Only until I find something more substantial to hold on to.”

  “I wish I could help. I’m trying. I’m really trying.’’

  “Well, don’t get tense about it. Perhaps we should stop for today. Have you had enough?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You’d better go home. Back to Rainbow’s End.”

  She stood up stiffly. “I regret telling you that about my hus­band. It seems to amuse you.”

  “On the contrary. It depresses me. I had a few plans on the drawing board myself.” Just one of them worked out, Pinata thought. His name is Johnny. And the only reason I’m trying to track down your precious day, Daisy baby, is because Johnny’s having his teeth straightened, not because you got your head stuck in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

  He turned the roll of microfilm back to the beginning and switched off the light in the projector.

  The girl in the horn-rimmed spectacles came hurrying over, looking alarmed as if she expected him to wreck the machine or at least run off with the film. “Let me handle that,” she said. “These things are quite valuable, you know. History being made right before our eyes, you might say. Did you find what you wanted?”

  Pinata glanced at Daisy. “Did you?” “Yes,” Daisy said. “Yes, thank you very much.”

  Pinata opened the door for her, and she began walking slowly and silently down the corridor, her head bent as if she were study­ing the tiles on the floor.

  “No two are alike,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “The tiles. There are no two alike in the whole building.”

  “Oh.”

  “Someday when this current project of yours is finished and you need something new to amuse yourself with, you could come down here and check.”

  He said it to get a rise out of her, preferring her hostility to her sudden, unexpected withdrawal, but she gave no indication that she’d heard him or even that he was there at all. Whatever corri­dor she was walking along, it wasn’t this one and it wasn’t with him. As far as she was concerned, he had already gone back to his office or was still up in the library looking at microfilm. He felt canceled, erased.

  When they reached the front of the building, the carillon in the courthouse tower across the street was chiming four o’clock. The sound brought her to attention.

  “I must hurry,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “The cemetery closes in an hour.”

  He looked at her irritably. “Are you going to take some flow­ers to yourself?”

  “All week,” she said, ignoring his question, “ever since Monday, I’ve been trying to gather up enough courage to go there. Then last night I had the same dream again, of the sea and the cliff and Prince and the tombstone with my name on it. I can’t endure it any longer. I must satisfy myself that it’s not there, it doesn’t exist.”

  “How will you go about it, just wander around reading off names?”

  “That won’t be necessary. I’m quite familiar with the place. I’ve visited it often with Jim and my mother—Jim’s parents are buried there, and one of my mother’s cousins. I know exactly what to look for, and where, because in all my dreams the tombstone is the same, a rough-hewn unpolished gray cross, about five feet high, and it’s always in the same place, by the edge of the cliff, underneath the Moreton Bay fig tree. There’s only one tree of that kind in the area. It’s a famous sailor’s landmark.”

  Pinata didn’t know what a Moreton Bay fig tree looked like, and he had never been a sailor or visited the cemetery, but he was willing to take her word. She seemed sure of her facts. He thought, So she’s familiar with the place, she’s been there often. The dream didn’t just come out of nowhere. The locale is real, perhaps even the tombstone is real.

  “You’d better let me come along,” he said.

  “Why? I’m not afraid anymore.”

  “Oh, let’s just say I’m curious.” He touched her sleeve very del­icately, as if he were directing a highly trained but nervous mare who would go to pieces under too much pressure. “My car’s over on Piedra Street.”

  8

  Right from the beginning, she has been ashamed, not only of me but of herself, too. . . .

  The iron gates looked as though they had been made for giants to swing on. Bougainvillea concealed the twelve-foot steel fence, its fluttery crimson flowers looking innocent of the curved spikes lurking beneath the leaves, sharper than any barbed wire. Between the street and the fence, rows of silver dollar trees shook their money like demented gamblers.

  The gray stone gatehouse resembled a miniature prison, with its barred windows and padlocked iron door. Both the door and the lock were rusted, as if the gatekeeper had long since vanished into another part of the cemetery. Century plants, huge enough to be approaching the end of their designated time, lined both sides of the road to the chapel, alternating with orange and blue birds of paradise that looked ready to sing or to fly away.

  In contrast to the gatehouse, the chapel was decorated with vividly colored Mexican tiles, and organ music was pouring out of its open doors, loud and lively. Only one person was visible, the organist. He seemed to be playing to and for himself; perhaps a funeral had just taken place, and he had stayed on to practice or to drown out a persistent choir of ghosts.

  There was a threat of darkness in the air, and a threat of fog. Daisy buttoned her jacket to the throat and put on her white gloves. They were pretty gloves, of nylon net and linen, but they looked to her now like the kind that were passed out to pall­bearers. She would have taken them off immediately and stuffed them back in her purse if she hadn’t been afraid Pinata would observe the gesture and put his own interpretation on it. His interpretations were too quick and sure and, at least in one case, wrong. She thought, I know no person called Juanita, only an old song we sang at home when I was a child. Nita, Juanita, ask thy soul if we should part. . . .

  She began to hum it unconsciously, and Pinata, listening, rec­ognized the tune and wondered why it disturbed him. There was something about the words. Nita, Juanita, ask thy soul if we should part.... Nita, that was it. Nita was the name of the waitress in the Velada Café, the one Fielding had “rescued” from her husband. It could be, and probably was, a coincidence. And even if it wasn’t a coincidence, and Nita Donelli and Juanita Garcia were the same woman, it meant nothing more than that she had divorced Garcia and married Donelli. She was the kind of woman who would ordinarily seek employment in places like the Velada, and Fielding was the kind of man who frequented them. It seemed perfectly natural that their paths should cross. As for the fight with the woman’s husband, that certainly hadn’t been planned by Fielding. He’d told the police when he was arrested that she was a stranger to him, a lady in distress, and he’d gone to her assistance out of his respect for womanhood. It was the type of thing Fielding, at the euphoric level of the bottle, would say and do.

  They had come to a fork in the road at the top of the mesa which formed the main part of the cemetery. Pinata stopped the car and looked over at Daisy. “Have you heard from your father?”

  “No. We turn right here. We’re going to the west end.”

  “The waitress your father got into a fight over was named Nita. Possibly Juanita.”

  “I know that
. My father told me when he phoned about the bail money. He also told me she was a stranger to him, a good- looking young woman who’d led a hard life—those were his words. Don’t you believe him?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  “Well, then?”

  Pinata shrugged. “Nothing. I just thought I’d mention it.”

  “What a fool he is.” The contempt in her voice was softened by pity and sorrow. “What a fool. Will he never learn that you can’t walk into a squalid little café and pick up waitresses without invit­ing disaster? He could have been seriously injured, even killed.”

  “He’s pretty tough.”

  “Tough? My father?” She shook her head. “No, I wish he were. He’s like a marshmallow.”

  “Speaking from my own experience, some marshmallows can be very tough. Depends on their age.”

  She changed the subject by pointing out of the window. “The fig tree is over there by the cliff. You can see the top of it from here. It’s a very unusual specimen, the largest of its kind in this hemisphere, Jim says. He’s taken dozens of pictures of it.”

  Pinata started the car, keeping down to the posted limit of ten miles an hour although he felt like speeding through the place and out again, and to hell with Daisy baby and her fig tree. The rolling lawns, the green and growing things, made too disquieting a contrast to the dead buried beneath them. A cemetery shouldn’t be like a park, he thought, but like a desert: all tans and grays, rock and sand, and cacti which looked alive briefly only once a year, at the time of the resurrection.

  Most of the visitors had gone for the day. A young woman dressed in black was arranging a bouquet of gladioli above a bronze nameplate, while her two children, T-shirted and blue- jeaned, played hide-and-seek among the crypts and tombstones. A hundred yards farther on, four workmen in overalls were start­ing to fill in a freshly dug grave. The green cloth, intended to simulate grass, had been pulled away from the excavated mound of earth, and the workmen were stabbing at it listlessly with their shovels. An old man with white hair sat on a nearby bench and looked down at the falling earth, stupefied by grief.