Dead on the Island Read online

  "Forget it, gulls," I said.

  They weren't bothered in the least by my voice, and they screeched and swooped for a few more minutes before they gave up and went back to whatever it is that they do when they aren't begging: sitting on posts, floating on the swell, scouting out new territory. Eventually I got up and went away myself.

  I killed a little more time walking around on the beach, looking for shells. Sometimes in the winter you can still find them, but not very often. Certainly not like when I was a kid and it seemed as if they were lying everywhere.

  When I figured that Evelyn Matthews had had plenty of time to get home from work, I got in the car and drove over to her house.

  It was easy enough to find, once I located the street among the Tunas and Mackerels and Dolphins. The house was just like all the other houses in that area; they looked as much alike as if they'd been stamped out with the same die. Frame structures with one-car garages, all part of a cheap and quick development a long time ago, but all well kept up and nicely painted now.

  I parked the car, went up the walk, and knocked on the door. I didn't see a doorbell button.

  I didn't know what I was expecting to see, but the woman who answered the door wasn't it. I suppose that I'd associated the fact that she worked for Dino's uncles with the time of their heyday, which began in the 'twenties and extended into the 'fifties. Let's face it. I was expecting some kind of little old lady, but the woman who answered the door looked no older than I did.

  She was short, with dark hair and eyes, and her figure was what might best be described as voluptuous. She'd probably really been something thirty years ago.

  "You must be Truman Smith," she said. Her voice was dark, like her hair.

  "That's right," I said. Before she could ask, I took out my billfold and handed her my ID. She looked it over and handed it back. Only then did she ask me inside.

  We walked into a small living room furnished with a love seat instead of a sofa, a couple of platform rockers, and a twelve-inch TV on a stand. There was also a small bookshelf against one wall, and I drifted over to it. I'm incorrigibly curious about what people read. There was no Faulkner, so there was no danger we'd be involved in a literary discussion. Her taste ran more to Bobby Jean Mason and Margaret Atwood.

  "Have a seat," she said, and I sat in one of the rockers, which was covered with some sort of Early American pattern: lanterns, plows, harnesses.

  "Truman," she said. "That's a funny sort of name. Is it a family name?"

  "No," I said. "It's a political name. My father always liked that picture of Harry Truman holding up the newspaper headline declaring Dewey the winner of the 1948 election. He liked to see the underdog win."

  "Oh," she said.

  "Most people just call me Tru," I said.

  "All right, Tru." She looked at me with her dark eyes for a minute as if making up her mind about something. "Dino says I can tell you everything. He says you won't involve me in any way that might . . . might . . . . "

  "I won't compromise your position in town, not if I can help it," I said.

  "That's what I mean, I guess."

  "Then don't worry. Dino and I grew up together, played a little football together. He was a couple of years ahead of me in school, but we know each other pretty well. If you trust him, you can probably trust me."

  "I'll try," she said. "Do you mind if I smoke?"

  It was her house. I was so surprised that she asked; I said "no" before I thought about it. She got up and went out of the room, then came back carrying a table that looked a little like a TV tray. She set it down by her chair, and I could see a package of Marlboro Lights on it, along with a Bic disposable lighter and a pink ceramic ashtray shaped like a scallop shell.

  She tapped a cigarette out of the pack and lit it with the Bic. She inhaled deeply and blew the smoke out in a long, straight jet. I don't really mind smokers, and in fact she made smoking look so good that I was tempted to take it up myself.

  "What do you need to know?" she said.

  "Let's start with you," I said.

  "Me? But I thought--"

  "You thought this was about your daughter, and it is, but Dino didn't tell me much, and I want to get a feel for things. So we'll start with you. For one thing, you're a lot younger than I expected. That is, if you worked where Dino said you did."

  She smiled behind a cloud of smoke. "I'm forty-six."

  She looked a lot younger than that. "Still, I would've expected someone around fifty. Maybe older."

  She tapped her cigarette on the edge of the ashtray. "You're sure you want to hear this?"

  "I'm sure."

  "All right. I came down here when I was fourteen years old. I wanted to be a whore." She looked at me to see if I was shocked. I wasn't, so she went on. "I was from Houston, and I'd heard about the houses here. Where I lived, you heard about places like that."

  "You hear about places like that everywhere," I said.

  She tapped the cigarette again. "I guess that's true. What I mean is that where I lived, places like that seemed like an attractive alternative. Anyway, I hitched a ride to Galveston and showed up at one of the houses on Postoffice Street. There's always a market for girls of fourteen."

  I did some quick arithmetic. "You couldn't've worked for very long. The last of those places closed in 1957."

  "Technically, you're right. But for a young, attractive girl there was still an opportunity for some free-lance work at certain hotels. I didn't have anywhere else to go, and I needed the money, so I was able to keep working for a while."

  I'd brought the folder Ray had given me, and I handed it to her. "Where does your daughter come into this?"

  She opened the folder. "Her name is Sharon. Didn't Dino tell you?"

  I shook my head. "Dino didn't tell me anything. I wanted to hear it from you."

  She held the folder in her left hand, looking at the picture. In her right was the stub of the cigarette, which she ground out in the ashtray. "This picture was taken a few years ago, her senior year in high school. She's nearly twenty now."

  I did some more figuring. Sharon had been born when her mother was twenty-six, twelve years after she'd come to the Island. "Were you still, ah . . . ?"

  "Whoring? The word doesn't bother me. I just don't want people to know for Sharon's sake. Yes, I was. I'd been on the circuit for a bit by that time, but when Sharon began making her presence obvious I came back here. I moved into an apartment, told people that my husband had died in an automobile accident. I got a Social Security card. I looked pretty good, and I had a good telephone voice. I've been a receptionist ever since."

  I looked at her a little dubiously. "Most women with a background like you've described wouldn't find it quite so easy to fit into the straight life."

  She lit another cigarette, exhaled. "Nobody ever said it was easy. I did it, that's all."

  "You were never tempted to make a little extra money on the side?"

  "Tempted? Sure. But I never gave in. I had a job and a daughter. I wanted to keep both of them."

  "How about romantic involvements?"

  She handed me the folder after a last brief look. "None. Oh, there were advances made to me from time to time, but that's one thing about me that didn't change; I still see men as good for only one thing."

  "Let's talk about Sharon, then. What's the story?"

  For the first time she looked as if her calm facade might crack, but it was only temporary. Then she was in control again. I wondered if control was something she'd learned while doing her job on Postoffice Street.

  "She went out on Friday night. She didn't come home. The next morning I called Dino."

  "I've got to admit that's succinct," I said. "So. Where'd she go?"

  "I don't know." She blew another of the smokey jets.

  "Did she walk? Ride? Go alone, or with someone?"

  "I'm not sure."

  "Look," I said, feeling exasperated already, "you must know something."

 
; She ground out the cigarette, looking at the ashtray instead of me. "No," she finally said. "I don't have to know something. My daughter lived here with me, but that doesn't mean we communicated."

  Something clicked. "She knew," I said. I thought about it a minute. "She didn't know, and then she knew. Recently."

  Evelyn Matthews looked at the folder I was holding, but she still didn't look at me. "Yes," she said.

  I thought that now we were getting somewhere and that this might turn out to be easier than I'd thought. "Isn't it possible that she just went away for a while to figure out how she felt about things? She'll probably call soon, or come home. You can see that she's had a shock."

  She nodded reluctantly. "It's possible, but I don't believe it."

  "Did she have any money? A car?"

  "She might have a little money of her own. She's been working part-time in a little shop on The Strand."

  "What does she do the rest of the time?"

  "She goes to the community college. She wants to be a lawyer."

  "Boyfriends?"

  "No one steady." She reached for the Marlboro pack, picked it up, and then set it back down. "I smoke too much," she said. "There's a boy she likes, Terry Shelton. You could talk to him. He works at the shop, too."

  "What about the car?"

  "I have a car. Sharon doesn't. Mine's in the garage."

  It was time to backtrack a little. "How'd you get to know Dino?"

  She smiled a reminiscent smile. "He used to hang around the house. He was just a kid, eight, ten maybe. He and Ray came around sometimes. We all knew he was related to the bosses, so we were nice to him. He never came in at night, just in the afternoon sometimes."

  Something must have showed in my face.

  "Not nice to him the way you're thinking," she said. "Jesus. He was just a kid."

  "Sorry," I said.

  She waved it away. "No more than what most people would think. We were whores, after all. But we weren't as bad as all that. Anyway, Dino remembers. He thinks of me as sort of one of the family. There's not many of the old bunch left around here, you know?"

  I said I knew. "Did Sharon have any friends at the college, anyone she might have confided in?"

  She thought about it for a second or two. "There's one girl there, Julie Gregg, who works in the Social Studies Department. Sharon mentioned her a few times."

  "One more thing. How did Sharon find out about your past?"

  She reached for another cigarette and lit it, whether she smoked too much or not. "I wish I knew," she said. "I wish I knew."

  4

  The last time I saw Jan was about six months before she disappeared. She drove up to Dallas to visit me one weekend. I'd been promising to get down to the Island for nearly a year, but I'd never done it. We went out to eat, to a movie, and talked about the old days. She seemed happy and pleased with her life.

  When her letters stopped, I got worried, but not worried enough. And by the time I did get worried enough, it was already too late. I hoped that I wouldn't be too late for Sharon. Maybe I was thinking that in some way finding Sharon would make up for losing Jan. Or maybe in some way I hoped that in looking for Sharon I could find a trace of Jan, something new that would put me on the right track. Whatever it was, I'd decided to give it a try. If Dino hadn't convinced me, talking to Evelyn Matthews had. I thought she was an honest woman.

  It was still cold when I left her house, but the sky was beginning to clear a little. It was dark, and I could see a star or two, which meant that the front had managed to push its way out into the Gulf and that tomorrow would be considerably warmer. You could never tell about February, though.

  I drove back to my house, which really wasn't that far, and parked in the back yard. Nameless materialized at my feet when I stepped out of the car and followed me inside. I made sure his water bowl was full and tore open a packet of Tender Vittles for him. While he was scarfing it down, I went upstairs to check out the refrigerator. There wasn't really anything I could do about Sharon Matthews until the next day, and I was hungry.

  The refrigerator still held what it had when I'd looked earlier, a half a loaf of bread, part of a jar of peanut butter, a nearly empty two-liter bottle of Big Red, a piece of cheddar cheese wrapped up in plastic wrap so that I could see the greenish mold spots on it, a couple of Hormel wieners, and a dish of something that had probably been edible once, a long time ago. Having had peanut butter for lunch, I decided to spend some of Dino's money and treat myself to a hamburger.

  I went back downstairs, carrying a load of laundry. Nameless was chasing a roach the size of one of those thick pink erasers I used in the first grade. I watched until he caught it, then shooed him away and crunched it underfoot before it could run away. He'd weakened it considerably, or I never would have caught it.

  I dumped the dirty clothes in the washer, pitched in some Tide, which had been on sale last week, and started the washer. By then Nameless was at the door, ready to go out. He didn't spend any of the nighttime hours in the house, not by choice. He was nothing more than an orange blur moving through the darkness by the time I got to the first step.

  Monday night in February--the streets weren't crowded. I drove down Broadway to the golden arches and ate two cheeseburgers and a large order of fries. The fries were better than the burgers.

  It was still early, so I went home and tried to read a little more of Absalom, Absalom. This time, I found the going a little easier. That worried me a little, but not much. I read until ten o'clock; then I went to bed. I was surprised next morning to realize that I drifted off to sleep almost immediately.

  ~ * ~

  I got up at seven o'clock, ate a piece of dry toast, and let Nameless in. He was ready for more Tender Vittles. There was a little sun, and the temperature was already edging up toward fifty degrees. I got the washing out of the machine and tossed it in the dryer. It was mostly sweatshirts, shorts, and jeans, so leaving it in the washer overnight hadn't hurt it.

  I got dressed and drove down to the west end of the seawall for my run. I wanted to get it done early because if it warmed up and the sun came out, there'd be a lot more people on the wall than there had been the day before. Besides, I had work to do.

  Back at the house, I took a shower, dressed, and pitched Nameless out. He looked so comfortable balled up on my bed that I hated to do it, but I wasn't sure when I'd be back in. I didn't want to deprive him of his early evening rambles.

  The community college campus was over near Ball High School, so the drive wasn't far. But then nothing on the Island is very far from anything else. It didn't take long.

  I had a little trouble finding a parking spot. The college had just built a big new library and classroom building on the spot that had once been a parking lot. There was a new lot a couple of blocks away. I parked there and walked back to the campus.

  At not quite ten o'clock on a Tuesday morning, most of the students on campus were in class. I stopped one who wasn't, a girl who was carrying a canned Coke down the hall, and she directed me to the political science department. They don't call it "social studies" anymore, the way Evelyn Matthews had. That's high school terminology.

  The office wasn't large, and there was a blonde girl sitting at a desk. She didn't look up when I stepped through the open door because she was too busy stapling papers together, after she gathered them from the various neat stacks lined up on the desk. She was muttering something under her breath. It sounded like, "I hate this. Why is this in my life?" I stood there for a second or two waiting for her to notice me, but she was so intent on her gathering and stapling that she never looked up. Finally I tapped on the door frame.

  She turned and focused a pair of very large brown eyes on me. "Oh," she said. "I'm sorry. I didn't hear you come in. Can I help you?"

  "Looks as if you're the one who needs help," I said.

  "Oh no." She gave an embarrassed laugh and glanced at the papers on the desk. "It's just that we do have a collator, but Dr. Samuel
always forgets to set the machine correctly. Then he just brings his papers down here for me to collate."

  She was dressed casually in jeans and a blue shirt, but she certainly had nice eyes.

  "You do this for everyone in the department?" I said.

  "Not everyone. Mostly just Dr. Samuels." She looked at me questioningly. "Are you looking for Dr. Martin?"

  I asked who Dr. Martin was.

  "He's the department head. But he's in class right now, but he'll be back at ten-fifty."

  I stepped a little farther into the office and saw that there was a door connecting this one with another, larger one, presumably Dr. Martin's.

  "No," I said. "I'm not looking for Dr. Martin. Actually, I'd like to talk to you, if you're Julie Gregg."

  "I'm Julie," she said. "What did you want to talk to me about?"

  "It's about Sharon Matthews," I said.

  "Sharon? What's the matter with Sharon?"

  "Probably nothing. Did you see her here at school yesterday?"

  She thought about it. "Well, no. But we don't have any classes together on MWF. Is she sick?"

  "She seems to have left home unexpectedly," I said. "Her mother's worried."

  "Her mother," Julie said.

  "Anything wrong with her mother?"

  "No, nothing," Julie said, looking back at the papers on her desk as if the job of collating and stapling them had suddenly grown incredibly fascinating.

  So much for keeping Evelyn's past a deep, dark secret, I thought.

  "Sharon told you, huh?" I said.

  Julie forced herself to look back at me. "Told me what?"

  "Look, Julie, let's not beat around the bush. That might work on an essay quiz in history class, but this is a real live person we're talking about here. Sharon told you about her mother. Did she tell you anything else?"

  "Are you from the police?" she said suddenly.

  "No," I said. I got out my billfold and showed her my license.

  "I don't have to talk to you, then, do I?"