Silence Page 5

  Whenever Till visited Garden House he drove around the block once, doubled back to be sure he had not been followed, and then parked his car in a different spot at least a block away and walked. He had been a homicide cop for a long time, and now he often took cases that left people angry with him. He had always dreaded the possibility of leading anyone to Garden House, and he knew that beginning today, his precautions would need to be more elaborate: He had just made sure that a potential killer knew his name. He took a last glance behind him as he walked up the sidewalk to the porch and rang the doorbell. Even though Till and the parents of the five other kids had formed a trust that paid for Garden House, the idea from the beginning was that it belonged to the kids, and the parents were guests.

  The door swung open and there was Bob Driscoll, his face already in a grin. “Hi, Jack,” he said, his voice loud and happy. “Come on in, Jack.” He pulled the door open wide, and Till followed him into the living room.

  “Hi, Bob. How have you been?”

  “Great. Just great. I got a different job. It pays a lot better than the car wash. I’m working at this little organic vegetable store on Foothill called Darlene’s Farm. Come in and see us. You’re here to visit Holly, of course.”

  “Sure am. Seen her around?”

  “Not in a while. She and Marie went to buy groceries. And Nancy, maybe. Yeah. I think the three of them went. Holly, Marie, Nancy. Hey! I bet you could stay for dinner. They were going to get some stuff to make an Italian dinner together.”

  “No, I don’t think so, thanks. I just dropped by for a little visit with her. You know I have to see how my little girl is.”

  “She’s great, Jack. You’ll see.” He sat quietly for a moment. “And how about you? How have you been?”

  “Not so bad, I think. I’m pretty much always the same. How are your parents?”

  “I saw them last week. They’re getting old, but they’re still happy.”

  As Till looked at Bob Driscoll, he could not keep himself from seeing the distinctive features of a person with Down syndrome—the rounded head and body, the slightly protuberant eyes and small nose. The young people who lived in Garden House all resembled each other more than they resembled their relatives. It was as though Garden House were a family. The young people also seemed to share things that were more fundamental, a set of attitudes and mannerisms that they picked up from each other, and an outlook that often made them seem to him to be like half-wise, unspoiled children. But they were no longer children.

  The birth had been in December. During the pregnancy, Rose had decreed that the baby would be Christopher if it was a boy, and Holly if it was a girl. Her obstetrician had not seen any reason to insist on amnio, because all was going well, and Rose was healthy and twenty-four. There had been no warning that something had happened on chromosome twenty-one, and that Holly had Down syndrome.

  By the next December, Rose had already walked out on them, and Till was making his first Christmas celebration for his only child, Holly. Her first birthday, on the tenth, had been a quiet two-person affair, with Holly asleep at seven, and he had resolved never to let any celebration be quiet again. Every birthday and every Christmas after that had been big and boisterous, with the house full of people. Till had noticed with satisfaction that since Holly had come to live at Garden House, her three birthday parties had been long, raucous, and messy.

  He heard the car come in the driveway, then a couple of doors slam. He stood to look out. Holly and the two other girls were laughing and chattering as usual, and then, as though she had felt his gaze, Holly looked toward the house. “Dad!”

  He came out onto the porch. “Hi, Holly. Can I help with the groceries?”

  “Sure. I was looking to see if Bob and Randy would help, but I see they’re hiding until all the work is done.”

  “That’s how men are,” he said. “I warned you.”

  “You’re not that way, Jack,” Marie said.

  “That’s because Holly trained me.”

  “Hello, Jack,” said Nancy. “Long time no see.”

  “I was here on Wednesday, Nancy.”

  “I know. I just like to say that.”

  “Okay, then.” He lifted some of the grocery bags, went inside with the others and set the bags on the counter.

  When their arms were free, Holly threw hers around his neck and they exchanged their usual exuberant hug. “Can you stay for dinner?”

  “I don’t think so tonight. I’m in the beginning of a hard case, and I’ve got to do some things tonight. But thanks. I really just dropped by because I wanted to talk to you a little.”

  “Really? How come?”

  “Because I like to talk to you.”

  “That’s because you love me,” she said. “It’s good.”

  “I know.”

  “Come on, then,” Holly said. “Let’s go for a walk while we talk.”

  “Okay.”

  She called to the empty doorway to the hall, “Don’t stand there, Bob. You can start the water boiling while I talk to Dad.”

  Bob emerged from the hallway, unabashed. “Okay.”

  Till and Holly walked out across the porch, down the steps to the sidewalk and strolled up the street past more old houses, all of them refurbished during the past few years. Till said, “How are things this week, Holly? I know it didn’t go too well last week.”

  “It’s better. Work has been more fun since I got Nancy hired. We’ve been doing a big cleaning to get ready for the summer sales. We may even paint the place. Mrs. Fournier and I are thinking it over.”

  “Sounds ambitious.”

  She looked over her shoulder. “We’re far enough from the house now to talk. What’s up?”

  “It’s this case.”

  “You got it today?”

  “Not really. It’s something that happened six years ago. You were about fifteen then. I don’t know if you remember. I was gone for a bit over a week. You stayed with Grandma.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I remember staying with Grandma a few times. Usually you just had a girlfriend and you were sleeping with her.”

  He smiled uncomfortably. That was part of it, too. To Holly there didn’t seem to be any special categories of things that weren’t for discussion. “It’s possible,” he said. “But this was something else. It took over a week. It was a girl who was hurt and scared. I took her far away and taught her how to stay hidden from some bad men.”

  “Good for you, Dad. You’re the best!”

  “Well, it may be that I’m going to get in trouble for helping her hide. I found out that an innocent man—an old boyfriend of hers—is being accused of killing her. So I had to go to the District Attorney’s office and admit that I took her away and she’s living somewhere else.”

  “Why?”

  “So the DA would tell the police to let him go.”

  “Couldn’t you just tell the police yourself? They know you.”

  “No. It had gone too far for that. There’s going to be a trial.”

  “So you told, and saved him. Now what’s the problem?”

  “I may have to go away myself, because of it. What I did to make this girl hard to find wasn’t all perfectly legal. I helped her get false identification papers and so on. I helped her to lie.”

  “Are you going to jail?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When will you know?”

  “Sending me to jail would take a long time. They would have to charge me and then have a trial, and I would get my turn to tell the judge why I did it, and show that I didn’t mean any harm, or really hurt anybody.”

  “So you probably shouldn’t worry yet.”

  “That’s exactly right. It may never happen. I’m only telling you about it right now because that’s always been our arrangement, our deal. You and I tell each other things as soon as we know them.”

  “What can I do to help you?”

  “Nothing yet. Maybe if I do have to serve some time, you c
an store some of my stuff for me.”

  “I would visit you. too. And write you long letters.”

  “Thanks, honey. I knew I could count on you to think of something nice to do.”

  They were walking around the block, and Till could see the back of Garden House between the two houses behind it. He watched Holly staring at the house, as though she were deciding what to plant next, or what color to paint it.

  He wondered what her mother would think if she could see her and hear her. Holly was visibly a person with Down syndrome, but she was also beautiful and strong. He wished that Rose could have foreseen the possibility that someone could be all of those things at once. Rose had been living in Florida for twenty years already, remarried for eighteen of them to Dr. Timothy Zyrnick. It had always seemed strange to Till that she had married a doctor. He had never been able to tell whether Dr. Zyrnick knew about Holly. In the letters Till had sent her over the years—usually once a year—he had never asked, and in her replies, she had never mentioned anything that passed between her and her new husband. Till had enclosed pictures of Holly at first, but then one of his letters got an answer asking him not to. A few years later, Rose asked in a letter that he stop writing to her and allow her to go on with the new life she had built. She had added that if she and her husband moved, she would keep him informed in case there were some legal or medical reason for his knowing. Since then she had moved about three times to houses in fancier-sounding neighborhoods around Naples. She’d never had any more children.

  He walked along beside Holly, made the last turn toward Garden House, and felt a deep sadness. He had a lot to do this evening, but he hated stopping for ten minutes, having a quick conversation, and then leaving her.

  She looked at him slyly. “It’s spaghetti, you know. You can always add enough of it to the boiling water to invite another person.”

  He put his arm around Holly’s shoulders and squeezed. “Okay. Now that you’ve coaxed me, I’d love to stay for dinner.”

  8

  LATE THAT NIGHT, Jack Till sat in his car on Vignes Street, watching the lighted space outside the gate of the county jail. Even though it was after midnight, the slit windows of the big concrete building were brightly lighted and at least forty people sat in their cars or stood beside them at the curb outside, waiting They looked like people at the harbor waiting for a ship to dock. There were young women with children who were too tiny to be out at this hour, old ladies who were obviously waiting for sons or daughters. On the other side of the street there were three low-rider cars with candy-flake paint jobs and lots of chrome, all sitting nose-to-tail. The young men who had brought them were out walking back and forth, talking and waving their heavily tattooed arms for emphasis. Till couldn’t tell from here what gang colors were on the tattoos, but he knew that if he moved closer, he would recognize the symbols. He had seen all of them before on corpses and on suspects. The friend they were waiting for must have been popular to rate a convoy to take him home.

  The door of the building opened and a group of inmates was released into the area just inside the gate. The jail was crowded and understaffed, so the guards always seemed to process the prisoners in batches. Till saw a few arms wave, a few of the people in cars get out and walk toward the fence. A guard went to the gate and unlocked it, then let the prisoners out one at a time.

  Till got out of his car, stood beside it and spotted the prisoner he had been waiting for: Eric Fuller was in his early thirties, as tall as Jack Till, and he had hair so short and blond that the eye had trouble telling where it began or ended. His face was reddish and slightly lined for his age, as though he had spent time squinting. As he came out the gate, Till intercepted him. “Hello, Mr. Fuller. I’m Jack Till.”

  “Jay Chernoff told me about you. Where is he, anyway? I thought he’d be here.”

  “I asked him to stay on the other side of the building, in case there are reporters or something worse waiting for you. We agreed that I would take you home, because I wanted to talk to you. All right with you?”

  Fuller looked up the dark street. The other prisoners had all gotten into cars and driven off. “I don’t have much choice.”

  He followed Till to his car and got into the passenger seat. Till got in and drove. “I know you have a right to be mad at me.”

  Fuller turned to look at him. “I’m happy to know that Wendy’s alive, and I guess I should thank you for that, and for coming forward now. That doesn’t mean I like you. You took Wendy away, and let me think she was dead for six years. Wendy was—is—the most important person in my life. I’ve thought about her every day since she disappeared. Sometimes I’ve wished I had died with her. And about twenty-four hours ago, I got arrested and hauled down here and thrown in a cell that smells like piss and vomit, and charged with murdering her. I can’t help thinking I owe you some of the thanks for that, too.”

  “I was trying to save her life. I apologize to you for the parts of this that got you in trouble. As soon as I found out about it, I went to the DA.”

  “I know you didn’t intend to do me any harm. But what made her do that? I loved her. What the hell was she thinking?”

  “I was under the impression that you two had broken up.”

  “Broken up? That term doesn’t apply to us. We had been together so long that getting married seemed like the obvious thing to do. When we realized it wouldn’t work, we admitted we’d been more attracted to other people from the beginning, but didn’t see how we could be apart. We weren’t mad at each other. It wasn’t like her not to tell me what she was doing. Why didn’t she tell me?”

  “She thought it was the only way to protect you. She believed that her time here was over. Yours wasn’t. She had helped start your restaurant and turn it into a paying business, but you were the real force behind it. She said, ‘Nobody comes to a restaurant because there’s a good MBA in the back office.’”

  “That isn’t a reason to let me think she was dead.”

  “She also thought you would try to protect her, maybe go after the people who were trying to hurt her.”

  “It was a stupid thing to do. I could have helped her. Instead I get accused of killing her.”

  Till took a deep breath and let it out. There was no reason to hold anything back now, and he had no right. “She also felt that at some point you two had to separate. You would never find a woman who could tolerate having someone like her in your life. If she was around, you wouldn’t even look. The same was true for her. The reason she left was the danger, but the killer wasn’t the only thing she needed to escape.”

  Eric Fuller was silent for a few seconds, his body leaning forward in the seat and his eyes on the dashboard. It looked to Till as though he might lunge toward him. His face was reddening, and looked almost swollen, and Till could see moisture welling in the blue eyes. “She didn’t even think it through and prepare. She left everything—her half of the restaurant, her half of the house, everything we had built together.”

  “She thought you had more right to it than she did, and there was no way to hold on to things like that and disappear. I know you’re mad at her tonight, but I can tell you that she cared about you and wanted to be sure that her trouble didn’t destroy you.”

  He leaned back in the seat with his eyes closed and rubbed his forehead. “God. I’m sorry. It’s just that everything is happening at once. To be honest with you, I’m afraid. I’m just out on bail. Nobody dropped any charges. I don’t want to go to jail for the rest of my life. Jay told me about the advertisements. I keep wondering what happens if Wendy doesn’t see them. What if she’s living in another country? I could be convicted of murder, and she would never even know it. I could get the death penalty.”

  Till drove in silence for a few seconds. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you. I need to know anything you can tell me that might help me figure out how to reach her.”

  “I don’t know. When she was missing at first, I called everyone we knew, s
earched our house and our restaurant for any clue about where she might have gone.”

  “Was there any other city she ever talked about where she wanted to live someday?”

  “Here. L.A. She was the one who chose it as the place to start the restaurant.”

  “Is there anywhere that she said she wanted to go on a vacation, but you never did?”

  “Oh, God. Everywhere. When we were really young we were too poor to go anywhere, and when we were older, we were too busy. At one time she wanted to go to France, but it was mainly so I could apprentice in a great restaurant. When we were in school in Wisconsin, we would talk about Tahiti in the winter and the Rocky Mountains in the summer. We were never serious about any of it. She could be anywhere.”

  Till said, “I told her that if she wanted to stay hidden, she should never try to get in touch with anybody she knew again. But that’s not an easy rule to follow. If she weakened and decided to talk with someone, who would she choose?”

  Fuller shrugged. “The person she would choose is me.”

  “That’s what I thought. That’s the other reason why I wanted to talk to you right away, tonight. What you’ve got to understand is that six years ago people like me gave her lots of sensible advice and tried to talk her out of it, but she was the one who was right—there really were men determined to kill her. The only person who could have planted the evidence to frame you now is the one who attacked her. They’re trying to get her to show herself. When she does, they’ll try again. They’ll be watching you, and if it helps them get to her, they’ll kill you, too.”

  He drove Eric Fuller to the house that he had once shared with Wendy Harper. When Fuller got out, Till handed him a business card. “If she calls or writes or tries to get in touch with you in any way at any time of the day or night, you’ve got to call me immediately. And if you notice any kind of surveillance on you, I’ll come and check it out. It may just be the cops, but if it’s somebody else, I’ll arrange a surprise for them.”