Gumshoe, page 23
“Mrs. Dorman?” I asked.
“Yes?”
“I wonder if we could have a word with you, ma’am?”
Her eyes took in Kayla, then returned to me. “And who might you be?” There was no suspicion in her voice, only interest. Her life wasn’t a parade of visitors, at least not by people she didn’t know.
I didn’t want to tell her my name. I turned to Kayla, who stepped closer and said, “My name is Rosalyn Sjorgen, Mrs. Dorman. Or was, years ago. Now it’s Williams.”
Emmaline’s eyes brightened. “Jonnie’s daughter?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“But of course. And look at how you’ve grown. We met, years ago, dear, when you were no more than ten or twelve.” A cloud passed over her features, which finally took on a look of resignation. “Ever since this awful business with Jonnie and David…I wondered if anyone would drop by one day.” Her gaze took in both of us. “But the two of you aren’t here about that, are you? I mean, not directly. You’re here because of Edna.”
“Yes,” Kayla said.
Emmaline stood to one side. “Please, come in.”
We went into the coolness. The living room was small—area rugs over wood plank flooring, ordinary but for framed black-and-white photographs of old buildings and windmills, rusting tractors, mining ruins, all in magnificent lighting, dramatic shadows and perspectives, terrific clouds.
Emmaline noticed my interest. “Those were taken by my late husband, Hank. Many of them before we moved out here to Austin.”
“They’re very good.”
“His work was published in a number of magazines. Would you like something to drink? Coffee? Tea?”
I said no, but Kayla surprised me by asking for tea, if it wasn’t too much trouble. Emmaline returned a few minutes later, and we sat in the living room on overstuffed furniture that swallowed us whole. I hoped I could get up when the time came to leave. Kayla introduced me as Morrie, of all things, a friend of the Sjorgen family. I was still wearing my wig, feeling as if a cat had parked on my head.
Emmaline nodded and gave me a welcoming smile. “Now, then, what can I tell you?” she asked, pouring two cups of tea.
She knew exactly what. Her comment about Edna at the door told me that. She wanted coaxing. I said, “Anything you remember about Edna moving into the Sjorgen mansion on Virginia Street way back when, Mrs. Dorman.”
“Please, call me Emmaline.” She handed Kayla a cup on a saucer, then looked at her and smiled. “You are the spitting image of Jonnie, dear. He was a terribly handsome man.”
“Thank you.”
“Nineteen seventy-six,” Emmaline said slowly. “I…well, I’m not sure what to say.” She leaned back, balancing her cup, and gazed at Kayla. “What I mean, dear, is that you have the right to know if anyone does, but…the thing that happened back then, it’s not a very nice story.”
“Please,” Kayla said.
“I would get no joy speaking ill of the dead.” She gave Kayla a direct look and her tone grew sharper. “I am referring to your father, Rosalyn.” She awaited a response. I sensed that what she was waiting for was permission to continue, at which time she was indeed going to speak ill of the dead.
“My father and I haven’t been close for a long time,” Kayla said. “Please, tell us.”
Emmaline looked at Kayla a moment longer, then down at the cup in her hands. “There was a scandal. Or might have been, but it was averted by Wendell, your grandfather. And, of course, by others who were involved.”
“A scandal?”
Emmaline nodded. “It was hushed up. There would be no public record of it now. Nothing at all. Are you aware that Edna had a daughter?”
“A daughter?” Kayla gave her a surprised look, then turned her head to me.
“Jacoba,” I said.
Emmaline looked startled. “Why, yes, Jacoba. However did you learn that?”
I shrugged. It didn’t seem my place to point out the obvious, that these two women were in the presence of one of the finest gumshoes in the hemisphere.
“Jacoba Woolley,” Emmaline said slowly. “Edna and Herman’s only child, her first pregnancy. She was forty-six years old. It was a very difficult birth. During labor, the child was damaged.”
“Damaged?” Kayla said.
“Deprived of oxygen for too long. She survived, however, and grew into a remarkably beautiful girl, which wasn’t surprising—Edna was a great beauty in her day. But Jacoba was, well…simple.”
I gave her a questioning look. Edna hadn’t so much as hinted at that about Jacoba.
Emmaline sipped her tea. “There are all sorts of euphemisms for it these days, but, to be blunt, Jacoba was retarded. Genetically she was fine, perfect, but mentally…at fourteen she had the capacity of a child of no more than four.”
“She didn’t go to school?” Kayla said.
“No. She never learned to read. She had a child’s vocabulary. Oh, but Edna doted on her all the same. Even more so after Herman passed away, when Jacoba was still only a child. Outwardly, there was nothing wrong with Jacoba.” Emmaline’s eyes dropped again to her hands. “Far from it, in fact. She developed quite early in the physical sense. At fourteen she could have passed for seventeen. That was the summer of ’76.”
Which was shaping up to be a rather bad year, I thought, but I remained quiet. Emmaline stopped talking. The drone of the swamp cooler filled the room. Half a minute went by.
“College was out,” Emmaline said finally. “Jonnie and David—Mr. Milliken—were home. The summer after their first year. Jonnie was back from Harvard, David from Princeton. They were bright boys, but pampered, spoiled. They didn’t want for much. One day in August, Jacoba turned up missing from the yard in front of her house, three blocks from the Sjorgen place, the house Edna lives in now. It was twilight, almost dark. Edna was frantic. No one had seen Jacoba. A search was quickly mounted, but Jacoba was gone.”
Emmaline paused and looked at Kayla.
“It’s okay,” Kayla said. “We have to know.”
“A patrolman found them in Idlewild Park, a mile from Edna’s house. He heard them—Jonnie and David and Jacoba—in a thicket of bushes by the river.”
Again she stopped, face flushed, then she pressed on: “They were…unclothed. The boys were nineteen. Jacoba was fourteen. They had…they had been with her. You know. The police officer guessed who Jacoba was by a description he’d heard over the radio—others had been searching for her for two hours by that time. He knew her age. He arrested the boys on the spot, took them and Jacoba into custody, the boys in handcuffs. At the police station he spoke only to the chief of police, however, because the boys had told him who they were, trying to convince him to let them go.
“Edna was called to the station, and Jonnie’s father, Wendell, and David’s father, Victor. Charges were made but never filed. The paperwork sat idle for several months. Everything was hushed up while lawyers on both sides made proposals and counterproposals in an effort to keep the incident from going public, perhaps ruining the boys’ lives. I remember it quite well because I typed up all the legal documents on Jonnie’s behalf. Frank Oleson was Wendell’s lawyer…but I guess you know that.”
“Yes,” Kayla said quietly.
“Edna was very hard on them, but what mother wouldn’t be? By October, Jacoba had missed her period, which she’d been having for over a year by that time.”
“Oh, God,” Kayla breathed.
“She was pregnant. Back then there was no way to determine who the father was, Jonnie or David, not before the baby was born. Abortion was out of the question. Edna wouldn’t hear of it. She let everyone know that the Lord’s work would be done. She was quite Catholic, you know. Each of the fathers was terrified for his son’s career, as you might imagine. The upshot of it all was that Victor Milliken paid Edna a hundred fifty thousand dollars to keep her from proceeding with criminal charges against his son.”
“And Edna got Wendell’s house,” I said.
“Yes. Not the deed, but the right to live there for as long as either she or Jacoba was alive, which might as well have been the same thing as far as Wendell was concerned, since Edna came from sturdy stock and Jacoba was a mere child. It was a rather odd agreement. I always suspected that its very strangeness was Edna’s idea, that it was a cunning way for her to further punish the Sjorgens, since Wendell would have no reasonable way to explain it.
“Wendell also gave Edna sixty thousand dollars. She demanded a full confession as well, signed by both Jonnie and David, witnessed by the fathers, the lawyers, and myself and several others. Edna took one of the original copies, of course. I imagine she put it someplace safe, insurance in the event that Wendell tried something underhanded once the dust had settled, which, of course, would have been entirely in keeping with his character.”
For a moment Kayla and I sat there in silence. Again, Jonnie’s out-of-control libido had bobbed to the surface, this time with a mentally retarded girl fourteen years old. I glanced at Kayla. She was staring out a window at the town below, at long shadows leaning eastward in the waning afternoon sun.
She turned to Emmaline. “Did Jacoba have the baby?”
“That I don’t know. Once Edna accepted their terms, a cloak of silence descended over everything. It’s likely Jonnie himself didn’t know, or David. I never heard about a baby, not that I would have. It’s always possible that Jacoba miscarried, but I simply don’t know.”
Kayla set her saucer on the table in front of her. “But, if she had the baby, wouldn’t it be common knowledge? Wouldn’t there be records?”
“I’m sure there must,” Emmaline said. “In Myrtle Beach.”
“Myrtle Beach? North Carolina?” Kayla said. “Or is it south?”
“South,” Emmaline said. “Edna sent Jacoba away to live with her sister. I forget the sister’s name, but I’m pretty sure she never married. To the best of my knowledge, Jacoba never returned to Reno.”
“Even though Edna doted on her?” I said.
“Yes. Seems strange, doesn’t it? Edna’s revenge was that the Sjorgens would never again step foot in their own house as long as she was alive, but the agreement was that either Edna or Jacoba had to inhabit it. It couldn’t be allowed to stand empty. I can only imagine that Edna went to Myrtle Beach often to visit Jacoba, but I really don’t know.”
Kayla got up and paced. “I suppose there’s no doubt that my father and Milliken knew Jacoba was retarded,” she said.
“Oh, heavens no. None whatsoever. Reno was much smaller then. Jacoba wasn’t in school or anything, but she lived nearby. The boys had known her for years.”
Boys, I thought. Nineteen years old. Risking it all for a moment of fun.
“And then, after all that, Jonnie and Dave simply went on with their lives,” Kayla said.
“Yes. Or so it seems. It also appears to have settled the boys down. There were no further…incidents after that. Victor Milliken had no trouble raising his part of the settlement. Wendell didn’t either, but he gave up the house and had to endure a great deal of speculation about him and Edna, which I’m sure pleased Edna. Certainly she did nothing to lessen it, although the terms of the agreement forbade her to mention the incident between the boys and her daughter. The entire point of the arrangements was to buy her silence. The house had been recently renovated. It was Wendell’s pride, his boyhood home. To give it up like that, without any explanation…well, in the end, the whole thing simply blew the Sjorgen family apart.”
“Jane divorced Wendell,” I said.
“Yes.”
“And then, later, we elected Jonnie mayor of Reno.”
Emmaline smiled sadly. “Nothing ever slowed him down. Jonnie was always quite the charmer.”
* * *
The sun was a molten gold speck in the west when we left the house. The Toiyabe Mountains were tinged pink under a pastel-blue sky full of high, thin clouds painted a gaudy rose.
“You hungry?” I asked.
“Not very.”
“Maybe in a while.”
“Maybe.”
She was taking it hard. Jonnie was her father. We walked along the highway without speaking, then turned and took the road that led toward Stokes Castle. The road was dirt and gravel, winding not quite half a mile into the hills. As we rounded a final bend, the castle was a dark mass against a burgundy sunset. It was a square, smallish thing of hand-hewn granite, three stories tall, surprisingly ugly for a so-called castle, built over a century ago by mining baron Anson P. Stokes, one of those bizarre anomalies you find in a land settled by eccentrics. We had it all to ourselves, and to Mormon crickets, and bats flitting dark against the sky, this monument to whatever strange dreams or mad flights of grandeur Stokes once had. He’d lived in it for only a month or two in 1897, then abandoned it. It looked cold and uncomfortable. I would’ve abandoned it after eight hours, or less.
In silence, we watched the last vestige of daylight leave the sky. Stars came out. The moon, almost full, floated up over the Toiyabes, lighting our way back down the hill.
We ate at the International Hotel—a hotel in name only. It no longer rented rooms. During the time of the Civil War it had been dismantled board by board in Virginia City and trundled through the desert to Austin, then reassembled. They did things differently back then.
Afterward we walked the streets until the night chill drove us back to the Lincoln Motel. At an elevation of sixty-six hundred feet, the nights in Austin are cold, even in August.
The shower was too small for two. Nor was Kayla in the mood. She showered, then I did, and we went to bed.
Although the sag in the middle ensured we wouldn’t drift apart, Kayla clung to me. Not with passion, however. More than anything, I felt like a life raft, keeping her afloat. I could only imagine how it felt to learn such terrible things about your father.
We left the window open an inch, allowing cold air to drift into the room. Clean mountain air, full of magic and narcolepsy.
We slept.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I AWOKE, MISSING her.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring out the window at the night. Moonlight was on her neck, arms, breasts, sending glints of silver through her hair. Her nipples were erect in the cold. It was a hell of a sight, but I felt like a voyeur, looking at her without her knowing.
I sat next to her, our knees almost touching the wall beneath the windowsill. The town and the valley were bathed in eldritch light.
“He was a rotten son of a bitch,” Kayla breathed.
I had no answer to that.
She leaned a shoulder against mine. Her skin was cool. “When I was fourteen,” she said, “he came on to one of my girlfriends. Well, came on isn’t quite right, but…something.”
She spoke to the empty night, not looking at me.
“I never told anyone. By then he was married to his second wife, Anne. I didn’t like her very much. That’s one reason why I didn’t say anything, to her or to anyone. I didn’t want to cause trouble. And, I guess, there wasn’t all that much to say.”
A lone pickup truck rumbled along the highway fifty feet away, taillights and engine sounds fading, then gone.
“Her name was Suzy Evans. It was just the two of us. She was my best friend. Sometimes I’d sleep over at her place, or she would sleep over at mine. Dad—Jonnie—cupped her breast in a hallway one night as they were passing, squeezed gently. She was in a nightgown. Not flannel. Something filmy, like sheer polyester. It was way late. We didn’t think he was still up.”
“She didn’t think it was an accident?” I asked.
“No. She said he…reached out and grabbed. Squeezed her for a second, then smiled and kept going. Didn’t say a word.”
Another fourteen year old. “She never said anything to anyone, either?”
“Not that I ever heard. Maybe she thought no one would believe her. But she never came over again, and I never went back to her place. After that we drifted apart. I guess I didn’t believe her myself, not completely. I mean, my own father. It was so…weird. If it were true, it would have been unbelievably stupid of him, and I’d never thought of him as a stupid man. Disingenuous at times, but not outright stupid.”
I took her hand. Moonlight and cold night air bathed our bodies.
Kayla sighed. “I guess it was true, though. Probably was.”
I still didn’t tell her about Clair Hutson and the alleged attempted rape of Sarah Jean. No reason to. Kayla already knew more than she wanted to about Mayor Jonnie.
“Makes me wonder…” she murmured, letting the thought float away in a sigh.
“What?”
“Given how my father was, if…if maybe I have a half-brother or half-sister somewhere.”
“Victoria,” I said. It was out before I could stop it. It must have been on my mind, ever since Emmaline told us about Jacoba’s rape.
“What?”
“Nothing.” I closed my eyes at my stupidity. Too late. Too damned late.
“Victoria. You said Victoria.”
“It’s just a name.”
“You say names? They just pop out? Who is Victoria, Mort?”
Maybe I had to tell her, I didn’t know. Victoria had said she was Edna’s granddaughter. Maybe she was. Edna only had one child, Jacoba, who had been knocked up by either Jonnie Sjorgen or Dave Milliken. Maybe Jacoba had given birth to Victoria. But if Jacoba had never returned to Reno, why would Victoria have come back? Or was she lying? Maybe she was a scam artist. I wouldn’t have trusted her or her kid, Winter, with a roll of nickels.
Kayla grabbed my jaw and yanked my face toward hers. It hurt. “Who is Victoria?”
So I told her about my impromptu visit to Sjorgen House, being discovered by Winter outside, then Victoria, then my lengthy pseudo-conversation upstairs with Edna afterward.
“Victoria,” Kayla breathed. She looked at me. “You know a lot about what’s going on, Mr. Angel, sir.”
“That’s impossible, since I don’t have the slightest idea what’s going on.”
“You knew about Jacoba. Now I find that you know this woman, Victoria. And her daughter.”
