Civil Twilight (13 page)

I sat, staring out the windshield at the darkening fields. It hadn’t rained in three months. The grasses were tan, dry. The rolling summer hills of the
Golden State. Fire tinder. Here and there a boulder thrust out as if coughed up in one of the earthquakes. In depressions, clutches of scrub brush and live oaks huddled throwing their last shadows in the dusk. It was a surprisingly empty land for the nation’s most populous state, the kind of place where you could walk a long way before finding help.

Wallinsky spent time talking about cases he’d solved, techniques he used. I had the feeling he’d sensed my need for distance and was filling the space between us.

“So what about Madelyn Cesko?” I asked, after a while. “And what’s with Claire? Is there a cookbook gene?”

“Madelyn Cesko was killed.”

“Killed?” I’d remembered something unpleasant connected to her but not that she’d been a rural murder statistic.

“On her farm. Farm in the sense that she kept a kitchen garden for her work. The place is isolated, miles outside town, which isn’t more than a couple of stores and a gas station anyway. A brutal killing.”

“Brutal how?”

“Stabbed in the chest with her own chef’s knife.”

“Omigod!” Suddenly the air-conditioning was freezing. The worst that should have befallen her was a collapsed soufflé. “I’m beyond shocked. I mean, my mom had her cookbook! It’s, like, people whose books you make apple betty from don’t get killed . . .”

“The case was huge up here. I was just out of high school and got involved.”

“You were here then?”

“It was my intro to investigating. The biggest thing in Star Pine before or since. People still talk about it like it happened last week, like they were there even if they moved to town last year.”

“Who killed her? Why?” The truck rattled; outside muted colors whirled by as if unrelated to rocks and grass and bushes. Madelyn Cesko killed with her own knife! Karen Johnson dead on the freeway! I had a cold, foreboding feeling. “Who—?”

“Who killed her? Sonora Eades. A college girl.”

I exhaled.

“She was taking a survey”

“Huh?”

“You heard me right—a survey.”

“They were strangers?”

“So far as anyone knows.”

“Then why . . . how . . . ?”

But he didn’t answer. The truck had slowed, the road surface grown rougher. Metal rattled, the seat belt cut into my ribs. Low houses lurked under cover of trees behind fences fifty yards from the road. Wallinsky stared straight ahead and I couldn’t read him well enough to guess why he’d suddenly clammed up. The houses were closer together now, nearer the road. A sign proclaimed: “Welcome to Star Pine.” The road curved right and became a town street.

“Wallinsky, is this case personal?”

“Seem like that?” he asked, looking not at me but scanning out the window. “It’s just part of my history now, same as Mike is.”

“What about the killer? That girl, Sonora? Did the state have the death penalty then? Or did she get second degree?” With appeals, either way she could still be alive. “What could possibly have caused her to—”

He jerked the truck to the right and yanked the emergency brake, smack in front of a railroad train.

IT WASN’T A whole train, but a single car. The Caboose Café & Bar, announced the sign in shiny green with gold trim and red lettering outlined in gold. Inside, the place was brightly lit and packed with what must have been everybody in Trinity County.

“So, what’s your plan here?” I asked, but he was halfway out of the truck.

Wallinsky was an easy guy to be with—undoubtedly his stock in trade. But there was something about him I didn’t trust.

Inside, we grabbed two stools at the bar between a couple in their twenties and a dark-haired woman Wallinsky’s age who eyed him with interest. It was a tight fit. Wallinsky ordered us beers, burgers and fries.

“Edie, the owner,” he whispered to me, as a large red-haired woman three stools to my right, readjusted herself. She sat facing the room, resting one elbow on the bar, and leaning back so a roll of torso rested on the rail. The eight or ten tables were full, with voices battling friends and neighbors and a constant drum roll of dishes arriving, silver being bused back onto trays.

The beers came. We drank, Wallinksy heartily, me on a choke chain till I ate. I didn’t know what I was going to say here, but I was damned if I’d blow any chance of saying it. I nudged my companion. He huddled over his glass. Beyond, Edie looked to be eyeing him.

I didn’t like the feel of things. But in for a lamb, in for sheep. I took a swallow and said in Wallinsky’s direction, “So then, this is the place where”—I let my voice rise—“Madelyn Cesko died?”

Edie stared.

Wallinsky glared.

I hunched down, grabbed my glass with both hands as if it were an offering to her. “Sorry.”

Edie straightened up, looked over, and made the kind of sound suited to an offended matron at high tea.

Wallinsky concentrated on his beer.

“Oh ferchrissakes, Edie, go ahead and tell her. You spin it out for every stranger who buys a meal. She’s already got a drink,” the guy next to me said. When I swiveled to look at him, he winked.

Edie shot darts at him, shifted her butt and leaned around Wallinsky to ask, “You a reporter?”

I couldn’t be certain I’d guess the right answer, so I went with safety. “No. Just visiting my friend.” I patted Wallinsky’s thigh. He had an impressive ability to sink into the background. Edie’s attention was on me now. Everyone had gone quiet, watching Edie, as if waiting for the lion to be let into the coliseum.

“You heard of Madelyn Cesko?”

“She wrote cookbooks?”

Edie leaned forward.

“Madelyn,” she said firmly, “was not just any cookbook writer. She didn’t just churn out recipes. She was an institution.” She paused, then said, “She wrote ten cookbooks, five of them bestsellers across the state. She used to create a new dish for The Caboose here every single year. It was a tradition. There’d be a story in the local paper and mention in
The Record Searchlight
in Redding and once, in the
Chronicle.
It was so
popular that the first time we made each one there’d be a line outside. One year, we even had to take reservations.”

“Wow.” I nodded appreciatively. “She was great for business, huh?”

“Well, yes, of course. But what I’m telling you is what a lovely person she was for the whole town. Busy as she was, she took in Claire—that’s her niece—when her parents died. A two-year-old! Her with no experience with children! But that didn’t faze her. Next year she had a new cookbook and a new dish for The Caboose, too.”

“She lived here in town?”

“No, no. She had a little farm about thirty miles from here. She did all the work around the place herself. Her niece, Claire, helped along with some migrants. Even with a garden as small as hers, there’s a lot needs doing and she must have worked like crazy, what with trying the recipes and writing them up and all. Don’t know how she did it.”

“By not wasting time in here, for one thing,” someone called out.

Edie took a swallow of beer, staring at her glass till the room was quiet again. I wondered how long she’d been honing her delivery on this story. She waited half a minute until a guy at the nearest table seemed about to speak. “That summer,” she said, “twenty-five years ago, this college girl comes to town. Says she’s doing a survey for a sociology project on the differences between farm life and city life or some garbage like that.”

“Don’t need any survey to tell you that. On the farm you work, in the city you sit. Pretty obvious,” the same voice explained.

“That’s what sociology is—the study of the obvious.” The woman next to Wallinsky grinned at us and let her gaze linger on him.

Everyone laughed, except Edie.

“So she—this is Sonora Eades I’m talking about—she drives out to the farm and I guess she asks her questions. But the answer she gets is Madelyn Cesko’s too busy to be bothered with stuff like that. If she’d checked before
she went wandering out there any of us could have told her. ‘Don’t go out there expecting her to be the same as she is in town’—not that Sonora Eades would have known how she was in town—but my point is we all knew not to bother her at home.”

She leaned toward me, lowering her voice. “But she—
she
—didn’t ask anything about Madelyn Cesko. She’s banging on doors all over the area. So, out she goes. Not once, but twice at least. We don’t know what all went on there because after she killed Madelyn she lit out, leaving poor Claire, her niece, there with the body—and that girl was only fifteen. She was a wreck. Had to go into treatment in San Francisco for months. Never the same afterwards. She was a normal kid—one of my cousins went to school with her, not in her class but in the next grade, and said she was. A normal kid, that is. Quiet, but normal. Isn’t that right, Patty?” She asked the woman next to Wallinsky.

“I wasn’t in her class either, but it’s a small school. No one talked about her before, so she must have been okay.”

Three or four of the people at tables agreed. But Patty wasn’t looking at them. She was eyeing Wallinsky as if he was a specimen of some kind. Whatever her motive, it couldn’t be good.

“What did Claire look like?” I asked, curious.

“Like a waif, a blonde waif, like she’d had the life sucked out of her.”

I gasped.

Edie nodded appreciatively.

I could have smacked her. It was a moment before I could say, “But what do
you
think happened, Edie?”

“We’re never going to know for sure, not now. Claire wasn’t in any condition to talk about it for a good long time. Of course, those migrants vanished like mist on a hot morning. Like I said, Sonora Eades did her killing and got out quick. Left Claire with her aunt’s body, dead or near dead.
Poor girl didn’t know how to drive. Don’t know how long she tried to save Madelyn, if that’s what she did. Or maybe she was in shock so bad she just sat there. Whatever, it was the next day before a delivery guy saw her walking along the blacktop. He brought her into town. By the time the sheriff got out to the house, Madelyn’d been dead over twenty-four hours. It was summer. The sheriff said he’d never seen a crime scene bad as that.”

“Because her body’d, uh, gone bad?”

“Blood all over the place.”

“Everywhere?”

“All over the stoop, the door, the outside of the house. Like it’d been splattered with paint.”

“But why? Why’d she kill her? Burglary?”

“Didn’t take anything, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t intend to. Claire came in from the garden and scared her off.”

I gasped. “Awful!” I muttered. “How totally awful for her!” I glanced at Wallinsky, but he’d turned toward his plate. For all his history with Madelyn Cesko’s murder, it was suddenly as if a few fries were more compelling.

“That’s the truth. You can see why poor Claire needed to be sent off for treatment. She’s lucky to be as sane as she is now. After the tragedy they were afraid to even send her to San Francisco. She kept talking about the Golden Gate Bridge—you know, jumping?”

As a native of the city, I knew only too well.

“But they do amazing things at those clinics,” Edie went on, “and she saw someone in Redding every week for a year or so, and then there was the medication—I don’t know if she’s even on that anymore.”

“Claire’s still here?”

“Of course. She’s as back to normal as she’s ever going to get, able to run Madelyn’s farm all by herself. You’ve got to hand it to her.”

“You’ve seen her? Recently?”

“Of course, I have. Last week right out front here.”

Last week was an eternity ago. Three days ago Karen Johnson hadn’t been hurled off the fifth-floor slab onto the freeway.

“Claire Cesko’s still here,” I said aloud, just to make the words real. “She’s lived out there alone all this time?” How could she live there alone with the memory? Year after year?

“Word is she thought about going away, maybe to college or to the city, but it was more than she could handle. It’s hard running a place like that, but it’s what she knows. We see her in town every week or so, picking up groceries and the like. She’s not like her aunt when she came to town; Claire doesn’t talk more than she has to. Madelyn had a word for everyone.”

Edie looked at me pointedly. “If you ran into her, you’d probably think she was rude, but we’re used to her. We don’t even notice it now. It’s just the way she is. Could be lots worse.”

“What does she say about Sonora Eades now?” Wallinsky’s voice seemed to come out of nowhere.

“Claire never mentioned her, never said the kind of things you’d think. It was way too much for her just to keep on keeping on. I don’t think she ever got to the point of turning her fury on Sonora. She just swallowed it and let it eat away at her all these years.” Edie gave a mighty shrug. “That’s how I see it, anyway—not that I’m any shrink.”

“What happened to Sonora afterwards? Why,” I said, “was it so clear that she killed Madelyn? It doesn’t sound as if Claire, or anyone, actually saw her do it.”

“No one there but her and Claire, and the migrants. They came and went. They had no reason to harm Madelyn. It wasn’t one of them.”

“But how do—”

“Or Claire, if that’s where you’re headed.”

It was. “How—”

“Because”—Edie paused, checked her audience—“the Eades girl’s fingerprint was on the knife. On the handle, pressed into Madelyn’s blood.”

The room went silent. Though I suspected that, as an audience, they were on the verge of applause.

“But—”

“No buts. Not at all. We must’ve had every cop and every sheriff and all the techs from the coroner’s office in here. And the press! That was back when papers had their own reporters, didn’t just pick up stuff off the wire.”