Rainbow's End (50 page)

Dolly turned the sign and smiled. “It's just that it's so early. Come on in.”

“I was up at dawn, wanted to see the sunrise. Some sunrise.” He said this as he followed her through the store.

“Looks artificial almost, too pretty to be true.” She stopped to adjust some plastic bottles of stuff and then went on down the aisle. Jury followed, noticing as he did all of the hair-care products. Ye gods, judging from this lot, a woman could spend half a day washing her hair. He picked up a canister of mousse and had the childish desire to write in white foam across the plate-glass window. He returned that to its large mousse family—how many brands were there of the stuff?—and studied a white plastic cylinder that said “sculpting gel.” What the hell was that? He wondered if it was something you get in London and whether Fiona had it. Never mind, she could always use more. As he passed the makeup display, he thought of Carole-anne. That would only be lily gilding, so why bother? Anyway, he had already bought Carole-anne some earrings, little cascades of silver coyotes.

At the end of the aisle were more coyotes, some cloth, some tin wind-up toys. Jury tossed one up a little, judging its weight. Then he took purchases to Dolly Schell.

“I'll have these. Presents.” He smiled as she took them from him. “And some Dramamine too, I think. Got a bit sick on the flight from New York.”

“A lot of people say that. It has something to do with the air mass over the mountains.” She took some Dramamine from the display behind her and dropped that in the bag. The drawer of the old-fashioned register popped out when she hit some keys. “You're leaving?” He nodded and she frowned, looking disappointed. “When's your flight?”

“This afternoon. Around three. That's to New York. I have to wait—oh, I don't know, with the time difference, perhaps a couple of hours for the London flight. Middle of the damned night, those flights.”

Dolly returned his change and asked, “Did you get what you wanted? I mean about Angela?”

“No. Perhaps there's nothing to get.” He shrugged. “Doesn't seem to be anyone, not anyone I talked to, who can think why anyone around here would wish her harm.”

Dolly Schell looked up at him, an ironic smile on her mouth. “Except me?”

Jury thought for a moment. “Did you really dislike her that much? Enough to kill her?”

Now Dolly grew quiet. “I can't say absolutely no.”

That was clever.
Mary's voice spoke in his head. “How about Mary?”

“Mary? What about her?”

“She works for you sometimes.”

Dolly frowned. “She delivers prescriptions if people want deliveries.” She put her hand on a small pile of white envelopes lying by the cash register. “These should have gone out yesterday afternoon. She didn't show up. Rather annoying. I guess I'll have to get somebody else. Mary's not the most dependable person.”

“Don't blame her; blame me. I was out at their house, talking to the housekeeper. Mary came in and I talked to her too. Had dinner with Dr. Anders—”

Dolly's face grew softer.

“Nils is very fond of her,” said Jury absently as he collected his purchases.

“Angela? Probably.”

“No, Mary. I doubt he was really all that fond of Angela.” Too late to call the words back. He had spoken—albeit with perfect innocence—without thinking.

She looked at him quizzically. “Mary?”

“I only meant . . . ” Jury was stumped. He didn't know how to cover up his blunder.

But when she spoke next, it was with a smile: “Is Nils really very fond of anyone?”

Jury said, clumsily, “It was pleasant, our talk. It did tell me a good deal.”

Again, she gave him an ironic smile.

“OUT TO HELL-AND-GONE,
” Rosella had said, impatiently, as, inside the Casita de Hope, she pointed towards a window facing west. “
Her and that damned coyote of hers walk out there whenever my back's turned.
”

Jury saw her now in Hell-and-gone. He'd been walking for perhaps ten minutes when he came out of a small cactus forest to see Mary Dark Hope a hundred feet away, sitting on a rock. He did not see Sunny.

Her legs were pulled up, her chin on her knees. She turned her head towards Jury. “Hello.” Mary pushed her hair back from her face with a gesture that in a woman would have seemed flirtatious, but on Mary seemed nothing more than a wish to get her hair out of her face. “How'd you find here?”

“ ‘Here'?” He smiled. “I found ‘here' by following Rosella's directions.”

“Really? I didn't think she knew.”

Jury sat beside her on the boulder, its top worn smooth by weather and much sitting. “She doesn't. It's just that you usually walk in this general direction.” Jury looked towards the mountains, purple in the distance; the sky was a hard, clear blue. “You come here a lot.”

“Yes. I like to watch the sunset.”

He nodded. Then he said, “I talked to Dolly Schell again.” He looked at her. “After that comment you made last evening.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You thought it was ‘clever' of her to admit to something I'd be sure to find out anyway.”

Apparently taking the question as rhetorical, she just kept staring straight ahead.

“It sounds pretty improbable. Even if she'd found a way to murder Angela, it's improbable that the two British tourists would be involved.”

“Sherlock Holmes.”

“What?”

“He said if you eliminate the impossible, then if what's left over is improbable, it makes no difference, you go with it.”

“Well, Sherlock had a better mind than I have.”

There was a silence, and then she asked, “When will they send—Angie home?” Her voice tripped up on the “Angie.”

Painful question. “Just as soon as they determine the cause of death.”

“It's taking them long enough.”

“It's difficult, not knowing the—possibilities.”

Mary turned to look at him through her crystal-spring-colored eyes. “That's sort of like saying, ‘If they knew, they'd know.' ”

Jury smiled. “Sounds like it, I expect. But it's three times as hard because of the other two women whose deaths might be related. Did the three of them meet in England? It's possible. Did the three perhaps dine together? Could they have ingested something that worked in quite different ways on each of them? They could all have died by accident.” Two of them, perhaps. Fanny Hamilton had died back in January.

“And they could all have been murdered.” Mary shied a flat stone at a cactus.

“That's even harder to demonstrate. But one of the reasons this is taking so long is that it's become a three-way investigation.”

She picked up another flat stone. “I haven't figured out why she'd kill them too, the Englishwomen.”

Perhaps her feeling about Dolly Schell could serve as some sort of channel for grief. It was easier if you could get angry. Imagine a future managed by a social worker. The knowledge that Dolly Schell was her only relation must have made the knowledge of her diminished family particularly awful.

She scratched with a stick in the dirt. “You're leaving, aren't you?” Her voice was sad.

“In a few hours.”

“Will you be back?”

“We'll see each other again.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

They sat side by side, looking off across the godforsaken landscape. Jury lost any sense of time, so that he wondered how long they'd been there when he heard several short, distinct barks that soared upwards in such a desolate howl the hairs on his neck stood up.

“That Sunny?”

Mary Dark Hope nodded. “I guess it is.”

“Somehow, that just doesn't sound like a German shepherd.”

For a moment she was silent. Then she said, “I didn't say he was
all
German shepherd.”

After seven hours, and no sleep, Jury made sure he was in the first clutch of passengers off the BA flight and into Terminal 3, where passport control would make life a hell for travellers not holding EEC passports. Heathrow was in the throes of its usual travails and uproars: planes delayed, passengers stranded, kids squalling—and always, the lines of people looking anxious as if theirs was the last flight to heaven. Cancelled.

The plane had landed at six a.m.; it was now six-forty, and Jury wanted nothing more than to get to Islington, call Plant, call Macalvie, drop into bed. But first he had his bargain to keep.

He saw her sitting on a high stool behind the register and staring out over the terminal. What a bloody boring job that must be, he thought, as he muscled his way through a swamp of Japanese travellers, feeling not a whit guilty for being twice as big as they were. He could see from the expression on the face of the interpreter that they were making her life miserable already.

Finally, he reached the counter. “Hello, Des,” said Jury, as he set down his suitcase.

Perhaps because she'd been called back from some interior landscape, she regarded him vacantly at first, but then gave a little start of pleasure. “It's
you
!”

“Me. Back from the jaws of nicotine hell. I felt pretty self-righteous sitting in the no-smoking zone, I can tell you. Five days and not one fag. I thought it'd kill me.”

“Me, too. But I held out. Even so, I couldn't think of anything but a smoke. And
then
having to work this
counter
and being always having to look at the bloody things—”

As if taking a cue, a customer materialized at that moment, forcing her to look at the bloody things. He put down a ten-pound note and asked for two packets of Marlboros, one of which he jammed in his briefcase. The pack in his hand he tamped a half-dozen times on the counter, then zipped off the line of gold cellophane, then tore at the tin foil, then extracted one of the cigarettes, and finally stuffed it in his mouth. He brought out his Zippo and lit up. He inhaled, and then said, “Damn those smokeless flights.” He said this sheepishly, as if he were wedded to this ritual and only after its completion was he permitted to acknowledge the presence of others.

“I know how you feel,” said Jury. “We're trying to stop, too.” He nodded at Des.

“Stop? God, how I wish I could. I've tried everything, every bloody thing: I've tried nicotine-free cigarettes—they taste like empty air; those holders that keep reducing the amount of nicotine; gum, pills, group therapy; nicotine patches;
individual therapy
, that costs an arm and a leg; you name it, I've done it. Nothing works.”

Watching him inhale again, Jury was certain that not a centimeter of lung was missing its nicotine bath.

The stranger said, “So how'd you do it?”

Jury laughed. “Well, I haven't really ‘done' it, you know. I just managed to stay off them for five days, well, seven counting the days before I left. And so has Des.”

Ruefully, the man looked at the cigarette between his fingers and shook his head sadly, “Five days, bloody hell, I can't last for even five
hours.
No willpower. None.”

“Oh, I don't think it's willpower.”

He seemed astonished. “You don't? Then what?”

The fellow looked so terribly serious about all of this. Here were two people who had undertaken some sort of vision quest, or had faced the Minotaur, or had run the rapids and lived to tell about it. It was as if his two soul mates here were offering him some sort of Sanctuary. They might have been priests and he the penitent.

Jury said, “I think you have to try something or find something that's more important to you than smoking. Make a pact with someone else who's trying to quit. Your wife, a friend, anyone. You've got to make the goal attainable, too, like telling yourself it's only for two days, three.”

“Like AA, kind of. ‘One day at a time.' That kind of thing.”

“That kind of thing, yes.”

The man checked his watch, thrust out his hand. “Thanks. It's a relief to find that the three of us have something in common, right?”

The three of us.
Something shifted in Jury's mind; he saw himself back in the Silver Heron. Then Des was waving as their newfound friend dashed to security control.

Des said, “That's right, what he said. I got a friend in AA. It's funny how much it makes a bond between people, trying to stop drinking. I expect it's the same with smoking.” Des smiled. “I owe you a kiss.” Keeping her end of the bargain, she leaned over the counter, threw her arms around him, and gave him one slightly clumsy, quite long kiss.

“And I owe you a bracelet.” He moved to the counter on the other side of the register.

“It's gone. It's sold,” said Des, sadly.

“
What
?”

She nodded. “Yesterday. Some woman bought it.” She sighed. “But that's all right.”

No, it isn't, thought Jury, surprised by the force of his anger. That bracelet represented something—a prize, a victory. Now, the two of them looked into the case where a satin-covered wheel turned ceaselessly, jerking to a stop and starting again.

“I don't know why I fancied it so much. I mean, it wasn't really any prettier than these ones.” She reached in and pointed to a row of silver bracelets.

“The point is you
did
fancy it. That's what matters.” He looked at her. “And you didn't even go for your smokes, even when that happened?” She shook her head and looked quite resolute and proud. “That's bloody marvellous.” He bent down to open his suitcase, found the earrings intended for Carole-anne, and said, “Look, it's not your bracelet, but I picked these up in Santa Fe, they're very Southwest. I got them in case—” Jury shrugged, not wanting to make this into a total lie. Carole-anne would kill him, of course, coming back without a present for her.