Silent Partner (43 page)

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We started to leave. Jasper ran after us, grunting sounds. We stopped. He gave me a drawing, turned away, embarrassed.

I raised his weak chin with my hand, mouthed "Thank you," overenunciating just as the boy had.

Jasper's grin said he understood. I held out my hand. This time he gave it a weak shake and held on.

"Come on, mister," said Gabriel. "Leave them be."

I patted the little man's hand and pried it loose, followed toward the willows, jogging to keep pace. Before stepping under the weeping green branches, I looked back and saw the two of them, hand in hand, standing in the middle of their dirt lot. Staring after us as if we were explorers—conquistadors setting out for some brave new world that they could never hope to see.

He climbed the stairs, taking three at a time. I followed, noticed a wooden sign near the entrance.

HE'D PARKED a big restored Triumph motorcycle in back of the Seville.

Two helmets, one candy-apple red, the other starred and striped, dangled from the handlebars.

He put on the red one, climbed on, and kick-started the bike.

I said, "Who told you I was here? Wendy?"

He ran his hand over his bristle-top and tried to stare me down.

"We take care of each other, mister."

He gave the bike gas, set off a dust storm in the dry weeds, then did a wheelie and peeled out. I jumped into the Seville, trailed him as quickly as I could, lost sight of him past the abandoned press, but found him a second later, headed back toward the village. I put on speed, caught up.

We passed the mailbox that bore his family name, kept going until the schoolhouse, where he decelerated further and signaled right. He shot up the driveway, circled the playground, came to a halt at the schoolhouse steps.

WILLOW GLEN SCHOOL

ESTABLISHED 1938 ONCE PART OF THE BLALOCK RANCH

The letters were rustic and burned into the wood. Same style on the sign marking La Mar Road, a private road in Holmby Hills. As I stopped to take that in, Gabriel made it to the top of the stairs, threw open the door, and let it swing shut behind him. I ran up, caught it, and walked into a big, airy schoolroom that smelled of finger-paint and pencil shavings. On the brightly painted walls were health and safety posters, crayon drawings. No apples. Blackboards hung on three walls, below Palmer penmanship guides. An American flag dangled over a large, round clock that put the time at 4:40. Facing each blackboard were about ten wooden school desks—the old-fashioned type, with narrow tops and inkwells.

A partners' desk faced all three seating groups. A fair-haired woman holding a pencil sat behind
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it. Gabriel stood over her, whispering. When he saw me, he straightened and cleared his throat.

The woman put the pencil down and looked up.

She appeared to be in her early forties, with short wavy hair and broad, square shoulders. She wore a short-sleeved white blouse. Her arms were tan, fleshy, ending in dainty, long-nailed hands.

Gabriel whispered something to her.

I said, "Hello," and came closer.

She stood. Six feet or close to it, and older than a first impression suggested—late forties or early fifties. The white blouse was tucked into a knee-length brown linen skirt. She had heavy breasts, a thin, almost pinched waist that accentuated the breadth of her shoulders. Beneath the tan was a bed of ruddiness—a suggestion of the same coral tone that blanketed her son like some perpetual sunburn. She had a long, pleasant face enhanced by carefully applied makeup, full lips, and large, luminous, amber eyes. Her nose was prominent, her chin cleft and firmly set. An open face, strong and weathered.

"Hello," she said, without warmth. "What can I do for you, sir?"

"I wanted to talk about Sharon Ransom. I'm Alex Delaware."

Hearing my name changed her. She said, "Oh," in a weaker voice.

"Mom," said Gabriel, taking her arm.

"It's all right, honey. Go back to the house and let me talk to this man."

"No way, Mom. We don't know him."

"It's all right, Gabe."

"Mo-om."

"Gabriel, if I tell you it's all right, then it's all right. Now kindly get back to the house and attend to your chores. The old Spartans back of the pumpkin patch need pruning. There's still plenty of corn to husk, and the pumpkin vines need tying."

He grunted, gave me the evil eye.

"Go, Gabey," she said.

He removed his hand from her arm, shot me another glare, then pulled out his key ring and stomped out, muttering.

"Thank you, honey," she called out just before the door closed.

When he was gone, she said, "We lost Mr. Leidecker last spring. Since then, Gabe's been trying to replace his dad and I'm afraid he's grown overly protective."

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"A good son," I said.

"A wonderful one. But he's still just a child. The first time people meet him, they're overwhelmed by his size. They don't realize that he's only sixteen. I didn't hear his bike start. Did you?"

"No."

She walked to a window and yelled down: "I said back home, Gabriel Leidecker. Get those vines propped up by the time I get back or it's curtains for you, kid."

Protest noises floated up from below. She stood in the window, hands on hips. "Such a baby,"

she said with affection. "Probably my fault—I was much harder on his brothers."

"How many children do you have?"

"Five. Five boys. All married and gone except for Gabey. Subconsciously I probably want to keep him immature."

She shouted, "Scoot!" and waved out the window. The rumble of the Triumph filtered up to us.

When the silence returned, she shook my hand and said, "I'm Helen Leidecker. Forgive me for not greeting you properly. Gabe didn't tell me who you were or what you were about. Just that some city stranger was snooping around the Ransoms' place and wanting to talk to me." She pointed to the school desks. 'If you don't mind one of those, please sit down."

"Brings back memories," I said, squeezing behind a front-row seat.

"Oh, really? Did you attend a school like this?"

"We had more than one room, but the setting was similar."

"Where was that, Dr. Delaware?"

Dr. Delaware. I hadn't given her my title. "Missouri."

"A midwesterner," she said. "I'm originally from New York. If someone had told me I'd end up in a sleepy little hamlet like Willow Glen, I'd have thought it hilarious."

"Where in New York?"

"Long Island. The Hamptons—not the wealthy part. My people serviced the idle rich."

She went back behind her desk and sat.

"If you're thirsty," she said, "there's a cooler full of drinks around back, but I'm afraid all we've got is milk, chocolate milk, or orange drink." She smiled, got younger again. "I've repeated that so many times it's etched indelibly into my brain."

"No thanks," I said. "I had a big lunch."

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"Wendy's a wonderful cook, isn't she?"

"Wonderful early warning system too."

"As I said, Dr. Delaware, this is a sleepy little hamlet. Everyone knows everything about everybody."

"Does that include knowledge of Shirlee and Jasper Ransom?"

"Especially them. They need special kindness."

"Especially now," I said.

Her face collapsed, as if suddenly filleted. "Oh, gosh," she said, and opened a desk drawer.

Taking out an embroidered handkerchief, she dabbed at her eyes. When she turned them on me again, grief had made them even larger.

"They don't read the papers," she said, "can barely read a primer. How am I going to tell them?"

I had no answer for that. I was weary of searching for answers. "Do they have other family?"

She shook her head. "She was all they had. And me. I've become their mother. I know I'm going to have to deal with it."

She pressed a handkerchief to her face like a poultice.

"Please excuse me," she said. "I'm as shaky as the day I read about it—that was a horror. I just can't believe it. She was so beautiful, so alive."

"Yes, she was."

"For all intents and purposes I was the one who raised her. And now she's gone, blotted out. As if she never existed in the first place. Such a damned, ugly waste — Thinking about it makes me angry at her. Which is unfair. It was her life. She never asked for what I gave her, never...Oh, I don't know!"

She averted her face. Her makeup had started to run. She reminded me of a parade float the morning after.

I said, "It was her life. But she left a lot of people grieving."

"This is more than grief," she said. "I've just been through that. This is worse. I thought I knew her like a daughter, but all these years she must have been carrying around so much pain. I had no idea—she never expressed it."

"No one knew," I said. "She never really showed herself."

She threw up her hands and let them drop like dead weights. "What could have been so terrible that she lost all hope?"

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"I don't know. That's why I'm up here, Mrs. Leidecker."

"Helen."

"Alex."

"Alex," she said. "Alex Delaware. How strange to meet you after all these years. In a way I feel I know you. She told me all about you—how much she loved you. She considered you the one true love of her life, even though she knew it could never work out because of your sister.

Despite that, she admired you so deeply for the way you devoted yourself to Joan."

She must have read the shock on my face as pain and gave me a look rich with sympathy.

"Joan," I said.

"The poor thing. How's she doing?"

"About the same."

She nodded sadly. "Sharon knew her condition would never really improve. But even though your commitment to Joan meant you could never commit fully to anyone else, she admired you for it. If anything, I'd say it intensified her love for you. She talked about you as if you were a saint. She felt that kind of family loyalty was so rare nowadays."

"I'm hardly a saint," I said.

"But you are a good man. And that old cliche remains valid as ever: They're hard to find." A faraway look came onto her face. "Mr. Leidecker was one. Taciturn, a stubborn Dutchman, but a heart of gold. Gabe has some of that goodness—he's a kind boy. I only hope losing his dad so young doesn't harden him."

She stood up, walked over to one of the blackboards, and made a few cursory swipes with a rag.

The effort seemed to exhaust her. She returned to her seat, straightened papers, and said, "It's been a year for losses. Poor Shirlee and Jasper. I so dread telling them. It's my own doing. I changed their lives; now the change has wrought tragedy."

"There's no reason to blame you—"

"Please," she said gently. "I know it's not rational, but I can't help the way I feel. If I hadn't gotten involved in their lives, things would have been different."

"But not necessarily better."

"Who knows," she said. Her eyes had filled with tears. "Who knows."

She looked at the clock on the wall. "I've been cooped up in here all afternoon grading papers. I could really use a stretch."

"Me too."

As we descended the schoolhouse steps I pointed to the wooden sign.

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"The Blalock Ranch. Weren't they into shipping, or something?"

"Steel and railroads. It was never really a ranch. Back in the twenties, they were competing with Southern Pacific for the rail lines connecting California with the rest of the country. They surveyed San Bernadino and Riverside for an inland route and bought up a good chunk of both counties—entire villages at a time. They paid top dollar to get Willow Glen land away from the apple farmers who'd homesteaded it since the Civil War. The result was a huge spread that they called a ranch. But they never grew or raised anything on it, just fenced it in and posted guards.

And the railroad was never built—the Depression. After World War Two, they started selling some of the smaller parcels back to private people. But several of the big tracts were snapped up by another corporation."

"Which one?"

She patted her hair. "Some aviation concern—the one run by that mad billionaire, Belding." She smiled. "And that, Dr. Delaware, is your California history lesson for the day."

We entered the playground, strolled past swings and slides, headed toward the forest that carpeted the foot of the mountains.

"Does Magna still own land here?" I asked.

"Plenty of it. But they won't sell. People have tried. For all intents and purposes that keeps Willow Glen a backwater speck. Most of the old families have given up, sold out to rich doctors and lawyers who use the orchards for tax write-offs and run them down—capped irrigation lines, no pruning or fertilizing. Most of them don't even bother to come up and harvest. In some places the earth's turned hard and dry as cement. The few growers who've stayed have become suspicious and mistrustful—they're convinced it's all part of a conspiracy to run things down so the city folk can buy what's left on the cheap and put up condominiums or something."

"That's what Wendy thought."

"Her folks are newcomers, really pretty naive. But you have to admire them for trying."

"Who owns the land Jasper and Shirlee live on?"

"That's Magna land."

"Is that common knowledge?"

"Mr. Leidecker told me, and he was hardly a gossip."

"How'd they end up there?"

"No one knows. According to Mr. Leidecker—I wasn't living here then—they showed up at the general store to buy groceries back in 1956—back when there was a general store. When people tried to talk to them, Jasper waved his hands and grunted and she giggled. It was obvious they were retarded—children who'll never grow up. The prevailing theory is that they escaped from some institution, maybe wandered away from a bus and ended up here by accident. People help them when it's needed, but in general no one pays them much mind. They're harmless."

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"Someone pays them mind," I said. "Five hundred dollars a month."

She gave a hand-in-the-cookie-jar look. "I beg your pardon."