Both Ends of the Night Page 2

  I concentrated on completing the turn. Giving her time. My eyes swept the sky for other aircraft, but I didn’t spot any. In spite of its being a beautifully clear November Friday, there had been little traffic on the way here or at either airport. Again I rolled out and brought the Cessna straight and level, taking in the way the watery sunlight put a glow on the browned hills.

  When it seemed Matty was closing off again, I said, “You didn’t file a report because you think John disappeared voluntarily and will be angry with you when he comes back, for calling police attention to him.”

  “… Something like that.”

  “And you think the disappearance has its roots in this past he never speaks of.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Why?”

  “Just a feeling.”

  “What were the exact circumstances of his leaving?”

  “Damned if I know. I was away, had flown a couple of businessmen down to Monterey on a charter.”

  “You’re taking on charters as well as instructing?”

  “Sure. It’s a good way to pick up extra cash, and the routes’re so familiar I could fly them in my sleep. I haven’t been on a cross-country to unfamiliar territory in ten months; I’ve probably forgotten how to plot a course. Not that I’m complaining; I enjoy being home.”

  “So you were in Monterey the day John disappeared.”

  “Yes. When I got back, he wasn’t home and one of the trucks was gone. It was late, but I didn’t think anything of it, just went to bed. But in the morning I got worried—he never stayed away all night—and took a good look around. His shaving stuff, duffel bag, backpack, and some of his clothes were gone. One of the guns, too—a forty-four Magnum.”

  “And he gave you no indication whatsoever that he would be going away?”

  “Well, maybe. A couple of days before, he was supposed to have lunch with me at the diner, but when I got back from my eleven-o’clock lesson, he was very nervous—upset, really—and said he had to cancel. A problem at the tree farm, he claimed, but he wouldn’t go into it. Then he wasn’t around much till the night before I was due to fly to Monterey.”

  “And that night?”

  “Just an ordinary night at home, except he was… well, more loving than usual.”

  “As if he was saying good-bye?”

  She compressed her lips and shook her head, unwilling to consider that.

  I put the Cessna into a steep-banked turn, thinking to head back toward the airport. “Okay, exactly what do you know about John’s background?”

  “Very little. He came to town ten years ago with his baby son and bought a half interest in this failing tree farm.

  He says trees are one of the few things he really understands, and he must understand them pretty well, because the farm’s turning a good profit and he bought out his partner last year.”

  “Back up a minute—he has a son?”

  “Zachary. He’s eleven.”

  “Is he with you?”

  “Uh-huh. He’s a good kid, we get on. And I guess John trusts me to look after him.” She paused, reflective. “Zach hasn’t had an easy time of it the past few years. He’s curious about where he was born and what his mother was like—normal, at his age. But John won’t talk about it, and it’s driving a wedge between them at a time when a boy needs to be close to his father. There’re no family photos; John doesn’t get letters from relatives—or anybody else. It’s like he’s trying to erase his entire life before he came here.”

  “And you haven’t asked him why?”

  “No.”

  To most people it might have seemed curious that a strong, outspoken woman like Matty Wildress wouldn’t have confronted the issue. But she was talking to the right person: I had avoided a similar confrontation with Hy during the years he’d remained stubbornly silent about the ugly things he’d seen and done as a charter pilot in Southeast Asia.

  Matty added, “I figured if I gave him some space he’d eventually tell me.”

  I’d figured the same with Hy, and he’d finally unburdened himself. But John Seabrook had left Matty without a word.

  I asked, “Where was Zach when his father left?”

  “Staying with Karla and Wes Payne, our neighbors. Wes used to be John’s partner. That’s another thing that tells me he planned to leave; a couple of days before, he arranged for Zach to sleep over at the Paynes’ that night.”

  “Does Zach have any idea where John might’ve gone—or why?”

  “He’s as puzzled as I am. Hurt, too.”

  “I’d say you’re pretty damn hurt yourself. And you’re afraid you’re involved in something you can’t handle.”

  She’d been looking at the ground as I continued to turn. Now she whipped her head around, nostrils flaring. “Hey, McCone, that’s getting too damn personal. Back off!”

  At last I’d caught a glimpse of the old Matty—the woman who did not passively accept the blows life dealt her, the woman who fought back. But the old Matty could also be closed off, prickly, and quick to take offense. She’d have to unbend if I was to work for her.

  Instead of backing off, I rolled out of the turn and began pulling back on the yoke.

  “What the hell?” she said.

  I kept pulling back, raising the Cessna’s nose higher and higher.

  “McCone!”

  I grinned at her. Kept pulling till I felt the controls go mushy. The stall horn squealed, the plane shuddered, and the lift went out from under the wings. The Cessna plummeted wildly, yawing to the left.

  And I took my hands and feet off the controls.

  Matty grabbed my arm and shouted, “Yes!”

  I folded my hands in my lap as the Cessna pitched nose downward. Hills and pastures and trees and ranch buildings flashed past the windows at unnatural angles. Then, slowly, the plane righted itself. Its nose tipped upward and it began to fly without any help from me.

  Matty was laughing now. “God damn, you sure did get over hating stalls!”

  “Yeah, I did.” I got back on the controls, brought us to level flight again.

  Suddenly she was serious, studying my face. “You’ve changed, McCone.”

  “Sure I have. Now, how about you? You’ve always hated talking about anything personal. It’s time you changed, too.”

  Two

  The tidy rows of Douglas fir started beyond the drainage ditch beside the country road and spread up the hillside, parting like a forked river around a white frame farmhouse, then reconverging. Here and there branches brushed the sides of Matty’s van as she steered it along the potholed driveway. Even with the windows closed, the trees’ scent was strong, and it gave me a flash of childlike anticipation. With surprise, I realized Christmas was only five weeks away.

  “Let me go over what you wrote me in my birthday card,” I said. “You met John at the airport last September, on the day the pilots’ association gives rides to raise money for charity.”

  “Right. Zach read about it in the paper and begged John to let him go up. I took him in that old 150 you trained in.”

  “John didn’t want a ride, too?”

  “God, no. He hates to fly, says he’ll never set foot in a light plane.” She pulled the van under an apple tree in the weedy front yard, where leaves and deadfall fruit lay on the ground. The house was one story, with a dormer attic window and a deep wraparound porch. Fuchsia plants, leggy now, hung from the eaves.

  “Nice place,” I said.

  “Thanks. The yard could do with some work, and the house was kind of run down when I moved in. John had just bought out his partner and was putting all his energy into the tree farm, and besides, he’s not good with stuff like painting and carpentry. I am, so he gave me free rein.”

  We got out of the van and crossed to the wide front steps. “Okay,” I said, “you gave Zach a ride…”

  “While John ate lunch at the diner. After that, he started hanging around the airport. He claimed it was the Seven Niner burgers that kept calli
ng him back—one of the few things we’ve got in common is love of a good burger. But I knew it was really me.”

  “And he courted you throughout the fall and the holidays, till you moved in after New Year’s.”

  Matty fumbled with her keys and inserted one in the lock. “Courted! That’s one hell of a… what d’you call them?”

  “Euphemisms?”

  “Right. What he did was go after me with all the subtlety of a bull moose in rutting season. We had a damned good time together, and I decided I’d be a fool to let him get away, especially at the start of a cold, wet winter.”

  The hallway she led me into was narrow and wainscoted. Its hardwood floor gleamed, and above the paneling the freshly painted white walls were covered with enlarged color photographs. I stopped to look at one of Matty in the cockpit of a sleek yellow monoplane with a red sunburst pattern on its low wings. The canopy was open, and she was grinning widely, looking straight into the camera’s lens.

  “This isn’t the plane you used to fly,” I said.

  “No, it’s new, last year. Stirling Silver Star 360, customized to my specifications. Manufactured by Stirling Aviation in Arkansas. They’re one of the top aircraft-design firms, got into a lot of trouble some years back, but have turned around beautifully. This plane is one of the best there is. Very low drag, performs like a dream in those upward rolling maneuvers that impress the judges. Has unlimited capability, really.” She touched the picture frame lightly, straightening it.

  “What does John think of you flying competitively?”

  “He cheers me on.”

  “I’d’ve thought a man who hates to fly would be afraid for you.”

  She shrugged. “He’s got confidence in my abilities and not a great deal of imagination when it comes to what might happen. I don’t have much myself. You can’t, or you’d scare yourself right out of the cockpit.”

  And there was the reason I’d never be very good at aerobatics; my imagination was always several steps ahead of me, and often tripped me up.

  “Hey,” she said, “I know what you’re thinking. Sure, there’s risk involved. But simply living’s a risk. My mother was a very fearful person; the whole time I was growing up, it was always ‘You can’t do that. What if something happened to you?’ I used to listen to her and think, Jeez, what if nothing ever happens to me? The way I see it, life’s about accepting risk, meeting it head on. Otherwise you might just as well sit in a glass bubble the whole time, waiting to die.”

  I nodded, recognizing it as a rule that I too had more or less lived by. Then I began moving along the hall, examining the other photos until I came to an eight-by-ten of Matty, a tall man, and an adolescent boy.

  “This is John and Zach?”

  “Yes.” She glanced at the picture, and her lips tightened. Wordlessly she brushed past me, heading for the back of the house. I stayed where I was, taking a close look at the missing man and his son.

  John Seabrook was big, the way a quarterback is, with powerful muscle development and not an ounce of fat. His light brown hair was longish, falling in a thick shock over his high brow, and his skin had the deep tan and weather lines of a man who has spent most of his life outdoors. Zach had a similar body type, but his hair was blond, his eyes a striking shade of blue. The facial resemblance was obvious, though: father and son shared the same square jaw, high cheekbones, and aquiline nose. No mistaking the relationship.

  After a moment I went the way Matty had gone and found her in an old-fashioned kitchen, sorting through the mail she’d grabbed from the box beside the road. She saw me looking around at the warped green linoleum and cabinets coated in numerous layers of paint. “Not much I could do to improve this room,” she said. “Calls for a complete remodel, and we can’t afford it.”

  “I know how that is. You should’ve seen mine before I scraped together the cash to have it redone.”

  “Cash—that’s always the problem.” She grimaced and set the mail down. “Everybody thinks flight instructors make big bucks, and we would if we worked forty hours a week, fifty-two weeks a year, which we don’t. And aerobatics is even worse: There’s no prize money for winning a competition, and I’ve never earned more than six thousand for flying in an air show. If it wasn’t for my corporate sponsor, I’d be out of the game.”

  “But the tree farm—you say it’s profitable?”

  “Now it is. John started a wholesale landscaping nursery three years ago, so it’s not as seasonable a cash flow. Eventually we plan to redo this whole house. Not that I care what shape the place is in, so long as I get John home safely. What matters to me is that we’re a family—what I’ve always wanted.”

  “Really? I wouldn’t have thought family life fit your plans.”

  “Well, maybe not a traditional family life. God knows I’ve never had that. First there was my own family, which didn’t work for a variety of reasons. Then there was my marriage, which also didn’t work, but for different reasons. When that busted up, all I had was my flying, which is more than a lot of people have, but still not enough. And now I’m afraid… shit, McCone, you don’t need to hear it. You want to get started looking through John’s stuff?”

  Actually, I wished she’d talk more about herself; I’d never known about the marriage or the dysfunctional family. But time was getting short, and I was due at a dinner party in the city at seven, so I nodded and followed her upstairs to the bedroom she shared with John Seabrook.

  Unlike most investigators—including my operatives Rae Kelleher and Charlotte Keim—I’m not at all comfortable intruding on other people’s personal space. It strips the individual, who isn’t there to protest, of precious pretense and privacy; it leaves me feeling only one rung higher than a voyeur on the ladder of disgusting practices. But a person’s choice and treatment of his or her possessions can provide valuable information, and over the years I’ve become expert at reading others by the things with which they surround themselves.

  John Seabrook’s clothing, for instance: it told me he was very much the outdoorsman that his photograph suggested. Wool shirts, tees, jeans, cords, down vests and jackets—and there wasn’t a suit or tie in evidence. He was an orderly man who arranged everything by type, so he probably possessed an orderly mind. When I asked Matty what he’d taken with him, she was able to be specific: a blue down jacket, a couple of changes of his heaviest clothing, thermal underwear, a knitted cap, gloves, and hiking boots.

  The dresser drawers were filled with neat piles of the usual stuff, except for the bottom one; that was dedicated to keepsakes and the kind of items we all hang on to because they’ve been given to us and we don’t know what else to do with them. Seabrook’s collection included an unopened bottle of Old Spice, two boxes of monogrammed handkerchiefs, a pair of silver cuff links, a shoeshine kit, a manicure set, and a gold-plated fortune cookie—all in their original boxes. He attached sentimental value to three silver dollars; a California scratch-off lottery ticket that, had he claimed it, would have netted him two dollars; a Clinton-Gore campaign button that told me one more thing he and Matty didn’t have in common; a sand dollar; and a champagne cork. And in a blue velvet box I found a man’s wedding band.

  I took the ring out and held it up to the light. It was plain but scratched and had nothing engraved inside it. I looked at Matty and raised my eyebrows questioningly. With a shrug, she turned away and began straightening the rumpled bedclothes.

  I held the ring in the palm of my hand, closing my fingers around it. Foolish to think its weight and shape might communicate something to me, and yet…

  When Matty told me John wouldn’t talk to Zach about his mother, I’d assumed bitterness on Seabrook’s part, perhaps stemming from an ugly divorce or abandonment. But this ring—not just tossed into the drawer but preserved in its box among other mementos of apparently happy times—spoke of love and caring. I knew, because Hy also had a wedding ring preserved in his dresser drawer. Two years ago he’d shown it to me because it was of an origina
l design created by an artist friend of his, and the expression on his face as he held it had unsettled me, because it gave away how much he still loved and missed his dead wife, Julie Spaulding.

  After a moment I replaced John Seabrook’s ring and said to Matty’s back, “Anyplace else in the house where he keeps personal things or papers?”

  “Not really. There’re some books in the bedside table drawer and downstairs—outdoor adventure and thrillers, mostly. I’ve already checked them for anything he might’ve stuffed inside. His papers’re over at the sales office.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Down the road a piece. We can get to it in about five minutes by a trail through the trees. Do you want to take a walk over there?”

  “Yes. There’re a number of details I need to get started on this, including his Social Security number.”

  The Christmassy scent was nearly overpowering as Matty and I followed a well-worn path through the fir trees. It put me in mind of the list I’d drawn up of gifts I’d yet to buy, and of the plans Hy and I had made for Christmas Eve. No—“plans” wasn’t the right word. Plans were things you thought out and agreed on and, in most cases, looked forward to. But these particular arrangements had descended on me like a flash flood, and, caught by surprise, I’d allowed myself to be swept away. Now I was looking forward to the event as much as I would to death by drowning.

  On Christmas Eve, Hy and I were supposed to arrive with arms full of presents and hearts full of good cheer at the Seacliff district home that my friend and operative Rae Kelleher shared with my former brother-in-law, Ricky Savage. A year before, had anyone attempted to foist this scenario on me, I’d have pronounced the person quite insane. But since last July Rae and Ricky—who, if the charts were to be believed, was currently the hottest country singer in the nation—had been an item. And my sister Charlene was living in Bel Air with her new husband, international financier Vic Christiansen.

  All of which added up to six confused and disillusioned Savage offspring.