Cyanide Wells Read online

  He wasn’t aware of making a conscious decision, much less a plan. He simply turned on the table lamp and went to the closet off the sleeping alcove, where he began going through the cartons stacked in its recesses. When he located the one marked P EQUIP., he carried it to the braided rug in front of the hearth, sat down cross-legged, and opened it.

  Memories rose with the dust from the carton’s lid. He pushed them aside, burrowed into the bubble-wrapped contents. On top were the lenses: F2.8 wide angle, F1.8 and F2.8 telephotos, the F2.8 with 1.4x teleconverter, and even a fish-eye, which he’d bought in a fit of longing but had seldom needed. Next the camera bag, tan canvas and well used. And inside it, the camera.

  It was an old Nikon F, the first camera he’d ever bought and the only one he’d kept when he sold his once-profitable photography business. Heavy and old-fashioned next to the new single-lens reflexes or digital models, the markings were worn on the f-stop band, and the surfaces where he’d so often held it were polished smooth. He stared at it, afraid to take it into his hands because if he did, it would work its old magic, and then what he now realized he’d been subconsciously considering would become a reality…

  Don’t be ridiculous. Picking it up isn’t a commitment.

  And just like that, he did.

  His fingers curled around the Nikon, moving to long-accustomed positions. They caressed it as he removed the lens cap, adjusted speed, f-stop, and focus. He sighted on the flames in the fireplace, saw them clearly through the F3.5 micro lens with a skylight filter. Even though the camera contained no film, he thumbed the advance lever, depressed the shutter.

  The mind may forget, but not the body.

  She’d said that to him the last time they made love, in a sentimental moment after being separated for two months, but he sensed that her body had already forgotten, was ready for new memories, a new man. She’d told him she needed to be free—not to wound him, but with deep regret that proved the words hurt her as well. But now, after allowing him to think her dead for fourteen years, it seemed she was alive in California, near a place called Cyanide Wells. He had no reason to doubt his anonymous caller, who had taken the trouble to track him down for some unexplained reason.

  “…your wife is very much alive. And very cognizant of what she put you through when she disappeared…”

  Matt’s fingers tightened on the Nikon.

  Picking it up had been a commitment after all.

  Soledad County, California

  Tuesday, May 7, 2002

  Rain clouds hovered over the heavily forested ridge-line that separated central Soledad County from the coastal region, reminding Matt of home. As the exit sign for Talbot’s Mills appeared, he took his right hand off the wheel of the rented Jeep Cherokee and rubbed his neck. It had been a long drive north from the San Francisco Airport, and he was stiff and tired but keyed up in an unpleasant manner that twice had made him oversteer on Highway 101’s sharp curves.

  It had taken him two weeks to put the charter business in order so that it would run properly under Johnny Crowe’s supervision, as well as to prepare his cabin should his absence be a long one. All the time he was going about his tasks, he felt as if he were saying good-bye: to Millie, to Johnny, to the woman at the bank where he arranged for payment of what few bills would come in, to the clerks at the marine supply he patronized, to the mechanic at the gas station where he had his truck serviced for the drive to Vancouver. Once there, he left the truck in the garage of a woman with whom he’d had an onand-off affair for years, and she drove him to the airport. As his plane took off and his adopted country receded below him, he wondered what kind of man he’d be when he returned there.

  Now he rounded a bend in the highway and sighted the lumber company town nestled at the base of the ridge. Clustered around the interchange were the ubiquitous motels and gas stations and fast-food outlets, and beyond them a bridge spanned a wide, slow-moving river. Two huge beige-and-green mills sprawled for acres along its banks, and small houses rose on the terraced slope above them. Higher on the hill were larger homes, including one whose gables cleared the tallest of the trees.

  Matt exited on a ramp whose potholed surface threatened to jar the Jeep’s wheel from his hands. Logging rigs lined the frontage road’s shoulder on both sides, in front of a truck stop advertising HOT SHOWERS AND GOOD EATS. He’d pulled off for a burger hours ago in a place north of the Golden Gate Bridge called Los Alegres, but the keyed-up feeling had prevented him from eating most of it. He knew he should have a solid meal, but his stomach was still nervous, so he drove past the truck stop, looking for a motel.

  There was a Quality Inn sandwiched between a Denny’s and a Chevron station about fifty yards ahead. Grease and exhaust fumes were a potential hazard, but its sign advertised vacancies, and if he didn’t like it, he could move. He pulled in, rented a surprisingly spacious room, and then set to work with the county phone book.

  No listing for an Ardis Coleman. Listing for the Soledad Spectrum on Main Street in Cyanide Wells. No public library there, but Talbot’s Mills had one, located in the Talbot Mansion on Alta Street. Best to make that his first stop, gather information, and map out strategy before visiting the smaller town.

  He wasn’t concerned that he’d run into Gwen and she’d recognize him. Immediately after making his decision to come to Soledad County, he had begun growing a mustache and beard, neither of which he’d ever worn before. The heavy growth rate of his facial hair, which he’d cursed his whole life, produced both quickly and respectably. The dark-brown dye he had applied to his naturally blond hair the night before he left Port Regis had further changed him, and as proof of the tepid quality of his relationship with the woman friend in Vancouver, her only comment on his new look was, “I don’t like beards.”

  Even without these changes it was possible Gwen wouldn’t know him should they come face-to-face. For one thing, she wouldn’t expect to find him here. And he was older, his weathered skin a deep saltwater tan. His once-stocky body had been honed lean by his active life on the sea. He walked differently, with the catlike precision necessary to maintain balance on an often heaving deck. He spoke differently, with the slowness and economy of one who spends a great deal of time alone.

  No, he was not the man Gwen used to know.

  While he was crossing the bridge, the pretty picture of the old-fashioned company town that he’d formed from a distance deteriorated. One of the long mills was still in operation, a thick, steady stream of smoke rising from its tall stacks, but the other was in poor repair, surrounded by broken, weed-choked asphalt and twisted heaps of rubble. As he climbed higher on the slope, he found that the small, identical frame cottages on the terraced streets had peeling paint, sagging rooflines, and many boarded windows; their patches of yard were full of disabled vehicles, trash, cast-off furnishings. Still higher, a small business district contained mostly dead store-fronts and empty sidewalks. Even the equipment in a playground had been vandalized.

  Matt drove slowly through the business district, looking for Alta Street, found it at the very end, and turned uphill again. The homes there were of Victorian vintage—mostly modest, but larger and in better repair than the cottages below. At its end tall, black iron gates shielded a parklike area, and beyond rose the mansion he’d glimpsed from the freeway: three stories of forbidding gray, with iron railings, verdigrised copper gables, huge stained-glass windows, and balconies with trim as delicate as the icing on a wedding cake. Although it must have been built in the Victorian decades, it bore little resemblance to the recognizable styles of that era; if anything, it was a hodgepodge of architectural features that only a serious eccentric would incorporate into the same edifice. A sign on the gate identified it as the Talbot Mansion, now the Central Soledad County Public Library and Museum.

  Matt studied it for a moment, wondering what kind of lunatics the Talbots had been to create such a place, then drove through the gate, parked in the small paved lot, and went inside. After an hour an
d a half he’d amassed a surprising amount of information about Gwen and her new life as Ardis Coleman.

  He went to bed early that night but found he couldn’t sleep, not even after the double shot of Wild Turkey he’d poured from the bottle he’d bought at a nearby liquor store. Finally he got up and dressed and drove back to Talbot’s Mills. There he prowled the deserted streets, looking for…

  What?

  He didn’t know, so he kept walking until he found an open tavern in the half-dead business district—a small place with a single pool table and a jukebox playing country songs. Only three old men hunched over their drinks at the bar, and the bartender stood at its end, staring up at a small, blurry television screen. Matt ordered a beer and took it to a corner table, where dim light shone down from a Canadian Club sign.

  Canada…

  Most people led one life. They might move from place to place, marry and divorce and remarry, change careers, but the progression was linear, and they basically remained the same persons from birth to death. Until fourteen years ago Matt, also, had been one person: He’d enjoyed an overprivileged childhood in Minnetonka, a suburb of Minneapolis; learned boating from his father, an accomplished sailor, at the family’s cabin near Grand Marais, on Lake Superior; attended Northwestern University, majoring in prelaw while studying photography under a master of the art in nearby Chicago. When photography won out over the law, his teacher recommended him for a position at small but prestigious Saugatuck College in his home state. The pay was also small, so his parents offered to loan him the money to establish his own commercial studio. Two years later he married a journalism student who had taken a course from him, pretty Gwendolyn Standish. Life should have been good.

  Yet it wasn’t. After their marriage, Gwen’s personality changed, so much that she seemed like two persons encased in one skin. Caring and passionate, withdrawn and cold. Cheerful and optimistic, depressed and pessimistic. Open and filled with confidence, closed and filled with self-doubt. Eventually the negative side overwhelmed the positive, and despite Matt’s assurances that he would do anything to save the marriage—counseling, therapy, walking barefoot over hot coals—she insisted on a divorce.

  Even the divorce hadn’t ended what he now thought of as his first life, though. That was brought on by her disappearance and its aftermath.

  Suspicious minds…

  The words echoing from the jukebox meshed with his thoughts. The first hint of suspicion had come during the call from the Wyoming sheriff, Cliff Brandt: “I take it you can account for your whereabouts during the past two weeks.” And he’d too quickly replied, “Of course I can! I was here in Saugatuck, teaching summer classes.” Too quickly and also dishonestly, because of an ingrained fear of the authorities that stemmed from his older brother Jeremy’s arrest and eventual conviction for dealing cocaine in the mid-seventies; Matt was thirteen at the time and had watched the officers brutally subdue Jeremy when he attempted to resist them.

  In truth, Matt had been nowhere near Saugatuck during those two weeks. The summer of 1988, a drought year, was the hottest and driest Minnesota had experienced since the 1930s. Matt’s temper grew shorter with every July day, and he found it difficult to maintain focus on his work. So he closed down the studio, turned his summer classes over to a colleague, and went on a solo driving and camping trip designed both to escape the heat and help him put the failure of his marriage in perspective. It was his bad luck that the trip, which ended in Arches National Park, on Utah’s Green River, took him home through Wyoming along Interstate 80 at approximately the same time Gwen’s car was abandoned by the side of a county road north of there.

  Sheriff Brandt found that out, of course, when he called the college to verify Matt’s alibi and then checked the paper trail of credit card and gas station charges. His department lifted Matt’s fingerprints from the abandoned Toyota (which he had occasionally driven) and inside Gwen’s purse (where he had occasionally placed items of his own too large for his pockets). The Lindstroms’ property settlement showed that Matt had consented to pay Gwen half the value of his photography business. And, most damning, Matt had lied to the sheriff during their first conversation. Brandt, unable to produce any trace of Gwen, seemed determined to prove Matt a murderer.

  Eventually, of course, Brandt had given up. Even in Sweet-water County, Wyoming, he had more pressing matters to attend to, and the district attorney convinced him that no-body cases were difficult to prove in any jurisdiction. But by then, the damage had been done.

  The police in Saugatuck watched Matt’s every move; he was repeatedly stopped for nonexistent traffic violations, and it became common for him to see squad cars cruising past his house and place of business. Gwen’s disappearance and his possible involvement were worked and reworked by the media. Initially friends and neighbors were supportive, but after a while they stopped calling him. Halfway through the fall semester, a television show, which both described in sensational terms his romantic involvement and marriage to a sophomore and raised questions bordering on the libelous about her disappearance, prompted several students to withdraw from his classes. In the spring the college’s governing board unanimously decided it would be advisable that he take a year’s sabbatical without pay; if the “regrettable situation” was resolved before the year was up, his pay would become retroactive.

  And yet there remained no trace of Gwen.

  By the anniversary of her disappearance in July, Matt’s former friends were crossing the street to avoid him. Requests for his services at weddings, anniversary parties, and bar mitzvahs dropped off sharply. New mothers no longer brought their babies to his studio for their first portraits. Engaged couples took their business to his competitor across town. At Christmastime he shot a photograph for only one customized card: an elderly woman and her “family” of three toy poodles. The dogs yipped and snarled and peed on the carpet, and when the woman was leaving, she told him she’d only come there because she couldn’t get an appointment with the other photographer.

  At least, Matt thought, his competitor had a clean rug.

  He stubbornly hung on in Saugatuck, however, living off his savings. It was his home; he’d done nothing wrong except stupidly lie to a Wyoming sheriff. Sooner or later he would be vindicated.

  When his savings were about to run out, he phoned home to ask for a loan; his mother agreed but then called back the next day.

  “Your father and I have discussed the loan,” she told him, “and we have come to the conclusion that it’s time we stopped spoiling you. Look what happened to your brother because of our indulgence: He’s down in New Mexico, taking drugs again.” When Matt started to protest that Jeremy was in Albuquerque working as a counselor in a program for troubled youth, she cut him off. “No, hear me out. Your father and I know you couldn’t have killed Gwendolyn. We didn’t raise you that way. But the negative publicity has made it very difficult for us—”

  Matt hung up on her.

  Still, he remained in town, selling off cherished possessions and then the photography business. With some of the proceeds he hired a private investigator to look for Gwen; the man delivered sketchy reports for a month and then ceased communication; when Matt called his office, he found the phone service had been discontinued.

  Then, three weeks after the second anniversary of Gwen’s disappearance, a chance encounter in the supermarket ended his first life.

  He was in the produce section, filling his cart with the vegetables that had become staples of his diet now that he could no longer afford meat, when he looked up into the eyes of Gwen’s best friend, Bonnie Vaughan, principal of the local high school, a heavy but attractive woman with long, silky hair and gray eyes. Eyes that now cut into him like surgical instruments.

  “So you are still here, you bastard,” she said in a low voice that was more unsettling than if she’d shouted.

  “Bonnie, I—”

  “Shut up, you murderer!”

  The words and her tone rendered him spe
echless.

  “We know what you did,” she went on. “And we know why. You’d better get out of Saugatuck before somebody murders you!” Then she whirled and walked away.

  Matt stared after her. Bonnie had always been a gentle, caring woman: She tended to her friends’ homes and pets while they were out of town; she could always be counted on in an emergency; she brought thoughtful, handcrafted gifts when invited to dinner. The last time he’d seen her, eleven months after Gwen disappeared, she’d hugged him and said he had her full support. If the hatred that had infected the rest of the community could also infect a woman like Bonnie Vaughan, he wanted nothing more to do with Saugatuck—

  “Hey, mister.”

  Matt started and focused on the woman who had spoken. He’d been so deeply mired in his memories that he hadn’t noticed her come into the bar. She was in her early twenties, too thin, with long brown hair that could stand a washing, and an unhealthy grayish pallor to her skin.

  “Buy me a drink?” she asked with a tentative smile.

  He didn’t want company, particularly her brand of company, and his expression must have said so, because her smile faded.

  “Listen,” she said in a different tone, “I’m not selling anything, if that’s what you’re thinking. I just need somebody to talk to.”

  Something in her voice convinced him she was telling the truth. Besides, her earnest, pleading expression made him feel sorry for her. Maybe listening to her troubles would help him keep his own pain at bay.

  “Okay.” He motioned at the chair opposite him. “What’ll you have?”

  “Whatever you’re having.”

  He took his empty mug to the bar and ordered a round. As he was paying, the bartender said in a low voice, “Be nice to the kid. She’s going through a bad time.”