A Multitude of Sins Read Free Page B

mouth was Houdon.
    He sighed. His objectivity was going to hell.
    “But it’s a long and probably apocryphal story. May I offer you a cup of coffee—or something else, perhaps?”
    “Why, yes, thank you. Coffee would be fine.”
    “Sugar and cream?”
    “Please, if it isn’t too much bother.”
    He retired to the kitchen and after a brief search in the cupboards, took out a tray and a pair of porcelain cups and saucers. Somehow, mugs didn’t seem appropriate. While he prepared the tray, he took advantage of the pass-through and her momentary interest in the Netsuke case to study his enigmatic guest, a nagging memory refusing to come into focus. He’d seen her before. Not at the bookshop, although he was sure she’d been a frequent customer lately. Sometime before that.
    He was still frowning in pursuit of the memory while he poured the coffee, but when he carried the tray into the living room, he offered a reassuring smile. He put the tray on the table between the Eames Barcelona chairs facing the windows, and when they were seated, made a diversion for himself in lighting a cigarette while she stirred sugar and cream into her coffee. He looked around finally to find her studying him over the rim of her cup, to all appearances perfectly at ease; she seemed privately amused at something.
    “You know what they say in the village, Mr. Flagg?”
    “In this village, a great deal is said.”
    “They say your mother was Chief Joseph’s daughter.”
    For a moment, he was stopped by the sheer incongruity of that; then he laughed aloud.
    “Is that what they say? Well, there’s a flaw in the chronology of several generations. Chief Joseph met his Waterloo long before my mother was born. But she was Nez Percé; she gave me my middle name in honor of the old chief.”
    “What was she like?”
    “Thoroughly ‘civilized.’ But I don’t remember her too well; she died in one of Pendleton’s bad winters, of pneumonia, when I was thirteen.” When she looked vaguely startled at that, Conan asked, “Didn’t they tell you about that in the village?”
    “No, I mean, it just occurred to me that I was thirteen when my mother died.”
    “That isn’t a pleasant thing to have in common.” He paused, watching her. “You know, it’s disconcerting thinking of you as ‘Jane Doe.’ It doesn’t fit you somehow.”
    She put her cup down, centering it precisely in the saucer, and with that seemed to shift mental gears, an underlying tension exposed in her restrained composure.
    “Does Isadora Canfield fit better?”
    “Yes. You have identification, of course?”
    That apparently surprised her, but she reached into her purse, which she’d put on the floor by her chair, took out a billfold, and handed it to him without hesitation.
    “My driver’s license and some other cards are in there.” As she reached across the table, her sleeve pulled back, and he caught a glimpse of a thin, reddish scar across the inside of her wrist.
    The driver’s license told him, among other things, that she was twenty-one years old. There were membership cards for the Young Republicans Club, Sierra Club, Portland Symphony Association, and a student ID from Willamette University in Salem. The address on all the cards was Mission Drive in Salem, the Oregon state capital.
    At this point, the “Canfield” began to register.
    He turned over the last plastic folder and found a faded snapshot. Three people, obviously mother, father, and daughter, seated on a porch ornamented with elaborate Victorian gingerbread. The child was Isadora Canfield at about ten years old. The woman was smiling down at her, while the man, broad-shouldered and vigorous, but already graying at the temples, was looking directly into the camera.
    “The late Senator John Canfield,” Conan said quietly. “You’re his daughter.”
    She nodded once. “Yes.”
    Finally, the nagging memory came into focus.
    “Now I remember where I’ve seen you.”
    “The Canfield name