answered McCleary. “Something about it then and Jackie wouldn’t have had to go away.”
Easy asked, “You have no servants? No one to look after the house or grounds?”
“No one. Since Jackie disappeared I haven’t felt the need of anyone around. I can look after myself, cook when I have to. As for the grounds, well, as you’ve seen, nature has reclaimed them. I don’t feel like having a gardener around.”
“Did you tell anyone to look after your house while you were away? Neighbors or the police?”
“I don’t know the neighbors anymore. I already told you I didn’t want the police involved in any way.”
“There was no letter when you got back?”
“No, no word and there hasn’t been since.”
The cat was on the narrow mantel over the empty fireplace, stalking now one of McCleary’s Academy Award statues.
Easy said, “Any sign someone had been here in your absence?”
McCleary blinked his puffy eyes. “You think Jackie may have returned to the house?”
“Anyone might have,” said Easy. The Oscar was swatted off the mantel and fell with a clang into an empty copper woodbin. Easy crossed and retrieved it. “Did you notice that anyone had been in the house?”
“No, no evidence of that,” said the old man. “Of course, I don’t pay the keenest attention to my surroundings these days.”
Before putting the Academy Award statue back in place, Easy thwacked Tuffy lightly over the skull with it. “What about your daughter’s friends? Have any of them heard from her?”
“Let him play with it,” said the old man. “It doesn’t bother me.”
Easy gave the Oscar back to the cat and repeated, “Your daughter’s friends?”
The golden statue clanged once more into the woodbin.
“They’ve scattered in five years,” said McCleary. “I still keep in touch with a few of them. I suppose they all think my belief that Jackie is still alive is simply an obsession. By now a boring one at that. To answer your question, Easy, none of Jackie’s friends whom I’ve contacted have received any communication from her at all.”
“You can give me their names?”
“Most of them,” said the old man. “I’ll take you out to Jackie’s cottage. There are photos of her and most of the San Amaro gang.” He rose slowly from the sofa.
“San Amaro gang?”
“Jackie’s closest friends in the last year or two before she disappeared,” said McCleary, breathing with a faint wheeze as he began to walk toward the wide arched doorway. “A half dozen or so kids who hung around the beach down at San Amaro. Jackie had a notion she might want to model, do television commercials. Most of these kids were on the fringes of show business in one way or another.” He went up the three mosaic tile steps that led to the red tile hallway. “I had the contacts then to help Jackie, but she’d have none of it. She was a very independent girl. Still is I imagine. She lived by herself in a beach apartment in San Amaro those last two years.”
The fat, gray cat sailed from the mantel to the sofa to the rug. He hustled up the tile stairs and tangled himself in McCleary’s long legs. The old man tripped, fell back against Easy.
Easy caught him. “Most of these San Amaro kids were with her, were on that yacht when she disappeared?”
“With one or two exceptions,” said McCleary, regaining his balance. “Although they were in their twenties, they were still very much like a gang of grammar school kids. You know, with blood oaths and fierce loyalties.”
Easy quietly booted Tuffy over into a white plaster wall of the long hallway.
Cupboards and tables lined the walls, holding small bronze sculptures, wrought iron candlesticks, Mexican straw figures. On one cupboard shelf sat a half-finished wedge of cherry pie, now beginning to go green with mold, and on a claw-footed table a nearly full tumbler of milk was already sour.
“Jackie had her own private cottage out back,” said the old man over his bent