If Dying Was All Read Free Page B

shoulder, “from the time she was sixteen. She loved to sketch in charcoal and she wrote some very fine, though youthful, poetry.” He stopped to face Easy. “She had such great potential. I expected so much.” He turned and moved slowly on to the rear door of the corridor. From a side pocket in his tweed jacket he took a ring of tarnished keys and unlocked the door.
    The thick door opened onto the glaring, yellow day. The sky was blurred with smog, and even here you could smell the burning in the valley. There was a good half acre of grounds to cross. Only a narrow flagstone path showed clear, cutting through the weeds and overgrown plants and tangled wild flowers. “Did your daughter come here often after she moved to San Amaro?” asked Easy.
    Pronged leaves and drying seedpods brushed the old man’s puffy face. The afternoon heat had brought out an immediate wash of perspiration on his pale forehead. “Not often, but now and then. Jackie was never completely alienated from me. Sometimes, though, she’d show up for a day or two and not even come over to the big house at all. A very fragile, sensitive girl. I hate to think of her still in trouble.”
    Near a high, whitewashed stucco wall stood a small two room cottage. It didn’t match the main house. It was like a miniature English inn or coach house, crisscrossed with beams. The big, gray cat came rustling out of the brush when McCleary inserted a key in the lock of the cottage door. “No, this is the one place Tuffy isn’t allowed. Would you see he doesn’t sneak in, Easy?”
    Catching Tuffy by the scruff, Easy carefully threw him into a far clump of high milkweed. He followed the old man into the shadowy cottage and closed the door. This room was small and had a beamed ceiling. The walls were nearly all given over to bookcases, and all the books were bright and fresh dusted. “You still come out here?”
    “Yes, I like to spend time here. I visit most every day.” McCleary leaned down over a low spool-legged table and picked up a thick, black photo album. “I can give you a few pictures of Jackie. You’ll no doubt need them in your work.”
    Easy was crossing over the two hook rugs and looking at a patch of wall that was free of bookshelves. It held a dozen framed photos. Easy tapped one with a forefinger. The photo showed several young people standing side by side, wearing bathing suits, smiling in front of a clear ocean sky. “Is this the San Amaro gang?”
    McCleary had been painstakingly easing snapshots out of their black hinges. “What?”
    Easy’s blunt finger tapped the glass again. “The San Amaro gang?”
    The old man rested the photos on his palm and looked over. “Yes, that’s them, Jackie’s own wild bunch.”
    Unhooking the picture from the wall, Easy said, I’ll borrow this. And I want the names of these people and the addresses of the ones you’re still in contact with.”
    McCleary hesitated, then said, “Yes, very well.”
    “I’m going to have to have,” said Easy, “copies of the two letters you were sent. Plus a letter or two she wrote before she disappeared five years ago.”
    “These are the only words I’ve had from Jackie in all that time,” said the old man, touching again the pocket that held the letters.
    “Make me a photocopy.”
    “I’m not planning to go out.”
    “Let me have some made then.”
    “I assure you, Easy, that this is my daughter’s handwriting.”
    Easy said, “I want to be sure, too.”
    The old man nodded finally. “Yes, you’re right. Very well.”
    There was a crash from behind a half-closed door, a glass bottle smashing. Then out of the cottage’s bathroom came the big shaggy cat, chasing a fluffy powder puff.
    “How’d he get in?” asked Easy.
    “I don’t know,” said McCleary. “I always keep all the windows and doors shut tight and locked.”

III
    T HE MAN IN THE white cape said, “It’s not the fires we have to worry about, my friends.” He was a scruffy, bearded