Bill Pronzini - Bindlestiff

I opened closet and cabinet doors at random, with Runquist’s tacit consent. I did not expect to find anything, and I didn’t. The closets and cabinets were as clean and neat as the rest of the place.

In the master bedroom, the spread over the bed was rumpled and pulled down at one corner; that was the only thing I had noticed anywhere that was out of place. I asked Runquist, “How do you know Mrs. Peterson didn’t sleep here the past two nights? Was the bed like this on Friday?”

“Yes., She was lying down when I got here; that’s how the spread got pulled around like that. If she’d slept here either night she’d have made the bed when she got up. She’s compulsive that way.”

We started back to the front room. “Mrs. Peterson’s late husband left her this house, is that right?” I asked.

“Right. Joe Peterson. He built it for her.”

“Built it himself, you mean?”

“Yes. He was in the construction business.”

“Did you know him?”

“Only by name. He died three years ago. Heart attack; he was twenty-five years older than Hannah.”

We reentered the living room. I said, “You told me you talked to the neighbors yesterday. Just the immediate neighbors or what?”

“Everybody who lives within a block of here. There aren’t that many; this is almost the country out here. None of them saw her at any time on Friday night.”

“Does she normally park her car in the driveway?”

“No. Inside the garage.”

I nodded, and he moved away from me in that restless way of his and started a turn around the immaculate living room. Only it wasn’t quite as immaculate as I’d first thought; I noticed now, as Runquist paced in front of the fireplace, that in the middle of the hearth there was a small pile of ashes and charred paper overlain with cigarette butts. The rest of the bricks in there had been swept clean.

I went over and knelt down and poked through the pile. Some of the pieces of paper were not completely charred; they were glossy-like the remains of photographs that had been torn up and then set afire. I fished out the largest of the unburnt pieces. It was the bottom third of a color snapshot, showing the legs of a man and a woman and an expanse of lawn or meadow.

Runquist had come over beside me. I straightened and held the fragment out so he could see it. “Do you know what this is?”

“Part of a photograph,” he said.

“Sure. But what I’m asking is, why would Mrs. Peterson tear up and burn a bunch of photos?”

“I don’t know.”

“You weren’t here when she did it?”

“No.”

“Were these remains here on Friday afternoon?”

“I don’t remember,” Runquist said. “Why? You think it means something?”

“Maybe. People don’t normally destroy photographs this way; and not on the same day they’ve learned of a death in the family, unless they have a pretty good reason for it. Any idea what this snap might have been of?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think it’s anything I’ve ever seen before.”

“Does Mrs. Peterson have a photograph album? Or a box or something where she keeps photos?”

“If she does she never showed it to me.”

“Where does she keep her personal papers and things?”

“I don’t… wait, yes I do. The sitting room-she uses that as an office.”

The sitting room was off the master bedroom. It was smallish, with not much in it except for a sofa, a reading lamp, an antique console radio, and a trestle desk set against the wall next to a curtained window. I said, “I’ll need your permission to look through the desk.”

“Go ahead.”

I opened each of the drawers. Pens and pencils and other paraphernalia, notepaper, envelopes, file folders crammed with paid bills and receipts and canceled checks-but no photographs of any kind. I turned away from the desk. In one wall were a pair of sliding mahogany doors; I pushed one of them open and looked into a closet full of cardboard packing boxes, small cartons of stationery supplies, odds and ends. And on top of one of the packing boxes, two thick leather-bound photo albums.

I carried the albums over to the desk. Runquist stood peering over my shoulder as I opened one and began leafing through the pages. The pictures were all family-type snaps, most in color and nearly all of Hannah Peterson at various ages up to about sixteen, doing the various things that kids do to get their pictures taken. An older girl who had to be Arleen Bradford was in some of the photos; Charles Bradford was in a couple more; and a faded-looking blond woman with nondescript features was in half a dozen of the early ones. Bradford’s wife, probably. I wondered what had happened to her. Neither Arleen nor Hannah had mentioned their mother, as if she had never really been an important part of their lives. Or of their father’s.

The second album was much more interesting. The first few pages were all Hannah, of course; she had to be something of a narcissist to have collected all these photos of herself. Not that that was surprising; I had met the lady, after all. Two pages of Hannah at her high-school senior prom where she had evidently been the belle of the ball, judging from the number of boys hanging around her. A page of Hannah in cap-and-gown at her graduation ceremony, and another page of Hannah in a bikini at some lake, with more boys paying homage. And then four pages of nothing but those little paper corners you use to keep photographs in place in an album, some stuck to the pages and some lying loose as if the photos they’d held had been ripped out.

I turned another page. A couple of snaps had been pulled off there, too, and of the ones remaining, one was lying at an angle near the bottom, a corner of it bent as though the album had been closed on it. A photo Hannah had meant to burn and overlooked? I picked it up and studied it.

Color shot of a teenage Hannah standing alone on the bank of a wide river, one hand on her hip, giving either the camera or whoever had taken the picture a provocative look. I turned it over. On the back, in red ink in a fancy feminine hand, was written “Me in Nebraska.”

There was something about that notation that started vague stirrings in my memory, like ripples on placid water. I handed the snapshot to Runquist. “Does this mean anything to you?”

“Nebraska,” he said. “That’s where Hannah lived with her first husband.”

“Oh? Where in Nebraska?”

“Omaha, I think.”

“What was his name, do you know?”

“Adams. I can’t remember his first name. She doesn’t talk about him much; I don’t think their split was very friendly.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, she did mention once that they fought a lot. He was more than twenty years older, like Joe Peterson was; I don’t know why she kept taking up with older men.” He pawed at his face again. “She also said something once about having to sneak away when she finally decided to leave him. He wouldn’t have let her go if she hadn’t, she said.”

“So she was afraid of him?”

“I think she was, yeah.”

Omaha…

I flipped through the rest of the album. There were no other photos of Hannah or anybody else in Nebraska; that had evidently been the batch she’d destroyed. The rest of the photos included several men. I asked Runquist if he’d ever seen a picture of Hannah’s first husband, this Adams.

“No,” he said.

“So you wouldn’t know if any of these guys might be him?”

“No. She never showed me any of these photos.”

Omaha. Omaha, Nebraska…

Then I had it, the connection, and I said, “Jesus Christ!” before I could check myself. Because there was a jolt in it; there was a hell of a jolt in it.

Runquist said, “What’s the matter?”