Росс Макдональд - The Far Side of the Dollar

Stella’s cheeks were flushed when I came out. “I called home. We better not stop for breakfast on the way.”

“Your mother’s pretty excited, is she?”

“Dad was the one I talked to. He blames you. I’m sorry.”

“It was my bad judgment,” I said. “I should have taken you home last night. But I had something else to do.”

Get a man killed.

“It was my bad judgment,” she said. “I was punishing them for lying about Tommy and me and the car.”

“I’m glad you know that. How upset is your father?”

“Very upset. He even said something about Laguna Perdida School. He didn’t really mean it, though.”

But a shadow crossed her face.

About an hour later, driving south with Stella toward El Rancho, I caught a distant glimpse of the school. The rising wind had blown away all trace of the overcast, but even in unobstructed sunlight its buildings had a desolate look about them. I found myself straining my eyes for the lonely blue heron. He wasn’t on the water or in the sky.

On impulse, I turned off the highway and took the access road to Laguna Perdida. My car passed over the treadle. The automatic gates rose.

Stella said in a tiny voice: “You’re not going to put me in here?”

“Of course not. I want to ask a certain person a question. I won’t be long.”

“They better not try to put me in here,” she said. “I’ll run away for good.”

“You’ve had more mature ideas.”

“What else can I do?” she said a little wildly.

“Stay inside the safety ropes, with your own kind of people. You’re much too young to step outside, and I don’t think your parents are so bad. They’re probably better than average.”

“You don’t know them.”

“I know you. You didn’t just happen.”

The old guard came out of his kiosk and limped up to my side of the car. “Dr. Sponti isn’t here just now.”

“How about Mrs. Mallow?”

“Yeah. You’ll find her down the line in East Hall.”

He pointed toward the building with the ungenerous windows.

Leaving Stella in the car, I knocked on the front door of East Hall. After what seemed a long time, Mrs. Mallow answered. She was wearing the same dark formal costume that she had been wearing on Monday, and the same rather informal smell of gin.

She smiled at me, at the same time flinching away from the daylight. “Mr. Archer, isn’t it?”

“How are you, Mrs. Mallow?”

“Don’t ever ask me that question in the morning. Or any other time, now that I come to think of it. I’m surviving.”

“Good.”

“But you didn’t come here to inquire after my health.”

“I’d like to have a few minutes with Fred Tyndal.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “the boys are all in class.”

“It could be important.”

“You want to ask Fred some questions, is that it?”

“Just one, really. It wouldn’t have to take long.”

“And it won’t be anything disturbing?”

“I don’t think so.”

She left me in the lounge and went into Patch’s office to make a telephone call. I wandered around the big battered homeless room, imagining how it would feel to be a boy whose parents had left him here. Mrs. Mallow came back into the room: “Fred will be right over.”

While I was waiting, I listened to the story of her marriages, including the one that had lasted, her marriage to the bottle. Then Fred came in out of the sunlight, none of which adhered to him. He sort of loitered just inside the door, pulling at the hairs on his chin and waiting to be told what he had done wrong this time.

I got up and moved toward him, not too quickly. “Hello, Fred.”

“Hello.”

“You remember the talk we had the other day?”

“There’s nothing the matter with my memory.”

He added with his quick evanescent smile: “You’re Lew Archer the First. Did you find Tom yet?”

“Not yet. I think you can help me find him.”

He scuffed the doorframe with the side of his shoe. “I don’t see how.”

“By telling me everything you know. One thing I can promise – they won’t put him back in here.”

“What good will that do me?” he said forlornly.

I had no answer ready. After a moment the boy said, “What do you want me to tell you?”

“I think you were holding back a little the other day. I don’t blame you. You didn’t know me from Adam. You still don’t, but it’s three days later now, and Tom is still missing.”

His face reflected the seriousness of this. He couldn’t stand such seriousness for very long. He said with a touch of parody: “Okay, I’ll talk, I’ll spill everything.”

“I want to ask you this. When Tom broke out of here Saturday night, did he have any definite person or place in mind that he intended to go to?”

He ducked his head quickly in the affirmative. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Do you know where he was going?”

“Tom didn’t say. He did say something else, though, something about finding his true father.”

The boy’s voice broke through into feeling he couldn’t handle. He said: “Big deal.”

“What did he mean by that, Fred?”

“He said he was adopted.”

“Was he really?”

“I don’t know. A lot of the kids here want to think they’re adopted. My therapist calls it a typical Freudian family romance.”

“Do you think Tom was serious?”

“Sure he was.”

Once again the boy’s face reflected seriousness, and I caught a glimpse there of the maturity that he might reach yet. “He said he couldn’t know who he was until he knew for sure who his father was.”

He grinned wryly. “I’m trying to forget who my father is.”

“You can’t.”

“I can try.”

“Get interested in something else.”

“There isn’t anything else.”

“There will be.”

“When?” he said.

Mrs. Mallow interrupted us. “Have you found out what you need to know, Mr. Archer? Fred really should be going back to class now.”

I said to him: “Is there anything else you can tell me?”

“No, sir. Honestly. We didn’t talk much.”

The boy started out. He turned in the doorway suddenly, and spoke to me in a voice different from the one he had been using, a voice more deep and measured: “I wish you were my father.”

He turned away into the bleak sunlight.

Back in the car, I said to Stella: “Did Tom ever tell you that he was adopted?”

“Adopted? He can’t be.”

“Why not?”

“He can’t be, that’s all.”

The road curved around a reedy marsh where the red-winged blackbirds sounded like woodwinds tuning up, and violins. Stella added after a while: “For one thing, he looks like his father.”

“Adopted children often do. They’re picked to match the parents.”

“How awful. How commercial. Who told you he was adopted?”

“He told a friend at the school.”

“A girl?”

“A boy.”

“I’m sure he was making it up.”

“Did he often make things up?”

“Not often. But he did – he does have some funny ideas about some things. He told me just this summer that he was probably a changeling, you know? That they got him mixed up with some other baby in the hospital, and Mr. and Mrs. Hillman weren’t his real parents.”

She turned toward me, crouching on the seat with her legs under her. “Do you think that could be true?”

“It could be. Almost anything can happen.”

“But you don’t believe it.”

“I don’t know what I believe, Stella.”

“You’re an adult,” she said with a hint of mockery. “You’re supposed to know.”

I let it drop. We rode in silence to the gate of El Rancho. Stella said: “I wonder what my father is going to do to me.”