John Lutz - Burn

“I never complete those puzzles,” Wallace said. “I work on them until I get fed up, then say the hell with it and put everything back in the box. You can’t do that with most things in life, but you sure as shit can with a jigsaw puzzle.”

Carver felt a twinge of envy. “That’s a healthy attitude.”

The Cloys were both standing watching him, waiting patiently for him to get to the point.

“Your daughter reported that Joel Brant-the man I told you about last time I was here-tried to run her down with his car.”

“She OK?” Wallace asked.

“Yes, she wasn’t injured. She reported the incident to the police, then she went into hiding.”

“Into hiding where?” Sybil asked. Wallace glared at her for asking what he obviously considered to be a stupid question.

“That’s what I came here to ask you,” Carver said. “Marla left a note saying she was leaving town. Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”

“If she’s hiding,” Wallace said, “why should we tell you where she might be?”

“For her own good. Brant’s on the run from the police, maybe searching for Marla. She might need protection.”

“Orlando,” Sybil blurted out. “She used to live in Orlando, you know. She has friends there.”

“Do you know anyone she might have gone to for help? Someone who’d give her a place to stay for a while?”

“No. We never talked much about her life in Orlando. Never talked much about anything the last few years.” Now it was Sybil’s turn to glare at her husband.

Carver decided to take a chance. “Mrs. Cloy, are you, uh, aware of your daughter’s alternative lifestyle?”

Several seconds passed.

“Alternative lifestyle?” she echoed.

“Get out!” Wallace growled the words.

“It’s a question that might be important,” Carver said.

“Get out before I throw this hot coffee on you.” Wallace took a threatening step toward Carver.

“Stop it!” Sybil yelled.

“Stop it hell!” Wallace took another step and drew back his arm, holding the mug level. Carver could see steam rising from it.

Carver set his cane on the plush blue carpet and backed away. Wallace stood motionless, glowering at him from beneath his hedgelike eyebrows. A vein on the side of his neck was protruding and pulsing out his rage like a primitive dark code.

As Carver made his way outside, Wallace advanced on him, the coffee mug held at his side now. “There was nothing wrong with the way Marla was raised! You understand that?”

Carver said nothing as he worked his way down the steel steps, then limped out into the front yard.

Wallace stopped and stood in the doorway, leaning from the waist so only his stocky upper body was outside. “It don’t matter about Sybil’s sister anyway! We raised Marla right!” He tossed the hot coffee in Carver’s direction but down into the ground, where it sloshed onto the grass and steamed even in the heat. Sybil’s arm snaked around Wallace’s waist and gently pulled him back, easing him all the way inside the trailer. The white aluminum door slammed shut.

Carver walked down the driveway to where his car was parked at the curb.

He was about to open the door and get in when he looked up and saw Sybil coming toward him. She strode swiftly but gracefully, her handsome face creased with concern. “Mr. Carver!”

He braced with his forearm on the car’s top and stood waiting. She came to the passenger’s side of the car and stood staring across the expanse of the canvas top at him, as if it were a negotiating table that would give ideas and insults time to cool as they crossed.

“Please don’t think too harshly of Wallace,” she said. “He’s sensitive about that subject. Just its mention makes him angry. A man his age, and he’s from a small town in the Midwest. I guess you’d have to say he has a simplistic and bigoted view of people with different sex preferences. Alternative lifestyles, as you called them.”

“I understand,” Carver told her.

“My sister Grace lives in New York and is active in the gay and lesbian rights movement. That never has set well with Wallace.”

“So that’s what he meant when he said your sister didn’t matter. Does he think she might have somehow influenced Marla?”

“Oh, no. Grace and Marla hardly know one another. What Wallace meant was that even if those scientific studies suggesting sexual orientation might be inherited are correct, it doesn’t reflect on us-on him, really-because Marla was adopted. I told you, he’s touchy on the subject.”

“Does Marla know she was adopted?”

“Yes. We told her before she graduated high school. She was surprised, but she seemed to get over it. The truth is, she never had what you’d call a happy childhood. She was so unsettled all the time. And there was always trouble with Wallace, something between them.”

Sybil paused, catching herself. Whatever had been between Wallace and Marla, she didn’t want to discuss it.

Carver said, “Mrs. Cloy, are you afraid of Wallace?”

“No,” she said defensively. “Not as long as we live life his way. If we do that, everything is all right.”

“Is that why you have little contact with Marla, because Wallace doesn’t want you to see her?”

She held her hands out and examined the backs of them, as if looking for new liver spots or wrinkles. “Wallace can be a violent man, Mr. Carver.”

“Was he violent with Marla?”

“Marla had boyfriends in high school,” Sybil said, as if Carver hadn’t asked the question. “Dates with boys, anyway. Then the business with other girls started, and we-Marla and Wallace, actually-had a terrible falling out.” Sybil looked back at the pristine white trailer like an infidel trying to recall paradise, then at Carver. “I’d like to think someday Wallace will come to his senses and love her like a daughter.”

Carver smiled. “I’d like to think that, too.” But he didn’t believe it would ever happen.

Sybil returned his smile and straightened up to stand away from the car.

She remained standing motionless as he slid behind the steering wheel and drove away.

Near the main entrance to Sleepy Hollow he pulled the Olds to the curb and sat in the heat with the engine idling. He went over in his mind the newspaper accounts of Portia’s fatal accident. Then he got out Marla’s photograph and stared at it, along with the copy of Portia’s newspaper photo.

What he suspected was possible, he decided, as he slipped the gearshift lever into drive and accelerated out onto the highway.

He wasn’t sure what it might mean, but it was possible.

A few miles outside Orlando, at a combination souvenir shop, produce stand, and country and western restaurant called Citrustown, Carver stopped for lunch and to phone Beth.

While he was waiting for his order of chicken salad sandwich, french fries, and Gallopin’ Grapefruit Freezy, he made his way to the public phone mounted on the wall over by an alcove crammed with a display of souvenirs.

He punched out the cottage’s number and waited while the phone rang on the other end of the line, eyeing the miniature covered-wagon lamps, realistic plastic fruit, animals constructed of tiny sea shells, and waxed and polished slabs of genuine cypress with electric clocks (quartz movement) inlaid in their centers,

When Beth answered the phone, he knew better than to ask how she felt.

Instead he said, “Can you get your friend the Burrow computer hacker to try tracing the origins of Portia Brant and Marla Cloy?”

“Origins? You mean their childhoods?”

“Yes. As far back as possible.”

“All I have to do is ask,” Beth said. “Jeff already has a lot of information on them, from social security numbers to their credit ratings. Backtracking into their childhoods should be relatively easy. But why do you want to do it?”