Sue Grafton - S is for Silence

The town of Serena Station appeared beyond a bend in the two-lane road, with a street sign indicating that it was now called Land’s End Road. The street ran in a straight line for three blocks and ended abruptly at a locked gate. Beyond the gate, the road wound up a low hill, but it didn’t look like anyone had traveled it for quite some time. There were numerous cars parked in town-in driveways, along the streets, behind the general store-but nothing seemed to move except the wind. A few houses were boarded up, their exteriors bereft of color. In front of one, the paint on the white picket fence had been stripped to the wood, and portions of it sagged. In the small patchy lawns, what little grass remained was dry, and the ground looked hard and unforgiving. In one yard, a camper shell sat under an overhang of corrugated green plastic sheets. There were tree stumps and a tumble of firewood. What had once been the automobile-repair shop stood open to the elements. A tall, dark palm tree towered above a length of chain-link fence that extended across the rear. A stack of fifty-five-gallon oil drums had been left behind. Weeds grew in dry-looking puffs that, in time, the wind would blow free, sending them rolling down the middle of the road. A hound trotted along a side street on a doggie mission of some kind.

Behind the town the hills rose sharply, not mountains by any stretch. They were rugged, without trees, hospitable to wildlife but uninviting to hikers. I could see power lines looping from house to house, and a series of telephone poles stretched away from me like hatch marks on a pencil drawing. We parked and got out, ambling down the middle of the cracked blacktop road. There were no sidewalks and no streetlights. There was no traffic and, therefore, no traffic lights. “Not exactly bustling,” I remarked. “I take it the auto-repair shop went belly-up.”

“That belonged to Tannie’s brother, Steve. Actually, he moved his operation into Santa Maria, figuring if someone’s car broke down, the owner would never manage to get it out here. He wasn’t about to offer to go get them. At the time, he only had one tow truck and that was usually out of commission.”

“Not much of an advertisement for auto repair.”

“Yeah, well he was bad at it anyway. Once he moved, he hired a couple of mechanics and now he’s doing great.”

Daisy pointed out the house where Chet Cramer lived with his current wife. “The Cramers were the only family with any sizeable income. They had the first television set anybody’d ever seen. If you played your cards right, you could watch Howdy Doody or Your Show of Shows. Liza took me over there once, but Kathy didn’t like me so I wasn’t invited back.”

The Cramers’ house was the only two-story structure I’d seen, an old-fashioned farmhouse with a wide wooden porch. I’d stuck a pack of index cards in my jacket pocket, and I used one now to make a crude map of the town. I’d be talking to a number of current and former residents, and I thought it would help to have a sense of where they’d lived relative to one another.

Daisy paused in front of a pale green stucco house with a flat roofline. Up came the hand so she could gnaw on herself. A short walkway lead from the street to the walk-out porch. A chain-link fence surrounded the property, with a sign hanging from the open gate that read NO TRESPASS. The yard was dead. Raw plywood sheets had been nailed over the windows. The front door had been lifted from its hinges and left leaning against the outside wall. The house number was 3908.

“That’s where you lived. I recognize the porch rail from the photograph.”

“Yep. You want to come in?”

“We’re not trespassing?”

“Not now. I bought it. Don’t ask me why. My parents rented from a guy named Tom Padgett, who sold it to me. You’ll see his name on the list. He was in the bar on a couple of occasions when the two of them pitched a fit. Daddy worked construction so sometimes we had money and sometimes not. If he had it, he’d spend it, and if he didn’t have it, too bad. Owing people money never bothered him. Bad weather he’d be out of a job or else he’d get fired for showing up drunk. He wasn’t exactly a deadbeat, but he operated with a similar mentality. He’d take care of the bills if he was in the mood, but you couldn’t count on that. Padgett was forever pounding on him for the rent because Daddy tended to pay late, if he paid at all. We’d be threatened with eviction, and when he finally coughed up the rent, it was always with the attitude that he was being abused.”

I followed her through the gate. I knew she must have been back a hundred times, but looking for what? An explanation, a clue, an answer to the questions that were plaguing her?

Inside, the layout was elementary. Living room with a dining cove, a kitchen with just enough room for a table and chairs, though those were long since gone. The kitchen appliances had been removed, pipes and wires sticking out of the wall. Blocks of relatively clean linoleum indicated where the stove and refrigerator had once sat. The sink was still there, along with the chipped Formica counters with metal rims. Cabinet doors stood open, revealing the empty shelves where paper was curling up from the corners. Without even meaning to, I moved forward and closed one of the cabinet doors. “Sorry. Things like that bug me.”

“I’m the same way,” Daisy said. “You wait. Leave the room and come back and the door will be open again. Almost enough to make you wonder about ghosts.”

“You’re not tempted to fix it up?”

“Maybe one day, though I can’t imagine ever living here again. I like the house I’m in.”

“So which bedroom was yours?”

“In here.”

The room was barely nine feet by twelve, painted an unpleasant shade of pink that I supposed was meant to be girlish.

“My bed was in this corner. Chest of drawers there. Armoire. Toy box. Little table and two chairs.” She leaned against the wall and surveyed the space. “I felt so lucky to have a room of my own. I didn’t know from tacky. Most of the people we knew were as bad off as we were. Or that’s what I realize now.”

She moved from her room to the second bedroom and paused in the door. This one was painted lavender with a wallpaper border of violets along the low ceiling line. I backtracked three steps and checked the bathroom, where the sink and bathtub were still anchored in place. The toilet had been removed and a rag was stuffed in the hole, which still emitted the spoiled-egg smell of flushes gone by. This was possibly the most depressing house I’d ever been in.

She moved in behind me, perhaps seeing the house as I did. “Believe it or not, my mother did what she could to pretty things up. Lace curtains for the living room, throw rugs, doilies for the furniture-stuff like that. One of the last fights I remember, my dad went berserk and tore down one of her precious lace panels. I don’t think he could have done anything worse. That’s how they were, always going to extremes, pushing each other over the edge. She tore down the rest, ripped them off the rods and threw them in the trash. I could hear her screaming she was finished. Done. She said he destroyed everything beautiful she tried to do and she hated him for that. Blah, blah, blah. That was a couple of days before she left.”

“Did it scare you? The fights?”

“Sometimes. Mostly I thought that’s just how parents behaved,” she said. “Anyway, the upshot is I’m a chronic insomniac. Shrinks have a field day with that. The only time I remember sleeping well was when I was a little kid and my parents went out. It must have been the only time I felt safe, because Liza was in charge and I knew I could trust her to take care of me.”