False Conception Read online

  She shrugged. “I don’t really know. I never talked to him, only to say hi to. He always looked so envious, I remember that. As though the people on Santa Ana were from another species. As though living out here was the greatest thing that could happen to a person.”

  “It probably seemed that way to him.”

  She looked toward the window and the manicured world beyond it. “Well, it might have looked enviable on the outside, but inside it was different. We certainly weren’t happier than other people, I don’t think. I wasn’t, I know that. I was miserable in those days. So was Stuart.”

  “Why was Stuart so miserable?”

  “Because his father was never satisfied with anything he did and because his sister was better at most things than he was. She was even stronger than he was; the kids teased him about it unmercifully. I felt sorry for him. Of course in those days, he didn’t care what I felt; I’m not sure he does now.” She blinked and gnawed her lip. “I didn’t mean that. Of course he cares. He wouldn’t have agreed to go through all this turbulence to give me a baby if he didn’t care.”

  “Why were you so miserable in those days, Mrs. Colbert?”

  She had stopped blinking and now seemed subdued and transfixed, the ether of the past acting on her nerves as a tranquilizer. “Because I was a gawky kid with no hips or breasts even after the other girls had them, someone who wasn’t good in school, or at sports, or fast dancing, or anything else that was important at that age, including giving boys what they wanted.” She blushed when she saw my smile. “I don’t mean sex, necessarily, I mean the flirting, the suggestiveness, the fawning—all the stuff that makes boys want to spend time with you at that age. Or any age, I guess.”

  “Was Clara Brennan good at those things?”

  “She was the best.”

  “Then why did she end up with Luke? Why didn’t one of the rich kids latch on to her?”

  “Because of what happened to her father.”

  “Tell me about that,” I said.

  She finally abandoned the window. “What do you want to know? He got in trouble at the company and blew his brains out when they caught him.”

  “Did everyone know about the trouble before he killed himself, or did that only come out afterward?”

  “I didn’t know about it, that’s for sure. I don’t think any of the other kids did, either. And Clara didn’t seem much different till after he was dead, so … I think it came out after they found him spattered all over the porch at the big house.” She shuddered. “It was awful. They painted it over and everything, but there were still spots that seeped through—Luke used to sell tickets to see them, a dollar a peek. I still get the creeps when I go over there. Not that I ever do, except at Christmas.”

  “What happened after Ethan Brennan died? What did people say about it?”

  “There were all kinds of guesses about how much money he’d taken and what he’d done with it. People said it was buried in the yard—some kids even dug it all up one night, but they didn’t find anything. There were rumors he’d done other things, too.”

  “What kind of things?”

  She colored. “You know kids—they make melodrama out of everything.”

  “For example.”

  “Oh, they said Ethan had raped one of the models down at the store, or that he got caught trying to rob the mansion, or was trying to kill Mr. Colbert so he could take over the company himself, or that he didn’t commit suicide—he was killed because he and Mrs. Colbert were lovers. All kinds of stories were going around; it must have been awful for Clara—she and Luke ran off right afterward. Luke was the only one who stood by her, what with the shame and everything.” She closed her eyes and remembered more. “I would have stood by her, too, except I didn’t count by then.”

  “Did you ever see Clara Brennan after that?”

  She shook her head. “Not once.”

  “Did she and Luke get married?”

  “I heard they did,”

  “Did you ever see him around here afterward?”

  “No.”

  “How about his family? Where are they?”

  “I never saw his father. His mother worked in the big house, I think, but she left right after Luke did. Fern was a nice woman,” she added generously.

  “What’s wrong with your mother-in-law?”

  She tossed a nervous glance in the direction of the house down the block. “Delilah’s a hermit. Never entertains; never goes outside for anything. I hardly ever see her and I don’t know anyone who does except Mrs. Brennan. She didn’t even come to our wedding—she says we’re unclean.”

  “What did she mean by that?”

  Her face took on a look of abject panic. “I didn’t ask her. Would you?”

  I smiled and shook my head. “Did Luke Drummond have any reason to hate your husband, Mrs. Colbert?”

  The question surprised her. “Why would he?”

  “I thought maybe Stuart might have fired him. Or taken his girlfriend. Or beat him up. Or embarrassed him in some way. One of those things that happen when you’re young and one person thinks it’s trivial and the other holds a grudge for the rest of his life.”

  She was shaking her head before I finished. “I don’t know of anything like that, but Stuart and I didn’t run in the same crowd in those days, so I can’t say it didn’t happen.” An impish smile stretched and flattened her lips. “But no one on Santa Ana was strong enough to beat up Luke Drummond, that’s for sure.”

  She laughed a quick titter, then as quickly began to cry. “I can’t help thinking about my baby out there, growing inside someone else, not even knowing who I am or how much I love him. Maybe being damaged by what that Hammond woman’s doing to herself. Maybe being sick. I feel like such a failure: we should have adopted; I told him we should have. But he wouldn’t listen. He had to have a child of his own. As if anything matters but how much you love it.”

  Sobs racked her body in a powerful paroxysm; I could only sit and watch. “What if I never get to see him, Mr. Tanner?” she continued, working the rhetoric to its gloomy end. “What if he’s born and grows up and I don’t ever know the tiniest thing about him? What if that’s the only baby I ever have, and I don’t even have him? What do I do, then?”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I told her I was going to try to keep that from happening. The bromide didn’t seem to soothe either of us.

  CHAPTER 20

  I paused in front of Rutherford Colbert’s mansion long enough to absorb the message that beamed my way from within the pink stucco walls and the orange tile roof and the tangled web of foliage that wrapped the quixotic structure in a swath of leafy bondage. My sense was that the wavelengths stemmed from a source that was hostile, forbidding, and arrogant—we don’t want you here, they said; we don’t need you here, they announced; we are your betters in here, they bragged; we repel invaders, they warned. It was enough to keep me moving—I hurried next door and rang the bell for reasons that remained inchoate, since I was far from sure that the elder Mrs. Colbert was competent to conduct a conversation.

  After the fourth ring I decided I was going to be just another worldly object shunned by the reclusive woman who had reportedly been a holdout in the house for almost twenty years. But as I turned to walk on to her daughter’s residence, the door squeaked open at my back.

  The woman who commandeered the threshold looked at me with a bulldog expression that suggested I was violating a cardinal principle and that if I knew what was good for me, I’d repair to a suitable temple and atone for it. For a moment, I thought it was Delilah Colbert herself determined to bar my entrance, but this woman seemed both too focused and too diminutive to be the allegedly addled mother of the one of her children I knew.

  I nodded a greeting and clasped my hands at my back, bending at the waist like Groucho. “My name’s Tanner. I’d like to speak with Mrs. Colbert for a moment.”

  She was apparently a combination security guard and practical nurse. She wore a sha
peless blue smock and serviceable black shoes and her hair was contained by a net of a type I hadn’t seen since I used to visit my grandmother in search of oatmeal cookies. But my grandmother didn’t wear rubber gloves that reached to her elbows. Beneath their elastic sheaths, her tiny forearms were the size and density of pool cues.

  “Mrs. Colbert no longer receives visitors,” she said unnaturally, as though reciting directions in a foreign tongue.

  “It’s about—”

  “Doesn’t matter what it’s about—no visitors.”

  “—her son,” I finished nonetheless.

  She frowned the way Warren Christopher frowns. “Stuart? What about him?”

  “I have reason to believe he may be going to come to grief because of what happened in this neighborhood twenty years ago.”

  The barrier didn’t melt. “We’ve all come to grief because of what happened twenty years ago. If Stuart’s stirring all that up again, grief is the least he deserves.”

  I met her look. “Even if that’s the case, it would be to the advantage of both of you to talk to me.”

  “Miz Colbert’s got enough troubles, she’s not looking to take on any more. And neither am I.”

  In the face of her obstinancy, I blurted more than I should have. “Even if it would help her grandson?”

  She puffed like a partridge. “There’s no reason for her to have anything at all to do with that boy at this point, and you can tell Stuart I said so.”

  The response seemed oddly heartless. “Shouldn’t Mrs. Colbert be the one to decide that?”

  The question seemed to penetrate a layer of her conditioning, but one layer wasn’t enough. “I’ve got my orders.”

  I unclasped my hands and folded them across my chest. “What’s your name?”

  “What do you need to know that for?”

  “I like to know who I’m pestering.”

  She crossed her arms to ape me. “You’re not going to be pestering me any longer; I’ve got chores to do.”

  “You’re Opal Brennan, aren’t you?”

  “What if I am?”

  “If you are, then your daughter is involved in this as well.”

  She squinted against the suggestion. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Involved in what?”

  “Kidnaping, maybe.”

  Her right hand rose to her throat and remained like an ivory broach, of gnarled and knobby design. “Who’s been kidnaped? Clara?”

  “At this point it’s not clear that’s what’s happened. But she could be in serious trouble. But if you and Mrs. Colbert cooperate, I may be able to get her out of it.”

  Her voice rose with the aid of twenty years of paranoia. “How do I know that? How do I know you’re not a policeman? Or another of them that’s working for Mr. Colbert?”

  “I am working for Mr. Colbert. But I’m also a friend of Clara’s and I’m trying to help her out of the mess she’s in.”

  “That’s easy enough to say. It might not be so easy to prove.”

  “I first knew her as Greta Hammond. She lived in an apartment on Kirkham Street. Near Golden Gate Park. I think she buys you your rubber gloves.”

  The conversation was going into forbidden territory but she didn’t know how to confine it. “That proves you knew her. It doesn’t prove you’re a friend.”

  “She collects Supremes records and eats sauerkraut even though she hates it.” I looked for a thaw but still didn’t find one. “She likes vanilla wafers and her right breast is larger than her left.”

  Her hand dropped from her throat and made a fist at her abdomen. “Gracious.” She took an involuntary step backward, into the gloomy confines of a house where licentiousness was never an issue. “What is it you’re telling me?”

  “I’m telling you that I’m Clara’s friend,” I said again, then indulged in what I hoped was hyperbole. “And I’m telling you she needs to let me find her if she wants to keep out of prison.”

  “I … perhaps you should come in.”

  More frightened than I wanted her to be, she let me into the foyer, then opened the door to an adjoining parlor that seemed to have been custom-made for her. The room was small and cramped, furnished with delicate chairs and tables inspired by the French provincials, each piece so reduced in scale they might have been purloined from Millicent Colbert’s dollhouse. The floors were fir; the rugs thrown over them were loosely woven cottons that probably originated in Turkey. The lamps were hooded with colored glass that gave the room the inexact illumination of a church. Half a dozen bowls held discs of peppermint candy, just like the sweets down the block.

  Opal Brennan led me toward matching chairs that faced each other in front of the tiny fireplace. The painting over the mantel was of the smaller man in the snapshot I’d seen at Greta Hammond’s, the one who had been gazing at his mate with fondness. “Handsome man,” I said when she saw me looking at it.

  “Yes,” she said simply.

  I looked at the portrait again. Rutherford Colbert seemed pleasant and guileless and chipper, with no hint of the cruelty he was reputed to be capable of. I decided the artist was more tactful than precise, and had been paid to be just that.

  “Have you spoken with your daughter lately, Mrs. Brennan?” I asked as I took a seat by the fire.

  A bulb flashed on and off within her eyes. “Why is everyone looking for her?”

  “Are you saying other people have asked about her?”

  She started to elaborate, then didn’t. “Some.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “That I didn’t know anything about it.”

  “I don’t believe that’s true,” I said.

  She grew huffy at the slur. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “Because she’s your daughter.”

  “That hasn’t meant anything since she ran off twenty years ago.”

  I went back to square one. “As I said, my business has to do with Mrs. Colbert’s grandchild.”

  She frowned and shook her head. “Delilah’s got no interest in that circumstance whatever. Chickens coming home to roost is all it is.”

  For a second time, the reference was puzzling. “That’s an odd thing to say about a child,” I said, in an effort to draw her out.

  “That’s no child and never was or will be.”

  I still didn’t know what she was talking about. “I’m afraid you’re confused, Mrs. Brennan. Maybe if you let me talk to your boss, we can straighten it out.”

  She started to recite her exclusionary rule once more but something made her change her mind. Like a toy figure down from atop a music box, she got to her feet and returned to the foyer, then disappeared down the hall. I was as neglected as the candy in the crystal bowls.

  I figured it was no better than even money she’d come back for me, but she did. “Mrs. Colbert says she can’t help you,” Opal announced from the foyer, proud that her stance had been validated. “She says she doesn’t know anything about Clara whatsoever.”

  “She must know something—Clara grew up in this house and you’ve been her companion for twenty years.”

  Opal Brennan sniffed at my naiveté. “You don’t know anything about this house, then or now, and there’s no use pretending you do. Mrs. Colbert says to leave her be.”

  I fired my last shot. “Tell her that I’ve been hired to find Clara, and that if you two don’t cooperate, I’ll tell her husband that she has crucial information that she’s refusing to disclose. And I’ll tell the police as well, since they’ll be involved in this sooner or later.”

  I’d gambled that Rutherford’s name would be more galvanizing than his son’s, and I was right. Opal gave my threat some thought, then disappeared down the hall once again.

  Minutes later she was back. “Take off your shoes if you’re coming.”

  I stepped into the foyer and did as I was told. In my stocking feet I felt four feet tall, which put me on a par with Opal Brennan, which might have been the idea.

  “Washroom’
s in there.” Opal pointed at a narrow doorway to the left of the staircase. “Clean your hands, then put these on.” She handed me a seersucker bathrobe, a white gauze mask, and a pair of rubber gloves.

  “Why the garments?”

  “Miz Colbert doesn’t like germs.”

  “I don’t have any germs.”

  “Everybody has germs.”

  “Then why aren’t you wearing a mask?”

  She straightened like a soldier. “The germs I have are too old to do damage—I haven’t been outside this house since 1974.”

  I went in the bathroom and did my duty. When I came out, I felt like an amalgam of Ben Casey and the Lone Ranger.

  “Did you wash up?” Opal demanded. “She’ll smell your fingers, to see if you used the soap.”

  I told her I’d used the soap.

  Satisfied with my ablutions, Opal led me down the hallway, past a music room and a utility closet, and opened a door that admitted us into a chamber that was as different from the rest of the house as gypsum is from mud.

  The floor and walls and ceiling formed an igloo of enameled white, unmarred by ornament, antiseptic in aspect. The vinyl floor had been cleared of everything but a bed and a chair and a tungsten floor lamp that was bright enough to illuminate any germ that blundered by. The only other objects in view were an electric humidifier, some sort of air cleaner that purred like a cat in a corner, and a table next to the bed from which dangled what looked to be an old-fashioned douche bag. The odors were of rubbing alcohol and disinfectant; the aura was distinctly creepy.

  Some newspapers were stacked by the bed as well. Newspapers are clean, supposedly; they’re what you wrap babies in when you have them in the backseats of taxis or the aisles of airplanes. Which made them one of the few suitable companions for the woman who occupied the bed the way a corpse occupies a coffin.

  “This is Delilah Colbert,” Opal Brennan said, as if there were some other option. “You’re to state your piece and move on.”

  Propped at an angle by a mound of foam pillows, Delilah Colbert wore a white satin gown that buttoned at the neck and wrists and fell well below her ankles. There wasn’t an alien object on her body—no makeup, no jewelry, no article of clothing other than the shimmering raiment. Her skin was as white as the walls and eerily unlined, as though it were a piece of lingerie she’d slipped into when she heard I was coming. Her lips were a bloodless buttonhole in the center of her stolid face; her hair was as white as her gown and wrapped in a black net much like her companion’s. Her eyes were drips of ink on a page of blank parchment; her fingers were raised off the bedclothes the way a pianist raises his hands at the end of an étude.