Blood in the Water(65)

“What I think is truly bizarre,” Gregor said, “is that the murderer only went to the trouble of destroying one of the bodies.”





FOUR

1

To Walter Dunbar, everything that had happened in the last month—and especially everything that had happened in the last few hours—was proof positive that the world was a pack of idiots. Sometimes what had to be done seemed so obvious to him, he just didn’t believe that other people didn’t see it. Sometimes he was convinced that the world was full of people who existed only to spite him. Horace Wingard, to name one, would be willing to see Waldorf Pines and everything it supposedly stood for sink into the sea and drown before he’d admit that Walter was right about anything.

And Walter was always right about everything.

Walter had no idea what had started him thinking, this morning, about his mother. He only knew he had woken up and walked out onto the deck as usual, and suddenly his head was full of the sound of her voice. She’d been dead now for nearly thirty years, but Walter could still remember the last time he’d talked to her. He’d gone to the little town house she’d lived in in the “retirement community” where he’d found her a place after his father died. The place had started out being called an “adult community” until he complained, because of course, by then, “adult” had come to mean “pornography.”

“It’s not a very nice thing, saying your mother lives in an adult community,” he’d told the management not a week after he’d moved his mother in. “It makes it sound like she’s going to put tassels on and buy fans.”

The snot-nosed idiot at the management office hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about. He’d probably never even heard of a fan dancer. There was something that had come and gone without a trace. Walter remembered fan dancers. They were the “respectable” strippers, and Perry Mason even had one as a client on the old television show.

He’d had to go up the chain of command, then, to talk to somebody old enough to have much sense—not that even older people had much sense. He’d made enough of a stink about it to force the change of name, and he’d put his foot down about calling the place a “senior” community. If there was one thing Walter hated it was all that crap about “senior citizens.” It was as if the world was supposed to be one big high school, complete with class colors and junior–senior balls. Walter had hated high school, much as he’d hated elementary school, much as he’d hated college. Education was a pile of crap, anyway. You slogged your way through a lot of meaningless bullshit, and then they let you make a living.

The last day Walter had seen his mother, she had been watching the neighbors’ grandchildren in the neighbors’ yards. She had a pair of binoculars to do it with, and the longer she watched, the more agitated she got.

“You’re not supposed to have children here,” she told him, “not even for the afternoon. It’s against the rules. It upsets the residents.”

Walter could see how the children would upset his mother. They were on both sides of her, and they were very wild and noisy. People didn’t know how to keep their children well behaved anymore. The children ran and screamed and shouted and broke things. These children were climbing on the cellar doors and pretending to slide down. Then they were crying that they had splinters. Some of them had Frisbees. The Frisbees sailed right over the hedges into his mother’s own yard and the children climbed over after them.

“I’ll go do something about it,” he’d said.

Then he’d walked right over to the management building to complain. It was Saturday. The crew that was on for the weekend was all young, and none of them really wanted to take responsibility for anything.

“But it’s grandchildren,” the little girl in the office had said, looking confused. “You don’t want people not to be able to have their grandchildren visit?”

The little girl in the office made the statement as if it were a question, but Walter could see it in her eyes. She thought he was crazy. She thought nobody on earth would mind if people’s grandchildren made a fuss and a bother and came running onto people’s lawns, because they were grandchildren, and everybody had to love grandchildren.

“They’re throwing those Frisbees right into my mother’s yard,” he’d said, “and then they’re running into the yard to get them. They’re going to break something. A window maybe. And I don’t care whose grandchildren they are, I want them out of there. That’s why there are rules.”