I was looking that way, toward the barn, when the man came out of it. His sudden appearance brought me up short; he was moving in a furtive way, his face and eyes turned toward the house. Bulky guy, sandy hair done up in a frizz—familiar even at this distance.
Richie Dessault.
What the hell? I thought. I ran back into the hall and out onto the porch. He was no longer by the barn and no longer moving furtively; he had started to run up into the woods on the far slope, being more or less quiet about it. I thought about yelling at him, but it wouldn’t have done any good: he was building a good head of steam, dodging this way and that through the trees, and he wasn’t looking back. I pounded down the stairs and across the yard in front of the barn. But by the time I got to the foot of the slope he had vanished near the crest.
I didn’t see any point in chasing after him; he had thirty years on me and a lot more wind and stamina. And I couldn’t have caught him anyway because after a minute or so there was the distant sound of a car engine revving up, over on the other side of the hill. Another road, probably, invisible from here.
What the hell? I thought again. What was Dessault doing here? What was his connection with Danny Martinez? And why hadn’t he driven his car into the yard, as I had, instead of leaving it out of sight and skulking over here through the woods?
I swung around and went into the barn, to see if I could tell what he’d been doing in there. The interior was gloomy and nurtured a sour smell composed of dust, dry rot, manure, and other things I couldn’t define. On the packed-earth floor just inside the doors was a large stack of lumber, a couple of sawhorses, a scatter of carpentering tools; it looked as though Martinez had bought the lumber with the idea of making additional repairs on both the house and the barn. Along one wall was a workbench cluttered with all sorts of junk, from spools of wire to a radio in a cracked plastic case; propped against another wall were a hand plow and some gardening tools. At the rear were three horse stalls, two of them empty, the one in the far corner containing another, smaller stack of plywood sheets and two-by-fours. A ladder gave access to a hayloft; it looked sturdy, so I climbed it far enough for a look into the loft. The only things up there were a rusty pitchfork and some remnants of old hay.
Dessault hadn’t been doing anything in here, the way it looked. Except hiding, maybe. Caught here, or out in the open nearby, when he heard my car; so he’d waited, watching, until I entered the house, and then made his escape through the trees.
But I still couldn’t figure a reason for him being here. Did he know Martinez? The way he’d reacted yesterday morning, when I’d asked Melanie if she knew anyone who spoke with a Latin accent … now that I thought about it, his reaction had been a little too sharp and edged with surprise. Maybe he did know Martinez. But that still didn’t explain his presence here today, or his furtiveness.
The barn was oppressive, somehow; I went back out into the sunshine and took a look at the chicken coop. Nothing there. I crossed to the house again. And prowled through its five rooms and bath, starting with the parlor.
The loose papers on and around the desk weren’t particularly interesting. Old bills, some paid and some not; a couple of personal letters written in Spanish to “Eva cara mia” and signed “Mama,” but with no address or envelope to tell me where they’d come from; some crayon drawings similar to the one on the wall, the kind of stuff proud parents save. What was interesting was the way the papers were strewn around, as if they had been pawed through by somebody in a hurry. Martinez? Or Dessault? And if it had been Dessault, why? What was he looking for?
The kitchen was next. Pots and pans, a few dishes, some packaged and canned foodstuffs in the cupboards—Martinez hadn’t bothered to take any of that. Or clean out the refrigerator, either: a couple of things in there wore greenish fur coats. But again, there was evidence here of haste either in packing for departure or in a rapid search. Cupboard doors stood open, drawers had been pulled out and left that way, the shards from a broken vodka bottle were scattered across the drainboard and among a tier of dirty crockery and utensils in the sink.
A dining area opened off the kitchen, but there wasn’t anything in it except a table and some chairs and a sideboard. Nothing in the little boy’s bedroom, either, except a bunk-style bed; the closet was empty except for a couple of dropped coat hangers, a toy soldier with its head twisted off, and the remains of a balsa-wood model airplane. I moved into the bath that separated that bedroom from the one where Martinez and his common-law wife had slept. The medicine cabinet door was open, revealing two empty shelves and one containing some used razor blades. A vial of cheap men’s cologne had been dropped and broken in the sink; but there was not much odor from it, even when I poked my nose down there, which meant that the vial hadn’t been broken recently.