Hearts of Sand(24)

He opened the note. It had been typed out, very neatly, on Alwych Police Department letterhead.

This is Juan Valdez, the note said. He’ll be your driver while you’re in town. I’ve told him to take you directly to the Switch and Shingle as soon as you get in. He can bring you out to us when you’ve gotten settled. Thank you again for coming. Jason Battlesea.

Gregor read the note through twice. What in the name of God was the Switch and Shingle? He looked up at Juan Valdez.

“Is the Switch and Shingle close to here?” Gregor asked.

Juan Valdez stared at him. Then he bent over and picked up the suitcase. He did not touch the attaché case. He said something in Spanish that Gregor didn’t understand. Then he headed through the doors to the waiting room.

Gregor grabbed his attaché case and followed as quickly as he could. Juan Valdez was moving through the doors on the other side as Gregor got to the waiting room benches. Gregor tried moving faster still.

He got out of the waiting room’s front doors and found himself on a little sidewalk with cabs parked along it. The only car that wasn’t a cab was a brown Volvo sedan. Juan Valdez was standing next to the sedan, closing the trunk. Then he came around and opened the back passenger door closest to the curb.

“Por favor,” he said.

Gregor hesitated a moment, then got in. At least it wasn’t a limousine. Juan Valdez closed the door next to him and went around the car to get behind the wheel. Then he pulled out as if there were no other cars in the area, and pulled out onto Main Street.

Main Street looked, from the ground, pretty much as it had from the train. There were dress shops and restaurants, a little local bookstore with a cat in the window, a drugstore with a big cardboard sign in front in the shape of a gigantic puppy. They passed a hospital and, right next to it, a building announcing itself as a FREE CLINIC. They passed a small park that sat deep in a well in the ground, so that you had to go down a steep grassy hill or an equally steep ramp to get to it. It had slides and swings and places where the grass had been removed to make way for sand.

A couple of minutes later, Gregor began to feel the sea. The car was running the air-conditioning at full blast, but he put his window down anyway. As soon as he did so, he could most definitely hear it. He could smell it, too. There was ocean here.

They took another turn, and they were on a wide, nearly straight boulevard flanked by the sea on one side and huge, secretive houses on the other. The houses were all behind hedges. Gregor turned around and looked out the rear window. All the way at the end down there, getting smaller and smaller, was an even bigger building, houselike but without the quasi-protection of hedges, and with terraces making a wide sweep over the beach. That, he thought, must be the Atlantic Club.

The houses never got smaller, but they did get farther apart. The beach was empty, even though the day was beautiful and it was almost July. They glided past it all as if none of it had any significance to Gregor’s being here, even though he knew this had to be Beach Drive, and that meant that this had to be where Chapin Waring had died. He tried to concentrate on the houses, to see if he could pick out the one. There was nothing out in the open that indicated that any house was any different from any other. There weren’t even any people. For some reason, Gregor found that very disturbing.

The road made another little sweeping turn, and Gregor suddenly found himself being driven through the gates of a big Victorian with wide terraces facing the ocean. He just caught the sign that said THE SWITCH AND SHINGLE BED AND BREAKFAST as they passed it.

Juan Valdez pulled the car up in front of the front door. Gregor opened his door and got out. The driveway under his feet was gravel. The house in front of his face was big enough to be a girls’ school.

Suddenly, the front doors opened and a woman came out. She was tall and heavyset and out of breath, and she was wearing the muumuu to end all muumuus. It was mostly purple, but it had some flamingo pink in it, and some neon orange. She was, however, wearing neither makeup nor jewelry, and she had never dyed her hair.

She came down the steps from the front door and walked right up to him.

“Are you Gregor Demarkian?” she asked.

“I most definitely am,” Gregor said.

“Well, we got something right, at any rate,” she said. “I’m Darlee Corn. I was born and brought up right here on Beach Drive, in this very house, and if you think I spend my time wishing I hadn’t been, you’d be right. Jason Battlesea is having the vapors about putting you up here, and Evaline don’t-say-my-last-name-too-loud Veer is doing worse, but there aren’t any hotels in Alwych. I gave you the best room in the house and I think you’re going to like it. You’d better come right in now. If you take too much time, we’re going to have Jason over here foaming at the mouth.”