Dearly Departed

The detectives who searched Alison’s purse had found the note. The single word, SOON was printed with an ordinary crayon on common white typing paper and placed in a standard number-ten envelope; the examiners at the BCA laughed when they were asked for a handwriting analysis. The detectives had also found Alison’s gun. It hadn’t been fired. The detectives traced it to a sporting goods store in Bloomington. An employee there remembered Alison.

“She wanted a .357. Everyone wants a ca

There was nothing else in her purse that should not have been there. Each item was carefully logged. Truman had been correct; Alison’s ID, cash, ATM card, credit cards, and checkbook were all intact.

And that was it. The photographer had taken his photographs, the sketcher had made his sketches, the measurer had taken his measurements, the evidence man had tagged and preserved his evidence, and the master notetaker had written down in shorthand the observations and descriptions offered by all the others. It all added up to zero. This lack of clues didn’t surprise me. In a murder, it’s the victim who supplies the most information—and our victim was not to be found.

As for witnesses: The bulk of A

I was sitting at my dining room table, the pages of the file freed from the fastener and organized in front of me. Ogilvy, my gray-and-white French lop-eared rabbit, lounged at my feet, munching day-old popcorn.

A photograph was included in the file, an eight-by-ten color glossy of two women dressed in period costumes. Turn-of-the-century European, I guessed. The woman in the background, dark hair, dark visage, seemed formidable but confused—anger without focus. Her hand rested on the shoulder of a younger woman in the foreground. The younger woman was Alison.

I set the photograph aside yet found myself returning to it several times while I read the file, picking it up and studying it and tossing it down again only to reach for it a few minutes later. This was a different Alison than the woman in the black-and-white photograph. This Alison was no mysterious femme fatale, a seductress framed in shadow. This Alison was soft and vulnerable and desperate. You could feel her throat tightening around some great, indescribable pain. And her eyes, her spectacular blue-green eyes, were almost too painful to contemplate, yet I kept looking into them, couldn’t stop looking into them.

One of the women who’d been interviewed was an actress named Marie Audette. She had been close to Alison when they both toiled for the University of Mi

I was debating whether to sift through the entire file a third time when the telephone rang. The Twins and Indians were on the radio, Hall of Fame broadcaster Herb Carneal doing the play-by-play, and I turned down the volume before answering the phone.

“Have it solved, yet?” A

“The butler did it with a candlestick in the library.”

“Now, why didn’t I think of that?”

“How’d the roundup go?”

“No muss, no fuss,” A

“So you had to take him alive, huh? Bummer.”

“You believe it? He kept the gun! You never keep the gun. Any idiot who ever watched an episode of Perry Mason knows you never keep the gun.”

“The declining grade of criminal we get these days, A

“I did. He agreed to let you in.”

“Great.”

“Desperate men will do desperate things. He’ll meet you at eight tomorrow morning at the scene; he doesn’t want you seen hanging around the station. Only, keep it quiet. Teeters has taken a beating over this case. The last thing he needs is for the media to get involved again. Especially your friend Beamon at the Mi

“Beamon is no friend of mine.”

“Then why does he keep asking about you every time I see him? He asked about you again this afternoon when we brought in the killer.”

“He thinks we’re having an affair.”

“Set him straight, will you?”

“I have. But the more I tell him we’re just good friends, the less he believes it. I don’t know what else to do.”

“You could marry Cynthia.”

“There’s a thought.”

The other end of the phone went dead silent, and for a moment I thought we had been cut off.

“A

“I was joking,” she said.

“So was I,” I told her.

“I’m going home to bed. It’s late.”

“Thanks, A

“One thing, Taylor,” she said. “If you learn anything, anything at all …”

“I’ll tell Teeters first and then you.”

“Good night, Taylor.”

“Good night, sleep tight, and don’t let the pom-poms bite.”

“Pom-poms?”

“Just something my daughter used to say.”

four

Alison Do

This resentment permeated the statements made by the witnesses: “You’d think she would have known better.” “I guess she wasn’t so smart after all.” “She was always too smart for her own good.” Crap like that. According to the file, Alison had forged only two long-lasting friendships in her lifetime, both with women she hadn’t seen or spoken with for at least one month prior to her disappearance. Which is why I found no irony in her choice of profession. Perhaps by working in public relations she’d hoped to gain what she seemed to lack in her private life: personal attachments. But that’s just a guess, the amateur psychologist talking. And maybe I was projecting too much of my own life into the theory. I, too, was basically friendless—except for A

What I did find ironic was Alison’s choice of homes. If you wanted to avoid people—and I don’t think she did—this was a good place to live. The house was located well outside of Hastings, about a forty-minute drive from St. Paul, on a dead-end road that I missed twice, in a forest that resembled Itasca State Park more than a simple grove of trees. Only six homes shared the cul-de-sac, built at least an acre apart. I parked in front of a large colonial with cedar shakes. The one with the patrol car in the driveway.