Blunt Darts Read online

  “Oh, it’s not,” she replied quickly, and glanced down at the waiter’s tray. “But let’s not be rude to the chicken.” I laughed and motioned to the waiter to begin serving.

  The entree was delightful, punctuated by few words. Valerie finished a bit before I did and fixed me with deep-brown eyes. “I can’t really start at the beginning because I didn’t know the family then,” she said. “But this past year in class—I teach the eighth grade—I had a boy named Stephen Kinnington in my homeroom and English classes.”

  “Familiar name,” I interjected, finishing the last of my chicken.

  “I’m not surprised. His father, Judge Willard J. Kinnington, was one of the youngest men ever to go on the bench, and his family has sort of, well, ruled Meade since long before I arrived. Anyway, Stephen’s mother, Diane Kinnington, killed herself about four years ago by driving her Mercedes off a bridge and into the river. Apparently she boozed it up a lot, so no one knows whether it was accidental or suicidal. It hit Stephen pretty hard, as you can imagine. I’ve talked with his fifth-grade teacher, Miss Pitts, who’s retired now, and she said that his mother’s ‘activities,’ as Miss Pitts put it, had been affecting Stephen for a long time prior to Mrs. Kinnington’s actual death. I got the impression from Miss Pitts that by ‘activities’ something more than simple alcoholism was involved, if you know what I mean.”

  “I’ve read of such goings on in France,” I said.

  Valerie made a face and plowed on. “Anyway, by the time I got Stephen this year, he seemed to be perfectly normal, though a little reserved around the other kids. By all tests, he was exceptionally bright. I mean a real brain-trust. At the beginning of the year, he would ask me whether I’d read certain books. He obviously had read them, and they were way beyond eighth-grade level. He’d missed a year of school because of sickness—hospitalized, even—but he’s still only fourteen. I sort of took it on myself to suggest to his father that perhaps Stephen should go to a private school with an accelerated program. But whenever I called his office at the courthouse, he wasn’t available, and he never returned my calls.”

  The word that stood out for me was “hospitalized,” but instead I said, “Don’t you have some sort of parent-teacher conference during the year?”

  “Yes, but the judge didn’t appear for the first one I scheduled, and when I called his home that evening, he wasn’t in. I was pretty upset, since those conferences are scheduled on my time, so I kind of demanded to speak with someone—the housekeeper answered the phone, you see—and that’s how I came to meet Mrs. Kinnington.”

  “The judge remarried?” I asked.

  “Oh, no, his mother—that is, the judge’s mother and Stephen’s grandmother, Eleanor Kinnington. Everyone calls her Mrs. Kinnington. She’s a little tower of power, and she was ripping mad that her son had skipped the appointment. She asked if it was convenient for me to come there for dinner the next evening to discuss Stephen. I said I’d be happy to come, but the judge wasn’t there the next night, either, and Mrs. Kinnington apologized for him through clenched teeth.

  “I had a terrific dinner and talk with her, though. She must be nearly eighty and needs hand braces—the kind polio victims use?—to walk around. But she’s really sharp. Anyway, Mrs. Kinnington said the judge would never allow his son to go to a private school. I got the impression that it was for local political reasons, as if it would seem that the town’s public schools weren’t good enough for a Kinnington. She encouraged me to help Stephen as much as I could. I also got the feeling that she thought the wife’s—or mother’s—death was really a blessing in disguise.

  “Anyway, after that I began giving Stephen some separate reading assignments that he really enjoyed. I also got to be good friends, in a formal sort of way, with Mrs. Kinnington, because we’d discuss Stephen from time to time.”

  Valerie paused for a moment to take a sip of wine. I found her way of running parenthetical thoughts and sentences together to be a mite tough to follow, but oddly not tiresome.

  “Um, I have to stop drinking this wine or I’ll never stay straight enough to finish the story. Anyway, about two weeks ago, Stephen disappeared.”

  “Kidnapped?”

  “Apparently not. It seems that he packed his things one afternoon and, well, left.”

  “You mean he ran away from home?”

  “Well, yes, but not exactly. I mean, no neighbor saw him shuffling along the sidewalk with a stick and stuffed handkerchief over his shoulder. And Stephen packed really thoroughly, as if he expected to go a long way for a long time.

  “Has he been heard from?”

  Valerie shook her head as she took another gulp of wine. “No, and the police haven’t found a trace in two weeks.”

  “What police?”

  “The local Meade department. Technically, I guess Stephen’s just ‘a missing person,’ since there’s no evidence of kidnapping. But there’s also been no publicity, so nobody is on the lookout for him except some agency the judge hired. You see—”

  “Wait a minute. What agency?”

  “Oh, somebody and Perkins on State Street.”

  “Sturney and Perkins, Inc. They’re one of the best, Val.”

  She smiled. “But they haven’t found anything. And I bet they’re not nearly as good as you.”

  I set down my wine glass and gave her my best counselor’s look. “Sturney and Perkins have a substantial staff. In a specific-crime case, sometimes one operative is better than an entire posse. That’s because he or she can get inside the investigation without causing ripples until the operative wants to make something happen. But a missing-person case requires a computer-type approach, assembling all the information you can from all sources and trying to blanket the areas he might be in with investigators, both police and private.”

  “But then why haven’t there been any newspaper articles with pictures of him to help?” Valerie asked, her eyes glittering.

  “Maybe the police and Sturney, et alia, feel that publicity would just invite a lot of crank calls or start the wrong people looking for him.”

  “You mean like criminals the judge put in jail?”

  “One example,” I said.

  “But right now Stephen’s out there with them anyway. I mean, he’s in their element, where he’s more likely to be hurt by someone who doesn’t even know who he is.”

  Valerie was becoming upset, so I decided to shift gears a little. “By the way, if Stephen’s disappearance has been kept so much under wraps, how do you know about his packing and so forth?”

  She blinked a few times and played with her nearly empty wine glass. “Well, that’s how I came to call you.

  “Stephen didn’t come to school for two days—you see, he took off just after final exams. Anyway, I called his house—I’d given up trying to reach his father—and Mrs. Kinnington told me all about it. We’ve talked almost every day since, and she was so upset last night, because nothing has happened, and we all know I don’t have the money to pay you, so …”

  “… so you sort of volunteered to be Mrs. Kinnington’s cat’s-paw and bring me into the case for her.”

  Valerie looked at me with a smile somewhere between bleakness and mischief. “At least you think it’s a case, huh?”

  I put on a fake frown, and she laughed. “Oh, please, John, Stephen’s such a good, bright boy. And despite the family money, he’s had a really tough time of it in life. Plus, I’m so afraid for him out there.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, and motioned to the waiter. “Let’s have our salad, and then you can telephone Mrs. Kinnington to set up an appointment.”

  Valerie Jacobs smiled, shook her hair and poured herself another glass of wine.

  “Today’s the judge’s afternoon for tennis, so he won’t be home until at least seven. Mrs. Kinnington’s expecting you at four-fifteen.”

  Three

  VALERIE WANTED TO CHAUFFEUR me out to the Kinnington place, but I insisted that she merely lead me there and let me
see the grandmother alone. Valerie reluctantly walked with me to the rent-a-car place in Copley Square (my ancient Renault Caravelle being in the shop awaiting a used A-frame from North Carolina). I signed for a Mercury Monarch, and we bailed her car out of a parking garage.

  Valerie took the Mass Turnpike to Route 128, the elongated beltway around Boston. We were beating the high-tech rush hour by thirty minutes. After about six miles she turned at the exit after the one I used for Bonham and continued into Meade.

  As we wound down the stylish country road, I began to get a better sense of the town. Meade was about as rural as its neighbor, but a good deal ritzier. In Bonham, there were big old farmhouses flanked by peeling, musty-looking sheds with rusting agricultural machinery slumped in their yards. In Meade, there were big, skylighted farmhouses flanked by newly painted, too-red barns with burnished BMW’s and Jags in their yards.

  I looked at myself in the rear-view mirror. Meade would happen to Bonham someday, at which point I’d probably no longer be allowed to use its firing range.

  Valerie signaled a turn onto a private, gravel road, then pulled past it to a stop. She stuck her head out the window and swiveled a hopeful face back toward me. I waved her on. Ms. Jacobs frowned and crunched some gravel on the shoulder as she accelerated out. I checked my watch. It was a shade after four, so I made the turn and weaved slowly upward through the trees.

  As I approached the Kinnington house, it appeared more modest than I’d expected. White colonial, with thin black shutters framing the smallish downstairs windows. No modern glass walls punched through here.

  I swung around a wide circular drive with a small, nonspitting fountain in the center, pulling past the fountain so that the Merc was headed out again. By the time I closed the car door, the main entrance to the house was open and a middle-aged black woman stood at the threshold, frowning at me.

  “Hello,” I said, “I’m—”

  “I don’t want to know your name. I don’t even know you’re here. Mrs. Kinnington is upstairs. Follow me.”

  Maybe, I thought, it’s my breath.

  The central staircase was beautifully maintained, with a polished, curving mahogany handrail atop off-white pickets. The steps were also mahogany under a narrow, Oriental runner. I glanced left and right as we climbed. On one side I could see a living room with a large portrait of a young army officer over the mantel. On the other side was the corner of a dining room. Polished hardwood floors and no wall-to-wall, only old, tasteful Orientals. A natural product of old, tasteful money.

  At the top of the staircase was an invalid lift, a chair that would slide mechanically up and down on a floor-and-wall track. Through clever coloring, the track itself was almost invisible.

  We turned right, then left. There appeared to be a similar wing on the other side of the building. I realized that the house was a good deal bigger than it appeared from the driveway.

  We entered a robin’s-egg-blue bedroom that must have measured thirty-by-thirty feet. Sitting on a love seat, with a beautiful silver service on a low table in front of her, was a double for the late actress Gladys Cooper. A double except for the eyes, which were flinty-hard and so dark that there was no way to tell where the pupil stopped and the iris began. On one side of Eleanor Kinnington rested a pair of metal braces; on the other was a Princess phone the color of the walls.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” she said. “Thank you, Mrs. Page. That will be all.”

  I half-turned, and the woman shot me a look that indicated she was sorry her name had ever been mentioned in my presence. She closed the door behind her.

  “No need to worry about Mrs. Page,” Mrs. Kinnington said in a tone she probably believed to be pleasant. “She and I have an understanding. Please, sit down.”

  The least delicate-looking chair in the room had apparently been moved from a now-bare corner to a conversational distance from her. I took it.

  “Will you have some tea?”

  I declined.

  Mrs. Kinnington settled back with hers. “You look younger than I expected,” she said from behind her teacup.

  “It’s the booze,” I replied. “Acts as a preservative.”

  She sniffed a smile at me. “So, early-middle-aged and impudent. Well, that’s probably just the combination I require. Has Miss Jacobs fully informed you of what has happened?”

  “Miss Jacobs has told me everything she believes is important.”

  A better smile this time, and the teacup was replaced on its saucer. “Then why don’t we begin discussing what I feel is important?”

  “Fine. Just so it doesn’t interrupt our train of thought later, my fee is two-hundred-and-fifty dollars per day, plus expenses.”

  “I trust then that you intend working on no other cases save this one?”

  “By some frantic telephoning, I was able to clear my calendar.”

  Exit her smile. “Continue.”

  “Second, the chances of one investigator finding one boy two weeks after he’s vanished, even assuming he hasn’t been kidnapped, are very, very slim.”

  “He hasn’t been kidnapped.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “There has been no ransom note, and Stephen packed before he left.”

  “Both good reasons, Mrs. Kinnington, but I’m afraid the lack of a ransom note would be consistent with packing if someone were trying to give the impression that the boy had skipped on his own.”

  She broke eye contact and retrieved her teacup. “Could we please refer to my grandson as ‘Stephen’ rather than … ‘the boy’?” she said softly.

  “Of course.” A sincere emotion? Yes, all the more because while the voice changed, the face, more easily controlled, did not.

  “I’m certain Stephen packed himself, because items are missing that another person, even his father, would never have thought to take.”

  I let her reference to the judge pass for the moment. “Examples?”

  “Before we go any further, I really must give you some insight about Stephen. He is an exceptionally gifted child. He was reading at age three. I had feared so that his mother’s behavior and the shock of her death would crush his talents. But if anything, his unfortunate home life seems to have spurred him onward. His teachers and I, recognizing his abilities, have given him more and more advanced materials to study and absorb. Given a few months of intensive study, I daresay he would be a better lawyer than—but, I digress. The point I wish to make is that Stephen has the emotional and intellectual courage to strike out on his own. He would know exactly and concisely what he would need, and that is what he packed.”

  “Toward … ?”

  “Until my stroke, three years ago, I was an active camper. The judge despises the outdoors and would feign illness when he was younger to avoid accompanying my late husband and me.

  “Stephen, however, seemed born with a love for the outdoors. He would walk the property here, approximately seventy-five acres, endlessly, as one season changed into another, observing the wildlife and plants. After my stroke, he would come in each day and describe to me what he’d seen and heard and touched. Stephen became terribly interested in the wilderness, and with my help, he and I selected numerous books and items from L. L. Bean, Abercrombie, and other catalogs to prepare a wilderness-survival kit for him.”

  “And that’s what he took with him?”

  “Yes and no, Mr. Cuddy, which is my point. What is missing is not his whole kit, nor a random sampling of all the items he had. What he took were only the lightest components and the barest necessities. My memory is still perfectly sharp, and I’m sure only his hand or mine could have selected so carefully the items that are missing.”

  “Could you make a list of those, along with the clothes Stephen was wearing and the clothes that are missing?”

  Mrs. Kinnington reached her hand down between the cushion and the couch and handed me a small envelope. “It’s all in there.”

  “Do you have a recent picture of him?”

>   “The best one is also in the envelope. I would appreciate your making copies and returning the candid to me as soon as possible.”

  “I’ll do that.” I opened the envelope and scanned the list. It was written on rose-colored stationery with her name embossed on the top. The handwriting, now shaky, once must have won penmanship awards.

  Then I studied the photograph. It showed a black-haired boy, whittling but looking up at the lens. The body was right, but the face was somber, joyless, and somehow not … young.

  “How long ago was this taken?”

  “About six weeks. Stephen disappeared on Tuesday, June twelfth. The photograph was taken by his father, which explains Stephen’s expression.”

  I slipped the photo back into her envelope. “Mrs. Kinnington, you don’t speak as lovingly of your son as you do of your grandson. Was the judge the reason Stephen ran away?”

  “I don’t believe that is necessary for your task. Regardless of what my grandson’s reasons were for leaving, I am convinced Stephen’s father had nothing directly to do with his departure. Accordingly, I don’t wish you to speak with the judge nor even allow him to become aware that you are pursuing the case on my behalf.”

  I cleared my throat. “Mrs. Kinnington, that’s probably not possible. I’ll have to ask some questions in this town about Stephen, and that fact is bound to get back to the judge. Aside from you and him, I can’t think of anyone who would hire me to look for Stephen. Your son’s bound to add it up.”

  She fixed me firmly. “Nevertheless, I do not wish you to do anything that would specifically lead him to that conclusion.”

  “Mrs. Kinnington, I will do what I believe is best for finding Stephen. If that isn’t acceptable to you, I’ll walk right now. No charge.”

  She blinked and sighed. “Please do your best, then, to honor my wishes.” Barely a murmur.

  “I will.”

  I mentally reviewed the topics I had wanted to cover with her. Two remained.

  “I have only a few more questions for now, Mrs. Kinnington. One is about Stephen’s ‘hospital’ time after his mother died.”