“Who taught her?” I asked.
The girl’s finger traveled. “That was the new man. His name was Ralph...”
My heart began to beat hard and fast against my chest.
“Ralph Overholst. He walked in here with some good references from up north at a time Mr. Barnard needed another instructor, so he put him on. He wasn’t here long, couple of months, then he just didn’t show one day...”
“And that was?”
“About a month ago. No, month and a half. Same time Mrs. Mossby phoned and said she’d decided not to take more lessons...” She looked up, startled. “Hey, is that why...”
“What did he look like?” I asked. “This Ralph Overholst?”
“Oh, let’s see. Medium tall, medium thin, about thirty, maybe older or younger. Brown hair... Why are you asking? Has he done something?” She leaned on the counter, woman-to-woman.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“They try to be careful here when they hire instructors, check references and stuff, you know?”
I nodded. They probably were careful. However, Mama was not. “Was he cleanshaven?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. They have to be. Mr. Barnard insists on it. Older women don’t trust men with beards, that’s what he says, and our clientele is mostly older women.”
“You told me.”
“So Mr. Barnard said he’d have to shave before he came to work.”
My hardbeating heart jounced in my chest. “So this Ralph Overholst had a beard when he applied?”
“Hairy! You wouldn’t believe.”
“Thank you,” I said, and ran out to my car.
I stopped at a drugstore and got a small bottle of brandy, then at a lunch counter I picked up a carton of takeout coffee. I drove back to the motel, laced the coffee with brandy, and dialed Jeff’s office. It was twelve thirty. He wouldn’t go out to lunch for another half hour or so, and I planned to give him something to chew on. “Jeff?” I yelled into the mouthpiece... “No, I am not home. I’m still here... Yes, I turned off the lights. And looked under the beds... Oh, shut up a minute and
What he thought of it was the weirdly contrived logic of an ad man. “For Pete’s sake, Margaret,” he said impatiently, “your mother probably asked this young man to sell a few useless things for her, then she probably hired him to drive her someplace — on one of those trips she’s been talking about... Why don’t you stop fooling around and come on home?”
I hung up, poured some more brandy in the coffee, and drank it down. I thought, for one cynical moment, of the police, discarding the thought immediately with the certain knowledge that they would regard my suspicions with the same cavalier dis-passion as had Jeff.
I jumped into my car and drove to Mrs. Herter’s daughter’s house.
Mrs. Herter was there, shoes off, varicose veins swollen, serving her grandchildren a peanut butter lunch and hating me for being my mother’s daughter.
“Why did she let you go, Mrs. Herter?”
“Because she had that young dude there and you can’t tell me any different.”
“Young dude?” I asked.
“The way she simpered around him was enough to make anyone sick and him young enough to be her son, maybe young enough to be her grandson...”
“About how old?”
“At first, she made a pretense. Well, at first, I guess, he actually was teaching her to drive. He’d come after her on the days I worked there and she’d go trip-pin’ out on those heels of hers to the car he brought in front — you know, the one with two driver’s things...”
“Dual drive.”
“But later, he was teaching her in her own car — and I’ll bet that wasn’t all he was teaching her, either. I found some of his clothes in that other bedroom...”
I turned my face away.
“The day she told me she didn’t need me any more, I figured she didn’t want me nosing around. She was probably ashamed. If she wasn’t, she should have been.”
“And that’s all she said? That she just didn’t need you any more?”
“She said she could get along without me. Who knows? Maybe
“What did he look like?”
“Just young. All young people look alike.”
It was one o’clock. I knew a lot now that I had not known this morning, but not enough to know where Mama was and why. Enough only to know that her driving instructor, Ralph Over-hoist (or one who called himself by the name), a hairy, then cleanshaven man, finally neither, but looking like everybody else, had sold a number of Mama’s antiques.
I drove from Mrs. Herter’s daughter’s house across town and down a street of tiny look-alike houses to the one on the corner where Joe Gomez lived. His truck was not parked in the driveway, so I drove on. He was probably out clipping grass, and any question and answer game I might attempt to play with Mrs. Gomez would come out pure Spanish, which I cannot understand.
I turned toward the hills.
