S Is for Silence

making a mistake you’d regret for the rest of your life.”
    “Never mind. All right. I get that.”
    “At long last.”
    “I guess, if it came down to it, I’d do the same for you.”
    “I know you would and I appreciate your saying that. You’re a good friend.” Kathy leaned forward as though to hug her, but Liza remained upright and Kathy was forced to convert the gesture into something else. She brushed a speck from her skirt and then took another sip of wine with a hand that trembled slightly.
    “As a matter of fact, I did.”
    “Pardon?”
    “I did the same thing for you. You meddled in my life so I decided I should meddle in yours.”
    Kathy lowered her glass.
    Liza’s tone was mild but her gaze was unwavering. “I called Winston this afternoon. I told him about Phillip.”
    “You told him?”
    Liza laughed. “I did. Every last detail.”

    I hadn’t meant to stay at Liza’s as long as I did, but once Kathy left, we had to sit and do a postmortem. Liza seemed lighter and freer than I’d ever seen her. We laughed and chatted until I happened to glance at my watch. 8:39. “Wow, I gotta get out of here. I didn’t realize it was so late. Where’s the sheriff’s substation?”
    “It’s on Foster Road over by the airport. Here, I’ll draw you a map. It’s not hard,” she said. “The quickest route is to cut down from Highway 166 to Winslet Road on Dinsmore.”
    “Oh yeah, I’ve seen that,” I said.
    Liza drew a crude map on a paper napkin. The scale was off, but I got the general idea.
    I tucked the napkin in my pocket. “Thanks. As soon as I get this last piece of information, I’m heading over there. I trust they have a copier. The originals are Daisy’s, but I want one set for my files and one set for theirs.”
    “You’ll be driving home after that?”
    “I have to. I’ve got a stack of files on my desk, plus mail, plus calls to return. If I don’t get back to work, I won’t eat this month.”
    We hugged quickly. When I left, she was standing in the doorway, silhouetted in the light from the living room. She watched until I was safely in my car and then she waved. I started the engine and pulled away from the curb, taking another quick peek at my watch. Mrs. Wyrick struck me as a stickler for punctuality, someone who’d lock the door and turn the lights out if you were one minute late. She’d love nothing better than to shut me down.
    The temperature had dropped and the night was considerably colder than it had been when I left Daisy’s. I sped over to Main Street, which turned into Highway 166. Traffic was light and once I had Santa Maria at my back, the darkness stretched out in all directions—broad fields of black rimmed in lights where a house or two backed up to the empty land. The air smelled damp. My headlights cut a path in front of me into which I rushed. I had only a rough idea how far away she was. This section of the county was uncomplicated, five or six roads that ran in straight lines, cattywumpus to one another so that they occasionally intersected. I was currently heading toward the ocean, which was somewhere ahead, fenced off by a low rim of hills marked in darker black against the gray-black of the sky.
    Now and then I passed an oil rig and farther on a huge storage tank, lighted from below as though to emphasize its mass. Barbed-wire fences ran on both sides of the road. I could see the ghosts of irrigation pipes zigzagging across a field where the available moonlight picked out the lines of PVC in white. A stand of frail pines was the only feathery interruption to the skyline. I caught a flash of bright blue—Mrs. Wyrick’s house, a hundred feet off the highway and planted in the middle of a junkyard.
    I slowed and turned onto the rutted dirt driveway. She lived in a landscape of rusted farm equipment, disabled vehicles, piles of lumber, wood pallets, and scrolls of chicken-wire fencing. This was apparently where old bathroom fixtures came to die once the renovations were done. I could see sinks, toilets, and upended bathtubs. In another area, sections of wrought-iron fencing had been laid against a wooden shed. There were sufficient discarded iron gates to enclose a pasture if you soldered them together side by side.
    There was a doghouse, of course, and chained to it, a heavy-chested brindled pit bull. The dog’s choke collar made its bark sound like whooping cough was on the rise. I thought about Jake’s pit bull killing Violet’s toy