S Is for Silence

jeans, my boots, and a T-shirt, and then ate a bowl of cereal while I cruised through the local paper. I reached the office at 8:30 and spent an hour on the phone, taking care of business unrelated to Violet Sullivan. At 9:30 I locked up, hauled my portable Smith-Corona typewriter out to the car, and drove to Santa Maria for my meeting with Kathy Cramer. I didn’t expect to get much from her. At the time, she’d been too young to qualify as a keen observer of adults, but I figured it was worth a try. You never know when a fragment of information or an offhand remark might fill a blank spot on the canvas I was painting bit by bit.

    The Uplands, the golf course subdivision Kathy Cramer had just moved into, was still a work in progress. The course itself was an irregular series of fairways and bright greens that formed an elongated V the length of a shallow valley. A man-made lake sat in the angle between the front and back nine holes. View homes were perched on the ridge that ran along one side of the course while on the opposite hill, I could see the lots laid out and marked with small flags. Many homes had been completed, with sod lawns and an assortment of shrubs and saplings in place. Other houses were under construction, some framed and some consisting solely of the newly poured slabs. Across the low undulating hills, I could see a hundred houses in various phases of completion. Kathy’s house was finished, but the landscaping wasn’t in. I’d seen its twin or its mirror image replicated up and down the street—buff-colored stucco with a red tile roof. I parked at the curb, where moving boxes had been piled in anticipation of a garbage pickup. I took the walkway to the front door. The shallow porch had already been furnished with a faux-wicker couch, two faux-wicker chairs, and a welcome mat.
    As I was knocking, a car pulled into the driveway and a woman got out, her frizzy mane of blond hair held back with a navy headband. She was dressed in tennis shoes and navy shorts and a matching navy jacket, with a white leotard visible where the jacket was unzipped. Her legs were as lean and muscular as a biker’s. She said, “Sorry. I hope you haven’t waited long. I thought I’d get here before you did. I’m Kathy.”
    “Hi, Kathy. I’m Kinsey. Nice meeting you,” I said. “Your timing’s perfect. I just arrived.”
    We shook hands and then she turned and unlocked the front door. “I switched to an earlier Jazzercise class, but got caught in traffic coming home. You want ice water? I need to rehydrate.”
    “I’m fine, thanks. You like Jazzercise?”
    “I should. I’m taking six to eight classes a week.” She dropped her bag on a console table just inside the front door. “Make yourself at home. I’ll be back in a sec.”
    She disappeared down the hallway, moving toward the kitchen, her rubber soles squeaking on the gray ceramic tile. I turned right and went down two stairs into the sunken living room. The walls were painted a dazzling white, and the only artwork in sight was an oversize painting from a chain of commercial galleries devoted to one man’s work. The autumnal scene was of a mare and foal in a gauzy-looking pasture at dawn.
    There were no window coverings and the light spilled in through a haze of construction dust. The powder blue wall-to-wall shag carpeting had been installed recently, because I could still see bits and pieces—tufts and scraps—left behind by the flooring guys. The couch and two matching chairs were upholstered in a cream-colored chenille. On the coffee table, she’d arranged a stack of decorator magazines, a centerpiece of pale blue silk flowers, and a cluster of color photographs in silver frames. The three girls portrayed were variations of their mother—same eyes, same smile, and the same thick blond hair. Their ages seemed to fall within a six-year range. The oldest was probably thirteen, braces gleaming on her teeth. The other two girls stair-stepped down from eleven to nine. The middle girl was decked out in a majorette’s uniform, a baton held aloft.
    Kathy returned to the living room with a tumbler of ice water in hand. She found a coaster and moved toward a conversational grouping of navy blue club chairs with a glass-topped table in the center as though for a conference of some kind. I pictured a meeting of the neighborhood association during which other people’s tacky yard ornaments would come under fire. She took one chair and I sat across