Read Undercurrent (The Nameless Detective) for Free Online Page B

while?"
    I did not want to stand face to face with her grief, but there was no way I could turn her down. "Yes," I said. "Where are you?"
    "The Bay Head Inn. Room five."
    "I'll be there as soon as I can."
    I left the cottage ten minutes later, fully shaved. The sunlight was warm and effulgent, and the glare stabbed at my eyes like sharpened fingernails. The day was sharply voluble with the barking of sea lions and the screaming of gulls and cormorants and loons and the drifting sound of distant laughter. The bay was speckled with the whiteness of sails and with golden threads woven by the rising sun. Idyllic Sunday morning: illusion, concealing human folly and human despair. Or maybe I just had a hard-on for the world today.
    I crossed to the motel office, and there were two cars just leaving the grounds—travelers moving on, as travelers do, or nervous vacationers fleeing the onus of prolonged association with violent death. I went inside, and Orchard was not on duty; his place had been taken by a plump, matronly woman wearing a bright dress and a brighter smile. If she knew what had happened at the Beachwood the previous night and the part I had played in it—and she must have known—she was not letting on about it. Her greeting was cordial and professional. I told her I would probably be staying another full day, if not the night itself, and got a street map of the area from her and asked her where I could find the Bay Head Inn. She told me, and I found the street on the map; it was a couple of blocks off Grove Avenue, in the heart of the village.
    I was there in five minutes, and the inn was an Old Spanish-style building three stories high, with wrought-iron balconies and a tile roof and a whitewashed adobe facade grown with ivy and shaded by tall Monterey pines. A slender clerk told me where Room 5 was located, and I went up a curving iron-railed staircase to the second floor and stopped in front of the door with Five spelled in black iron. I knocked softly. She said my name in there, questioningly; when I confirmed it, she told me to come in, the door was unlocked.
    I depressed the antique latch and stepped into a long, large room darkened against the brilliancy of the morning; sunlight and spring, like laughter by the side of a grave, make a mockery of grief. Judith was sitting in a saddle chair studded with black rail-spike heads, her legs tucked under her, her face a white oval in the room's half-light. She wore a simple black dress, and no make-up that I could see; the blond hair was limp, uncombed. She looked like a sad, lost little girl, sitting there that way, her hands folded in her lap. You could sense the feeling of privation in the dark silence, like the essence of vanished youth and faded memories that lingers in the room of a very old gentlewoman.
    I shut the door, and she said "Thank you for coming" in that low, painful voice. She watched me as I crossed to the second of the two chairs and sat down and tried to find something to do with my hands.
    I said inadequately, "I'm sorry, Mrs. Paige."
    "Yes," she said. "I know that."
    "Is there anything I can do?"
    "That was what I wanted to ask you. Can you . . . help the police in some way?"
    I had been afraid of that sort of response to my question, because there was only one answer I could give her. I said, "I don't think so, Mrs. Paige. The authorities don't like private individuals involving themselves in murder investigations. And I have no facilities of my own, even if I could get permission to look into it."
    "I see." She looked beyond me, to something only she could see. "Why would anyone kill him?"
    "I don't know, Mrs. Paige."
    "He had no enemies. He was very easygoing."
    You only knew him for a few months, I thought. I said, "The police will find out who it was. And why it was. It will only be a matter of time." The words seemed hollow as I spoke them.
    "There's a chance it was a woman, isn't there?"
    I couldn't lie to her. "Yes, there's a