An Absence of Light

“Well… that’s not a Dodge van in the driveway,” Neuman said. The black Corvette was glistening from the mist that floated out of the green light. “And there’s no garage. If they’re going to park at this house, they’ve got to park there.”

“Maybe it’s the roommate’s.”

Neuman leaned over and popped open the glove box and started digging around. “How about some light?”

Paula flicked on the flashlight. “What are you doing?”

“I keep some IDs and stuff in here,” Neuman said, fumbling through a clutter of maps and envelopes, vitamin bottles and flashlight batteries until he found something in a single-fold leather holder. He put it in his pocket He undid his tie and grabbed his sport jacket which lay between them. “Come on.”

They got out and walked to Heath’s driveway, following it up behind the Corvette to avoid the lawn sprinkler.

“This thing is spanking new,” Neuman said. He bent down and looked at the small metal dealership logo on the lower left side of the trunk. “Bought it in El Paso.”

They went around the car and into a courtyard to the front door. The night air was sticky, coming off Galveston Bay less than three hundred yards behind them. The mumbling of an inboard motor started up somewhere in the canal behind the house, and they could hear people calling to each other, friendly voices, a woman’s laughter. The sound of the inboard grew deeper as it began moving along the canal. Neuman rang the doorbell and quickly checked the mailbox, which was empty.

“This is too damn late,” Paula objected quickly.

The woman who came to the door looked to be in her early forties. She had dark hair chopped off short and kind of ragged at the neck and was wearing a pale blue terry cloth romper set She was barefooted and holding a spatula in one hand.

“Valerie Heath?” Neuman asked.

“Yeah.” The woman looked at Neuman expectantly and then took in Paula with a quick up-and-down of her eyes.

Neuman held up the ID he had gotten out of the glove box. “I’m Raymond Stuffier and this is my assistant Gail Aldridge. We’re with American Universal Life Insurance Group-”

“You gotta be kidding,” Heath interrupted him. “You people must be desperate.”

She was closing the door, but Neuman’s hand stopped it as he said:

“Ms. Aldridge is the woman who called you today about Colleen Synar.”

The door stopped, the woman’s face went slack, and her eyes returned to Paula. She opened her mouth, but said nothing.

Neuman didn’t wait. “Ms. Heath, I’ll quickly explain,” he said, talking fast. “We are client locators for American Universal. Ms. Synar’s father died five weeks ago. He had a thirty-thousand-dollar policy with us and had named Ms. Synar as the beneficiary. Now we’ve got to find her within the next forty days or so or she forfeits being able to collect. We are obligated by our charter to make every effort to find these beneficiaries, but, frankly, you’re the closest we’ve been able to come to Ms. Synar.”

The woman’s mouth was hanging open slightly, and she seemed to be trying to decide what to do. The smell of frying food was coming out of the house.

“Do I smell something burning?” Neuman asked.

“Oh, shit.” The woman turned, leaving the door open, and fast-walked back into the house.

Neuman looked at Paula. “She’s sure as hell not the woman in the photograph on Synar’s Contributor ID sheet.” He turned back and shouted into the house.

“Can we come in, Ms. Heath? Thank you very much…”He looked at Paula again and tilted his head for her to follow. “I really appreciate this,” he said, keeping his voice loud so that she would know he was coming in, though he counted on her being too busy to object “This isn’t going to take but just a minute of your time. We’re out of the Baltimore office, Ms. Aldridge and I are, but we’ve been from one side of this country to the other looking for Ms. Synar-”

“Look, just wait a damn minute…” the woman was saying. She was standing at the stove frantically taking up whatever it was she was cooking. The stove was behind a bar that looked out into a family room at the end of a broad entrance hall through which they had just walked. Neuman and Paula were standing in the middle of the room looking at her across the bar. In the brighter light of the kitchen Neuman could see that Valerie Heath’s hair was an unnatural pitch black and though he still guessed her to be in her early forties, he could see now that they must have been a hard forty years.

Neuman quickly assessed the contents of the house. The place didn’t look as if it was occupied on a regular basis. There were only a couple of pictures on the walls, generic seascapes, and only the bare minimum of furniture. The bar behind which Valerie Heath was trying to rescue her food was bare, no personal items such as a few favorite seashells or goofy ceramic knickknacks or photographs of people or pets. The house looked like it was a time-share property and no one ever lived there long enough to really make it feel like a home.