“No reason to. Clarice gave a cousin’s address in Pittsburgh when she turned over the baby. There’s no one in Stebbins with the name Gibbon or Gibbons, and Clarice only stayed here for a while. She was never an official resident. Besides, I was only able to piece this together when I added Selma Conroy’s name to the search. Selma was given as next of kin for Clarice. Even then, though, it was Selma’s East Texas address. The records are messed up six ways from Sunday. ”
“Intentionally?”
“Can’t tell. Most of it was probably the result of some semiliterate white trash filling out hospital forms. And later maybe Homer Gibbon brushed out his own backtrail. ”
“What about the mother, Clarice? Where’s she?”
“Off the radar, and probably dead. Last record of her was an arrest for possession in Harrisburg in 1993. My guy at Harrisburg PD looked in her jacket, and she had a dozen arrests for drugs and solicitation. Medical records say she had HIV and a bunch of other problems. She probably died in a crack house. Lots of junkies die in those places without ID, or their ID gets stolen after they OD. ”
“Dead end,” Trout said. “Any other living relatives?”
“None of record. There’s more background stuff but nothing else exciting. Copies of records, stuff like that. I’ll dig in on Volker now. ”
“Okay, Marcia,” said Trout. “You are the best. ”
“I know I am,” she said with a bit of sauce, and disconnected.
Trout turned to Goat. The cameraman was grinning. “Oh yeah,” he said, “Pulitzer for sure. ”
“Movie for sure,” countered Trout. He restarted the car. “Now, let’s go see Aunt Selma. ”
The GPS directed them onto smaller and smaller roads, until they thumped along a rutted dirt road that threatened to tear the undercarriage out of the Explorer. They turned onto a lane that was so small the GPS had no name for it.
“Is this even a road?” complained Goat as he bounced around in the passenger seat.
The road rounded a bend and passed under the reaching arms of a double line of twisted elms whose bark was mottled with blight and wrapped in hairy vines. Poison ivy lined both sides of the lane that twisted a crooked half mile toward a weathered, abused old farmhouse.
Trout rolled to a stop, his foot on the brake, the engine idling quietly.
“Jeez,” breathed Goat, and Trout nodded. Not even the blaze of fall colors could lend this place a shred of grace. The reds and oranges melted together into a pattern like the skin of a burn victim. The house itself was shuttered against the coming storm. The walls had once been whitewashed, but the paint had peeled to reveal leprous gray wood beneath. A broad gallery porch surrounded the house, and a row of empty rocking chairs creaked in the stiff westerly breeze that came whipping off the overgrown cornfields. Those fields were withered and brown, the stalks sagging under the weight of unpicked ears.
“Get some footage of this place,” said Trout. “This is gold. ”
“I know,” Goat said, already fiddling with settings on a small high-definition digital unit. “Frickin’ Addams Family farm. I’ve been to haunted hayrides that are cheerier. Be best if we can get flyover shots from a chopper. ”
“Who’s going to pay for that?”
Goat smiled. “I’m just saying. If you want to put some real mood in this thing. ”
Trout rolled down his window and leaned out. Even the air was ripe with the sweet stink of vegetable decay.
“This place has all the mood we’re going to need,” he said as he eased off the brake and drove the rest of the way to the front of the house.
They parked in a roundabout next to a two-year-old Nissan Cube that was so clean and out of place that it looked Photoshopped into the landscape.
“Aunt Selma drives a Cube?” asked Goat, grinning at the thought.
Trout shook his head. “Got to be a visitor. She’s old, so maybe it’s a Meals-on-Wheels thing. I don’t know. Car’s clean. Nothing else out here is. ”
They got out of the car and began walking toward the porch steps. Goat had his full-size camera now and he hoisted it onto his shoulder, the tape already run
ning.
As they approached the bottom step, the front door opened a cautious five inches. Trout stopped and touched Goat’s arm. The face that peered out at them was that of a woman whose skin was so comprehensively wrinkled that she looked like an ancient mummy. The one eye they could see, however, was a startling and lambent green.
Before Trout could say anything, the woman demanded, “What?” Her voice was as sharp as a breaking stick.
“Pardon the intrusion, ma’am,” said Billy Trout in his very best hat-in-hand, aw-shucks voice. For all that Pennsylvania was a nominally northern state, there was a lot of country out here in the farmlands. “I’m with Regional Satellite News. My name is—”