FALSE CONCEPTION by STEPHEN GREENLEAF

Author:STEPHEN GREENLEAF
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: POCKET BOOKS
Published: 1994-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 21

Cynthia Colbert was spending her Sunday walking her dog in Stern Grove. Or so her maid informed me when I rang the bell of the sprawling Cape Cod house and asked to see her employer. When I asked what kind of dog it was, she told me it was a Russian wolfhound.

Since Stern Grove was only a few blocks away, and since I didn’t have anything better to do on my Sunday afternoons now that Betty Fontaine had discarded me, I pointed my car toward the ocean, cranked it into a parking spot on Sloat Boulevard just west of Nineteenth Avenue, and entered the overgrown grounds of the park on a path between the tennis courts and the putting green, through a WPA gate built in 1935.

The odds of finding Stuart Colbert’s sister within the expanse of the grove weren’t good, but it was a nice day—cool, bright, and snappy—and I hadn’t communed with nature since I’d visited the Academy of Sciences while waiting to spy on Greta Hammond, and even that had been a taxidermic substitute for the real thing.

Biophilia notwithstanding, I don’t commune with nature all that much since nature seldom talks back to me, but once in a while an organic flush of my corroded urban pipes seems called for, if only from the standpoint of preventive maintenance. So I strolled down the steep path toward the core of the grove, was soothed by the breezy songs of conifers and ferns and buoyed by the sharp scent off the eucalyptus that soared overhead as I ambled with a host of others of similar inclination, keeping an eye peeled for a woman with a wolfhound. I didn’t know what a wolfhound looked like, exactly, but I figured there was a good chance that it was big and ugly and resembled Rasputin. From the descriptions I’d gotten from her brother, Cynthia Colbert must have been a twin.

Stern Grove is the venue for a concert series during summer months—everything from jazz to opera to mime. The performances are staged at a natural amphitheater in the center of the grove. Along the eastern edge of the amphitheater are several picnic areas, complete with tables and benches and fire pits. Perched on a hollow log in the center of one such glade was a woman with a dog. The dog looked more like a collie than a mastiff, but I figured she was a possibility.

I sat on a nearby bench and observed her. She was a large woman but not corpulent, ruggedly handsome and aggressively self-assured in the masculine manner far too many women adopt these days for reasons more Freudian than feminist. Her image was augmented by her outfit, a riff on the bush hat and safari suit motif that could have been plucked from a rack at Colbert for Men—if an emu had happened by, Cynthia Colbert would doubtlessly have gunned it down. On closer inspection, she seemed less a great white hunter than a metaphysician, her blinkless eyes raised to the treetops, looking into her soul or maybe into the solar system.

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