by Mary Bowers
“And then you took over and started telling her what you thought instead of listening to her. Really, Teddy! Didn’t you even discuss the investigation with her over dinner last night?”
“I felt she needed to be distracted from her troubles, especially at night, when she was facing bedtime and nightmares. So I kept it light. Told her funny stories.”
“Did a few magic tricks?” I said, meaning it to sting.
“Actually, yes. She loved it.”
“Oh, Teddy!”
I gave up. By that time we had followed her outside to a garden shed. It was small, about 16 feet square, and had small windows that were covered on the inside.
I don’t like going into places with no outside view, and I looked at the little cabin-like shed and felt uneasy. Somehow I was sure it was going to be damp and dark inside. We stood around and waited while Wanda sorted through her keyring, looking for the right one. Then she began to fumble inexpertly with the lock.
I bounced on my heels and looked around, up at the trees, across to Clay’s yard, and finally at the Carteret house. Wanda’s description hadn’t done it justice. Across the back of the second floor, projecting dramatically into the yard, was a wall of slat-like windows set in a grid of thin black frames. Strangely, even though it was getting close to noon, any view from them was cut off by wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling curtains.
As I first glanced at them I thought I saw the curtains move but I couldn’t be sure. I stared at the spot intently but couldn’t detect any more movement, so I decided I must have imagined it. While I was staring, I heard the snick of the deadbolt behind me.
“I never did find her keys. I had to have a locksmith come out and put in a new lock on the darkroom.”
“Darkroom?” Teddy said.
“She was a photographer,” I told him.
“Nobody develops film anymore,” Wanda said, ushering us inside. “She didn’t even bother with blackout curtains. But she liked the feel of a darkroom. She had one in her little house back in Michigan, and when she moved here, she took over the garden shed and kept all her equipment in here, even the things she didn’t use anymore. I suppose you could say it was her mancave, even though she was a woman. Nothing fancy. Just a private space for her camera equipment and files. This is where I had my encounter with her spirit. That’s when I realized that she wasn’t just missing; she was dead. Oh, we kept up the searches, and I never let on to the police, but I knew. My Alison was no more.”
“I saw you out here with the police after you reported her missing,” Clay said. “You didn’t tell them about it?”
“I told them I’d been out to the darkroom in the middle of the night looking for her, but not that I’d seen her spirit. I knew they wouldn’t believe me. You know how down-to-earth they are. Just the facts, ma’am. They thought I’d just left the darkroom unlocked afterwards and mislaid the key, but honestly, I didn’t. Alison opened the shed that night. I never had a key. That’s part of the reason I knew it was her – who else could have opened the door, or would even want to be in here? The police wanted me to tell them if anything was missing, and of course I didn’t know. She had so many old cameras – she collected them – but I did notice her tripod was missing.”
“No it’s not,” Teddy said, walking to the back of the shed. “See, it’s right here.”
“That’s her old one. After she bought the new one, she never used that one anymore, but she kept it as a backup. The new one was found on the beach later, up by Marineland.”
It was immediately obvious to me what had happened. The killer had taken Alison’s keys from her body and gotten into her darkroom to grab some equipment to use to misdirect the search. When Wanda surprised him, he ran off with the key, leaving the door unlocked. Yes, yes, yes, I thought, it’s all coming together. This solved the mystery of how Alison got to the beach without her car, carrying heavy equipment. She wasn’t carrying heavy equipment at all, just a small camera.
Alison gets up one morning and decides to walk to the beach and capture the sunrise, leaving her car and her heavier photography equipment at home. Later, thinking the camera could easily wash out to sea, the killer gets into her darkroom and takes some of the heavier stuff – the tripod, a knapsack, whatever – and leaves it on the beach miles away from where he’d buried the body.
I jumped to those conclusions, but for some reason I was very sure of them. Whatever phenomenon that Wanda had thought she’d witnessed in the darkroom, it was much more chilling to me to realize that the murderer had been sniffing around her property after the murder.
Maybe we needed Porter after all. I never gave much credence to Teddy’s claims of Porter’s extrasensory perception, but he was a pretty good guard dog. Oh, he was more likely to try to play with a burglar than to stop him, but the point was, Teddy and Wanda would be warned that somebody was on the premises.
“And what kind of phenomena did you witness in here, Wanda?” Teddy said. He was getting into TV personality mode, interviewing her with his on-camera voice. It hit a false note, and I saw Clay shoot him an exasperated look.
“I was worried about Alison, and I couldn’t sleep. I kept checking her room, and getting up to look out the window to see if the light was on in the darkroom. Along about two in the morning, I saw a kind of flickering inside so I went out to investigate.”
“Good lord,” I said. “Alone?”
She turned a complacent face to me. “I knew it was Alison. I thought she’d come back, and I wanted to know where she’d been. It would’ve been just like her to go directly to the darkroom and put her things away instead of coming into the house and explaining where she’d been. But when I thought about it later, the flickering I saw was nothing like the light fixture being on in here. It was more like the glow of a restless spirit, fluttering about.”
Teddy hunkered down. “What happened next?”
I interrupted. “So this was when Alison was first missing? You said you didn’t know she was dead yet. How long after she went missing was this?”
“It was the first night she didn’t come back. Before I went to the police to report her missing. As I came up to the door, I could see that it was slightly open, but before I could get inside, the flickering glow went out.”
“And you went in?” I asked, my voice rising.
“I keep telling you, it was Alison! I called her name and she answered me. She called me Mother, like she always did. Not Mom, not Wanda. Mother.”
“You recognized her voice?” I asked. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. She whispered, like she was worn out. Like she was sad. I heard her make a sobbing sound as I came up to the door. Of course now I know why: she was already dead, searching for the comforts of home but finding everything changed. I tried to reach the light switch, but I wasn’t used to going in there at all, let alone after dark, and I couldn’t find it. While I was reaching, I felt her come to me.”
“Come to you,” Teddy repeated. “What does that mean? Speaking as a psychic, of course. Was it physical or spiritual?”
“Both. She brushed by me, she touched my face, I felt her presence. She was close, almost inside me, but only for a split-second.”
“How did you know it was her?” I asked. I was still convinced she’d had a close encounter with the murderer, not her daughter. “Did it smell like her? Did you see her silhouette?”
Wanda considered. “Her silhouette, I think. And her coldness. Alison’s hands were always cold.”
“Everybody’s hands are cold in the middle of the night,” I muttered. I don’t think she heard me, but Clay looked at me sharply.
“But they weren’t even like hands, really,” she went on, determined to hang onto the idea of a visit from her dead daughter. “It didn’t even feel like skin.” I didn’t bother to debunk that one. It was too obvious.
“But mostly, I think,” she said after a moment’s thought, “it was the way she was crying. Alison always cried quietly. She was never a screamer. Sh
e kept her sorrows to herself. When I came to the door, before I began to open it, I heard her crying and whispering to herself, very softly. And somehow she was projecting light. It was unsteady, shaking, like she didn’t yet know how to control it. Like psychic energy flaring and fading.”
Teddy was glowing, deeply gratified. This was the kind of stuff he lived for.
Clay, not so much.
I looked at Clay with a skeptical face, and for the first time I sensed an ally. I made up my mind that before I left Redbud Street, I was going to go over and knock on Clay’s door.
While I was thinking that, Teddy asked, “So where is your actual proof?”
“Oh, yes,” Wanda said. She walked over to a steel file cabinet and pulled a drawer open. There was nothing in it. “I saw a lot of her files scattered on her worktable when I finally got in here and got the light on, so I came over for a look. Everything had been rifled, but as far as I could see, nothing was missing.”
“All of it’s missing now,” Teddy remarked.
“When I told the police the files had been messed with, they took them all. After her body was found, they went over everything in here with a fine-tooth comb. But that night, right after I saw Alison, the files were all still here, I’m sure of it. Don’t you see? Her photographs were important to her. She wanted to see them again. But her spirit was weak, uncontrolled, and she only managed to scatter them. Only Alison would have been interested in her photos. To tell you the truth, they were kind of repetitive.” She ducked and looked around, as if Alison could hear, and lowered her voice. “You know, the same thing over and over, going for the perfect shot. A thief would have been after her camera gear, something he could sell, not a lot of pictures of the sunrise. No, it had to be Alison.”
“Did the police check the files for fingerprints?” Clay asked. He gazed at me after he said it, and I knew exactly what he was thinking. I mouthed the word “gloves,” and he nodded.
“Oh, yes. That’s why they took them away. But they only found Alison’s and mine.” She seemed to think that proved her theory.
“How sure are you that nothing was missing?” I asked. “Would you have noticed if somebody had removed just one file?”
“Why would anybody do that?” Wanda said, maddeningly. “They were just pictures.”
I looked at Clay helplessly. Neither Clay nor I had been paying any attention to Teddy anymore, but when he spoke, we both turned tired eyes upon him.
“The dead do come back to say good-bye,” he informed Wanda. “Though, in my experience, not so quickly. It’s as if,” he said, going pedantic, “they need time to internalize the fact that they are dead. They’re in denial. But eventually, they come back. A week, a month, even a year. When they do, they tell their loved ones good-bye and are gone forever. Best case scenario, of course. Is that what she said to you? ‘Good-bye, Mother?’ Is that what she said to you as she passed through you in the doorway?”
It was as good an example of leading the witness as I’d ever seen, but Wanda didn’t go along with him. “No, it wasn’t good-bye. What she said was, ‘It’s me, Mother.’ I remember it so well I can replay it in my mind like a tape recording, because it gave me chills at the time, the sound of her voice, like a whisper on the wind. Like words with no voice to color them in. Not a real, human voice.”
“I see, I see,” Teddy said, nodding.
I thought I did, too. A murder, a burglar, and an extremely dangerous person, trying to impersonate a lady he’d just killed so he could make a clean getaway. He had probably been perfectly willing to kill again if Wanda tried to stop him. Or her. Wanda thought it was her daughter, but I wasn’t sure that increased the chances it was a woman.
“Did she seem strong?” I asked. “You know, empowered by her new freedom from her body?”
“She seemed . . . desperate. Desperation makes you strong. So yes, Alison had become stronger, I think.”
“I see.”
I decided we’d pushed her too far. She was trying to shape her memory to fit her theory, and she was a muddleheaded person to begin with.
Chapter 18
Clay didn’t come back into the house with us. He went on home. That suited me fine; I didn’t want to talk to him in front of Teddy and Wanda anyway. I wanted a private conference.
Concerned about what I’d just found out, and worried about Wanda’s safety, I must have seemed distracted as I left, and in fact, I don’t remember what we said as we were wrapping it up.
Oh, I do remember saying one thing: “I’m getting Porter from the shelter and bringing him here as soon as I can manage it. Plan on having him by tonight. I think you guys need him.”
They were both pleased. Celebrity dogs are few and far between, and now Wanda would have both Teddy and Porter (and occasionally Ed) tending to her problems. To someone who felt she belonged to their world, it must have been exciting. Teddy, of course, just wanted his dog to play with.
I didn’t even have to knock at Clay’s door. He was waiting for me. He opened the door and ushered me inside without a word.
I only got a moment to look around the foyer at the wide, curving staircase leading to a generous oval in the ceiling that revealed graceful second and third floor balusters. Clay immediately said, “Well? Are you going to spout some of your fairyland theories about the dead lady playing around in the darkroom, or are you here to talk sense?”
“Let’s start with some sense and see where it leads.”
He frowned. He looked like he was thinking this was a bad idea, but he decided to give me a chance. Grudgingly. He turned and led me across the black-and-white checkerboard marble of his foyer, past a tall ferny tree thing standing in a huge blue pot, down some short halls lined with paintings and mirrors, and finally back to a sitting room that overlooked his own yard and part of Wanda’s. He had a nice house. By the time we got to the sitting room, I wasn’t sure I could have found my way back to the front door again without getting lost. Along the way I caught a glimpse of myself in a wide, gilt-framed mirror and was surprised at the grim look on my own face.
He didn’t offer any kind of refreshment, and I wouldn’t have taken it if he had. At least not until I could figure out if we were going to be friends.
“What did you make of Wanda’s story?”
“I think Wanda’s lucky to be alive,” I told him. “I like simple explanations, and it’s a bit of a stretch to say that it must have been Alison’s ghost. But it makes all the sense in the world to me that Alison’s killer was rifling the place, looking for stuff to leave on the beach miles away from where he’d buried her so nobody would find her body. And the ‘flickering’ she saw . . . .”
“A flashlight.”
“Right. What do you make of her saying the person seemed desperate, i.e. strong? Think it was a man?”
“Who knows? All this psychic nonsense,” he said, getting worked up. “It’s dangerous. If she didn’t have these ideas about ghosts wandering around, she would have realized she was in danger that night. She would have called the cops when she found somebody in her daughter’s shed.”
“You’re not suggesting she’s lying, are you?”
“Of course not. She’s just confused.” He leveled with me. “When Alison didn’t come home, she called me first. Alison went out to the ocean before dawn to photograph the sunrise every now and then, and she always came back home afterward wanting breakfast, around 8 or 9 o’clock. When she wasn’t home by evening and she wasn’t answering her cell phone, Wanda started to panic.”
“So she called you? Why would she think Alison would be with you?”
“Alison and I were friends. More than friends. We were spending more and more time together. Wanda didn’t say so, but I think she assumed that Alison and I had spent the night together and she was still at my house. That’s why she didn’t call the police sooner. If her adult daughter was spending the night with a man, well, she didn’t want to make a federal case out of it.”
“And if t
he two of you had been together, Alison wouldn’t have appreciated having the cops called in.”
“Exactly. When neither Wanda nor I had heard from Alison by the next morning, we decided she should report her missing.”
“And in the meantime, Wanda had her encounter with the ‘ghost’ in the darkroom.”
“I never knew about that until today. You heard her – she was quick to decide it was a ghost, and she knew I wasn’t into that kind of thing. Like the police,” he added. “’Just the facts, ma’am.’ She thought I’d make fun of her. Which I wouldn’t have.”
“And so the encounter slipped through the cracks.”
“I guess you could put it like that. You have to understand the relationship Alison had with Wanda. She wasn’t here because they enjoyed living together. They didn’t. You heard what Wanda said. Alison even called her ‘Mother.’ Not Mom. She was there doing her duty as a daughter, watching over her elderly parent.”
“And she thought Wanda was more likely than most to get strange in her old age.”
He heaved a big sigh. “I guess so. And I have to admit I agreed with her. I was relieved when I heard her daughter was coming to live with her. That was before I even met Alison. After I met her – we just clicked.”
“So,” I said carefully, “it actually was likely that Alison would have been at your house all night?”
I was afraid he’d tell me to mind my own business, but instead, he said, “It was getting likelier all the time. We didn’t bother to try to hide it. I’m sure Wanda noticed. All the neighbors probably noticed. At our age, who cares? Alison was special. I’ve dated a lot of women but I’ve never come even close to marrying one, and I never felt at home with a woman like I did with Alison. Like I’d known her all my life. I could feel it: we were a match. And it would have been perfect. She could’ve gotten out of her mother’s house, where there was always tension, but still been close enough to keep an eye on her. But most of all, we could have been together. It had been so long since I’d been around somebody who felt real to me. Somebody normal.”