Dorset in the Dark

by Susan Russo Anderson

She nodded.

  “And you drank it?”

  “It wasn’t the first time. We often met in the park. Well, I say often, but Jerry is a recent acquaintance. Dorset met him a few months ago, and since then, we’ve seen him and his brother a handful of times in the park. The coffee they brought me smelled so good.”

  “So this wasn’t the first time. And you didn’t bother to tell me?”

  “I didn’t think it mattered. It had nothing to do with …”

  “It has everything to do with your daughter’s disappearance. It was a setup, don’t you see? It had all happened before—your meeting in the park, their bringing you coffee. Only this morning, the coffee was drugged.” I held up Dorset’s notebook and told her where I’d found it. I told her about Jerry Koznicki’s body. “He is dead, probably murdered. His brother wasn’t with him.”

  “And Dorset? She wasn’t there?” Cassandra Thatchley got up and began to pace again, tearing at handfuls of curls.

  After a few turns, she stopped and shot me a look, not quite comprehending, but I could see her eyes searching for something, the shard of a memory. Sitting back down, she reached for the notebook and touched it.

  I let her have it and watched as she ran her hand around its edges. Opening the cover, she traced her daughter’s name with her fingers. She turned pages and nodded. “It’s Dorset’s, all right. She has loads of them upstairs. My girl. Her father used to bring them to her. It’s my daughter’s notebook, and I’m the one who let her go. What would Ronnie think of me? I’ve harmed my daughter. I’ve …”

  She stopped talking as grim possibilities began to sink in. Cassandra Thatchley put her head on the table. For a moment she didn’t move. I could see a bald spot on the top of her head and felt bad for her. When she lifted it, color washed into her face, big red splotches of it. At first she made no sound. I thought she was going to faint, but instead she started to cry. The crying began softly, like the sounds of a small animal who’d lost its mother, but in a few minutes her whimpers grew into great gulping sobs. I should have held her then, I knew it. I was so chicken in front of another’s grief. After watching for a few seconds, I made a judgment call. Cassandra Thatchley would not, could not abide being touched by anyone at that moment, not even a gentle caress from one of her late husbands.

  “How did she meet Jerry Koznicki—at the League?”

  She shook her head, then shrugged. Her throat was filled with emotion and at first I couldn’t understand her, so I told her so. That made her angry, but more intelligible. Before she continued, she shot me daggers with her eyes. Good, she was angry. At least that would prevent her from sinking into herself. I needed to hear the rest of the story.

  “Dorset came home from the soup kitchen one evening and she couldn’t stop talking about the artist she’d met there. ‘Mom, he makes these wonderful collages.’ He’d given her one as a present, and she showed it to me. I must admit, I had to admire the work; it was clever, creative, arresting, I’ll say that. ‘He’s meeting us in the park tomorrow, the usual spot. He wants to meet you.’ The usual spot—her words. So I thought, all right, my daughter is seeing a grown man? But she’s such an innocent. I thought the best way to handle it would be to go with her. Well, I’m usually with her in the park in the mornings.”

  “Except when you’re not?”

  “I have an early morning class on Wednesdays. Their meetings must have started then. Their meetings—it sounds so strange, so …”

  She searched for the right word so I helped her out. “So sordid?”

  She did that rapid-fire nodding with her head, over and over again, unable to say the word. “But when I met him, my fear melted away. You’d have to meet him to know what I mean. He isn’t a man at all, not really. He is sui generis.”

  She looked at me and sucked in a cheek, aware, I supposed, of my ignorance. I wondered if that was how she looked at her students when she said something brilliant that needed an explanation.

  “Sui generis. It means in a class of his own. He wasn’t an adult except in years. He was so childlike. I recognized him for what he was the moment I saw him: he was unique, an artist in every ounce. It was in his bones, in his head, in the way he turned and smiled. It was as if he said, ‘Let me draw your angles, your gesture. With them, I will tell a story, your story, the best story, and it will enthrall you, surprise you, captivate you.’ You see, I thought he was so good for Dorset.” She made a futile flap of her hand. “So I was the one who encouraged her to talk to him. I was the one who sealed her fate. I am the enemy, the one who kidnapped her. Oh, God, you’ve got to find her.”

  “We’re almost there. Almost.” A total lie, but for a second, I believed it.

  She teared up again and this time I reached for the box of tissues on the counter and handed her a few.

  “He introduced me to his brother, a nice enough man. A little bossy, but I could tell Jerry needed him. You’d know what I mean had you met him.”

  In a sense I had.

  She was silent for a moment, her eyes unfocused. Choosing her words, she went on. “Sometimes very creative people are emotionally inept. Jerry is such a simple soul, but so filled with ability—the canniness to see and to show what he sees. I don’t know how to explain it. The day we met, his brother introduced us. ‘Shake hands with the lady,’ his brother commanded. That’s what it was, a command. But Jerry didn’t hear him. Instead, he knelt, in awe over something he saw in the grass, some twigs, a torn piece of paper. He held up the paper and let the light shine through. Oblivious of everything else around him. Then he began arranging objects into, what, a pattern, I guess you’d call it. I can’t describe it other than to say it was a natural collage. It sounds so silly, but he’d captured beauty out of … nothing. I thought his influence on my daughter would be invaluable. Dorset was a sponge soaking up his talent, so I encouraged their friendship.”

  So if this man Jerry was so unique, why hadn’t she thought of him before this, I asked her, and she shook her head. “Buried, I suppose, the result of the drugs his brother gave me. Oh, yes, I have no doubt it was his brother who drugged me. The man is cruel. Whenever he spoke to him, Jerry wouldn’t look at his brother. He rocked back and forth and seemed to withdraw into his own world. I didn’t blame him. I thought our kindness was the only joy he’d known, outside of his art.”

  I sat still and listened to the grandfather clock tolling the seconds, listening for other sounds inside the house.

  The refrigerator turned on and I started. “Where is Brunswick?”

  She pointed to the ceiling. “Sleeping it off, I suppose.”

  “And Brook, where is she?”

  “Sleeping as well. She came home a few minutes after you and that detective of yours left. I don’t know where she’d been. I didn’t ask. Brook comes and goes. She takes night photographs, she told me once. Likes the mood they create. Have you been to her studio?”

  I nodded.

  “She’s an artist. That’s how she copes, so I leave her alone.”

  I had half a mind to wake Cassandra’s older children. I wanted to hear what they knew about Jerry Koznicki and his brother, but it could wait—my mind was exploding with everything I had to do. For one thing, I wanted to question the Ellstons—they might have some idea of where to find Jerry’s brother.

  “I don’t question Brook,” Cassandra was saying. “Unlike Brunswick, she has adjusted to life. She has a purpose. She creates. I wanted that for Dorset, don’t you see?”

  She stopped talking and I let her have her thoughts. In a few minutes she dried her eyes. Blowing her nose, she said, “You can leave now.”

  “I need to take the notebook.” I told her it was evidence, although contaminated. I shuddered at Jane’s response to my having removed it from Jerry Koznicki’s studio.

  Cassandra Thatchley rose and held it out to me. “I said you can go now.”

  “You’ll deliver the ransom money tomorrow at noon?”

  “Part of it, or have you f
orgotten the terms?”

  She told me she’d call me after she heard from Dorset’s abductors. “It will take me five business days to get the rest. She’ll be home after I deliver it, and I’ll call you and pay whatever else I owe. I’m sure you tried. When I hired you, I thought Dorset would be home in a few hours. I was mistaken.”

  Damning words.

  She rose and led me to the door, her eyes averted. No “thank-you-for-all-you’ve-done,” nothing like “we’ll meet again, I’m sure,” no “I’ll recommend you to all my friends.” Before I could say goodnight, the door shut.

  Lorraine and the Long Shot

  When I got home, Denny and Lorraine were in the kitchen, speaking in low tones—so as not to wake the twins, I figured. Holding up the red notebook, I told them I’d found it in the dead man’s studio. “I stopped by Cassandra Thatchley’s home just now. She identified this as her daughter’s, and suddenly she remembered the events of this morning.”

  “As if by a miracle.” Denny sounded skeptical and I asked him why.

  “She could have arranged to have her daughter kidnapped for the publicity,” he said with a shrug. “Or for the sympathy. Stranger things have happened.”

  I didn’t agree, and I could tell Lorraine didn’t either. “Cassandra might have a funny way of showing fear and bereavement,” she said, “but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a mother kidnapping her child. Unless of course there’s a custody battle going on.”

  I thought of Ronnie Clauson’s mother but let it go, especially after Lorraine convinced me she wouldn’t take her grandchild. And Cassandra Thatchley was weird, but not deranged enough to fake an abduction. Besides, I didn’t think she was single-minded enough to plan and execute it.

  “She said her daughter met Jerry Koznicki several times in the park, and did so this morning. She called the artist ‘sui generis.’”

  Lorraine nodded. Denny said nothing.

  “We’ve got to have a plan B in case Jane’s team doesn’t nab the kidnapper tomorrow.”

  “You mean today,” Lorraine said, drying her hands with a towel. “Jane’s plan has some holes in it.”

  “For one thing, Clancy and Denny won’t be there,” I said, not looking at my husband. Some of what I was feeling must have mixed in with the words because I could see him squirm. In the old days, we would have fought about his leaving Jane in the lurch. And it dawned on me that tomorrow he’d be taking the first of many steps needed for our move to Poughkeepsie. Of all places. I’d no longer be a Brooklynite. I was beginning to feel the weight of that sentence, but stopped short of going there. Too deep.

  As if he read my thoughts, Denny began pacing. “Do you know what it’s like to go to work each day wondering if it will be your last?”

  I couldn’t listen to him, not now. After all, a young girl was missing. I was beginning to get a feel for where she might be, but something was blocking me. Because of finding the notebook in Jerry Koznicki’s studio, because of what Cassandra Thatchley remembered about the events of that morning, I could trace her to the Koznicki apartment. But then where had she gone?

  Lorraine was talking to Denny, her words bringing me back to the present. “You’re right. We have no idea what it’s like to be in your shoes,” she said. “There was a time when your father felt the same way. About the need to leave, I mean. For somewhere safer.”

  Denny closed his eyes. I could see he was making an effort not to interrupt.

  “In the 1970s, two of his buddies were killed in the same week, shot point-blank at the scene. They’d answered a domestic disturbance call in Flatbush.”

  Denny sat on the edge of his chair. “I didn’t know.”

  “You weren’t born yet. There was a surge of police officers killed in the line of duty that year. This was in the early seventies when we were dating. It shook him. He wanted to move. No question I’d follow him, I was crazy in love. At first he thought we’d go to a small town. He interviewed with two or three units in Dutchess County and was about to take a job when he decided it was not for him. He searched for a different occupation, even tried selling cars on his days off. But he just wasn’t happy. In time, things quieted down, and he forgot about moving.”

  “What happened?”

  Lorraine shrugged. “I guess life happened. For one thing, the PC resigned or there was a new mayor, I don’t remember which exactly. Just that things got better. In a few months, Robbie was given a promotion and we got married. We never moved.”

  “So you’re saying the violence against police is cyclical and you want me to ride it out while our buddies are shot and prices go crazy up?”

  “That’s not what I said, Denny, and you know it.”

  It was the first time I’d seen Lorraine short with her son. She had a funny way of showing anger, though, with her voice going all furry and her face a mask.

  He reared back as if he’d been punched.

  “I’m not saying what was right for your father is right for you. You do what you have to do, and I will support you.” Lorraine looked at me. “We all will.”

  I supposed she was waiting for my response, expecting something like, “Whatever you think is best, my darling.” Or at least a nod. But I couldn’t give in like that. I looked at the carpet, trying to focus on Dorset while the earth and everything in it, except for distant traffic noises, went silent.

  “You and Clancy keep your appointment tomorrow. It’s important,” Lorraine said. “Jane has a whole team she can tap into.”

  She cleared her throat and picked up her iPad. “In the meantime, I found something. Maybe it’s nothing. But it might be important. You asked me to take a look at the 701 area code—Powers Lake, North Dakota. Population three hundred twelve.”

  I’d almost forgotten. It was the area code assigned to the phone the kidnappers used to communicate with Cassandra Thatchley.

  Denny sat up. “Can’t this wait until tomorrow?”

  “It won’t take long. You see …” Lorraine looked up at the ceiling. “Where to begin?”

  We waited.

  “There is a still point in this investigation.”

  Usually Lorraine made everything clear. Right then, she wasn’t making sense.

  “There’s one place around which everything revolves—Ronnie Clauson’s death and his daughter’s kidnapping. And of course the drugstore robberies.”

  “I don’t see how you can say that, unless you’re talking about Dorset Clauson,” I said. “She’s the one I’m worried about. She’s the one we’re being paid to find.”

  “I am talking about a place, not a person. Think about it.”

  “There’s the park, of course.”

  Lorraine shook her head.

  “Cassandra Thatchley’s home?”

  Again she shook her head.

  “It’s after one o’clock and we’re playing guessing games?” Denny again.

  “This is not a guessing game,” Lorraine said, and she narrowed her eyes. “It’s the drugstore.”

  Lorraine went on to say that when I’d asked her to do some research, she’d combed what records she could find on Powers Lake, North Dakota, looking through Census Bureau records for some link with the Thatchleys or the Clausons. She’d even spoken to some of the store owners in Powers Lake, all of them clustered within a half block of one another. People were friendlier in small towns, she said; a real person picked up on one ring and actually talked to her, trying to answer her questions. When she’d phoned Gladys Kemp’s Nail and Beauty Salon, the beautician, who’d been in business for over forty years, wanted to help but she’d never heard of anyone named Thatchley or Clauson.

  “But Brooklyn rang a bell with the beautician, although she couldn’t say why.”

  “Brooklyn rings a bell with everyone,” Denny said.

  Lorraine went on. “At first she asked me to repeat my question. ‘You have such a thick accent,’ she said. She told me it was the first time she’d spoken with someone outside of North Dakota.”


  Denny, who’d begun gathering up beer bottles and pizza boxes in the dining room while he was listening to his mother’s story, left everything on the table and sat back down again. I heard cooing noises over the intercom. Robbie. I stood up and was about to leave the room when both Lorraine and Denny told me to wait. Truth was, I needed to see my children, but the cooing stopped and Lorraine was talking.

  “We’d almost become friends, Gladys Kemp and I. She said Brooklyn was so distant; of course she’d seen pictures. She often heard people in the diner talking about New York. I could feel her trying to make a connection. ‘But hold on, there’s an old geezer,’ she told me. ‘Everyone calls him the local historian.’ She thought he might remember something; she’d get in touch with him and get back to me. ‘Don’t hold your breath’—she told me he’d had a stroke a few months ago and was still recovering.”

  At the mention of stroke, I flashed to my father, his bogus wife, and my picture-perfect half sister, but stuffed the images and concentrated on what Lorraine was saying.

  “I gave up on Gladys Kemp and Powers Lake and went to meet with Jane Templeton’s boss. That’s when I discovered the still point.”

  Denny’s face was a total puzzle.

  Lorraine continued. “Everything about this case seems to revolve around a single spot.”

  There was that single-spot deal again. She wasn’t making sense. Denny got up and went to the dining room to finish the clearing up.

  “Sit down, Denny. There’s more,” Lorraine said, and there was steel in her voice.

  She told us about seeing Jane’s boss that evening. “He was still convinced his friend, Dorset’s father, had been murdered, and sent me the police report. I spent the better part of the evening studying it.”

  “Ronnie Clauson died of natural causes, according to Cassandra Thatchley,” I reminded her.

  “We’ll never know, will we?” Lorraine said. “Because Cassandra Thatchley refused to have her husband autopsied like the chief urged.”

  “I understand her reluctance,” I said. “My mother wouldn’t agree to one when her sister died.”