Lewis’s desk phone rang and rang. He was in the restroom. I checked my wristwatch. He’d been in there a while. He was too young to have gut problems. I thought back to my ulcers, acquired in my twenties. Okay. Maybe not too young then.
I tapped my fingers against my desk, one at a time. Horse trot noises. Trot trot to Boston; trot trot to Lynn; trot trot to Cambridge, but don’t fall in! It was an old nursery rhyme. One my parents recited as they jogged us up and down on their knee. On “don’t fall in,” you got dipped into the gap formed between their knees, and you shrieked and clapped because it was a fun game. I’d played it with Susan when she was a baby. She’d start grinning at “Lynn” because she knew what was coming. After I’d done it, she’d gurgle and say, “’gain!” I played the same game years later with my own kids.
Lewis’s desk phone rang again, and he appeared in time to snatch it up. “Yes?” He looked at me and mouthed “Medical Examiner.” I listened in, but Lewis didn’t say much. Lots of “huh”s and “okay”s and, at the end, “when?” He hung up. “More info on Elizabeth Gardner,” he said.
“And?”
“They’re faxing it now.”
“We’ll get it by Thanksgiving,” I said.
“I’ll go check the fax,” he said. Paused. “Think that counts as exercise?”
I shook my head. It was the “new” office game. Doing something like stapling a report and then asking, “Hey, does this count as exercise?” Only a few men were bold enough to play it in front of Chief Lynch, but he knew about it, knew it was widespread. I’m sure Grace Dunsmore kept him apprised.
I looked again at the papers. There wasn’t even a photo of Donald Waverly. Not surprising. You didn’t photograph an interview subject. Still, I’d have liked something more than a name and a defunct address and phone number. I picked up the phone and tried again to reach the owner of the landscaping company Donald had worked for when he and Elizabeth dated.
Turns out late May is the busy season in the life of a landscaping company. Lawns to be seeded, mulch to be strewn, trees to be planted, and whatever else those guys did. Me? I’d maxed out at lawn mowing and hedge trimming. Not that I needed to do such things in my seedy little apartment complex. I’ll say this for my ex-wives: They guaranteed I’d never have to operate a lawn mower again.
When I called Fern Landscaping, the phone was answered by a human, not an answering machine. That was where the good news ended. I got a temp who didn’t know anything about nothing. No, she didn’t know when Jim, the owner, would be in the office. No, she didn’t know what his home phone number was or if she was allowed to give it out, and um, could I hold? I held. After seven minutes, I decided she was never coming back and I hung up.
Lewis returned, faxed report in hand. “I hate that machine.”
“Did it eat the cover page?” I asked.
“No. It gave us every other page of the report. So, I’ve got pages 1, 3, and 5.”
“You want me to call and ask them to resend it?” I offered.
“Would you?” he asked. “I wanna read this first.”
“Sure.” I dialed the ME’s office and explained that our fax machine was cursed by a demon who hated even-numbered pages. The woman on the other end seemed less than amused by my flight of fancy, especially when I told her I needed her to fax the whole report, not just the even-numbered pages, because our fax-machine demon was anything but predictable.
Lewis said, “Why do I have a feeling they’re going to put your picture up at the ME’s office with a label that reads ‘Crazy’?”
“No idea. So, what do the odd-numbered pages tell us?” I asked.
“In addition to her blunt-force trauma, Elizabeth May Gardner suffered multiple stab wounds. The jacket she wore was largely made of polyester. It was intact enough to reveal cuts and bloodstains. There was knife damage to some bones. There’s a lot of cautious statements here, but it looks like a serrated blade, six inches or so.”
“Defensive wounds?”
“Nature didn’t leave them much to work with.”
Smart killer. Dumping a body in a shallow grave in the woods wasn’t super-genius-level stuff, but it wasn’t stupid either. Much of our victim’s body had succumbed to time and insects and scavengers and the earth. Without her gold crown, we might not have identified her for a long, long time.
“The report say anything about how long she was in the ground?” I asked.
“Based on decomposition and what they could recover of the clothing, it’s likely she was buried before 1981.”
“Between April 1979 and before 1981,” I said.
“That’s the best guess. Soil samples and leaf matter and nasty bug info says she likely went into the ground in spring.”
“The guy snatches her in mid-April and doesn’t keep her long,” I said.
“Might have killed her the same day he grabbed her.” He bit his lip. “Why’d he dump her there? It’s not exactly well-known, yeah? For all he knew, he was going to wind up in someone’s backyard. Kind of dicey.”
“Maybe he knew the area?”
“Local boy?” he asked.
“God knows. I’m still digging into Donald. Can’t make contact with the landscape owner.”
“When is Ms. Holliday going to talk to us?” This wasn’t the first time Lewis had posed the question. Elizabeth Gardner’s mother was upset and angry. I didn’t blame her. Discovering her daughter had been murdered and buried in the woods? That was devastating. But the unsympathetic detective in me wanted to ask her why, if she was so certain she knew who killed her daughter, why wasn’t she calling us with information that could help us?
Lewis looked at the missing persons poster of Elizabeth. “Nice smile,” he said absently. “When my kids smile, it’s like they’re practicing for Halloween. All teeth and gums.” He gave me an example.
I said, “When my daughter, Carly, was young, she’d complain that people told her she didn’t smile enough, and I’d tell her, ‘You don’t have to smile. Friendly is overrated. Friendly gets you killed.’ And then I’d tell her how Ted Bundy lured many of his victims by faking an injury. ‘A guy needs help,’ I told her, ‘you tell him to ask another man for help.’ She’d shake her head and say that no one else’s dad told them such stories, and I’d tell her that proved I loved her more than those other fathers.”
When had I last spoken to Carly? February? Real father-of-the-year material there.
“You told your child not to smile,” Lewis said. “Because friendly gets you killed?”
I nodded. It hadn’t helped that, at the time, there had been a grisly murder splashed all over the news. A young woman only a few years older than Carly had been murdered by a stranger who’d given her a ride on a rainy day.
“What kind of a world we live in?” Lewis asked, his eyes looking at Elizabeth May Gardner’s photo. “A world in which you tell your child not to smile.”
CHIEF THOMAS LYNCH
TUESDAY, JUNE 1, 1999
1100 HOURS
Mrs. Dunsmore appeared, a folder cradled to her chest like a baby.
“Tell me that isn’t the budget,” I said.
She said, “It’s not the budget.”
“Oh?”
She set the folder down on my desk: Idyll Police Budget, Fiscal Year 2000.
“You told me it wasn’t the budget.”
“You told me to tell you that.”
“What’s the problem? We set the figures.” By “we” I meant Mrs. Dunsmore, with some input from me.
“Don’t you think we’ll need to increase it?”
“Why?” I asked.
“I keep hearing rumors about Y2K.”
“Such as?”
“Such as that the world’s computers are going to fail, people will lose their money from banks, and there will be looting.”
“If those computer geniuses can’t figure this out and fix it before New Year’s, then they’re not so smart after all.”
“Chief.” Sh
e nudged the folder to me.
I sighed. “The mayor will blow his top if I amend this budget. You know that. You trying to get me fired?”
“If I’d wanted that, I’d have done it by now,” she said. Probably true. And then who would she have to torture? “I think it would be smart to prepare for a worst-case scenario. Maybe we’ll never need it. Besides, I hear the Fire Department has drawn up some scenarios.” Ah, her trump card. Well played. She knew I didn’t want to look less prepared than Captain Hirsch.
“Hey, can I ask you a question?”
“Questions are free. Answers will cost you,” she said.
“Funny. Do you know why I wasn’t invited to participate on the softball team? Do they usually exclude the chief?” This was a trap. I knew the answer. I’d dug back into the files and found that the chief of police always captained the team, except in 1978, when he’d been away, at some conference.
She asked, “Do you want to know the answer?”
No. “Yes.”
“Some of the men are still … hesitant to embrace you as their chief. They worry too much about appearances.”
“What? They think I’m going to make them wear rainbow-colored shirts?”
“I believe they voiced concern that the color pink would be involved.”
“You’re serious.”
“Sadly.”
“One more question. Can they keep me off the team? Is it allowed?”
She considered the question. “It’s never come up before.”
“Okay.” I grabbed the folder she’d given me and opened it up. I muttered, “Where would people loot? The candy store? The garden-supply store?”
She didn’t turn around. Just called out, “People will surprise you,” as she left the office.
After I’d spent two hours trying to imagine worst-case scenarios—townspeople stealing gas from the Citgo station, all electricity going out (but that had happened in February during a blizzard), a computer blackout that meant we couldn’t pull any driver’s information while on patrol—Finny strolled into my office. He held a folder and looked worse for wear.
“Tell me that’s not the budget.” I distrusted all folders on sight now.
“What?” He glanced at the folder, as if it had perhaps changed its contents while he wasn’t looking. “No. It’s an update on the Gardner case. The plastic bag they recovered from the scene had nothing to do with the grave. Trash, mostly, and too modern to be related.”
“Too bad,” I said. “Would’ve been nice if it included a receipt with the killer’s name.”
“And home address and telephone number,” he added.
“Sure. While he’s at it, why not include a big old sample of DNA? What was inside?”
“Potato chips pack, crushed beer can, two broken pencils, a circular from the newspaper, a half-empty soda bottle, and three Tic Tacs, orange flavor.”
“Orange? Yuck. What’s the point of a breath mint if it’s orange-flavored?”
“Beats me. We’re due to meet Elizabeth Gardner’s mother in three days. She’s going to give us more information on the ex-boyfriend.”
“Great. Hey, while I have you in here, I’ve got a question.” I lowered my voice. “About the other case.”
“Oh, yeah?” He closed the office door and said, “What is it?”
“Well, it occurs to me that your sister probably didn’t associate with doctors, so how did she know who to visit about her situation?”
His brow furrowed. “I don’t know.”
“Maybe she asked someone at her school? Maybe someone she knew had an abortion?”
“Like who?”
“I was hoping you could help me there. High schools are usually gossip mills, yeah? You ever hear anything about a girl going away for a few days to take care of an issue?”
He bit the tip of his pinkie finger. “Maybe. There were some rumors about Melissa Kennedy. She was two years behind me and two above Susan. She got sick at school, and a few weeks later was gone for a whole week. Her parents took her out for a trip to California. That wasn’t normal. Some of the girls said her boyfriend had knocked her up. Melissa was a grade-A student, headed for college, so I can see where a baby wouldn’t have fit her plans or her parents’ plans for her.”
“Any idea where she lives now?” I asked.
“You want to call Melissa Kennedy and ask if she had an abortion nearly thirty years ago?” He didn’t have to make it sound like a mission-impossible task, did he?
“You got any better ideas?” I asked.
“I could see if any of the guys back home I worked with arrested any doctors back then, but …”
“But?” That was exactly the resource I wanted, and couldn’t get access to, what with my investigation being secret and not sanctioned.
“But I’d have to tell them why I’m asking.”
He didn’t want to tell the Boston Police that his teenage sister had slept around back in the day. Was it sweet that he wanted to protect her reputation? Or stupid? Maybe both.
“If you don’t want to do that, I need Melissa Kennedy’s phone number.”
“I’ll ask Carol. She and Melissa were friendly. Have sons the same age, I think.”
“Melissa had kids later?”
“Sure, after she graduated college. Right after, I think. I’ll see about getting you her number.”
“Unless you’d rather have your sister ask her?” I suggested.
“Carol?” He considered this. “She’d probably worry it would end their friendship.”
“Right.” Leave it to the gay stranger to ask a woman private details about her high-school sex life. Fantastic.
“That all?” he asked.
“Yeah.” He turned to go. “No. Um, do you play in the softball tourney?”
He winced, so fast I almost missed it. “Yup. Outfield.” Outfield? Outfielders had to run. Our team was worse than I thought.
“Gonna play this year?” Maybe he hadn’t known about my being excluded from the team. And maybe pigs were flying outside at this very moment.
“Sure, unless this case requires me to work that weekend.”
“Who plays first base?” I asked.
“John Miller.”
“Dispatch John Miller?”
“He played on his college team, back in the day. That all?” He edged nearer the door.
“Sure.”
He left, without saying any more about the softball game. I was good enough to investigate his sister’s disappearance, good enough to talk to her high-school friend about her abortion so he and his sister, Carol, weren’t put in an awkward position. But good enough to play softball with? Apparently not.
DETECTIVE MICHAEL FINNEGAN
FRIDAY, JUNE 4, 1999
1400 HOURS
Ms. Hannah Holliday, the former Mrs. Mick Gardner, had the spotted skin of a person who lived in the southwest and spent a lot of time outdoors, her bleached hair made whiter by the sun. She wore a large turquoise necklace and carried a bag embroidered with sunflowers. She was not what I expected. What had I expected? Black dress and gray hair and fingernails gnawed short? Perhaps. I stole a peek at her hands. Her nails weren’t bitten. They were on the long side, and unpainted. She also subverted my expectation of animosity with her first words. “Thank you for bringing her to us, so we could lay her to rest.”
Lewis pulled out a chair and urged her to sit. He’d asked Chief Lynch if we could borrow his office, and the chief had said yes without hesitation. “May I get you some water?” Lewis asked. She nodded, and he stepped outside. She looked around the office, her eyes settling on the plant in the windowsill. Lewis returned, water cup in hand. He gave it to her. She took a tiny sip and set the cup atop the desk.
I cleared my throat before I asked if she remembered anything odd about Elizabeth’s behavior in the weeks prior to her disappearance.
“Odd how?” she asked.
“Did she seem nervous or scared or upset?” I asked.
She pulled her top lip down with her bottom teeth. “No. She was a little quiet. But then, when I went back and read her diary, I realized why.” She reached into the sunflower bag and withdrew a cracked, red leather diary. She patted the cover. “I gave her this when she was seventeen. It’s a three-year diary. She didn’t write in it often.” She wrinkled her nose. “I didn’t like to read it. I waited, months, before I did. Well, not exactly. I read the last two pages two days after she went missing. I didn’t read the others until later. If only I’d read those sooner.”
“May I?” Lewis asked, extending his hand slowly, the way you would approach a shy animal you didn’t wish to startle. Her fingers tightened on the diary. Then she extended it, with a soft sigh, as if releasing it from her grip cost her.
“January 28th,” she said.
Lewis opened the diary and flipped pages. January 28, 1979, was two-thirds through the book. Those unfilled pages, awaiting news of boyfriends and squabbles with friends and concerts attended and hearts broken, those pages were a mirror to all the days she didn’t live, and would never experience.
Lewis read, his brow furrowing. “Donald hit her,” he said. “Because she contradicted him.”
Ms. Holliday pulled her lip down again with her teeth. “If you read further, you see where she hid it, the bruise, with makeup. She didn’t tell me or her father or anyone. She thought it would never happen again.”
“But it did?” I prompted.
“Twice more, before she broke up with him. It’s all in there. She broke up with him after the kicking incident. I remember I was surprised when she told me she was splitting up from him. When I asked why, she said they had other interests, and she didn’t think he took her photography seriously. She loved taking pictures, so I believed her.”
“When you read the diary, did you tell the police what you’d learned?”
“Yes. Of course! I called them and told them, and they promised to look into it.”
Lewis cut a glance to me and then to the diary. They hadn’t taken it as evidence. Why?
Idyll Hands Page 13