No Place Like Home

by Mary Higgins Clark

  “Then why weren’t there any fingerprints on the picture, including Georgette’s?” Ortiz asked.

  “Nolan may have handled it but been afraid to take it with her in case other people had seen Georgette with it. Instead, she wiped it clean of any fingerprints and put it in Georgette’s bag.”

  “You’ve missed your calling, Paul,” Jeff snapped. “You should have been a trial attorney. You sound persuasive on the surface, but it’s full of holes. Celia Nolan is a wealthy woman. She could have bought another house with a snap of her fingers, and sweet-talked her husband into going along with it. It’s obvious he’s crazy about her. Go ahead and check her prints in the database and then let’s move on. What’s happening, Mort?”

  Mort Shelley pulled a notebook from his pocket. “We’re putting together a list of the people who might have had access to that house and then we’re interviewing them. People like other real estate agents who have keys to the lockbox, and people who do any kind of service, like housecleaning or landscaping. We’re investigating to see if Georgette Grove had any enemies, if she owed any money, if there’s a boyfriend in the picture. We still haven’t been able to trace the doll that was left on the porch of the Nolan house. It was expensive in its day, but my guess is it was picked up at a garage sale at some point and has probably been in someone’s attic for years.”

  “How about the gun the doll was holding? It looked real enough to scare me if I was facing it,” Jeff said.

  “We checked out the company that makes them. It’s not in business anymore. It got a lot of bad publicity because the gun is too realistic. The guy who owned the company destroyed all the records after seven years. That’s a dead end.”

  “All right. Keep me posted.” Jeff stood up, signifying the meeting was over. As they were leaving he called out to Anna, his secretary, to hold any calls for an hour.

  Ten minutes later, she buzzed him on the intercom. “Jeff, there’s a woman on the phone who claims she was in the Black Horse Tavern last night and heard Ted Cartwright threatening Georgette Grove. I knew you’d want to talk to her.”

  “Put her on,” Jeff said.

  26

  After she left Marcella Williams, Dru Perry went directly to the Star-Ledger offices to write her story about the homicide on Holland Road. She then cleared it with her editor, Ken Sharkey, that she would work at home in the morning to put together a feature story on Georgette Grove for the weekend edition of the newspaper.

  That was why, with a mug of coffee in her hand, and still dressed in her pajamas and robe, she was at her desk at home on Friday morning, watching local Channel 12, on which the news anchor was interviewing Grove’s cousin, Thomas Madison, who had come from Pennsylvania when he received the news of Georgette’s death. Madison, a soft-spoken man in his early fifties, expressed his family’s grief at their loss and his outrage at her coldblooded murder. He announced the funeral arrangements he had made—Georgette would be cremated when her body was released by the coroner, and her ashes placed in the family plot in Morris County Cemetery. A memorial service would be held at 10 A.M. on Monday at Hilltop Presbyterian, the church she had attended all her life.

  A memorial service so soon, Dru thought. That says to me cousin Thomas just wants to get things over with and go back home. As she pressed the remote button and snapped off the television, she decided to attend the service.

  She turned on her computer and began to search the Internet for references to Georgette Grove. What she loved about the Internet was that when she combed it for research, she often stumbled across valuable information that she had not expected to find.

  “Pay dirt,” she said aloud an hour later, as she came across a school picture of Georgette Grove and Henry Paley when they were seniors in Mend-ham High. The photo caption said that they each had won a long distance race in the annual county competition. They were holding their trophies. Henry’s skinny arm was around Georgette, and while she smiled directly into the camera, his fatuous smile was only for her.

  Boy, he looks lovesick, Dru thought—he must have been sweet on Georgette even then.

  She decided to try to find more information on Henry Paley. The pertinent facts that turned up were that he had worked as a real estate agent after college, married Constance Liller at age twenty-five, and joined the newly formed Grove Real Estate Agency when he was forty. An obituary notice showed that Constance Liller Paley had been dead for six years.

  Then, if one could believe Marcella Williams, he tried to romance Georgette again, Dru mused. But she had wanted no part of it, and lately they had been quarreling because he wanted to cash out his interest in the business and the Route 24 property. I don’t see Henry as a murderer, she thought, but love and money are the two main reasons people kill or get killed. Interesting.

  She leaned back in her creaking desk chair and looked up at the ceiling. When they had talked yesterday, did Henry Paley talk about his whereabouts when Georgette was killed? I don’t think so, she decided. Her shoulder bag was on the floor beside her desk. Dru fished in it, pulled out her notebook, and jotted down the questions and facts that were jumping into her mind.

  Where was Henry Paley the morning of the murder? Did he go to the office at the usual time or did he have any appointments with clients? Lock-boxes have a computerized record. It should show how often Henry visited Holland Road. Was he aware of the paint cans in that storage closet? He wanted the agency to close. Would he deliberately sabotage the Old Mill property to embarrass Georgette, or to kill the sale to the Nolans?

  Dru closed her notebook, dropped it in her bag, and switched back to researching Georgette Grove on the Internet. In the next two hours she was able to form a clear picture of an independent woman who, judging from her many awards, was not only community minded but a dynamic force in preserving the quality of life, as she saw it, in Mendham.

  Lots of people who applied for variances to the zoning board must have wanted to strangle her, Dru thought, as she came upon reference after reference to Georgette Grove eloquently and successfully arguing against loosening or bending the existing zoning guidelines.

  Or maybe one of them wanted to shoot her, she amended. The record showed that Georgette had stepped on a lot of toes, especially during the last few years, but maybe her pro-community actions had affected nobody more directly than Henry Paley. She picked up the phone and dialed the agency, half-expecting it to be closed.

  Henry Paley answered her call.

  “Henry, I’m so glad to reach you. I didn’t know if you’d open the agency today. I’m working on the article I’m writing about Georgette, and I was thinking how nice it would be to include some of those wonderful pictures in your scrapbook. I’d like to drive over and borrow your scrapbook, or at least make a copy of some of the pictures.”

  After some encouragement, Paley reluctantly agreed to allow her to photograph the pages. “I don’t want the book to leave the office,” he said, “and I don’t want anything taken out of it.”

  “Henry, I want you to stand beside me when I’m doing it. Thanks very much. I’ll see you around noon. I won’t take too much of your time.”

  When she replaced the receiver, Dru stood up and pushed back her bangs. Got to get them cut, she thought. I’m starting to look like a sheepdog. She went down the hallway to her bedroom and began to dress. As she did, a question came to mind, an intuitive question that was partly hunch, the kind that made her a good investigative reporter. Does Henry still run or jog, and, if so, how would that fact fit into this whole scenario?

  It was something else to check out.

  27

  Martin and Kathleen Kellogg of Santa Barbara, California, were the distant cousins who adopted me. At the time of Mother’s death, they had been living in Saudi Arabia where he was with an engineering firm. They did not learn anything about what had happened until the company relocated them back to Santa Barbara. By then the trial was over and I was living in the juvenile shelter here in New Jersey while the Di
vision of Youth and Family Services, DYFS for short, decided where to place me.

  In a way, it was good that they hadn’t had any contact with me until that time. Childless themselves, they learned of what had happened, then, quietly and without a hint of publicity, came to Morris County and petitioned to adopt me. They were interviewed and checked out. The court readily approved them as being suitable to become the guardians and adoptive parents of a minor who had not spoken more than a few words in over a year.

  At that time, the Kelloggs were in their early fifties, not too old to parent an eleven-year-old. However distant the connection, Martin was a blood relative. More important, though, they were genuinely compassionate. The first time I met Kathleen, she said that she hoped I would like her and, in time, come to love her. She said, “I always wanted to have a little girl. Now I want to give you back the rest of your childhood, Liza.”

  I went with them willingly. Of course, no one can give you back something that has been destroyed. I was no longer a child—I was an acquitted killer. They desperately wanted me to get beyond the “Little Lizzie” horror, and so coached me in the story we told to anyone who had known them before they returned to Santa Barbara.

  I was the daughter of a widowed friend who, when she learned she was terminally ill with cancer, asked them to adopt me. They chose my new name, Celia, because my grandmother had been Cecelia. They were wise enough to understand that I needed some link to the past, even though it would be secret.

  I lived with them for only seven years. During all that time, I saw Dr. Moran once a week. I trusted him from the beginning. I think he, rather than Martin, became a real father figure for me. When I could not speak, he had me draw pictures for him. Over and over, I drew the same ones. Mother’s sitting room, a ferocious apelike figure, his back to me, his arms holding a woman against the wall. I drew the picture of a gun poised in midair with bullets flying from it, but the gun was not held by any hand. I drew a picture that was the reverse of the Pietà. Mine depicted the child holding the dead figure of the mother.

  I had lost a year of grammar school but made it up quickly and went to a local high school in Santa Barbara. In both places I was known as being “quiet but nice.” I had friends, but never let anyone get close to me. For someone who lives a lie, truth must always be avoided, and I was constantly having to guard my tongue. I also had to fiercely conceal my emotions. I remember in a sophomore English class, the surprise test was for the students to write an essay about the most memorable day of their lives.

  That terrible night flashed vividly before my eyes. It was as if I were watching a movie. I tried to pick up my pen but my fingers refused to grasp it. I tried to breathe, but I couldn’t pull air into my lungs. And then I fainted.

  The cover story we used was that I had almost drowned as a small child, and had occasional flashbacks. I told Dr. Moran that what had happened that night had never been so clear, that for a split second I had remembered what Mother had been screaming at Ted. And then it was gone again.

  The same year I moved to New York to attend the Fashion Institute, Martin reached compulsory retirement at his company, and they gladly moved to Naples, Florida, where he took a position with an engineering firm. He has since fully retired, and now, past eighty, has become what Kathleen calls “forgetful,” but which I fear is the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s.

  When we married, Alex and I had a quiet wedding in the Lady Chapel of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, just the two of us and Jack, Richard Ackerman, the elderly lawyer who is the senior partner of Alex’s law firm, and Joan Donlan, who was my right hand when I had the interior design business and who is the closest I have to an intimate friend.

  Shortly after that, Alex and Jack and I flew down to Naples to visit Martin and Kathleen for a few days. Thank God we stayed at a hotel, because Martin often became disoriented. One day when we were lingering over lunch on the patio, he called me “Liza.” Fortunately, Alex was not within earshot because he had headed to the beach for a swim, but Jack heard. It puzzled him so much that it became embedded in his memory, and from time to time he still asks me, “Why did Grandpa call you Liza, Mom?”

  Once, at the apartment in New York, Alex was in the room when Jack asked that question, but his reaction was to explain to Jack that sometimes people who are old begin to forget and mix up people’s names. “Remember, your grandpa called me ‘Larry’ a couple of times. He mixed me up with your first daddy.”

  After my outburst over the pony’s name, I had followed Jack into the house. He had run to Alex and was sitting on his lap, tearfully telling him that Mommy scared him. “She scares me too, sometimes, Jack,” Alex said, and I know he meant it to be a joke, but the underlying truth was undeniable. My fainting spell, my crying episodes, even the state of shock I’d been in after finding Georgette’s body—all those things had frightened him. And the fear might as well have been stamped on Alex’s forehead: he obviously thought I was having some sort of breakdown.

  He listened to Jack’s story about how I had yelled at him, saying he couldn’t call the pony Lizzie, and then he tried to explain: “You know, Jack, a long time ago a little girl named Lizzie lived in this house and she did some very bad things. Nobody liked her and they made her go away. We think about that bad girl when we hear that name. What’s something you hate more than anything else?”

  “When the doctor gives me a booster shot.”

  “Well think about it this way. When we hear the name Lizzie, it reminds Mommy and me of that bad girl. Would you want to call your pony ‘Booster Shot?’ ”

  Jack began to laugh. “Nooooooooo.”

  “So now you know how Mommy feels. Let’s think about another name for that pretty pony.”

  “Mommy said we should call her ‘Star’ because she has a star on her forehead.”

  “I think that’s a great name, and we should make it official. Mommy, don’t we have some birthday wrapping paper?”

  “Yes, I think so.” I was so grateful to Alex for calming Jack down, but oh, dear God, the explanation he gave him!

  “Why don’t you make a big star and we’ll put it on the door of the barn so everyone will know a pony named ‘Star’ lives there?”

  Jack loved the idea. I drew the outline of a star on a section of glittery wrapping paper and he cut it out. We made a ceremony of pasting it on the door of the barn, and then I recited for them the poem I remembered from childhood:

  “Star light, star bright,

  First star I see tonight,

  I wish I may, I wish I might,

  Have the wish I wish tonight.”

  By then it was six o’clock, and the evening shadows were beginning to settle in.

  “What is your wish, Mommy?” Jack asked.

  “I wish that the three of us will be together forever.”

  “What do you wish, Alex?” Jack asked.

  “I wish that you’ll start to call me ‘Daddy’ soon, and that by this time next year you’ll have a little brother or sister.”

  That night, when Alex tried to draw me close to him, he sensed my resistance and immediately released me. “Ceil, why don’t you take a sleeping pill?” he suggested. “You need to relax. I’m not sleepy. I’ll go downstairs and read for a while.”

  When I take a sleeping pill, I usually break it in half, but after the day I had just gone through, I swallowed a whole one and for the next eight hours slept soundly. When I awakened, it was almost eight o’clock, and Alex was gone. I pulled on a robe and rushed downstairs. Jack was up and dressed and at the table, having breakfast with Alex.

  Alex jumped up and came over to me. “That was some sleep,” he said. “I don’t think you stirred all night.” He kissed me with that gesture I love, cupping my face in his hands. “I’ve got to be off. You okay?”

  “I’m good.” And I was. As the remnants of sleep left me, I felt physically stronger than I’ve felt since the morning we first pulled up to this driveway. I knew what I was going to do. After I dr
opped Jack at school, I would go to one of the other real estate agents in town and try to find a house that we could rent or buy immediately. I didn’t care how suitable it was. Getting out of this house would be the first step toward regaining something approaching normality.

  At least it seemed like the best thing to do. Later that morning, however, when I went to the Mark W. Grannon Agency and Mark Grannon himself took me around, I learned something about Georgette Grove that took my breath away. “Georgette was the one who got the exclusive listing on your house,” he told me as we drove along Hardscrabble Road. “None of the rest of us wanted to touch it. But Georgette always had a guilty feeling about the place. She and Audrey Barton had been good friends at one time. They went to Mendham High at the same time, although Georgette was a couple of years older than Audrey.”

  I listened, hoping Grannon could not sense the tension rushing through my body.

  “Audrey was a great rider, you know. A real horsewoman. Her husband, Will, though, was deathly afraid of them and embarrassed about it. He wanted to be able to ride with Audrey. It was Georgette who suggested that he ask Zach at Washington Valley Riding Club to give him lessons, something they agreed to keep secret from Audrey, which they did. Audrey knew nothing about it until the police came to tell her Will was dead. She and Georgette never spoke again.”

  Zach!

  The name hit me like a thunderbolt. It was one of the words my mother had screamed at Ted the night I killed her.

  Zach: It was part of the puzzle!

  28

  On Friday afternoon, Ted Cartwright’s secretary informed him that a Detective Paul Walsh from the Morris County Prosecutor’s Office was in the waiting room and needed to ask him a few questions.