by Nancy Martin
“Actually, it’s my job. I write for the Philadelphia Intelligencer. I report on charitable events, so I have to dress up sometimes. To you, I probably look a little silly. Again.”
She had come wearing a hooded gray sweatshirt and jeans with a pair of boots that had probably been all over Afghanistan. Grudgingly, she said, “You look okay.”
Michael had gathered his courage, I could see. He’d been astonished to find Carrie at the door, but now he appeared capable of intelligent thought. He said, “Carrie remembered your name. Found you in the phone book and tracked down the address. Pretty smart, right?”
“Very smart,” I said warmly. “But, after all, she’s a grown-up. Why don’t you come inside? I’ll get you something to drink. Michael?”
“Sure. Anything. Let’s go in here,” he said to Carrie, standing back so she could precede him into my grandfather’s library. “This is one room where you won’t get frostbite.”
“He’s warm-blooded,” I said lightly. “Me, I’ve lived here long enough to know to wear extra sweaters. What would you like? A beer? Coffee? I think I have some diet soft drinks.”
Carrie wasn’t sure what to make of our banter, so she scooted into the library. Over her shoulder, she said, “I’m not old enough to drink beer yet. And anyway, this isn’t really a social visit.”
Michael and I exchanged raised eyebrows and shared the same thought. By law, she was old enough to carry a weapon in defense of her country, but not old enough to drink alcohol. He took a deep breath and followed her into the library. I went off to the kitchen. I took my time making up a tray with a crystal pitcher of water, two glasses with ice and lemon slices. I found a few crackers, too, and sliced up some cheese. They needed a chance to be alone together, so I took my time.
When I got back to the library, Carrie had clearly blurted out her mission.
Michael was sitting in one of the deep leather chairs, looking grave. To me, he said, “Carrie needs me to sign some papers.”
I set the tray on the big coffee table.
Carrie sat opposite Michael in the matching chair, but she perched uncomfortably at attention on the edge of the seat and had wrapped her arms around herself. Between them on the table lay a sheaf of official-looking documents.
To me, she said, “I have a shot at a promotion. But now that my mom is gone, I need somebody who can sign papers. For the promotion.”
“And somebody to notify if you get hurt,” Michael said.
“Yeah, that, too.”
He reached for the papers and gave them a cursory skim. “What kind of promotion is it?”
“Just a new job. It requires a higher security clearance than I have at the moment. I should warn you, there will probably be some people coming around to ask questions, too.”
He glanced up. “What kind of questions?”
“Just stuff. It’s not a big deal.”
“They want to be sure you’re not mixed up with Al Qaeda, I guess?”
“That kind of thing, yeah.”
Michael reached for his reading glasses and put them on. While he read the first sheet, Carrie shot another peek at me. There was mistrust in her eyes. I saw I’d made a mistake, bringing the crystal on a tray. That detail combined with my frilly dress and fancy shoes made me alien to her. I began to wish she’d come a few hours earlier when I’d been wearing my jeans and chasing ponies around the property. Tonight, I probably looked like some kind of debutante. No help with a military promotion.
Michael continued to read, and he wasn’t making a good impression, either. I knew he was dismayed to imagine this young girl risking her life in the military. But to her, he seemed standoffish.
A door banged far away in the house, and I realized Reed had let himself in the back door. He was early. I went to the library’s doorway and called to him. A minute later, he showed up, but he stopped short at the sight of a pretty young woman sitting in the room with Michael.
“Hey, boss,” Reed said.
“Hey, Reed.” Michael didn’t look up from his reading.
“Reed, this is Carrie Hardaway. Carrie, Reed Shakespeare.”
“Hey,” he said to her.
“Hey,” she replied.
Once again, I read her mind. Reed had come in his standard outfit—blue pants, white shirt and a Windbreaker. He dangled the car keys from one hand. All he needed was a chauffeur’s cap to look like a chump in her eyes.
The best thing I could do was leave quickly. I gathered up my wrap and said, “Well, good night, you two. Michael, I’ll be home before midnight.”
“See you then.” He stopped reading long enough to accept a kiss from me. His gaze darkened when he met mine. “Be careful.”
“Of course. Good-bye, Carrie. It was nice to see you again.” I shook her hand.
“Yeah,” she said. “Bye.”
Two minutes later, I was outside with Reed and heading for the car.
Reed’s usual stone-cold demeanor thawed considerably. “Who was that?”
“Prepare to be amazed,” I said. “She’s Michael’s daughter.”
“Get out!” Reed stopped dead on the sidewalk. “You gotta be kidding.”
“I’m not,” I said. “She showed up yesterday. She was . . . a bit of a surprise to all of us.”
Reed wanted to know the whole story, so I told him what I knew as we stood outside the big SUV under the trees in the half-light.
“She’s good-looking,” he said when I had finished. He glanced over his shoulder as if hoping Carrie might come running out the back door after us.
“Michael hasn’t discovered his protective inner father yet,” I warned. “But that’s going to happen. So watch your step, Reed.”
“Good point.” He managed to get his aloof facade back into place.
“Since we’re early, I’d like to make another stop before we go into the city,” I said.
He groaned. “You’re not going to drive again, are you?”
“Not tonight. But I need your expertise.”
With the help of Reed and his magic cell phone, we figured out an address in New Hope.
Pee Wee McBean lived in a modest ranch house outside of town, on a low ridge alongside a group of identical little homes. Each house had a side carport, aluminum siding, bay windows, and front doors located under a porch roof too small to shelter a single trick-or-treater on a rainy Halloween night. The houses were not ostentatious in any way, but tidy—although maybe a little shabby around the edges. The siding was faded, the shrubbery too large. I spotted Pee Wee’s white Crown Victoria parked in his driveway. He had a worn Fraternal Order of Police sticker on the back bumper.
“What’re you doing here?” Reed asked when he pulled into the driveway.
“I need to speak with the owner. Reed, if I don’t come out in fifteen minutes, will you knock on the door?”
He turned around and looked at me over the seat. “That doesn’t sound good.”
“I’m sure I’ll be fine. The homeowner gets overly excited sometimes, that’s all. Will you do it?”
He grimaced and got out of the SUV. He came around to open my door and help me down. As I went up the sidewalk to the front door, Reed waited in the light of a gas lamp to show Pee Wee I hadn’t come alone.
Pee Wee answered the door wearing gray boxer shorts, a faded Notre Dame sweatshirt and green socks with a gaping hole in one toe where a long yellow toenail showed through. He carried a can of beer and blinked at me with astonishment.
“Hello,” I said calmly. “May I come in?”
“I was expecting a pizza,” he replied, but he automatically stepped back to allow me to enter his home.
Pee Wee’s house was decorated entirely in green plaid. Someone had painstakingly wallpapered the living room with a green tartan design, then added a plaid sofa and two plaid recliners before topping off the decor with assorted accessories bearing shamrocks and the Notre Dame logo. The television was the size of a car, and it blasted a college football game.
>
From one recliner, an elderly dachshund snarled at me. I’d have snarled, too, if forced to live in that kaleidoscope of the Emerald Isle.
Displayed in a large glassed-in case were various guns—a couple of rifles, an old shotgun and some handguns in many shapes and sizes. The case, I noticed, was not locked.
The air smelled of burned meat, and a smoky haze hung in the room. From the kitchen, I could hear the frantic beep of a smoke alarm.
Pee Wee stood holding the front door open and gaping at me as if I were a fairy princess who’d walked into the lair of Rumpelstiltskin.
“I was on my way to a party,” I said, “but I have a few extra minutes, and I thought we could talk.”
Pee Wee had used intimidation and false pretenses on me on the previous day, but I had other weapons at my disposal. I fully intended to intimidate him right back with my good manners and my graceful long skirt that looked as if it cost as much as a year’s worth of his mortgage payments.
It worked.
Belatedly, Pee Wee closed the door and realized he was underdressed. He snatched a plaid blanket off one of the recliners and wrapped it around himself like an overgrown kilt. With a remote control, he thumbed the volume down on the television.
“I wasn’t expecting no company,” he said with as much dignity as he could muster while wearing green socks with holes in the toes. “Except the pizza man. I burned my dinner.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I won’t stay long. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“About what?”
“About Pippi.”
He glowered at me. “I got nothing more to say about her than I already told you.”
“Why don’t we go shut off that smoke alarm?”
“But—”
Following my nose, I led the way to the kitchen, where a frying pan sat smoking in the sink. Two charred hot dogs smoldered in a puddle of greasy water.
The rest of the kitchen wasn’t going to win any prizes, either. Dishes sat stacked in a drainer beside the sink, and the counters were cluttered with boxes. Dozens of cereal boxes were lined up beside boxes of Hamburger Helper and instant mashed potatoes. Several plastic jugs of pre-mixed iced tea stood on the floor. I didn’t see a single fresh vegetable or piece of fruit.
I opened a window and flipped on the fan over the stove. Almost immediately, the smoke alarm ceased shrieking. Over the fan’s rattling roar, I said, “Let’s clear the air, shall we?”
“I got nothing to say to you, lady. Unless you tell me I got something coming from your relative.”
“We’re a long way from learning the details of Aunt Madeleine’s will. Shall we scrub out this pan while it’s still warm?”
He elbowed me out of his way and reached for the frying pan. “Don’t touch that stuff. You’ll get all covered in grease.”
I stood back and let him fill the sink with soapy water. “Can we talk about Pippi now?”
“What do you want to know about her?”
“How did she come to this country?”
“I told you that. Your aunt brought her here. On a boat.”
“On a boat? A yacht, you mean?”
“I don’t know nothing about what kind of boat. It was just a boat, that’s all.”
“But Pippi didn’t have a green card?”
“Right. She wasn’t no ballerina or famous scientist like all the others who got special treatment.”
“Like all the others?” I repeated.
“Yeah, the Blackbird lady always had foreigners staying at her house—big-deal people, I guess. Not like the newspapers said. No prostitution. But Pippi was a nobody, see? And a Russian to boot, so it was hard for her.”
I began to arrange the cereal boxes in a neat line at the back of the counter, tidying up. “And Madeleine introduced the two of you?”
“Naw, I saw Pippi shopping at the store a couple of times, so I asked her if she wanted to get a cup of coffee. That first time, she said she had to get back to work, but the next time she said her boss lady told her it was a good idea to meet some people from the community. So we had coffee, and one thing led to another.”
I guessed Madeleine had brought Pippi into the country illegally and had seen Pee Wee as a way for Pippi to acquire citizen status. But I didn’t say so. Instead, I asked, “When Madeleine announced she was leaving for Indonesia, did Pippi plan to go with her?”
“She didn’t tell me so, no. Not until the last minute when she came to say good-bye. They were leaving the next day, she said. Getting on an airplane. First I heard of it.”
“Madeleine and Pippi went together?”
“Yeah, right.”
“Do you remember the exact date?”
“Yeah, sure, I got it written down someplace.”
I thought that information might be helpful to the police, but I asked, “Do you remember anything that happened that day? Anything specific? About who Pippi or Madeleine might have seen besides you? Or if anyone else planned to travel with them?”
“I don’t remember anything like that, no. Just that Pippi stopped by in the afternoon. To say good-bye.”
I realized Pee Wee was scrubbing the pan so hard that water splashed in all directions. He clenched his jaw, too. Maybe I’d misjudged him. I thought he’d been solely looking for a piece of Madeleine’s estate, but now I realized he was probably worried that Pippi had never loved him. That she’d used him to get a green card.
I touched his shoulder. “I’m sure she was sorry to leave.”
He shook off my touch. “She seemed damn happy to me. They were going around saying good-bye to everybody that afternoon. Your aunt waited in the car while Pippi was here.”
“They were paying other calls?”
“To people in the neighborhood, yeah. Bragging about their trip.”
I had already calculated that I’d been away at school the year Madeleine left Bucks County. Now I wondered if she’d stopped at Blackbird Farm to see my parents one last time. I’d have to ask my mother when she phoned me from whatever resort she had landed in recently. Maybe Mama remembered something about that afternoon. Knowing Madeleine’s state of mind would be helpful. And maybe Mama could guess what Pippi’s role in their travel to Indonesia might have been.
I didn’t have the heart to ask Pee Wee if he thought his wife was capable of locking Madeleine in an elevator and running off to Indonesia to impersonate her. But it was a theory that was starting to sound possible to me.
I took a dish towel from its hook on the wall. Pee Wee handed me the frying pan, and I dried it while he pretended to wipe perspiration from his brow.
The doorbell rang. In his blanket-wrapped glory, Pee Wee pushed past me and headed for the door. I replaced the dish towel and followed.
It was the pizza man making his delivery. Behind him, Reed waited anxiously on the sidewalk. When I bade Pee Wee good-bye and went outside, Reed took my arm protectively. “You okay? That guy looks like a nut.”
“I’m fine, thank you.” I wasn’t so sure about Pee Wee. As we walked away, he stood in the doorway of his house, alone and holding his pizza.
In the car on our way into the city, I phoned the state police. I reached the detective who’d come to my house and told him Pee Wee probably knew the exact date of Madeleine’s supposed departure for Indonesia. Then I asked about the bones in the woods.
“Yeah, we found ’em just where you said to look.”
“Any idea who it is?” I asked nervously.
“It was a woman,” he told me. “With a hole in her skull, so she didn’t die of natural causes.”
I felt sick. “No identification?”
“Nope. Just a funny clue. She had some special metal in her teeth. Nothing like dentists use to fill cavities here in the United States. She was from some other country.”
“What country?” I asked.
“No idea yet. Got any suggestions?”
With a dreadful feeling inside, I said, “Think about Russia.”
&nb
sp; CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
After I spoke with the detective, I thought about Pippi and Madeleine until my head was spinning. If Pippi was dead, who had been sending postcards pretending to be Madeleine?
Between my visit to Pee Wee and a traffic backup, I missed my first event—cocktails to raise funds for a rare blood disorder that was found mostly in the African-American community. I would owe someone a note of apology for skipping.
By the time I arrived at the ritziest of downtown hotels, I had shoved murder out of my mind and bailed out of the SUV, determined to focus on work. Outside, I met my friend Delilah Fairweather, the best professional party planner in the biz. She stood on a red carpet that had been rolled out in front of the hotel. She was working her cell phone like the commander of a battleship in the midst of a storm at sea. But she spotted me emerging from the backseat of Reed’s SUV and snapped her phone shut in midsentence. With a big grin on her face, she charged my way.
“Nora! Babycakes, it’s been weeks since I’ve seen you! Give me some sugar.” She enveloped me in strong arms and a cloud of intoxicating perfume. Dressed in the perfect little black dress with a matching coat and a shredded sort of scarf in an African textile via Seventh Avenue, Delilah teetered expertly on a pair of spike-heeled platform shoes that marked her as the Amazon in charge.
“I should have known you were running this show,” I said. “The advance press has been terrific.”
“I’ve worked my tail off,” she said happily. “They should name a whole wing of this hospital after me.”
Delilah had risen to the top of her profession through a combination of towering energy, tireless communication skills and a delightfully creative mind when it came to throwing a bash. I had no doubt her phone call had been to deal with a party scheduled weeks away. Her attention to detail exceeded NASA’s planning for a space launch.
“I’m ready down to the last napkin ring. Don’t you look smashing in this outfit.” She gave me another bear hug, then held me at arm’s length and admired my dress. “Ver-ry sexy! Who are you dressing for these days? You got a hot man you’re meeting later?”
I laughed. “You could say that.” To explain further would have required more time than either of us had. Around us, hotel bellmen bustled, and other journalists were beginning to gather.