Pursued by Shadows

by Medora Sale

  The patients’ lounge had been designed more as a conservatory than a sitting room. It was filled with trees in pots, tropical shrubs, and lush green plants. Lesley was curled up in the corner of a large and comfortable-looking chesterfield, half-hidden in the jungle; the sun poured through the curved glass onto her damp hair. She had one eye on a game show repeat on the communal television set and the other on a hand of solitaire laid out in front of her. As Jane watched, she leaned forward, laid down a card, shifted a long row, turned up another, and paused to contemplate the result.

  “Lesley?” said Jane tentatively, but without much hope. As far as she knew, her sister had shown no reaction to anyone or anything, nor had she spoken a word since Dean Smithson had died in a pool of blood on the polished wood floor of Amos’s loft apartment.

  “Jane!” Lesley turned, saw her, unwound her legs, and jumped up. For a second or two, she stood where she was, leaning heavily with one hand against the arm of the couch, then shook her head and grinned. “I’m a bit dizzy. I have to watch that.” She threw her arms around her sister’s neck and clung tightly for a moment. “What in hell is going on?” she asked, as she released her grip. “Would you mind sitting down and explaining it all to me? In words of one syllable?” She dropped back on the chesterfield and dragged Jane with her. “I wake up this morning in a hospital bed with someone dumping a tray of unspeakable breakfast on my lap. And, so help me, I haven’t the faintest idea what I’m doing here. I find a nurse out in the hall and ask her and of course she just looks at me in that way they have and says that the doctor will be in later. Big help. So I come down here. That room I’m in is like a morgue. There isn’t even a copy of Vogue in it.” She stopped, breathless with exhaustion after all that unaccustomed speech.

  “You don’t remember anything?” asked Jane incredulously.

  “Obviously not, or I wouldn’t be asking you.” A frown of anxiety formed itself on her face. “Look, Jane. You might start with where I am. This seems to be a nice hospital, as hospitals go, but where is it?”

  “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  “Yesterday,” she said. “When you called me. You asked me to drive down and you sounded scared. Are you in some sort of trouble? It’s Guy, isn’t it?”

  “No—I’m not in trouble,” said Jane hastily. “A lot has happened, that’s all. It was really stupid of me to drag you down here. I realize that now.”

  “Why not? That’s what sisters are for, aren’t they? Anyway. . .” She frowned and rubbed her forehead. “I guess I must have packed. I remember getting the suitcase out and I remember putting it in the car and driving somewhere and after that—I just don’t know. I’ve been sitting here playing cards, trying to remember, but it’s pretty hard. I have a lot of disconnected memories of things happening, some of them pretty bizarre, but I might have been dreaming them all.”

  Jane looked anxiously into her sister’s face, at a loss where to start. The date seemed easiest. She could scarcely conceal the passage of time from her, anyway. As soon as Lesley picked up a newspaper she’d realize something was wrong. “Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “First things first. It wasn’t yesterday that I called you—”

  “Omigod,” she said, zeroing in at once on the implications. “How long was I out? And why?” She grabbed Jane by the wrist. “Tell me the truth. I wrecked the car, didn’t I? And hit my head. I wrecked the goddamn car and Dad’s going to be furious.”

  “No, sweetheart, you didn’t wreck the car. It’s in the hospital parking lot. You drove down here in your car, took my rental car down to New York, turned it in, and I came down and got you in your car.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “You were—hurt. In New York.” She saw her sister’s eyes spread in panic. “No, no—you were mugged. Attempted robbery. It’s New York City, remember. It could happen to anyone,” she said soothingly. “But he had a knife, and you were injured. Not badly. Look at your arm. Your left arm.”

  Lesley looked down at the red line of fresh scar tissue on her left forearm. She ran a finger along it and looked up in amazement. “I don’t remember a thing about it.”

  “They told me at the hospital in New York that being mugged is a terrible shock for anyone, but it’s much worse for someone who’s been attacked before. It took a week or so for you to snap out of it. Actually you just blanked out everything leading up to it as well, so it’s more like two weeks that you can’t really remember.”

  “Two weeks? My God. And you’ve been hanging around looking after me all this time? Oh, Jane, I’m sorry to have been such a nuisance.”

  “Don’t even think about it. Being down here hasn’t been all bad.”

  “Then to get back to where we started from, where is here?”

  “What do you mean, can’t remember?” Amos was encircling each leg of the table with corrugated cardboard and tying it firmly in place as he talked.

  “The last thing she remembers is getting out her suitcase to come down here.” Jane handed him the knife to cut the twine.

  “Before throwing her handy complete knife kit in the car?” he said, giving the twine and knife back, and picking up the next piece of cardboard.

  Jane nodded somberly. “I’m afraid so.”

  “Did you tell her?”

  “What she did? Not a chance. I’m leaving that in the hands of the professionals.” She handed the ball of twine over once more.

  “Professionals,” he said flatly. “You know, Jane—I think it’s time you explained your sister to me.” He picked up his coffee cup. “Come on out on the dock.”

  “Explain her?” Jane followed him into the warm sun, and settled herself at the end of the dock with her toes dangling in the water.

  “That’s right. Like—what’s wrong with her. And is she going to try to stab me some day? I can understand why she’s so good with a knife—it runs in the family—but the rest puzzles me. You seem so normal, somehow, in spite of all the crazy things happening around you.”

  “I am normal, and we both had a relatively normal upbringing.” She stopped. “It’s hard to know where to start,” she said, moving her toes in opposing circles in the water and studying the swirling patterns that resulted while she considered the problem. “Okay. I’ll start at the beginning. Lesley and I are full sisters. Our father was this long-haired, good-looking, no-talent folk musician—you know, the sixties, with guitars and flowers and all that sort of thing—that Mum got mixed up with. She claims he married her, but there’s no evidence of it. And, by the way, we were damned lucky. We almost got called Starshine and Moonglow. My grandmother talked Mum out of it. I break into a cold sweat every time I think about the possibility. Another thing is that Mum swears Lesley is Dad’s kid. Something to do with being embarrassed at getting married just before Lesley was born, I think, to someone who wasn’t her baby’s father. But you only have to look at the two of us to realize that Jack Sinclair—my dad—isn’t our father. You’ll see when you meet him and my brother, Jeff.”

  “She’s upset because she isn’t sure who her father is?”

  “Uh huh,” said Jane, with a negative shake to her head. “She knows who her father is. And anyway, that whole thing isn’t what did in Lesley. When she was fourteen she was grabbed by a gang of boys from her school and beaten and raped and dumped by the side of the road, badly injured. I’d left home a couple of months before it happened, and the case was tried in juvenile court, so I never found out the circumstances. I know it happened after school, and I’m pretty sure it happened in a car—because she won’t ride in a car with a man driving. She can’t even take cabs. I suppose someone she knew and trusted offered her a ride home from school. And at least one of the boys must have been old enough to have a license—and maybe old enough to stand trial in adult court. But there wasn’t much of an investigation into it. A couple of fifteen-year-olds got their wrists slapped a
nd all the girls at the high school got lectures on self-defense. A big help. But I’m guessing about most of this,” she repeated. “No one would tell me. They were too upset and ashamed—everyone thought it was partly Lesley’s fault for not being more cautious—and they were still furious at me for leaving home. And Lesley has never been able to talk about it, except, I suppose, to her psychiatrist. Anyway, she seemed to recover and be okay until she left home to go to college, and then she just fell apart. Depressed, terrified of men, thinking she was being followed. That still hits every once in a while, but her psychiatrist thought she had pretty well recovered. God only knows what I’ve done to her by dragging her into this.” Jane stared gloomily into the water.

  “You may not have changed anything at all. After all, this time she wasn’t the helpless victim, was she? Maybe it even helped her.”

  Jane blinked and looked doubtfully at him. “You’re trying to cheer me up, aren’t you?”

  “Of course I am. And to manipulate you and everything else you can think of.” He put an arm around her shoulder and gave it a little squeeze. “Because now that you’re a rich widow, instead of a starving single woman, I think we should get married before some other guy grabs you off. And then I think we should go and find your little girl and introduce ourselves to her—”

  “—introduce ourselves?”

  “You can’t expect a baby to remember someone who hasn’t been around for a while. And then repossess her, so to speak. Gradually.” He smiled lazily. “When can we get your sister,” he added in one of his lightning shifts of tone, “and take her back to your parents?”

  “Tomorrow, unless she gets worse again.”

  “Have you seen the baby?” asked Harriet, once she had poured out coffee and sliced up a Chelsea bun.

  “Yes,” said Jane, suddenly transported to an entirely different word. “Oh, Harriet—she’s beautiful. And very sweet. It took her a little while to get used to us, but she cried when we left this morning,” she added, as if this event over-shadowed everything else that had happened in the past months.

  “How is your mother taking it?”

  “Oh, God,” said Jane with tears starting up in her eyes. “That’s something else. She’s absolutely crushed—”

  “Bullshit,” said Amos, abruptly. “She’s relieved as hell, but wants you to suffer for all those diapers she’s changed, and lies she’s had to tell for you.” He laughed. “She’s also very keen to know about the money. Apparently the cops were around hinting that you were going to inherit big bucks.”

  “Do you really think she won’t mind? Amos seems to be able to read my mother after three days more accurately than I can after twenty-seven years,” she said, turning to Harriet. “But he has an eye for people. And it is obscene how interested everyone is in the money. We’ll have to go see the lawyer tomorrow morning and find out. And Nina, too, I suppose.”

  “Nina?”

  “On her last trip Nina picked up all Guy’s London paintings and mounted a huge show here in town. This morning I was talking to someone who told me that almost everything went in the first few days—at good prices. I know she can be a bitch, but she is a good agent.”

  Harriet smiled noncommittally. Amos stood up, stretched, and wandered out onto the deck.

  “He gets sick of people talking about Guy, I think,” said Jane apologetically. “But I won’t have to, soon. Once I collect that stack of money she’s holding it’ll be over with.”

  “Where did Peter fit into all this?” asked Harriet, glancing out at the deck to make sure that Amos was still outside.

  “Peter? Do you mean Peter Bellingham? Fit into what? All he ever did was leave underwear and wet towels all over the bathroom floor and have hangovers—loud, moaning, irritating hangovers. He didn’t fit into anything.”

  “He told us you were having an affair with him, and that’s why you left Guy.”

  Jane looked at Harriet in astonishment. Her eyes widened and then crinkled into almost nothing and she began to howl with laughter. Free, honest, genuine mirth. “Me? An affair with that pig? Are you kidding? I’d as soon go to bed with a vampire. Or a toad.”

  “So you weren’t—” began Harriet.

  “No. Absolutely and definitely no. I cannot imagine why he would have said that, but I assure you it’ll be for some slimy purpose of his own. Come on, love—time we were moving on,” called Jane, still laughing.

  The door opened with a clatter and John Sanders’s familiar footsteps reverberated up the stairwell. “Are you leaving?” asked Sanders as he walked into the room.

  “Lots of things to do,” said Jane. “And I expect Harriet does as well. So we’re off. Unless there’s something new?”

  “That depends on your definition of new,” said Sanders. “Smithson’s funeral is in forty minutes and they’ve closed the case.”

  “That was quick,” said Harriet.

  “Well—Dean told you that he killed Beaumont, and he had no real alibi for the probable time of the murder, so the official word was that there wasn’t any point in flogging a dead horse, so to speak. It’s been filed.”

  “You disagree?” asked Jane.

  “Not exactly. Let’s just say that there are a hell of a lot of questions dangling out there, but I guess with Smithson dead, we’ll never know the answers anyway.”

  Chapter 15

  Sanders drove to the funeral home at something more than his usual city speed and abandoned the car on a set of diagonal yellow lines in the lot. The chapel was not quite half-filled when he slipped in behind the chief mourners as unobtrusively as possible and positioned himself at the very back. The service was a quasi-religious one, like those weddings where vague spirits of peace and goodwill are called down from some newfound Mount Olympus to speed the bride and groom on their way. It might have been better, thought John, considering what the man had been doing when he died, to omit any discussion of his life and character; as it was, the eulogy was phrased with such excessive delicacy that it suggested that the deity who cared to clasp Dean Smithson to his bosom would be a strange one indeed. He was to be cremated; there would be no sorry procession out to the cemetery to mar the beauty of the June morning. John wasn’t quite sure why he had taken the trouble to come to the service, now that the case was closed, except that he had a feeling of incompleteness, of dissatisfaction over his role. And watching words being spoken over the coffin of the perpetrator hadn’t helped at all. Sanders edged his way out before the ceremony ended, planting himself, from habit, beside a cedar hedge to observe the rest of the mourners. Nina, chalky-faced against the black of her suit, walked down the chapel steps supported by Christopher. John was considering that impassive expression, wondering if it grew from a superhuman strength of will or an unnatural indifference to her firstborn’s fate, when a hand grasped his arm. Turning, he saw that he had been captured by a tiny woman, pale and dark-haired, with black circles under her swollen, reddened eyes. “Are you the police officer in charge of this case?” she asked in a soft voice. “The murder they’re saying Dean committed? Someone told me you were.”

  The coffee shop was almost empty at that time in the morning, and John shepherded his new witness into a booth at the back, ordering as he went by the counter. She cradled a cup of coffee in her hands as though they were so cold that nothing could warm them ever again and stared into the table. Sanders waited for her to gather herself together.

  “Thanks for listening to me,” she said, in a low voice. “I thought I’d say that now, because you might not want to hear what I have to say.” She gave him a very slight, watery smile. “My name is Susan Pappas. I was engaged to Dean—” Her voice broke and she went back to staring at the table. “We were going to get married this summer if we could.”

  “If you could?”

  “Well—Dean worked for his mother and she treated him like a little kid—you know, paid his bills and gave h
im room and board and an allowance. You can’t get married on that and he never had the training to do anything else. She’s filthy rich, but her husband left all his money to her and not a cent to the kids unless she remarried. I wanted him to quit the gallery and just get any kind of job he could and work himself up—I mean, I’ve got a good job and we could have managed—but I guess if you’ve grown up with money it’s hard.” She stopped to catch a breath. “He wanted to start a business of his own. He didn’t have any capital, you see, but he had this thing going that he was really excited about—”

  “Do you know what it was?”

  Susan Pappas frowned at the interruption. “No—he never said. But he was sure he could raise the money if everything went according to plan. It may not have been exactly legit,” she said, “but it didn’t have anything to do with killing that artist.”

  “How do you know?” he asked.

  By this point, tears were streaming down her face, but she simply brushed them aside with an impatient hand. “Because the night that he was killed, Dean was with me. All night. We were at my parents’ cottage on Lake Simcoe. We cooked hamburgers on the barbecue and rented a movie and spent the night together.”

  “Could he have left and come back?”

  She shook her head emphatically. “No. It’s so quiet up there that a car starting sounds like a bomb going off. And Dean had left his car parked right under the bedroom window. He couldn’t have taken it without my hearing it. And that night I didn’t sleep very well. I kept waking up and seeing him there and trying not to disturb him. Because I knew he had to get up very early.”

  She paused, and Sanders composed his features into an expression of relaxed, friendly interest. Under that rapid, jerky delivery he could feel the solid bedrock of hostility. At the moment he was her ally against Nina; if he put one foot wrong, he would lose her. “Why is that?” he murmured at last.