by Jane Haddam
“But as far as we know,” Jason Battlesea said, “Kyle Westervan wasn’t involved in those robberies.”
“As far as we know,” Gregor agreed. “But as far as we know doesn’t go all that far, does it? So maybe Kyle Westervan was involved. Or maybe Caroline Holder is looking for revenge, and she intends to get every member of her sister’s little clique—”
“Now you’re in psychopath territory,” Andy said.
“I know,” Gregor said.
“We don’t know anything,” Jason Battlesea said. “I could have killed them.”
“No,” Gregor said. “I don’t think you could have. The angle of the wound in Chapin Waring’s body is wrong. She was killed by somebody taller than she was, I think, but not so much taller as you.”
“I’m not that tall.”
“Chapin Waring was very short,” Gregor said.
“I think I’m where I need to be,” Andy said suddenly. “I think I can go back to New York and tell them it’s not likely that this has anything to do with us. I do need you to keep us informed, just in case—”
“We will,” Gregor said. “But I don’t think it’s going to be much longer now. I think we’ll probably have a definitive answer for you in the next day or two, if not sooner.”
Andy looked curious. “Do you mean you think you know who killed these people?”
“I do think so,” Gregor said. “At least, I’ve got an explanation that I think is the only one that’s likely to fit.”
“Are you always this fast?” Andy asked.
“I haven’t been all that fast,” Gregor said. “I’ve been here for days, and I’ve been looking at the case files for longer than that. It took me a while to get past the miasma thrown up by that robbery case, in spite of the fact that I knew that wasn’t where I should be focusing my attention. But I got there, eventually.”
“Got where?” Jason Battlesea demanded.
“I’m going to go,” Andy said. “Thank you both for all your help. I’ll have someone call in and give you our fax numbers and you can send the final autopsy report when it’s ready. Happy Fourth of July.”
“Damned idiot,” Jason Battlesea said.
Andy walked out the door as if he hadn’t heard.
3
The door had barely closed behind the retreating FBI agent when Jason Battlesea turned on Gregor Demarkian.
“You can’t do this,” he protested. “You can’t. You’re here as a consultant. The point is to consult. You’re supposed to let us know what’s going on.”
“I am letting you know what’s going on,” Gregor said. “I tried to explain it to you before you went rushing off to the parade.”
“You tried to show me pictures of the robberies.”
“I did,” Gregor said. “Security footage from two of the robberies. In both of which, Chapin Waring’s accomplice, who was almost certainly Martin Veer, was dressed up in stretchy clothes and then padded out in a way that made him move awkwardly and that entirely distorted his body type.”
“Yeah, he had a better disguise than she did,” Jason Battlesea said. “So what?”
“He wasn’t wearing a disguise,” Gregor said. “He was wearing a costume, and that’s the point. Chapin Waring wasn’t murdered because of the robberies. She was murdered over a crime that was committed thirty years ago, but not that crime. The key to this is the fact that the robberies weren’t the only crime, and Chapin Waring and Marty Veer weren’t the only criminals.”
Gregor packed up his attaché case and put it under his arm.
“Let’s go,” he said. “We’ve got people we need to talk to. And get Mike Held and Jack Mann. This is supposed to be their case.”
SIX
1
Evaline Veer felt awful, and the only thing that made her feel even a little bit better was that Virginia Brand Westervan looked even more awful still. It had been an awful morning for the both of them. Evaline was not so obtuse as not to realize that Virginia had never really stopped loving Kyle, even if she’d stopped being able to live with him. Kyle and Virginia were, after all, the only two of that group who had stayed together many long years after the Waring case, and they were the two Evaline had never suspected of lying to her. She had even suspected Tim of lying to her. When Tim was younger, he lied as naturally as other people breathed. When he got older and got religion, he lied to save other people from hurt feelings—some of the time. It was always hard for Evaline to tell when he was trying to be good to her and when he was letting her know what was on his mind.
Evaline had expected to see Tim somewhere here at this largest of the official picnics, but he was nowhere to be found. She didn’t know why she so desperately wanted to see Tim. She just knew that the sight of him would have been reassuring.
Virginia was over at the bandstand, talking to constituents and signing autographs.
Evaline tried to wave discreetly when Virginia looked in her direction, but of course it was useless. Evaline was so short, and almost everybody else was taller. Even some of the Girl Scouts were taller.
Evaline finally managed to catch Virginia’s eye. When she was sure Virginia understood, she started drifting away toward the edges of the crowd. She ran into a few people who wanted to shake her hand and congratulate her on her speech. She avoided another—a man named Michael Kerr—who would certainly want to tell her what was wrong with it. She got all the way to the west end food tables, picked up a corn on the cob and put it on a plate, and waited.
It took Virginia a little time, but she got there.
“I’m exhausted,” she said, picking up corn on the cob herself. “I didn’t get any sleep last night, which I suppose was inevitable, but it hasn’t been much good this morning. I keep waiting for the thing to explode.”
“For what to explode?” Evaline asked.
Virginia shrugged. When she shrugged, it was a monumental event. She was, after all, nearly six feet tall. She got a skewer of peppers and chicken and said, “It’s the usual thing to suspect the wife, or the ex-wife, first. And here I am. The ex-wife.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Evaline said, a little shocked. “You can’t really think they’re going to do that. You wouldn’t have killed Kyle. And you couldn’t have. You were doing that thing at the hospital and then you were doing campaign things.”
“Even if it’s true that my alibi is absolutely ironclad, it won’t matter. Do you remember the Chandra Levy thing? Do you honestly think anybody cared whether that congressman was actually guilty or not? Of course not. It was a much better story to hammer it home as ‘Representative Implicated in Intern’s Murder.’”
“Maybe Mr. Demarkian will find the murderer today,” Evaline said, “and the police will arrest somebody. And you’ll be out of it.”
“I don’t know if I would actually be out of it, even then,” Virginia said. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt. And then, you know, it’s Kyle. We were married. We got along, more or less, even after we weren’t married anymore. We saw each other several times a year. There was no harm in him at all, you know. He was a thoroughly nice man. He was nicer than I am. That’s why we could never stay married.”
“I’d think it would be easier if he was a very nice man,” Evaline said. “But then, I’ve never been married. So I don’t know.”
“I think it’s odd how many women I know in my generation who never married,” Virginia said. “And yes, I’m including you loosely, even if you are a bit younger. And it’s not just women. Tim never married either.”
“I suppose Chapin never married,” Evaline said. “Although I don’t really know that. Aren’t a lot of them married, the ones who disappear for a long time? There was that woman who had something to do with a revolutionary group, or something.”
“There was nothing revolutionary about Chapin Waring,” Virginia said. “When we were in high school, and even when we were in our first year of college, we all thought she was a force of nature. But she wasn’t, really. She was just a mildly
charismatic teenager with very little impulse control and a wild streak a mile wide. And she was a lightweight. If she hadn’t committed those robberies, she would have flunked out of college in her junior year, married some stockbroker, and gone crazy about exercise so she wouldn’t get fat.”
“Maybe,” Evaline said. She felt a little uncomfortable. Other people were coming up to the buffet table now. Evaline began to drift a little toward a line of benches near the swing sets, hoping Virginia would go with her.
“I always blamed Chapin for Marty’s dying,” Evaline said. “I blamed all of you, really. Not for all of it. Not for the robberies. I assumed that you all had to know about it and you all had to have participated in it. And then later I thought that that couldn’t have been right.”
“I wouldn’t worry yourself about it,” Virginia said. “You weren’t the only person who thought we must all have known. The FBI probably still thinks we must all have known.”
“But I did blame you all for the accident,” Evaline said. “I know it was Marty himself driving, and I know he was drunk, but you must have known he was drunk, too. And nobody tried to stop him.”
“It wasn’t the kind of thing you did in those days,” Virginia said. “And he was drunk, yes, but he wasn’t sloppy, falling-down drunk. It was a very odd night. Tense. One of those times when there’s obviously going to be a fight somewhere but you’re not sure about what yet and you’re not sure who’s going to be in it.”
“He must have been upset because of those two people dying,” Evaline said. “I’ve never been able to get my head around that, you know. That he was partially responsible for the murders of two people who hadn’t done anything but be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I blame Chapin for that. I know he wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been in him. I know it had to be partially his fault. But that’s the way things are, isn’t it? You have the potential to do harm, but if you’re never put into the right circumstance, you don’t do it.”
“Marty’s been dead a long time,” Virginia said.
“Would it be wrong to say I want Marty back?”
“It wouldn’t be wrong to say it, but I don’t see where it would do much good,” Virginia said. “Chapin’s dead, too, now. I’m sure that the families of the people they killed still find it impossible to accept, and they should. But it’s over, Evaline. It was over the moment Chapin hit the floor.”
Evaline shook her head. “I spent all night thinking about it. It can’t be over. If it was, Kyle wouldn’t be dead.”
“It depends on why Kyle is dead,” Virginia said.
Evaline looked away. She had had a reason for coming to see Virginia. She had had something she wanted to say, or something she wanted to learn. Now she couldn’t remember what it was she had wanted, and she could feel Virginia looking at her with both puzzlement and interest. It wasn’t a good feeling.
“I need to go somewhere and behave like the mayor,” she said. “Maybe I should set a good example and pick up trash.”
“Evaline, is there something going on here? Is there something I should know about? Because you’re behaving—”
“I’m behaving like myself,” Evaline said. “I was like this after Marty died, only I was worse. I’m a little upset, that’s all.”
“I’m a little upset,” Virginia said. “I was married to him.”
“Yes,” Evaline said. There was a piece of trash on the ground right in front of her. Somebody had dropped a wrapper from a Fudgsicle and just let it lie. Evaline picked it up and folded it in her hands. “I just don’t think it’s over,” she said finally. “I don’t think it will ever be over. I think it will be part of all of us always. If it isn’t, then it would be as if it had never happened at all. It would be as if Marty had never been alive at all.”
2
At first, Hope Matlock wasn’t entirely sure of what she was doing. She had walked a long way this morning to get to where the people were. She had started out from her own house at just after six. Then she had walked and walked through streets that were already cleared for the parade and other streets that were empty of everything but parked cars. Her feet hurt before she’d gone three full blocks. The rest of her hurt soon after, and still hurt. She was so heavy these days that she found it hard to move under the best of circumstances. Having to stop and go and turn and twist every few seconds made her feel as if she’d been run over by a truck.
She walked all the way out to Beach Drive. She felt winded the way she had when she was a child and fell off the low slides at Waldham Park.
“Got the breath knocked out of you,” her mother used to say, making it sound like something so vilely stupid that no decent person would admit to it.
After a while, she had hated those slides so much, she refused to go on them.
“That’s why you’re always too fat,” her mother had said. “And you’re going to be as fat as a pig when you get older. You don’t take any exercise. Decent people take exercise.”
But it wasn’t true she had been fat then. She had been a little chunky. She couldn’t help that. That was her genes. Her mother was a little chunky, too, and her father was downright squat.
The day was hot. Hope found a place on the parade route where there was a bench she could sit on. She thought she should have brought a folding chair, but she was pretty sure she would not have been able to carry it all that distance. She sat down and folded her hands in her lap and looked into the empty road.
When she was younger, she used to come down here with Chapin and Virginia and Marty and Tim and Kyle. They would use Chapin’s house, or Tim and Virginia’s, and sit at the end of the driveway to watch the parade come by. The smaller children would stay on the lawn and come to the edge of the driveway only when there was something to see. You always had to worry about them darting out into traffic. On the last Fourth of July before everything fell apart …
But no, Hope didn’t remember that. Everything fell apart in June that year, she was sure of it. The robberies. The accident. Marty’s funeral out at the New Hope Cemetery where the reporters all wanted to take pictures of Chapin instead of Marty’s parents. She could remember standing at the edge of the grave with that big hole dug into the ground and somebody droning on and on about an eternal life nobody really believed in. She had a bandaged arm. She had bruises all over her face. She looked a mess, and her mother told her so, even as she was making everything ready for a decent funeral appearance.
“You don’t see Chapin all battered up like that,” her mother had said. “You don’t see Virginia all battered up, either.”
“They were in the backseat,” Hope had said.
This was true. Virginia and Tim and Chapin were in the backseat. Marty and Kyle and Hope herself were in the front. It was an old car, which her mother called “vintage,” because she didn’t want to admit that Marty could barely afford anything else. There was a long front seat without any buckets. None of them ever wore seat belts.
“I don’t care where you were,” her mother had said. “What will the Warings think of us?”
It was years before Hope understood how odd that sentence had been—how odd it was for everybody to worry about the Warings, and the Brands, but not about the Veers, who had lost a child. She remembered Evaline at the funeral, standing close to the casket with a furious, mulish scowl on her face, not looking at anybody. It was years afterwards before Evaline would talk to any of the people who had been her brother’s friends. The first person she talked to was Hope—because, she said, Hope was the only one of them who had ever cared if Marty lived or died.
The parade was over, and Hope didn’t remember any of it. She didn’t remember the marching bands. She hadn’t even heard them. She didn’t remember the floats or the Girl Scouts or anything else. The road all around her was nearly devoid of people. Everyone was going on to one of the picnics. Or maybe it was earlier than that. Maybe the speeches were still going on at the War Memorial.
She waited for a while and
then stood up. She had to. She couldn’t sit all day on this bench, with nobody else around. She started up Beach Drive and back toward town. It was very hot, and she felt very dizzy.
If she was honest with herself, she had to admit that everything had started to fall apart long before Marty died, and long before the robberies became a public issue. Only Chapin looked as if she didn’t care one way or the other.
Hope looked around. She had reached a street she didn’t recognize. It was a “nice” street, with houses set back from the sidewalks. The houses were smaller than the ones on Beach Drive, but most houses anywhere were smaller than those. The houses were also newer than the ones in Hope’s own part of town, but that wasn’t strange either. The houses in Hope’s part of town were some of the oldest ever built on the Continent.
Hope wished she knew more or less where she was. There had been so much construction in Alwych in these last thirty years. The lots were smaller and the houses were bigger, and the houses were full of people nobody had ever known.
It was so hot, the air felt thick and patterned. It would be better if there were a bench somewhere along here, but Alwych didn’t have benches except in the middle of town. Why had she come out here to begin with? She wasn’t sure.
It was really very hot. It was very, very hot. Hope’s head hurt, but it felt as if it were floating about her neck, way into the stratosphere, so that it had nothing to do with her. She was nauseated, but the nausea was halfway up her chest, not in her stomach. She needed to stop moving and sit down. If she didn’t do that, she was going to fall down. She felt enormously stupid. She hadn’t had to walk all the way to Beach Drive. She could have walked to the train station. The War Memorial was only a little ways from there. She could have stayed home. That would have been an even better idea.
Hope stopped still and closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She was swaying. She could feel it. She didn’t know what would happen if she fell down. She didn’t know if anybody in any of these houses was at home. She had her cell phone, but she wasn’t sure if it was working or not.