Winter House

by Carol O’Connell

  „Well, they know you. And they’ve known you for a long time.“ Her eyes were asking, accusing and demanding all at once, And how do you explain that?

  Detective Riker liked the kitchen best. Unlike the rest of the house, this room was built to human scale. The low ceiling made it cozy, almost cottagelike. He declined an offer of alcohol but allowed Nedda Winter to make him a glass of iced tea with thanks.

  She selected a lemon from a bowl of fruit. Knife in hand, she stood at the butcher block and smiled at him. It was almost a tease, as if to ask – did he object to her holding this dangerously pointed object?

  Riker’s mouth dipped on one side to say, Yeah, right.

  He made a cursory inventory of the room, his gaze passing over a meat cleaver, then traveling onto a cutlery block of knives. A case bolted to the far wall contained a fire extinguisher and a small ax. With all the lethal weapons in this kitchen arsenal, a pair of scissors had been an odd choice to bring down an intruder tonight.

  Miss Winter made short work of the lemon, cutting a slice and draping it over the edge of a tall glass full of ice cubes. She stood at the table, pouring tea from a pitcher and saying, „Please sit down, Detective. Don’t wait on me.“

  As Riker setded into a chair, the woman pulled a frosty beer from the refrigerator and uncapped it. Now he revised his ideas of society matrons, for Nedda Winter drank straight from the botde, long swigs.

  „Beer,“ she said, pulling up a chair on the other side of the table. „Nothing like it on a warm night. They go together, don’t they?“

  „Yeah.“

  There was no false note in her voice and nothing ingratiating in her manner. He liked her style and her brand of beer. This was one of his people.

  „Of course – “ She paused to study the bottle in her hand, then flashed him a wry smile. „If you do beat a confession out of me, the alcohol might argue for diminished capacity.“

  „I can live with that.“ Riker reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of yellow-lined paper. „We’ve already got this statement you gave to the West Side detectives. But there’s just a few… inconsistencies.“ This word was a cop’s euphemism for lies and more lies. „A few things that need explaining.“ In other words, Try and talk your way out of this if you can.

  Her gray eyebrows were on the rise. They were whimsical things, stray hairs growing this way and that. How old was she? So much hung on the year of Nedda Winter’s birth. The detective searched her face and found wrinkles enough to make her seventy – the right age for a legend – but he could not be certain, not in this world of plastic miracles where women of sixty passed for forty. There was evidence of surgery, anomalies in the planes of her cheeks and forehead, as if she had been badly broken long ago and put back together. She withstood this intense scrutiny with smiling pale blue eyes. Their directness appealed to him and also put him on his guard. She was looking past his smile.

  There was still some doubt about her identity. Or maybe he could simply not believe his own luck to find her in this house tonight. Blunt questions were not an option, not yet, and so he must go slowly with this woman. Intelligence lived in those quick blue eyes that missed nothing. As he took her measure, she measured him.

  „So why are all of these people still in my house?“ She set her beer bottle to one side. „The truth.“

  Riker settled on a half-truth. „They’re trying to reconstruct what happened here.“

  „I told them what happened – several times.“

  „Like I said, Miss Winter, there ‘re a few glitches in your statement. And then there’s the problem of the ice pick.“

  Charles Butler followed Mallory into the front room, where the tall mirrors created an unsettling carnival effect. It was impossible to look anywhere without encountering one’s own reflection repeating two and three times.

  Yet Mallory managed it.

  He watched reflected copies of her negotiating the ocular maze with downcast eyes. Actually, this was a familiar phenomenon. She had always avoided every looking glass, even shunning reflections in shop windows. He once had a theory to fit her early history as a homeless child: she might see something ugly or worthless when she met herself in mirrors; self-esteem issues were the sad baggage of that background. However, he had retired this idea for another one that was truly eerie and almost akin to vampirism. She raised her eyes now, and there was no way she could fail to see her own reflection walking toward her from three directions. Yet, she lacked the instant catch-eyes response of every normal person. She appeared to see nothing at all, no recognizable form or proof of her own existence, and she moved on without pause.

  What a bundle of contradictions was this stunning young woman who could not enter any room unnoticed – invisible Mallory.

  He climbed the spiral staircase, following her black running shoes, Italian leather imports that might cost a week’s pay for the other civil servants in this house. He sometimes wondered if she did not delight in raising rumors that she might have an illegal source of income.

  And, of course, this was true. She was his business partner. They were headhunters.

  Halfway up the stairs, Charles discovered a design flaw. Because of the cathedral ceiling, this march of steps to the second floor was the length of more than two flights. The house had been made for appearances only and with no consideration for inhabitants of Nedda Winter’s age. Did that name sound more familiar to him now? He was distracted by Mallory as she explained that there were not enough ice picks in the house.

  But there had been an ice pick lying on the floor by the dead man. Surely the one was sufficient.

  Enigma, thy name is Mallory.

  And sometimes he wondered if she simply enjoyed sharpening her claws on his brain. He looked over the railing and down at the lavishly stocked wet bar by the foot of the stairs – and the silver ice bucket, which would so nicely complement the burglar’s expensive ice pick. He could not recall when he had last found a use for his own pick. Regrettably, the day of the old-fashioned ice block delivered by horse-drawn cart was long gone. Perhaps Miss Winter, like himself, had inherited one with the family silver.

  „Well,“ he began, picking his words more carefully this time, „I’m guessing – not assuming, mind you – that the ice pick near the body doesn’t belong to the burglar.“ So far, if he interpreted her silence correctly, he was on safe ground. „I suppose the man found the pick after he broke into the house?“

  „Looks that way, doesn’t it?“ she said.

  And so, of course, his theory must be dead wrong. All right, the bedrock of logic was a bit shaky here. Mallory had already conceded self-defense, so either the pick belonged to the burglar or the man had found it in the house. One of these two things must be true – or not.

  He sighed.

  Mallory paused on the stairs and turned to face him. „The dead man wasn’t a burglar. He was a serial killer out on bail. I’m the one who arrested him. He always used a hunting knife. I found one strapped to his leg. He never had a chance to pull it out before one of those women stabbed him. There’s only one line in her statement that rings true. She said it was done in the dark. Now that part’s true. If the lights had been on, she’d never have gotten close enough to kill him.“

  „This serial killer was out on bail?“ Dangerous, but he had to ask. „How is that possible?“

  „Bad judge, good lawyer.“ Mallory glanced over the railing, looking down at the front room below and the dead man at its center. „So that ice pick was out of character for him – and one weapon too many.“ She resumed her climb.

  „Well,“ said Charles to Mallory’s back, „given his history with women, the very fact that he broke in with a knife strapped to his leg, that should be enough to – “

  She paused on the second-floor landing to stare at him in a way that asked whose side he was on. „Neither one of those women knew he had a knife.“ Mallory turned her back on him and approached a door to the right of the stairs.
„Odds are, they still don’t know.“ She rested one hand on the knob. „When Riker and I showed up, the West Side cops were still trying to get Bitty Smyth to unlock this bedroom door. I had better luck.“

  Charles was not certain that he wanted more detail on this.

  „I told her to open up or I’d shoot off the lock. That’s when Bitty decided to come out.“ Mallory opened the door and waved him into the darkness ahead of her, saying behind his back, „And this is what she didn’t want the cops to see.“

  What a flair she had for drama.

  The lights switched on, and, in the sudden bright light, Charles faced a wall lined with scores of photographs and saw his own face looking back at him from the picture frames.

  His eyes gravitated first to a shot taken when he was a child of ten. The backdrop was a birthday party in Gramercy Park. A neighboring frame held a small portrait with the gray grain of newsprint and a companion article about the youngest student ever to matriculate at Harvard University. Next was a picture of a child in cap and gown, inches taller than his graduating class of young adults. In successive photographs, he passed through puberty, collected more academic credentials and entered a prestigious corporate think tank. The caption of an old photo cut from Fortune had him escaping the corporation to strike out on his own. And the rest were a collection of society-page shots from weddings and funerals.

  The most recent picture of the lot was a candid photograph taken on the streets of SoHo. This one was framed in silver on the table beside Bitty’s bed.

  „So you have a stalker.“ Mallory turned to the bureau and picked up a stack of three diaries, each with a flimsy lock that had been opened. „Take a look at these. I need to know if she’s dangerous.“

  „You’re joking.“

  Her chin jutted forward, and an angry line appeared between her eyes, an unsubtle reminder that she had no sense of humor. Mallory held out the journals.

  Charles recoiled as if she were offering something unclean. „This can’t be right, reading her personal – “

  „This is a crime scene, Charles. I don’t need a warrant.“ And her subtext was unmistakable: she was the law; friend and business partner aside, he should not push his luck with her tonight.

  A third voice chimed in to say, „What?“

  They looked over to the far corner of the room to see a bird emerge from a large cage on the floor. It was smaller than a parrot but somewhat larger than a parakeet. A comb of yellow feathers unfurled at the top of its head in a gesture of surprise.

  „It’s a cockatiel,“ said Charles.

  Mallory looked down at the bird, clearly regarding it as something that she planned to wipe off the sole of her shoe. Charles sensed that this was not their first meeting. The tiny creature was too quick to pick up on her hostility. It opened its beak wide, but not to scream. The posture reminded Charles of a baby bird begging for worms, or, in this instance, begging for its life. The cockatiel flattened its comb of yellow feathers and, head ducked low to floor, retreated behind the fringe of the bedspread.

  Charles, however, had nowhere to hide. He stared at the journals as Mallory pressed them into his hands. He shook his head. „Bitty Smyth impressed me as a very fragile personality. Reading her diaries would be rather like an assault.“

  „Read fast and she’ll never know.“ Mallory turned away from him to rifle the contents of the closet shelves.

  He sat down on the unmade bed as he took in all the items of the room. Bitty’s interests were not limited to himself. His photographs shared a bit of wall space with the Virgin Mary, and small statues of saints decorated her dresser alongside lipstick tubes and other toilet articles. There was also a collection of equestrian figurines from a young girl’s horse-crazy stage of life, and stuffed bears abounded here. Apart from the religious themes, the underlying decor was that of a teenage girl, who was approximately forty years old.

  He opened the earliest of the diaries and read it as fast as he could turn pages. Even given his skill as a speed reader, this was a waste of time. All the famed diarists in history had written with posterity and an audience in mind, and so did damn near everyone else on the planet. Consequendy, the entries were usually absent anything as embarrassing as truth. In a matter of minutes, he was reading the final page of handwriting, small and neat, and not one line to support the idea of Bitty Smyth as an obsessive stalker. „I’m not in any of these diaries,“ he said. „Satisfied?“

  „No.“ Mallory stood before the open closet, holding a sheaf of papers bound in clear plastic. „This is a Ph.D. dissertation – yours. Think she read it?“ Mallory held up a worn sock with a hole in it. „Or did she just want another souvenir like this one?“ She tossed the sock into his lap. „Your size, I think.“

  Charles shrugged this off. „Bitty moved on to another obsession two years ago.“ He stacked the diaries on the bedside table. „All she wrote about were her religious retreats on the weekends.“

  His Ph.D. dissertation flew across the room to join the holey sock in his lap, and he looked down at the cover sheet of this paper authored before he was out of his teens. The subject was prodigies, his own peer group. Charles rose from the bed, drawn to the wall of framed pictures and another sort of peer group – children ganged by age and social strata. „This one,“ he said, staring at the group photograph taken at his tenth birthday party. „This is the connection between Bitty and me.“

  Mallory crossed the room to stand beside him as he pointed to the smirking face of one child in the crowd.

  „That boy is Paul Smyth. Must be a relative. I don’t remember meeting Bitty Smyth as a child, but I suppose she could have been at this party. Though… I don’t see her in the picture. Odd. She has the kind of face that never changes – gamine, all eyes. Maybe she was the one with the camera. The shot angles upward, a child’s point of view – a child smaller than the others.“

  Mallory stepped closer to the photograph. „There must’ve been fifty kids at that party.“

  „At least,“ said Charles.

  „So you don’t remember Bitty – very distinctive face – but you remember Paul Smyth, the ordinary-looking kid. He was a friend of yours?“

  „Hardly.“ All of his childhood friends had been adults. „I didn’t even know most of these children.“ This had been a family experiment in social interaction with youngsters of normal intelligence. All such experiments had ended in disaster. Children were so good at sussing out and torturing the alien in their midst, the child with the freakish large brain. „But I knew Paul Smyth too well. He called me Froggy all morning.“

  Of course Mallory would not ask why. So obvious. His bulging eyes did call to mind a bullfrog.

  „Froggy – only nickname I ever had. So that was memorable. It caught on with all the other children that day, and that’s what he wanted. He was setting me up. I figured that out when it came time to open my presents.“

  „He gave you a frog?“

  „A big one.“ The huge frog had leapt from the open gift box, initiating a scream from one of the mothers. For six seconds, that amphibian had been the only pet that Charles had ever owned. But then, of course, the other children had converged upon the creature and slaughtered it – slowly – smashing it out of existence under sandals and sneakers and patent-leather shoes. The frog-stomping had been the highlight of his birthday party, for normally the children were not encouraged to kill living things. Later in the day, they had turned their sights on him – froggy number two.

  „All right – back to Bitty.“ Mallory picked up the stack of diaries. „She’s a religious fanatic. I think I guessed that. What else can you tell me?“

  Charles absendy stared at the stuffed toys on the bed. The teddy bears were quite old. A child – Bitty, no doubt – had loved the small leather noses off their faces, rubbed them all away with kisses. And then there was the little bird hiding beneath the bed, a metaphor for its mistress who shared the trait of extreme timidity. „I can’t believe this woman could kill
anyone.“

  „Bitty? Of course not,“ said Mallory, oh so casually. „It was the old woman who did the stabbing. Nedda Winter confessed to the first cop on the scene.“

  Charles turned his eyes heavenward. He was not praying. „Then why – “ He paused a moment to dial back the frustration. „Why did you put me through this? Invading this woman’s – “

  „Because she’s a stalker.“

  „No, Mallory, that’s not quite it. Try again.“

  „I want you to talk to Bitty Smyth. You said you didn’t know her.“ Mallory stacked the journals on a closet shelf. „Well, now you do.“

  He shook his head, but denial was futile. „You set me up!“

  She raised one eyebrow in a silent acknowledgment of Yeah? So?

  „You seriously expect me to make use of this woman’s personal diaries to interrogate her?“

  „She won’t talk to cops. She just throws out quotations from the Bible.“

  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death? Given Mallory’s effect on the woman, that might be -

  „It’s like biblical Tourette’s,“ said Mallory. „So just go down there and talk to her. Get her to open up.“

  „I have no intention of – “

  „You do it, or I do it.“

  Her tone implied a threat. No – cancel that – it was a solid promise to do some damage to that fragile little woman downstairs. Bitty Smyth was most likely in shock, and Mallory would be best described as sociopathic on a good day – not that he adored her less for that. And, even understanding that emotional blackmail was Mallory’s idea of sport, he said, „All right.“

  When the door had closed on the detective, a small voice from the darkness beneath the bed said, „What?“

  Charles looked down to see the bird emerge from its hiding place. It limped badly on one leg and could not travel in a straight line, but veered in curving paths and circles. One of its wings was missing a full complement of flight feathers, and the raggedy tail feathers dragging along behind the creature were more proof of a walking bird, hence the cage on the floor to accommodate the handicap of being earthbound.