Winter House

by Carol O’Connell

  „Last night,“ she said, „it would’ve been suspicious if you knew who Nedda was.“

  „She’s right,“ said a voice behind him.

  Charles turned to see Riker walking across the library, a cup of coffee in hand and probably wondering when the rest of his breakfast would be ready. The detective lacked the patience for homemade croissants.

  „Don’t feel bad,“ said Riker. „After fifty-eight years, only a cop would’ve made the connection to Nedda Winter – and not just any cop. It even took me awhile, and I was raised on that story. The only name most people knew her by was Red Winter.“

  Mrs. Ortega’s vacuum cleaner preceded her into the library, and all conversation stopped. The wiry little woman with dark Spanish eyes and a Brooklyn accent said, „Pick up your damn feet,“ as she moved the sucking nozzle perilously close to Riker’s scruffy shoes. She switched the machine off just long enough to curl her lip while passing judgment on his suit. After pulling a wad of paper slips from her apron, she stuffed them into the man’s breast pocket. „Those are dry-cleaning coupons. You know what you have to do.“ And now the vacuum powered up to move back and forth across the rug.

  Charles handed the book to Riker and raised his voice to be heard over the noise. „Here, a gift. Might be rather dry reading. This author is known for that.“

  „I read it,“ said Riker.

  „You what?“ The vacuum cleaner switched off, and Mrs. Ortega observed a moment of silent disbelief. Previously, this detective had only admitted to reading the sports pages. And never mind the book’s cover art. Lurid drop of painted blood aside, this was a thick book. She steered the vacuum cleaner out of the room with mutterings of damn miracles.

  As an apology for literacy, Riker shrugged and said, „I had to read it. The massacre was my bedtime story when I was a kid.“ He hefted the book in one hand. „But this wouldn’t have helped you last night. The guy who wrote it never mentioned Nedda’s real name. He only calls her Red Winter.

  So much for historians, huh?“ He opened the volume to the title page. „My copy’s autographed.“

  When they were all seated around the table in Charles’s kitchen, the batch of oven-warm croissants quickly disappeared. The detectives had not paused to savor the buttery flakes; they had inhaled them with their coffee, then made short work of the crepes. Now and then, one of them would stop feeding to extract information from him, rather than relying on his recollection of events. Perhaps he was inclined to be too wordy, possibly trying their short – „At the time of the murders,“ said Mallory, keeper of the body count, „there were nine children and four adults living in Winter House.“

  „And four children survived the massacre.“ Charles used a napkin to mark the book page that would allow him to recite their names in birth order.

  „But there ‘re only three left,“ said Mallory. „You didn’t buy the story of Sally Winter as a runaway?“

  „I didn’t say that. I said it didn’t quite ring true in all the details. Lionel had an odd reaction that I couldn’t put down to – Oh, how should I put this?“

  „Put it briefly,“ said Riker. „If you weren’t such a good cook, Mallory would’ve shot you twenty minutes ago.“

  She nodded, as if in agreement, while reading the marked passage on the youngest Winter child. „This author follows Cleo and Lionel from grammar school through the college years. He’s got dates of enrollments and graduations. But all he’s got on Sally is her date of birth.“ She looked up at Charles. „Could be another homicide. Did you question them about it?“

  „Well… no. After Bitty’s little exhibition on the staircase, the rest of them were sliding into shock. It would have been rude to ask if they’d murdered Baby Sally.“

  By the rapid clicking of Mallory’s pen, he deduced that a simple no would have sufficed.

  „Good for Bitty,“ said Riker, who was apparendy allowed to make extraneous remarks between forkfuls of strawberry crepes. „I never thought she had it in her.“

  „She had to get drunk to do it,“ said Charles. „She’s a passive-aggressive personality. It was wildly out of character to – “

  „How aggressive?“ Mallory leaned forward, liking this detail.

  „Oh, not in the physical sense. She’ll take a sniper shot from the woods, but it’s strictly verbal. I think Nedda was being truthful when she confessed to killing that burglar the other night. Bitty simply could not have done that.“

  „I never thought she did,“ said Mallory, and her tone was a rather pointed reminder that she had said as much the other night and disliked repeating herself. „Bitty’s a mouse.“

  Riker was more charitable. „But last night she nailed her whole family.“

  „I’m guessing that was a tactic to get attention,“ said Charles. „Bitty’s emotional maturity is a bit stunted.“

  „What gave her away?“ asked Riker. „Was it the prom dress or the teddy bears in her room?“

  Charles ducked this sarcasm by filling his mouth with food. Last night, the significance of Bitty’s outlandish makeup and dinner dress had nearly escaped him. At first, he had believed that her mother must have engineered that fashion travesty. Later, he had realized his error. Cleo Winter-Smyth would never have taken that much interest in her daughter. The mother had simply neglected to save her child from ridicule. The absence of parental bonding would explain a great deal. And now he quietly cleaned his plate, having learned not to volunteer any more elaborate explanations.

  Riker wore a satisfied smile as he laid his napkin to one side. „So it’s a dysfunctional family.“

  „A bit more bizarre than that,“ said Charles, filling Riker’s coffee cup and instantly forgetting all his lessons in brevity. „There’s no real family dynamic. They’re like islands, all of them. I had the distinct feeling that Sheldon Smyth was only going through the motions of playing a father to Bitty. Same thing with Cleo and Lionel. Correct responses without any matching nuances in tone or expression.“

  „I got it,“ said Riker. „Like a pack of aliens imitating a human family?“

  „Exactly. It suggests – “

  „You haven’t mentioned Nedda yet.“ Mallory tapped her pen on the table. „How did she fit in?“

  „She didn’t. I’d say she was more of a watcher on the sidelines. Though I did see genuine affection for Bitty. And there was a bit of tension with her sister and brother. Nedda never exhibited any aberrant behavior-if that’s what you’re asking.“

  „But she’s been away for a long time,“ said Riker. „We think she’s been institutionalized.“

  „Well, I could be wrong,“ said Charles, „but in a case like that, you’d expect to see more signs of – “

  „Vm positive“ said Mallory, „and I know it wasn’t prison. We ran her prints. No criminal record.“

  Charles pushed back from the table. „So you think she’s been in an asylum all these years? Well then – that dinner party should’ve made her feel quite at home. But she was the normal one at the table. And quite charming.“

  He could see that Riker was also rejecting Mallory’s idea of Nedda as a certified lunatic with a bloody past. This detective was Charles’s only ally in the theory of an innocent runaway child. The man seemed very much on Nedda’s side, wanting to believe in her.

  However, when the subject turned to an old deck of tarot cards produced at the dinner table last night, a deck belonging to Nedda Winter, the light in Riker’s eyes simply died.

  A light breakfast had revitalized Bitty Smyth, and now she climbed toward the top of the house, almost cheerful as she led the expedition to the attic.

  Following close behind her niece, Nedda Winter pressed close to the banister to avoid treading upon the corpses of her stepmother and her father. On the third floor, they passed the door to Henry’s room, where the budding artist, four years of age, lay dead among his sticks of chalk and pencils and drawing papers. Her little brother Wendell, only seven when he died, lay on the floor of the next room
.

  Upward they climbed, passing a hall closet where her nine-year-old sister, Erica, huddled in terror and absolute darkness, listening for the footsteps of a monster and hoping that death would pass her by. Nedda trod quietly past this door and fancied that she could hear the beat of a child’s wild heart.

  I’m so sorry.

  The staircase narrowed as they approached the last landing below the attic. Here she skirted a small corpse on the stairs. Mary had escaped the nursery in a two-year-old’s version of mad flight, and she had died in a toddle down the steps.

  The dead were invisible to Bitty, who resided solidly in the present. Nedda lived much of her life in the past, where the nanny on the hallway carpet was more recently deceased, the flesh still warm, and the bit of blood on her breast had not yet dried. Nedda looked down at the face of this teenager, Gwen Rawly, who had previously believed that she was immortal. The girl’s lips were parted, as if to ask Why? Beyond the young nanny’s body was the door of the nursery.

  It was closed in the current century.

  Bitty and Nedda paused beneath the great glass dome that crowned the fourth floor and divided the two attics. Here the stairs were split like a forked tongue. The steps curving to their right led to the north attic used for storage. Bitty climbed toward the south attic, a repository for personal effects of the dead. This was a family custom begun in the eighteen hundreds.

  Following her niece, Nedda entered the narrow room of slanting rafters and the old familiar smells of rotting history and dust. It was illuminated by a row of small gabled windows, and appeared to be unchanged. Early memories were clear pictures in her mind, all that she had had to feed upon for so many years.

  She looked at the trunks stacked in rows and representing generations of her forebearers. The contents were the odds and ends of life on earth. Her eyes gravitated to her mother’s trunk. As a child, she had spent many hours counting up the dresses, lace handkerchiefs, hairpins and such, souvenirs of a woman who had loved her, a woman who had died when Nedda was too young to memorize her living face. This morning, she passed it by, following her niece between the rows of the murdered Winters, adults and children.

  „You know what this place reminds me of?“ Bitty reached up to pull on strings that switched on the overhead bulbs as she walked the length of the attic. „Early Christian catacombs, corpses stacked up like cordwood. Of course, there are no actual bodies.“

  All the brass plates on this row of trunks had been polished by a ringer through the dust, the better to make out the letters etched in old-fashioned script. Nedda knelt on the floor to read the names.

  Bitty squatted down beside her. „I couldn’t find a trunk for Baby Sally. It’s not in the north attic or the basement.“ She looked up at her aunt. „Sally had a trunk of her own, didn’t she?“

  „Yes, dear, we all did. I remember Sally’s trunk was at the foot of her crib.“

  There had been no family conversation on this subject, no catching up on one more death in the family. She had asked no questions of Lionel and Cleo, not wanting to open the door to any more sorrows. And she had thought it unnecessary. An early demise had been foretold for the baby on the day she was born. Her heart ailment had been some grave defect in the bloodline of Quentin Winter’s second wife, Alice.

  „You might find this interesting.“ Bitty reached behind the row of trunks and pulled out a canvas sack, yellowed and cracked with age. „Have a look.“

  Nedda opened the drawstring and emptied the contents onto the floor. Among the clothing was a little girl’s sailor suit of rotted fabric. The years had been unkind to these artifacts stored outside of the cedar-lined trunks. The next item retrieved from the pile was a christening gown, and it fell apart in her hands. All that held together was the little bit of material embroidered with Sally’s initials. Nedda’s hand passed over small moldy stuffed toys and books of nursery rhymes. She tenderly picked through the rest of the clothing in the varying sizes of a growing child who had lived for three or four years following the massacre.

  Bitty folded the child’s clothing and placed it in the sack. „My father said Sally ran away the year that Lionel turned twenty-one. So she would’ve been ten years old. But where’s her trunk? Can you imagine a ten-year-old girl dragging her trunk with her when she ran away from home?“

  „No,“ said Nedda, „I can’t.“

  Sally had never run anywhere. A legion of heart specialists had all predicted a very short life of invalidism. Did Bitty know this? Nedda could not ask, and there were other questions that would never be answered. Had Sheldon Smyth lied about Sally running away from home, or had someone, Cleo or Lionel, lied to him? Nedda had lost the heart to go on with this disturbance of the dead. „Where is my trunk?“

  Bitty stood up and walked to the end of the row of murdered children. One trunk had been segregated from all the rest and pushed to the wall. „This one. You were never legally declared dead, but I guess they gave up on you after a while.“ She opened the lid. „But this isn’t where I found your tarot cards.“

  Nedda joined her niece by the wall and read her own name on a brass plate. In the context of this attic, it was like viewing her gravestone. She followed Bitty to the far corner of the attic, the resting place of an old standing trunk larger than all the others and plastered with travel stickers. What was this old piece of luggage doing in the attic of dead Winters?

  Bitty opened it like a closet. „I found Uncle James’s passport in here, and that’s odd because he has a regular trunk like the others. It’s stored in the north attic.“

  „This is a steamer trunk,“ said Nedda. „Your grandparents used it for ocean voyages.“ She examined the drawers that lined one side. In the last one, she found a jumble of bright colors, cheap, gaudy clothing that stirred a memory.

  „I found a long red hair,“ said Bitty. „It was snagged in the tarot card box.“ She turned to look at the bottom drawer her aunt had opened. „That’s where I found the cards. And there were short red clippings in all of those clothes, so I wondered if your hair – “

  „Yes, it was cut off… very short.“ Short as a boy’s. Nedda recalled her waist-long hair falling to the floor. The snip of the scissors – it seemed like only this morning. She had been sitting on a wooden chair in a small shabby room with tattered pulled-down shades while this mutilation covered the floor. The red strands had come alive, curling and writhing in the wake of a large cockroach moving through the pile of clippings. And Nedda had cried all the while, listening to the steady beat of rain against the window – the snip of scissors.

  Bitty pulled a dress from the lower drawer. „Now this is the same size as the ones in your trunk, but otherwise nothing like them.“

  Indeed, this was rather poor fare for the child of a wealthy family. Nedda well understood her niece’s curiosity. Unable to get any reliable information from her family, Bitty had produced the tarot cards at the dinner table, hoping for answers via surprise attack. And now this – gentle ambush.

  „I had a theory about Sally,“ said Bitty, „I thought maybe – years after the massacre – you came back for her.“ Intrepid Bitty.

  The detectives talked as they walked through Greenwich Village, breaking off their conversation whenever they were assailed by tourists with a wild, lost look about them. Grid logic was abandoned here, where West Fourth Street ran amok to bisect West Tenth Street. Two gray-haired people stood at this crossroad, unable to move on, gaping at the improbable street sign and willing it to make sense.

  „I can’t believe we’re doing this.“ Annoyed, Mallory waved off this elderly couple, souring the message on their I-Love-New-York tote bags.

  „It’s not much farther.“ Riker flicked his cigarette into a gutter. „And it’s worth the trip. This is the only place in town where you can find a tarot card reader and an ice-pick murder in one conveniently located square block. It’s the neighborhood where Stick Man screwed up royally – a killing close to home.“

  Mallory ope
ned her borrowed copy of The Winter House Massacre and removed the brochure she had used for a bookmark. It had been written by the same author, and now she reiterated the title with sarcasm. „A guided tour of murder in Greenwich Village?“

  „The guy never made much money publishing the book. Bad writer if you ask me. So he makes a living with this walking tour.“

  „If you’ve already taken the tour, why do we have to waste – “

  „And there he is now.“ Riker nodded toward a small cluster of people on the sidewalk and their tour guide, a middle-aged, chinless, hairless man, who was barely five feet tall.

  Martin Pinwitty was addressing his less than rapt audience of out-of-towners. Only tourists would politely listen to his monotonous drone while their eyes glazed over with fatigue. Any New York crowd would have left footprints on the author’s face by now. The man actually managed to bore them with the story of a mob-financed killing machine and details of murders by gun and baseball bat and, Riker’s personal favorite, the ice pick. The group’s interest was suddenly revived when Pinwitty told them that they were standing on the very site of an ice-pick murder. They all looked down at their feet, perhaps expecting to find bloodstains more than half a century later.

  „They always do that,“ said Riker, hanging back with Mallory at the edge of the tour group.

  „How many times did you take this tour?“ Something in her tone of voice implied that she had lost all respect for him.

  „I check in once a year. This guy’s still doing research, and his spiel is always changing.“

  Martin Pinwitty and his tour group walked a few paces down the sidewalk, and the lecture continued. „The victim was a reporter who covered the hearings on Murder Incorporated in the early forties. Now that investigation was over years before this murder took place. I believe the reporter had uncovered some new evidence on a professional assassin.“