Skeleton Key

by Jane Haddam

  “Ummm,” Gregor said.

  “And of course you’ll be coming up to look into what happened to Kayla Anson. That’s the only thing that makes any sense here, for you to be on this train. I wouldn’t be on it myself except that I was going to take a few days in the city and I didn’t want to bring my car. And now, of course, I simply can’t. Of course, of course, of course. I keep repeating myself. I’m glad I ran into you.”

  “It’s very kind of you to say so.”

  “I’m going to sit down now. This car is nothing to stand up in when it gets moving.”

  Gregor watched her walk away, down the aisle, and take a seat in the middle of the car. Was it surprising that she knew that something had happened to Kayla Anson? Probably not. These were small towns up there. Everybody in them probably knew by now that something had happened to Kayla Anson, and if Gregor had been able to get to a television set he was sure he would find that CNN knew it, as well.

  The train jolted and moved a few feet forward. Gregor looked down at the front page of the Times. There was a story about the still-evolving investigation of that mess the United States had gotten itself into in the Sudan. There was another about the upcoming elections and whether being known as a Friend of Bill would help candidates or hurt them in the coming races. Gregor finished off the rest of his coffee in a gulp and put his head back on the seat and closed his eyes. The bud car was moving, but not very fast. It felt to Gregor as if he were being rocked to sleep in a cradle.

  Then, what seemed like moments later, he felt himself being shaken hard. Someone was holding him by both shoulders and slamming him against the back of his seat. He opened his eyes in a squint and saw what looked like Bennis standing over him, although he was sure that had to be an illusion. Bennis was waiting for him in the train station in Waterbury. She was supposed to be bringing her car.

  “Gregor,” Bennis said.

  “It’s going to be an unbelievable mess,” Gregor told her.

  Bennis shook him hard, again. Her thick black hair was coming lose from its pins. Wisps of it were floating around her face.

  “Wake up, Gregor, for God’s sake. What’s wrong with you? This car is going to take off again any minute.”

  Gregor sat forward and hunched over his knees. He felt sick to his stomach, but at least he no longer thought he was hallucinating. He felt sick enough to pass out. He had to do something about the not sleeping.

  “Are you all right?”Bennis asked him.

  He stood up and looked around the car. There were three people in it, but not the same three people who had been with him on the ride out from Bridgeport. These had to be people hoping to take the train into New York.

  He made his way out into the aisle and looked around.

  “Sorry,” he told Bennis. “I fell asleep.”

  “I could see that. You looked white as a sheet. You scared me to death. Come on out and get into the car.”

  “Right,” Gregor said.

  He followed Bennis through the narrow door and out onto the platform. The train station in front of him was made of red stone and boarded up. The small city beyond it looked empty and down on its luck. All the buildings were both old and dirty, except for the big clock tower that rose almost exactly over his head.

  “That’s the Waterbury Republican,” Bennis told him, as she threw his big suitcase into the space behind the backs of the seats in her little orange Mercedes. “It’s the local paper, more or less. Except that all the elite types get the Litchfield County Times. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “I’m fine.” Gregor settled himself into his seat. “I need some rest. Have you seen anything of the news this morning?”

  “I’ve seen all of it.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “It’s a circus. What did you expect it would be like?”

  Gregor sighed. Bennis pulled the car out on a dilapidated city street that was so full of potholes, Gregor had a momentary fear for the tires.

  “It’s that I didn’t think about it at all, and I should have,” he told her. “Because the media climate matters.”

  Three

  1

  Eve Wachinsky had a ritual for deciding when she could go to the doctor. First, she had to be sick enough so that she was sure she had no other choice. It didn’t make any sense to spend all that money just to be told that she didn’t need any medicine, that she would have been better off if she’d stayed at home and stayed in bed. Second, she had to call the doctor and find out exactly what it would cost—although that was not, really, entirely possible. Her doctor charged sixty-nine dollars for a standard office visit, and eighty-nine dollars for something longer. Eve always counted on the eighty-nine dollars. There were always tests, or blood work, or something else that needed to go to the lab, and that she would be required to pay for right up front. This was the bottom line with not having insurance. People who had it sailed in and out without ever being questioned. Even if their insurance ended up refusing to cover whatever it was they’d had done, even if they ran up a bill for thousands of dollars they ended up having to pay for themselves, nobody in the doctor’s office thought twice about it. People who did not have insurance had to have money, right away, or they would just be told to go home. Or Eve thought they would. She had never dared go into the. doctor’s office without at least thinking she had enough to pay her bill. On the one occasion when she had figured wrong and had been able to pay only part of it, she had had to listen to Moira Rackhorn lecture her on taking advantage of the doctor.

  Actually, Eve thought, turning over in bed and wishing the chills would stop, it wasn’t true that every patient without insurance had to have money right up front. There were people, like that writer who lived in town, who just seemed to call up depths of sympathy in doctors and dentists and nurse practitioners. Eve had read an interview with the writer in the Waterbury Republican—about how this woman had lost her insurance when she lost her husband, young, to cancer; about how good and helpful and kind all the medical professionals had been, a year later, when she fell in her driveway and sustained a multiple fracture of her right leg. Eve could see the difference, even in the grainy black-and-white photograph—although she couldn’t have said exactly what it was made up of. It was a kind of a puzzle she had spent her whole life trying to solve, without success. For some reason, she could just tell that the writer was someone who had gone to a good college, had grown up in a family that owned a decent house, had learned to expect that she would be treated well. She could tell this even though the writer was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and sitting cross-legged on the floor of what looked like a wide front porch.

  Eve turned over in bed and tried to breathe. Her chest hurt. Her head hurt, too. When she tried to move her head from side to side, there was so much pain in her neck she almost cried out. She had no idea how much money she had in the bank, or how she was going to find out. When she tried to move, everything inside her seemed to explode.

  If worse came to worse, she could go to the emergency room at St. Mary’s Hospital in Waterbury. St. Mary’s was the one that took anybody in. Their waiting room was always full of Spanish boys who had cut each other and pregnant women with four other children in tow. There were policemen stationed there, at the doors, all the time. It had always made Eve wonder. Did the doctors and nurses feel they were under attack? Did the people come in from off the street and try to steal things?

  Eve’s apartment was just one big room, at the front of a house just off Hemenway Place, in Watertown. From that window she could see the tiny mall called Depot Square and one side of the old Hemenway School. The house was an old clapboard one with a barn out back that had been converted into a garage. Her car was in the garage with four others, the ones that belonged to the other people in the house. She had to get out of her bed and out of her apartment and out to her car, and then she had to drive it.

  She did manage to get out of bed. She mostly fell onto the cold linoleum floor, but she go
t out. She looked at the faded black-and-pink-and-silver pattern of swans and thought that she should have done something about it long ago, bought a rug or had the floor pulled up at her own expense. The pattern was so ugly. She grabbed the side of the bed and pulled herself up. She could stand if she held onto things. She was holding onto the wall.

  She had gone to the Hemenway School herself, when she was small. She had walked up the hill from the little house where her family had had their own apartment and watched the big yellow school buses come in from the subdivisions in the north part of town. In those days she had wanted nothing as much as she wanted a split level, with two bathrooms, and a room that wasn’t the living room to put the television in.

  She looked around and saw that she had made it to the door. She was still wearing her nightgown. She was still shivering. She was sure she had forgotten something, but she couldn’t remember what. She had to get to her car, that was the thing. It didn’t matter if she was in her nightgown. Nobody would see her until she got to the hospital, and at the hospital nobody would care.

  She went out into the hall and looked around. She could hear music coming from the apartment across the way. Classical music, that was what it was called. Except that it sounded funny, even for classical music, tinny, maybe, or very high-pitched. Eve’s head hurt so badly that she thought it was going to pop open.

  The door had clicked shut and locked behind her before she realized what it was she’d forgotten—and then it was too late, of course. She didn’t know what she was going to do.

  Her keys. She didn’t have her keys. She was in her nightgown, and her keys were in her pocketbook on the table with this morning’s breakfast dishes. She had sat down to eat just after she got in from work, but she had already been feeling awful. She’d been feeling worse than awful. She never threw food away. She couldn’t stand the idea of wasting it. This food she’d left sitting in its dishes, as if fairies would come to eat it in the night.

  If her keys were still on the table, she wouldn’t be able to drive her car. She wouldn’t even be able to get back into the apartment The door locked automatically when it closed. She felt the tears well up behind her eyes. It wasn’t true that everything was her fault. It really wasn’t. Some things just happened.

  She was only half aware of slipping to the floor, of sitting there hunched with her back against the wall. The chills were so bad now that she was shuddering more than shaking. She felt like one of those old cars you see on the highway sometimes, rattling so much that you think they’re just going to fly apart.

  If she couldn’t get to the car, she couldn’t get to the hospital. If she couldn’t get to the hospital, what would happen to her? Maybe she would die here, in this hallway, and the next person to come through would find her body on the carpet, curled into a ball like a sleeping cat.

  She took a deep breath. She wished with everything she had that her neck didn’t hurt so much. She counted to ten and got lost in the middle somewhere.

  Then she felt a heaviness on her shoulder, and turned to find a young woman standing beside her, dressed in jeans and the whitest sneakers that had ever existed on the planet They were so white, they hurt Eve’s eyes.

  “Excuse me?” the young woman said. “You’re Ms. Wachinsky, aren’t you? You live right over there? Are you all right?”

  Eve tried to look up and started crying, instead. She saw that the door to the apartment across the hall was open. The music had stopped. This must be her neighbor, the one she had never seen, the one who had moved in just last month. She buried her head in her arms and rocked.

  A hand came down on her head, then on her forehead.

  “Jesus Christ,” the young woman said. “You’re burning up. Do you need to go to a doctor?”

  Eve kept her head very still. Her neck hurt so much she never wanted to move it again. “Hospital,” she said. “Going to hospital.”

  “You want to go to the hospital. Good plan. I can do that. Do you want me to take you to the hospital?”

  “Hospital,” Eve said again. “St.—”

  “St. Mary’s. Right. Okay. Look, let me go get you a sweatshirt or something to wear—I’ve got some that are as big as coats. Then I’ll go get the car. Then we’ll take you to the hospital. Will that be all right?”

  Of course it would be all right, Eve thought. This was ridiculous. This woman was ridiculous. She was dying, of course she had to go to the hospital. She wondered what had happened to the music. She wondered what was going on.

  The young woman disappeared and came back with a big red sweatshirt. Eve let her force it over her head and only cried out once, when her neck was moved too far.

  “Damn,” she heard the woman say, “you’ve got meningitis. I’ll bet anything.”

  Eve tried to remember what meningitis was and couldn’t. Something terrible. Something people died of. She tried to remember if it was catching, and couldn’t get hold of that information, either.

  “Listen,” she tried to say.

  The young woman was pushing her out their mutual front door. The car was right there. Eve had no idea when the young woman had had a chance to go get it. The whole world seemed cold and hot at once. The sun was much too bright. Her eyes hurt. She felt herself being folded into a bucket seat and began to shudder again.

  The door next to her closed. On the other side of the car, the driver’s side door opened, and the young woman climbed in behind the wheel. Then that door closed, too—God, but the noise was loud; it was explosive—and the engine started up.

  “I’m Grace Feinmann, by the way,” the young woman said.

  That was when a voice from the radio started talking about how Kayla Anson had been murdered, only the night before, and something in Eve’s head began to struggle mightily to put the information in context. BMW. Jeep. The Litchfield Road.

  The cold gave way to heat. Eve was suddenly burning up, so hot that there was no way she could move, no way she could shudder, no way she could do much of anything except sweat and sweat until big rivers of water ran down the front of her chest.

  But the car was out on the road now, moving, and that made her feel a little better.

  2

  Annabel Crawford knew that the death of Kayla Anson had done her at least some good—although she didn’t like to think about it like that. She didn’t like to think about Kayla dying at all. It had been so odd to get up this morning and see it all over the news like that. It had been odd, in fact, just to see the television on at ten o’clock. Annabel’s mother always said she hated television, the way women like her were supposed to hate it. The set was kept in a cramped little “sitting room” at the back of the house, off the kitchen, and only turned on in the early evenings, when Jennifer Crawford had nothing else to do. Annabel’s father wasn’t home enough for decisions like that to matter. Annabel thought she should have known, as soon as she came downstairs looking for coffee, that something was terribly wrong. Her mother only kept the television on like that for major league airplane disasters.

  “I’ve been trying to get through to Margaret all day,” Jennifer said, when Annabel came down and began moving around the kitchen. “The phone’s on the answering machine—I don’t suppose I blame her. There must be reporters crawling all over that place by now. And it’s only going to get worse.”

  Annabel found grapefruit in the refrigerator. She got one out and cut it in half. She hated the taste of grapefruit, but that was the point. If you hated the taste of something, you didn’t eat too much of it. She put the half a grapefruit in a little bowl, and found a spoon, and sat down at the table. The red Corvette was parked right outside the kitchen window, in that part of the drive that came up to the back porch. Annabel was surprised that she hadn’t thought to put it away in the garage.

  “There’s something I’ve got to talk to you about,” Annabel started.

  Jennifer was still on a roll. She was a fine-boned woman with too much hair and clothes that had come straight out of the Talb
ot’s store in Southbury. She looked like any one of a hundred Litchfield County ladies.

  “Strangled,” she was saying, pacing back and forth from the kitchen to the little sitting room and back again. “That’s what they said on the news. Strangled. And hit on the head, too, or something. I don’t know. The news is very confusing. But I don’t think there’s a safe place left anywhere in the world.”

  “She was strangled in her house?” Annabel asked.

  “She was strangled in her car. Or strangled and then put in her car. Really, Annabel, it’s impossible to sort it all out. There are all these news reports, but I don’t think anybody really knows anything. And there were pictures… of them bringing the body out. You know. The bag. And all I could think of was that Kayla Anson was in that bag.”

  Annabel felt suddenly very ill. Kayla in a body bag. Body bags in general. She pushed her grapefruit away from her.

  “Mother, listen to me,” she said. “I sort of stole this car.”

  “What?” Jennifer said.

  “Well, I didn’t really steal it. I just—I was out with this guy. Tommy Haggerty. You know. He goes to Princeton. His parents belong to the club.”

  “It’s going to be really awful if it turns out it wasn’t some thug from the neighborhood. So to speak. If it turns out it was one of Kayla’s boyfriends.”

  “Kayla only had one boyfriend. He wouldn’t strangle her. The thing is, Tommy and I went out to the Lucky Eight last night, and he was drinking, and—”

  “You can just imagine what Margaret is going through. Especially given the fact that Margaret is Margaret, if you know what I mean. A more tightly wound, unforgiving woman I’ve never met. Margaret hates publicity.”

  “He got too drunk to drive,” Annabel said, plowing on gamely. “So I took his keys and left him in the bar and drove his car back here. And now it’s in our driveway. That one. The Corvette.”