Skeleton Key

by Jane Haddam

  “But they both got expelled.”

  “Annabel got expelled expelled—don’t ever darken our door again. Kayla got held out for a year. Annabel had it coming. It wasn’t the first time she’d pulled something. She was suspended for a term the year before, but I don’t remember what that was about. Anyway, they came out here, because their families have houses here. Annabel’s actually live in Washington Depot practically full-time. And Kayla’s mother has that big yellow thing out on Sunny Vale Road. So they’ve been around almost full-time for nearly a year now.”

  “And they made friends?”

  “Out at the country club their parents belong to, yeah, I think so. The Swamp Tree Country Club. Out on Swamp Tree Road. They’ve all got names like that up here.”

  “Did they have jobs?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Were they doing anything in particular? Volunteer work? Writing memoirs?”

  “This fall they were coming out. Being debutantes. There was a big write-up about it in the Litchfield County Times. I don’t understand much about that, but it seems to mean they had to go to a lot of parties. And give a lot of parties. I’m from out by Manchester. We don’t do a lot of that kind of thing out there.”

  They did do a lot of that kind of thing in Philadelphia, but Gregor’s understanding of it was hazy at best. He supposed that if he needed to understand it better than he did, he could always ask Bennis. Bennis had been a debutante.

  “So,” he said, “on the night of the murder—”

  “Oh. Well. She went to Waterbury. She went to Walden-books. She stopped at the salad place at the food court and got herself some kind of veggie sandwich in a pita to go. The girl there remembered her, and we found the wrapping paper in the car when we found her. She bought a bunch of stuff at Sears. They didn’t remember her there, but the bags were in the car. A pair of running shoes, good ones, Nikes. Three packages of white athletic socks. Three pairs of sweatpants and a sweatshirt. Plain solid gray. Nothing fancy.”

  “Was that like her? To buy clothes at Sears?”

  “Well, it wasn’t clothes exactly. If you see what I mean.”

  “Yes.” Gregor did see what Stacey meant. “What happened next?”

  “Well, that was it, really. She headed back to Washington Depot, except that she didn’t take Route Eight, which she could have. She came back the regular roads through Watertown. Route Sixty-three, that would be, to One-oh-nine. A lot of people do that. They don’t like the highway. Or they don’t like it in the dark.”

  “All right. She was seen on the trip home?”

  “She was seen on Route Sixty-three by a woman named Zara Anne Moss. You’ll get to meet Zara Anne Moss. She’s not exactly a reliable witness. She’s not—you ever know anybody who claimed to be a witch?”

  “You mean this woman says she saw Kayla Anson in tea leaves?”

  “No, no. With ordinary eyesight, going by on Route Sixty-three sometime during the six o’clock news. Which fits, time wise. The thing is, Zara Anne Moss lives with Faye Dallmer—”

  “I know Faye Dallmer,” Gregor said. “She’s the one—the organic everything woman. Who writes the books. And does the advice thing on the Today show.”

  “Right. She lives out here. Has a place on Sixty-three with a vegetable stand and sells quilts. That’s how she started, actually. The other stuff came later. Anyway, she’s, um, she’s uh—”

  “Gay.”

  “Right. And Zara Anne is her latest live-in. There have been a lot of them. They’ve all been a little flaky, but this one is way flaky. Anyway, Faye Dallmer has this refitted Jeep she uses to do truck farming stuff, and it looks like a monster but it goes fast, so kids like to steal it and drive it around. It happens all the time. And Friday, it looked like it had happened again. And Faye was out back somewhere doing some work, and Zara Anne noticed that the Jeep was gone, so she went out on the porch and looked around, and saw it coming, bad-assing down Sixty-three, going really fast. And following Kayla Anson’s BMW.”

  “Following it?”

  “Well, here’s what we’re not sure of. Zara Anne says following, but it might just have been behind there accidentally. There’s no way to tell. She might actually have seen them half an hour apart. Anything.”

  “What happened to the Jeep?”

  “Well, that’s an odd thing. What usually happens is that the kids just bring it back. Faye doesn’t even bother to call anybody anymore. But Friday it was a long time, hours, really, so about eleven Faye called the police in Watertown and they sent somebody out.”

  “And?”

  “And they finally found it up in the Fairchild Family Cemetery in Morris. Turned over on its side way up on the hill. It’s one of those really old cemeteries. Goes back before the Revolutionary War. They’ve always got trouble up there. Besides the Jeep that night there was a skeleton up there, sitting right on Martin and Henry’s front porch, turned out it came from the anatomy exhibit at the Litchfield County Museum. But in case you’re wondering, there was nothing in the Jeep that had anything to do with Kayla Anson, as far as we could tell. Although it was smashed up a lot, like it had been run into something.”

  “Kayla Anson’s car?”

  “More like a tree. But we’re going to check that, too.”

  “What did happen to Kayla Anson’s car?”

  “That’s a good question,” Stacey Spratz said. “I saw it, like I told you, going through Morris like a bat out of hell around eight-ten and I let it go. And that’s it. That’s all anybody saw of it until your friend Bennis found it in the Anson garage and Kayla Anson in it.”

  “Was Kayla Anson in it when you saw it in Morris?”

  “I’ve got no idea. I didn’t get any kind of look at all at whoever was driving, and I didn’t see if there was a passenger, either.”

  “So Kayla Anson could have been driving. Or she could have been being driven. Or she could have’ been dead in the car. Can you remember, where was she sitting in the car when her body was found?”

  “Front passenger seat.”

  “Passenger seat.”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Stacey said. “I’ve been thinking the same thing myself. She could have been alive when the car went by me in Morris. If I’d chased it instead of let it go, she could be alive. I’ve been over and over it. But I just can’t figure out what else I could have done. The car was going at least ninety. It might have been a hundred. I’m surprised everybody in the thing didn’t end up dead on the road somewhere.”

  “But you called ahead to the Washington police.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And what did they do?”

  “There wasn’t much they could do. They sent a car out to the Morris line, but if the BMW was going like that, it would have been long gone by the time they got there.”

  “Is it far, from the town line to Kayla Anson’s house?”

  “It’s practically a straight shot on One-oh-nine. Maybe five miles. Then a left turn and maybe fifty feet. And that’s the Anson drive.”

  “I’m surprised nobody else heard the car. You’d think somebody would. Going at that speed. Or that Bennis or Margaret Anson would have heard it.”

  “Well,” Stacey said, “I don’t think your friend Bennis could have heard it. Not if it got to the house at twenty after eight or half past. She didn’t get there herself until quarter to. If then. She had dinner at the McDonald’s off Exit Eight on I-Eighty-four at ten minutes after eight. That’s what she said she did, and we checked. Three people there recognized her. From stories about you. In People magazine.”

  “Ah,” Gregor said.

  He and Stacey both looked down at the dining room table, now covered with neat stacks of paper, not a thing out of place.

  “Well,” Stacey said, “I guess I’d better get you to this press conference. If I don’t, they’ll probably send somebody out to pick you up.”

  Seven

  1

  What Bennis Hann
aford really wanted to do was to drive out to Margaret Anson’s house and get a look at the garage—now, in the daylight, when she would be able to see what she was doing. Something had been bothering her about the garage ever since she had found Kayla Anson’s body in it, but the more she thought about it, the less she was able to see what it was. She went over and over it in her mind. The big barnlike place. The car. The cement floor. The light from the one small window. When she came to the light, she always stopped and thought of it again, because there seemed to be something there that was important. Then she decided that it was lost to her. Maybe she was just obsessing on the scene because it had been such an awful scene, something she would rather have had no part in at all. Remembering what the light had looked like, falling over the tops of the cars, was so much easier than remembering what Kayla Anson’s face had looked like in that same light.

  In the end, she did drive out to Sunny Vale Road. It was actually on the way from Caldwell to Waterbury, except that she had to turn off 109 for a few feet to reach the front of the house. As it turned out, she didn’t even do that. The trip was ridiculous on the face of it. She wouldn’t have been able to get a look at the garage unless Margaret Anson had opened the gate and let her in. That was as likely to happen as Tinker Bell was likely to get a religious vocation. Once she had got to the road, though, Bennis could see that she wouldn’t even be able to go to the front door and ask. Sunny Vale Road was packed with cars and minivans and people.

  Media, Bennis said to herself, slowing down as she went up the hill. She recognized one or two of the people pacing back and forth on the narrow blacktop. She felt her lungs begin to convulse again and let herself cough. There was nobody here to lecture her about smoking. This time the cough went on and on, giving way suddenly to dry heaves. When it died down, Bennis found herself shaking.

  When this was over, she was going to have to go someplace and get it checked out. That was what she was going to have to do.

  She slowed the car literally to a crawl. It was a good thing there was nobody behind her on the road. It was a good thing she didn’t want to go down Sunny Vale, too. She could see the CNN van, open at the back, with people jumping in and out of it. She could see a blonde woman she was sure was one of the anchorwomen for WVIT, without a coat and walking in little circles to ward off the cold. Why were local anchorwomen always blonde?

  Bennis put her foot on the gas; 109 was hilly and long. When she got to the center of Morris, she slowed, because the Morris cops often had a car out by the traffic light, on alert for people who might be speeding. All of this part of Connecticut looked to her, suddenly, shabby and small, pinched, at war with modernity.

  At the blinking red light at Four Corners, Bennis turned right onto the Litchfield Road. This was the way Kayla Anson had come the night she died, except that she was going in the other direction. Bennis tried to imagine it all in the dark. Halloween was now only two days away. The little red fabric store had a banner outside with a pumpkin on it. One of the houses that sat very close to the edge of the road had a jack-o’-lantern and a straw man arranged on the steps of its stoop. It was a gray day—the kind of day, later in the year, when Bennis would have expected snow.

  She rode the Litchfield Road to its intersection with Route 6, when it became Main Street in Watertown. She watched people standing in little groups in front of the big white Methodist church and then, a little ways down, other people making their way to their cars in the massive parking lot that belonged to the Roman Catholics at St. John the Evangellst. St. John the Evangelist was made of brick, as were most of the buildings on Main Street. Some of the stores had Halloween cut-out pumpkins in their plate glass windows. Toto Mundi, one of them was called. It looked filled with the sort of all-cotton, peasant-inspired “natural” wear that had been popular when Bennis was in college, with the same people who had tried to learn to play the dulcimer and listened to Sally Rodgers on Wheatland Records.

  People who wear Birkenstocks, Bennis thought idly. The red brick of central Main Street gave way to a sort of strip-mall-like area where one chain store seemed to follow another—Brooks Drugs to Dunkin’ Donuts to Burger King to Carvel. The road veered off and became Straits Turnpike. A short stretch of green and residential housing gave way to yet another strip-mall-like area, this one full of car dealerships and offering K-mart and McDonald’s.

  “Watertown in the gateway,” Abigail had warned her, when she’d packed her off to try to “talk sense” to Margaret Anson. “It’s half Litchfield County and half not. You’ll see.”

  Bennis saw the signs for 1-84 and headed for those.

  There was something else that had been nagging her, of course, as well as the problem with the garage. Gregor was here, and she was glad he was here, but his coming had not given her the peace she had expected it to. Maybe he had been too tired, what with all the hauling up and down the countryside she had put him through on almost no notice. Maybe whatever was wrong was entirely her fault. That was more than possible. She didn’t think she had ever in her life been able to maintain a relationship for more than a year. Usually, once she had sex with a man, the connection lasted barely a few months. She didn’t think she could be that stupid about Gregor—about somebody she had known for so long, and had cared about so much—but the possibility was there. The possibility was always there. Sometimes, when she tried to stay with men after she knew she should leave them, she started to hate them.

  It was age that was doing it to her, she thought, age that kept getting in the way, making her options unclear. She was over forty years old. She couldn’t shake the conviction that she should be settled by now, that she should have done something with her life besides produce a whole raft of best-selling sword-and-sorcery fantasy novels. Women her age had husbands and children and houses and volunteer work as well as careers. They had families and commitments. She never seemed to do anything but bounce from one thing to another, on the emotional level. Even her commitment to Cavanaugh Street was tentative, and attenated in conception. She had her apartment and her routines, but she was always aware of being the only non-Armenian American on the block, the odd woman out, the curiosity. It said something about her, she thought, that she was only really comfortable when she was absolutely sure she didn’t fit. It said something even less flattering that she was so protective of her isolation—that she sometimes felt, in dreams, as if she would rather die than give it up.

  She had gotten on 1-84 without realizing she was doing it. She saw the signs looming up for Exit 23 and headed toward them. She had directions from the woman at the desk at the inn, and so far there seemed to be nothing wrong with them. The highway was broad and well-kept, but it was also stark and inhuman. The Waterbury that flanked its sides was run-down and dispirited. Bennis was aware of feeling much better than she had.

  She went down the long ramp that led to what seemed like three or four little mini-exits, then off onto a short country road with signs clearly posted saying: MALL. She followed the arrows and saw that she couldn’t have missed it. God, but she hated malls. She hated them almost as much as she hated reruns of Gilligan’s Island, which at the moment were Father Tibor Kasparian’s favorite method of relaxation. Still, she couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.

  She entered the mall at the far end, near Sears, because it seemed to her easier to get in that way. She parked in the half-empty little section of lot and got out and made sure that all her doors were locked. She was doing things by rote, moving because she had to move. She couldn’t just stand still. Past the mall she could see the middle of Waterbury, right there, with its storefront windows boarded up and the boards spray painted with uninspired graffiti. People came here on foot. She could see three of them walking down the hill in her direction, women dressed in spandex, with too much hair.

  She was almost to the little-found entryway when it struck her—what it had been about the garage, what was wrong with the light.

  It was coming from the wrong direction,
that was What was wrong with it. Or some of it was. The light on the tops of the cars was coming from the little window on the wall, but the light that had struck Kayla Anson’s face, that had made it possible to see that Kayla Anson was dead, that had had to come from somewhere else.

  Behind. And lower. Maybe. Somewhere.

  Bennis shoved her hands into the pockets of her jacket and tried to think.

  2

  There had been a man out from the Litchfield County Museum all Saturday afternoon, but Martin Chandling had had hopes that Sunday would be better. Who worked on Sundays, after all, especially out here? People went to church, that’s what they did on Sundays, and then after church they went to the Farm Shop or Denny’s to get something to eat. Catholics ate a lot when they went out, because they’d had to fast all morning in order to take Communion. Protestants ate less, but still enough to make them fat. People got fatter and fatter every day. Martin had seen them. It was pitiful, what went walking around in the middle of town these days, and dressed in stuff so tight you could see their nipples right through the fabric. In Martin’s opinion, no woman had a right to dress like that unless she looked like Gwyneth Paltrow. In Henry’s opinion, it was a good thing if he got a chance to see nipples.

  They were sitting together at the breakfast table, eating toast and coffee and arguing about the paper, when the car drove up. The paper was full of stories about the elections. There was even a picture of Monica Lewinsky on page six, next to a story about the “moral backlash” the Waterbury Republican thought was going to happen to Democrats running for Congress. Martin thought the Waterbury Republican was very aptly named. They hadn’t endorsed a Democrat at that paper since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and maybe they hadn’t endorsed him. Or maybe they had. Martin didn’t really pay much attention to the paper. He was just tired of stories about Monica Lewinsky.

  The car parked right on the grass at the side of the house, as if there weren’t a perfectly good dirt drive to put a car on. Henry looked up over the top of his section of the paper and said, “Christ on a crutch. It’s what’s-his-name. Back again.”