by Jane Haddam
“Would she have hitchhiked out to Margaret Anson’s house?”
Faye sat up a little straighter. “I don’t think so. She wasn’t an energetic person, if you know what I mean. She tended toward lethargy. Hitchhiking is a lot of work, especially on back roads on Sunday afternoon. And there’s one other thing.”
“What?”
“I’m not sure she actually knew where the Anson house is. I know she’d seen pictures of it, but I don’t think she’d ever been out there. And it wasn’t in a direction she would be likely to go. To Waterbury to the mall, you know, or even here in Watertown to Kmart or one of those places, but not farther up into the hills. Unless there was a meeting or a conference or something of the sort, and then we would have gone together.”
“And you didn’t.”
“No.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “One more thing. What about friends. What kind of friends did she have, who did she see, other than yourself?”
Faye blushed. “No one,” she said. “The whole time she was here, she never saw anyone at all except me.”
“Really? But that’s—she was local, wasn’t she? Woodbury is somewhere close to here?”
“Oh, yes, it’s very close. But I was just as surprised as you seem to be. I thought she must have been from out of state, or at least way off on the eastern corner, because she never saw anybody. Or called anybody. Or wrote to anybody. Not anybody at all. And now it turns out she had parents in Woodbury. I can’t believe it.”
“Did you know if she’d had problems with her parents? If there was some reason for an estrangement?”
“Well, there must have been, mustn’t there?” Faye said. “You don’t just stop talking to your parents completely unless something has come up. But she never mentioned anything to me. She never even mentioned her parents. She never mentioned school, or friends—and yet she was always talking about herself. How she felt about things. What she meant to do. I don’t know what to make of it.”
“I think it’s nuts,” one of the policemen said. Faye noticed that it was the state policemen this time, the one with the very blond hair.
“I think it’s nuts, too,” she said. “But it’s the truth. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
Gregor Demarkian nodded a little and stepped away. “Well, we’ll just have to talk to her parents, then. And any acquaintances from high school we can find. But you must realize how important it is, determining just how she got out to Margaret Anson’s house.”
“Oh, yes.”
“And why,” Gregor Demarkian said.
“I think I’d stopped thinking about why when it came to Zara Anne,” Faye said. “I think I’d just come to accept that Zara Anne did what she did.”
Gregor Demarkian nodded a little—and then, suddenly, the whole lot of them were in motion. Faye stood up herself, realizing with something like franticness that they were all headed out her front door. They were going to leave her alone. And what was she going to do when she was alone?
She trailed behind them through the front hall and stood in the doorway as they filed out. She watched them get into their cars one after the other. Gregor Demarkian got into the state police car. He was not driving. Faye pulled at her hair and felt a raft of pins come lose.
It was worse than swimming through Jell-O. It was like being drugged. She had no idea what she was going to do now that she was on her own. She only knew that she did not want to be on her own, here in this house, by herself. She wished she had thought to ask them how Zara Anne had died. She envisioned Zara Anne’s face, mottled and bug-eyed from strangulation, which was what was supposed to have happened to Kayla Anson. Then she bent double and wrapped her arms around her body. She thought she was going to be sick.
She had never wanted Zara Anne to die. That was the truth. She had only wanted to be on her own again for a while, to have some quiet, to be able to think. Now she had all those things, and she hated them.
3
Back at the Mayflower Inn, Bennis Hannaford was stretched out on the bed, feeling awful. The television was on. She had heard much of the press conference, and she had gone on watching after everybody had taken off for Margaret Anson’s house. Breaking news, they called it—an excuse for hyperactivity. She knew nothing at all about this young woman, Zara Anne Moss. She wondered just what it was Gregor was doing. She wished she could stop coughing. That was the thing. She couldn’t stop coughing.
Actually, she did stop coughing, on and off. She stopped and felt the muscles in her arms and chest relax—and then, as soon as they did, the coughing would start again. It had gotten to the point where she was afraid to sit up. Any movement at all seemed to trigger another set of spasms. She didn’t even move to answer the phone when it rang. She was afraid to turn over, or that, if she did answer it, she would start coughing and not be able to stop. She willed herself to lay still until the ringing stopped. Then she closed her eyes and tried very hard not to yawn, even though she needed to. Yawning was the most treacherous thing of all.
She was just beginning to drift off to sleep when the phone started ringing again. She sat up to answer it without even thinking about it. She got the receiver off the hook and said, “Bennis Hannaford speaking” before the cough started in again.
“Bennis?” Donna Moradanyan asked.
“Donna,” Bennis tried to say, but it didn’t work. The coughing hit her like a wave, and in no time at all it was much worse than just coughing. It was something like convulsions.
She stood up and bent over at the waist.
“Bennis?” Donna said again.
Bennis felt something come up her throat, something thin and raw. She convulsed one more time and spat it out, and then the coughing stopped.
Then she looked at the floor, and saw what she had left there.
It was a thick clot of blood.
Three
1
Bennis Hannaford was asleep in bed when Gregor got back to the inn that night, carrying an armful of notes that made him feel as if he were back in college and had lost his briefcase. She was awake when he got up the next morning, running the water in the shower and muttering behind the bathroom door. Gregor got up, discovered that the bathrobe he’d brought was gone—this was nice, it meant that Bennis was behaving according to type—and took up his notes of the day before. It felt to him as if he had seen a million people in just a few hours. It might even have been true. Kayla Anson. Zara Anne Moss. The two deaths were almost undoubtedly connected. Gregor just didn’t understand why investigating them required riding around in cars for the better part of the day.
Bennis was done in the bathroom. Gregor waited politely for her to come out and then went in himself. She did not look well. Her eyes were pouchy. Her skin was much too white. Gregor took a shower and brushed his teeth and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. His eyes were pouchy. His skin was much too white. Maybe there was nothing wrong with Bennis except that she was a forty-year-old woman and he was seeing her the first thing in the morning. Maybe the other mornings when he had seen her first thing, and she had not been like this, had been the real exceptions.
He went back out into the main room and found Bennis sitting at a small round table, eating breakfast. The table was set for two, and the wheeled cart beside it had urns for both coffee and tea. She must have called room service.
“Good morning,” Gregor said.
Bennis waved at him with her cigarette. “Donna Moradanyan called. Last night. She said it was important, but you can’t call her back today. She’s out until just around dinnertime.”
“Did she say what it was about?”
“Something about Peter. She didn’t go into a lot of detail.”
“She didn’t go into detail with you?”
“I was throwing up at the time. I think I’ve got a touch of . . . food poisoning. Or something.”
“I thought you looked ill,” Gregor said. “Do you want to see a doctor?”
“I don�
�t see what for. I’m not throwing up anymore. I don’t feel as if I’m about to die. I’ll be all right.”
“Maybe you should just stay in and take it easy.”
“Mmmm,” Bennis said.
Gregor sat down at the chair that was waiting for him and got himself coffee. It was decent coffee, properly perked, as he would have expected it to be. There were Danish pastries and doughnuts on the tray, too, and he took one of those. Bennis, he saw, was having her usual fruit and cheese, but she had barely touched it.
“I’m going to have to do quite a lot of running around today,” he said. “I’ve got Stacey Spratz picking me up about quarter to nine. I think we’re going to interview the boyfriend.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Kayla Anson had a boyfriend.”
“Oh.” Bennis stirred out of her lethargy. “I’ve heard about him. From Abigail, my friend who sent me down here. Margaret was supposed to be livid.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s self-made, or something. Abigail said he was really quite respectable. You couldn’t tell he hadn’t been to Taft and Yale. But apparently he has no real background, the way Margaret would define the term, and he’s in business for himself, by which I suppose she’d mean that he doesn’t have enough money. I mean, her own husband was in business for himself.”
“I’m not too sure if you describe the founder of a global conglomerate as ‘in business for himself.’ ”
“Well, maybe not. But you see what I mean. And I don’t really see why it would have mattered anyway, unless he was a beach bum or a ski instructor, and Abigail says he definitely isn’t that. He owns Goldenrod. The catalogue company.”
“Am I supposed to know what that is?”
“You’ve seen enough of their catalogues,” Bennis said. “They sell natural fiber clothes for the country. Sort of like an East Coast Sundance. I buy a lot of my flannel shirts from them.”
“And they’re successful?”
Bennis shrugged. “I suppose you can never tell without a financial report, but I’d guess that unless the man’s an absolute ass of a businessman they must be. Their stuff is everywhere. They’re the most status-ridden label on any college campus. I don’t think they’re outsold by anybody except J. Crew and L. L. Bean.”
“Sounds good.”
“One would hope. But that’s just like Margaret Anson, you see. I suppose you’ve met her by now. You must have seen what she’s like.”
“She’s an unattractive woman.”
“Unattractive nothing,” Bennis said. “She’s a rattlesnake. I don’t think I’ve been so upset by anybody in my entire life. Do you think she’s some kind of serial killer, luring young women into her garage and then—”
“I doubt it,” Gregor said. “In fact, one of the few things I’m sure of is that Margaret Anson did not physically strangle either one of those two women.”
“Is there a way to strangle somebody that’s not physical?”
“I meant strangle with her own hands. Rather than induce somebody else to strangle. Pay somebody else to strangle. That kind of thing.”
“Oh,” Bennis said. “Well, that’s a possibility. Do you think there’s something about mothers that makes them hate their own daughters?”
“What?”
“I don’t mean all mothers,” Bennis said. “I mean, obviously, I got along wonderfully with mine. I mean some mothers. And the hate is so deep that it’s like acid. Deeper than hate could ever be otherwise.”
“I think in a case like that, the hate is usually mutual.”
“Well, Margaret Anson hated her daughter. I can tell you that absolutely. I don’t know if Kayla Anson hated her mother. I only met her superficially once or twice.”
“You only met Margaret Anson once.”
“It was enough.”
Gregor stood up. “I’d better get dressed and ready to go. Stacey Spratz seems to think that we’re going to tour most of the state today. And maybe we are. I think I need to get him to make me a map. I never know where I am.”
“I’m going to stay in and drink tea and read P. D. James.”
Bennis was already almost reading P. D. James. She had picked the book up from the floor and laid it in her lap. Now she was rubbing the tips of her fingers against the cover. Gregor hesitated. The way she was this morning made him uneasy. She was so—worn out.
“Well,” he said, “if you’re sure you’ll be all right here alone.”
“Of course I’ll be all right here alone. And you couldn’t take me with you. You know that. I’ll be fine.”
“Of course you will.”
“Of course I will.” Bennis looked up. “Go get dressed, Gregor. You’re hovering over me like a storm cloud.”
It was Bennis’s hair that looked like storm clouds. Gregor had always thought so.
He left her sitting at the little table and went back into the bathroom to get dressed.
2
Gregor was already sitting in the lobby when Stacey Spratz showed up. It took no time at all for Gregor to realize that Stacey was full of news, since Stacey tended to announce it, out loud, to everybody assembled near the inn’s front desk.
“I got you all those things you asked for,” he called out, in a voice that could have carried across a football field. “The police report sheets from Watertown, Morris, and Washington for Friday night. What a zoo that was, Friday night.”
The people in the lobby all looked excessively well-heeled. The women wore good wool slacks with creases in them instead of jeans. The men wore sport coats. They turned first to look at Stacey Spratz, and then to look at Gregor. Gregor sighed.
“I take it you left them out in the car,” he said, in as quiet a voice as he could manage.
“They’re right on your seat,” Stacey said. “But I’m impressed, you know. You were right. All kinds of stuff went on that night, and all in the right areas as far as we know. Well, not out near Margaret Anson’s place, but where the Jeep and the BMW were seen together. You wouldn’t believe what I found—”
“Let’s go out to the car,” Gregor said.
The woman behind the reception desk was glaring at them. They were mucking up her atmosphere.
Stacey trailed Gregor happily across the lobby and out the front door, talking all the way. Gregor stopped on the inn’s front steps and looked around. Fall was here for real. The air was cold. The trees were nearly bare, and the leaves that lay on the ground were yellow and red. Stacey’s state police cruiser was one of only six cars in the small lot.
“You want to hear this list of things we’ve got?”
“Absolutely,” Gregor said.
He had reached the cruiser. The doors weren’t locked. Gregor was beginning to wonder if he was one of the last people on earth who locked his doors. He opened up and climbed into the passenger seat, waiting for Stacey to come around and get behind the wheel.
“So,” he said, when Stacey was settled in. “Tell me.”
“I’ve got copies in the back,” Stacey said, “but I’ll give you a rundown. First, Watertown. The Jeep was stolen. And Zara Anne Moss saw it pass.”
“We knew that”
“Right. But then it gets more interesting. Then we get to Morris.”
“And?”
Stacey started the engine. “And Martin and Henry Chandling. Two old guys who do caretaking work at this historic cemetery. The Fairchild Family Cemetery. It’s protected, or something, as a landmark. Established up here in sixteen eighty-six. Closed pretty much before the Civil War—lack of space, and lack of Fairchilds. It sits up there on its hill, you know, and the gravestones are all a hundred years old at least, and people come to take stone rubbings. You know about that, people bring tracing paper and pencils or char-coal and they rub against the stones and get the words and stuff on the paper?”
“I’ve heard of it, yes.”
“Well, I don’t get it, but it’s really big with a certain kind of woman from New York. Anyway, that’s wh
at they do. That’s where the Jeep was found.”
“In the cemetery.”
“Right. Tipped over on its side and a real mess. We can look at that, too. But that isn’t all. This is the part I thought you’d be interested to hear. Thing is, they heard this noise and they went out to investigate it and it was the Jeep. But then when they got back to their little house, they had another surprise. They had a skeleton. Not one of their own skeletons. A strange skeleton.”
Gregor considered this. “Strange in what way? Do you mean fake?”
“If you mean fake plastic, or that kind of thing, no. I talked to the Morris PD. This was a real enough skeleton, only it came from an exhibit up at the Litchfield County Museum. That’s this little place some foundation has set up that does educational exhibits for schoolkids to take field trips to. You know the kind of thing.”
“And they were doing anatomy?”
“They were doing bones. They’ve got all kinds of skeletons—a beaver, I think I heard, and an ostrich. I don’t know where they got that one. And I don’t know what the exhibit was supposed to be in aid of, either, so don’t ask me. But somebody took their human skeleton and put it on Martin and Henry Chandling’s front porch.”
Gregor drummed his fingers against the top of his knees. He hated details like this. They almost always meant trouble, even if—like this one—there was a good chance that they had nothing to do with the case in hand. It was Halloween, after all. The skeleton could have been put on that porch by anybody at all, just as a trick or treat prank.
“Did they have to move this skeleton a long way to get it to this porch?” he asked.
“Just down the hill to the back,” Stacey told him. “Guy I talked to out in Morris was fit to bust. Seems like the guy who runs this museum, Jake something, anyway, he’s some kind of obsessive. He spent yesterday afternoon going back and forth from the museum to the house where Martin and Henry live, over and over and over again, and measuring everything—”