by Jane Haddam
“You didn’t like Kayla living with you,” Derek said. “I was always rather surprised that she agreed to it Now that she was eighteen, I mean. She had control of a good deal of money. Why didn’t she just leave?”
“Leave and get her own house and sign up for an ordinary public school and finish her senior year that way?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“She thought of it,” Margaret said. “We talked about it. Or rather, she talked about it to me, and to Annabel Crawford and Peter Greer.”
“And?”
“I take it they didn’t think well of it or they talked her out of it. Annabel isn’t really interested in graduating from some public high school. She likes being the world’s ultimate debutante. And Peter—” Margaret made a gesture in the air.
“I thought Peter was out of the picture.”
“I thought so, too. I know Kayla was sour on him. He called and she didn’t return his calls, or mostly she didn’t. But she saw him last week. They had dinner together out in Southbury. She got home very late.”
“Maybe they were gearing it back up again.”
“He wanted to marry her,” Margaret said. “I know all about that. He’sreally the worst kind of social climber. But Kayla wouldn’t have married him. She—was—enormously annoying about all kinds of things, but she wasn’t quite that stupid. I’ve often wondered what happened at that dinner out in Southbury. I’ve wondered if she dropped him flat”
“Yes,” Derek said. “Well. If you want to look at the structure of the estate—”
The structure of the estate, Margaret Anson thought and then she sighed a little.
They were all so self-protective, these people. None of them could look life in the eye and accept it for what it was. None of them could accept themselves for what they were. But she could. In that way, she was much better than Kayla had ever been, or Robert, either. She was much better than Mr. Gregor Armenian Demarkian, who had come into her house and thought he was tricking her into talking to him. Margaret never talked to anyone she didn’t want to talk to, and she never said a single thing she didn’t want to say. She wondered what Derek would think if she told him what had really gone on in her mind when she first saw Zara Anne Moss lying dead on the floor of her garage, with her eyes bugged out like the eyes of a carnival doll.
Instead, she got down to business.
“I don’t want to talk about the structure of the estate,” she told him. “I want to talk about whether or not I’m going to come into some money.”
2
It took everything Sally Martindale had not to ask to leave the office early—everything she had and everything she was likely to have for days to come. Ruth Grandmere was going methodically through every account file, one by one, file after file, even though she wasn’t finding anything. She couldn’t find anything. The files were in perfect order. The only way Ruth would know which ones had been doctored would be to talk to the people they belonged to, and even then she might not know. Some of these women were extremely bad about money. They didn’t know how much they had or how much they’d spent or when they’d taken out cash and when they hadn’t. Sally wished she had been more careful to take money out only when the account holder was actually at the club. She’d been careful to take it in the same amounts the account holder took himself. She’d been careful in a million other ways. Not careful enough, but careful. Ruth Grandmere was not going to find anything wrong in these accounts today.
Even so, by one o’clock, when it was time for her to leave, Sally was as limp as overboiled vegetables. She had been sweating so much that the back of her dress was soaked through and her hair looked as if it had been in a shower of filthy water. If Ruth had asked her to stay on longer, she would have found an excuse to go. She couldn’t have stood the tension for another minute. As it turned out, Ruth herself was fed up and wanted lunch. She left the office first Which was what gave Sally her chance.
She needed more than two hundred dollars now. She needed at least a thousand. Fifteen hundred would be better. If she went out to Ledyard with pocket change, she would never have a hope of doing what she needed to do. She started plugging numbers into the computer, and this time she wasn’t careful at all. She had no idea who was or wasn’t in the club at the moment. She didn’t even care. She only cared that she not deplete any account to the point where it might cause a member to be charged off, or take so much from any one place that the taking would be obvious. In the end, she had to access twelve different accounts. She’d put herself in a whole new kind of danger. If anybody ever lined up this day’s activities in one place, they would see immediately what was wrong. They’d see the rash of charges all made within the same two minutes and know that she, and only she, could be responsible for them. Her muscles seemed to be quivering under her skin. She thought she was going to be sick.
When she was finished, she had to look at the notepad next to her on the desk to see how much she’d taken. She had lost count somewhere in the process. Then she tore the page out of the notebook and tore it into little shreds. Then, just to be safe, she went down the hall to the ladies’ room and flushed them down the toilet. When she got back to the office, it was still empty. She felt a shot of adrenaline up her spine—if Ruth had come back from lunch, this would all have been useless. She would have doctored the accounts and gotten nothing out of it at all. Instead, she had timed it perfectly.
She went to the cash drawer and took out twenty-five hundred dollars in twenties and fifties. There were hundreds in the drawer, too, but she didn’t want to touch those. They made her feel funny. The club usually had ten thousand dollars in cash on hand on any ordinary day. They never went through that much, but they always had it, just in case.
She tried to put the money in her wallet and found it wouldn’t fit. She stuffed it into the little inside zipper pocket instead. It still bulged. If she had known she was going to do this, she would have brought a bigger bag.
Nobody who saw her would think the bulge in her bag was twenty-five hundred dollars of the club’s own money. She knew that. They would think she was carrying tennis balls, or that she had her period. She put her bag over her shoulder and looked out over the office. Everything seemed to be all right. Everything seemed to be where it was supposed to be. It was so damned hard to concentrate.
She left the office and went down the short hall to the lobby. She said good-bye to the doorman and walked out the front door. She walked out across the parking lot to her car and climbed in behind the wheel. She was finding it almost impossible to breathe.
She got the car started and moving down the long drive to the road. She made herself think about the steering wheel and the gas pedal and the brake. She made herself think, hard, about Ledyard and the slots. That was what she was going to do today, the slots. No blackjack. No roulette. Just slots. She was going to take quarter after quarter, token after token, and hit those machines for the rest of the afternoon, for as long as it took to get the jackpot bell to ring and the money to come pouring down the chute at her, the money that she would then be able to bring back to the club and use to make everything right.
That was what she needed to do. She needed to make everything right. She needed to get her luck going for once. She had terrible luck. She had always had terrible luck. Her life had been ruined by the way her luck was always getting in her way.
Somewhere out on the highway, she began to calm down—but by then she was halfway across the state, and she couldn’t remember most of the driving she had done. She was also doing eighty miles an hour.
She made herself slow down—all she needed now was to have some state trooper pull her over and ask to go through her bag—and then she realized that there was only one way she was going to be able to get through the rest of this day, until her strategy paid off and she had money again, until she had gotten herself out of this trouble.
She forced one part of her mind to concentrate on the road, and she let the rest of it dr
ift. She put herself squarely into the future, with the coins falling into her lap, and then with the meeting there would be in the casino’s office. She made herself see the man from the IRS and the check that would be made out in her name. She made herself see herself taking that check to her own personal bank and putting it in as a deposit. In Connecticut, the law required banks to make the funds from a local check available on the next business day. She made herself see herself in the morning, transferring the money she needed to transfer from her own account to the club’s account, and fixing all the records for as far back as they needed to be fixed.
There was only one problem with that. She couldn’t remember how much money she had taken, or from whom, or when. She hadn’t written it down, and she had done it so often by now that she didn’t know if she would ever be able to track it all down.
3
Eve Wachinsky woke up from her fever on Monday afternoon. She had actually woken up a couple of times before then, but she’d still been hot and confused. She’d only been sure that she was in a hospital room, in a hospital bed, and that people kept telling her she was going to be all right. She didn’t think she really was all right. All her muscles ached. Her eyes felt ready to fall out of her head.
Now she turned over in bed and saw a young woman sitting in a chair near the broad plate glass window, reading an oversized paperback book. In Praise of Folly, it was called, by Desiderius Erasmus. Eve had never heard of a writer named Desiderius Erasmus. She hadn’t heard of many writers at all, although she knew who Stephen King was, because she had seen him once on The Tonight Show.
She tried to sit up and found it too hard to do. She was too weak. And she was starving. She tried again and let out a little moan. The young woman at the window put her book down and looked up.
“Oh, my goodness,” she said. “You’re awake. I’d better call the nurse.”
“Accident?” Eve asked.
The young woman had come up to the bed and begun to ring the buzzer there. She shook her head at Eve’s question and said, “No accident at all. Spinal meningitis. Very nasty. I was worried about you for a while there yesterday. Do you remember who I am?”
“No.”
“I’m Grace Feinmann. I live across the hall from you in Watertown. You came out into the hall, and you were really feeling awful—”
“Yes,” Eve said. She did remember. It was fuzzy, but she could remember. Lying on the carpet in the hall. Feeling that it wasn’t possible to stand up. Feeling that she had to get to the hospital and that she would never be able to drive. And then this young woman had come and taken her to a car.
“Eve,” Eve said.
“Oh, I know,” Grace said. “Your name is Eve Wachinsky. We had to go through your wallet to find your information. So that we could check you into the hospital. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No,” Eve said. “Hungry. I’m—hungry.”
A nurse came to the door and looked in. “Oh, wonderful,” she said. “You’re awake. I’ll call Dr. Carpenter right away.”
“She says she’s hungry,” Grace Feinmann said.
“I can get her some chicken broth. That’s on the chart. For more than that, we’ll have to talk to the doctor. I’ll be right back.”
“I hope chicken broth is okay,” Grace said.
Chicken broth was fine. What Eve really wanted was to sit up. She tried again, but fell back almost as soon as she got up. She shook her head.
“I—want to—sit—up,” she said.
“Oh, I can do that,” Grace told her. She fumbled around at the edge of the bed, and Eve heard machinery under he whirr. The top half of the bed slid upward. It wasn’t exactly like sitting up, but at least it wasn’t lying flat on her back, either.
“There,” Grace said. “I hope that helps.”
“Yes,” Eve told her. “Thank you.”
“We really have been terribly worried. Nobody knew exactly what was going to happen to you. It was very frightening. The doctor said you must have been having symptoms for at least twenty-four hours. Meningitis doesn’t hit like this without a day or so of feverishness and achiness that comes before. But I told him, people just don’t go to the doctor for things like that. Not unless they have just tons of health insurance, and I couldn’t find any health insurance for you at all. I hope you don’t mind that we went through all this stuff. We didn’t mean to invade your privacy. We were just trying to do what was best—”
“It’s all right,” Eve said.
A tall nurse’s aide came into the room, carrying a tray with two Styrofoam cups full of chicken broth on it. The cups had white plastic lids on them. The nurse’s aide put the tray down on a rolling table and pulled the rolling table over to the bed.
“You can have ice water if you want. To go with the broth. Mrs. Corcoran said it would be all right.”
“Yes, please,” Eve said.
The nurse’s aide disappeared and appeared again a few seconds later with a plastic pitcher and a small glass. She put them down on the rolling table next to the broth and disappeared.
“Here, I’ll pour some water for you,” Grace said. “This seems like a really strange hospital to me. It’s almost as if it were empty. The hospitals I’m used to always seemed crammed full of people.”
Eve managed to drink some water. Her mouth felt instantaneously better. She hadn’t realized how dry it was. She reached for one of the Styrofoam cups of broth and tried to get the lid off. She cup was warm to the touch. The lid wouldn’t budge.
“I’ll get that,” Grace said, and did. Then she handed Eve the opened cup of broth and stepped back. “You’re going to be weak as hell for a week, Dr. Carpenter said. Oh, I’m sorry about the language. I mean, I’ll be more careful if you want me to be. I keep forgetting that not everybody talks like a bunch of graduate students.”
The broth tasted wonderful. It felt wonderful, too. Eve could practically feel her mind clearing and the fuzziness draining away. She tried sitting forward again and found that this time it was not impossible. It wasn’t easy, but at least it wasn’t impossible. She took another long sip of broth and then a deep breath. It only hurt a little.
“I’ve caused you a lot of trouble,” she said finally.
“No, no,” Grace told her. “It wasn’t any trouble. And to tell you the truth, sitting here with you in the afternoons has been a big help to me. I mean, I have all this reading to do, and when I’m home I get distracted by the television or the CD player or something else and I don’t get it done. Or the phone rings. There’s always something. But when I’ve been here I’ve been able to concentrate, you see. So it’s really worked out.”
“Oh,” Eve said.
Grace had left her book on the chair she had been sitting in. Eve looked at it again, but it was no more comprehensible than it had been. She tried to put together some kind of idea of Grace’s life, and couldn’t do it. None of the people Eve knew read many books, and the books they read had titles like Love’s Tempestuous Flower or Blood Vengeance. Grace had said something about being a student, but Eve didn’t think that could be right. Grace looked too old to be a student.
Eve took another long sip of broth. She was glad she had a second cup of it. The first one was going fast. And she was hungrier by the minute.
“So,” Grace said, “I talked to Darla Barden. You’ll have your job when you get out of here. She seems like a very nice woman. Oh, and I got the key from the super and went in and tidied up your apartment a little. Not that it was a mess or anything, but I was looking for your insurance card and there were a few dishes in the sink and I did them. Oh, and I kept you all the stories about the murder.”
“Murder?”
“Two murders,” Grace said. “First the murder of Kayla Anson, which is really the big noise, and then yesterday there was somebody else. The woman who lived with Faye Dallmer. You know Faye Dallmer, she writes those books about organic gardening and whatever. So this woman was murdered, the second one, and they found he
r in the same place they found Kayla Anson, in the Anson garage, you know, and now there’s a famous detective here from Philadelphia looking into it all. At any rate, I thought it would be a distraction, if you know what I mean. Everybody in town is talking about it and practically nothing else.”
Kayla Anson was dead? And also Faye Dallmer’s friend, what’s-her-name, Zara Anne Somebody. Eve rubbed the side of her face and tried to think.
In the world in which Eve Wachinsky had grown up, people like Kayla Anson and Zara Anne Somebody did not get murdered. Gang girls got murdered, and old ladies who lived in bad neighborhoods in Waterbury and had to walk to the bank and the grocery store. Women like Eve herself got murdered, too, if they were married and their husbands got liquored up. Eve had once gotten a black eye from a boyfriend who had snorted three lines of cocaine after drinking half a bottle of vodka and then decided that he didn’t like the smirk on her face. That was the boyfriend before the last one. Part of her was really happy that she hadn’t had more boyfriends than she had had.
She took another long gulp of chicken broth and finished the cup. She reached for the other cup and got the lid off this time without difficulty. Grace beamed at her as if she had done something very clever.
“So,” Grace said, “let me fill you in. Let me tell you all about the murder and all the rest of it. Really, it’s the most interesting thing that’s happened around here in the last century.”
Five
1
It was Stacey Spratz’s idea that they should do something about lunch that was “convenient.” It took Gregor Demarkian a whlle to realize that Stacey wanted to go out for fast food—wanted it, in fact, as ardently as Bennis Hannaford ever wanted Godiva chocolates, or Tibor wanted an evening at La Vie Boheme, where they made perfect flaming orange chicken. There was a Burger King on Main Street in Watertown, and a McDonald’s on Straits Turnpike near the Middlebury town line. If you wanted something more esoteric—Taco Bell, say, or Arby’s—you had to go into Waterbury, or out to the new mall. Stacey Spratz did not want anything esoteric. He wanted a Big Mac Extra Value Meal with a Barq’s root beer. He was willing to settle for a Whopper if Gregor had strong preferences in the direction of Burger King. Gregor didn’t think he had eaten in a fast-food restaurant of any kind since he’d been reassigned off kidnap detail, and that was—what? Thirty years ago? McDonald’s had only just been starting up then. They’d sold hamburgers for fifteen cents.