Skeleton Key

by Jane Haddam

  He let all four feet of his chair hit the floor and heard Henry do the same.

  “Come on up,” Henry was saying as he got to his feet. “It’s right up the path. It isn’t far at all.”

  “It seemed far on the night,” Martin said. “In the dark.”

  “We thought it was kids,” Henry said. “We’re always getting kids. Kids like to muck around in graveyards.”

  “They like to overturn the gravestones,” Martin, said helpfully.

  In the full light of day, it wasn’t a long walk up to the cemetery at all. It didn’t seem treacherous, either. The path was well-packed and broad enough not to be claustrophobic. When you could see it, there was nothing to stumble over.

  They got to the top of the hill. Martin and Henry stood back to let Stacey Spratz and Gregor Demarkian go before them. There was really not very much to see. The Jeep had been a heavy vehicle, so there was still some impression in the dirt, but not much. The grass had sprung back into place.

  “If we’d have known it was going to have something to do with the murder,” Martin said, “we’d have been more careful. We just thought it was kids.”

  “This was at what time?” Gregor Demarkian asked. “Do you remember?”

  “Sure we remember,” Henry said. “It was just after midnight. That was part of the point. They always wait to midnight to get going. They think it’s funny.”

  Gregor Demarkian was circling the few indentations in the ground that were left as evidence of what had happened to the Jeep. Martin thought he looked like a dog trying to get comfortable enough to go to sleep. He stopped and looked back in the direction of Martin and Henry’s house. Then he did another circle of the area and looked down the hill.

  “What’s down there?” he asked.

  “Capernaum Road,” Henry said. “Town-maintained dirt. Except I think it’s Watertown, not Morris.”

  “It is Watertown,” Martin said.

  “All these towns up here sort of wrap around each other,” Stacey Spratz said to Gregor Demarkian.

  Gregor Demarkian was looking at the ground again.

  “Does anybody have any idea of how the Jeep actually got here? Did it drive up from the house?”

  “It couldn’t have,” Henry said. “We would have heard it. We were sitting right there in our front room.”

  “How about down from the Litchfield County Museum?”

  “It couldn’t have gotten through,” Martin said. “There’s a path to that but it’s a footpath. It’s not wide enough for a Jeep.”

  “Trees,” Henry said solemnly.

  “All right,” Gregor Demarkian said. “That seems to leave two possibilities. Either in from the road out front, or up from down there. There was no indication?”

  “It’s all rocks,” Stacey Spratz said apologetically. “There’s nothing to leave tire tracks in. Everybody likes gravel drives.”

  They all looked down at the hill that led to Capernaum Road. That was rocks, too, but bigger ones than what would be on a gravel drive. Martin thought this was really pitiful. On television, when the police conducted investigations, they used state-of-the-art equipment and mobile crime labs. They were able to find microscopic cloth fibers on blades of grass.

  “I don’t know what you’re going to find up here, just looking around,” Martin said. “They took the Jeep away the next morning. That was Saturday. And then we tidied up some. That’s what we’re paid to do. Keep the cemetery tidy.”

  “The cemetery is not in use any longer?” Gregor Demarkian asked.

  “Well, of course it’s in use,” Martin said. “We’ve got dead people up here. Dozens of them.”

  “He means in use by people today,” Henry said. “They don’t bury anybody new up here, that’s what he wants to know. They haven’t buried anybody new up here for a long time.”

  “How long a time?” Gregor Demarkian asked.

  “Maybe a hundred and fifty years,” Henry said.

  “There are still Fairchilds out there someplace,” Martin said. “They’ve got a right to be buried here if they want to be. ‘Cept none of them ever seem to want to be.”

  “Do they visit their dead?” Gregor Demarkian asked.

  “Of course they don’t.” Henry said. “Do you visit the graves of people in your family died around Civil War? Nobody visits graves that old.”

  “Mr. Demarkian’s graves would probably be in Europe somewhere,” Martin said.

  Gregor Demarkian made another circle of the area. Then he straightened up. “All right,” he said. “That’s the most I can do here. The Jeep was really banged up?”

  “It was damned near totaled,” Henry said.

  “You can go down to Faye Dallmer’s place and see it,” Stacey Spratz said.

  “What I want to know is whether it was more banged up than it should have been just from driving up to this part of the cemetery. Even if, say, it came from down there.”

  “It looked like it had been in a head-on collision,” Henry said.

  Gregor looked from one to the other of them and nodded. “All right,” he said again. “That’s what I needed to know. I thank you both for taking the time and the trouble to help us out.”

  “It was no problem at all,” Martin said.

  “It put a little interest in the day, if you want to know the truth,” Henry said. “Not a lot happens up here. You get bored.”

  “I don’t get bored,” Martin said.

  They walked down the hill toward the house and Stacey Spratz’s state police car. What Martin had said was perfectly true. He didn’t get bored—listless, sometimes, but not bored. But then, he didn’t think of the Jeep and the murder of Kayla Anson as putting a little interest into the day. He didn’t know how he thought of them.

  They got to the state police car. Gregor Demarkian got into the front passenger seat. Stacey Spratz opened the driver’s side door and leaned on it for a moment.

  “We’ll probably have to come back,” he said. “We’ll give you a call.”

  “Fine,” Henry said.

  Martin went back up on the porch. It was definitely colder than it had been. He should have worn his barn jacket instead of just this thick flannel shirt. He wondered what would happen to him when he died. He couldn’t be buried in the Fairchild Family Cemetery. If he died before Henry, maybe Henry would have him cremated. If he died after, there would be nobody to do for him at all.

  Henry came back up on the porch.

  “You ever think about dying?” Martin asked him.

  “No,” Henry said.

  “You want to tell me why you told that Demarkian man we were sitting in the front room when the Jeep crashed, when you know as well as I that you were out in back and I was on the porch?”

  Seven

  1

  Later, Gregor Demarkian would wonder if he had gone about it wrong—if there was something he should have done that he didn’t do, if there was something he did do that he should have left undone. At the time, he hardly thought of himself as making a decision. There was so much going on in the case, so much that he didn’t understand. He was captive to Stacey Spratz and his state police car, too. Gregor didn’t think he had ever been in a place where what he needed to see so was spread out, or separated by so much dead space. He supposed Donna Moradanyan Donahue would not be happy about his calling good forest land and open meadows “dead.” In spite of the fact that she was staying on Cavanaugh Street, she declared great affection for nature and the outdoors. Gregor had never understood it, himself. He was an urban animal, born and raised in the middle of Philadelphia, forever afterward more comfortable with asphalt than mulch. He also tended to assume the existence of public transportation, which was not a safe assumption. Out here, he could die of exposure waiting for a bus.

  “I have an appointment for us with Greer at his house,” Stacey Spratz said. “You won’t believe this place. Cedar modern, post and beam, millions of windows. Hangs off the side of a hill, you think it’s just going to co
llapse one day in the rain. But it’s been up there for five years.”

  “Only five years? I thought Greer had been in business for longer than that.”

  “I don’t know how long he’s been in business, I only know when he built the house. I do remember when the business went big, though. It was about two-and-a-half years ago. All of a sudden, there were ads everywhere. He must have spent a mint.”

  “Or the company did.”

  “I never get how that works. My brother-in-law, he’s got a body shop business out in Manchester. If the company spends money, he spends money. It’s all his money one way or another, you know? But some of these guys, the company gets big enough and it’s not all their money anymore.”

  Gregor tried to think of a way to explain the principle of legal incorporation to Stacey Spratz, and failed at the attempt. He had known officers like Spratz often in his years in the FBI, especially after the founding of the behavior sciences unit, where liaisons with local forces were a matter of almost daily routine. Stacey Spratz would spend his career in a uniform. He would be honest and efficient. He might even be promoted to sergeant. Beyond that, he would not be able to go, no matter how often he pushed all the right buttons, crossed all the right Ts, dotted all the right Is. He lacked both imagination and sophistication. Out here, most of the time, that didn’t matter. In a major city, like Hartford or Bridgeport, it would be fatal. That was the trouble with the state police. It covered a lot of territory. Any serious promotion would require Stacey Spratz to go into places he was not familiar with and deal with people who were far more cynical, and unrelenting, than any people he had so far known.

  They had gone for miles without seeing any other indications of civilization than speed limit signs—didn’t they name the roads out here? Gregor wondered. Didn’t they feel the need to post the route numbers?—when they came to a clearing on the side of the road. The clearing had a sign out in front of it that said LINDA’S PARTY STORE, and beyond the sign a low clapboard building that looked like it might once have been a house. It also looked about ready to fall down. Gregor didn’t think it could have been painted in a year.

  “Pull in here,” Gregor told Stacey. “I want to make a phone call.”

  “Phone call?”

  “There are two pay phones right over there.”

  The pay phones were standing side by side on black metal posts just outside Linda’s Party Store’s front door. Gregor had no idea why Southern New England Telephone had thought it worth their while to install two of them. Gregor wondered if Linda managed to make any money. Maybe the local people thought it was worth their while to drive all the way out here for liquor. Maybe they weren’t really “all the way out here” at all, but had traveled another one of their pretzel routes and ended up almost back to where they had started.

  Stacey pulled into the parking lot next to the phone. Gregor got out of the car and rummaged around in the pockets of his trousers for change. Linda’s Party Store had made a halfhearted attempt to decorate for Halloween. There was a jack-o’-lantern next to the front door. There was an orange banner on the side of the building with a picture of a black cat on it. Gregor was suddenly homesick for Cavanaugh Street and Donna Moradanyan’s lunatic decorating, even though he knew that she hadn’t done it this time. He didn’t know what he was going to do when she moved and started decorating a different building. Maybe he and old George Tekemanian would be able to convince her to come back and decorate theirs, as well.

  He found a pile of change in one pocket and put it out on the little stainless-steel ledge above the hanging phone book. He reminded himself that if he could remember his calling card number, he wouldn’t need change for the phone so often. He reminded himself as well that if he could only remember to bring his calling card along in his wallet, he wouldn’t need to remember the number and he wouldn’t need the change at the same time. He was just so paranoid about carrying around cards. He’d seen too many people get their lives shredded because they’d lost control of their plastic.

  He punched a bunch of coins into the machine and dialed the inn. It was only after he’d done it that he realized he was making a local call. It was really impossible to find anything at all around here, or to know where anything was. When the woman at the inn picked up, he asked for his own room. Then he listened to the phone ring for a while and wondered what had happened to Bennis Hannaford.

  She must have been in the bathroom, or asleep, he decided, a second later, when the phone was picked up. She certainly sounded tired. He tried to lean against the side of the booth and found he couldn’t do it. It was one of those new booths that weren’t booths at all, but little freestanding cubicles, practically out in the air and in public.

  “Bennis?” He said.

  “Oh,” Bennis said. “It’s you. I was wondering what you’re doing.”

  “We’re on our way to interview Kayla Anson’s boyfriend. Except that he’s not a boy. If you know what I mean.”

  “Peter Greer. Who owns Goldenrod.”

  “Right.”

  “I’ve been lying down.”

  “I thought you might have been. That’s rather why I called. I was getting a little worried about your health.”

  There was a little pause on the other end of the line. Gregor thought that Bennis must be dragging on a cigarette. He thought that even though he hadn’t heard her light up, and he should have, if she had been asleep when he called.

  “My health is fine,” she said finally. “I’m just a little tired. Maybe I’m just a little depressed. This hasn’t been a lot of fun.”

  “No, I can see where it wouldn’t be.”

  “Are you going to be long?”

  “I don’t know,” Gregor said. “I expect it depends on how things go with Peter Greer. And then what else Stacey has for me. I’m trying to convince him to draw me a map.”

  “Probably a good idea.”

  “Definitely a good idea, but it isn’t going over very well. I think he doesn’t understand how confused I get. It can be very frustrating.”

  “I think I have to he down again,” Bennis said. “I really am tired beyond belief. I’m sorry, Gregor.”

  “Just as long as you aren’t angry with me,” Gregor said. “I don’t know why, but I keep getting this feeling—”

  “I’m not angry with you. Believe me. I’m not angry with you in the least. I’m just—tired. And distracted. Okay?”

  “Yes,” Gregor said.

  “I’m going to get a little more sleep.”

  “All right. I’m going to let Stacey Spratz drive me around. You can get in touch with me if you want to, you know. All you have to do is call the state police dispatcher and tell him who you are. I put you down as one of the people they’re supposed to notify me immediately if you call.”

  “Who else did you put down?”

  “Old George Tekemanian and Tibor.”

  “Not Donna?”

  “I’d never get off the phone.”

  “I’m going to get off and close my eyes.”

  “Right,” Gregor said. And then, because the situation seemed to call for something more, “I missed you. When you were out here and I wasn’t Did you know that?”

  “Yes. I missed you, too. Go work.”

  Gregor put the phone back and stepped away from the booth. He wished he had some other name for it besides booth. It wasn’t a booth. He didn’t know what it was.

  He went back to the car and got into the passenger seat. The engine was still running. Stacey had Big D 103 FM on the radio and was singing along to the Beach Boys doing “Sloop John B.”

  “Everything okay?” he asked, when Gregor got back into the car.

  “Fine,” Gregor said.

  Everything was fine, too. Gregor was sure of it. He thought the nagging doubt at the back of his brain was just a residual nattering from his obsessiveness about love earlier in the week. He could be obsessive about just about anything if he let himself.

  “It’s not
all that far from Peter Greer’s,” Stacey told him. “It’s just a little bit farther up in the hills.”

  2

  Peter Greer’s house was in New Preston, and “a little bit farther up in the hills” was a good way to describe it, although Gregor might have dispensed with the “little.” The hills were relentless. Gregor had no idea what people did out here when it started to snow—and they had to do something, because there suddenly seemed to be a lot more of them than there had been. It wasn’t that the area was builtup. There was nothing at all like a subdivision, for instance, or a city block. There were, however, a lot of houses, both close to the road and farther back, placed every which way on lots that all seemed to be protected by low stone walls. Every once in a while, there was a wall with a driveway entrance but nothing else to be seen. The house beyond was protected by shrubbery or a thick tangle of trees or sheer distance, so that it couldn’t be seen from the road. Peter Greer’s was one of these houses. At first, all Gregor could see was a square stone pillar with the number 267 attached to it on a burnished bronze plaque, and an oversized blue mailbox.

  “If I lived out here, I’d five close to the road,” Stacey said. “I mean, think of the days when you don’t want to go out, but you have to get into your car just to get to your mailbox. Either that, or trek through the snow and the rain just to find out that all you’ve got is another mailing from Publisher’s Clearinghouse.”

  Peter Greer’s driveway was narrow and rutted. Stacey Spratz’s patrol car bumped along, threatening to blow a tire every few feet.

  “Gravel drives cost a mint to keep up,” he said. “And people run out of money and they stop doing it, and this is what you get instead.”

  “Not good,” Gregor said.

  “Well, the idiot has probably got an ATV. That could explain it, too.”