by Jane Haddam
“No, Krekor. I don’t even think she could be in Philadelphia yet. It hasn’t been that long. And she wouldn’t be here. She is going to her doctor’s.”
“Which doctor?”
Tibor appeared to think about this for a moment. “Not the lady doctor. The other one.”
“Gerald Harrison.”
“Yes, that one.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, Krekor. But she had me call him for her. To tell him she was coming. And she said to tell him it was an emergency.”
Gregor took a deep breath. “How could it have been an emergency?” he asked reasonably. “She drove down to Philadelphia, didn’t she? She took her car.”
“Yes, Krekor, she is driving.”
“Then she must be well enough to drive. What kind of an emergency could there be that would make it necessary to see her doctor—when? When do you figure she’ll get to Philadelphia?”
“Around seven o’clock, Krekor. Yes, I know. It’s crazy. I can’t make it out. But that was what she wanted. I am surprised she didn’t tell you.”
“I was out”
“You were investigating a murder, Krekor, yes. I understand that. But I think you’d better come home as soon as you can. Because Bennis does not panic for no reason. So I think it possible that this is serious.”
Gregor ran his hands through his hair. Serious. Yes, he could see that it might be serious. There was always the chance that a health problem could be serious. Even a little health problem that you didn’t think much about at all.
Suddenly, he couldn’t stop thinking about Bennis’s cough.
Four
1
Somebody—Mallory, probably—had put a jack-o’-lantern on the top of the steps that led to the front door, and lit a candle in it. Sally Martindale parked the car halfway up the drive and sat looking at the light. There were lights on in the house, too, in the keeping room and beyond. The car was making that rattling noise that said it was almost out of gas. Sally Martindale was out of money. She thought she should have kept some of it to get home on, considering how much she had started with, but in the end she hadn’t been able to stop trying. That was what mattered, trying. She had always believed that. It just seemed, sometimes, as if trying didn’t work for her. She tried and tried, and everything came apart.
This was the way the house looked best, in the almost dark, with the lights on. You couldn’t see anything at all of the fact that she hadn’t had enough money to keep it up in the last year or two. The paint peeling on the northern side didn’t show up in the dark. Neither did the sag in the railing on the little porch that led to the side door. Even the windows might as well have been washed. When she and Frank had still been together, she had had people in to take care of what needed to be taken care of: Ray’s Remodeling to repair sags and rebuilt porches; Proe’s Lawn Service to do the grass and the shrubbery and the gutters; Martin and Sheedy to paint inside as well as out. Now she didn’t even have the lawn service. Mallory had gone to Sears and bought a lawn mower. She shaved the grass short once a week when she had a little time away from her classes.
I’m going to go to jail, Sally thought and then she rubbed the palms of her hands over her face, over and over again, as if she were trying to rub out a makeup stain. Her head hurt. Her body felt drained of blood. She had cried off and on on the drive home—cried bitterly and without shame, since no one was able to hear her—but now she was just tired, and beyond caring. What she couldn’t get out of her mind was herself at Mallory’s age, standing at the mailbox of her parents’ plain asphalt driveway, opening the letter that told her she had been accepted at Smith. She could see the houses that surrounded her, ordinary little Cape Cod houses with plastic awnings over the windows and plastic flower boxes attached beneath them. She could hear Didi McConneky and Linda Giametti laughing in that high-pitched way they had when they were talking about boys. She was, she had thought then, on a long and exciting journey out—out of a life in little houses like these, out of too many pregnancies too early, out of following soap operas instead of the exhibition season at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She had had a vision of herself, grown up and on her own, and in the end it had been a vision about money. Later, at the end of her second year at Smith, she had gone to Linda Giametti’s wedding, and that had been about money, too—money spent on a wedding dress and a reception that was as much as some people used for the down payment on a house, money charged to credit cards and taken out in loans, money thrown away on a spectacle that lasted only a few hours on a single day. She had felt as if she had a secret that no one else could share. She knew what really mattered, and how to make sure that her life would have some meaning. She knew how to get away from all this.
Now she got out of the car and looked around. It was cold, this late in October. Tomorrow was Halloween. If Linda Giametti could see this house, she would not know that there was something about it that was better than her own. She would like the size, but she would think that its age spoke against it. She wouldn’t be able to understand why Sally hadn’t opted for vinyl siding. Maybe the truth was that you could never get out. You always ended where you started, even if it seemed you didn’t.
Mallory was in the kitchen. Sally could see her moving around in there. She looked at the sag in the porch rail near the kitchen door and the jack-o’-lantern near the front one and opted for the sag. Everything in her life sagged these days. What difference did it make?
The kitchen door actually let her into the pantry. Sally put her pocketbook on the floor and called out, “Mallory?”
“In here.”
Sally picked her pocketbook up again. She didn’t know what she was doing. She wasn’t thinking straight. She went into the kitchen and saw Mallory with her back to her, working at the big black eight-burner restaurant stove.
“Well,” she said.
“Ruth Grandmere called,” Mallory said, without turning around. “She said it was important. In fact, she said it was urgent.”
Sally pulled out one of the chairs at the kitchen table and sat down. It was an Eldred Wheeler chair and an Eldred Wheeler trestle table. The set had cost something like fifteen thousand dollars, new.
Mallory turned around and faced her. “I think you’ve been caught,” she said.
“Maybe,” Sally said carefully. “Maybe not. As of this morning, they knew somebody had been taking the money. They didn’t know it was me.”
“From Kayla Anson’s account.”
“Oh, from all the accounts, or a lot of them. I never took from men. They pay too much attention. I never took from women lawyers, either. The housewives were the best. Most of the time, they didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on.”
“Do you know how much?”
“Before today?”
“You took some money today?” Mallory looked startled. “After you already knew they knew that something was wrong?”
“I was going to fix it,” Sally said. “I thought that if I could only do it right, if I could go out to Ledyard and really make a stand—”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
“If I could do it right, I could fix it. So I took—I don’t know. Some money. Fifteen hundred, maybe. Or twenty-five hundred. I can’t remember.”
“How can you not remember?”
“Because I can’t.”
“Jesus.”
Sally started to rub her face again. Mallory was pacing back and forth. This was all so complicated. Mallory just didn’t understand it.
“It was because it wasn’t fair,” Sally said finally. “They just—those people—the Ansons and the Crawfords and the Ridenours—those people just are, if you know what I mean. They don’t have to do anything. They just are. But people like me have to work at it. And luck isn’t evenly distributed.”
“I think,” Mallory said, “that you’re having a nervous breakdown.”
“If life were fair, I would have won today. I would have come home with a whole pil
e of money and I would have been able to put the money back, and there would still be enough left over, you know, to get us by. Because I really don’t know what to do, Mallory. I really don’t. We barely had enough to get through last winter, and now it’s worse. I’m behind on everything. People call here all the time, the credit card companies, those people, they call all the time. You don’t know what it’s like. And I don’t know what to do. And now this. I suppose they’ll put me in jail.”
“I don’t think so,” Mallory said. “Not as long as you pay the money back.”
“I can’t pay the money back. It must be ten thousand dollars by now, counting today. Maybe even more.”
“You can sell the house,” Mallory said. “That will pay back the country club, and it will pay off the credit card bills, and it will leave you enough for another house—”
“A smaller house,” Sally said, feeling suddenly savage. “A more sensible house. Just like your father wanted us to have. While he moved into a duplex penthouse on the Upper East Side and bought a place on the Vineyard for his sweetie pie.”
“Listen,” Mallory said. “This is not about my father. This is a crisis.”
“He caused the crisis.”
“Maybe he did. But you don’t want to go to jail. And I don’t want you to go. And there’s no reason why you should. We can sell the house. We can get something smaller. We can make do. I can go to nursing school—”
“Your father will pay for—”
“I don’t want him to pay for, except nursing school if he’s willing. It makes perfect sense. It’s a good field. If you specialize in surgery or crisis pediatrics you can make a pile of money. I can turn it into something else later. It’s a start, Mother.”
“It’s the kind of thing the girls I grew up with did, if they were considered bright. Nursing and teaching. The two main professions for lower-middle-class women.”
“You care too much about class.”
“The world cares too much about class,” Sally said. “What do you think would happen to us, if we did what you want us to do? Do you think we would still have any friends? People would mean well, of course, but it wouldn’t last long. They’d get sick of our poverty and drift off. We’d be—alone out here.”
“We’re going to be just as alone out here if you go to jail for embezzlement,” Mallory said. “You’re not making any sense.”
“I kept thinking I could do it,” Sally said. “I went out there and I played the slots for hours. Hours and hours. I worked so hard. When I was growing up, it was a kind of truism. If you worked hard you got what you wanted. But it didn’t happen this time.”
“I don’t think working the slots is what they meant by working, Mother.”
“No,” Sally said. “I suppose it wasn’t.”
Mallory went back to the stove. She was cooking dinner. That was good. Sally could use something to eat. She hadn’t eaten for hours and hours. She hadn’t wanted to waste the money, in Ledyard, on food.
When she was growing up, the purpose of her life had been clear: to get out, to get free, to escape. If she was going to end up right back where she started, then what had been the point of it all? Had she really had to come to Connecticut to see her daughter train as a nurse, or to live out her life in a little ranch house with a patio out back? Had she really come all this way just to be the person she could have been if she’d stayed at home? Life was a tunnel, that was what she thought Life was a black hole that sucked you in and kept you captive.
Mallory came to the table, bearing a small plate of fried chicken.
“You’d better call Mrs. Grandmere back,” she said. “It’s not going to do you any good to postpone all this until tomorrow.”
2
Ever since Jennifer Crawford had come out to Margaret Anson’s house to pick up Annabel in the Volvo station wagon that served as the family “country” car, she had been nattering—and all the time she had been nattering, Annabel had been trying not to listen. Now that they were at home, the nattering had gotten even worse. Jennifer fussed, that was the problem. Jennifer always fussed. At the moment, she was fussing about the state of Annabel’s sweater, which she thought of as completely inadequate.
“In my day, sweaters were made of wool,” she kept saying. “I don’t know who got this idea to make them from cotton. At least wool sweaters kept you warm.”
Annabel was warm enough. She was almost hot. Toward the end of the time she had spent at Margaret Anson’s house, a woman who had identified herself as a doctor had come along and made her drink two stiff shots of Johnny Walker Black. Annabel had had to swallow them in two swift single gulps, like guys doing divebombers in a bar.
“It’s what they seem to have around this place,” the doctor had said cheerfully. “At my house, all we have is beer.”
Truthfully, Annabel couldn’t quite understand why she wasn’t drunk. She thought she ought to be flying. Instead, she was just a little hot, and desperately tired. She just didn’t want to sleep. Every time she allowed her eyes to close, she saw Margaret Anson’s face, in death, with the eyes bugged out and the neck at that uncomfortable tilt. She put out her hand again to touch the body and felt that it was already cold. What she couldn’t get out of her mind was the really important question. She wanted to know if Kayla had felt like that, too, when she was dead.
“I’ve been thinking,” Jennifer said now. “Maybe we ought to go back into the city for the rest of the fall. You’re coming out in the city as well as here. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be in Manhattan.”
“I’m all right,” Annabel said.
“Well, yes, sweetie, I know you are. It’s not that I don’t think you’re all right. It’s me, really, I guess. I’m sure this has upset you enormously. It’s upset me. And I suppose I don’t really want to be around it while it’s going on.”
“Maybe they wouldn’t let me leave,” Annabel said. “Maybe I’m a suspect.”
“Oh, surely not, sweetie. You couldn’t be a suspect. What an absurd idea. Nobody would think that for a minute.”
“That Mr. Demarkian thought it.”
“What?”
“Mr. Demarkian. The detective. He thinks I’m a suspect. I talked to him today. I don’t see how you can blame him. I was Kayla’s friend. I was right there where Margaret Anson was—was—” Annabel took a deep breath. “Dead,” she finished.
“I don’t see what your being Kayla’s friend has to do with it. And as for Margaret Anson, well, let’s face it. If that Mr. Demarkian is making a list of people who hated her enough to kill her, it would look like the Manhattan phone directory.”
“I want a cup of tea,” Annabel said.
What Annabel really wanted was a cup of tea with another shot of that Johnny Walker Black in it, but she wasn’t going to ask for it. For all her fake IDs and raids on bars for St. Pauli Girl Light, she really neither liked nor approved of alcohol. She didn’t really like the way people got when they drank, and she especially didn’t like the way so many of the people she knew seemed to be unable to go a day without drinking. Even people her own age. There had been girls at boarding school who had kept flasks in their underwear, so that they’d be able to take nips off them every once in a while during the day. Annabel knew everything there was to know about buying liquor in secret in small towns near fancy schools, about getting the liquor back into the dorm without being seen, about drinking without getting caught at drinking. It came with the territory.
Jennifer came bustling over with a cup of tea. Annabel hadn’t even heard the kettle whistle.
“Listen,” Jennifer said. “Even if they do have to think of you as a suspect, because police procedure is police procedure, you know. I understand how it is. Even if they have to do that, you could still come in and spend the fall in the city with me. You could go shopping. You could go to the theater. There would be something for you to do there. Unlike here. Where you’re stuck. So to speak.”
“I wanted to call Tommy about t
he car,” Annabel said.
“The car?”
“The night Kayla died. I was out with Tommy Haggerty. He got drunk as a skunk and I left him in the bar and drove his car back here so that I could get home. It was parked in our driveway all that morning, Mother, for God’s sake. It was fire engine red.”
“Well,” Jennifer said, “as long as you don’t drive with anybody who’s drunk. That’s all I ask. Just stay sober yourself or have a designated driver.”
“Yes, I know. But the thing is, I don’t drive all that well in any case, and I clipped a mailbox. So the paint got scraped on the front near the headlights on the passenger’s side. And I’ve been wondering if I should offer to pay for the repairs, you know, or if the fact that he made a mess of himself and forced me to find my own way home should be enough in the way of payment. And I still don’t know what to do. But I’ve got to do it.”
“Now?”
“No,” Annabel said, feeling confused again. “No, I guess not. I don’t know. I was just thinking about it.”
“I think you’re in shock,” Jennifer said firmly. “You should put something serious in that tea. Enough honey to make it thick, that would work. Let me get you some honey.”
“I don’t like honey.”
“I know you like to watch your weight, Annabel, but this is no time for it, trust me. This is a time to take care of yourself. I wish I had some chocolate in the house.”
“What were you like, when you were my age?” Annabel asked. “Were you like you are now? Were you different?”
Jennifer stopped in the doorway. It was a dramatic pause, but it was in character. The rest of the Litchfield County ladies would pause like this, too. We look a lot alike, Annabel thought, and then wondered why she’d thought it. Most of the time she believed that she looked nothing like her mother at all.
“What an odd question,” Jennifer said. “Of course I must have been different. I was much younger then. Let me get you that honey.”
When people died, their faces froze in place. They stared into the future and saw nothing. You could see it in their eyes. Someday, her own eyes would stare into the future like that and it would all be over.