by Jane Haddam
“For God’s sake,” I said. “You’re going to get me killed.”
“You’re going to get yourself killed,” Phoebe said. “You’re supposed to be in the hospital.”
“I couldn’t get anything done in the hospital,” I said. I held up the silver thing for her to see. “You know what this is?”
Phoebe is not easily deflected. “I want to know why you’re not in the hospital,” she said, “and I want you to tell me while we’re in a cab taking you back.”
I did the only thing I could do. I ignored her. I waved the silver thing at her again.
“It was in this envelope full of stuff from my pockets,” I said. “What is it?”
Phoebe squinted at it. “Oh,” she said. “You were holding that when they brought you into the hospital. You wouldn’t let go of it for anything. They kept trying to get it away from you and you wouldn’t unlock your fingers. Not even drugged.”
“I was holding it when I came into the hospital?” I said.
“That’s right. I think you had it with you all the way in. It took a general anesthetic and some kind of sleeping shot to get you to give it up.”
“But what is it?” I asked.
Phoebe regarded it solemnly. “It’s a little silver thing,” she said.
I said “Fine” and headed for the Braedenvoorst’s archway. The Braedenvoorst does not have a door fronting the street. It has an archway, which leads to a courtyard. If you get through the archway (the archwayman has a gun), you are allowed to blunder around the courtyard looking for the one of fifteen identical entryways leading to your apartment.
Phoebe trotted along behind me, frantic. “But Pay,” she said. “You can’t just get up and walk out of a hospital. Your doctor has to okay it. I talked to your doctor yesterday. He said it would be nearly a week.”
“Tell that to Public Relations over at AST,” I said. “Tell that to Dana. I’m supposed to be in Cleveland in less than a week.”
“Cleveland?”
The archwayman gave Phoebe a smile and a nod and me a curt little wave. Phoebe does not live in the Braedenvoorst, but the staff wishes she did.
I strode through the courtyard, keeping the pace Phoebe expected of me. I was already exhausted, but it wasn’t the time to show it.
“I couldn’t get anything done in the hospital,” I repeated, ducking into my entryway and heading for the elevator. “I call Dana to ask for Marilou Saunders’s private line, she hangs up on me. If I call Marilou, she’ll hang up on me. You can’t get anything done on the phone.”
“I don’t understand,” Phoebe said. “What do you want to get done?”
The elevator, an ancient brass cage, bumped to a stop in front of us. I popped the latch and pulled the metal grille out of the way.
“Most of what I want,” I said, “is to tell that preserved-in-chemicals nitwit that I know what she’s doing and she’s not going to get away with it. For starters.” I pushed the button for the fifth floor. “After that, I’m going to deck her. After that—”
“But Pay,” Phoebe said. “You can’t do any of that.”
“You want to bet?”
“I don’t have to bet,” Phoebe said. “I know. They already talked to Marilou Saunders, last night, yesterday afternoon, sometime. Right after you woke up. She talked to Nick and she talked to Tony Marsh and then she just-—disappeared. People have been looking for her all day and no one can find her.”
I considered this. “No one can find her? You mean she didn’t show up for work?”
Phoebe looked uneasy. “Well, no,” she said. “She was there this morning. And she taped, of course. It’s just that—”
“They wouldn’t let anyone on the set and by the time the taping was over she’d disappeared,” I said. “Like that.”
“Well,” Phoebe said. “Well. I guess so.”
“Which means she isn’t seeing anybody because she doesn’t want to see anybody,” I said. “What about her apartment?”
“She isn’t at her apartment,” Phoebe said. “At least, she wasn’t a few hours ago. Nick and I both went. And somebody from Tony Marsh’s people.”
“Ah yes,” I said. “Tony Marsh’s people.” The elevator stopped on five. I let us out. “Why don’t you tell me how diligent Tony Marsh’s people have been about trying to get hold of Marilou Saunders?”
Phoebe stepped into the fifth-floor hall, dainty, decorous, careful. “Marilou Saunders may be a twit,” she said, “but she’s an important woman. You can’t just go hauling off questioning her about God knows what just because one person says so when everybody else says not.”
“Who says not?”
“Dana didn’t see anybody but you,” Phoebe said stiffly.
“Then Dana arrived after the other two were gone,” I said. “Do you think I’m hallucinating? Do you really and honestly?”
“They talked to her once and she denied it,” Phoebe said. “And there’s no evidence she was there. Nobody else saw her.”
I began looking for my apartment keys. “Don’t start,” I said. “I’ve had enough of this. I watch a perfectly innocuous woman get poisoned at my feet. I’m out for three days. I wake up and people who’ve known me forever and should know better keep acting like I’ve turned into a lunatic. I don’t need this, Weiss.”
“Patience,” Phoebe said. “Listen to me. It would be one thing if Sarah English was really dead. Or even missing. But she isn’t. She’s back in Holbrook and she’s fine. I don’t know what you saw.”
“Did you talk to her yourself?”
“Well, no,” Phoebe said. “She left a message with my service.”
“Anybody could have left a message with your service.”
“Patience—”
“I know what I saw. I saw Sarah English die. I know that sort of thing when I see it. Especially these days.”
“She went back to Holbrook and she’s fine,” Phoebe said. “You got poisoned by one of those nuts who doctor Halloween candy. She didn’t want to be in the way.”
I threw the keys on the floor. I’d tried every one of them. None of them fit my apartment door. Since this happens at least once a week, I picked them up again.
“Have you been in my apartment?” I said.
Phoebe nodded. “I just came from there.” She held up her velvet string bag. “I was getting you some stuff.”
“What about Sarah’s stuff?”
“There wasn’t any Sarah’s stuff,” she said. “She took it with her when she left.”
“How?”
“What do you mean, ‘how’?”
“How did she get her stuff if she didn’t have a key?”
Phoebe stared at me. She stared at the keys in my hand. She stared at the rose and gray wallpaper in the hall.
“You didn’t let her in,” I said.
“No,” she said.
“Nick didn’t let her in or he would have said something. And the building people might have let her through the arch, but they wouldn’t open my apartment for her.”
“Maybe you forgot,” Phoebe said. “Maybe you gave her the keys after all.”
“I have three sets of keys. One I carry. One you carry. One Nick carries.”
She took my keys out of my hand and fingered through them, frowning. Then she stood up very straight. “It’s not here,” she said.
“What?”
“It’s not here. It’s the one with the little knob at the bottom and it’s not here. Maybe you did give it to her.”
“I couldn’t have given it to her. I came back here after we all had dinner and opened the door myself.”
“Maybe you gave them to her later.”
“Maybe someone took them out of my purse while I was lying on the floor in Dana’s reception room.”
Phoebe weighed the keys in her hand. She bit her lip. She shuffled her feet.
“We’ll go to Holbrook,” I said. “She’s supposed to be in Holbrook—we’ll go to Holbrook and find her.”
T
WELVE
PHOEBE IS BETTER AT these things than I am. She doesn’t have to make lists. She had to borrow my bag, but that was detail. My bag was the only leather receptacle in New York capable of holding ten cans of decaffeinated Diet Coke, ten cans of Orange Crush, eight cream-cheese-and-olive sandwiches, two three-foot-long pepperonis, one quart of macaroni salad, six individual-serving bags of potato chips, a family pack of Chunky pecan bars, a pound box of Goobers, and three pieces of Phoebe’s mother’s kosher chocolate cake. When Phoebe traveled, she traveled prepared.
Nothing could have prepared us for our first sight of Holbrook, Connecticut. Phoebe had lived in cities all her life. I grew up in what people like my mother call “the country,” by which they mean an exurban ghetto for the respectably ancient WASP rich. Holbrook was a provincial trading center for failing tobacco farmers, factory hands from Sikorsky Aircraft, small-time law firms, and the kind of Specialty Dress Shop that sells orlon imitations of fifties after-five dresses to women who want to look different at the Volunteer Fire Department’s St. Valentine’s Day Ball. We got off the train onto a creaking wooden platform, walked three yards to a disintegrating wooden station, and descended to what passed for a street. The street had been paved the way carpet is laid down in an irregular room. There were strips of dirt at the edges of the tarmac.
There were no cars in the parking lot, and no signs of town. Phoebe peered into the dusky gray afternoon, frowning.
“Taxi,” she said. “Do you suppose there is a taxi?”
I pointed at a sign to a basement entrance to the station. It said, “Taxi Service in Holbrook and Suburbs.”
Phoebe headed for the stairs under the sign, holding her skirts away from the filthy railing and above the grease-skidded stairs. She pushed open the door at the bottom of the stairs and marched in like a general.
“Taxi?” she asked the man sitting at the desk in the corner. The desk had one missing leg. It listed, threatening to spill papers and Michelob cans everywhere. The man in the chair had a White Stag ski jacket over his head. He didn’t move.
Phoebe marched up to him. “Taxi,” she commanded. When he still didn’t move, she pulled the ski jacket away.
He was awake. His eyes were open. His breath was fouler than skunk cabbage. He gave Phoebe a wide grin and said, “Do I look like a taxi? Taxi’s out back. Ford Impala, ’67.”
“You’re the driver,” she said.
“That’s true,” he said. “I’m the driver.”
I got the cigarettes out of my pocket. I figured we were in for a lengthy impasse. Phoebe knew what she wanted, but she wasn’t sure she wanted it from him. He was drunk. He intended to get drunker. He had a pile of unopened Michelob cans under his chair.
Phoebe took a piece of paper out of her pocket and consulted it. “Three twenty-three Halston,” she said. “That’s where we want to go.”
“Three twenty-three Halston,” he said. “Nobody’s home.”
“I’ll leave a note,” Phoebe said.
“Three twenty-one Halston, there you have somebody home. Cassie’s got so many kids, she hasn’t left the house ’cept for deliveries the past five years.”
“Three twenty-three Halston,” Phoebe said.
“New York City,” the driver said. “Went away to become a big famous writer. Everybody’s heard about it. Practically took out an ad in the paper, Sarah did.”
Phoebe sighed. The man was not only drunk, but immobile. She obviously had no idea what to do with him. I did, but I wasn’t sure I should. Did I want four six-packs of beer driving me through what could turn out to be traffic?
“How far away is it?” I asked him. “Could we walk?”
He cocked an eyebrow at me. Actually, he cocked half an eyebrow at me, because he had only half an eyebrow above each eye. Otherwise, he had burn scars.
“Anybody could walk,” he said. “It’s out the other side of town on the river. Mystery walk, we call it.”
“Mystery walk?” Phoebe found this melodramatic in the extreme.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s a mystery where all them babies come from. Ain’t no men the women will admit to and ain’t no women the men will admit to, see what I mean.”
“Oh,” Phoebe said. “Sort of like a housing project for unwed mothers.”
“Unwed mothers?” I said.
“I think we ought to risk it,” Phoebe said. “This is getting worse by the minute.”
I started pulling out money.
Nothing about Sarah English was as I’d expected it to be. Instead of an apartment, she had one side of a vertically divided two-family house that was three years past “needing paint.” I got out of the cab and stood in the unpaved road looking at it. There was nothing neat about it, nothing loving or well cared for or hopeful. Shutters that had once been green hung from single hinges at the upstairs windows. The mailbox swung rusted and dented from a single loose nail pounded into a splintering wooden post. The door, once red, looked fire-blistered.
I looked at Phoebe and said, “Nobody who ever lived in this house ever wrote a book.”
“I know what you mean,” Phoebe said. She peered into the mailbox. It was empty. “She took her mail. She has to have been home.”
“If she ever gets any mail.”
“Sears ads,” Phoebe said. “And stuff from the Franklin Mint.”
I let that pass. Somebody who lived in this house had written a book. For some reason I was never going to be able to pin down, Sarah had been the exception. She had smelled of failure and not failed.
I walked back and forth in front of the mailbox, kicking the rubber soles of my Adidases in the crack in the first cement sidewalk step. Sarah’s situation had been worse than I’d imagined, needier. Looking at that house was an object lesson in the mechanics of entrenched despair. But Sarah had written a book and got it accepted for publication and come to New York. She had not been entrenched in anything.
I muttered something about “candidates for the gene pool” and started climbing the stairs to the walk, Phoebe trailing behind me. Somebody was home in 321, the other half of the two-family. Maybe Cassie, whoever she was, knew something about Sarah.
Phoebe chugged up beside me. “It wasn’t so different in Union City,” she said. “Not even different enough to notice.”
“I’ve been to your mother’s house,” I said. “She’s got clean curtains on the windows. She’s got fresh paint if she has to paint herself. It’s not the same.”
“Not for her,” Phoebe said. “You ever look around the rest of our neighborhood?”
“The rest of your neighborhood isn’t the point.”
“Keep things in perspective,” Phoebe said. “She was an unusual person, making something out of herself starting in a place like this. Granted. Still, it can be done. I did it. Nick did it. It’s not the equivalent of walking on water.”
“I didn’t say it was.” I did, however, think it was. One of the drawbacks of growing up in “comfortable” circumstances is the tendency to be mystified at how anyone lives outside them. Another is the tendency to be overly impressed by people who not only do but make an escape besides.
I rang the bell at 323, listened to the silence on the other side of the door, then crossed the porch.
“Nobody home,” I said.
“He told us that,” Phoebe said. “She could be at work.”
I said “Maybe,” but without the sarcasm I would have used back in New York. Phoebe no longer sounded so sure of finding Sarah; She kept looking over her shoulder, off the porch and across the road to the river. That river looked lethal. It gleamed rainbow slick in the weak sunlight. It moved like something congealed.
On the other side of the door to 321, a child was crying. A woman’s voice called out, asking Johnny to be quiet. Johnny didn’t oblige.
The door opened on a chain, showing me a single unpainted eye and an unlikely tuft of pale brown hair.
“I haven’t got it today,” the woman said. “Come back Friday.�
�
I was wearing olive drab fatigues and a “None of the Above” T-shirt I’d had made for the Carter-Reagan race and resurrected for Reagan-Mondale. Either bill collectors in Holbrook were an unusual lot, or the woman was blind.
“I’m looking for Sarah English,” I said.
The pale brown hair quivered. “Not home,” she said. “Out of town.”
Phoebe pushed to the front. “We got a call from her,” she said. “She said she was back.”
“Sarah called you?”
“That’s right,” Phoebe said.
Silence on the other side of the door. Labored breathing. The woman was a worse chain smoker than I. She took a long time thinking things through. She squinted the single eye at Phoebe and said, “You’re from New York.”
“That’s right,” Phoebe said.
“One of you someone named Caroline Dooley?”
I could see the will to lie rising like a balloon in Phoebe’s head. She beat it back. “No,” she said. “I’m Phoebe Damereaux and this is—”
“Phoebe Damereaux?”
The door slammed shut. The chain rattled in the groove. The door swung wide, revealing a short, gone-to-seed woman in a blue plaid flannel housecoat and half-teased hair, biting the butt of a cigarette. She advanced to the porch, staring at Phoebe’s face, her mouth and nose and eyes twisted into an attempt to look too tough to be fooled.
“You’re not wearing one of those things,” the woman said.
“Oh,” Phoebe said. “Well. They’re not very good for running around in.”
The woman squinted and twisted again, letting us know she was thinking it over. Then she gave us a curt nod and an incongruously sickly sweet smile.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’d have known you anywhere. I saw your picture in People magazine.”
After a comment like that, Phoebe usually says something about how she hopes the person has also read the new Phoebe Damereaux. This time she didn’t.
The woman was holding the door open for us, making ushering motions with her hands and the hanging flesh of her upper arms.
“Right this way,” she said. “I had no idea Sarah knew so many famous people in New York. I mean, I guess she’ll meet all the famous people now, won’t she? Becoming a famous writer herself. Probably moving out of here and going to live in the city first thing, like she always wanted to. Not that I blame her for moving out of here.”