by Jane Haddam
We followed the hand and arm movements into a small living room. There was a tin wastebasket in one corner, a foot high and six inches across, filled to overflowing with cigarette butts and Ring Ding wrappers and used Pampers crumpled into brown streaked balls. There was a television set on an orange crate with a stack of yellowing newspapers beside it. There was a pile of empty Burger King wrappers on the couch. A listless baby sat in the middle of them, crying.
“I’m Cassie Arbeth,” the woman said, hurrying over to the couch to pick up the baby. She held him sideways, like a sack of raw potatoes she was having trouble carrying home from the store. “I’ve been taking care of things while Sarah’s in New York. Only the thing is, I can’t watch everything every minute of the day, you know, and with my five and Sarah’s Adrienne—”
“Adrienne?” The bottom of my stomach departed for Middle Earth.
Cassie nodded vigorously. “Adrienne’s no more trouble than any of the others, she’s only seven but she stays out of trouble, that one, but with Adrienne and my five to look after I don’t have no time to be hanging around the porch, and with the noise they make and all—”
“Adrienne is Sarah’s daughter,” I said.
Something about the way I said it must have sounded odd. Cassie smirked. “Yeah,” she said. “Adrienne. Told Sarah it was something else in a name, least ’round here, but Sarah was always reading books.” She sounded amazed that anyone would read books. “Sarah is a lot older than me,” she said. She meant it as an explanation.
I looked at her more closely. Sarah had been in her late thirties. Cassie Arbeth looked fifty-eight.
“I’m twenty-four,” Cassie Arbeth said. She rushed to the built-in bookcases under the stairway and extracted the only books there, four Holbrook High School yearbooks, each bound in imitation red leather with a raised plastic shield on the front. I looked at the dates and subtracted. She was only twenty-four. At most, twenty-five.
“Sarah isn’t in any of these,” she said. “Sarah was class of ’65. God, that seems ancient to me. Not that Sarah showed her age so much.”
Next to Cassie Arbeth, Hermione Gingold didn’t show her age much.
“Wait a minute,” Cassie said. She ran out to the porch and yelled “Adrienne!” at the top of her lungs. The word echoed down the empty street, finally drowning in the river. “The thing is,” she said, coming back, “did you come from this Caroline Dooley or did you come about Adrienne?”
Phoebe was about to say something. I glared her into keeping silent. Cassie didn’t remember what we’d said on the porch about looking for Sarah. I was beginning to think it was just as well.
“What did Caroline Dooley call about?” I asked.
“Well, it’s like I was saying. I got a lot to do and I can’t be watching everything every minute. I must’ve been out back sometime or else it was when I was asleep, you can get robbed on this street night or day, you know, but it could have been night, I told this Caroline Dooley that—”
“You had a robbery?”
“Sarah had a robbery. That’s what I’ve been telling you. Sarah had a robbery and a bunch of stuff probably got taken, but I can’t tell what. I called this number she gave me, but nobody’s ever home—”
“Probably my number,” I said. “I really haven’t been home.”
“Yeah, well,” Cassie said. “I don’t know what this Caroline Dooley wanted, but I told her I wasn’t going to find it for her. Things are so messed up in there I’m never going to find anything. Not that things aren’t messed up in here, you know what I mean, but it’s different.”
“Right,” I said.
A small girl, pale blond and plain, appeared in the front doorway. Her hair was brushed sleekly back and caught with an elastic at the nape of her neck. Her dress was starched and pressed and clean. She looked like a Christmas angel come to roost at the town dump. She was very, very tense.
“Adrienne,” Cassie said. “These are friends of your mother’s.”
Adrienne and I regarded each other. Usually, children take to Phoebe and avoid me. My height frightens them. My diffidence puts them off. With Adrienne English it was different. We each knew what the other was thinking. Better, we each knew what the other was thinking about Cassie.
I put out my hand. “I’m Pay McKenna,” I said.
“How do you do,” Adrienne said. She turned to Phoebe and waited politely.
“Phoebe Damereaux,” Phoebe said. She sounded breathless. The sound of Adrienne’s voice had been unexpected. Phoebe was concentrating on me.
Adrienne, too, was concentrating on me. “Is my mother going to be back soon?”
I thought of Sarah on Dana’s reception-room floor, Adrienne in Cassie Arbeth’s house. Somewhere there would be a juvenile authority and a list of foster homes, people who took children in for the money. Somewhere there would be a string of third-rate schools and a lot of subtle pressure to skip the college courses for something more “practical.”
I thought of Sarah arriving in New York, eyes shining, the vicious circle broken. Finally.
“Actually,” I said, “we’re going to take you into New York with us.”
Cassie said, “Oh, good.”
Phoebe almost started smoking.
“Your mother is staying in my apartment. You can have a room of your own if you want.”
“In New York City?”
“Right.”
Adrienne regarded me. She was not so much solemn as cautious. Her eyes were very wide and very brown and very intelligent—intelligent enough to know from my manner that something was wrong, and that I had a reason, for now, for not telling her what it was. She made her decision on available facts, available prejudices: me and New York (unknown, but with possibilities), Cassie and Holbrook (known, but unbearable).
“All right,” she said.
“Oh, good,” Cassie said again.
“Dear Jesus,” Phoebe said.
“Do you know how to make braids?” Adrienne said.
I got a hairbrush from my bag and undid the elastic at the nape of Adrienne’s neck. I ignored Phoebe. Phoebe knew as well as I that Sarah had not come back to Holbrook without rescuing Adrienne from Cassie Arbeth—which meant she hadn’t come back to Holbrook at all. If she hadn’t come back to Holbrook, someone else had probably made the call saying she had. Which meant I was right all along. Sarah was dead.
“In front of your ears or behind?” I asked Adrienne.
“Behind, thank you,” Adrienne said. “It’s so much neater.”
I waved my hand in Phoebe’s direction. “Go call the cab man back. I’ll be done in a minute.”
“We’ll have to get some of Adrienne’s things,” Phoebe said. She looked murderous.
“We’ll go next door and get them,” I said.
Cassie Arbeth was on her feet. “I’ll call the cab,” she said. “I got something I want you to take to Sarah anyway.”
She came back with a photocopy of Sarah’s manuscript. She had spilled ketchup on the title page.
THIRTEEN
THE INSIDE OF 323 WAS the first thing in Holbrook that reminded me of Sarah as I had known her. Toppled furniture and emptied drawers could not hide the essential neatness of that room, the shine of newly polished windows and freshly waxed floors, the precision of carefully hand-framed prints on the walls, the books (alphabetical by author) in orderly rows in a floor-to-ceiling plywood bookcase she must have had built or built herself. What she had not spent on the outside of the house she had spent on the inside. Walking through the door, you thought you’d entered an alternative universe.
Whoever had tossed that room had been bored before he started. The damage was minimal. The search, if there had been one, had been superficial. The desk was overturned and denuded of its drawers. The highboy, with its rows of birthday angels and ornamental plates commemorating childhood Christmases, was untouched. There had been no vandalism. Sarah’s slipcovers, hand-sewn with a mediocre touch from cheap cotton calico, w
ere new and clean and unripped.
Adrienne’s room, one of the three small bedrooms on the second floor, was pristine. We left her there to pack dolls and pajamas and “good” dresses for the trip into the city, looked once into Sarah’s bedroom (drawers pulled out in the imitation captain’s chest, red cardboard jewelry box apparently untouched) and once into the third bedroom (sewing machines, sewing materials). Then we went downstairs.
“Television set,” I told Phoebe. “That’s all they could have taken. It’s the only thing that should be here that isn’t here. I don’t think I’ve ever been angry at a thief before.”
“You’ve lost your mind,” Phoebe said.
“She had that jewelry box,” I said. “It was probably all junk jewelry, but it must have meant something to her. And the creep didn’t even open it.”
Phoebe planted herself in a massive overstuffed armchair. “You’re crazy,” she said. “You can’t do this.”
I righted the desk and started replacing the drawers. Part of me said we should do what Cassie had not and call the police, but I couldn’t see how it would help. It seemed much more important to return that living room to the antithesis of Miss Arbeth’s. I couldn’t think about Cassie Arbeth without getting ill.
“That woman is nine years younger than we are,” I told Phoebe. “How could she let that happen to herself?”
“It’s illegal,” Phoebe said. “We’re going to get arrested.”
“What for?” I started picking up check stubs. I could hear Phoebe’s foot tapping the floor behind me. Phoebe’s feet almost never reach the floor when she’s sitting in chairs. Tapping her foot takes an effort. Tapping her foot is a warning. “Doing this is better than leaving her in that,” I said stubbornly.
“Sarah left her in that,” Phoebe said.
“For three days. Because it was all she could do.”
“If she’d wanted to bring her to New York, she could have brought her to New York. You certainly have enough room.”
“If I’d known there was an Adrienne, I’d have invited Adrienne. She didn’t even mention it. Not even in passing.”
“You ever wonder why not?”
“This is New England, Phoebe. She didn’t mention it because she didn’t mention it. Maybe she was embarrassed about being an unwed mother. If she was an unwed mother. I don’t know.”
“What’s going to happen if she turns up here looking for her daughter and that idiot next door announces the kid’s been—For God’s sake, Pay, this is kidnapping.”
I started on the ragged, pick-up-sticks pile of pens and pencils, making neat horizontal rows of them in the center desk drawer. I could hear Adrienne marching around above my head, pulling out drawers, moving things on wooden surfaces. “Even that hole I used to live in on Eighty-second Street was better built than this.”
“Patience.”
I turned to look at her. Her voice was stern, demanding, but she looked confused and hesitant. The last time I saw Phoebe (Weiss) Damereaux look confused and hesitant, she’d been matriculating at Greyson College for Women.
“She’s not going to come back,” I said gently. “This whole thing only makes sense if the rest of you are wrong and I’m right. You know that.”
“I know you’re taking that child across state lines, which makes it federal.”
“You got a call from someone saying she was Sarah calling from Holbrook. So did Dana. But it couldn’t have been Sarah calling from Holbrook. If she’d been here, she’d have seen Adrienne and that woman. Besides, look at this place. She’d have picked up. She wouldn’t have made a lot of long-distance calls she could have made local in the city.”
“Maybe she didn’t come to Holbrook,” Phoebe said. “That doesn’t mean she’s dead.”
“What does it mean?”
“She could have dropped out of sight.”
“Whatever for?”
“Obviously,” Phoebe said, “she’s got a whole life we know nothing about. We pegged her for an old maid, she’s got a child. We had her scenarioed in an apartment, she’s got half a house. She could have had all sorts of reasons.”
There were postcards scattered over half the carpet. I started stacking them. “You don’t believe it,” I said, “and I don’t blame you.”
Phoebe sighed. “No,” she said. “I don’t believe that. But for God’s sake, Pay, what do you think I’m going to believe? That someone murdered Sarah English? What for? That someone took her body and—”
“She was a small woman,” I said quickly. “Five feet, very thin. She wouldn’t be hard to carry.”
“Why bother?”
“To get her out of sight. So people wouldn’t know she was dead.”
“What for? I mean, dear Lord, I know you’re angry at Tony Marsh, but he’s not an amateur. If he had any plausible reason for someone to kill Sarah, if he could find some solid evidence she was dead—and he was looking—”
“I’m not saying the reason’s obvious.”
“If they were going to move Sarah, why not move you? You’re telling me this person had two people poisoned with arsenic on his hands and only moved one.”
“There wasn’t any percentage in moving me. I practically live with Nick. I’m in the middle of a book promotion. I’m with you all the time I’m not with somebody else. I can’t go missing without its being noticed.”
Phoebe set her mouth. “The arsenic was in the Halloween candy. There are nuts like that all over the world. You ran into one.”
“Where’s Sarah English?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why is Marilou Saunders lying?”
Phoebe hesitated. She didn’t like Marilou Saunders any more than I did. She certainly thought her capable of lying.
“Maybe Marilou Saunders was there,” she said. “I can’t see any reason for her to want to kill Sarah English.”
“Neither can I,” I said. “That’s not the point. We couldn’t see any reason for someone killing Julie Simms, but somebody did. Even if Marilou didn’t kill Sarah, even if she didn’t see Sarah—which she did—she’s saying she didn’t see me, that she wasn’t even there, and I know that’s a lie. I might have seen Sarah very sick and only thought she was dying. Until we find a body, that’s always a possibility. But Marilou was also in that room and it’s her word against mine.”
“Maybe we ought to talk to Marilou,” Phoebe said. “Maybe somebody ought to.”
“I’ve got to tape her show Friday,” I said. “I’ll take care of her when the time comes. We won’t be able to find her unless she wants to be found or Tony Marsh gets a subpoena, and I don’t think we’re going to get either. Who we have to talk to is Caroline Dooley.”
“Caroline Dooley?”
“Caroline Dooley called here looking for Sarah. We can’t trust the slob queen next door to remember what she wanted. I’m not even sure Cassie listened to what Caroline wanted. The only thing we can do is ask Caroline herself.”
“Oh,” Phoebe said.
“Logical,” I said.
“I don’t see what good it’s going to do,” Phoebe said. “But—”
There was a sound on the stairs. We both turned to see Adrienne descend, dressed in fresh starched yellow cotton, with a soft gray cardigan over her shoulders and a child’s cardboard suitcase in her hands. She walked down the stairs as if she were balancing the traditional book on her head.
She reached the bottom of the stairs and put her suitcase on the floor.
“I thought it was better to change,” she said. “The other dress was wrinkled in the back.”
“Good idea,” I said.
Phoebe wagged her head, considering. “Do you like cheese blintzes?” she asked Adrienne.
Adrienne had never heard of cheese blintzes. She was, however, “very fond of cheese.”
FOURTEEN
IT IS NOT RESPONSIBLE to leave a seven-year-old child alone in a large, unfurnished Manhattan apartment. Phoebe knew that. I knew that. Even Nick would know it
when he finally showed up. Nick was going to be the biggest problem. Nick was going to swear. Nick was going to shout while he was swearing.
We sent Adrienne down the long hall in search of a room she liked. I explained about the lack of beds. Adrienne nodded solemnly, humoring me.
I watched her progress through the living room, hoping she’d pick something with a view—the room I’d given Sarah, for instance, that overlooked Central Park. She was very small in Myrra’s formal living room. She was also very straight-backed.
“You’re sick,” Phoebe said as soon as the child was out of sight. “You’ve been running around all day. You can’t go running around all night.”
“I tried phoning,” I said. “I couldn’t get an answer.”
“What makes you think going over there is going to be any better? If Caroline isn’t home, she isn’t home.”
I pointed to Phoebe’s watch. “It’s six-thirty. She’s probably on her way home from work. Everybody is on their way home from work.”
“I’ll go over there,” Phoebe said.
“I can’t cook,” I said.
“Oh, God,” Phoebe said. “You’ve got a six-pack of diet soda, two bottles of Heineken dark, some Devon cream, and a yogurt. We have to go to the store. Children need vegetables.”
“Santini’s delivers,” I told her. I got a scarf out of the closet and draped it around my neck, concession to Phoebe’s as yet unstated fear that I would Catch a Chill. “I’ll probably get there right when she does. I’ll ask my questions and come home.”
“You could wait to call later in the evening.”
“No.”
“Patience—”
“Hold Nick off until I get back,” I said. “Give him something that will make him lose his voice.”
Adrienne appeared from the back hall. “You really don’t have any furniture,” she said, giving me a half-shocked and thoroughly admiring look. “Not any.”