by Jane Haddam
I caught myself right before I fell into the tangle of wires on top of the elevator cage. Caught myself and stopped, looking down at the gears and cables and electric lines.
Looking down at the body of Radd Stassen, his ankle caught in a rope, his mouth stretched into a maniac’s grin.
I was wondering what had made him die grinning when I heard her voice at the end of the hall.
“Some people,” she said, “are hell-bent on suicide.”
It was a duet for stringed instruments: Dana at one end, me in front of the swinging doors of that freight elevator, fuses blown and windows blocked by black construction paper. We were two ghosts talking in the dark.
I couldn’t see if she was holding a weapon. I couldn’t see her face.
“That’s where Sarah’s body was,” I said. “On top of the elevator cage. When the police wanted the elevator, they rang for it. It wouldn’t have occurred to them to open the doors before the cage got here. Or you ran down and sent the elevator up a few floors. Either way.”
“Why in the name of God would I want to kill a first novelist—a first romantic suspense novelist, for God’s sake?”
“For the same reason you had to kill him,” I gestured at Radd Stassen. “The Gallard Rowson line’s a sham, Dana. Ghostwritten from start to finish, contract or no contract. Max Brady did most of it. I sent you Sarah’s manuscript and you stole it whole. Mostly the slush pile isn’t worth bothering with, but Sarah was an exception. I kept thinking it was Verna who must have stolen it, and as long as I did, things wouldn’t come together. Verna was supposed to have stolen Amelia’s outline, but I’m beginning not to think so. No matter what she told Amelia. I think you stole that, too.”
“Ask Amelia’s little secretary. She says it was Verna.”
“You could have paid her for that.” I started inching away from the elevator shaft. Even if Dana didn’t have a weapon, she could rush me. If she rushed me, I might lose my balance and fall. I didn’t want to end up on the top of that elevator cage with Radd Stassen’s body.
Unfortunately, Dana was between me and the exit. The only way I could move was back toward the windows, into a corner.
“Gallard Rowson wouldn’t take ghostwritten,” I said. “That was in the contract. They would have ruined you if they’d found out what you were doing.”
“Gallard Rowson takes what I give them. I don’t tell anybody anything they don’t want to hear.”
“You used to have a lot of hot-shit writers, but you don’t anymore,” I said. “You got into genre much too late, so you had to go all out. You had no track record in packaging. You had to give Gallard Rowson something. They wanted brand names and celebrities really writing their own books. They wanted personal revelations they could sell to the readers.”
“It’s been very successful. The initial subscription is through the ceiling.”
“It won’t stay that way if the books are awful. There isn’t any way you could give Gallard Rowson what they were asking for. Marilou Saunders can’t write, and neither can the rest of your celebrities. And your romance writers aren’t romantic suspense writers. You had to have the books and the plots and the characters, not just the bylines. And you had only one way to get them. Ghosts. Max. Cheating.”
“So what?”
“If it came out, Gallard Rowson would dump you.”
“Maybe. And maybe not.”
“You couldn’t take the chance, Dana. You’re the packager. Gallard Rowson pays the advances, but the authors contract with you. They work for you. A few of those people probably wanted, and got, guarantees. Like Marilou Saunders. Whether the book is published or not, they get paid. Whether it makes royalties or not, they get paid. And you pay them.”
“This is getting positively baroque,” Dana said.
I took a deep breath. Was I imagining it, or was Radd Stassen beginning to smell? I was probably imagining it, but imagining it was enough.
“It wouldn’t have mattered if Jane Herman hadn’t sold Sarah’s novel to Caroline. If Sarah had sold it somewhere else, you could have blamed Verna for stealing it, but with it coming out of your own agency, you were going to get looked at more closely than you could allow. And you couldn’t afford that. You had to make the whole situation go away. And you almost did.”
“No ‘almost’ about it, Patience. Truly.”
“Radd Stassen was checking into Max Brady, so you had to get rid of him. Maybe he found something. You put Sarah’s body in a big plastic garbage bag and hid it here somewhere and then you had to stash it and you knew she’d be found, so you—what? Put it in a suitcase? You took it up the freight elevator in her building, that you must have done. And you set fire to the paper in there because you needed to call attention to Caroline. To anyone but yourself.”
“Does this get better as it goes along?”
“You were looking for copies of Sarah’s manuscript. You went out to Holbrook and searched her house. You got Max all worked up and made sure he’d do your dirty work at Caroline’s office—”
“No,” Dana said. “That I didn’t do. I got him worked up, yes, but Caroline’s office was a bonus. I hadn’t expected that. It did save me some work.”
“And it got you the keys.”
“Oh yes. But I’d have got the keys anyway, Patience. One way or the other.”
“You killed Verna because she was going to blow it. She realized it was Sarah’s manuscript you were putting out as hers. What did you do—tell her it was a ghost deal? And when she found out it wasn’t, she was going to talk? You killed Sarah because she would have talked, and she’d have insisted on her book being published as her book. You killed Radd Stassen because he was getting too close.”
“But nobody killed Verna,” Dana said gently. “Nobody could have. The police have gone on record with that.”
“I was watching a demonstration today,” I told her. “Self-defense techniques for rape attempts. I know how it was done, Dana. I know how the arsenic got into the coffee and how it got into the Halloween candy. I know everything but what happened to poor Radd Stassen. You’ll probably tell me.”
“No,” Dana said.
I took the “little silver thing” out of my pocket. “This is yours,” I said. “I must have taken it off you that day in the reception room. It’s been bothering me ever since. You must have been moving Sarah’s body and I must have seen. They said I wouldn’t let go of it in the emergency room.”
The silence was thick, heavy, motionless. I could feel her at the other end of the hall, shifting from foot to foot, getting ready to move toward me. I started to panic. Worse, I started to imagine things. I thought I heard the sound of the safety being clicked off on a gun. I thought I heard the sound of a knife being unsheathed. I thought a lot of things that couldn’t be true, because none of them were Dana’s style. Dana would push. Dana would poison. Dana would never handle a weapon. It would be much too obvious.
Besides, I was looking right at her. Her hands were free.
I got my hands on the windowsill and pulled myself up until I was sitting on it, my legs swinging in the air. If she came too close, I could always kick. In the darkness, I might get away with it. I tried to keep my arms and torso tense, my legs loose and limber. I tried to remember what friends had told me about self-defense. It didn’t help.
Dana was coming toward me, slowly, shuffling down the hall.
“I didn’t know we’d sold that damn manuscript until you brought that little hick up here,” she said. “I thought I had the thing taped. Jane must have said something, but I didn’t realize it was the same one. If you hadn’t brought Sarah up here, there really would have been a mess.”
“This isn’t a mess?”
“This is messy,” Dana said. “There’s a difference.”
She fumbled with something, made a sound like breaking plastic, sighed. A flashlight went on in my face.
“If you don’t get off that window,” she said, “I’m going to break your ankle.�
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“I’ll kick you,” I said.
“Don’t be childish,” she said.
“Stop,” Phoebe said. “Or I’ll shoot.”
It was so absurd, we were both caught in a kind of suspended animation. The idea of Phoebe (Weiss) Damereaux, four feet eleven, 130 pounds, everything-would-be-all-right-if-you’d-only-eat-more, pointing a gun at someone and spouting trite dialogue from a horse opera was enough to give anyone pause.
It gave Dana the idea she should turn around. She did, moving very slowly, pivoting on one heel, frowning.
As soon as she had her back to me, I jumped her.
I had her on the floor before I realized she had nothing but the flashlight in her hands after all.
EPILOGUE
WE PUT SARAH DOWN in what might very well have been the last private cemetery plot in Manhattan. I had to bribe my Aunt Eugenie (who owned the plot), and we had to agree to cremation and a silver urn in a marble box (to save space; Eugenie had every intention of being buried there, too), but we did it. Adrienne insisted on it. In the week since Dana Morton had been arrested, Adrienne had organized her grief. There were rituals to be performed, courtesies to be observed, poetic balances to be maintained. We brought Sarah’s body to St. Thomas’s churchyard in a stretch limousine. Everybody wore black.
Adrienne wore black wool from Lord & Taylor—$230 for a dress she would wear only once and would grow out of in a year. Phoebe had elected herself Arbiter of What Is Necessary for Children. I wanted to tell her I doubted if a shoemaker’s daughter from Union City, New Jersey, spent her childhood in Lord & Taylor black, but I didn’t. Her orientation made a peculiar kind of sense. Sarah had worked to make a certain kind of life for herself and Adrienne. Phoebe just wanted to make the dream come true.
Nick divorced himself from the funeral arrangements and went to work on Sarah’s money. There was going to be a lot more of it than we thought at first. Shadows in the Light was not her only romantic suspense novel. There were six more. Like a lot of unpublished writers, Sarah had (sensibly) kept them in the mail. They started to drift back after stories about her appeared in the newspapers. They came with notes attached, “under the circumstances” notes. “Under the circumstances” in this case meant that everyone wanted to publish them, but they were Nice People and knew AST should have first crack. I found an agent happy to set up a bidding war, and Nick kept watch with a calculator.
The last I heard of Dana, she was accusing me of the murder of Verna Train. Dana had been getting fairly crazy since her arrest, and I had a feeling she was going to get crazier still. You cannot claim Extreme Emotional Disturbance unless you show signs of being Extremely Emotionally Disturbed.
“It was a mistake,” I told Phoebe, on a late Monday afternoon about a week after the funeral. We were sitting at my kitchen table, waiting for Adrienne to come home from her first day at Brearley. Phoebe had a new set of romantic suspense posters (girls in off-the-shoulder peasant blouses hanging from cliffs, tied up in caves, disappearing down Alpine crevasses, getting swamped by tidal waves) and four different colors of AWR letterhead. Nick had the Personal Response Form for the Department of Social Services. I had given him a dollar and hired him as my lawyer.
“The key to it,” I said, “was that she didn’t know she’d sold the manuscript twice. She had it retyped and left the original on the receptionist’s desk to be returned. But Jane Herman came along and thought she saw it in the In box, and had nothing to do for the weekend, and the next thing you know, Dana had sold it to Gallard Rowson as a Verna Train novel, and Jane had sold it to AST as a Sarah English novel. If Sarah hadn’t come to New York, or hadn’t had dinner with all of us, no one would have known until the books were published.”
“Do you have any skin irregularities?” Nick asked.
“What?”
“Social services.” He waved the forms in my face. “If you want to go through with this adoption, you’ve got to fill out two sets of forms. New York and Connecticut. Skin irregularities,” he said again.
“No,” I said. “She was completely out of control by the end, you know. Once the secret started getting out, it was out. She got Radd Stassen by doctoring his coffee when he came to tell her he’d found out about Max’s ghosting, but she couldn’t have stopped with him. She’d have had to waste half the business before she was safe. Maybe they will get her off on Extreme Emotional Disturbance. God only knows she had to be crazy to think she could pull it off.”
“You have to. be crazy to think you can pull this off,” Nick said. “Listen to this. Religious involvement. What in the name of God do they want? Piety on a scale of one to ten? Contacts with Krishna groups? Membership in—”
“Protestant Episcopal,” I said. “I think we’re high church.”
“You think?”
“I prefer high church,” I said. “It’s prettier.”
“You’re a Congregationalist,” Phoebe said patiently. “It’s your Aunt Eugenie who’s Protestant Episcopal.”
Nick glared at us.
Out in the hall, the apartment door opened and closed. The hall closet opened and closed. Adrienne appeared in the kitchen, prim and neat in Brearley’s maroon and navy uniform. She put her books on the table and took a chair. We stared at her.
“Well,” I said, “how was it?”
“I’ll get you something to eat,” Phoebe said. “I made cookies.”
“Could I have some milk, please?” Adrienne said.
“Of course, milk,” Phoebe said.
Adrienne turned to me. “You can wear any socks and shoes you want,” she said. “Most of them have Adidases and funny knee socks. Courtney has reindeer knee socks.”
“Who’s Courtney?”
“Courtney Feinberg. She sits next to me.”
“You like her?”
“A lot. She’s very smart.”
“Where does she get her knee socks?”
“Putumayo.”
I winced. I couldn’t tell Adrienne she couldn’t go to Putumayo, since I go there myself. On the other hand, the prices...
Adrienne took three large cookies and bit one over her napkin. “Are we going to get married to Nick?” she said.
Nick looked at her, nodded, and stuck a thumb in the air. “You don’t have to do that for free,” he told her. “I’ll pay you to talk her into it.”
Adrienne ignored him. “If we’re going to get married to Nick,” she said, “we ought to do it right away. Before court.” Court was what Adrienne called the adoption. She’d been all in favor of adoption since she’d found out she didn’t have to change her name to do it. Staying Adrienne English was one of the things she was doing for her mother.
“I talked to Courtney, and she said with adoptions they like the adopting person to be married,” she said. “So I think we should cover our—”
I gave her a look. She coughed. “You know what I mean,” she said.
“That I do,” I said.
“I think you’re going to have to do this,” Nick said gleefully. “I think she’s going to back you into a corner.”
“Nobody backs me into a corner,” I said.
“Everybody backs you into corners,” Nick said. “You spend your life getting backed into corners.”
“Courtney says it’s very important,” Adrienne insisted.
“It would help,” Nick pointed out.
“It would be good for you,” Phoebe said.
“The next thing you’re going to want is a move to the suburbs,” I said.
Adrienne looked horrified. “Oh no,” she said. “You never give up a good apartment in Manhattan.”
I was beginning to have second thoughts about Brearley. It was reputed to be the best girls’ school in Manhattan, but I was beginning to think there was such a thing as being too bright. And too hip. If there was something like that, Adrienne was going to have it down in less than a week.
I grabbed a cookie and got out of my chair. Putumayo, for God’s sake. Reindeer kne
e socks. Courtney Feinberg.
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “You want to be a flower girl.”
“I’m too old to be a flower girl,” Adrienne said. “But if that’s what it takes to get you to do it, I’ll do it.”
Nick was grinning like a homicidal maniac. “Score,” he said.
“Caterers,” Phoebe said. “And not just the caterers. Invitations. I’ll have to call Tiffany’s. And the flowers, this time of year—”
After all that, buying a kid eighty-dollar sneakers actually seemed sane.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Patience McKenna Mysteries
Great virtue consists of a strictness in small things.
—Louisa Haldoran Campbell McKenna
If my mother ran the universe, Theodore Roosevelt would have been immortal, and he’d still be President.
—Patience Campbell McKenna
ONE
THERE IS NO TRAIN STATION in Waverly, Connecticut. There may have been once—there’s a small section of town called Waverly Depot—but for as long as I have known the place, it has been deliberately isolated from all modern forms of transportation. Even the roads are a joke. 202, 45, 109: square white markers with those numbers on them appear at irregular intervals along the two-lane blacktops that twist and dip and rise and plummet through the hilly landscape, remnants of a time when the mere presence of asphalt spelled “progress.” When the snows come, the town is cut off, not only from the towns around it, but from the access roads that lead to the interstates that lead to the stores that make living in the country possible. Waverly has no supermarkets, no groceries, no convenience stores, no malls. Shopping for food means a forty-five-minute trek to Waterbury. Shopping for clothing means a longer trip—to West Hartford, where the West Farms Mall has branches of Lord & Taylor and Laura Ashley and Ralph Lauren Polo, or into Manhattan. Waverly does have a hardware store, and a few gas stations, and the best bookstore in the state of Connecticut. It also has a great many very old houses. Some of these houses are very large and very expensive: reconstructed New England antique. Others are very small and not expensive at all. The people who live in those will sell you cordwood in the winter and shovel snow off your gravel drive at twenty dollars an hour. At least, they will do these things if they can get out of their own driveways and down the road to yours—which they can’t, most days. The snows always come, and with them some of the nastiest patch ice in the known universe.