“Oh, yeah?” I responded, still facing the younger Brant. I took in his blond hair and blue eyes, which apparently had been inherited from his mother. “You don’t look much like him.”
John Brant laughed. Marlee turned red. John shifted the garment bag to his other arm.
“Nice to meet you. Sorry about your sister.” He turned and went into the other inner office, next to the one occupied by his father and Al Barlow.
“Oh,” Marlee said in a whisper, clearly mortified at John’s behavior, “he can be so shameless, sometimes.”
John Brant came back out of his office and walked over to me. He handed me a business card.
“If you ever want to go out sometime, call me,” he said, smiling unctuously at me. Marlee was speechless. He turned away and, this time, went to his father’s office, where he knocked, entered, and closed the door behind him.
“Let’s go see the chapel,” Marlee said, grabbing me by the arm and hustling me out into the hallway.
So these are the people Cara trusted with her immortal soul, I thought. What I had seen so far didn’t instill in me any desire for baptism, however wonderful a minister Daniel Brant might be. I was far too put off by his son and his assistant.
“I am so sorry, Sutton,” Marlee apologized as we walked down the hallway. “Sometimes John just doesn’t know when to quit.”
“Does he always come on that strongly to complete strangers?” I asked. “I wouldn’t think most people would appreciate it in a church setting. And surely his mother must have taught him better.”
“His mother died when he was a boy,” Marlee said. “He was mostly raised by his father, and he does behave much better when Reverend Brant’s in sight,” Marlee said. “He’s just one of those men who thinks he’s irresistible to women. He can’t understand why any woman would turn him down.”
We had reached the chapel door.
“Here we are,” Marlee said. “Let’s go in and let you look around.”
I had glimpsed the church’s cavernous main sanctuary from the entry foyer when I first arrived and again as we walked past it on our way to the chapel. But the chapel was much more to my taste. It was small, and without the warehouse atmosphere that today’s larger sanctuaries often have. There were beautiful red oak pews stained a burnished gold, with wine-red cushions, enough to seat a hundred and fifty to two hundred people. The oak floor was carpeted in a wine color that matched the cushions and that brought out the glow of the wood under our feet as well. The walls and ceiling were a warm off-white. Behind the pulpit, which faced us from the far end, was a beautiful stained-glass window, probably eighteen or twenty feet tall, showing the biblical scene of Jesus gathering the children around him.
“It’s lovely,” I told Marlee, walking halfway up the aisle and sitting down in a pew to my left. My problems with organized religion never had prevented me from appreciating the beauty of many churches or from loving the music of the Southern hymns. I didn’t have any problem believing that God, whatever God was, was present in some of the churches I had seen. My problems had much more to do with what got said in those churches in God’s name, while He maintained His silence.
“It was Cara’s favorite place in the whole church,” Marlee said, joining me on the pew. “She often came in here during her lunch hour, to just sit and enjoy it. She said she could hear God in the quiet.”
My eyes burned, and it took me a moment to regain control. And did she hear Him at the ATM? I wondered bitterly. Did He hear the silent prayers she must have been sending up in her terror? I looked for a way to change the subject. I felt the business card still in my hand.
“So how did you escape John Brant’s clutches?” I asked, turning to look at Marlee.
She laughed at the memory.
“He came on to me pretty heavy when I first started working here about a year and a half ago,” she said. “I finally had my boyfriend, Matt, come by to take me out for lunch one day when I knew John would be in the office. Matt is at least four inches taller, and probably outweighs John by fifty pounds. One look at Matt, and John apparently lost all interest in me.” She smiled again.
I smiled, too, more at the image of tiny Marlee with the Incredible Hulk than at the picture of the two males checking each other out, but I didn’t tell Marlee that. As I imagined the scene that she described, however, another picture occurred to me, one that wiped my smile away.
“Did he come on to Cara, too?”
Marlee didn’t answer for a moment, clearly thinking how to word her response.
“I’m afraid so,” she said finally.
“Just how obnoxious was he?” I asked, confident that Cara would not have welcomed his brash, brazen approach.
“A lot sometimes,” Marlee admitted. “He really had a bad case for Cara, and she wasn’t interested in John at all, which just made him that much more interested. She told me she finally had to threaten to go to his father after John tried to kiss her in the office one day.”
“Did that work?” I asked much more calmly than I felt, not wanting Marlee to see the anger that the picture of John Brant mauling my sister conjured up.
“I think so,” Marlee said.
“He doesn’t strike me as someone who would handle such rejection well,” I commented. “Was he nasty to her after that?”
“Not really. Mostly he just ignored her from then on,” Marlee said. “Except for when he got mad at her about his computer.”
“What was he mad about?”
“He thought she had been messing around with the computer in his office.”
I looked confused.
“You have to understand about John,” Marlee explained patiently. “He’s very good with computers and very particular about anyone but him touching his computer here.”
I looked down at the business card. It said John Brant, Brantlow, Inc., and included a local telephone number that was only one number away from the one I had written down days before for the church office.
“If he works for this Brantlow, Inc.,” I asked Marlee, “why does he have an office here at the church?”
“Oh, that’s a company his father and Al started,” Marlee continued. “But John really does most of the work. He does computer-system consulting for businesses, so he travels a lot. But he also spends time keeping the church records computerized, at no charge, so he just uses the office here at the church for everything when he’s in town. As I said, he’s real good with computers. It’s what he was studying in college, before he got sent home.”
“Sent home? For what?”
“I don’t know for sure. I heard some talk that it had to do with a girl, which I guess would be no surprise. It was before I came to work here, but the secretary I replaced told me about it. She said Reverend Brant was pretty mad, but that John just said a college degree wasn’t that important anyway for what he wanted to do.”
I pondered the developing picture of John Brant, would-be Casanova of the churchy set.
“So what did Cara do to his computer?” I asked.
“Nothing as far as I know.” Marlee frowned, remembering. “John and I had been in the main sanctuary checking on a couple of things, and when we walked back into the office, Cara was coming out of John’s office. He flew off the handle at her, asked what she was doing in there. She told him she wasn’t doing anything, just looking for a dictionary. John wanted to know if she had been fooling around with his computer, but Cara said she hadn’t touched it. He acted like he didn’t believe her. He was pretty mad.”
“What did he say then?”
“He told her the next time she wanted something from his office to ask him, and to stay out the rest of the time. Then he went in and slammed the door. He sat looking at the computer for a few minutes, did a couple of things on it, and then made some phone calls.”
“What did Cara say about it? Was she okay?” I asked. Cara never had handled being yelled at very well. As a girl, it always sent her out of the room in tears.
/> “She said that if whatever he had on it was all that important, then he should remember to turn the computer off when he went out of the office. But I think it bothered her a lot more than she let on. She didn’t seem herself the rest of the day. She and John really didn’t speak to each other after that.”
“And Reverend Brant didn’t intervene?” I asked, wondering why he would let his son be abusive to such a good secretary.
“He wasn’t here at the time,” Marlee explained. “And I don’t think Cara ever said anything to him about it. She admired Reverend Brant so much, and in spite of her threat to go to him when John was so… ah, attentive, I don’t think she really wanted Reverend Brant to know that she was having problems with John.”
I was surprised that I hadn’t heard a word from Cara about her argument with John Brant about the computer. But then she hadn’t mentioned his coming on to her either.
“When did this big argument happen?” I asked, still trying to put the whole story together in my mind. Marlee had to think about it for a minute.
“Actually, it was on the Thursday before she… died,” she said finally. “I remember thinking I wished John had apologized for yelling at her. I hated to think that Cara died with anger still between them.”
To myself, I thought that John Brant probably didn’t have enough of a conscience to feel bad about it. To Marlee, I said, “It is too bad. Cara hated being upset with anybody. She just couldn’t rest after an argument until it was settled and everybody’s feelings were smoothed over.”
Our conversation seemed to run down at that point. After a moment we both stood up, knowing it was time to get back to the office and take care of the details of Cara’s memorial service. When we arrived, the Reverend Brant’s office door was open. There was no sign of him, his son, or his assistant.
Six
In my car twenty minutes later I indulged my irritation with John Brant for yelling at Cara. It was either that or think about what I was on my way to do. I needed to pack up Cara’s things so the apartment manager at the Easton Arms Apartments could rerent her unit. I knew that the packing was going to be like dissecting her life and then burying her all over again. I wasn’t looking forward to it.
John Brant did sound paranoid about his computer, I mused. Granted he probably was much more proficient with it than either Marlee or Cara, but wasn’t he overreacting just because Cara had walked into his office while the computer was on and he was someplace else? It wasn’t like the church operations were a big secret to her; she was one of the secretaries, after all. He certainly seemed to have an unreasonable side to his personality that also extended to his ideas about his effect on women. What a conceited asshole, I thought, and then put him out of my mind as I pulled into the parking lot at Cara’s apartment.
The Easton Arms is a 1960s-era apartment complex just north of the commercial area of Springfield. Its apartments cluster in two-story buildings of eight units each, with an open-air stair/hallway onto which the apartments open and that divides each building in half. While the architecture of the complex is less than memorable, its age means the apartments offer more spacious rooms than much of anything built since the mid-seventies. The size of the rooms, the reasonableness of the rent, by Washington standards, and the complex’s proximity to shopping and to my own apartment two miles away had been selling points for Cara.
At the Easton Arms rental office, located in the first building of the complex, I introduced myself to the secretary, a plump woman in her late twenties, with brassy blond hair and a little too much makeup for my taste. I wasn’t crazy about her floral challis dress either, which featured a ruffled V-neckline that was much fussier than anything I would wear. But she had kind, intelligent eyes. I noted the desk nameplate that said GINEA APPLEGATE and introduced myself. I told her why I had come, and she got up and stuck her head around the door of the office behind her.
“Charlie, can you come out?” Gina asked into the back office, and then returned to sit down at her desk. A moment later a man of about my age came out into the reception area. He was an inch shorter than I and one of those small men with more energy than his frame could quite contain. He wore khaki slacks and a navy-blue knit shirt with the Britches of Georgetown’s tongue-in-cheek warthog emblem on the left breast. The blue-and-white Nikes on his feet told me that either he did a lot of running around the complex responding to problems or that his feet just hurt.
“May I help you?” Charlie asked from the doorway of his office.
“This is Cara McPhee’s sister, Charlie,” Gina explained on my behalf. “She’s come to pack up Cara’s apartment.”
“We were so sorry to hear about what happened,” Charlie the Manager said, coming from the doorway to reach out and shake my hand. “Let me get you the spare key, and we’ll walk over.”
He took a ring of keys from his pants pocket and walked behind Gina’s chair to open a shallow cabinet that hung on the wall next to her. From it, he chose a key and then relocked the cabinet door. He handed the key to me. The small round paper tag tied to it with white string said “D-7,” Cara’s apartment number.
“If Gina can get a photocopy of your driver’s license, you can just keep the key and return it when you’ve got everything out,” he said. “Take a couple of days if you need it.”
I thanked him and reached into my purse for the wallet where I kept my license. Gina took the laminated card and went over to a small photocopy machine on the right-hand wall, where she made a quick copy of the license and brought it back to me.
I stuck it back in my wallet and followed Charlie out the door.
“Terrible thing, what happened to your sister,” Charlie said solicitously as we walked over to Cara’s apartment. It was a one-bedroom on the second floor, three buildings down from the one that housed the rental office. “Have the police turned up anything?”
“I’m afraid not,” I said, really not feeling up to discussing it with him.
“One of them was by the office Friday, to say they were finished with the apartment. But they’ve been pretty closemouthed. Except when they questioned everybody around here about it. Me, Gina, our maintenance staff, all her neighbors. They sure weren’t leaving any stones unturned.”
“I don’t think they have much to go on,” I replied, “but I’m glad to hear they’re being thorough.”
“That’s for sure,” Charlie said.
Our brief attempt at conversation was followed by silence until we reached the top of the stair at Cara’s door.
“Here we are,” Charlie said, putting the key into the lock and opening the door for me. Then we both stood rooted in the doorway.
“What the hell…?” Charlie exclaimed.
“Jesus,” I said, my voice coming out in a whisper.
Inside, the apartment had been turned upside down. In the living room, lamps and books were on the floor, clearly flung there at random. The foam cushions from Cara’s sofa and matching chair were tossed in a careless pile. The cushions’ dusky blue covers had been pulled off the cushions and thrown around. We stepped into the apartment.
To our left, through the kitchen doorway, I could see that all the cabinet doors and the drawers were open, with their contents spilled out across the countertop and floor.
My anger rising, I walked through the living room and into the short hall. On the left, the open bathroom door showed me all Cara’s cosmetics and other items from the medicine cabinet had been pulled down into and around the sink that sat underneath. Ahead of me was Cara’s bedroom, in which I found a similar scene. All her clothes were tossed into the middle of the room or scattered over gaping drawers. Even the linens had been stripped from her bed and left in a pile, and the mattress sat at an angle, half off the box spring underneath. Everywhere pictures and posters had been taken off the wall and left on the floor or the furniture.
I turned around in a fury, almost tripping over Charlie, who had walked into the bedroom behind me.
“I can’
t believe this,” I said heatedly. “Why would the police possibly have needed to do this to her things?” Charlie looked at me and shook his head.
“I had no idea this was how they left it,” he said apologetically.
“Excuse me,” I told him, going around him and out to the living room. I snatched up the telephone extension off the floor and plugged it back into the wall outlet from which the cord had been pulled. At the dial tone, I angrily punched in Detective Peterson’s pager number, which I had memorized by now, followed by Cara’s phone number. I slammed the receiver back down and waited in anger for Peterson’s call.
“I’m going to give those cops a piece of my mind over this,” I told Charlie, who had drifted back into the living room, where he still looked around him in amazement. Within no more than a minute, the phone rang in my hand. I answered.
“Detective Peterson here,” he said.
“This is Sutton McPhee,” I told him heatedly. “I’m here at Cara’s apartment, and I am just furious about what your people did to it!”
“What are you talking about?” Peterson asked.
“It looks like it’s been ransacked,” I exclaimed. “Everything is thrown around all over the place. Was it really necessary to do this to look for evidence?”
Peterson was silent for a moment.
“Are you in the apartment now?” he asked.
“Yes, and I’m telling you—”
“Leave,” he ordered. “Hang up the phone and leave right now!”
“What do you—”
“My men didn’t trash the place,” he said forcefully. “Someone else has been through it. And for all you know, they could still be in there. Now hang up the phone and go wait outside. I’ll have a marked car there in a few minutes, and I’ll be there myself as quick as I can.”
I admit I was slow on the uptake, but eventually I did the calculations.
“Right,” I said abruptly, and hung up the phone. Charlie the Manager was standing at my elbow. I grabbed him by the arm.
“Come with me,” I told him. “We need to talk outside.”
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