“It’s me,” I said over the wind. “It’s Harry.”
“I thought it was someone else,” she said, still looking wild-eyed. “I thought it was . . . someone.”
I pulled her close, wrapped my coat around her shoulders, and started her back to the house. She leaned heavily against me.
As soon as we got in the door I flipped on the hall light. The wind had disheveled her hair, leaving it tangled about her face. Shivering all over Louise ducked her head in embarrassment.
“I took some pills,” she said weakly. “I was asleep. I heard the car outside. I thought . . . ”
Raising her head she reached for me. I pulled her against my chest.
“I had a bad dream,” she whispered. “And I was alone.”
“I’m here now,” I said.
Holding her tight I guided her down the hall and upstairs. There was an open door next to the landing. The room inside was lit faintly by the moon. A canopied bed with lace valances. A smoothly sculpted Italian bureau. A skeletal chair by the window, casting long barred shadows on the rug.
I guided her over to the bed and laid her down on it. She wouldn’t let go of my hand.
“Please don’t leave me alone,” she whispered. “I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
“I won’t leave you alone.”
Working loose from her grasp, I went over to the window, picked up the chair and brought it back to the side of the bed. Sitting down I reached out and took her hand again.
“Are you all right?” I said to her.
“Better,” she whispered. “You won’t go?”
“No.”
She lay back on the pillows and stared up at the canopy above her. “I never liked being alone in the dark. There’s something in it, something that always terrifies me. Phil says . . . ” Her voice caught in her throat. “He said that someday it would swallow me up.”
“Why would he say that?”
“To frighten me.” She giggled like a child. It sounded strange coming from her—huddled and sad.
She squeezed my hand, then dropped it and rolled onto her side.
“You don’t have to sleep in that chair, you know,” she said, sounding more like the woman I knew.
I watched her for a time, then got up and lay down on the bed beside her. She put an arm around me.
“Thanks,” she whispered.
******
When I was sure she was asleep I got up and went downstairs. The flickering red-and-blue Christmas tree lights guided me down the hall to Phil Pearson’s study. I opened the door and went inside. Enough moonlight was coming through the French windows for me to make my way over to the glass desk. A small lamp sat on one corner. I flipped it on.
Papers were scattered on the desktop where Pearson had left them. I went through several of them—notes on patients, bills. I was hoping to find something to lead me to Carla. But nothing connected to the woman.
I did find something connected to Kirsten, however. Or disconnected. Facedown in the drawer of the desk I found half of a picture that had been torn in two. It was a picture of Kirsten when she was a little girl, standing on a lawn looking up lovingly at someone in the missing half of the photo. I could have been wrong, but I thought it might be the missing half of the photo I’d found in the girl’s room in Chicago—the photo of Pearson.
I was staring at it when Louise came in the room.
She startled me so much that I jumped.
“Sorry,” she said. “I woke up and thought you’d gone.”
“I told you I wouldn’t leave.”
“People don’t always do what they say.” She stared at the torn photo in my hand. “What’s that?”
“A picture of Kirsten when she was a little girl.”
A dark look passed over Louise’s face. “He would keep such a thing. His hair shirt.”
“What does that mean?”
Louise shook her head sleepily. “What difference does it make anymore? Come back to bed.”
“It makes a difference,” I said sharply.
Louise stared at me with new interest. “I thought this thing was over.”
“It’s not over.”
“I told you I didn’t want you to keep investigating it.”
“I know what you said. I’m not working for you now.”
Louise went over to a chair and sat down heavily. “Is there something I should know?”
“I think your late husband murdered his first wife.”
“Harry, I’ve already told you that he had no reason to want Stelle dead.”
“There was a reason—one you don’t know about.”
She shook her head. “It’s impossible.”
“I’ve got proof.”
“There is no proof,” she said dismissively.
“It’s in my office safe right now. Bankbooks for accounts that Phil established in Ethan’s name. Accounts that were used to pay off Rita Scarne.”
“Pay her off for what?”
“For helping to arrange Estelle’s murder with the help of a woman named Chaney or Chase.”
“Chase?” Louise said, looking surprised.
“You know her?”
“Phil had a secretary named Chase. At least I think that was her name.” She ducked her head. “Actually the one I’m thinking of was more than Phil’s secretary. She was . . . involved with him right before we met.”
“This could be important, Louise.”
She stared at me for a long moment. “All right, I’ll find out tomorrow. I’ll go through his old files. Okay?”
I nodded.
She held out her hand. “Now will you come back to bed?”
I got up from the chair and flipped off the light, dropping the torn photo of Kirsten back in the drawer.
******
Upstairs we made love, although there wasn’t much love in it. I wanted her. And she didn’t want to be alone in the dark. That was how it started, and how it finished. Just a one-night stand with the beautiful widow.
“Don’t brood,” she said, running a hand down my chest. “You helped me tonight.”
I shook my head. “Did I?”
“Yes,” she said, touching my cheek. “Sometimes it’s the only thing that does help.”
I stared at her voluptuous body, pale white in the moonlight. “You’re very beautiful.”
She smiled. “No, I’m not.”
But she was. Very beautiful.
We lay there for a while without speaking. Outside the cold December wind rattled the casements.
“Once this is over, I’m going to go away,” Louise said. “I’m a wealthy woman now that Phil is dead, so I’m going to go away. And when I come back I’m going to marry Saul Lasker.”
“Why?” I said with surprise.
“Because he’s very rich, my darling. And he’ll do anything I want.”
“You just said you had money of your own.”
“Not enough. There isn’t enough of that, ever.” She reached down and stroked me gently. “I won’t stop seeing you, darling, even after I’ve married Saul. You’re good at this, you know.”
I stared at her for a moment, unhappily. I had no claim on her. I doubted if any man ever really had.
“What if I’d said no tonight?” I asked.
She sighed peacefully. “I knew you wouldn’t.”
36
DAWN BROKE around seven, filling Louise’s bedroom with pale filtered light—the color of the lace on her windows, the pattern of the embroidery in the lace. The light woke me up—I’d scarcely been sleeping. I turned on the mattress and looked at Louise. We’d made love a second time early that morning. It was what she’d needed all along to calm her down, to chase away the ghosts, to put her to sleep. It wasn’t what I’d needed.
She’d wanted someone to hold her in the dark. In the day I knew it would be different. Her need would lessen, while mine would remain. What hurt me was that she’d known that—she’d counted on it.
The though
t depressed me so much that I got out of bed and started to dress. The moment she felt my weight shift off the mattress Louise opened her eyes, as if her sleep depended on the presence of a body beside her. I didn’t flatter myself that it depended on me.
Her face was drawn with fatigue, her eyes puffy with it. She sat up in bed, and the blankets slipped beneath her breasts. Even across the room she smelled of sex—and sleep and the sweet, floral fragrance that she wore.
“You’re going?” she said groggily.
“Yes.”
Arching her back she breathed out a sigh. Her long nipples hardened in the cold air. “You don’t have to go, you know.”
“I have things to do,” I said.
Louise glanced around the room uncertainly, as if she didn’t remember how we’d gotten there. “I was fairly . . . crazy last night, wasn’t I?”
“You got upset. It happens to all of us.”
“It doesn’t happen to me. If I said anything stupid . . . ”
“Don’t worry, Louise. I won’t tell.”
She brushed the hair back from her forehead. “You’re pissed off, aren’t you?”
“No,” I said.
“Yes, you are.”
Pushing herself up on the pillows she leaned against the headboard and stared at me sadly. “Harry, I truly like you. You’re a good man—good in bed, good for me. But don’t try to change me. Okay? I can’t be that person. I tried to be someone else when I married Phil. It doesn’t work.” Her face turned hard and remote. “Sooner or later you run up against your past. And it doesn’t change. It doesn’t want you to change, either.”
When I didn’t say anything, Louise lay back on the pillows and closed her eyes. “I’ll try to find that file you wanted. What was her name?”
“Chase. Jeanne Chase.”
“Chase,” she said dully. “Do the police think she’s involved?”
“Parker thinks the case is closed. And since it’s his jurisdiction it will be closed, unless I can come up with something fast.”
“About Phil and this woman?”
“Yes.”
“You’re wrong, Harry. But I’ll find her file for you if I can, and call you later today. I owe you that.” She rolled on her side, away from me, so I couldn’t see her face.
I drove back slowly to the apartment on Ohio. I’d only had a few hours sleep and I felt very tired. And very old. Too old to being play love-games with a pro like Louise Pearson.
I would be pushing forty-five come fall. The bachelorhood I’d half courted was already on me. I’d seen too many years to kid myself about a woman who gave me a hard-on. I wasn’t what she wanted. And what she wanted wasn’t enough for me.
I took a hot shower when I got home, trying to steam Louise out of my body and brain. But she stayed inside me like a dull ache. She’d stay in there for a while.
After the shower I wandered into the bedroom and sat down heavily on the bed. Through the blinds I could see the day dawning in earnest in a blaze of light. Sleepily I picked up the phone off the nightstand and called Shelley Sacks at his office. He didn’t sound particularly happy to hear from me. But then he was still keeping secrets that he knew I wanted to share.
I made an appointment to see him in the afternoon. I didn’t mention Jeanne Chase to him. I wanted to see him face-to-face when I did that. It wasn’t only Jeanne Chase I wanted to talk to him about.
Lying down on the bed I shut my eyes, thinking I’d rest for a few minutes.
I didn’t open them again until the telephone rang around noon.
I’d been dreaming about Louise—about the way she’d looked on the porch, bathed in white light. It turned put to be Louise on the phone. For a few moments I didn’t know whether I was awake or asleep.
“Harry,” I heard her say in a heavy voice. “The State Patrol just called. They found the kids.”
I shook myself. “They found the kids?”
“They’re bringing them out of the Miami River right now. They need me to make the identification.”
“I’ll come get you,” I heard myself say.
She hung up. I sat there on the bed for another minute waiting for time to catch up to me—real time not dream time. But I was in it already. As I got dressed I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was in them both.
******
It took me fifteen minutes to drive from Clifton to Indian Hill. Louise was waiting for me outside the door of the estate house. Lasker, her intended, was there too.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” Louise whispered as I came up beside her.
“Perhaps you shouldn’t,” Lasker said.
“I can go,” I told her. “I know what Kirsty looks like. You can come to the morgue later, if necessary, for Ethan.”
“Good,” Lasker said, clapping me on the shoulder.
I shrugged his hand off. Hard. For the first time since I’d met him I saw his smile completely vanish. Grinning I squared around to face him.
Louise stepped between us. “I’m going with you,” she said to me. To Lasker she said, “Go home.”
She went over to the Pinto and got in. Lasker and I eyed each other for a moment, before he drifted over to his Porsche.
I got in the Pinto and drove off.
Louise didn’t say anything as we headed up I-71 to 275. The scene with Lasker hadn’t registered with her. It woke me up, though.
I gunned the motor as we tore through the rolling farmland on the western edge of Hamilton county. The day was clear and bright and everything around us sparkled with ice, even the dark, turned earth.
I-275 deposited us on Harrison Pike, heading west past tin bait shops and loaf-shaped diners. The highway jogged southwest at Taylors Creek, and the scattered roadside businesses gave way to undeveloped lots, trashy fields dotted with scrub pine and river maples. To the east I could see the forested ridge that rose above the far bank of the Miami River. I couldn’t see the river itself yet, just the ground clutter on its western bank and a few rusted pedestrian bridges—bare steel hoops—rising above the treetops.
A mile farther on the river came into view, thick with plate-ice that flashed in the sun. A mile after that I saw the cop cars—a nest of them in a gravel clearing above the Miami’s western bank.
Louise saw them too. Reaching over she grabbed my hand and squeezed it tightly. I glanced at her face. She looked scared to death.
I slowed up and pulled off the highway, turning left onto a slick, gravel lane. Down we went, half sliding toward the police cars and ambulances in the clearing below us.
“Oh, Christ,” I heard Louise whisper.
I pulled to a stop and parked the car on flat ground. Glancing at Louise I opened the door and got out into the brilliant sunlight. She got out, too. Together we weaved through the tangle of cars to the riverbank.
The area above the river was teeming with men. Cops and ambulance drivers and newsmen. The air was filled with the smoke of their breath, and the steamy exhalation of the river itself—like a fire in the midst of the deep, frozen cold. A cop stopped us as we started down a dirt trail to the river’s edge.
“Officials only,” he said, barring the way.
“This is the kids’ mother,” I said, gesturing to Louise. “Mrs. Pearson.”
“Christ, I’m sorry,” the cop said heavily. He was just a kid himself, and he looked genuinely hurt. I knew at once that whatever was waiting for us at the end of that trail had to be pretty goddamn awful.
Louise didn’t understand that. She looked overwhelmed by the activity going on around us.
I caught sight of Larry Parker standing hands on his hips on an outcropping above the river. I called out to him and he turned his head. His face was grim.
“Wait here,” I said to Louise.
She nodded once, quickly.
I let go of her arm and walked over to where Parker was standing.
“They shouldn’t have called her here,” he said angrily.
“It’s bad?”
He pointed down. Immediately below us the bank fell away in a tangle of frozen vines and crusty shale to the water’s edge. The Miami was frozen solid all the way across. Two men in wet suits were kneeling on the ice, about ten feet out. They were looking down at something between them. All around them the ice smoked in the sun like doused embers.
Fighting the glare I ducked and squinted to make out what the two divers were looking at. Then I saw it.
It was a human face—or what had been a human face—half submerged in the frozen river. A foot or so to its right a human hand dangled like a wilted lily above the ice. The hand was as white as snow, except for the nails, which had turned jet black with stagnant blood.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, turning away. After a moment I asked him if he was sure it was the Pearson children.
Parker nodded. “It’s them. We’re going to have to use chain saws to cut the bodies out.” He glanced over his shoulder at Louise. “They shouldn’t have called her down here.”
“I’ll take her home.”
I turned to go and Parker grabbed my arm. “This is a terrible thing, Stoner. More terrible than you know. You can see through the ice in places around the girl’s body—see what the bastard did to her.” His mouth filled with bile and he spat it out on the dark frozen ground. “If there’s somebody left to punish for this,” he said bitterly, “I want to know.”
“I thought you said this case was closed.”
“Don’t be cute. You’ve been talking to Foster. You know how things stand. If you’ve got new information I want it. I want who’s responsible for that.”
He pointed to the river.
But I wanted her, too. As badly as Parker did. At that moment finding Carla Chaney was all I could think of.
37
LOUISE DIDN’T say a word until we’d gotten in the car and started back to Indian Hill.
“Are they sure it’s Ethan and Kirsty?” she said.
“Yes,” I said bitterly. “It’s them.”
Louise’s head sank to her breast. “Oh, God. Kirsty.”
She put her hands to her ears as if the thing was a noise she could block out of her head.
“I want this to stop.” Grabbing my arm she said, “I want you to stop.”
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