Killer Market dk-5

by Margaret Maron

  “Rats in a maze,” Pell said in his usual soft, self-deprecating tone. “Did you want to show Miss McKenzie around?”

  “Heather,” she corrected him.

  “Heather.” He smiled. “I can put more lights on for you.”

  “I do want to show her something,” I said, “but not in the sense you mean. She wants to see Savannah’s hiding place.”

  He stiffened. “I don’t think that’s a good idea at all.”

  Heather and I had discussed this and I said, “It’s not for a news story, Pell. Remember how you told Dixie and me about that time she went away for four months right before you came here twenty-odd years ago?”

  I could tell he thought I was betraying his trust and—by extension—Savannah’s.

  “She didn’t go away to get over a love affair,” I said. “She went away to have a baby.”

  “Ah.” Pell looked at Heather a long considering moment, then nodded. “Yes, I see.”

  “I brought pictures,” Heather said, hefting a manila envelope in her hand. “Documents. I thought if I could just find her, sit quietly for a few minutes and show her some of my baby pictures, maybe she’d—”

  “Clasp you to her bosom and tell you to call her Mommy?”

  “Pell!” I was surprised that he could be so harsh.

  “Sorry, Deborah. Heather. But even when Savannah was well, sentimentality was never her thing. And now we’re dealing with a very sick woman. She’s not going to respond in any predictable way. So I really am sorry, ladies, but I can’t let you in.” He turned to me. “Besides, David Underwood took my key, remember?”

  “I expect you found another,” I said dryly. “And of course, Savannah has her own. She’s in there right now, isn’t she?”

  “I mean it, Deborah, you can’t go in.” His long homely face was distressed.

  I held up my hands to calm him. “We won’t. But, Pell, if she’s so sick, she needs help. You know she does.”

  “I’m trying to convince her—”

  “You can’t convince a delusional person. Believe me, I know. I sit on mental health hearings all the time. There are times when you just have to do what’s best for the person until they’re well enough to make their own decisions again.”

  “She didn’t kill anybody,” he said. “Not Chan, not—”

  He broke off abruptly.

  “Not who, Pell?” I asked softly. “Evelyn? Is that why Savannah flipped out eighteen months ago? You said she was here when Evelyn fell, and you meant that literally, didn’t you?”

  Heather was bewildered. “Who’s Evelyn?”

  “It was an accident.” Pell’s eyes were anguished. “It really was an accident. I was in the stacks rounding up a handful of things to dress the set when Evelyn went up the steps. Savannah was at the end of the aisle. I heard her gasp ‘Oh, no!’ just as Evelyn screamed. Then Savannah started screaming and everyone came running…”

  His voice trailed off in memory. “She used to have cycles, Savannah did, and the highs kept getting higher and the lows were dragging bottom. She was near the end of a pretty bad low when it happened and she just couldn’t handle the pain. Seeing Evelyn fall knocked her for such a loop that we had to commit her to the local hospital till her father could send someone to take her back to Georgia.”

  Pell turned to Heather. “You saw her in the hospital down there, so you know.”

  “Yes.” She looked very young standing there, gazing up into his worried face. “But I also know I can’t go back to Boston without seeing her and having at least one serious talk together.”

  Pell sighed. “Okay. I’ll try. Why don’t you sit down on the steps here? If I can get her to come out, she might feel less menaced if she’s taller.”

  “Should I leave?” I asked.

  “No,” said Heather. “She knows you.”

  I sat down and leaned back on my elbows. “Okay. Tell her Ms. Sotelli’s here, too.”

  As we waited, we watched Lynnette play. She had found an antique wicker doll carriage and tucked a few teddy bears in, then set up a tea party on the floor for the others. We could hear her murmuring to herself, carrying on a lively conversation for five or six different characters. It was all very peaceful and quiet.

  “She probably won’t come,” Heather said pessimistically for the third time.

  That’s when we heard footsteps in the hallway.

  We had moved down a couple of steps to leave room for her to sit above us if she chose, but Pell followed behind her with a chair, which he placed on the landing.

  Savannah stood looking down at us for a moment, then a formal smile crossed her lips and she took the chair as if it were a Hepplewhite in a formal drawing room. Her colorful chiffon scarves no longer looked jaunty, merely sad. Her pink ballerina slippers were filthy. Her hair could have used a good brushing, but her face and hands were clean.

  “Ms. Sotelli, Miss McKenzie.” Her voice was as husky as ever. “How kind of you to visit. I confess I had not—”

  From out of the darkness came two gunshots in rapid succession.

  The shots were so unexpected that even though I’ve been raised around guns and actually had a .38 locked in the trunk of my car, it took a split second to register what was happening.

  A third shot hit the steel railing above, spraying me with enamel paint chips before ricocheting off somewhere.

  “Uncle Pell!” Lynnette screamed in terror and got up and started toward us.

  “No!” I yelled, ducking and running down the steps to her. “Stay there! Lie down!”

  But Pell was even faster. He pushed me aside and raced to snatch her up in his arms.

  Another shot shattered the concrete wall beside Savannah’s head. Heather scrambled up the steps, grabbed Savannah’s hand and pulled her back into the hallway, out of the line of fire. As they ran for cover, yet another shot zinged past.

  Even while listening for more shots, my mind was racing furiously. The shooter must be after Savannah since Heather and I had been there several minutes and no shots were fired till Savannah appeared on the stairs. But why shoot a delusional old woman?

  Mentally I tried to add up the shots. Five or six? And did the shooter have extra bullets?

  In the sudden silence, we heard a crash, then staccato footsteps running at least three aisles over.

  “He’s getting away,” I told Pell. “Quick! Call Underwood.”

  “Wait!” Pell cried, but I was already flying over the teddy bears, rushing toward the same door our assailant must be making for.

  And would reach before me, unless I could somehow fool him into thinking someone was between him and the exit?

  I grabbed a glass vase from the shelf I was passing and lobbed it as hard as I could over the shelves toward the exit. It landed with a satisfactory loudness and sounded as if it had taken a couple of other pieces of glass along, too.

  And it worked!

  The sound of running footsteps immediately swerved aside and headed out into the studio area. As he ran, crashes marked his direction. Glassware and metal fell to the floor as he brushed past them.

  In the dim light, I saw a narrow cross aisle up ahead and put on more speed as I turned left and followed the sounds ahead of me. I stubbed my toe sharply on some metal object that he’d dislodged in the aisle. Broken glass crunched under my shoes and I almost tripped over a stack of baskets.

  Then I heard another set of footsteps.

  “This way!” called Heather. “He’s heading for the front office.”

  I heard her roar, “Where the hell’s the fucking lights?” Then a crash from her direction. She must have tripped over a cable.

  The first footsteps vanished. Had he stopped short or was he hurrying across a carpeted set?

  I came around a wall in time to see Heather silhouetted against the security tights near the front.

  “Deborah? Where are you? Where’d he go?‘ she called, running blindly toward me.

  “Sh-hh!” I hissed as I strain
ed to see and hear.

  Then I caught a flash of white legs mounting upwards in the darkness. Someone was on those movable stairs. Theoretically, the steps went nowhere. In actuality, someone agile could probably pull up and onto one of the overhead catwalks and then run along a clear path to an unobserved exit.

  Someone in white silk slacks.

  Of course.

  Although I was pretty sure that she killed Chan, I still didn’t know why: but I could make a pretty good guess as to why she thought she had to kill Savannah.

  “You can’t get away,” I called. “I know who you are!”

  I saw a flash and heard the explosion in the same instant as the bullet destroyed a portable light stand off to the side. God, she was a lousy shot.

  “Help me,” I told Heather, who was puffing like a little steam engine as we both reached the sinuous set of steps at the same time.

  I fumbled for the brake release, then we gave the thing a mighty tug and swirled it out into open space just as Pell finally found the lights.

  Dazzled by the sudden brightness, I looked up into Drew Patterson’s startled face the exact instant she lost her balance and tumbled down the steps. The gun went flying and she bounced a couple of times, then landed at the bottom, whimpering with pain.

  “You bitch!” said Heather.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It was an accident,” Drew moaned. “An accident.”

  “Accident?” Heather was speechless with rage. “You damn near kill us and all you can say is it’s a fucking accident?”

  “Shut up, Heather,” I said pleasantly. “Which was the accident, Drew? Chan’s death or Evelyn’s?”

  “My shoulder,” she moaned. “I think it’s broken.”

  “Then tell me what I want to know and I’ll see about an ambulance.”

  Her face was gray and twisted with pain, but I was having a hard time mustering up any sympathy.

  “Both of them were accidents,” she wailed. “Honest. I was mad at Chan.”

  “He was going off to Malaysia without you,” I said, “so you killed him.”

  “I didn’t know he was that allergic. I just wanted to make him a little sick. First I wasn’t going to, but he was flirting with you, he was rude to Dad, rude to me—”

  She tried to sit up, then gasped in agony.

  “So while he was dancing with your mother, you went back to the ALWA party, put a couple of those brownies in a plastic bag that was lying on the table and smashed up some of your mother’s penicillin tablets. Then, when he was leaving and stopped to say goodnight, you slipped them into his pocket.”

  “I told him to think about me when he was eating them. But I only meant to make him sick, not kill him. I swear it!”

  “But you did mean to kill Evelyn so that you could have him,” I said inexorably.

  “No! It really was an accident. I tripped and bumped the stairs. You see how easy they are to move. I barely touched them, but they went flying and poor Evelyn—Oh, my shoulder! Please. Please.”

  I turned away, sickened, and saw Pell a few feet away. His hands were clenching and unclenching and his face was ghastly.

  “You came rushing up to Savannah that day. I thought you were upset because of Evelyn, but you knew she’d seen you and you were afraid she’d tell. That’s why you kept saying what a horrible accident it was, over and over, until Savannah reached out her hand and smoothed your hair and started crying. And cried for two days until they came for her. You did that. To both of them.”

  Then that gentle man spat on the floor beside her and turned to go let the police in at the rear door.

  27

  « ^ “The enjoyment of light in darkness could not be realized practically to any great extent without the means of vessels, or other mechanical devices of some sort, to contain in place, or convey to the action of heat, the fuels, oils, gases, etc., from which light is drawn.”The Great Industries of the United States, 1872

  I met Savannah again at the end of the summer.

  That’s how long it was before I could borrow one of my brothers’ pickup truck and go pick up my headboard at Mulholland where Pell had stored it for me.

  When I called Dixie to see which weekend would work for her, she mentioned that Savannah was going to be in town. “She’s going to stay with Pell while she clears her stuff out of Mulholland.”

  How could I resist?

  Dixie invited me to spend the night, so I took the three of them out to dinner at Noble’s—a much less crowded Noble’s. The food was even more delicious when you didn’t feel as if you were in the middle of the conversation at the next table.

  The changes in Savannah were astonishing. Her hair was still gray, but shingled to take advantage of its coarse texture. Gone were the layers of pastel chiffon, but she was not totally dressed in black either. Instead, she wore chic black pants with thin white pinstripes, a black short-sleeved silk sweater over a white cotton shirt, and shiny black patent high-heeled sandals.

  “Maybe I’ll graduate to purple by next year,” she said sardonically when she caught me staring.

  They brought me up to date on things that happened after my week of court was up last April. Some of it I already knew, of course. When I made my original deposition, Underwood admitted that he’d given me all that information for a reason. “From the things Major Bryant said, I figured you must be a pretty good catalyst.”

  I also knew that Drew was out on a very high bond while her attorneys kept stalling the actual trial, that Dixie and Pell had “found” Chan’s signed and witnessed will, and that Lynnette was now living with the Ragsdales in Maryland—“But she and Shirley Jane are coming to spend a week here before school starts.”

  “And you’re in Boston now?” I asked Savannah.

  “Heather and her mother talked me into giving it a try,” she said.

  “You should see the McKenzie homestead,” said Pell, who had visited when up on business a couple of weeks earlier. “You could fit my house and Dix’s, too, on the first floor alone, never mind the other two floors. It’s in a historical section that’s just ten minutes from the statehouse.”

  I was surprised. “You’re living in the same house with Heather and her mother?”

  “Old Home Week,” Savannah said dryly. “Caroline and I were roommates at a prep school in Atlanta when we were girls. That’s how the adoption was arranged in the first place. She has a tricky heart, which is why she sent Heather to find me—so the kid would have some family when she dies. Some family, huh? A mother dying of congestive heart failure, a mother living with a bipolar disorder, a father who wants nothing to do with her, and a half sister who’s ‘accidentally’ killed two people.”

  “You can’t choose your relatives,” Pell said softly and I, who sometimes feel as if I’m drowning in family, wondered what it would feel like to have only one or two relatives.

  Liberated or isolated?

  Dixie’s eyes were shadowed with pain. “At least you got your real daughter back.”

  Savannah shook her head. “No, I didn’t. Caroline is Heather’s mother, not me. And Heather herself is still the daughter of a childhood friend. We want to love each other and maybe we will… eventually. But feel for her what I felt for Drew all those years? I don’t count on it.”

  “Give it some time,” said Pell. He brushed back that long strand of hair from his blue eyes. “At least you’re working again. What did you say your new project is? Redesigning a gourmet cookshop in Cambridge?”

  It was as if Savannah didn’t hear him. “She’s a nice kid though, even if someone does need to wash her mouth out with soap. There’s a live-in nurse to take care of Caroline and she and Heather make sure I keep my medications balanced.”

  She took a couple of pills from a little gold box in her purse and weighed them thoughtfully in her small hand.

  I remembered the first time I met her and how she’d laid out a row of pills on the table beside her plate. “So you’re well now?”
r />   She shrugged. “I’ll never be well. What I can be is sane.”

  “But?”

  “But I miss my manic highs. I miss feeling the energy of line and color in my fingertips, the dance of fabrics and textures in my brain, the—” She broke off with an ironic smile. “I’m a seventy-eight rpm record that knows it’s going to be played at thirty-three and a third the rest of its life and I’m not totally convinced that normal and sane is worth the trade-off.”

  “Yes it is,” Pell said. He nudged her glass of water closer. ‘Take the damn pills.”

  “You sound like Heather,” Savannah grumbled, but she swallowed them.

  Later that night, Dixie changed into ice blue satin pajamas and I to a long white batiste nightgown. We curled toe-to-toe at opposite ends of her long comfy couch with a half-empty jug of white Zinfandel on the coffee table in front of us, talking girl talk.

  I took a slow sip of wine and asked, “What made you decide to give up Lynnette?”

  “No one thing,” Dixie said, stretching out a long leg. “More a combination. Millie and Shirley Jane, and even Quentin, I think, do love her and she loves them back. Pell convinced me that it was probably better for her to be in a young household rather than watching us dodder through middle age. And then there’s Tom. Did I tell you about Tom?”

  “Tupelo Market? Thinks you’re special? Makes you laugh?”

  She grinned and kicked me. “Did I say all that?”

  “Yeah. So does he still?”

  “Yeah,” she mimicked. “The thing is, it’s hard to be spontaneous and go flying off to Mississippi when you have a young child in the house. Besides—”

  “Ah, here it comes. The real reason!”

  “Is it?” Dixie’s slanted eyes grew thoughtful and her chestnut hair swung forward as she gazed down into her glass. Then she nodded. “You may be right. The truth is, even going to the gym three times a week, it’s hard to work all day and then come home and try to keep up with a seven-year-old.”

  “You and Pell miss her though?”

  “Oh, God, Deborah, you don’t know!” With her free hand, she gracefully tucked her hair behind her ears, making her look nearer twenty-five than forty-five. “But most of all, we miss Evelyn being over there in Lexington and dropping in with her a couple of times a week.”