Dorset in the Dark: A Fina Fitzgibbons Brooklyn Mystery

by Susan Russo Anderson

  A few feet in front of us, her form rimmed by light now streaming in from a window on the other side of the barn, was the silhouette of a woman. Long dark curly hair. Prominent nose.

  It took me a while to recognize Brook Thatchley. She held a pitchfork in both hands, the tines glinting in the light and pointing directly at us.

  “Put that thing down,” Jane said. “You don’t want to hurt us. Help us capture the druggist and his wife.”

  “Those fools? They can barely take orders. All he does is growl. All she does is cry.”

  “The court will go easy on you if you surrender now,” was all I could think of to say.

  “I can’t pay the mortgage. I’ve lost my studio. The bank will take all my equipment. I have no more to lose.”

  “Your mother has money. I’m sure she’s good for a loan,” Jane said. “Why didn’t you ask her for one? Or a gift. She’s so proud of you.”

  “At best you’ll get life if you kill us.”

  Brook stared at us, shaking her head, her eyes like flat discs.

  I could hear Dorset saying something in back of me. It sounded like, “Don’t worry, she won’t go through with it.”

  How long we stood there motionless, I can’t say. It felt like hours but was probably a few seconds. The pitchfork could rip my stomach apart. Worse, it could disable Jane forever. Or sever Dorset.

  Brook Thatchley took a step forward, her weapon aimed at us.

  Dorset was talking softly. “I don’t hate you, really I don’t. I’ll never hate you.”

  Suddenly I heard something hurtling through the air and Dorset’s red notebook slammed into her sister’s face.

  Stunned for a second, Brook swerved, lost her balance, righted herself.

  I heard the crunch of tires outside. Car doors slamming. The sound of voices. Running.

  “In here!”

  Brook raised the pitchfork, about to lunge.

  “That’ll be the feds,” Jane said. “Put down that fork. Give yourself up now.”

  Instead, Brook’s weapon flew through the air.

  I blanketed Dorset with my body as the sharp tips tore a hole through my jacket.

  Gates slammed. Wood splintered. Beams lit our stall.

  Arms clamped around Brook Thatchley.

  Jane rushed to Dorset.

  Denny scooped me up and held me tight, crying into my shoulder.

  Reunion

  Denny and I stood at the bottom of the stoop while Dorset ran up the stairs to her home. It should have been the end of the case, I thought, as she strained on tiptoes to ring the bell, but I had more information to share with Cassandra. We watched her being scooped up and held by her mother, who cried silently into her young daughter’s shoulder, rocking her back and forth while cars drove by and pedestrians with briefcases made their way to work.

  “How can I ever repay you?” she asked, ushering us inside.

  “Brook? Brunswick?” she called up the stairs. “Your sister’s home.” The sound echoed in the entryway.

  Denny poked me in the ribs. “You’ve got to tell her,” he whispered as we walked into the living room.

  But I gazed at mother and daughter hugging for a moment, dreading the news I had for Cassandra.

  “Tell her now,” Denny said as we sat in the living room. Morning sun streamed in from the bay windows and I felt Cassandra stiffen.

  “Brook is behind Dorset’s abduction. She’s being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center until her arraignment tomorrow.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Brook is upstairs sleeping.”

  “She’ll be charged with kidnapping in the first degree.”

  Cassandra sat down, pulling her daughter onto the couch with her, stroking her hair. Her neck was arched and she was looking at the ceiling. Wordless.

  “Brook needs you,” Denny said. “And she needs a good lawyer.”

  I cleared my throat and was about to explain when Dorset blurted out that Brook had never learned how to throw. “She aimed the pitchfork at me and missed.”

  “Brook!” Cassandra Thatchley stood up. “She’s asleep upstairs. I’ll prove it to you.” Her fingers pulled at her curls as she flew toward the hall. Turning around, she came back to shake a finger at me. Her mouth opened but one look at Dorset and she thought better of whatever she was about to say. She left the room, slamming the door behind her, and I heard her climbing the stairs, calling out her daughter’s name.

  I turned to Dorset, who sat on the couch, smiling up at me with that same guileless look I’d seen in her photo less than forty-eight hours ago. Ten years old, the adult in the house. I gave her my card as we left, telling her to call me whenever.

  “Mom will calm down in a few minutes. She always does.”

  The Long Goodbye

  As we pulled away from the curb, I remembered something. “Drop me off at the hospital.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Denny offered.

  But I persuaded him to go home, saying his mother shouldn’t be left alone too long with the twins. He reminded me about the nanny. “But by now, they’ll be up and hungry. Robbie will be trying to stand, his fat little fingers gripping the coffee table, and you know what he’s like when he doesn’t get his breakfast. Pandemonium.”

  Denny navigated through traffic and we were quiet for a while. But we’d been married long enough to know there was something unsaid between us. Volumes, as a matter of fact, and they needed to get out, most of the words involving moving to Poughkeepsie. I asked him if he and Clancy were planning on rescheduling their trip.

  He shook his head. Stopping for a red light, he shot me a sidelong glance. “Too early for talk of Poughkeepsie. Besides, I’ve been thinking.”

  Dangerous, that thinking business, but I didn’t say anything. One of these days I had to tell him about my father’s other family, but not now.

  He turned onto Montague Street. “I might get bored up there, I mean after the NYPD.” That was when he pulled me to him and gave me a big slobbery kiss, right there on the corner of Montague and Henry as we waited for a knot of gaping pedestrians to cross.

  We rode in silence.

  “I can’t imagine my mother not feeding Robbie. It’s almost ten. But you win. I’d be a third wheel, anyway. It’s you your father wants to see.” He sped across Court and Tillary, dropping me off at Brooklyn General’s main door. “Is there something you’re not telling me. About your father, I mean?” As if he were a clairvoyant.

  Time, like the Dorset Clauson case, had slipped away and I felt like I could have slept for a week. Foot throbbing and eyelids filled with grit, I told Denny we’d talk soon, gave him a peck on the cheek, and made my way to my father’s room in intensive care.

  But when I arrived, my heart jumped into my throat. There was another patient in his bed and a fresh crew on duty who knew nothing about Paddy Fitzgibbons. For a second I thought I’d dreamed the whole thing up until I found the nurse with the soft eyes who remembered me from last night. She told me my father’s condition had stabilized—she hesitated on the word—and although he was still intubated, they needed his bed, adding he was in the stroke unit, one floor below.

  A big part of me wanted to leave. I could use a bath. More than that, I needed to be with my family. My family, was my father still part of it? I peeked into his room and saw him lying in the bed. He looked old and shriveled. His eyes were closed and there was a mask over his nose and mouth. His chest rose and fell. His wife, or whatever you want to call her, the one who’d been holding his hand earlier, was sleeping in a chair by the window. I just couldn’t bring myself to go in.

  As I stood in the hall, I felt a light tap on my shoulder and turned to see the woman who could have been my stretched double. I would have recognized her anywhere. Still in the same outfit I’d seen her wearing last night—leggings and that bulky sweater—she gave me a slight nod. Kinky ginger must have been dominant in my father’s gene pool because I could see her curls pulling at her scalp.

  �
�Did you find that little girl? I’ve been praying you would.”

  She was trying, I’ll give her that, but I wasn’t in the mood. I grunted a reply.

  “What about my father?” I asked.

  Just then we were joined by her mother. The other woman. Although in her sixties, she was tall and shapely and had almost a regal bearing. Real blond hair with silver threads. She wore a camel coat, one of those old-fashioned jobs like something out of the eighties, and there were worn spots on the collar.

  “Did you ask her?”

  “Now’s not the time,” the daughter said.

  The woman’s hand went for her hair. “I don’t know what we’re going to do. You’ve got to find work.” Her eyes were red and swollen and I could tell she was having a rough time of it, but the diabolical in me wasn’t about to make it easier for her. All the same, I took a few deep breaths and suggested we sit in the waiting room.

  After I’d learned that the woman’s name was Rena and her daughter was Kate, who’d graduated in January from John Jay College with a degree in criminology, I asked what they knew about my father’s prognosis.

  They stared at me.

  “The doctor hasn’t talked to you?” Kate’s mother asked. Her right cheek had developed a tic and she tried to hide it by holding a hand to her face.

  “She hasn’t been around,” Kate said. “Like I told you, she just rescued the Clauson girl, you know, the one they’ve been talking about on the news?”

  “Well, it’s a mystery to me why he hasn’t opened his eyes.”

  “Mom!” Kate held out desperate hands. “Your husband is dying.”

  I stood up and opened a window, stifling a remark about his not being anyone’s husband, least of all hers.

  Rena brought out a tissue and blew her nose. Her hands were rough, her nails in need of a polish. Just like mine. “Where there’s life, there’s hope,” she said.

  “Then agree to disconnect him from the machine. He’s got a living will.” Kate looked at me. “He wouldn’t want to linger. Isn’t that right? Do you mind if I call you Fina?”

  I didn’t answer. “I’d like to see him. Just me and him.”

  I was having a hard time breathing as I walked down the hall. As I entered his room, all the pain of his abandonment, my helplessness over his drinking, my bitterness about his second family, all of it slipped away, at least for that moment. It was just me, the lost child coming home to my father. I took his hand and whispered in his ear and I swear I felt his hand grip mine. How long I stood there, I don’t know. Long enough to start saying the long goodbye.

  For the Third Time

  A few months later

  A few months later we were gathered around Lorraine’s breakfast table. Sunbeams shot off porch windows as I opened the back door and smelled the scent of a Brooklyn summer morning before wafting it away. I stood still for a moment, basking in its peace while Carmela, wriggling in my arms, grabbed a handful of my curls. It was the only day I’d had off in a while. Business had been brisk ever since Zizi Carmalucci’s story about Dorset’s rescue by the Fina Fitzgibbons Detective Agency broke in the Eagle. Cookie was glad for the work. We were so swamped I’d even hired Kate Fitzgibbons to help Cookie and Clancy with surveillance. After my father died, I learned she and her mother had been evicted from the home my father never could afford, thanks to his many illnesses, so both of them now lived in the floors above Lucy’s. I couldn’t bring myself to call them family, but Rena helped Minnie with the paperwork and Kate was proving to be a great snoop.

  Lorraine sat at one end of the table and watched as Frank served us. He’d moved into Lorraine’s house, sold his butcher shop, and split the money between his daughter and Denny, who at first refused the gift. “Blood money,” he called it, and it took him a few months and visits to his, what, stepsister of sorts, I guess, to begin accepting his expanding family. Greta Clauson was setting the table. She’d become friends with Lorraine and insisted on bringing over a huge platter of strudel.

  Dorset sat next to her mother, her mouth stuffed with her grandmother’s pastry. But that didn’t stop her whispering to her friend April—something about pretty soon they could leave. I marveled at how normal she seemed after her recent ordeal, but remembered what Lorraine told me once about kids’ cap on suffering. “It’s their only means of survival,” she’d told me, although I’d heard that Dorset, her mother, and Brook were benefitting from massive therapy. Brunswick, not so much, although I’d heard he was spending more and more time with his grandmother. That, according to Lorraine, who’d gotten the lowdown from Mrs. Hampton. She’d heard it straight from her old friend Bea Thatchley—neighborhood drums at work. The housekeeper also told Lorraine that Brook had been released on bail after cooperating with the feds and was awaiting trial. She’d gotten her old studio back, thanks to a hefty gift from her mother, who paid off the mortgage and past interest. And she had agreed to shoot weddings to cover her expenses. It didn’t hurt the photographer’s chances that Trisha Liam was her defense lawyer, and I felt sure a jury would find her not guilty. Kidnapping charges were difficult to prove, Trisha told me one day recently when I ran into her in the park. Although she’d declined to discuss the case when I asked how it was going, she wore a smug smile as she straightened her slacks.

  Realizing I’d been eavesdropping on her conversation with April, Dorset shot me a huge smile. “It’s okay if we take the subway, right, Mom?” And to me, “April’s mom is taking us to Central Park.”

  “I’m going, too, don’t forget,” Cassandra Thatchley reminded Dorset. She removed her daughter’s hat. “Not at the table.”

  Dorset ignored her. Both girls fidgeted. I knew they couldn’t wait to leave, and thinking back over the years to when I was their age, I didn’t blame them. Dorset held a mitt between scuffed sneakers, and I could see a red notebook poking out of a side pocket.

  The twins, who sat next to Lorraine, kicked their high chairs. Robbie couldn’t get the food in fast enough, but Carmela made a face when Lorraine held a spoonful of scrambled eggs to her mouth.

  “They like to feed themselves, Mom,” Denny said.

  Cookie asked for more strudel and Willoughby passed the platter to her.

  “I thought you were on a diet,” I said, smug because due to my ordeal in the trunk of the Ellstons’ car and barn, I’d lost close to five pounds. Although tempted to take a wedge of the warm, gooey stuff, oozing with apple and smelling of cinnamon and glaze, I passed the platter to Cookie.

  She helped herself. “I was watching my weight last week. But I got on the scale this morning. I can gain a quarter of a pound.”

  I said nothing, watching as Denny poured me a glass of orange juice.

  Jane cleared her throat. “Shirley Ellston and her son are talking,” she said. “Stanley is not.”

  “And I know a jury won’t convict my daughter,” Cassandra Thatchley said.

  There was a moment of silence.

  She rose, folding her napkin and laying it beside her plate still filled with food. “It’s time to leave.” She helped Dorset and April with their coats.

  “But, Mom,” Dorset said, her mouth full of strudel.

  I didn’t mind Cassandra’s departure. Matter of fact, I was looking forward to her absence from my life, although she’d made up for being a difficult client by handing me a massive bonus check that morning.

  After they left, we discussed the case in earnest.

  “Let’s see if I can guess,” Lorraine said. “It was all Stanley Ellston’s idea.”

  “What do you mean by ‘all’?” I asked.

  Jane shrugged. “According to Shirley.”

  “Who may or may not have been telling the truth.”

  Cookie crossed her arms. “Shirley is the dupe in this.”

  “She’s not the innocent she pretends to be,” Jane said. There was silence for a few beats. “What about her children whom she pretended not to know? And all those years her husband was running a pill mill a
nd she refused to do anything about it?”

  I watched Cookie’s face. It held storm clouds, but she did a good job of stuffing them.

  “How did they hook up?” Clancy asked.

  “According to Shirley, they met Brook in their drugstore. That was when Dorset was still a baby and Brook wheeled her around town. It was also before they started losing money and had to sell part of their store.”

  “Which is why it was so cramped,” Cookie said. “I still can’t get over Shirley Ellston being a kidnapper. She is such a sweet woman.”

  “To say nothing of abandoning her children, especially the youngest one, who needed her,” Lorraine said.

  “She didn’t abandon her children. They lived upstairs, didn’t they?” Cookie asked.

  “She lied about knowing them. She was never seen in public with them.”

  “How do you know?” I thought Cookie was going to start crying, but I had to find out. “You’ve been to see her, haven’t you?”

  For a moment, Cookie made no reply, but I could tell she’d been visiting the druggist’s wife.

  “She never lied about her children. She just kept her mouth shut. She’s an innocent who didn’t have much to begin with and now she has nothing.”

  Jane rolled her eyes.

  But Cookie was adamant and, if I knew her, was never going to change her mind.

  According to Jane, who’d gotten it firsthand from Shirley, the idea for Dorset’s abduction was all Stanley’s. After all, he and his wife were desperate; the drugstore was mortgaged up to the hilt ever since the cartel had taken over the drug running, paying the middleman a pittance. Moreover, the feds suspected the Ellstons of pushing the stuff, so they thought they had nowhere else to turn. “It was going to be so easy, according to Stanley.”

  “Why didn’t Brook just ask her mother for a loan?”