“Please. Join me in the sitting room.” Davies swayed across the foyer like a belle at a ball. Davies was using Frances’s death as an opportunity to place herself center stage.
Harper held back a series of not-so-nice thoughts. Growing up in Charleston hadn’t armed Harper with any tolerance for wealthy Southern women. They got under her skin like no other type of folk. Always competing to be the center of every darn thing. Davies was certainly playing the role.
When Davies had settled into an upholstered chair in another shade of apricot, Harper sat on the cream-colored couch, grateful that at least she wasn’t cast in the glow of peach. She placed the small digital recorder down on the glass-top table and pressed the “Record” button.
“Mrs. Davies, I’m going to record this conversation for the purposes of our investigation. Is that all right with you?”
“Of course,” she responded, leaning out from her chair and yelling toward the table as though the recording device was as hard of hearing as her husband.
“Can you please tell me exactly what happened this evening? Start with when you first heard the dog and continue until you called Mrs. Leighton.”
Davies twisted her lips. “Mrs. Leighton?”
“My mother,” Harper said.
Kimberly Davies stared past her and waved her hand. “Please, do come in, Officer. Join us.”
“I’m fine. Thank you, ma’am,” Sam responded from the foyer.
“Oh no,” Davies said, rising from the chair. “I insist.”
Sam sat at the far end of the couch.
Davies spent a couple of moments watching Sam as though to ascertain whether he was truly comfortable. It reminded Harper that—at least in the South—a man in uniform commanded more respect than a woman. She wanted to blame Davies, but it happened way too often.
“Mrs. Davies, when did you first hear the dog?” Harper asked.
“I hear that dog every single day. That thing barks about absolutely everything—”
“I mean, when did you first hear the dog this evening?” Harper was eager to identify a timeline and get on with the investigation.
“My husband, Teddy, was heading upstairs, and I was straightening the kitchen. It was seven or thereabouts. We normally retire about eight to read or watch television unless we’re entertaining, which we do several times a week.”
Harper noted the time. “And what time did you go over to Frances Pinckney’s home?”
“Not for a while. You see, the barking stopped and started quite a bit.”
“Is that normal?”
Davies billowed her nightgown out beside her, smoothing the silk against the matching sofa. “Well, yes and no. There’s quite a bit of that kind of stop and start during the day, but thinking on it, the barking is slightly more unusual for the evening. Usually Frances can get the dog to quiet down.”
“Can you be more specific about when you went over to Ms. Pinckney’s home?”
She focused on her nightgown, running long French-manicured nails across the fabric.
Harper tapped her foot on the floor, hoping to refocus Davies’s attention. This needed to move more quickly.
“Just about eight.”
“Eight,” Harper repeated.
She nodded.
“And you rang the bell?”
“Several times.”
“Was the dog barking then?”
“Oddly, no.” Her eyes widened. “That is strange. The dog completely stopped barking when I rang.” She looked between Harper and Sam. “What do you suppose that means?”
“I’m not certain,” Harper said as she wrote. But it did make her wonder, too. If the dog normally barked, why suddenly go quiet? “And about how many times did you ring the bell?”
“Two, maybe three. But I waited some minutes for Frances to come to the door. Her hearing is quite good, considering her age. Not like Teddy’s at all,” she said loudly, with a wave toward the upstairs.
“And when she didn’t come to the door, you looked inside?”
Her lips formed a small O as she pressed her palm to her chest. “Of course, I would never look into someone else’s home under normal circumstances. But with the dog barking so insistently and Frances not coming to the door, I was concerned for her well-being. It was my civic responsibility to check.”
“And at this point, the dog had stopped barking? He was quiet?” Harper clarified.
“Yes. Definitely.” Davies shifted her attention to a loose thread on the sleeve of her gown. Some witnesses fidgeted as an outlet to being nervous. Davies, on the other hand, seemed merely self-centered as though the loose thread was of real concern.
Davies had told her mother that she hadn’t looked into the house, but Harper knew that wasn’t true. Looking inside would be human nature—and especially tempting for someone who enjoyed gossip as much as Davies did. “I assume you looked inside, to be sure Frances hadn’t slipped and fallen,” Harper said, giving Davies an out.
“Well, of course I was worried.”
“Which windows did you look in?” Harper asked.
“The front window beside the door,” she began sheepishly. “And I also walked around the porch so I could see into the dining room.”
Harper pictured the Pinckney home. “The dining room opens to the front room, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. I believe I could even see a bit of the front room from there, but I didn’t see either Frances or that dreadful little dog.”
It meant that Frances Pinckney wasn’t lying at the bottom of the stairs when Kimberly Davies looked in. “You’re certain of the time? Can you recall what was on TV?”
“It was definitely eight o’clock because Teddy loves to watch the old black-and-white movies, and they start at eight. When I returned home, the movie was just beginning. The film was Sierra Madre.”
Harper nodded but said nothing.
“You know, with Humphrey Bogart,” Davies added.
Harper didn’t know the film. “And did you notice anything unusual? Something that might suggest there was someone else in the home with her? A coat or bag? Anything at all?”
Davies stared at the ceiling, and Harper waited patiently. Finally, she shook her head. “No. Everything was like it always was. Frances is quite tidy.”
Harper would bet Davies had taken a good look through that window, and she was the type to notice if something was off. If someone had been in the house with Frances Pinckney, he or she had been careful. Which implied planning. If the death was from natural causes, then something had set the dog off initially but then quieted it when Davies was at the house. Something about that theory didn’t sit with Harper. “And after that? You came back home?”
Davies hitched her chin up. “I came back to be with Teddy.”
“And when did the dog begin barking again?”
“Eight thirty or just after.”
If someone was in the house and had gone to the trouble of quieting the dog, then the barking would have started after he left. By that time, Frances Pinckney was probably at the base of the stairs. “But you didn’t go back over there?”
Davies waved to herself with a flourish. “By then I was in my nightclothes. I certainly wasn’t about to go out in this.”
“So that was when you called my mom?”
“Yes,” Davies said.
Harper laid one of her business cards on the table as she retrieved her recorder. “Please call me if you think of anything else. We would certainly appreciate anything you could add.”
Davies leaned forward. “Someone said that she fell down the stairs, and I wondered if she tripped on the dreadful dog.”
Harper had seen Frances Pinckney with her sweet dog. Frances adored him, and it was lovely to see the companionship the little dog brought her.
Kimberly Walker Davies was the dreadful one.
“We appreciate your help,” Harper told her, rising from the couch.
Davies stood, too, in a cloud of salmon, and led them to the f
ront door, promising she would be in touch if she remembered any little thing that might be helpful.
Harper was certain they would hear from her again. She thanked Davies as she jogged down one side of the stairs.
“I don’t get it,” Sam said. “If she looked in the house, why didn’t she see the body?”
“It has to mean that the body wasn’t there yet,” Harper said.
“So, what—she had a heart attack upstairs and then fell down the stairs later?” Sam asked. It was the most he’d said to her all night.
The timeline didn’t make sense to him either. Good. The deeper the case pulled him in, the more focused they would be on finding out what happened to Frances Pinckney.
“Yes,” Harper said, dread settling heavy in her gut.
8
San Francisco, California
Deep in the covers, Annabelle Schwartzman pressed her face into the yellow silk sheets. Gauzy curtains billowed in the wind. Not yellow. Cornmeal, the decorator had called the color and matched it with cornflower blue. Cornmeal and cornflower. Ridiculous, but she pretended to care. Women were supposed to care about the names of their drape and pillow colors. Successful ones knew the differences between cornmeal and daffodil and hay, the accent colors in the fabrics of the headboard and throw pillows.
Spencer had a thing for yellow, or maybe the choice had been hers. Even if the decision had been hers, it was still his. That was his magic. His charm.
Somehow those things had become more important than medical school, though she was head of her class at Duke for the three years she was there.
Smart like her father, people always said.
Beautiful like her mother. It wasn’t as true. Her nose had a small bend that matched her father’s larger one. But she had her mother’s bright-blue eyes and her slim build, her father’s long legs. She was beautiful.
That had been important in her youth. Only later did Schwartzman realize that her mother worried about beauty. A lot. And then it was decided. If she was beautiful enough for Spencer Henry MacDonald, then she was beautiful.
Things might have been different if her father hadn’t died. But in the wake of his death, Spencer MacDonald gave her mother confidence that her daughter would be cared for. And Spencer made her mother smile as nothing else had since her husband’s death. What choice, then, did Schwartzman have but to embrace him, too?
And so she had dropped out of school and had become the perfect wife. She joined the Rotary Club, among others, to get involved, careful not to overcommit. Her home responsibilities came first.
That night there was a fund-raiser for the children’s library, followed by a meeting of the women’s auxiliary board.
At the start of their marriage, she imagined being on the board, achieving great things for the less fortunate. She wouldn’t have a career herself, of course, but surely she could take on a leadership role in one of the important local charity organizations. But Spencer discouraged leadership positions. Nothing that would require too much—too much time, too much attention, too much of her. After all, there would be a family to think about and his needs.
That night she tipped the precarious balance. She should have chosen to attend one function or the other. Not both. If she had, she would have noticed that the sheets hadn’t been changed.
She would not have felt so exhausted that she’d gone to her dressing room and peeled out of the yellow blouse that now barely fit over her extended belly and the bright skirt that her mother had bought her at some exorbitant maternity store.
She would have had time to do her face washing and her eye and hand cream before the blood in her swollen feet made every step feel as if she were weighted down with sandbags.
She vaguely remembered the sheets had felt good, cool against the heat in her feet and back. The baby was active, as was often the case when she settled into bed. Like she missed her mother’s movement. She. A girl, although they hadn’t known it at the time.
Spencer didn’t want to know, and she had been utterly incapable of even that small act of defiance. She told herself that she was afraid she might slip. But that was far from the truth. By that time, she had become incredibly adept at keeping secrets.
Spencer had already discovered plenty to use against her, and she had long since seen how he gathered every morsel for later use as ammunition. His skill in this was impressive; he might not even be paying attention, and still, somehow, he absorbed details she shared. The most mundane, irrelevant facts were corrupted in his grip.
Her dislike for brussels sprouts meant they turned up in meals, at his instruction, when he felt she’d misbehaved. That he threw away strawberries that came fresh from the neighbor’s yard because he knew how she loved their bright color and succulent flavor.
“Trudy must have tossed them,” he would say, referring to the housekeeper. “Maybe they were rotten.”
She never once asked Trudy. She knew from the way he delivered the news that their disposal had been his choice. And they wouldn’t have been given to someone else—although Trudy would have gratefully taken them for her own sons.
No, Spencer would have instructed that they be discarded, and any other action would have been grounds for severe discipline.
She remembered how impressed she’d been by Spencer’s staff. He had the same cook and housekeeper, the same groundskeeper and driver since he’d bought his home at twenty-one. Spencer didn’t fire people for insubordination. Nothing that kind. He punished them by making it impossible to leave.
Being his wife was no different.
That night, she was sleeping soundly. The baby, too, had settled into sleep, nestled so that neither feet nor elbows pressed against any tender organs. She slept with an arm over her belly as she had been doing since the third month of pregnancy. Even Spencer seemed to calm with her pregnancy. He was out less often; they ate in more than out and designed the baby’s room together. He, too, seemed to be settling into the idea of fatherhood.
Surely, then, he might become the man that everyone outside the home saw. Loving, charismatic. His success was already proven. His intellect and passion and aptitude for strategy. He’d achieved so much already at the bank.
That very night he was out, celebrating some merger or partnership, she wasn’t sure which. She would have liked to know. She had a mind for that sort of venture, but, as he often reminded her, she hadn’t even finished college and was, therefore, more suited to paint colors than P&Ls.
Sometime in the night, the front door slammed, waking her. Windowpanes in every room shuddered, and Schwartzman along with them.
So much of that night was clear, but after the rattling of glass, the memories became disjointed snapshots rather than a running film. The most memorable were pressing her palms against Spencer’s chest, struggling against him. His face scarlet, spit flying from his lips as he turned her and launched her across the room.
She slammed belly-first into his dressing table, shattering a bottle of Gucci Pour Homme cologne, a smell that would forever more remind her of death. She remembered the feel of blood and amniotic fluid as it flowed down her legs like a thick, warm soup. She could see it pooling on her feet and into the pale-yellow carpet.
She tried to let the images of that night fall away. She had already lived it too many times.
The pain of striking the dressing table, the incredible pressure of the marble driving into her. The sense of everything inside slamming against her spine. She knew with absolute certainty that it was that third blow to the abdomen that killed her unborn daughter.
The image of the blood stayed with her.
She blinked and fisted her charcoal-gray cotton sheets.
Safe.
“You are safe,” she said out loud, and her voice was hoarse, her throat dry, as though she’d been screaming.
Sitting up against the hardwood headboard, she took even, deep breaths and pressed him away as she looked at the four corners of her bedroom. To her left, the corner where the t
wo gray walls met. On one wall a black-and-white silhouette drawing of a woman that she’d bought at an art walk in Seattle. The second corner with the dark door to the walk-in closet. A beautiful six-panel door she’d had stained black, the wood grain like swirls of gray sand. The knots were like pools of tar. The third corner with its windows drawn in black shades, then, to her right, the ashen wood of the bedside table with its metallic light and off-white lamp shade.
He is not here, she told herself. He is not here.
You are safe.
The familiar routine in the fight against the memories. The room was silent. Her room. Spencer MacDonald wouldn’t come here.
She settled herself back down in the bed, pulled a pillow into her arms, and held it tight against the emptiness of her belly, but there was no going back to sleep. Instead, she lay in bed and stared at the ceiling until the sun rose over the horizon and light filled the room.
Schwartzman arrived at the morgue just after eight. It was particularly cold as she entered through the doors, tying her gown behind her waist. The thermostat, when she checked it, was set at sixty-seven as always.
As she made her way across the room, her fingers automatically went to the place where her necklace normally lay, against the flat, bony surface of her manubrium, several inches below T2. Only skin.
People said they felt naked without a wedding ring. She understood.
She worked to push images of the scene from her mind. They would only be a distraction. Her job was in this room, lying on that steel table. Everything she could discover about this woman from the physical details of her body would help the police find her killer. She would have to be satisfied with that.
She fingered the implements on the metal tray. Her scalpels, bone saw, a camera for documenting injuries, the trimming shears she used to cut through the ribs. It was all there. Same as every other time. She ran her fingers across the tools again with the sense that something was missing.
Whatever she might have been missing did not make itself known. The metal wheels clacked on the cement floor as she wheeled the tray to the body. She tied her hair in a bun at the nape of her neck and checked for loose pieces before donning a pair of latex gloves.
Exhume (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 1) Page 7