by Nina Post
“No, I don’t know.”
“Well, she had some empathy, is what I’m saying.”
“Empathy is a condition now? Are teenagers getting medication for it?”
Robert lowered his shoulders and put his chest out a little. “Ms. Sylvain suffered from what is typically called Emotional Contamination.”
Shawn almost laughed. “Emotional contamination? What is that?”
“It is an OCD-related obsession. Essentially, Ms. Sylvain was obsessed over the notion that contact with a particular person or place would somehow contaminate and even endanger her.”
“In what way?”
Robert rested his wrists on the table and touched his fingertips together. “Well, she was afraid of losing her personality or her intelligence — a frightening prospect for someone like her.”
“It would be for anyone.” Shawn thought of the other Shawn. That jerk.
“Yes, but she was very fearful of this. She was afraid of taking on a negative characteristic of the person she was worried would contaminate her. She was afraid of being stuck in time —”
“Stuck in time?”
Westrom gave him a sad, slight smile, just the corners of his lips. “Yes.”
“Meaning what?”
“Just that, detective — stuck in time. She spoke to me about it briefly and only once, months ago. I don’t know anything much deeper than that.”
Shawn pictured the husband’s letter. “Was she afraid of anyone that you knew about? That she mentioned to you? You said a person or place. Did she give you any specifics?”
“No.” Robert seemed contrite.
“Do you have any opinions? Guesses, as to what or who she was afraid of?”
“No.”
Shawn sat back, disappointed. He waited a moment, then said, “So, you stopped her from turning the house into a home for stray people?”
“I said that people take advantage even if you’re the only kind person they’ve ever met. Especially if you are. The more people you had in the house, the more – ” his breath hitched.
“The more?”
“The more likely it is that one of them will hurt you. And one of them did, didn’t they?”
“Was there anyone who wanted to live in one of those unoccupied rooms that she had tell ‘no, sorry’?”
“No. But she talked about it.” Robert stared at his hands. “Maybe I’m hard-hearted, but she had too many employees as it was. Left to her own devices, that entire house would be a runaway shelter or a halfway house or veteran’s recovery house or homeless shelter. I just could not, in good faith, allow that. Besides, I don’t know if I could work there in that kind of situation, and I liked my job there very much. So part of it was selfish.”
“What was your opinion of Lyle?” Shawn rubbed his forehead for a second.
“He was a good pet for her. He was something else she thought she saved.”
“Saved? From what?”
“Her husband’s horrible family. They had sent Lyle to boarding school, you know.” He laughed. “The most ridiculous thing. They didn’t know how to take care of him there. When Haviland drove up to get him out, he was not doing well. It took some time here and a few trips to the vet to get him back to full health. He needed a big, safe yard with an insulated burrow, access to water and good plants, shade and sunlight. His diet at that school was not ideal, and he was very high-strung when she brought him back.”
Shawn didn’t speak right away, taking a few seconds to think through what Westrom said. “Did you resent Lyle?”
Robert gave Shawn a wry smile. “Why would I resent a pet tortoise? Besides, he was quite gentle and had more of a personality than you would expect.”
Shawn shrugged. “You took him to the vet. Maybe you resented having to do that task on top of all of the other ones you did.”
“No, I didn’t mind that.” Robert rose one hand and waved it in a dismissive gesture. “Logistically, it was a challenge: getting Lyle into the box — I can’t tell you how many time I cut or scraped my hands on him — and then —”
“Hold on.” Shawn sat up. “You cut yourself getting Lyle into his box?”
Robert held out his hands, which had a few scrapes, one fairly new.
“Cut, scraped, abraded,” Robert put his hands back in his lap. “First getting him into the cardboard box, which was large enough for him to move around in. Then getting him on the cart, if necessary. Then onto the floor of the front passenger seat. Then out of the car again and usually back on to the cart.”
Robert smiled slightly, looking at a spot on the table. “So I might have cursed a few times doing that, but I really didn’t mind. Frankly, I didn’t trust anyone else to take him. Not to toot my own horn too much, but I was the safest, most conscientious driver. Abrupt movements, like braking, made Lyle very nervous. I’ve always had a light touch with the brake, always coasted to a stop, just like my father taught me.”
“Didn’t Lyle have someone who took care of him?”
“Yes, Vincent. He was like Lyle’s nanny, I suppose.”
Shawn remembered the husband’s horrid uncle mentioning the nanny Lyle used to have, then silently laughed imagining how ridiculous it would be to get a nanny for Comet.
“Haviland called herself Lyle’s ‘custodian.’ She loved watching him play outdoors through the different seasons.”
“Why didn’t Vincent take him to the vet? Wasn’t that his job?”
Robert pursed his lips. “I didn’t think Vincent was a very good driver. He tended to be too emotional. He also tended to play his music too loudly, which also makes Lyle nervous. I may have a mental condition, but it’s usually under control. Maybe that was my problem. I was tired of being in control. I was tired of my reality.”
Shawn waited a moment. “What do you think of Vincent?”
“He was good to Lyle. He read to him, took him out for walks. He was in charge of his diet, which was much more specialized than you may expect.”
Shawn felt something like a light source burst and spread inside him. “That’s right. Vincent was in charge of Lyle’s diet. He ordered salads for him from the store, is that right?”
“One of my tasks was to plan the menus and put together the shopping list. We got a delivery of grocery items every Monday. Vincent would give me his own list, and those Italian salads were always on there. But we got him hay, and had tortoise-friendly weeds on the property, as well. Lyle was a voracious eater.”
“Did Vincent ever put anything with buttercup flowers on his list?” Shawn asked, not expecting a yes.
“Buttercup flowers? I don’t think so, but I didn’t pay that close attention. Why?” Robert seemed genuinely confused.
Shawn ignored the question. “Who was responsible for making sure that the back gardens were a safe place for Lyle?”
An outsider might think that he was more concerned with finding out who murdered Lyle than who killed Haviland Sylvain, but he had the feeling that figuring out why the tortoise was killed was crucial. He didn’t have a case-making lead for Haviland Sylvain’s murder yet. If he was right, if the same suspect killed both of them, and he could tie someone to the tortoise, then he was closer to getting them for the Sylvain murder.
“I didn’t know that anyone was.”
“Why don’t you retrace your steps for me on Wednesday, starting with the first time you saw Haviland Sylvain that morning to the time you left the house.”
Robert rested his forearms on the table and entwined his fingers. “I arrived at the house by five-thirty a.m. and began preparing breakfast. Ms. Sylvain loved breakfast — it was her favorite meal. Often she would eat very lightly for the rest of the day after enjoying what she referred to as ‘a trucker’s breakfast.’” He smiled as though it hurt him to.
“What was the breakfast?”
“The same as it was every day: muesli, fresh seasonal fruit, stewed fruit, toast, cheese, croissants, jams, yogurt. Eggs, typically poached. And cooked meats and s
moked kippers.”
“Is that all?”
“I also set out a variety of cereals in the box,” Westrom said, as though Shawn were being serious. “Mostly for the employees, though they’re also welcome to have a hot breakfast. They often don’t have time.” A slightly disapproving look passed over his face.
“How did Ms. Sylvain seem to you that morning?”
Robert cocked his head. “A little preoccupied. She didn’t eat much of her breakfast, though she thought she wanted it.”
“Preoccupied with what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you ask her about it?”
“No.” He looked ashamed. “I was respecting her privacy. I should have been nosy. Maybe it would have been helpful.” He got that look that Shawn recognized from the mirror, that feeling of too late, of regretting what you didn’t say or do, and wondering how things would have gone differently if you had.
“But then,” Robert continued, with a distant look, “she would have just put her hand on my shoulder with a reassuring smile and told me not to worry, everything was fine.” He scratched his stubble and held his hand there for a moment. His eyes glazed with tears.
“Go on. What did you do then?”
“Cleaned up after breakfast.” Robert took in a deep breath. “We use a lot of china in the setting, so I hand-wash those in mild detergent, store the silver in anti-tarnish bags, and note any food that we’re running low on. I dusted the wall and ceiling decorations in the ballroom and the friezes, lamps, and anything else that needed dusting on the third floor.”
“Where was Ms. Sylvain while you were doing this?”
“I believe she was in the library, which she uses as an office. She’s more scholarly than you would think. And she keeps up on all the physics journals.”
“Is that what she was doing?”
“I don’t know, but it’s very possible.”
“Do you know about the hidden staircase?”
“The one from the kitchen to Ms. Sylvain’s bedroom? Yes, and I implored her to get it sealed, or at least more securely locked.”
“Who had access to that stairwell?”
“Everyone.” Robert clearly disapproved. “Not that they used it.”
“What do you know about Haviland Sylvain?”
“Ms. Sylvain? Well.” He sighed. “She came from nothing, just a tiny little logging town that was mostly bog. As I hear it, a representative from Mr. Sylvain’s company visited the town, because they had some prime, rare lumber. Walnut, I believe.”
Shawn leaned forward, put his arms on the table, thinking of the husband’s letter.
“This representative spoke to Ms. Sylvain — well, she wasn’t a Sylvain at the time. Her real name was something terribly unfortunate. What was it. Hortense.” He shuddered. “But she was pretty, and she had already won Miss Grub Bog-Off, a local honor.”
“Grub?”
“That was the name of the town. Grub.”
“Wow,” Shawn murmured.
“Wow, indeed. Anyway, this representative spoke to the father about buying their lumber, which was on their property. Hortense’s father thought the lumber was sacred or too valuable or not ready. He refused to sell. The representative stayed for days, trying to get her father to change his mind.”
“Did he?”
“No. Her father wouldn’t sell the logging rights to the company. The representative finally left. Ms. Sylvain had told me that she was mightily intrigued by the place from whence the representative came. So, before she turned eighteen, she left on a bus.”
“What happened to her father?”
“He died.”
“When?”
“Only a week after the representative left, in some kind of bizarre coup that ended with the town selling the lumber at auction.” Robert shrugged, befuddled. “I don’t know any more about it.”
So Haviland confronted her husband about what had happened with her father’s land. Say the husband was telling the truth. If he really didn’t know anything about a Sylvain rep being sent with an offer that he forcibly effected without an acceptance, then who did know, who did sign off on it? Her mother-in-law? God, the woman sounded rancid. And did Haviland find out?
“So she came here,” Robert continued, “because the Sylvain family representative had talked about the mountains and the clean air and the glorious rolling farmland. He said it was God’s country. She got a job as a bank teller, though she had never had a bank account in her life, did not, in fact, even know what a bank was. She just liked the building — thought it was pretty. From that point, she earned her high-school equivalency degree, then met her husband-to-be, Ludivicus Sylvain, III, when he came into the bank one day.”
“He just happened to bank there?”
Robert considered this. “I suppose so. They had a short courtship, married at the mansion, left for their honeymoon, and then returned to the house. He gave her a ring that had been in his family as long as a tortoise with – “
“Lyle’s bloodline,” Shawn said along with him.
Robert nodded, amused. “— had been in their family. But she rejected it. This made Mrs. Sylvain, Ludivicus’s mother, furious. Haviland had Ludivicus buy her an opal ring she picked out herself.”
Shawn jolted forward. “An opal ring?”
“Yes.” Robert tightened his brow, surprised by Shawn’s reaction. “I think Mrs. Sylvain hated Haviland anyway, because she knew she was nothing, had come from nothing. It was a blatant insult to her pedigreed genealogy, you see. A slap in the face every time she saw her daughter-in-law, who was obviously a gold-digger, so Margaret Sylvain believed. Fortunately for Haviland, Margaret passed away soon after the honeymoon.”
“Really. Of what?”
“They were on a sailboat, Ludivicus and his mother. Haviland was supposed to go, and it was good for her that she didn’t, because Ludivicus and his mother never came back.”
“Their bodies weren’t found?”
“No, they were presumed lost in the ocean,” Robert said, with a slight arc to his brow. “So then, of course, Haviland inherited all of the money, in accordance with her husband’s will. And she took some of the money — a relatively tiny slice of it — and used it to get her undergraduate degree, then her PhD in physics, while still giving much of her money and time to help animals. A singular woman.”
Shawn desperately wanted to be moving, to go for a long walk so he could think about this. He considered what else he needed to know.
“When did Hortense change her name?”
“About the minute she arrived in town.”
“So it was before she married.”
“Yes, but not long before that.”
“Did her husband know where she came from?”
“He knew that she had a very modest upbringing, but I don’t think he knew how bad it was.”
“Did they seem to get along?”
“They had a cordial relationship.” Robert smiled tightly.
Shawn wrapped up the interview and let Robert go home or back to the facility in Charles County, if he preferred, as long as Shawn knew where he was and could reach him quickly. The house manager chose the hospital. Shawn marveled how these people were falling apart without Haviland to center them.
She and that mansion were their whole world — but someone had wanted to destroy that world.
He checked the bulletin board and was pleased to see that several of the number flaps on the cat flyer had been torn off. He didn’t want to take the cats to a shelter. They wouldn’t take so many, anyway – he would have to drive around the whole state.
Back at his desk, he saw a file folder, sat down, and open it, not knowing who had left it. There was a Post-It that read, Danger - Found this info, may be helpful. - F.
Fricker. Shawn went through the print-outs. They all concerned a family murder in Syracuse three years before. Vincent had left Syracuse two years before, he had said, which checked out with their background reports.
But the background reports hadn’t found what Fricker found. Two people in their seventies found bludgeoned to death in their home. Shawn skimmed through one of the articles. There was a thumbnail photo of Vincent, with the caption, ‘Live-in caretaker Chris Rogers,’ who found the couple in their living room, but who was released as a suspect after his alibi checked out.
“Chris Rogers,” Shawn said to himself.
He picked up his key and jacket, then swung by Fricker’s desk. The detective was looking at real estate in Colorado.
“I want you to call this PD and talk to someone who knows what that alibi was.” Shawn put the number on his desk. “Get anything else they know.”
He was ready to go back home and check on the whole cat situation when the ground rumbled beneath his feet.
“Earthquake!” someone yelled. Shawn fleetingly wondered how they knew, since they never got earthquakes in their part of the state. No, they had the one — it was in the paper. Back when he saw the first cat.
He crouched underneath a desk. Everyone in the squad room was in motion, either heading for door frames or away from the obvious projectiles. Things crashed to the floor — printers, fax machines, monitors, binders, desk lamps, framed photos of family, coffee mugs that spilled their contents onto the floor and then fell and cracked into pieces.
Six-feet tall metal shelves toppled to the floor with a bang. Part of the ceiling fell in near the kitchen, and all the time, the ground trembled. Shawn pictured his father, how his anger was so volcanic, so elemental in force that it seemed too much for his physical form.
That kind of anger needed a giant. A god. Not a man.
And then it stopped. Shawn heard a sharp intake of breath, his own. No one moved right away — they all waited, suspended, afraid it would start again. After a moment, people started to get up, come back. The squad room was in complete disarray, and the desks were clear because almost everything had been shaken off of them.
Shawn stood up and looked around, dazed. A woman who worked in administration and who was bleeding from a wound near her hairline said, “Doesn’t this only happen in California?”
Someone else said fault lines are everywhere.