by Linda Barlow
’Cause they weren’t gonna find her.
Once inside the apartment, Kate headed for the spare room that Gran had always let her use when she visited. She dumped her backpack there, then went next door to Gran’s room to see what they’d done to it.
They’d been through it—that was much evident as soon as she looked around. Gran had been very particular about where she kept her things. Looked like they had all been moved.
What losers, she thought. Couldn’t they just leave her stuff alone?
During the last couple of years since Gran had been spending so much time in New York, this place had been Kate’s refuge. She’d even skip school sometimes to come and visit Gran. And the best part of it was that nobody knew. Dad didn’t like Gran much. He always said nasty things about her behind her back. She suspected that Gran wasn’t too wild about Dad, either, although she was careful not to say so. But she listened sympathetically whenever Kate poured out her misery and unhappiness.
Gran had been such a good listener.
It wasn’t fair that she was dead!
Not that things were ever fair. She’d learned that two years ago when Mom had been killed in that car wreck. Before that she’d never even known that people you knew and loved could die. And now it was pretty clear when you looked around at all the lousy things that happened in the world that fairness had not been too high on God’s great list of benefits to humankind. Assuming there was a God, which Kate wasn’t so sure about.
But Gran’s death hadn’t been some awful random accident. She’d been murdered. Shot, just like on TV. Dad had said that a professional hit man had shot her, probably somebody who’d been paid to do it, although nobody knew by whom or why and so far the cops hadn’t done much to solve it. They probably never would. Someone had killed Gran, and it looked like they were going to get away with it.
Well, not if I have anything to do with it, Kate thought.
Kate returned to the guest room and curled up on the bed. She pulled the familiar comforter around her. From her backpack she pulled out the laptop computer that had belonged to Gran and switched it on. Maybe if she wrote for a while, she’d be able to see things more clearly.
“The Mystery of the Murdered Grandmother,” she typed at the top of a brand-new file. She looked at it then shook her head. Made you think of an old white-haired lady clubbed by a teenage gang while she was doing her knitting. Gran was a grandmother, but she hadn’t looked like one.
She deleted the line. “Murder at the Podium,” she typed instead. Now that sounded much better. Kate had learned the details of the shooting by questioning Delores, Gran’s secretary, who had tearfully spit them out after much prodding. While they had seemed to disgust Delores, Kate had been insistent about knowing such things as the kind of gun that had been used (Delores had had no idea) and the appearance of the wound in Gran’s head (Delores had scolded Kate for asking—apparently twelve-year-old girls weren’t supposed to want information about such things).
Kate wanted information about everything. She wanted the entire world to be open to her. Most of what she wanted to learn was the good stuff, like all the wonderful art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and all the great literature in the New York City Public Library—both of which she haunted on a regular basis. But she also wanted to know that bad stuff as well. She wanted to understand human nature. You couldn’t be a great writer if you didn’t know what would make your characters tick.
And more than anything, Kate wanted to be a writer. She didn’t know if she could be a great one, but she certainly intended to try.
All writers should keep a journal, Gran had said. A few days later she had solemnly presented Kate with a leather-bound book inscribed on the front with her full name— Katerine Marie-Claudine de Sevigny. The book was beautiful, but she hated the name almost as much as she hated the father who had stuck her with it. The other kids made fun of her. “You gotta be some kinda weirdo or lesbo with a name like that,” Barney Chassen had taunted her last year.
Kate had attacked Barney Chassen and made him pay for this insult with her fists. Last year she could have beaten up most of the boys in the sixth grade. Only a couple of them had been as tall as she was and none was as scrappy. This year, though, well, secondary school was more dignified. You didn’t go around beating up boys the way you had in grammar school, no matter how much you wanted to. You had to try to be a little more mature.
She hated being mature, though. She’d started getting her period six months ago and it was awful. All that blood and you never knew when it would hit. It was disgusting, really. God must have made a big mistake when he’d invented women’s reproductive systems.
Which proved God—if he existed—was a male. If She were a female, She’d have come up with a system that didn’t require one week per month of those disgusting sanitary pads.
Yawning hugely, Kate focused once again on the small screen of the laptop. She’d been trying to keep a journal, but she’d been writing it here instead of in the book Gran had given her. It was so much faster to write on a computer, and she’d always thought the laptop was a pretty neat one. She didn’t think Gran would mind that she wasn’t using the official journal, but had instead appropriated her computer.
Kate was going to be a writer when she grew up, but in order to be one she’d better get cracking. No one ever got to be a writer by staring at a blank page and daydreaming about other things.
She was going to write a novel about what had happened to Gran. Of course she’d change the names and everything. But the big difference would be that in her novel, the crime would get solved. She’d make the police smarter and more dedicated than they were in real life. The chief investigator on the case would be a woman, of course. She’d have the usual trouble getting respect from the male chauvinists she worked with, but eventually her brains and her courage and her determination would impress them and they’d give her their respect and affection. Together she and her men would examine all the clues and unmask the killer. Justice would prevail.
“Murder at the Podium.” Good title. She set aside the laptop and curled up on the bed to think about what would happen in the first chapter. It would be similar to what had happened in real life.
As she drifted into sleep, Kate thought of how she was going to solve the murder and capture the killer, all by herself.
Daddy would be proud of her then.
Having seen the de Sevigny residence on Park Avenue, April was somewhat surprised when Armand’s driver dropped her off at the high-rise on West Sixty-Second Street opposite Lincoln Center shortly before eleven o’clock. Several yuppie residents who appeared to be her own age and younger were congregated in the downstairs lobby, suggesting not Old World wealth and manners, but the high energy of a fast-paced contemporary lifestyle.
She identified herself to the doorman and was waved unceremoniously towards the elevators. “Tenth floor,” he told her, and she noticed as she entered the elevator that there were twenty-eight floors. Rina’s apartment was clearly not the penthouse.
She found the right door at the end of a hallway and used the key Armand had given her to unlock it. She entered a modern apartment, spacious and airy. To the left was a large L-shaped living room, furnished with two modern, low-slung but cozy-looking sofas covered in soft green. The oriental rug was ivory with vines and tendrils that were subtly picked up in the wall paper. There were several large plants that gave the room a refined jungle atmosphere.
Through a large picture window in the living room, April could see the lights of the Metropolitan Opera House and, in the distance beyond them, the shore of New Jersey across the black waters of the Hudson River.
April glanced at the curtains, wondering how often Rina changed them. She remembered the various tiny “housekeeping cottages” and one-room apartments where they’d lived together, the dancing new curtains revealing each change in Rina’s love life. Had she stopped taking new lovers when she’d married Armand? He was a charming, d
ynamic man. Thirty years ago he must have been an extremely handsome and sexy man as well. Had he been enough for her or had she never abandoned her freewheeling ways?
If she had been unfaithful, could this have been a motive for her murder? She’d taken her own separate apartment, a room of her own. Did that suggest that she’d needed a place to meet a lover?
Were the police examining this possibility? Armand had mentioned during their dinner that he had spent several hours answering questions from the authorities this morning. Was he a suspect?
They were all suspects.
Particularly in a case like this one, where large sums of money were at stake, everyone close to the deceased was bound to be considered a suspect.
She began to explore.
Kate woke up suddenly. The room was dark, and for a moment she had no idea where she was. Everything seemed alien and strange.
She reached for her favorite stuffed dog to cuddle but her hands came up empty. She pushed herself up, confused. She could see that she was in a bedroom and that the furniture was looming all around her as if it had a life of its own.
Then she remembered. Gran’s house. She’d run away— again. Another fight with Daddy. Seemed like all she did these days was get into arguments with Daddy.
So here she was at Gran’s, just like a million times before, except Gran was dead, and—
If she’s dead, how come there are noises coming from her bedroom?
Her heart started slogging as Kate realized that it must have been the noises that had awakened her so suddenly. Someone was in the apartment. They were moving around in there.
The killer, she thought. He’d come here to go through Gran’s stuff. Maybe he wasn’t a hired professional. Maybe he was someone she’d known, someone who could be linked to him. Maybe he was searching for crucial evidence that needed to be destroyed.
If so, he’d search this room as well.
And if he was searching, there would be no place to hide.
Kate crept from the bed, straightening the comforter as well as she could in the dark. She did not dare turn on a light.
She peered around. Not the closet—he’d look in there for sure. Behind the curtains? No, they were too thin; she’d show. Sneaking out of the apartment somehow was probably the wisest course, but what if he came out into the hall just as she entered it?
She padded over to the door, which she had left open halfway, and touched it. Her fingers were slick with sweat. To her surprise, she saw that the lights down the hall in the living room were on. Whoever the killer was, he wasn’t being very discreet.
What if it was somebody from the family? Wasn’t that what the cops always said on TV—that most murderers were known to their victims? Jeez, maybe one of her own relatives was a coldblooded killer. Maybe Daddy had done it.
Great, she thought. It was one thing to hate your father because you were confused and unhappy and full of what the adults loftily called hormones, but it was something else to wonder if he might actually be a murderer. Daddy and Gran were always arguing about something. Well, as always, Daddy didn’t have much to say that wasn’t sarcastic and cold. Gran had done most of the arguing. It had been one of the things Kate had always liked about Gran— she actually talked. You might not always agree with everything she had to say, but at least you knew what she felt about everything. With Daddy it was harder to tell.
A door closed and Kate heard the sounds of footsteps coming toward her. Too late to escape! There was nothing to do but hide behind the door and hope for a chance to slip out while the killer was right here in the room…
She pressed herself flat against the wall, trying to fight an illogical desire to step forward and give herself up to whatever fate awaited her. It would be less humiliating than to be caught cowering here. I wish I were braver, she thought. If I were the heroine of a novel, I’d be doing something clever instead of hiding behind the door!
The door to her bedroom swung inward, sheltering her behind it. Heels clicked on the hardwood floor. High heels, she realized. The killer was a woman!
She must have touched the switch because the room was flooded by light from the fixture overhead. And then she did what they never did on TV—she turned around and closed the door.
The woman gasped and Kate yelped as she propelled herself away from the wall like a swimmer pushing off from the end of the pool. She lowered her head and butted the woman smack in the middle of her body, knocking her backwards. Kate ended up sprawled on top of her, scrambling to get back up and run away.
But before she could do so, the woman grabbed her.
“Let me go!” Kate screamed, and started digging in with her claws. She must have bitten them down, though, because they didn’t seem to be doing any good at all. This lady was strong. Kate was astonished at the power of her grip as she rolled her over, stuck her knee into Kate’s crotch, and jammed her down on her back just like one of those bullies in a gang or something.
Looking up from where she was pinned to the floor, Kate blinked in disbelief. Her captor was soft-looking and pretty. She had auburn hair, and it was that thick blunt texture that Kate had always longed for. Blue eyes. Fat lips like the models in those putrid lipstick ads. She was wearing this frilly lace blouse and a short skirt and jewelry and stockings. She didn’t look like a coldblooded killer.
“You’re just a kid,” the woman said.
“Fuck you,” said Kate.
“A foul-mouthed kid,” the woman amended. “Who are you?”
“I belong here,” Kate cried. “Who are you?”
The woman considered. Kate thought she could detect some curiosity in those soft blue eyes. “Are you a member of the family?”
“This is my grandmother’s place so I guess I’ve got every right to be here.” Kate seized on a possibility: “I suppose you’re here to try to sell it or something. Like, before she’s even cold in her grave.”
“Your grandmother?”
There was a pause while the woman looked her over. She seemed doubtful now, and Kate took advantage of the moment by beginning to squirm again. The woman tightened her grip. Not a real estate agent, then, thought Kate. Real estate agents were wimps.
Coldly, the woman said, “Rina de Sevigny has no grandchildren.”
“Uh, stepgrandmother, actually,” Kate amended. “We weren’t actually related.”
The weird look in those blue eyes cleared. “In that case, you must be Christian de Sevigny’s daughter? I’d heard that he had one. But—” she paused “—you weren’t at the funeral, were you?”
Deep inside her, something clenched as all the tension Kate had been suffering threatened to give way and burst out of her. “I wanted to be there,” she said in a shaky voice. “More than anything. But he wouldn’t let me go. He’s like, ‘It’ll be better if you don’t go.’ And I’m, like, ‘But I want to go.’ And he doesn’t care because he’s, like, ‘You’ll have to trust me because I’m your father and I know more about these things than you do.’ Which is total bullshit. He doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t know me.”
Kate couldn’t believe she was actually spouting this garbage, and to some stranger, as well, some stranger who was sitting on her, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself.
“He tells me he went to his mother’s funeral when he was a kid and that it was horrible and he got scared because they made him kiss her dead body or something and that he’d never gotten over it. But I don’t see what that has to do with anything. I’m not him. I had a right to go to my own grandmother’s funeral! He’s an asshole. I hate him.”
Somewhere in the course of this narrative, the woman had taken most of her weight off Kate. She realized she could sit up if she wanted to. She wasn’t sure if she did want to. She was so tired, and she felt like she was going to cry any second. That would be so humiliating!
But the strange woman’s eyes were kind now, and her face alert and sympathetic, and Kate couldn’t seem to stem the tide of words that were flowing out o
f her. “We always fight,” she went on. “We had a fight tonight and I ran away. I always used to come here if things got too bad and Gran used to listen to me. She was good that way. She didn’t treat me like a stupid kid. He always treats me like some kind of retard or something. He’s, like, ‘You can’t do that because you’re too young,’ and I’m like, ‘Stop treating me like a child,’ and he’s like, ‘As long as you’re under eighteen and under my roof you’ll do as I say,’ and I’m like, ‘Fuck you, Daddy, I hate you’ only I don’t say that out loud because he’d probably beat me or something and then I’d get mad and call the cops and have him arrested for child abuse.”
“Whew,” the woman said. She was kneeling on the floor beside Kate. She was holding both of Kate’s hands in hers. “This may sound crazy,” she said, “but I understand exactly how you feel.”
“I don’t even know why I’m telling you this,” Kate said miserably. “I don’t even know who you are or what you’re doing in my grandmother’s apartment in the middle of the night.”
“I’m here because I was having dinner with your grandfather this evening and he gave me the key. My name is April Harrington.”
This didn’t help much.
“Hasn’t anybody told you about me?” April Harrington asked.
“Nobody ever tells me anything.”
“Me neither,” the woman said with a sigh. She rolled over and got up slowly from the floor. She was graceful in the way that Kate hated. Once again she was tempted to bolt, but once again her curiosity was too strong.
“Rina de Sevigny was my mother. She sent me to boarding school when I was about your age so she could marry Armand. They went to live in Paris. I stayed in this country, in Connecticut, in a school run by nuns. I hated it. Used to run away all the time. When they found me, they’d thrash me. That ever, happen to you?”