Crooked Heart

by Cristina Sumners

  “But I thought—they’re mystery stories, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, but nobody ever gets hurt. The crimes Nancy Drew investigates are things like forgeries and theft. Fake antiques, stolen wills. No murders.” Kathryn smiled. “I speak with authority, and not as the scribes! I read every one of them when I was that age.”

  Tom smiled. “I knew I’d come to the right place.”

  “Don’t expect too much. I’m a theologian, not a cop.”

  “Not to worry, I’ll tell you everything you need to know in the car.”

  In the front hall she took both their coats from the closet and handed him his. She got into hers without a move from him to assist her; she was used to unnecessary courtesies from older men, and mentally granted him points for having the wit to perceive that that stuff wasn’t called for in dealing with a card-carrying feminist.

  Tom, meanwhile, having captured his prize, was fairly glowing with pleasure at the prospect of spending time with her. He was so elated, in fact, that he forgot his manners. Oh, damn, he thought as they drove away from her house, I should have held her coat for her.

  CHAPTER 16

  Tita Robinson, in honor of Chief Holder’s visit, had been allowed to put on a robe and sit on the living room sofa, on the condition that she keep her feet tucked into a blanket. This was hardly dignified, but it beat giving testimony in bed, and she accepted the compromise philosophically. The Robinsons, conferring by telephone after Holder’s call, had agreed that Jim should stay at his office and that they should not ask their lawyer to be present; the less fuss made, the calmer Tita was likely to be.

  And Tita was very calm, disconcertingly so. Her feverish anxiety about the business had settled into a mild impatience the moment her mother had told her the police were coming to talk to her. For reasons hard to define, this change in mood made Julia Robinson all the more fearful that what her daughter had been chattering about was not, after all, a fantasy, which in turn made her all the more insistent, as she ushered the policeman and the priest into the house, that it was. Holder made noncommittal noises.

  They were led into the living room, and a thin child with freckles and ginger hair disentangled herself from a blanket and stood up to greet them. Her mother, too late to stop Tita from rising, refrained from correcting her, gathered up the blanket, made introductions, and stood ready to wrap Tita up again when the courtesies were over.

  Tom Holder, in a flash of inspiration, offered a hand, and Tita solemnly shook it. “And this is my associate, Kathryn Koerney.”

  The child turned to Kathryn, eyes bright with curiosity and hope. “Are you a detective?” she asked.

  Kathryn hesitated. To answer yes would be dishonest; on the other hand, “No, I’m a Sunday school teacher” seemed hopelessly flat. “I’ve never been one before,” she said confidentially, “but Chief Holder wants me to work with him on this problem, so this is my first case. We’re hoping you can help us.”

  “I hope so, too,” Tita replied with dignity, allowing her mother to re-cocoon her in one corner of the sofa.

  Gracious, thought Kathryn, I didn’t know they made them like this anymore. “O.K., then,” she said, settling into the other corner of the sofa while Holder placed a tiny tape recorder on the coffee table, switched it on, and took a chair a discreet distance away, “let’s start with your name, I like to get names right. On your statement it says Elizabeth, but your mother calls you Tita?”

  “That’s right. It’s sort of Spanish, short for Chiquita. And Chiquita,” she added in the unmistakable tones of one who has endured much, “does not mean banana!”

  Kathryn did not smile. “I know it doesn’t, it means Little One. I had a Spanish nickname myself when I was growing up”—Julia Robinson silently awarded Ms. Koerney a point for not saying “when I was a little girl”—“my uncle used to call me Trina, because my name in Spanish would be Catarina.” The spark of a joke leapt in Tita’s eyes; Kathryn saw it, remembered horrid times in first grade, and said brilliantly, “And if you tell me it’s short for latrine, I’ll put slugs in your bed!” Tita giggled, and several muscles in Kathryn’s stomach relaxed fractionally.

  “O.K., now, Tita. The first thing we need to do is read your statement, just to be sure it’s all correct.” Tom had fished it out of his folder and handed it to Kathryn, who read it aloud in a matter-of-fact voice, as though bodies in camper vans were as unremarkable as tomatoes in the kitchen. “Is that all right?”

  “Yes, except it doesn’t say who it was. I wanted to put that in, but Daddy said the policeman said it would be better not to.” The policeman, in fact, had agreed with James Robinson that there was no point in risking a lawsuit. “I don’t know why. I don’t think it’s better not to, do you?”

  “No, I agree with you. We better put it in. You could see who it was, then?”

  “Yes, it was Mr. Stanley.”

  Flicking a glance at Mrs. Robinson, Kathryn held her breath for an instant. Would the mother protest? No, the mother would not; Julia sat as though carved in marble, out of Tita’s line of vision, and the only change that came over her at the mention of her neighbor’s name was that the line of her lips became a little tighter. Good for you, thought Kathryn, and then: God, let me do this right. “Good. It’s good that you recognized him. Now, let’s start from the beginning. You opened your window. What did you see?”

  “Well, from my window you can’t see the Stanleys’ yard, because of the trees, so I just saw our yard.”

  “Can you see the Stanleys’ garage?”

  “No, there’s a really big tree in the way there.”

  “So what made you think something was happening?”

  “I heard their garage door open.”

  “Ah. And how did you know that the noise you heard was the Stanleys’ garage door?”

  “Because it squeaks. Johnny Hivers, he’s this boy lives two houses down, he says it sounds like a cat when it opens and a moose when it closes, but I think he’s just trying to be cool. I don’t think he knows what a moose sounds like.”

  “Does it sound alike, then, opening and closing?”

  “No, it really does sound different. That’s why I knew it was opening. It was the meow sound.”

  “Good. So you heard the garage door open. What made you think something was wrong?”

  “The garage light didn’t come on.”

  “Would you have been able to tell if it came on? I thought the tree was in the way.”

  “It is. But you can tell anyway. You can see it on the branches. Once when it was snowing they turned on the garage light and you could see the snow on the branches. It was really neat, like a Christmas card. That’s how I remember you can see the light, I remember when it was snowing.”

  “Excellent,” said Kathryn with complete sincerity. “Then what?”

  “Then I heard a noise like something falling over, or maybe like tripping over something, I’m not sure. But it was a”—Tita wrinkled her nose—“an accident kind of noise, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” Kathryn assured her with a smile of delight and a split-second prayer that when she had children they would be just like this one.

  Gradually, then, detail by detail, she coaxed the story out of the girl: down the stairs, out the door, across the yard, and up the fence, to the point where Tita had watched the van back out of the garage.

  “Was it coasting out, or was the motor running?”

  “The motor was running. I heard it start when I was climbing the fence, and thought somebody was stealing one of the Stanleys’ cars. And then, when I saw it, I really thought somebody was stealing it because it was all dark, they hadn’t turned the headlights on. But then it backed out to the middle of the driveway and stopped and somebody got out.”

  “You saw him getting out?”

  “No, I just heard him. The corner of the garage was in the way. I could see the side of the van, but I couldn’t see the driver’s side, you know?
” Kathryn made a listening noise. “So then he walked around to the back of the van and opened the doors. I heard that, too. I mean, I didn’t see it. Then he went into the house and that’s when I saw him.”

  “And that’s when you first knew who it was,” Kathryn said halfway between a statement and a question. This was the important bit, this was what Tom urgently needed. She simply mustn’t screw it up. She simply mustn’t fail. “How did you know it was Mr. Stanley?”

  “I just recognized him.”

  “There was light enough to see his face?”

  Tita paused, obviously puzzled. “I guess so,” she said slowly.

  “Think carefully, Tita. You first saw him when he walked from the back of the van toward the house. So you knew then that it was a man.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you think, Oh, it’s Mr. Stanley?”

  There was a pause. Kathryn let it lengthen.

  “That’s funny,” said Tita finally. “When he was walking toward the back door, I thought he was going to steal something from the house and put it in the van.”

  “Ah. And did you still think that when he went into the house?”

  Pause. “No, when he went into the house I knew it was Mr. Stanley.”

  “Why?”

  The child’s face puckered into heavy thought, and for nearly a full minute of silence Kathryn forbore to prompt her. Finally a light broke across Tita’s face. “I know! It’s the way he goes up the steps. Mr. Stanley always goes up in two big steps, you see. There are four steps, and he goes up them two at a time. Every time. And he puts his hand on the rail and he kind of pulls himself up when he does it, like he needs help, because he’s kind of short, you know? It looks kind of funny, really, like he really has to try hard, I don’t know why he does it that way. But he always does, so I knew it was him. You see?”

  Kathryn permitted herself a glance at Tom, who raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips—an expression Kathryn correctly interpreted as appreciation. She muttered silent thanks to God and returned to the witness.

  “That’s brilliant, Tita. So Mr. Stanley went into his house. Why did you decide to stay on the fence, watching?”

  “Because I still thought it was funny. You know, no lights and everything. I wanted to see what would happen.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Well, after a minute the door opened and he was there again, only now he was carrying something big. That was all I saw at first,” said Tita wisely, demonstrating that she had caught on to the rules of the game. “I didn’t see at first it was a body, just a big thing. Then, when he got down the steps, he turned toward the— Oh!” This last was a cry of consternation.

  “What is it?”

  “I just thought. Mr. Stanley doesn’t have a special way of going down steps, he just goes down them sort of fast, like lots of people. But he couldn’t go down them fast because of this big thing he was carrying.”

  Kathryn looked into a thin face full of trouble. “Yes?”

  “But don’t you see? I said it was Mr. Stanley coming out, but that’s only because it was Mr. Stanley going in. I mean, this man came out and I just thought, It’s Mr. Stanley coming out again, and I was looking at the thing he was carrying and trying to figure out what it was, but you see I can’t prove it was Mr. Stanley carrying it, because there’s nothing like that thing with the steps to prove it.”

  Kathryn looked to Holder for instructions, and got an infinitesimal shake of the head, which she interpreted to mean “Let it slide.”

  “O.K., Tita, we’ll be very careful and just say that a man came out carrying something.”

  “Yeah, it was big and it must have been heavy because of the way he was moving, real slow.”

  “How was he holding it?”

  “Over his shoulder. It hung down in front and back. He had trouble getting it out the door, you could tell, ’cause it was so big and it looked like it was hard to carry. But he got it out, and then he came down the steps real slow, and then when he got to the bottom of the steps and started to walk across to the van, then I saw. Because then I could see him sideways, you know, and I could see that the part that hung down in front of him was legs. Ladies’ legs.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Kathryn went right on saying “very good” and asking calm questions, but the knot in her stomach made her thankful there wasn’t much more ground to cover. The body had been carried to the back of the van, and once there, both it and its bearer were out of sight, leaving Tita nothing to report but noises. These, obviously, had signified the putting of the body in the van, the closing of the back doors, and the opening and shutting of the driver’s door. Then the van had backed out of the driveway, still lightless, and Tita had run to waken her parents.

  The interview concluded, Holder packed up his tape recorder and murmured his appreciation to Mrs. Robinson while Kathryn congratulated Tita on her powers of observation. Holder then asked if they might have a brief tour of the premises. Tita insisted that she was well enough to show them the spot where she had climbed the fence, but her mother, released suddenly from her frozen silence as if by the click of the stop button on the tape recorder, gathered herself together with visible effort and asserted Authority. Tita could not go outside; her mother would show the visitors the approximate place, and Tita could stand at the window and gesture to indicate a more exact location.

  It was not highly conducive to the dignity of the Chief of Police, standing in various experimental spots before a fence and being directed to right or left by the silent semaphore of a ten-year-old girl through a closed window, but Holder’s charity for Ms. Elizabeth Robinson was at that point boundless, and besides, zeal for the chase consumed him. He would have crawled around on his hands and knees at Tita’s direction, and scarcely have noticed that it was hardly the sort of thing he was accustomed to.

  In any event, the spot was located to Tita’s satisfaction after a minimum of back-and-forthing. Then, since the fence was of that woven board variety that even a middle-aged policeman and a female priest can scale without difficulty or broken fingernails, they both climbed up just high enough to peer over into the backyard of the William Stanley residence. The layout was exactly as described, the garage hiding part of the driveway, the back steps—four high—in plain sight. Holder grunted his satisfaction and descended to ground level. Kathryn remained on the fence for a moment, bothered by something.

  “What is it?” Tom asked.

  “I don’t know. Something . . . something I can’t put my finger on.”

  Tom climbed back up beside her and ran his eye over the scene, but could find nothing wrong with it. “Beats me,” he said.

  Kathryn shook her head. “Beats me, too. Oh, well, never mind, I don’t suppose it’s important.”

  When they returned to the house, Tita, triumphantly back in the limelight, led them upstairs to her bedroom. From her window they verified the non-view of the Stanleys’ backyard and nodded sagely over it as though it mattered.

  Tom turned away, but again Kathryn lingered. “What is it now?” he asked. After a minute she sighed, and admitted that she hadn’t the foggiest idea. Holder, still game, and with the greatest respect for Kathryn’s intelligence, went back to the window and looked again. Nothing. Kathryn shrugged, laughed at herself, and waved a dismissive hand. “Come on,” she said, “let’s go.”

  Chief Holder and Ms. Koerney then took their leave, shaking hands with the witness at the door to her bedroom, and being escorted out of the house by her apprehensive mother.

  Once back in the car and safely out of Mrs. Robinson’s hearing, Tom erupted in something approaching glee.

  “Fantastic!” he bellowed over the roar of the starting engine. “Did you hear that kid? Did you hear her? Not one witness in a hundred—hell, not one in a thousand—would’ve seen what she did, that business about not knowing for sure it was Stanley coming out because there was nothing like the steps to prove it. Fantastic!”

  “Do you
think it wasn’t Stanley coming out?”

  “Oh, no, of course it was Stanley, had to be. Unless he was carefully backing the van out of the garage so somebody else could come cart off the corpse, and I’ll believe that when I see pigs fly. Oh, no, it was Stanley. The only reason it’s important, the kid saying she wasn’t sure, is that it proves how good she is. She said she saw it, then by God she saw it!”

  He breezed through the next two blocks in a silent glow of satisfaction, so pleased with Tita Robinson that he temporarily forgot about Kathryn Koerney. Kathryn sensed that his thoughts were elsewhere, and in that brief emotional vacuum her lifelong hunger for attention raised its ugly and familiar head.

  “Uh, Tom?” she ventured. “When I asked her about the back-door lock—you know, you told me to see if I could figure out if she’d been fever-muddled or clear-headed, and I thought maybe little details like that—”

  “Oh, sure, sure.” He waved it aside, not dreaming that the Rev. Dr. Koerney wanted to be patted on the head and given a gold star. “No question. Clear as a bell. All my witnesses should be so sick.” He grinned. “Maybe all my witnesses should be ten years old.”

  Kathryn promptly decided she had done a mediocre job, but Tita had been so good, it didn’t matter, and Tom was too polite to say so. Deep in anticlimax, she was deposited back at her house with a casual wave of thanks.

  The Chief of Police then drove off in high spirits to pursue a judge and a search warrant, leaving in Tita Robinson’s mind, dormant and dangerous, the one piece of information he most needed.

  CHAPTER 18

  i

  He sat at his desk at work. Not that he was working. But some sort of appearance had to be kept up. It wouldn’t do to let anyone know how drastic, how desperate, the situation really was.

  He had thought Monday afternoon was as bad as things could get. It could only get better after that. But the night had brought new horrors.