Crooked Heart

by Cristina Sumners

  The Chief of Police was out beating the bushes with everybody else. No one was surprised. After all, when a child goes missing, the Chief is not going to sit back at the station, waiting for reports, he’s going to be out there with his men. And women. Not just his men and women, either; they had called for reinforcements from West Windsor and Plainsboro. When that hadn’t been enough, they called in Hopewell and Pennington and Lawrence. Private citizens, students from the university, all sorts of people had called in offering to help. So obviously the Chief was out there with everybody else.

  What no one knew except the Chief himself was that he wasn’t there out of duty or for community relations. He was there out of guilt. He didn’t even notice that the day had once more become overcast and dismal. The other searchers were encouraged to take breaks from time to time; people went around with thermoses of coffee, but the Chief wouldn’t take a break. His guilt was a consuming fire.

  He had missed something. That much was clear. He thought he had gotten everything the child had to tell him, but he was obviously wrong. Disastrously wrong. If only he could talk to Kathryn about it, ask her to help him to remember, maybe together they could figure it out. But Kathryn had left town for the weekend, and that woman, Mrs. Warburton, said she had tried to get hold of her and couldn’t; for some reason Kathryn hadn’t stayed at the motel whose name and number she had left with her housekeeper. So there was no help there.

  The thing that was driving him crazy was that the murderer was already in custody. The killer was cooling his heels in a cell in Trenton when the little girl went missing. So nobody took her, she’d just wandered off. She had to have just wandered off. That had to be it.

  But he didn’t believe it for a minute.

  iii

  Since there was nothing to do but wait, he did a lot of thinking, a lot of remembering. He wished he could stop himself from doing it, because it hurt so much. But the more it hurt, the more he remembered.

  The day they discovered they both loved Shakespeare. He had dug out his copy of the sonnets and read to her. That stolen afternoon they went to see Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. How they had squabbled amiably over it; he had liked the way they did the “Get thee to a nunnery” scene, she hadn’t.

  Hamlet.

  Oh, yes, indeed. To be or not to be. He had never expected to find himself so deep in despair that suicide looked attractive. Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt . . .

  Of course—he thought with a mordant flash of humor—that was just the problem, wasn’t it? It was too, too solid flesh that had gotten him into this.

  CHAPTER 29

  On the eastern face of the Rockies the weather had turned foul, and Grace and Kathryn found themselves in an interminable delay at the airport in Denver. They ate a late lunch in the restaurant, and lingered over coffee.

  They had a table by a window overlooking the runway, which Kathryn thought was fortunate. When two strangers share a meal, it helps to have something to pretend to look at when conversation languishes. But Grace was beginning to want to talk.

  She said, “You must think I’m terrible.”

  “What, for running away? I already told you—”

  “No, not for running away. For— Because of Bill.”

  “Oh.” Kathryn shrugged. “Not necessarily.”

  “Why not? It’s a sin, isn’t it? Adultery?” Grace spoke the word harshly, as if determined not to spare herself.

  “Grace. I am well acquainted with your husband. Your only choice was adultery or homicide.”

  Grace laughed in the middle of a sip of coffee, and choked.

  “Sorry,” said Kathryn hastily, thinking belatedly that a joke about homicide was probably in bad taste, given the circumstances.

  Grace recovered. “But you wouldn’t do it, would you? Commit adultery, I mean.”

  Kathryn privately believed that she was as likely to commit adultery as she was to commit murder, but then, ten years ago she would have said the same thing about divorce. So she said, “It’s a temptation that hasn’t come much in my way. I’ve been luckier than you in that respect.”

  “What a very kind thing to say.”

  “It’s true.”

  “You mean you’ve never been tempted?”

  “When I was married I was too busy being miserable, I think, to have the leisure to fall in love with anybody else. After my divorce—well, there was a married man, a friend, offering sympathy. I got drunk and depressed and got as far as kissing him. If he’d been patient, who knows, he might have succeeded in seducing me, but he was all over me in two seconds, and I broke and ran. And that’s when I left town at dawn to escape a man. I still have nightmares about it. All of which makes me more cautious than I used to be.”

  “So now you’re”—Grace looked for a word—“safe from it?”

  “From the deed itself, I think.” Kathryn flashed a smile. “But like Jimmy Carter and just about everybody else, I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.”

  Grace smiled back, and, emboldened by Kathryn’s frankness, asked, “Your policeman friend?”

  “Who, Tom? Heavens, no!”

  “You don’t find him attractive?”

  “Well, yes and no. To tell the truth, we flirt with each other in an understated sort of way, but it’s not serious. I don’t have fantasies about luring him away from his wife.”

  “Why not?”

  “Good question. Let’s see. It’s not because he’s fifteen years older than I am, and I really don’t think it’s because he’s forty pounds overweight.” She squinted out the window at the fog-bound planes. An uncomfortable thought occurred to her. How did one say it without sounding like the most god-awful snob? Kathryn sighed. “I feel reasonably sure he wouldn’t recognize a quotation from Hamlet if he heard one.”

  She was still looking out the window at the runway, but after several seconds in which no response came, she turned to look at Grace. She saw to her surprise that Grace’s eyes were filling with tears.

  “I know exactly what you mean,” said Grace. “George wouldn’t either. But Bill does. We were both English majors. He reads—he used to read the sonnets to me.”

  Kathryn tried to picture a real estate agent who read Shakespeare’s sonnets to his lover, and failed. “Tell me about Bill. If you like.”

  Grace dashed a hand across her eyes. “I don’t think I can. I obviously don’t know a thing about him.” She shook her head, baffled. “I’d have said he wouldn’t hurt a fly. He was always the kindest, most considerate—everybody loved him, everybody.”

  “Including Carolyn?”

  “Yes. I’m sure of it. But—” She stopped, and looked at Kathryn, considering. “Yes, I’ll tell you,” she decided. “Something happened to Carolyn. Bill wanted her to see a doctor, but she wouldn’t. She just lost interest in sex. It was about three years ago. She had twin beds put in their bedroom, wouldn’t let Bill touch her. Bill said she was very polite about it, she kept apologizing, but she was set on it. She just turned their marriage into a platonic relationship.”

  Kathryn digested this for a moment, then asked, “If that’s true, why would she have had such a fit when she found out that Bill was—”

  “I don’t know!” Grace cried. “And it haunts me! I always thought she knew, and that she didn’t mind.”

  “You thought she didn’t mind?”

  “I swear to you! She would make it easy for me and Bill to be together, she would actually suggest things we could do together, and she would smile at me as if she knew, as if it were—oh, some special joke that we shared. You don’t believe me.”

  “I believe that’s what you think happened. But I think you may be deceiving yourself. You wanted her not to mind, so you convinced yourself—”

  “No! No, I’m sure of it. She didn’t want him anymore, and she didn’t want to be a dog in the manger. She wanted him to be happy. She was a very decent person.”

  “Yes, I know she was, I’ve often thought so. B
ut however decent she was, last Monday she had a hell of a row with Bill, who, she said, had betrayed her. And she canceled her reservation at the Mark Hopkins, presumably to go to another hotel, which must mean—because I can’t figure out what else it could mean—she didn’t want Bill to know where she was staying. She was afraid. Just being clear across the country wasn’t safe enough.”

  “But that’s impossible!” Grace protested vehemently. “She could not have been afraid of Bill. He never even raised his voice to her.”

  “But, Grace—he killed her. Within the hour. She had put him into a fury, and she knew it. There’s no other explanation for her behavior.”

  “But why did it happen now? How did she find out?”

  “Maybe she found out from George. She was apparently acting quite normally until she had lunch with George. Then she returned to her office in a rare state and started making agitated phone calls and told Patricia to change her hotel reservation.”

  Grace was shaking her head firmly. “George doesn’t know.”

  “How can you be sure of that?”

  “Because he hasn’t said anything. Believe me, if George knew, my life would not be worth living.”

  “All right, then, could Carolyn have gotten it from Patricia?”

  “Patricia? How could she have found out?”

  “God knows. It occurs to me only because my friend the policeman says Patricia knows something she isn’t telling, and it’s about Carolyn’s private affairs.”

  The instant she said “affairs,” Kathryn understood. All the times I’ve seen them touch each other when they didn’t have to, she thought. Why did I never see it before? It explained the twin beds. Carolyn, operating under a peculiar version of monogamy, had stopped sleeping with her husband in order to be faithful to her lesbian lover.

  Grace was about to ask why Kathryn was looking so struck, but as Kathryn would never have told her, it was fortunate that there was a sudden diversion. After three and a half hours, their flight was being called.

  CHAPTER 30

  Tom Holder was not pleased. Kathryn sat with sinking heart and realized that she had erred disastrously. She had upstaged him. He had invited her in to help a bit, and she had taken over the show and outdone him. That could be the only explanation for the grim mouth and the hard eyes with which he listened to Grace Kimbrough’s story. Grace was clearly terrified of him, and Kathryn didn’t blame her.

  It was just after nine o’clock on Sunday morning. The flight had landed closer to midnight than to its scheduled eight p.m. Mrs. Warburton, who had whiled away the evening with an unusually witty historical romance, was disgustingly fresh, and said with a cheery smile as Kathryn and Grace got into the car, “Where to, boss?”

  Kathryn looked at her watch and groaned. “It’ll be after one before we get there. Oh, hell, Warby, take us home. We’ve spent all day in airports and airplanes, and I don’t know about you,” she said to Grace, “but I am stiff as a board, and I think that tomorrow morning is plenty of time to tackle Tom Holder.”

  Grace had heartily agreed. She had further agreed to spend the night in Kathryn’s guest room. “I don’t really want,” she said faintly, “to face George.” Kathryn had thought it high time Grace informed her unfortunate husband that she wasn’t dead, but when she had suggested as much while they were still in California, Grace had stated unequivocally that George would be happier thinking her dead than knowing she was having an affair. “If I’m dead, you see, it doesn’t bother his pride.” This was said not bitterly, but in the manner of disinterested assessment. Kathryn let the matter drop.

  On Sunday morning she had called the police station, ascertained that Holder was indeed there, and asked the officer to tell the Chief that Kathryn Koerney would be there in fifteen minutes with something he would find useful in the Stanley-Kimbrough case. Since it was only three blocks, and the threat of rain was not entirely convincing, they set off on foot beneath the dripping maples. On the way they stopped at the church so that Kathryn could tell the Rector she might not be there for the ten-thirty service, though she was hoping to be—which was why she hadn’t let Grace sleep until noon.

  As they went through the lobby of the City Hall toward the glass partition that said Police, Kathryn was too intent on her errand, and much too pleased at the prospect of Tom’s appreciation, to wonder why the place seemed a bit heavily populated for a Sunday morning. She ushered Grace through the glass door, stepped up to the desk, and said, “Kathryn Koerney. To see Chief Holder.” As the officer waved them toward an open door on his left, there was a stir behind them, the glass door was flung open again, and several people tried to crowd through it. A woman’s voice, excited and almost incredulous, shrilled, “Excuse me, aren’t you Grace Kimbrough?” As Kathryn and Grace both turned to look at her, two camera flashes in rapid succession caught them full in the face. Momentarily stunned, neither attempted to answer the questions that were being hurled at them by the woman and her media colleagues; Kathryn regained her wits, thrust Grace through the door into the hallway, gave the reporters a firm “No comment,” and slammed the door on them. Grace looked rattled, but Kathryn felt all the more like a hunter bringing home a twenty-point buck.

  She waltzed into Holder’s office, indicated her companion, and said with all the smugness of a fundamentalist warbling “Meet Me in the Rapture,” “Tom, this is Grace Kimbrough.” She had been unable to suppress a triumphant smile.

  The immediate reaction had been everything she’d hoped for. Tom rose from his chair with mouth agape, then tried to frame a question but couldn’t do better than an unfinished “What in hell—” and Grace, looking suitably solemn, was apologizing for all the trouble she’d caused them. Tom stayed dumbfounded through most of Kathryn’s brief explanation, but toward the end, when she was telling him how she’d gone out to California to fetch Grace, the wonder began to fade, giving way to an uncharacteristic grimness. He gave Grace a long, measuring look in which no sympathy could be detected, picked up his desk phone, and snapped into it an order for a tape recorder, and then, on an obvious second thought, growled at Grace, “I suppose you want a lawyer?”

  Grace cast a frightened glance at Kathryn and met a blank, unhelpful look. “I—ah— No,” she said. “No, I just want to get this over with.”

  Holder told her to sit down, and sat himself. Kathryn, who had observed his reactions with increasing dismay, began to edge tactfully toward the door, but was stopped by his bursting out aggrievedly, “For God’s sake, you’re not leaving, are you?”

  Kathryn swallowed. “Not if you don’t want me to,” she said carefully.

  Holder, his mouth a thin line, stabbed a finger toward a chair. Kathryn sat in it and gripped the edges of it with fingers that went white. An officer walked in with a tape recorder and proceeded to set up the machine on the Chief’s desk. Kathryn wondered how on earth she had so misjudged her friend: She had thought him that rarity, the man with an unassailable ego. She realized that she had assumed, because she didn’t scare him under normal circumstances, that she could do something extraordinary and still not threaten him. Stupid, she thought; I should have known better.

  So Grace told her tale into an unfriendly chill. Holder interrupted her from time to time with a question, but not often; besides the trial run to Kathryn in the Sunset Motel, Grace had had Saturday’s interminable cross-country flight during which to rehearse this speech, and by that point she had it pretty well organized. She finished, and there was a brief silence. Holder switched off the tape recorder and studied Grace.

  “You realize there are about half a dozen things we could charge you with,” he said.

  “Yes,” she answered, and closed her lips tightly. Holder’s mouth was tight, too, and he regarded Grace with narrow eyes. “I take it you intend to be cooperative?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Grace said again.

  The hard gaze went to Kathryn. “How about you? Can you spare a couple of hours?”

  “Sure,” sai
d Kathryn briefly. She was grateful not to find herself banished into outer darkness, but her apprehension remained. Tom was so obviously far from pleased.

  Had she but known it, Holder was not resentful of her coup, he was only desperately disappointed. It didn’t help. Victim and witness had changed places, but it just didn’t help. Kathryn had brought off something really brilliant, but he was still faced with a calamity he couldn’t explain and couldn’t fix. He wasn’t going to tell her, not yet, because she might be able to help him with Grace and Bill. Besides, let her enjoy her triumph a little while longer. He was in too much turmoil himself to notice that she wasn’t enjoying it at all.

  He pushed his chair back with a grunt, and rose. “Wait here a minute,” he said, and left the room. The two women eyed each other nervously. Kathryn stretched out a hand and grasped Grace’s forearm. “You’ll make it,” she said. Grace gave her a rather pathetic smile.

  Holder came back. “All right, now,” he said to Grace. “We’re going to Trenton to talk to Bill Stanley.”

  Grace stiffened, but Kathryn thought Tom was actually being rather polite; he could, after all, have said something cutting like “to see your boyfriend.” He was keeping the lid on something that looked suspiciously like anger, and he was not taking it out on Grace. Kathryn began to be intrigued, and to hope that she had not, after all, alienated him for life.

  CHAPTER 31

  Grace and Kathryn were bustled out the back door of the police station and into a waiting car. They had the backseat to themselves, Holder riding in front with the uniformed driver. Nobody spoke a word. They rode through the gray, early winter beauty of the New Jersey countryside, and eventually arrived at the unappealing urban sprawl of Trenton. They threaded through streets unfamiliar to Kathryn, and finally pulled up at the back entrance of a large and unmistakably institutional building.

  Here they were bustled again, Holder all but encircling them with his arms, for all the world like a hen with two chicks. He was afraid some chance passerby would blurt out the news that would ruin their concentration for the interview to come. He could not guard their ears with his physical bulk, but to make the attempt was instinctive. Kathryn wondered what he was protecting them from; Grace thought only that she was about to confront Bill, and would scarcely have noticed if Holder had led her by the earlobe.