Hare Today, Dead Tomorrow

by Cynthia Baxter

  “He went to MIT afterward, right?”

  “Almost graduated, too. And from what I understand, he was an outstanding student, at least in the subjects he was interested in. But for some reason, in the middle of his senior year, he just left. Nobody ever knew the whole story.”

  “And what about the girl?” I asked. “Do you know what happened to her?”

  He was silent for a long time before answering. “She’s dead.”

  “Dead?” I repeated, not sure I’d heard him correctly.

  “That’s right. She fell down a long staircase a few weeks after the incident with Ethan.” He paused. “Either that or she was pushed. It was never clear.”

  My heart pounded as I wondered if I dared ask the obvious question. “Was Ethan anywhere near her when she fell?”

  “As a matter of fact,” Theo said with a definite edge to his voice, “Ethan was spotted leaving the house shortly before the poor girl was discovered. The girl’s parents knew all about him being there. But for some reason, they didn’t pursue it. In fact, they never stopped insisting that her death was an accident.”

  Another stabbing. This time, it was a young woman’s hand, rather than her torso, but the modus operandi was the same. And according to Theo, Ethan had come right out and admitted he was responsible.

  The similarity between what had happened to the girl at Ethan’s school and what happened to Cassandra wasn’t wasted on me. And even though it was hardly enough to conclude that Ethan Thorndike was responsible for his sister’s death, it suddenly seemed extremely important to hear his side of it.

  Fortunately, I had the perfect excuse to pay Ethan Thorndike a social call. Ever since my visit to the Sewanhacky School on Monday, I’d been driving around with Mr. Ed in my van. The grinning guy in the red bow tie gave me the creeps under the best of circumstances, and with a scalpel stuck in his chest, the mere sight of him practically made me break out in a rash. As a result, I’d been keeping him stuffed in back. Now it was time to see him—or, rather, it—home.

  For the second time that day, I drove onto the Thorndike property. As I crunched along the driveway, I found the place quiet. This time, even Gordon didn’t appear to be around. Even though I wasn’t exactly looking forward to confronting Ethan, I desperately hoped I’d find him holed up in his tiny apartment above the garage.

  I drove up to the sagging white building and stepped out of my van, clutching the dummy under my arm like a sack of wooden potatoes. There was no movement or sound anywhere on the property, aside from the rustling of leaves in the cool autumn breeze. Yet rather than seeming serene, my desolate surroundings struck me as eerie.

  In fact, as I opened the side door and stepped into the garage, my heart pounded so furiously that I hoped it wouldn’t set off any of the car alarms.

  So I leaped about six feet into the air when something suddenly flew in front of me from out of nowhere, letting out a screech that made even the hairs on my toes stand on end.

  “Yaaah!” I yelped, or something that sounded an awful lot like it. And then: “It’s you!”

  I was beyond relieved to discover that the spooky monster that had just scared the so-called living daylights out of me was only Jenny, Ethan’s calico cat.

  But I hadn’t forgotten that the soft mass of gray, white, and orange fur wasn’t very friendly when it came to veterinarians. In fact, she glared at me, making it clear that she didn’t think dropping in like this unannounced was a good idea at all.

  “Don’t worry, Jenny,” I told her, keeping my distance. “I won’t be staying long.”

  But I would be staying. Jenny apparently wasn’t the only one lurking in the shadows of the creaky garage. From upstairs, I could hear footsteps, meaning Ethan was home.

  I crept up a flight of wobbly wooden stairs that creaked so loudly I figured there’d be no need to knock. Just as well, since when I reached the top, the wooden door leading to the second-floor apartment was wide open.

  Almost as if he’d been expecting me.

  “Ethan?” I called as I ventured a few feet inside through a small, dimly lit hallway. That silly heart of mine was still pounding, mainly because I didn’t know what I’d find. I braced myself for anything from the laboratory of a crazed scientist in a sci-fi flick to the climax of The Silence of the Lambs.

  So I was relieved to find that Ethan’s apartment was actually fairly ordinary. I stepped farther inside. Beyond the hallway I could see a cluster of small but immaculate rooms that were painted white. Pale gray wall-to-wall carpeting gave the stark space a softer look. The furnishings were simple, wooden pieces that looked straight out of the showroom of IKEA. There were a few designer-type touches like brightly colored throw pillows and a pot of sunny yellow chrysanthemums on the living-room windowsill that had Joan Thorndike written all over them.

  But Ethan had superimposed his own signature over the place as well. A bookshelf was crammed with the works of dark writers like Dostoevsky and Kafka and Sartre, along with a few oversize art books featuring the gloomy paintings of the German Expressionist movement. On the wall were several framed black-and-white photographs, which looked like tasteful accents from a distance but up close contained some disconcerting elements—like the stunning stylized portrait of a naked woman that on closer inspection turned out to be a naked man.

  Since I was holding Mr. Ed in my arms, I knew that at least I wouldn’t be caught off guard by the dummy’s sudden appearance. But that didn’t mean I didn’t jump at least a foot in the air when Ethan suddenly leaped out from behind a doorway.

  “Did I scare you?” he asked eagerly, his eyes bright.

  “Not at all,” I insisted, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of knowing he’d just taken several months, if not actual years, off my life. Boldly, I strode into the middle of the boxy living room. “Sorry to drop in unannounced like this, but I wanted to return something I believe belongs to you. I know this dummy is yours— and I imagine the scalpel is too.”

  “I suppose I should thank you,” he said begrudgingly, taking the dummy from me. I noticed he left the scalpel in place. “But somehow Red always finds his way home.”

  “Red?” I repeated, puzzled.

  “Red, Mr. Red...” Ethan shrugged. “I’ve got a few different names for this guy, most of them based on his bow tie. Makes him look pretty dapper, don’t you think?”

  I didn’t respond. I was too busy saying, “Mr. Ed, Mr. Red,” in my head, surprised that I’d managed to get the name of Ethan’s alter ego wrong.

  “I hope you didn’t take my practical joke the wrong way,” Ethan said, scrutinizing my face.

  “Not at all. I enjoy a chuckle as much as the next person.” I wasn’t about to go for the bait. Not when I had something much more important than Ethan’s fondness for ghoulish antics to attend to.

  “There’s another reason I wanted to see you,” I said, my sudden breathlessness betraying my discomfort. “I’m curious about an incident I understand you were involved in while you were at the Sewanhacky School. The one that you ended up being expelled for.”

  His steady gaze flickered. “Liza Ackerman,” he said in a strained voice. “The scissors.”

  “That’s right. I was hoping you’d tell me your version of what happened.”

  “There’s not much to tell,” he said, his blue-green eyes clouding. “Liza ended up in the hospital with multiple stab wounds in her hand. Ten or twelve, I think. They stitched her up and sent her home.”

  “I heard from a couple of people that you admitted you were responsible.”

  “Sure, I admitted it,” he replied with a shrug.

  “So you’re the one who stabbed her?”

  “No,” Ethan said, looking at me as if he couldn’t believe how naive I was. “She did it.”

  “She did it to herself?”

  “That’s right. I was covering for her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we were friends. Because I really cared about her.”


  “I don’t understand.”

  “Liza used to cut herself.”

  I blinked. “On purpose?”

  “That’s right,” he replied. “Some people see it as a way of easing the extreme emotional pain in their lives. By comparison, the physical pain they inflict on themselves seems like a relief. For them, it’s a way of getting through the tough periods.”

  Sure, I’d heard about people, usually teenage girls, who deliberately injured themselves with razor blades, knives, or anything else with a point or a sharp edge. But I’d never come into contact with anyone who actually did it.

  “She did it all the time,” Ethan continued, “but usually in places people didn’t see, like the inside of her thighs. She hardly told anybody, but I knew. She even showed me her wounds. But she made me swear I wouldn’t tell anybody. Especially her parents.”

  “But how could her own parents not know she was that unhappy?”

  He laughed coldly. “Most of the time, parents only see what they want to see. And Liza’s were the worst. They insisted their daughter was perfect. And she tried really hard to be just that. She got all As, she was in every club you can imagine...But her mother and father were so self-centered that they barely noticed how great she was, much less how disturbed she was.

  “Not that it would have mattered,” he added bitterly. “They were the type who never would have been able to bring themselves to face the fact that there was anything wrong with a daughter of theirs. After all,” he added sarcastically, “it would have looked bad.”

  Maybe Mr. Waylan, the janitor, was wrong about the problem with these kids being that they had too much money, I thought. From the way it sounded, the real problem may have been that their parents had too much money.

  “Ethan, I realize you were just a kid yourself. But did you ever think that maybe you’d be helping her by telling someone other than her parents? Maybe someone at the school?”

  “Sure I thought of it. But Liza begged me not to. She was afraid that if anybody knew, she’d get stuck in some mental institution. Although maybe that wouldn’t have been such a bad idea, given what happened a few weeks later.” He swallowed hard. “She killed herself.”

  “Were you there when it happened?” I asked softly.

  He nodded. “I’d gone over to her house when nobody else was home. Her parents had flown to Cancun or the Riviera or someplace like that for the weekend. They were really rich, and they lived in a huge mansion. That place was like a palace. I knew she didn’t like being there by herself, so when she called me up and asked me to keep her company, I went over.

  “I figured we’d play video games or watch a movie or something. But as soon as I walked in the door, I could see something was wrong. She seemed...crazed I guess is the word. She was talking really fast and she sounded practically hysterical. And she couldn’t sit still. I don’t know if she was on something or what. But she kept thanking me over and over for being her friend, telling me how much it meant to her.

  “I didn’t know what to do, but I figured just being there was enough. Then she asked me to go upstairs and find this CD she really liked. She said it was in her room somewhere and that I should just look for it. Her room was a mess. I’d been up there for less than five minutes when I heard this loud crashing sound. I came running out and saw her sprawled out on the marble floor of the foyer. See, when you walked into the house, there was this tremendous entryway with ceilings that were two or three stories high and one of those big staircases, the kind you see in the movies.

  “Liza was lying at the bottom of the staircase with her neck broken. Dead. It took the police two days to locate her parents. When they finally came home, they insisted it was an accident. The last I heard, they sold that house and bought another, one that was even bigger.”

  “Ethan,” I said, “did you ever tell all this to anyone else?”

  “Sure. I told Liza’s parents. At least, I tried to. But they just insisted I was lying, that it was all an accident. Like I told you, they didn’t want to believe their daughter was anything less than perfect.

  “Besides,” he continued, “what difference would it have made if the truth came out? Liza was dead. And I’d already been thrown out of Sewanhacky. It wasn’t like I cared about going back there or anything.”

  “But didn’t you want your parents to know what really happened?”

  He shrugged. “People believe what they want to believe.”

  The version Ethan was telling me was certainly different from what almost everyone else who knew about the incident seemed to believe—not only Theo, but the girl’s parents. Yet somehow it all sounded plausible.

  As I turned to leave, I noticed something I hadn’t seen on my way in. Pictures of Cassandra were tacked up along the cramped, dimly lit hallway. Not one or two, but dozens of photographs covered one entire wall. Cassandra as a little girl romping with a big furry black dog. Cassandra in a school play, probably in junior high, dressed like Juliet. Cassandra staring into the camera moodily, her look of utter disdain so convincing it was impossible to tell if she was sincere or simply posing.

  “Wow. You sure have a lot of pictures of your sister,” I commented, not knowing what to say but figuring I couldn’t go too far wrong by stating the obvious.

  Ethan surveyed the collection for a few seconds before saying, “Even this many pictures can’t begin to capture who she was. There were so many sides to her. Frankly, she could be pretty nutty, and we spent most of our childhood at odds with each other. But she was also the sweetest person I ever knew. Like when we were kids? I had a really hard time falling asleep, so she used to read to me every night. My mother never had the patience. She always said she was too tired, making it sound like I was the one who’d made her so tired. But Cassie never said no. In a lot of ways, she was like a mother to me, especially since I was pretty young when our real mother died.”

  Glancing at the wall of photographs one more time, he added, “So when Cassie was killed, I held my own private memorial service. Thing is, once it was over, I still couldn’t let her go.”

  My heart wrenched. For the first time since I’d met Ethan Thorndike, I realized how painful it must have been for him to lose his sister. Maybe he wasn’t exactly your average man on the street, but of course he must be devastated by such a tragedy.

  Only a teensy-weensy voice somewhere deep inside me dared to venture a single cynical comment: How do you know it’s not an act?

  In fact, as I climbed back down the rickety stairs, I realized that while I’d come to Ethan’s apartment to confront him head-on, hoping to determine once and for all whether he was a demon or just a poor, lost boy, I still didn’t have the slightest idea what to believe about Ethan Thorndike.

  Thursday turned out to be such a busy day that I didn’t have a moment to devote to Suzanne’s predicament. But even as I drove all around Long Island, putting in a long day of making house calls, the details of Cassandra’s life kept nagging at me.

  Part of me felt I was tantalizingly close to figuring out which of the different conflicts she’d been embroiled in had culminated in her murder. I’d met so many people who could have killed her, even though I wasn’t yet one hundred percent clear on what each person’s motivation might have been. From the start, I’d had to suspect the members of her family—at least her stepmother, Joan, her creepy brother, Ethan, and her fiancé, Robert. But she’d also been enmeshed in a battle that was being fought in the highly competitive Bromptons restaurant scene, one that involved not only Robert but also his competitor Preston and his supposedly loyal pastry chef Jean-Luc—even though I had yet to figure out exactly who was on whose side.

  Then there was Cassandra’s dalliance with the S&M set. What Nick had learned was that people with a proclivity for violence in their fantasy lives sometimes let things get out of hand in their real lives. That scenario pointed not only to both Jean-Luc and Preston once again but also to Thor and any number of others I couldn’t name but had seen at
the BDSM party I’d attended with Nick.

  Having identified all those strong possibilities, it wasn’t surprising that I felt pretty darn close to solving the case. Of course, another part of me felt I wasn’t even in the right galaxy. Sure, I’d uncovered many of the threads that had comprised Cassandra Thorndike’s life. But I was still struggling to untangle all the loose ends— complex intrigues, secrets, and lies that had led to one of them unraveling.

  Friday morning, as I drove to Sunshine Media’s television studio, I promised myself that I’d dedicate the next few days to Cassandra Thorndike’s murder. By this point, I was desperate to help Suzanne put this whole ugly episode behind her. Especially since Lieutenant Falcone was hot on her trail, anxious to prove to his adoring public what a great job he was doing.

  But for now, I had to put all that out of my mind and focus on perfecting my performance for Pet People. It was showtime.

  The second time around was easy, compared to the first. For one thing, I now knew that while Max and Lou were stars in my eyes, they simply weren’t cut out for the celebrity life. My instincts told me Tinkerbell was equally likely to use her fifteen minutes of fame to commit acts that were better off not being televised. As for Cat, subjecting her to the studio’s bright lights and strange sounds, not to mention all that moving around, would cause her too much discomfort. So this time, I’d brought along my least mobile loved ones: Prometheus and Leilani.

  Now that I was an old hand at this, I was able to find my own way to the greenroom, then sit patiently while Aldo performed his subtle but effective magic. I walked confidently into the studio, secure in the knowledge that my lips were sufficiently glossy and my cocker-spaniel hair concealed my unsightly ears. As soon as Patti pantomimed the countdown, I launched into my intro.

  “I’m Dr. Popper,” I began, feeling oddly at home amid a set that not long before had struck me as positively bizarre. “Welcome to Pet People, the program for people who are passionate about their pets.

  “Today I brought along two of my own pets for you to meet. The first one is Prometheus, a blue and gold macaw.” I raised the hand holding my exquisite bird up in front of the camera so everyone in TV land could admire him. “Parrots make terrific pets. They’re not only beautiful; they’re also extremely intelligent. They can be taught to speak and to play games, and they’ll quickly learn to recognize different members of your family.