Daddy's Little Girl

by Mary Higgins Clark

  Michael Rayburn’s voice broke. “She died of multiple fractures of the skull. Her face wasn’t recognizable.”

  I beat Phil to death, and it felt good.

  “Dan admitted that he’d been angry and upset after she got out of his car. He said he drove around for an hour or so, then parked near the lake and just sat there for a long time. But he had no one to back up his story. No one had seen him, and Phil’s body was found in a wooded area about a mile from the lake.”

  “Didn’t anyone else see Jim at the pizza parlor?”

  “People said they remembered a guy there with dark blond hair. But he apparently didn’t talk to anybody, and nobody noticed when he left. Dan was convicted and sent to prison. It broke his mother’s heart. She’d raised him alone, and, sadly, she died much too young and never lived to see him paroled.”

  My mother died much too young as well, I thought.

  “Where is Dan now?” I asked.

  “He got his college degree in prison instead of at Yale. I’ve heard he works as a counselor to former inmates. I never in my heart really believed he could do that to Phil. If it turns out that your theory is right, then I owe him a profound apology.”

  Rob Westerfield owes him a lot more than an apology, I thought. He owes him eighteen years—and the life he should have lived.

  “When are you going to put this on your Website, Ellie?” Michael Rayburn asked.

  “As soon as I can write it. That should take about an hour.”

  “Then I won’t keep you. We’ll be looking for it. Let me know if any new information comes in.”

  * * *

  I KNEW that I was already in jeopardy from the Westerfields and that by mounting this new assault I was being downright reckless. I didn’t care.

  When I thought of all the victims Rob Westerfield had claimed, I became enraged.

  Phil, an only child.

  Dan, his life destroyed.

  The Rayburns.

  Dan’s mother.

  Rob’s grandmother.

  Our family.

  I started Phil’s story with the headline: “WESTCHESTER DISTRICT ATTORNEY, TAKE NOTE!”

  My fingers flew over the keyboard. At nine o’clock it was finished. I read it over once and, with grim satisfaction, sent it to the Website.

  I knew I had to clear out of the inn. I closed the computer, packed in five minutes, and went downstairs.

  I was at the desk, paying my bill, when my cell phone rang.

  I thought it might be Marcus Longo, but it was a woman with a Hispanic accent who responded to my quick greeting.

  “Ms. Cavanaugh?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have been watching your Website. My name is Rosita Juarez. I was housekeeper for Rob Westerfield’s parents from the time he was ten years old until he went to prison. He is a very bad person.”

  I gripped the phone and pressed it closer to my ear. This woman had been the housekeeper at the time Rob committed both murders! What did she know? She sounded frightened. Don’t let her hang up, I prayed.

  I tried to make my voice sound calm. “Yes, Rob is a very bad person, Rosita.”

  “He looked down on me. He made fun of the way I talk. He was always nasty and rude to me. That’s why I want to help you.”

  “How can you help me, Rosita?”

  “You are right. Rob used to wear a blond wig. When he put it on, he would say to me, “My name is Jim, Rosita. That shouldn’t be too hard even for you to remember.”

  “You saw him put on the wig?”

  “I have the wig.” There was sly triumph in the woman’s voice. “His mother used to get very upset when he wore the wig and called himself Jim, and one day she threw it in the garbage. I don’t know why I did it, but I took it out and brought it home. I knew it was expensive, and I thought maybe I could sell it. But I put it in a box in the closet and forgot all about it until you wrote about it on your Website.”

  “I’d like to have that wig, Rosita. I’ll be glad to buy it from you.”

  “No, you don’t have to buy it. Will it help to make people believe that he killed that girl, Phil?”

  “I believe it would. Where do you live, Rosita?”

  “In Phillipstown.”

  Phillipstown was actually part of Cold Spring, not more than ten miles away.

  “Rosita, may I come and get the wig from you now?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  She was starting to sound worried.

  “Why not, Rosita?”

  “Because my apartment is in a two-story house, and my landlady sees everything. I don’t want anyone to see you here. I am afraid of Rob Westerfield.”

  For the moment all I cared about was getting my hands on the wig. Later, if Rob was put on trial for Phil’s death, I would try to persuade Rosita to be a witness.

  Before I could try to convince her, she volunteered, “I live only a few minutes from the Phillipstown Hotel. If you want, I could drive there and meet you at the back entrance.”

  “I can be there in twenty minutes,” I said. “No, make it half an hour.”

  “I will be there. Will the wig help to put Rob in jail?”

  “I’m sure it will.”

  “Good!”

  I could hear the satisfaction in Rosita’s voice. She had found a way to get back at the nasty teenager whose insults she had endured for nearly a decade.

  I rushed to finish paying my bill and quickly put my bags in the car.

  Six minutes later I was on my way to acquire the tangible proof that Rob Westerfield had owned and worn a dark blond wig.

  I was hoping that samples of Rob’s DNA would still be lingering within it. That would be definitive proof that the wig had belonged to him.

  45

  SOME TIME AFTER DARK the light mist had turned into a cold, battering rain. The windshield wipers of the car I had rented needed to be replaced, and before I had driven a mile, I found myself straining to see the road.

  The traffic became lighter the farther north I drove on Route 9. I could tell by the readout on the dashboard that the temperature outside was dropping, and within minutes I saw that the rain was turning into sleet. As ice began to collect on the windshield, it became harder and harder to see more than a few yards ahead, and I was forced to stay in the right lane and drive slowly.

  As the minutes passed, I became frantic that I would miss Rosita. She had sounded so nervous that I was sure she would not wait around if I didn’t show up on time.

  I was concentrating all my energy on watching the road in front of me and only gradually became aware that I was starting to go up a hill. It dawned on me that it had been a while since I’d seen any headlights coming from the opposite direction.

  I glanced at the odometer. The Phillipstown Hotel was not more than ten miles from the Hudson Valley Inn, yet I had already driven twelve miles and still wasn’t there. Obviously, somewhere I had veered off Route 9. The road I was on now was clearly not the main highway and was getting narrower.

  I looked in my rearview mirror to check for headlights. There were none. Frustrated and furious at myself, I jammed on the brakes—a stupid thing to do, because I started to skid. I managed to straighten out the car and carefully began to make a U-turn. In that instant a red dome light went on behind me and blinding headlights flashed in my eyes. I stopped the car, and what appeared to be a police van pulled up beside me.

  Thank God! I thought. I rolled down the window to ask the cop to please give me directions to the Phillipstown Hotel.

  The window of the van rolled down as well, and the man in the passenger seat turned to face me.

  Though there was no light directly on his face, I saw immediately that it was Rob Westerfield, and he was wearing a dark blond wig. With an unmistakable Hispanic accent, and with his voice pitched to sound like a woman, he mockingly called, “He was nasty to me. He made fun of the way I talk. He told me to call him Jim.”

  My heart almost stopped. Horrified, I realized that Rob
, pretending to be Rosita, had made the phone call to lure me out. Past him I could just make out the face of the driver—it was the man who had threatened me in the parking lot of the railroad station near Sing Sing prison.

  Frantically, I looked around for a way out. I could not get around them. My only hope was to straighten out the car, floor the gas pedal, and keep driving blindly ahead. I had no idea where the road might lead. As I accelerated, I saw that there were woods on both sides of me and that the road was steadily narrowing. The tires were slipping, causing the back of the car to fishtail.

  I knew I could not outrun them. I could only pray that I would not end up in a cul-de-sac, that this road might take me toward some kind of highway.

  They had turned off the dome light, but their bright headlights were still shining straight into my rearview mirror. Then they began to toy with me.

  They pulled up on my left, and the van slammed into the side of the car. The door behind the driver’s seat took the impact, and I heard grinding steel as the car lurched and my head banged into the steering wheel.

  They dropped back as I skidded from side to side, trying now to stay in the middle of the road. I knew I was bleeding from a cut on my forehead, but I managed to hang on to the wheel and keep the car on the road.

  Then suddenly they shot by me, angling in front of me and tearing the fender off my car as they hit me again. I could hear the fender scraping and dragging as I struggled to stay on the road, praying that soon I’d come upon an intersection or at least see another car coming toward me.

  But there were no other cars, and I sensed that a third attack was coming. Clearly they would aim to make it the final one. As the road curved sharply, they slowed and moved fully into the left lane. I hesitated briefly, then accelerated, hoping to break ahead of them again. However, they quickly pulled up even with me again.

  For a split second I glanced at them. The interior light was on in the van, and I could see that Rob was waving something at me.

  It was a tire jack.

  With a final burst of speed, the van cut sharply to the right, directly into my path, forcing my car off the road. Helplessly, I tried to turn the wheel, but I felt the tires losing traction. The car went into a spin and then tumbled down the sloping embankment, heading toward a wall of trees thirty feet away.

  I managed to hang on to the steering wheel as the car turned over several times. I covered my face with my hands as the car, right side up again, slammed into a tree and the windshield shattered.

  The sound of crashing metal and glass had been deafening, and the sudden silence that followed was ghostly.

  My shoulder hurt. My hands were bleeding. My head was throbbing. But I could tell that by some miracle I had not been seriously injured.

  The final impact had caused the driver’s door to spring open, and sleet was pelting at me from every side. The cold sting against my face may have kept me from losing consciousness, and suddenly my brain felt clear. It was totally dark, and for a moment, I felt extraordinary relief. I thought that when they saw my car tumbling down the side of the road, they decided that I was finished and had driven away.

  But then I became aware that I was not alone. Nearby I heard harsh, labored breathing, followed by the high choking sound that as a child I had described as a giggle.

  Rob Westerfield was out there in the dark, waiting for me, just as he had waited for Andrea nearly twenty-three years ago in the darkness of the garage-hideout.

  The first blow of the tire jack missed me and hit the headrest behind me. I clawed at the clasp of the seat belt and managed to release it.

  As I scrambled over to the passenger side, the second blow came so close that I felt it graze my hair.

  Andrea, Andrea, this is the way it was for you. Oh, God, please . . . please help me. . . .

  I think we both heard it at the same time, a car roaring around that last bend in the road. Its headlights must have caught the wreckage of my car, because it turned and came rushing down the slope to where I was trapped.

  Rob Westerfield, the tire jack in his hand, was illuminated in the glare. But so was I, and now he could see exactly where I was.

  Snarling, he twisted around and turned back toward me. He leaned inside the car until his face was only inches from mine. I tried to push him away as he raised the tire jack, about to smash it over my head.

  I heard the scream of sirens filling the air as I shielded my head with my arms and waited for the blow to land. I wanted to close my eyes, but I could not.

  I heard the thud before I saw the look of shock and pain on Westerfield’s face. The tire jack fell from his hand onto the seat beside me as he was suddenly thrust forward and disappeared. Unbelieving, I stared out.

  The car that had driven down the slope was filling the space where he had stood. The driver had seen what was happening and had done the only thing possible to save my life: He had crashed his car into Rob Westerfield.

  As the blazing lights of the police cars turned the area into virtual daytime, I looked into the faces of my rescuers.

  My father was driving the car that had hit Rob Westerfield. My brother was beside him. On Daddy’s face I saw again the agonized expression that I remembered from when he knew he had lost his other little girl.

  One Year Later

  I OFTEN LOOK BACK and realize how close I came that terrible night to sharing my sister’s fate. From the time I left the inn, Dad and Teddy had been following me from a distance. They had seen what they believed to be a police van behind my car and assumed that I had finally requested protection.

  However, they lost me when I veered off the highway, and Dad called the Phillipstown police to be sure the van had stayed with me.

  That was when he learned that I had no official escort. The police told Dad where I probably had taken the wrong turn and promised immediate response.

  Dad told me that when he came around the turn, the driver of Westerfield’s van had started to pull away. He’d been about to follow him, but Teddy spotted the wreckage of my car. Teddy—the brother who never would have been born if Andrea had lived— saved my life. I often reflect on that irony.

  Both of Rob Westerfield’s legs were broken when he was hit by Dad’s car, but they mended in time for him to walk into court for his two trials.

  The District Attorney for Westchester County immediately reopened the investigation into Phil’s death. He obtained a search warrant for Rob’s new apartment and found a cache of his trophies, mementos of his hideous crimes. God knows where he had them stashed while he was in prison.

  Rob had kept an album containing clippings of newspaper stories about both Andrea and Phil, starting from the time their bodies were found. The clippings were in sequence, and next to them were pictures of Andrea and Phil, photographs of the crime scenes, the funerals, and the other people caught up in the tragedies, including Paulie Stroebel and Dan Mayotte.

  On each page Rob had written comments, cruel and sarcastic commentary on his actions and the people he hurt. There was one picture of Dan Mayotte on the witness stand swearing that a guy named Jim with dark blond hair had been flirting with Phil in the lobby of the movie theater. Next to it Rob had written, “I could tell she was crazy about me. Jim gets all the girls.”

  Rob had been wearing the dark blond wig when he pursued me. But the most telling proof of his guilt in Phil’s death was that he had kept her locket; it was pasted on the last page of the album. The caption under it read: “Thanks, Phil. Andrea loved it.”

  The district attorney requested the criminal court judge to vacate Dan Mayotte’s conviction and to schedule a different trial: The People vs. Robson Westerfield. The charge was murder.

  I saw the locket exhibited at the trial, and my mind flew back to that last evening in Andrea’s bedroom when, close to tears, she had slipped it around her neck.

  Dad was sitting next to me in court and closed his hand over mine. “You were always right about the locket, Ellie,” he whispered.

/>   Yes, I was, and at last I have made my peace with the fact that, because I saw her wearing it and believed she had gone to the hideout to meet Rob, I did not immediately tell my parents when she was missing. It may already have been too late to save her, but it is time to relinquish the possibility that it may not have been too late, and to stop letting it haunt me.

  Robson Westerfield was convicted of the murder of Amy Phyllis Rayburn.

  In a second trial Rob and his driver were convicted of attempted murder for their attack on me.

  Rob Westerfield’s sentences are consecutive. If he lives another 113 years, he will be eligible for parole. As he was being escorted out of the courtroom, after the second sentencing, he stopped for a moment to check his watch against the courtroom clock. Then he adjusted it.

  “Don’t bother,” I said to myself. “Time has no meaning for you anymore.”

  Will Nebels, when confronted with the evidence of Westerfield’s guilt, admitted that he had been approached by Hamilton and offered a bribe to lie about seeing Paulie go into the garage that night. William Hamilton, disbarred attorney, is now serving his own prison term.

  My book was rushed out for publication in the spring and did very well. The other book—the sanitized version of Rob Westerfield’s sorry life—was withdrawn. Pete introduced me to the Packard Cable executives, and they offered me a job as an investigative reporter. It seemed like a good opportunity. Some things never change. I report to Pete.

  But that’s fine. We were married three months ago in the St. Christopher Chapel at Graymoor. Dad gave the bride away.

  Pete and I bought a house in Cold Spring overlooking the Hudson. We use it on weekends. I never tire of the view—that majestic river framed by the palisades. My heart has finally found its home, the home I have been seeking all these years.

  I see Dad regularly. We both feel the need to make up for lost time. Teddy’s mother and I have become good friends. Sometimes we all go up to see Teddy at college. He’s on the freshman basketball team at Dartmouth. I am so proud of him.