The toast in its silver rack was the ideal shade of gold, the butter in its small glass dish seemingly freshly churned, each piece of fruit in its porcelain bowl unmarred and sweet. Juana had always wanted to fix Louise an omelet or French toast or eggs Benedict for breakfast—this simple but perfect food was more to her liking. She poured herself a cup of tea from an elegant art deco teapot and smiled slightly. Before this morning, she would have never thought that her life would seem decadent in comparison to another’s.
She ate the toast and fruit and poured herself another cup of tea, but her eyelids were heavy. She pushed back from the table.
She went to the bathroom to remove her contact lenses, which felt glued to her eyes. Not bothering to turn on the light, she opened the closet door. Her handbag still sat on the floor of the closet where she had put it, but her clothes and shoes were gone. She had a disorienting moment of wondering if she had fallen asleep while sitting at the breakfast table, and Maja had come into the suite to get the clothes, but then saw a tiny sliver of light at the back of the closet. She realized that the closet must have a door that opened onto another room or a service hallway for the staff to discreetly remove dirty laundry or restock towels.
She almost reached out to tap the back of the closet but stopped herself. What would she do if the door opened and Maja stood there, asking if there was anything she needed? She smiled again, a bit ruefully. Was Theo going to show her up even in the degree of discretion and consideration with which he took care of his houseguests?
In the bedroom, she found a gray silk pajama top and pants arranged artfully on the bed. She removed the robe, donned the pajamas, and slipped between the fine white cotton sheets. A melancholy thought drifted into her head: there was nothing of her former life left. Mitchell, whom she had at one time considered her ally, had evidently thrown in his lot with Ballard. Her house was gone, George was gone. Gerard was dead. But before the melancholy could take firm hold, she was asleep.
4
When the ride share car that Mitchell Pieda had taken from Kennett Square pulled up in front of his aunt’s rancher in Jenkintown, he groaned inwardly at the sight of her car parked on the street. He had assumed she would be at work. He climbed out of the back seat and slammed the door on the driver’s request that Mitchell have a nice day and consider giving him a five-star review.
His aunt was lying on the couch in her housecoat, watching a soap opera, a box of tissues in her lap.
“Mitch, what are you doing home?” she asked in a nasal honk, struggling to pull herself up on the couch, whose rust-colored plaid was topped with a slippery plastic cover.
“What are you doing home?” he replied.
She waved the box of tissues at him. “Cold.” She spotted the dirt on his sleeve, which was hiding a smear of Philip Castillo’s blood. “What happened to you?”
“Tripped.”
“You okay?”
He brushed at his sleeve. “Yeah.”
She blew her nose and stuffed the tissue in her pocket. “Let me see if I can get it out—save you a trip to the dry cleaner.”
He stepped back. “No, that’s okay, I can take care of it.”
She looked at him skeptically. “Okay.” She extracted the tissue from her pocket, blew her nose again, then headed for the kitchen. “I’m going to make some Jell-O.”
He glared at the television, considering turning it off, but she’d just turn it back on when she got back from the kitchen.
He showered and changed into clean clothes: a shirt and pants from Boyd’s that had been favorites until he had experienced the clothes Louise had provided while he was living in Pocopson. When he got back to the living room, his aunt was back on the couch, sucking on a Popsicle and trying unsuccessfully to catch the drips in a paper towel. The TV was now tuned to a game show.
“My throat’s killing me,” she said.
“Tea with honey is good for a sore throat.”
“I’d rather have a shot of Jaeger,” she said with a raspy laugh that turned into a hacking cough.
With a shudder, Mitchell asked, “Want me to get you that?”
“I think we’re out.”
As the game show segued with a burst of applause into a commercial for life insurance, Mitchell went to the kitchen and scanned the refrigerator for options. He found the ingredients for an omelet—he had become partial to the omelets Juana had prepared for him and Louise.
As he sprinkled cheese over the omelet, his aunt shuffled in and tossed the Popsicle stick in the trash can under the sink, then used the sponge to wipe ineffectually at a few cherry-red spots on her housecoat.
“What are you doing home?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”
Mitchell hadn’t been at work for months. “There was a power outage, they sent everyone home.”
She glanced at the Kit-Cat clock on the kitchen wall, whose bug eyes and waving tail Mitchell had disliked even as a child. “Kind of early in the day. They didn’t want to wait to see if it came back on?”
Mitchell shrugged. “I guess not.”
“How’s it working out with that buddy you’re sharing the apartment with?” she asked.
It was the story Mitchell had given her when he moved into Louise’s house. “He got transferred, so I’ll be moving back here. If that’s okay.”
She shrugged. “Sure, no problem.”
He slid the omelet out of the pan onto a plate and took it and a glass of orange juice to the Formica table.
His aunt opened the refrigerator door, jiggled the tray of Jell-O hopefully, then shook her head and got another Popsicle out of the freezer. She lowered herself stiffly onto the chair next to Mitchell.
He scanned her thoughts to see if she was suspicious of his story, but there was nothing there to cause him concern. In fact, as usual, there was very little there at all—it was probably the reason he had been able to live amicably with her since his mother died when he was fifteen.
They sat in silence as she finished the second Popsicle and Mitchell ate the omelet. Then she stood and dropped the second stick into the trash.
“I’m going back to bed. If you’re out, can you pick me up some NyQuil?”
“Sure.”
She extracted a ten-dollar bill from the purse hanging on the back of one of the kitchen chairs and held it out to Mitchell. He took it by the corner and slipped it into his wallet as she shuffled off to her bedroom, leaving the game show squawking in the next room.
He went to the living room and turned off the TV, then returned to the kitchen. He was still hungry, so he put two pieces of bread in the ancient toaster oven. While the toaster ticked away, he looked around the kitchen, unchanged in the decade he had lived there. Magnets—souvenirs from his aunt’s vacations—held a ragged mane of coupons to the harvest gold refrigerator. The clock on the cheap white stove permanently displayed 12:37. The knotty pine cupboards showed the scratches and scars of his aunt’s late Bassett Hound’s continual search for snacks.
He thought back to the kitchen in Pocopson—the Sub-Zero refrigerator, the Viking range, the marble island that was bigger than his bed. He thought of the supple leather of the chairs flanking the fireplace in the library, the deep pile of the Persian rugs underfoot, the glint of light on the cut crystal decanter at the discreet bar in the corner.
If only the hostess had been as gracious as the decor, he thought bitterly.
At least he was done with Louise Mortensen. She had driven away in Owen McNally’s SUV, and he couldn’t imagine her coming back. There wasn’t anything left for her to come back to.
5
Philip Castillo opened his eyes to a sterile whiteness that could only be a hospital ICU. Details swam in and out of focus—the too-bright lights, the buzz of voices and bustle of activity outside the cubicle in which he lay, the monotonous beep of a monitor. His first coherent thought was that his shoulder hurt like a bitch.
A woman’s face moved into his field of vision. “Mr. Castillo?�
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Philip tried to figure out whether he should own up to his identity, but the nurse nodded as if he had responded and said, “I’ll let the doctor know you’re awake. And you have a friend waiting to see you.”
Her face disappeared and in a few moments another took its place—a man with reddish-blond hair and fair skin. Philip thought for a disorienting moment that he had been unconscious for so long that Owen McNally had had time to lose a tremendous amount of weight. Then he realized that this must be another of Lizzy’s allies, Owen’s brother. Philip cast about hazily for the brother’s name.
“Philip,” the man said, “I’m Andy McNally.”
“Dr. McNally,” Philip heard the nurse’s voice from somewhere behind Andy, “I’ll let the police know he’s awake.”
“Okay,” Andy said over his shoulder.
Philip could hear the light tread of steps as the nurse left the cubicle.
“Lizzy …?” he managed to rasp out.
“She’s fine.” Andy glanced back toward the door, then leaned toward Philip. “I know you’re not in the best condition for this, but you need a story to tell the cops. They think you were the victim of a mugging in Kennett Square. Tell them you’re here visiting me. I was in Sedona a couple of years ago—you can say I came to your counseling business for a reading, or whatever it’s called, and we kept in touch. You got a hankering for Mexican and went to a restaurant in Kennett Square. You got mugged and shot in the parking lot.”
“Mexican?”
“Trust me on this—you wanted to go to a Mexican restaurant and you went to Kennett Square.” McNally lowered his voice further. “Lizzy got you there and took your wallet to make it look like you had been shot in a mugging. That’s just for you,” he added, “don’t tell that part to the police.”
Philip nodded.
“If you can’t remember parts of the story,” said McNally, “just tell the police your memory is hazy about what happened—it’s not uncommon in people who have undergone severe trauma.”
“Severe?”
“You lost quite a bit of blood, but you’ll be fine. Remember what the story is—” and he ran through it again.
Visiting Andy … hankering for Mexican … shot in a restaurant parking lot. He supposed it made some sort of sense.
6
Brady Plott dropped a Wawa bag onto his desk and himself into his chair. At the adjoining desk, Bruce Denninger banged away, two-fingered, on his keyboard.
“Got some info about the guy that got mugged behind Dos Sombreros,” said Brady.
“Oh, yeah?” said Den, not looking up.
“Name’s Philip Castillo. He’s visiting from Arizona.”
“March seems like a weird time to leave Arizona and come to PA.”
“Yeah, no kidding. He’s visiting a friend—Andrew McNally. McNally’s actually a doc at Mercy—or at least does some moonlighting there. He was at the hospital with Castillo when I was there. He’s the one who IDed him.”
“Is Castillo a doc, too? You said he had some medical papers on him when he was found.”
“No. He’s some kind of counselor in Sedona. He was still unconscious when I went over there earlier. They’re going to call me when he comes around.”
“What did you find out from the people at the restaurant?”
“Just that some teenage girl ran in and said someone was in the parking lot and had been shot. They said she looked a little banged up—there was some blood on her cheek.”
“Was she involved in the mugging?”
“She didn’t say anything like that to the folks at the restaurant.” Brady considered. “Maybe she put her ear down to the guy’s chest to see if she could hear a heartbeat and got some of his blood on her.”
Den raised an eyebrow.
Brady shrugged. “Just speculating.”
“Who’s the girl?”
“No one knows. She didn’t hang around.”
“See if you can find her.”
“Will do.”
Den hammered on his keyboard for another minute, then said, “This guy got jumped in the parking lot and no one saw it?”
“He was in the back parking lot. But I’m wondering what he was doing back there—it was late, there must have been spaces out front.”
“Ask him about that,” said Den.
“Yup.”
“Was his car in back?”
“No, the only cars in back belonged to the employees.” Brady pulled a paper-wrapped object from the Wawa bag, unrolled it to reveal a hoagie, and took a giant bite. He wiped some tomato juice from his chin as he powered up his computer. He ate and typed for a few minutes, then said, “Got the autopsy report back on that guy in the basement of the Pocopson house. Guess what he died of.”
“Blood loss from the shot to the thigh?”
“Nope.”
“Smoke inhalation?”
“Nope.”
“He didn’t burn to death, right?”
“Right.”
Denninger sighed. “Okay, I give up.”
“Stroke.”
“Stroke?”
“Yup.”
“How old was he?”
“Forty-nine.”
Denninger sat back in his chair. “Some forty-nine-year-old guy’s walking around the basement of a house belonging to Gerard Bonnay, who died of a stroke during a break-in at his company three months ago, and Louise Mortensen, who has disappeared off the face of the earth—the basement of a house decorated with accelerant-impregnated curtains that were probably used to burn it to the ground … a guy, I might add, who was carrying a Sig Sauer and has a bullet wound to his thigh, and he dies of a stroke?”
“Yup.”
Denninger rubbed his hands down his face. “Fantastic.”
7
Late in the afternoon, Andy finally talked Lizzy away from Owen’s bedside and to the room at the William Penn Hotel that he had reserved for her.
When they reached the room, Andy said, “You wait in the hall for a sec, I’m just going to make sure no one else has come by to visit.”
“Andy, I should go in first—unless you’re carrying a gun, I’m more ‘armed’ than you are.”
“But I’m bigger and scarier looking,” he replied. “Well, not scarier looking—that would be Owen—but more imposing. Wait here.”
Lizzy fidgeted in the hallway while Andy checked behind the drapes and in the bathroom and closet, then waved her in.
“I dropped your bags off earlier,” he said. “Need anything else?”
“Not that I can think of. Thanks for everything, Andy.”
“No problem. If you get hungry, just order room service. When you want to go back to the hospital, give me a call and I’ll walk you back.” He glanced at his watch. “Although I need to swing by my parents’ house.”
“How are they doing?” asked Lizzy. Owen and Andy’s mother, who suffered from dementia, had been particularly unhinged at the news of her son’s heart attack.
“They’re all right,” said Andy. “Is it okay if we wait until tomorrow to go back to see Owen?”
“Sure, that’s fine.”
“I’m sure you can put the time to good use by catching up on some sleep.”
“You’re the one who looks like you need some sleep.”
“Nonsense, I’m just hitting my stride.”
Andy left, with an unnecessary admonishment not to open the door to anyone except him, and she flipped the door latch into place behind him.
She undressed, wincing at the stiffness in her muscles and the pain in her back. When she tried to take off her shirt, her stomach flipped and tears sprang to her eyes—it was still stuck to her back and shoulders by the blood from the wounds she had suffered forcing herself out of the tiny concrete window well to escape from the basement of Louise’s Pocopson mansion.
She ran a bath and lowered herself into it slowly, her shirt drifting up around her in the steaming water, and flinched as the heat hit her raw skin. Eventuall
y the sting passed, and she leaned back with a sigh. The next thing she knew, the water was cool.
She opened the drain and, as the water swirled away, tried to ease the shirt off her back. Still stuck. She refilled the tub with hot water and leaned back again.
She was able to remove the shirt after the third soaking.
She carefully toweled off and pulled on a nightgown. She ran her hand over her crew cut-short, copper-red hair. Maybe she’d stop at a drugstore and pick up a new hair color. Maybe she’d go back to her natural blond.
She checked her phone and found no new messages. She considered texting Andy, but she knew he would get in touch with her if there was any news. She was exhausted but jittery, and she decided to inventory the items she had from the visit that she and Philip had made to Pocopson.
She sat down on the bed and opened Philip’s duffel bag, which she had been carrying with her since the previous night. There was the small leather packet that held a syringe and a vial containing the drug Louise had formulated to increase Mitchell’s power—what Lizzy called the squeeze and Mitchell called the crush.
She also had, committed to memory, the phone number Philip had given her right before he entered Louise’s house—the number that he had told her to call if she needed a new identity. He had instructed her to tell the person on the other end of the line that Philip Casal had sent her. Philip must have changed his name from Casal to Castillo when he left prison. That was why Uncle Owen hadn’t found anything on Philip’s crime when he had done an internet search on him.
She opened the browser on her phone and typed castillo into the search: Spanish for castle. She smiled.
She started to type in philip casal murder arizona, then deleted it. It was clear Philip wanted to leave that part of his life behind. That was probably one of the reasons he had changed his name, and he wouldn’t have told her about what he had done if he hadn’t had to explain the reason for the favor he had asked of her. It felt disloyal to get the details from anyone but him.
The Iron Ring Page 2