“Just as long as you’re not depending on me to actually cook anything,” Martha said, adjusting large cuff bracelets of heavy silver on either arm as if to demonstrate how little equipped she was for any domestic task.
“We have everything well in hand,” Kathleen lied. “Why don’t you just pour us each a glass of wine?” She nodded to where supplies waited on the table.
“That I’m good at,” Martha agreed. Before she had a chance to begin, however, both of the other couples arrived, Brigit and Gloria coming directly to the kitchen, leaving their husbands and their host to deal with discarded coats, scarves, and boots in the hallway.
“Hey, don’t open that,” Brigit said, as Martha pulled the lead foil off a bottle. “I brought some Australian wine that the man down at the shop said we should try.” She held up two beribboned bottles. “Look, red and white; that’s enough choice for everybody.”
“More than enough,” Kathleen agreed. “Why don’t you and Martha open them and then we can offer the men some.”
“The men were drinking Scotch practically before they got through the door. I don’t think we have to worry about them,” Gloria said, coming over and picking up a glass from the table. “This is beautiful crystal, Kathleen. Was it Jerry’s?”
Susan thought it was a tactless question until she realized that both Gloria and Kathleen had married widowers. Maybe they accepted living with another woman’s things more than anyone else would.
“No, they were a wedding present from my colleagues back in Hartford. Beautiful, aren’t they? They’re antiques.”
“Gorgeous,” Martha agreed, pouring white wine into one of them. “Is that smoke?” she asked Kathleen while handing Brigit the first glass. “You be the taster, Brigit.”
“In case it’s poisoned?” Brigit kidded, before taking a sip.
Susan turned and glanced at her sharply.
“Oh, no! They’re burning!” Kathleen wailed, sharply jerking open the oven door.
Susan rushed to her side, potholders in hand. “No, no, just a little scorched. Take that pan off the burner, turn off the gas and I’ll take care of them,” she suggested, reaching into the oven. She pulled the smoking cookie sheets from within and placed them side by side on top of the stove. “Now don’t worry about anything,” she said, looking carefully at the food. The backs are a little burnt—your oven must heat unevenly—but we’ll cut off the brown bits and dip them in more parmesan and no one will ever know.”
“Except us …” Brigit began, passing a glass of red wine to Martha.
“And wives don’t count,” Gloria added complacently.
“Oh, we count. How else would everyone get taken care of and fed?” Martha said. “You know,” she turned to Brigit, “this is really good.”
“I’m waiting for Susan to try it. She’s the one who knows wine,” Brigit replied.
“Well, I can drink and snip off the ends here easily,” Susan said, and a glass was handed to her.
Kathleen, watching her friends and neighbors chatting happily because of her hospitality, felt warm and happy. This was the best of life in suburbia or anywhere, she thought.
V
“Evidently the car picked them up a few minutes ago. I couldn’t reach them in their rooms and the main desk suggested I speak to the concierge. He was very helpful. He not only told me about their departure, but he managed to inform me that they were in a good mood, despite the delay. They had been waiting in the small bar off the lobby for an hour or so, and were very relaxed,” Jerry reported, hanging up the phone and looking around at his guests.
“Well, that calls for a small celebration,” Dan Hallard said, picking up the bottle of wine in front of him and refilling everyone’s glass.
“When do you think they’ll arrive?” Susan asked, pushing the tray of cheese straws closer to Dan; maybe they would absorb some of the alcohol he was drinking so quickly.
“In this weather, we’ll be lucky if they get here within the hour,” Jerry answered.
“An hour?!” Kathleen exclaimed, and even Martha knew that she was thinking of her dinner.
“Well, I think we’ve all been through enough in the last week or so to find something to talk about, don’t you, Harvey?” Dan Hallard asked, slouching into the couch he was sitting on.
Harvey Bower looked up from his glass of Scotch, but seemed unable to find an answer.
“What do you mean, Dan?” Gloria asked, standing in the doorway on her way back from the phone in the kitchen, where she had been checking up on her new daughter.
At her appearance, Dan Hallard seemed to change his mind about what he was about to say. “Nothing at all. Just that a lot has happened in the last week.” He took another large sip of his drink.
Kathleen, losing interest in her job as hostess, peered from the Bowers to Dan and back again.
“You know,” Gloria Bower began in a voice a little too loud. “Harvey and I should have known that the Smalls were the burglars. We saw Colin drive out of your driveway alone just as we were arriving for the party, and we were pretty late getting there because of Missy and all the confusion about the sitter.” She smiled at her husband and he picked up the story.
“Yes, he must have been going out to commit the burglaries right then,” Harvey said, patting a spot on the sofa beside him to indicate that his wife should sit there.
“Then that’s how they knew that no one was going to be home at your house,” Susan cried. “I had been wondering about that all along. It made sense that everyone else who was burgled had an empty house, but not yours. Since Missy should have been there with a sitter.” She felt triumphant about this discovery.
“That’s right,” Jerry agreed. “You know, Sue, it was Chad’s talk about cars that made Kathleen start thinking about that very thing. And, when she told Sardini what Chad had said, he checked out the comings and goings around your house with Jesse Clark, and discovered that Colin Small had indeed left your house during the party—or at least his new Jaguar had left with a man in it. Sardini checked out their financial situation and, when he confronted the Smalls with the information, they confessed. At least, that’s the way Kathleen tells it. She also said that they got the idea from their own burglaries. Seems that they had been broken into so many times that they decided to try it for themselves.”
“What about Chad and the clue?” Susan asked.
“Yes. Are you saying that he knew who was coming and going just because he notices every car that passes him?” her husband asked, his voice proud. “Well, what about that? I guess all that interest in cars is paying off after all.” He beamed at everyone in the room and poured himself another Scotch.
“And just what are you two talking about?” Harvey Bower asked. Kathleen had been sitting on the arm of the couch, talking to Dan Hallard throughout her husband’s revelation.
“Nothing important,” Kathleen assured him. “Why don’t we all have a toast to Chad? I’ll even go upstairs and bring him down. He should know exactly how proud of him we are. Susan, will you make sure everyone’s glass is filled?” And she left the room, the tray of hors d’oeuvres she had been bringing to her guests still in her hand.
Guy Frye laughed. “I love to watch the hostess at the beginning of the party.”
“That’s because you men don’t know how much work putting on something like this is,” Susan told him, filling up his glass before moving over to his wife. “Right, Brigit?”
“I’ll say,” she agreed, drinking down the last of her white wine and holding out the glass for a refill. “We do almost all our entertaining in restaurants these days. It’s so much easier.”
“And cheaper than a divorce,” Guy added.
“I know what you mean,” Gloria Bower agreed. “Harvey and I had our first fight and our first dinner party on the same day. Didn’t we … ?”
“And we’re going to have another right now unless we get out of here,” was her husband’s surprising response. He had been staring at the d
oorway Kathleen had just departed through and he appeared to have suddenly made up his mind. He stood up and took his wife’s arm. “Sorry to drink and run, but we’re leaving now.”
And he pulled her out of the room and, without getting their coats, out the front door.
“What’s going on?” Susan asked, standing in the middle of the room, a bottle of wine in either hand. “What happened?”
“What’s going to happen is that they are going to be arrested for the murder of Dawn Elliot,” Kathleen said, reentering the room with Chad right behind her. The platter of hors d’oeuvres had evidently vanished like the Bowers. Instead, she held a rectangle of silk in her hand.
“My scarf!” Martha Hallard cried.
“Arrested?” Jed and Jerry said simultaneously.
“Just as long as Sardini and the rest of the police catch up with their car,” Kathleen said, ignoring Martha.
“They will. Their Porsche is fast, but not really very good with snow on the road,” Chad piped up. “Are you drinking both of those?” he asked his mother.
Susan looked from the wine to her son to Kathleen, and then at the spot on the couch that the Bowers had occupied until a few moments ago. “Maybe,” she answered vaguely.
“I’ll get that,” Brigit Frye offered, hearing the doorbell.
“It’s probably Sardini,” Kathleen said. “He told me that he would stop by as soon as the Bowers were captured. And they had a car on the block watching us, so it couldn’t have taken any time at all …”
“Jerry, I think these very tan people are here to see you.” Brigit reentered the room, followed by four rather dazed strangers.
“Do you all know that there are four police cars and about a dozen armed men on your front lawn?” one of them asked. “Maybe this isn’t a good night for us to get together?”
FORTY PLUS EIGHT
“Thank goodness they were good sports about it all,” Jerry said. “For one moment there, I saw the whole account going down the drain.”
“I still don’t understand everything,” Jed Henshaw said. “Susan invited you both over to get an explanation, so I hope you’re going to give one to me. Susan and I sat up last night trying to figure it all out, but we still don’t understand how you knew that the Bowers were the murderers, Kathleen.” He was sitting in front of the fire in his study with the Gordons the morning after the party. “Not that I have the faintest idea where Susan is now,” he added.
“That’s okay. I was on the phone with her before you or Jerry were out of bed this morning. She knows the whole story. She said to tell you that she had an errand to do,” Kathleen answered.
“If your wife isn’t going to explain, will you?” Jed asked Jerry.
“I’ll tell you right now,” Kathleen said. “You should be pretty proud. Once again, it was Chad who gave me the clue that led to the truth.” She smiled at the child, who was sitting in a recessed window, a car magazine in his lap, staring out into the glare of bright morning sunlight on yesterday’s snow.
“You see, Chad asked the right question: ‘Why did the Bowers bring their big car to the party instead of the Porsche?’ And the answer was simple. Because they couldn’t fit Dawn’s body into the trunk of their Porsche.”
“I don’t think that’s quite a complete explanation,” Jed said. “I don’t suppose you could start with why?”
“It was Dan Hallard who supplied the motive,” Kathleen said. “He found it in the hospital records and very unprofessionally told me about it: Harvey Bower was sterile because he had gonorrhea—a disease that he shared with Dawn years and years ago. The police had been looking into the records, too. Remember they asked who had your family’s medical records? And even Richard Elliot told me that the last time I saw him—in one of his endless Shakespearean quotes—that Dawn had had a venereal disease.”
“I still don’t understand,” Jed said.
“Harvey Bower killed Dawn because she knew that he had had VD, that he had been unfaithful to his first wife and was unable to have children of his own as a result. Harvey and Gloria were anxious to make sure that the information stayed hidden—especially now,” Kathleen said. “Because they had so much to lose, you see. They were afraid that if this information got to the state child welfare people, they wouldn’t be allowed to keep Missy. There are a lot of people looking to adopt babies these days, and Harvey and Gloria couldn’t risk looking anything but perfect. There were, of course, more than a few people who were trying to hide their past lives with Dawn, but no one except the Bowers had so much to lose: their chance for a child of their own.”
Jed looked into the fire, thinking that Gloria and Harvey had lost everything now. “But where did they kill her? Why bring the body to my house?”
“They killed her in their own home. Harvey told the police that they invited Dawn over and then shot her. The carpet fibers on her body will undoubtedly be found to match those in the Bower house. I think bringing her to your house was an impromptu idea. They killed her, put her in the car trunk and then, remembering Susan’s party, decided to leave her there. I had told Gloria about the Volvo, I’m afraid, and they hit on leaving the body in the car as a way to not only deflect guilt from themselves, but spread it around a little.
“Unfortunately, while opening the garage door, they laid the body out on the driftwood that you brought back from the shore, and it picked up sand and particles of wood that matched the ones found in the trunk of your Mercedes, Jed. That made the police look at you as a primary suspect. They didn’t think that you would be stupid enough to leave Susan a dead body for a birthday present, but they couldn’t figure out the evidence that they had collected. They were stumped, and so was I.
“And then Martha was complaining about the smell of her silk scarf, and Susan had complained about the smell of your bedroom from Missy’s stomach problems, and it occurred to me that maybe Missy had been left alone on your bed—and leaving a baby in the middle of a pile of coats and scarfs is probably as safe as can be—while the Bowers were away together.”
“Moving the body!” Jed exclaimed.
“Exactly,” Jerry agreed. “In fact, I saw Gloria on her way to the garage. She said she was going to throw one of Missy’s diapers into the garbage cans out there to keep the smell out of the house. But, actually, she was using that as an excuse to meet Harvey, and help him move Dawn’s body.”
“And so it all fits together,” Jed said quietly. “They wanted something so much that they were willing to kill for it, and then, of course, they had to lose it.” He was silent for a moment and then seemed to remember that this conversation might not be appropriate for his son. He turned to Chad, who was still sitting in the window, but no longer quiet.
“I don’t believe it,” the child was saying. “I don’t believe it.” And he jumped up and ran toward the front door, which had just opened to reveal his mother. “Where did it come from? Are you going to keep it? Can I … ?”
“Enough, Chad. Please don’t get excited. You’re still sick,” she answered, putting her hand on his forehead.
“But is it ours?” he insisted loudly.
“It’s ours. I just wrote a very large check to pay for it. It’s all ours.” She smiled at him as, unable to contain himself, he ran back to the window. She turned to Kathleen. “You explained everything? The whole story?”
“Sure did.”
The phone rang and Jed got up to answer it. He was only talking for a few minutes when he hung up and glanced out the window to see what his son was looking at. “That was Mitchell. He says we can pick up the Volvo at any time … what is that?” He walked over to the window and squinted out into the bright light.
Susan turned to her friends before answering. “I can’t bear the thought of driving that Volvo now.” She looked straight at her husband, a wide smile on her face, and answered his question.
“It’s a Maserati Spyder convertible. I thought I deserved another fortieth birthday present.”
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Valerie Wolzien is also the author of MURDER AT THE PTA LUNCHEON. She makes her home in Tenafly, New Jersey.
The Fortieth Birthday Body Page 24