Charley's Web (6 page)

“And how was your day, sweetheart?” Charley asked her daughter, who stood before her patiently, waiting her turn.

“It was good. How about you?”

“It was good,” Charley echoed, deciding she wanted to be just like her daughter when she grew up.

“Hey, Franny,” James called excitedly from inside. “Guess who’s here.”

“It’s your uncle Bram,” Bram announced, approaching the front door, James tucked under one arm.

Franny’s face lit up, as it always did when Bram was there. “Hi, Uncle Bram. I like your shirt.”

“You do?”

“Blue’s my favorite color.”

“Really? Mine, too.”

“Mine, too,” James squealed.

“You like purple,” Franny reminded him.

“I
like
purple,” James quickly concurred. “But blue’s my favorite.”

Franny smiled and said nothing. She knows when to keep quiet, Charley thought with growing admiration. She’s made her point. There’s no need to say more. “Anybody feel like some milk and cookies?” she asked.

“Me!” shouted James, now hanging upside down from Bram’s arms.

“What kind of cookies?” asked Franny.

“I have an idea,” Bram said. “Why don’t we order Chinese food for supper? My treat.”

“Yay!” James exclaimed.

“Can we, Mommy?” Franny asked.

“Absolutely,” Charley said. “Maybe we could see if…”

“Don’t even think about it,” Bram interrupted…. Grandma would like to join us, Charley finished silently.

“Don’t think about what?” Franny asked.

“Absolutely nothing.” Bram scooped Franny into his other arm and took off with both kids for the kitchen.

When did I end up with three children? Charley wondered, picking up the picture of the alligator and the snake that fell from James’s hand, and following after them.

Later, after Bram had gone home and the children were in bed, Charley sat on top of the white comforter on her bed, rereading the letter from Jill Rohmer.

Dear Charley, Hi. I hope you don’t mind my writing to you…

“Well, now that you mention it, I can’t say I’m exactly thrilled.”

This might sound strange, and I hope you won’t take it the wrong way, but you’ve always been a kind of role model for me….

“And look how wonderfully that turned out.”

I’m really a very good person at heart…. I even hope one day we might be friends….

“God forbid.”

Mine is a story that needs to be told. I think you have the courage to tell it.

Did she? Charley wondered. Did she have the courage, the desire, the
stomach
to revisit the horrifying events that had held all of Florida in its terrible clutches for months? Even now, a year after the trial, and almost two years since the murders themselves, the details were never far from her mind.

Little Tammy Barnet was five years old when she disappeared one sunny afternoon from her fenced-in backyard. Four days later, her body was discovered in a shallow grave beside the intracoastal waterway. She’d been tortured and sexually abused before being asphyxiated with a plastic bag.

Five months later, Noah and Sara Starkey, six-year-old fraternal twins, vanished while playing catch on their front lawn. Their mother had left them for two minutes to answer the phone. When she returned, the children were gone. They were discovered the following week, the plastic bags still wrapped around their heads, their naked little bodies bearing the grisly scars of dozens of cigarette burns and bite marks. Both had been violated sexually with sharp objects.

The killings sent shock waves throughout all of Florida. Not only were the police most certainly dealing with a serial killer but someone so deranged as to torture and kill innocent children. Not to mention, someone cunning enough to snatch those children right from under their parents’ watchful eyes. Someone the children obviously trusted, since no screams were heard. Someone who was probably known to both families.

On the surface, the Barnets and the Starkeys seemed to have little in common. The Barnets were young and fairly well-to-do; the Starkeys were older and just getting by. Ellis Barnet was an investment banker; Clive Starkey was a welder. Joan Barnet was a schoolteacher; Rita Starkey was a stay-at-home mom. They moved in completely different circles. Within weeks, however, the police had discovered the common link. Her name was Jill Rohmer.

The Barnets had hired Jill to baby-sit Tammy every Saturday night when they had their “date night.” Jill was always punctual, and happy to stay as late as needed. She’d play dolls with Tammy and read to her for hours before putting her to bed. According to interviews with her parents, Tammy adored her.

As did Noah and Sara Starkey, for whom she baby-sat every Friday, and then Saturdays as well, when those Saturdays suddenly freed up. Knowing the Starkeys were going through some tough times financially, Jill often refused to take their money. “The kids are fabulous,” she’d say. “I should be paying you.”

The police obtained a warrant to search the house Jill shared with her parents and older siblings. Under her bed, they found Tammy Barnet’s bloody underwear, along with the tape recordings of all the children’s dying screams. Jill’s voice could be heard plainly. And her DNA was a match to the saliva found on the bodies. An open-and-shut case.

Rumors abounded about an accomplice, and both her brother and boyfriend were early suspects, but there was never enough evidence to make an arrest. Jill refused to implicate them, and declined to take the stand in her own defense. Her lawyer, Alex Prescott, tried hard to make a case for reasonable doubt, but ultimately there was none. Jill Rohmer was convicted and sentenced to die.

And now, it seems, she wanted to talk after all.

If you decide to accept my offer, or if you have any questions at all, please feel free to contact my lawyer, Alex Prescott. He has an office in Palm Beach Gardens, and I’ve already alerted him to the possibility you might call.

Charley pushed herself off her bed and padded down the hall to the larger bedroom at the far end of the hall where her children slept. She peeked inside, saw Franny asleep in her bed on one side of the room, James half in, half out of his bed on the other. Watching her children sleep, she wondered how a seemingly normal young woman could have committed such heinous acts. And what could she possibly have to say that could mitigate her behavior? Was it possible someone else was responsible? Someone who was still out there?

Charley walked to the kitchen, made herself a cup of herbal tea, then reached for the phone and called information. “Palm Beach Gardens, Florida,” she instructed the recording. “Alex Prescott, attorney-at-law.”

S
he called the lawyer’s office first thing the following morning, seeking an immediate appointment.

“Mr. Prescott is in court until eleven o’clock,” his secretary informed her in crisp tones that declared
I am an immaculately coiffed icy blonde, whose well-manicured nails match my perfectly glossed lips.

Charley stared down at her brown blouse, its front stained by a wayward line of white toothpaste that must have dripped from her electric toothbrush while she was brushing her teeth. (“And you give me a hard time for not being able to manage a cell phone,” she could almost hear her mother tease.) “I don’t believe this,” Charley muttered, balancing the phone between her shoulder and her ear as she began unbuttoning her blouse.

“Perhaps something later in the week, say Thursday…”

“No. It has to be sooner.” Charley pulled her blouse off her shoulders and threw it on the floor. “He doesn’t have anything available today at all?”

“I’m afraid not. He’s in court till eleven, then he has a lunch meeting at twelve, another meeting at two…”

“Okay, fine. Never mind then.” Charley clicked off her cell phone, then tossed it on her unmade bed. Obviously this was a sign her collaboration with Jill Rohmer wasn’t meant to be. She walked to her closet and stared at her impressive collection of designer jeans and her less-than-impressive collection of everything else. “Who needs anything else?” she asked the empty house, the school bus having picked up Franny and James half an hour ago. Ultimately she settled on a rhinestone-studded, beige T-shirt, the bottom half of which was emblazoned with a skull and crossbones. Since she wouldn’t be visiting Alex Prescott this morning, there was no need for more formal attire. “It just wasn’t meant to be,” she said again, this time out loud.

She was surprised, and somewhat dismayed, to realize how disappointed she was, especially since she’d more or less decided that she wanted nothing to do with Jill Rohmer or her sordid story. This, after a sleepless night spent tossing around in bed, weighing her options, figuring out how best to organize her schedule, and even drafting an outline in her head. I can’t do it, she’d told herself repeatedly throughout the night, all the while composing a list of questions to ask Alex Prescott, and a further list of conditions that had to be met with regard to any possible collaboration. You’d just be asking for trouble, she’d cautioned herself minutes before dawn, trying to imagine her first meeting with Jill Rohmer, how she’d react when she saw her, what she’d say. By the time her alarm clock went off at 7
A.M
., she’d gone so far as to visualize the book itself, her name in embossed silver letters below the title, or better still, above it. (A photograph of Jill Rohmer would undoubtedly fill the front cover, but her own far more glamorous picture would occupy the back. Maybe she’d even borrow her sister’s white lace pillows.) “No, I can’t do it,” she’d said aloud, as she stepped into the shower and began washing her hair. Still, by the time her hair was dry, she’d settled on the simple opening line for the preface:
Yesterday I got a letter from a killer.

Oh, well, she could always use that line to begin an upcoming column, she decided. She retrieved her cell phone from the bed and slipped it inside the back pocket of her jeans, then threw the bed’s plain white comforter across the plain white sheets, so that at least it looked as if it had been made. One day I’ll get my life in order, she was thinking as she scooped her purse off the uncarpeted hardwood floor and headed down the hall. I’ll get nice sheets, I’ll buy a rug, I’ll wear some grown-up clothes.

Except what constituted grown-up clothes these days? Charley wondered. It seemed everybody wore the same things. There was no longer any dress code, no distinction between the generations. Three-year-olds wore the same styles as thirty-year-olds. Even seventy-year-olds dressed like thirty-year-olds. And thirty-year-olds dressed like teenagers. No wonder everybody was so confused.

“Times have certainly changed,” her mother commented recently while shopping for a birthday gift for Franny. “When I was young, I wouldn’t have dreamed of raiding my mother’s closet for something to wear.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Charley told her. “Your closet was empty.”

The conversation had come to an abrupt end.

Had this blurring of the generations, this reluctance to let go of one’s youth, the outright refusal to get old, contributed in some way to the increased sexualization of the young? Could current trends in fashion, reflective as they were of society’s attitudes toward larger issues, be at least partly responsible for what had happened to little Tammy Barnet or Noah and Sara Starkey?

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Charley muttered, pausing for a minute in the kitchen to jot down these ideas. (She kept pads of paper in every room in the house for whenever inspiration struck.) Even half-baked, the ideas were provocative enough to make for an interesting column at some future date. And it looked as if Charley’s future was going to be a little more free than she’d imagined last night.

“It just wasn’t meant to be,” she repeated once more as she opened her front door, shielding her eyes from the bright sun that had replaced yesterday’s gloom. When she looked up, she saw Gabe Lopez in her driveway, leaning against her car. The pinched expression on his face told her he wasn’t waiting to wish her a good morning. What had she done now? “Something I can do for you, Mr. Lopez?” she asked, approaching cautiously.

“You can stop harassing my workers,” he told her, his dark sunglasses preventing her from seeing his eyes. “I’m not running a dating service.”

Charley felt every muscle in her body tense. “Okay. I guess that’s good to know.” She gritted her teeth to keep the word
asshole
from escaping. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get to work.”

“I suggest you prowl for boyfriends in the personal columns,” Gabe Lopez continued, as if not convinced he’d made his point.

“And I suggest you get the hell out of my way.”

Gabe Lopez stepped back just enough to allow Charley room to open her car door. “Jackass,” she muttered, her fingers trembling as she pushed her key into the ignition. Backing out of her driveway and onto the street, she saw the worker in the yellow hard hat watching her from the roof. When she turned the corner, she glanced back. The worker was still there, still watching.

“Mr. Prescott is in court this morning,” his secretary told Charley at just past eleven o’clock, “and I’m afraid he’s fully booked this afternoon.”

Charley was somewhat gratified to note that although the forty-something-year-old woman was indeed an icy blonde, her hair was cut at an unflattering angle that accentuated her square jaw and did nothing at all for her overly tanned complexion. Her manicured nails, however, were a perfect match for the deep coral of her lips. “I was hoping I might catch him between appointments. Is he expected back before lunch?”

The secretary checked her watch. “It’s possible. But he’ll be in and out. Why don’t I make you an appointment for later in the week?”

“If it’s all right with you, I’d rather wait.”

“I think you’ll just be wasting your time.”

“I’ll take my chances.” Charley perched on the end of one of four dark green chairs that sat against the pale green wall.

The secretary shrugged and turned her attention to her computer, trying to look busy.

How did we ever manage without computers? Charley wondered absently, picking up a recent copy of
Time
from the stack of magazines on the small table beside her and thumbing listlessly through it. I certainly couldn’t function without mine, she thought, trying to think of anybody who could.

Her mother, she thought.

Elizabeth worked at a small gift store on Worth Avenue three afternoons a week, selling “traveling jewelry,” which was the Palm Beach way of saying “fakes,” but that was more for something to occupy her time than because she actually needed to work. Her former “life partner,” the woman with whom she’d escaped to the Australian outback, had died three years ago of cancer, leaving Elizabeth Webb her entire—and surprisingly considerable—estate. Elizabeth had immediately packed her bags and headed back to the States, with the highly unrealistic idea of dividing her time equally among her four previously discarded children and their offspring. Had she really expected them to tumble gratefully into her arms?

Charley shook her head in an effort to shake her mother from her thoughts, and focused all her attention on an article about a recent study on bone density that—surprise!—completely contradicted all previous studies. It seemed that the simple pill that had been touted as the miracle cure for osteoporosis might not be such a godsend after all. In fact, it might be more of a curse, responsible for a little something called necrosis of the jawbone. Even stopping the drug was pointless. Once the damn thing was in your system, it stayed there. Rather like mothers, Charley thought, catching a whiff of Elizabeth Webb’s favorite perfume as she returned the magazine to the table. “I think my mother wears the same perfume you do,” she told the secretary.

“Chanel Number Five,” the secretary said without looking over. “It’s been around forever.”

Charley reached for the latest copy of
Vogue,
thinking it was very considerate of Alex Prescott to keep his magazines so up-to-date. She flipped it open, immediately zeroing in on a beautiful white lace blouse by Oscar de la Renta. “Only six thousand dollars,” she noted wryly.

“I’m sorry. Did you say something?” the secretary asked.

“There’s a blouse here for six thousand dollars.”

“Amazing.”

“And this purse,” she sputtered seconds later, “this purse is seventy-five thousand.
Seventy-five thousand dollars!
Who pays seventy-five thousand dollars for a purse?”

“As my mother used to say, the rich are different from you and me,” the secretary said.

“F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Charley said.

“What?”

“‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ F. Scott Fitzgerald said it in
The Great Gatsby.
”

“He did? Well, he must have borrowed it from my mother.”

Charley chuckled. It always comes back to mothers, she was thinking, as the door to Alex Prescott’s office opened and a handsome blur in a dark blue suit burst across the room.

“Shit, what a morning,” he exclaimed, striding past his secretary’s desk and into his inner office without so much as a glance in Charley’s direction. Seconds later, the secretary’s intercom buzzed and a disembodied voice asked, “Did I see somebody sitting out there?”

The secretary smiled indulgently. “She was hoping you might be able to fit her in.”

“Not a chance. I’m up to my eyeballs. Have her make an appointment.”

“Mr. Prescott, wait.” Charley jumped to her feet, the magazine falling to the floor. “My name is Charley Webb. I was hoping to talk to you about…”

The door to Alex Prescott’s inner office opened instantly. “
The
Charley Webb?” A smile played with his lips. “Well, then, how can I refuse? Hold my calls,” he instructed his secretary as Charley picked up the magazine and tossed it on a chair on her way into his office. “Oh, and phone Cliff Marcus. Tell him I’ll be a few minutes late for lunch. Please have a seat,” he instructed Charley as he closed the door behind her. Settling into the chair behind his desk seconds later, he pushed his light brown hair away from his forehead, and stared at her with piercing blue eyes.

“Are you always this…busy?” Charley asked. She noticed his desk was immaculately clean and void of any family photographs.

“You meant ‘manic,’ didn’t you?”

Charley smiled. “Actually, you remind me a bit of my son.”

“Receding hairline, long nose, slight paunch?”

This time Charley laughed. “I didn’t notice a paunch.”

“Good. My trainer will be pleased. What can I do for you, Charley Webb?”

Charley took a breath for both of them. “It’s about one of your clients.”

“Jill Rohmer,” he acknowledged.

“She wrote to me.”

“She wants you to write her story.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think you should do it,” he told her.

“What?”

“I don’t think you should do it.”

Charley didn’t bother masking her surprise. “May I ask why?”

“Please don’t take this the wrong way….”

“But?”

“But I just don’t think you’re the right person to tell Jill’s story.”

“May I ask why?” Charley said again.

“Look, I’m a big fan,” he began. “I read your column religiously every week. I find you provocative and entertaining, but…”

“…shallow and lightweight,” Charley finished for him.

“Well, I wouldn’t have put it quite so harshly.”

“But that’s what you would have meant,” Charley said, trying not to bristle at the all-too-familiar assessment.

“I’m not saying you don’t write well. You do. It’s just that Jill Rohmer is a very complicated young woman.”

“And I’m too simple to grasp all that complexity,” Charley stated.

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“Have you ever written a book before, Miss Webb?”

“I’ve been writing my column for three years.”

“Not exactly the same thing. Look, I can understand what would appeal to you about this project.”

“You can?”

“Of course. It’s dark. It’s fascinating. It’s sexy, in a sick, perverted way….”

“You think sick and perverted appeals to me?” Charley folded her arms across the skull and crossbones on the front of her T-shirt.

“It’s high-profile,” he continued, ignoring her interruption. “It’ll get you tons of publicity, maybe even make you a star.”

“Only if I do a good job.”

“Why would you even
want
this job?”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“I had a few questions.”

“Fire away.”

Charley took another deep breath. Alex Prescott was exhausting, she thought, watching as he loosened his blue patterned tie and leaned back in his chair. He couldn’t be much older than she was, she was thinking as she tried to formulate her first question. “In terms of this book, what do you think Jill has in mind?”