Skeleton Key (16 page)

“You ought to get somebody to check out that cough,” Gregor told her.

Bennis stopped coughing and stood up. “I'm fine. I'm a little hyper. You ready to go?”

“Absolutely. Do you ever feel like you were born out of time and out of place?”

“Are we going to do philosophy again?”

“No,” Gregor said.

He got his coat from where he had left it lying on a chair when he first got to this room. He draped it over his shoulder. As he passed the couch he looked down at the little black jacket and saw the Chanel label inside the collar. Bennis would never consent to wear a real coat over a Chanel jacket/dress. It would spoil the line.

“Ready,” Gregor said.

Bennis got her bag—more Chanel. Gregor recognized the double-C bit on the handle. What was going on here? Bennis never dressed up like this, unless she was going to be interviewed on television. She hated shopping for clothes, and hated even more spending money on them, even though she didn't really have to worry about what she spent. Here it was again: one more thing to make him feel confused; one more thing to make him feel off-balance; one
more thing to convince him that he was somehow getting it wrong.

He opened the door that went from the living room to the hall. He waited for Bennis to go through and then walked out behind her.

Just a few minutes ago, he had been thinking about people who craved isolation, who hated connection. He had been thinking that that was true of everybody, to some extent. Now he thought he was thinking nonsense. It was not true about him. He had no need for isolation at all. He hated the very thought of it. If he remembered himself as he had been between the time Elizabeth had died and the time he had first met Bennis Hannaford, it was only because he now knew that he had been dead.

Then he remembered the title of a book he had seen once in an airport a couple of years ago, a paperback book in a rack with a dozen other books. All the other books in the rack had had something to do with diets. This one had been called
New Hope for the Dead.

He started to laugh out loud. Then he realized that Bennis was looking at him oddly, as if he had lost it, which maybe he had.

He bit his lip and made himself stop.

Half a minute later, they were in the lobby in front of the check-in desk, standing on thick rugs that were patterned with gigantic roses. The lights were all amber-tinted and soft. The people going back and forth all looked like they had children at good prep schools, which they probably did. What other reason could there be to come to Washington Depot, Connecticut, at the very end of October, except to go to Parents' Day at the kind of school that charged more in tuition than most people paid for their cars, brand new?

Bennis stopped at the desk to hand in her key and ask them to take any messages. Gregor noted idly that she
looked a little too fashionable for the people in this lobby, who tended to the kind of good wool and cashmere classic cuts that used to be sold at Peck and Peck. Even so, she looked good. He took a lot of pleasure watching her cross the room. She said hello to one or two people, as if she half knew them, maybe because she had run across them a couple of times in the halls. In some ways, Gregor realized, Bennis ran very much to type. You could tell just by looking at her that she had come from money, and never really fallen off the perch.

“Ready?” she said to him, as she came up beside him and laid a hand on his arm.

“Ready,” he told her.

Then he let himself be guided down a small hall toward a sign that said TAP ROOM. Tap room was a much better name for it than bar would have been. He understood that immediately. Places like the Mayflower Inn did not have bars.

They were just sitting down at a sturdy wooden table for two near one of the windows that looked out onto the inn's front drive when the woman walked up to them, and for a moment Gregor couldn't remember who she was. Her familiarity was overwhelming, but that was as far as he got. She was middle-aged and a little heavy, but definitely not obese. Her clothes were determinedly but unobtrusively provincial.

“Excuse me,” she said.

Gregor's head went up. The voice he remembered. He had always been better with voices than with faces.

“The woman on the train,” he said.

“Excuse me?” Bennis said.

The woman was nodding. “That's right, Mr. Demarkian. We met on the train. Or on the bud car, really. Coming up to Waterbury from Bridgeport.”

Bennis got her cigarettes out. The woman frowned at them, but she didn't protest. Gregor was sure that she wouldn't, no matter how much she wanted to.

“I'm Iris Brayne,” the woman said. “You wouldn't recognize
the name. I work for the
Torrington Register-Citizen.
In about half an hour, I'm going to file a story about you.”

“Ah,” Bennis said. She blew a thick stream of smoke in the air—directly at Iris Brayne, Gregor was certain, although he wouldn't have accused her of it out loud.

Iris Brayne waved smoke away from her face and grimaced. “I thought I'd give you a chance to comment,” she said. “You're here. You're with the woman who discovered Kayla Anson's body. You might want to say something the general public would understand.”

“Why should I say anything?” Gregor asked her reasonably. “I don't even know what's going on. I just got here. Miss Hannaford and I have barely had a chance to talk.”

“You've been here for hours. I know that. We came up together on the train.”

“I've been asleep. I was asleep on the train, if you were paying any attention.”

“She was the one who told me where to find you,” Bennis said drily.

“There, then,” Gregor said. “Why don't you just let us talk, and then after I know something I might have something to tell you.”

“You consult with police departments,” Iris Brayne said. “I want to know which one you're consulting with now.”

“I'm not consulting with, or for, any police department.”

“Your own—lady friend—found the body. Did you know Kayla Anson well?”

“I never met Kayla Anson in my life,” Gregor said.

“Did your lady friend know Kayla Anson well?”

There was something about this woman that was all wrong, mean-spirited and pinched. The lines in her face were too deep. She wouldn't look at Bennis Hannaford, even when she wanted Bennis to answer a question she obviously felt she needed to ask. Gregor looked down at her hands clutched together on the table and saw that the nails were bitten ragged.

“I think it's about time you went someplace and left us
alone,” he said, as pleasantly as he could. Then he stood up, as if he were about to help her—guide her—in getting where she was supposed to go.

By now, Bennis had finished her cigarette and started another one. This was defensive smoking, the kind of thing she did when she was trying to ward off some evil, like someone she thought might be stalking her on a city street. Iris Brayne had begun to rub her hands together fretfully. Her shoulder bag—the same one she had had on the train—was slipping down along her arm. Every once in a while she pushed at it, as if it were in her way.

“Everybody's going to know one way or the other,” Iris Brayne said. “It's going to be in the morning's paper. Even if you don't make a statement. It's going to be in the paper with a picture from the Associated Press.”

“That way,” Gregor said, pointing toward the door.

Iris Brayne looked at him long and hard, and then quickly at Bennis and quickly away. Gregor knew it would be a mistake to put a hand on her, even just on her elbow, to move her away. He had had run-ins with small-town reporters before. He had had run-ins with big-town reporters, too. If this woman had not been a reporter, he would have been worried that she was on the verge of becoming irrational.

Of course, the only way he knew she was a reporter was because she said she was. She might very well be lying.

Gregor was just making up his mind to do something—or to go to the bartender and ask him to do something—when Iris Brayne stepped away from him. The movement was abrupt and deliberate. She moved not a single millimeter more than she'd wanted to.

“It'll be in the paper tomorrow,” she said. “All about you and your lady friend and Kayla Anson. I bet it'll be picked up by the wire services, too.”

She hitched the strap of her bag back up on her shoulder and turned away.

She walked out of the tap room at a small-stepped, hitching
half-run, as if she'd suddenly realized that she was going to be late for her deadline.

There were millions of them like this, at small-town newspapers all across the country. Gregor had met them and understood them, just as he had met and understood their better halves, the reporters who liked being where they were. They didn't bother him, except that they did. Connection and isolation. He couldn't make it any clearer than that.

“So,” Bennis said. “What was that all about?”

“That” Gregor told her, “is a harbinger of things to come. I'm going to be panned unmercifully in the
Torrington Register-Citizen.”

Later, Sally Martindale would think about this weekend as a movable apocalypse. She would go over and over the particulars in her mind, the way people do when they are the victims of a preventable disaster. Because this disaster was certainly preventable. It would never have happened at all if Frank hadn't left her. It would never have occurred to her at all to take money out of Kayla Anson's account—or anybody else's—if she hadn't been left to rattle around on her own in this big, ancient house, if she hadn't already been forced to sell all the furniture she could get away with just to go on getting by. As far as Sally could tell, it was
all
Frank's fault, all of it, even her getting fired from Deloitte. It was true that she had been late more often than not in that last year before they had let her go. It was true that she had been distracted. It was even true that she had known all along what the competition was like, and that there would only be one or two of them asked to stay on to be partners. Nothing mattered except for the fact that Frank was leaving her. She couldn't think about anything else. She didn't even see why she should have been expected to.

The particulars that were going through her mind that weekend, though, were about different things. They were about the obvious. She had been careless these last few months—sloppy, really, tense and in a hurry all the time. There was that. There was also the fact that the murder had happened on a Friday, so that she hadn't even heard about it until Sunday morning. If it had happened on an ordinary weekday, she would have caught it on the radio news on her way in to work. Then it would have been easy to fix what she had done, at least well enough to get away with it just a little bit longer. She would only have had to move
a few things around and transfer a few dollars out of other people's accounts. She would have been careful to pick the right kind of people with the right kind of accounts, the kind she should have been using all along, except that it had seemed so much simpler to use Kayla Anson's. What she really needed was young mothers with young children—healthy but not reckless, distracted by baby-sitting and classes in Mozart for Toddlers.

The right kind of accounts, she had thought compulsively as she switched the television back and forth from CBS to NBC to ABC to CNN. The story was everywhere. It was just beginning to heat up. She had missed the beginning of it, because she had been so tense that she had just slept through most of Saturday, and then she had driven out to Ledyard again and given it one more try. All she had gotten for her trouble was one hundred dollars poorer. She hadn't dared to risk any more.

Now she pulled into the parking lot at the side of the club and looked at the long, low mock-Tudor building. She was finding it very difficult to breathe. Her chest hurt. Her muscles seemed to be knotted tight, so that when she tried to move, everything on her body resisted. This building had been put up in the twenties, when the first of the serious New York money began to move north—serious
old
money, that was the ticket. Down on the Gold Coast it was all stockbroker fortunes and people who'd made a million overnight. They liked everything shiny and new and very up-to-date. Sally liked things like that too. She'd just learned never to say so when she was with people up here, who all seemed to think that a cramped littie house where the plumbing was falling apart was more impressive than any other kind, as long as it had been built in 1676.

If I ever win the lottery, I'm going to run away to New York, Sally told herself. Then she bit her lip and put her head down on the steering wheel. She had lottery tickets, of course. She had diem every day. She had to have them. It was the only thing in her life that gave her hope. She wished she knew what people did for money, how they got
it how they handled it. She wished she knew where money came from. All her life, even when she was working, it had seemed to her that it had just fallen out of the sky.

Mallory had been sitting at the kitchen table when Sally first heard the news of Kayla Anson's murder, and Sally had felt Mallory watching her every move.

“I don't understand what your problem is,” Mallory had said. “You barely knew her. I barely knew her. She wasn't one of my
contacts,
Mother.”

Sally had considered telling Mallory all about it, about which account she had taken the money from and about what would happen to that account now that the account holder was dead, but she was stopped by the cold flatness in Mallory's eyes, the thing that was very near hate. Was it true that her daughter hated her? It seemed to be, although Sally knew she ought to be careful about this, because Mallory was still an adolescent. Adolescents went through phases where they thought their parents were beneath contempt. Even so, Sally didn't want to tell Mallory anything, not now and maybe not ever. She didn't want Mallory to see her any more clearly than she already did. Besides, the feeling was somewhat mutual. Mallory might hate her, but she hated Mallory, or at least spent some of the time wishing her dead. Sally only wished that her own mother had been for her what she was being for Mallory—her own mother, who thought the height of success was to be able to buy a sofa and love seat combination at Sears.