Skeleton Key (17 page)

“I'm going into my office,” was all she said, gathering up her pocketbook and keys. She thought for a moment that she ought to change into something more professional, and then decided against it. Nobody dressed up to spend Sunday at the club, no matter what they were doing there. She didn't want to be conspicuous, or conspicuously odd.

“You never go into the club on Sundays,” Mallory said, “except when I've got something on, and then all you do is
police
me.”

Sally kept her head against the steering wheel and began to count. She couldn't go inside when she was this obviously
upset. They would pick it up right away. She tried to call up Kayla Anson's face and found only Kayla's cousin Annabel instead—and this in spite of the fact that she had just seen Kayla's picture on the news. She had the radio on and turned to a classical music station. In a couple of minutes, the station would break for the hourly news and she would have to hear the whole story again. She made herself take a deep breath, and then another, and another. She counted to one hundred and then started from one hundred and counted backward. She heard a car pulling into the lot somewhere behind her. She couldn't sit here like this forever.

The car belonged to Marian Ridenour—one of those young mothers with young children. Sally sat up and watched them all pile out of the Volvo station wagon, two young girls and, a tiny boy. The girls were dressed in cham-bray jumpers with very white turtlenecks under them. Sally took her keys out of the ignition and opened her own car's door. The cold poured in on her and made her shiver. Marian Ridenour's husband worked for Goldman, Sachs. Sally couldn't remember what he did, only that he got paid a lot of money—and that Marian was his second wife.

She waited for Marian and the children to be out of hailing range, and then started into the club herself. She took the front entrance, even though it was more likely to get her seen, because there was something about going around to the side that smacked to her of sneaking. The last thing she needed was to have somebody see her here and conclude that she was hiding in some way. If she had any chance at all, it was to do what she had to do before anybody else even thought about the account that Kayla Anson, like all the other members, kept at this club.

She got down to her office without seeing anybody. She sat at her computer and booted up. The club seemed very, very busy, full of people. It was a Sunday afternoon in October and people didn't have anything else to do.

She got to her desktop screen and then from there to the accounts. She typed in Kayla Anson's name and waited. A
second later, a window popped up, making a sound like a cymbal being struck, that said
FILE NOT FOUND
.

“Shit,” Sally said, under her breath. Then she felt instantly guilty. You didn't use words like
shit
at this club. Even the men didn't use them.

She tried Anson, Kayla. She got another window:
FILE NOT FOUND
. Then she tried the account number. She knew that number by heart. The cymbal went off and the window went up:
FILE NOT FOUND.
Just to check, just to make sure, Sally typed in “Marian Ridenour.” The account document flashed into the window, accessible and complete.

There was a small rivulet of sweat going down the back of her neck. Sally could feel it. Any minute now, it would soak into the silk of her pale blue blouse. Somebody had deleted Kayla Anson's account file, or moved it, or put it off limits. She had absolutely no idea what she was supposed to do now.

“Did we mess up your program?” a voice asked from the doorway. “I told them to be careful, but you know what those people are like. And they were in an incredible hurry.”

Sally looked up and saw Ruth Grandmere standing in the doorway. Ruth was the club's weekend manager, a salt-and-peppered-hair woman with a sensible figure and a penchant for dresses in floral prints. Unlike Sally, she had never been a member of the club—and never even wanted to be.

“What
what
people are like?” Sally asked her. “Do you mean someone's been in here playing with my machines?”

“The Anson people. Kayla Anson's trust lawyers. Tons of them. Well, I suppose it was only three. But still. Can you imagine getting three eight-hundred-dollar-an-hour white shoe Wall Street lawyers out to the Northwest Hills of Connecticut the first thing Saturday morning just to get the records on an account that had, what, in it—maybe a thousand dollars?”

“I don't know,” Sally said. Her throat felt raw and bloody, as if she'd swallowed glass.

Ruth had come all the way into the office. Now she sat down on a corner of Sally's desk.

“If you ask me, it's Margaret. I don't mean Margaret made them come out. I mean they don't trust Margaret. Not as far as they can throw her. And I can't say I blame them. Lord, but that woman is god-awful. And rdon't think she ever cared about Kayla at all, except for the money. That girl lost everything she had when her father died.”

“Yes,” Sally said.

“Anyway,” Ruth said, “they wanted the account records, so I gave them to them—I hope you don't mind. You weren't here and I couldn't get you at home. Not that there's anything wrong with that It's your weekend. But they were in a hurry. And I called Mortimer and he said to make every accommodation.”

Mortimer was the club's regular manager.

“No,” Sally said. “I don't mind.”

What was she supposed to say?

Ruth hopped down off the desk. “I didn't think you would. And you'll get the account documents back—you've still got them, really, they've just been moved and protected with a password or something, I don't remember how it works. They just want to dot all the i's and cross all the t's, if you see what I mean. Did you really come in to work today?”

“What? Oh, no. No. I came to have some coffee and get out of the house. I just thought I'd check on some things while I was here.”

“Well, good. Good. I keep telling Mortimer that we ought to put you on full-time. We need you on full-time. But you know how Mortimer is. Now I've got to go and make sure that the golf caddies aren't ready to kill Stephen Holdenbrook again—why that man has to be so awful to the caddies, I don't know. It's a terrible thing, isn't it, about Kayla Anson?”

“What? Oh, yes. Yes, it is.”

“There's nothing else on tap for conversation around this place today. If you want to get away from the news, you'd
better go to Hawaii. I can't imagine what it would be like, to be dead at an age like that.”

“Yes,” Sally said again.

Ruth retreated into the hall. Sally looked at the screen of her computer. There wasn't anything she could do about this mess, not here, not now. Maybe there was nothing she could do about this mess ever. She wrapped her arms around her chest and held herself tight.

She needed to get up and close the office door. She needed to lock it tight.

She didn't want anybody to see her in here, bent over her keyboard, breaking down.

Faye Dallmer had thirteen earthenware pots of mint to put out on the boards in the roadside stand this morning. She normally hired somebody to do that kind of thing for her, but today she needed to do it herself. She needed to be out of the house. She needed to be away from Zara Anne. Most importantly, she needed to be doing something physical. Ever since she had heard about the death of Kayla Anson, she had been agitated, and she wasn't even sure why.

It isn't as if it has anything to do with you, she kept telling herself, as she set mint pots into even, orderly rows. You didn't even know Kayla Anson. You were out back mucking around in the dirt when whatever it was that happened, happened. You didn't even have the Jeep.

It was the Jeep that was nagging at her, although that made no more sense than anything else. She had the Jeep back, after all. It was sitting right next to her little Escort in the garage. It was just more than a little banged up, that was all. There was bark all over it, as if somebody had smashed it into a tree, except that it wasn't that smashed. She wondered who had taken it, back on Friday night. When kids took it, they always brought it back. They put it in the garage or left it parked in the driveway. Maybe
this time, after they hit the tree or whatever it was, they had been too ashamed to return it

“It was chasing that girl's car,” Zara Anne had said, that night, to the policemen who showed up at the door.

Faye had been able to tell that the policemen had not been taking Zara Anne seriously. Local people rarely did take her seriously. She was a hard young woman to take. By the time the pollcemen got there, she had put on all her jewelry, necklaces and bangles and earrings that dangled and shone. She sounded like a jewelry store walking whenever she moved. She had put on more eye makeup, too, including thick black liner that she had painted into wings at the sides of her eyes. Faye wondered why she had never noticed it before, this need of Zara Anne's to be as ridiculous as possible.

“It was right up on the back of that car,” Zara Anne told them, “practically climbing up the bumper. Tailgating, that's what it's called. And it didn't have to be. There wasn't anybody else out there. It could have passed anytime.”

“I didn't make it up,” Zara Anne had told Faye herself, the next morning. “I really did see it happen. I don't understand why you won't believe me.”

It wasn't that Faye didn't believe her. Not exactiy. It was more complicated than that. Part of it was that Faye was used to Zara Anne's exaggerations. Five hits out of twenty on an ESP test became an “incredible proof of extrasensory perception. The failure of a checkout girl to make eye contact at the supermarket became “irrefutable evidence” of her Christian fundamentalism and hatred of Wicca.

“They all want to go back to burning witches at the stake,” Zara Anne would say, as they got back into the car after a long day of grocery shopping.

Faye had given up pointing out that nobody had ever burned a witch in the American colonies. Witches here were hanged, not burned. The hangings took place in Hartford.

Part of it was that there was something wrong with this—this vision of the Jeep chasing the BMW, tailing it, out there on the Litchfield Road. Faye made sure her rows of mint were straight and then went to the back of the stand to see what she still had in boxes on the ground. She took a box full of organically grown beets with their greens still on and lugged it to the front. She had on two thick cotton sweaters over her turtleneck, but she was still cold: If the weather went on like this, she didn't know if she would be able to keep the stand open until November. She thought of Towne Corn out in Morris, where they kept the stand open almost forever. The people there wore heavy corduroy jackets lined with fleece and thick suede gloves.

I couldn't do it like that, Faye said to herself, outside. Then she stopped working for a moment to watch a car pass on the road. On Sunday mornings like this, the road was nearly empty. They wouldn't start to see any serious traffic until people started coming out of church.

“I think I could tell what he was thinking,” Zara Anne had said stubbornly, the next morning, when the news was everywhere that Kayla Anson was dead. “I didn't know she was dead last night. I wasn't trying to get in on the publicity. I didn't know there was any publicity to get in on.”

“I wasn't saying you were trying to get in on it last night,” Faye said. “I know we didn't know anything last night. I said I thought you were trying to get in on it now.”

“By talking to you.”

“By working this whole story up in your head. And it is a story. Because you know they're going to be back.”

“Why should they be back?”

They had been standing in the kitchen by then. Zara Anne had been all pouty and furious and rumpled. She was always rumpled when she got up in the morning. It was as if she had a disorganized soul.

“Kayla Anson's been murdered,” Faye told her. “In her car. The one you said the Jeep was chasing. Not just happened to be behind. Chasing.”

“Somebody stole the Jeep and then they killed her,” Zara
Anne said. “You're just jealous I knew it before you. Wic-cans always have to be careful about their powers. Other people get jealous.”

“I'm not getting
jealous
of your
powers,”
Faye said.

“I could feel it the whole time they were driving by,” Zara Anne said. “I've got the sight that way. I could feel the badness coming right out of that Jeep. That's why I didn't go and tell you about it. That's why I just waited until you came home. I didn't want you chasing that Jeep with all the badness in it.”

“You're going to bring a million reporters out here, do you understand that?” Faye asked her. “You're going to bring Geraldo Rivera and Ricki Lake and I don't know who else. You're going to turn this place into a circus.”

“It will be good for the movement. It will be good for people to see that we aren't just making it up.”

“You're going to get a reporter from the
Weekly World News
to camp on our doorstep. They'll find aliens landing in my pumpkin patch. It will be nuts.”

“You're only jealous because it's me instead of you. That's all this is. You think you have a right to be the big important one all the time.”

“Fine. Wonderful. Then we'll let it all be you. When they start inundating this place, and clogging up the parking lot so that nobody can get to the stand, you can just move out and take a room at the Super 8 in Waterbury. You can clog up their parking lot and talk to reporters there.”

“You're just jealous because it's me instead of you,” Zara Anne said again.

The beets were all put out on the stand. She had a box of zucchini the size of jousting lances at the back that needed to be put out, too. Had she ever really made love to Zara Anne? Had she really done all those physical things, and allowed them to be done to her, that should only be done between two people who were very much in love?