Skeleton Key (21 page)

“It's two days before Halloween,” Martin pointed out. “We're not ready.”

“Ready?” Jake Sturmer looked confused.

“For the invasion,” Henry said. “Christ on a crutch. What more can you possibly want to know? We came back from finding that damned car overturned in our own graveyard and there was your skeleton. If you ask me, it's all connected. Whoever took the car took the skeleton.”

“Well, yes, Mr. Chandling. I think that's what the police are dunking of—”

“So there's nothing we can tell you about it,” Martin said. “That's what we're trying to say here. We don't know anything about it. We didn't hear anything we didn't go investigate. We went over all this stuff—”

“Yes,” Jake said. “I know. But the thing is, I just realized.”

“Realized what?” Henry asked him.

Jake Sturmer was energized. “It was while I was in the shower this morning that I realized. I drove to get to your place, you see, so it wasn't clear at first, because of the way the roads go. You have to go around. But if you didn't have to use the roads, then we'd be right up there.” He pointed into space behind the house.

“What would be right up there?” Martin asked.

“The museum,” Jake said. “It's right up there. Right through that stand of trees. It's maybe a thousand yards from here. You could have walked it. I could have. Anybody could have. So you see, it makes more sense than we thought it did. For the skeleton to have ended up here.”

“Okay,” Martin said.

“It's an invitation to Lyme disease, that's what it is,” Henry said. “It's crazy. Those trees are thick.”

“It's not much farther, if you go around the side of them,” Jake Sturmer said. “Then there's a little field. You could even have driven the Jeep. It has those big wheels. It's supposed to go over terrain. That's the point.”

“I don't see what we're getting at here,” Martin said.

Jake Sturmer hesitated, as if he didn't either—which he
might not, Martin thought, because he was so obviously the sort of man who needed to do things. Some people should never retire from their jobs. It made them anxious and overwrought.

“Well,” Jake said finally, “I was just going to ask. If you'd mind. If I walked it myself. First through the woods and then across the field.”

“Why?” Henry asked.

“I don't know. To see if I could find anything. To see if—I don't know.”

“Asshole,” Henry said.

“I don't see how it would do any harm to let him walk around in the trees,” Martin said.

“I didn't say it would do any harm,” Henry said.

“I'm just going to go up there and check it out,” Jake said. “I won't bother you at all. I promise you. I just want to—look around.”

“Go right ahead,” Martin said.

“Asshole,” Henry said again.

Henry turned around and stomped back through the front door, slamming it behind him. The sharp noise made Jake Sturmer jump.

“Well,” he said, looking Martin up and down. “I guess I'll just go on up. If you don't mind.”

“Don't mind at all,” Martin said.

“Right,” Jake said.

He smiled weakly and then took over, looking back over his shoulder every few steps to see if Martin was still watching him. Martin seemed to be, but he wasn't. He was looking up into the stand of trees that started maybe thirty yards from the house and covered the rise of the hill at that end of the property. At lot of things out here were close together, but you didn't realize they were. The roads were odd, and there were so many trees. He couldn't believe that anyone would come down through that stand in pitch darkness carrying a human skeleton, even one that had been cleaned and polished to make an exhibit in a museum.

“Martin?” Henry called from inside the house.

Martin turned away from the sight of Jake Sturmer plodding through the thick underbrush at the start of the trees and went back into the house.

Out at the Swamp Tree Country Club, Annabel Crawford was sitting at a large round table near the bar, sipping neatly from what was supposed to be a Virgin Mary. A Virgin Mary was what the bartender had served her. She'd bloodied it up on her own with a couple of little airline bottles of vodka. On the other side of the room, at another table, Tommy Haggerty was sitting with a big groups of boys, ignoring her. He was still furious at her for taking the car and leaving him stranded at the Lucky Eight. By now, Annabel had come to the decision that everything that had happened had been his fault, and that she didn't want to see him again anyway, never mind sleep with him. She could do much better if all she was looking for was somebody to sleep with. She could do much better just by standing up in the middle of this room and announcing that she wanted to get laid.

The bloodied Virgin Mary tasted raw. Annabel wished that everybody wasn't so wrapped up in the press conference that was supposed to happen any minute now, that people could talk about anything—
anything
—that wasn't the murder of Kayla Anson. She also wished that she were someplace else besides this table, anchored unmercifully to the low droning voice of Mallory Martindale. Annabel Crawford had never had any use for Mallory Martindale. Fat girls made her furious. They were only taking their neuroses out on themselves.

“… so you see,” Mallory was saying, “I've decided not to come out, and I've got that magnificent dress, the Carolina dress, that you were saying you liked so much. And of course she doesn't do copies. So you couldn't have it.
But since I'm not coming out, I'm not going to need it. If you see what I mean.”

“Why aren't you coming out?” Annabel asked. “That doesn't make any sense.”

“I never wanted to come out,” Mallory said. “It was my mother's idea. I'm going to nursing school. I just finally made her see reason.”

“I can't imagine not coming out,” Annabel said. “You won't get invited to any of the parties.”

Mallory Martindale was drinking a vanilla Coke. It looked thick and syrupy, even in the glass.

“I thought you might like to buy the dress,” she said. “The Carolina dress. You'd have to take it in. But you said you liked it. And it's never been worn. And I'd charge a lot less for it than Carolina would if you got if from her.”

“I don't really think you've got your mother's permission to do this,” Annabel said. “I think you're trying to put something over on her and then when the finds out all hell is going to break loose. And I'm in enough trouble already.”

“All right. I'll ask Bronwyn Kidd. She liked it, too.”

Bronwyn Kidd was one of the Goody Girls, as Annabel thought of them. She had gone through four perfect years at Choate-Rosemary Hall and was now at Vassar, where she was intending to major in something esoteric and intellectual, like philosophy. Annabel's mother was always pointing to Bronwyn Kidd and her two best friends whenever Annabel said that it really, really hadn't been her fault that all the trouble had started.

“So,” Mallory Martindale said.

“Wait a minute.” Annabel got up and brought her glass back to the bar. The bartender made her another Virgin Mary and handed it over. Annabel came back to the table and took two more airline bottles of vodka out of her bag.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Right now, I have every intention of getting thoroughly drunk.”

“Is there a reason for that?”

“Yes,” Annabel said. “Because I want to.”

“They know you're doing it, you know. Or at least, the bartender does. What are you going to do if he throws you out?”

“He won't throw me out. He just won't let me drive home. Which is beside the point anyway, since I don't have a car. My mother will have to drive me home.”

“Won't she be upset? At the drinking?”

“No more upset than she ever has been before. We were talking about the dress.”

Mallory Martindale looked down into her vanilla Coke and then looked up again. “Do you have any more of—whatever that is? What you're drinking?”

“Vodka?”

“Whatever. Could I have some to put in my Coke?”

“I think it's rum you usually put in Coke.”

“Do you have any rum?”

“No,” Annabel said.

Mallory shrugged. “I'd take fifteen hundred dollars for the dress. It cost my father nearly six thousand. And it wouldn't be hard to get it taken in. It's not the kind of thing that needs to be precisely fitted anyway. I thought vodka tasted-good in everything. I thought vodka didn't have a taste.”

Annabel reached into her bag, got out another bottle of vodka, and handed it over. She was not drunk, but she thought she could get that way, if she worked at it. Now she thought she would like to see Mallory Martindale drunk.

“You're different,” she said accusingly.

Mallory Martindale dumped vodka in her drink and smiled.

The press conference was due to be held at the Washington Police Department—Washington Depot, it turned out, was the unofficial name given to a part of the town, not the whole town itself. There were other sections of town with names. Stacey Spratz drove Gregor through at least one of them, called New Preston. He also drove Gregor past some of the most spectacular houses Gregor had ever seen, even more impressive than the big ones in the best parts of the Main Line suburbs. Large brown-and-beige Tudors and white clapboards sat high on hills so steep Gregor had no idea how anybody managed to mow the lawns. Blank-faced brick Federals with half a dozen additions sprawled across three hundred feet of frontage, looking more like institutions than private residences, but private nonetheless. No more than a third of the roads they passed had road signs.

“People steal them,” Stacey Spratz said when Gregor asked. “The theory is, if you don't know where you are, you don't belong here. And if you don't belong here, you've probably got it in mind to steal something, so we're not going to make it any easier for you. Although I don't know why they think somebody's going to come out here and steal something. Nobody like that even knows this stuff is here.”

This seemed true enough. It seemed unlikely that some ghetto gang from Hartford or New Haven would come all the way out here to rob a ten-thousand-square-foot house, when they could take the bus into one of the nearer suburbs and rip off something there. Still, Gregor found the effect unsettling. The Main Line was a rather straightforward place. Rich people lived there, in sight of one another, and nobody who entered the precincts of Bryn Mawr or Radnor expected anything different Out here the impression was
given, possibly deliberately, that the area was nothing more than a country way station, an old New England outpost that had more in common with small towns in Vermont than pricey suburbs on the Gold Coast In some ways, the impression was very much wrong.

The Washington Police Department was in a small brick building on a side street in the middle of what Gregor was coming to think of as a moderate-sized town. Before he'd seen Morris, and Caldwell, he would have called Washington “small.” Stacey Spratz pulled up to the curb outside the parking lot. He had to, because the parking lot was full.

“Here we are,” he said.

He and Gregor both looked at the cars and minivans crowding the small space in front of the police station's doors. A small podium had been set up on the steps, with a wooden lectern backed by half a dozen chairs. The lectern had a microphone on it, with cables running down and off to the side. A lot of the people in the minivans had microphones, too, big boom ones. Cables for camera feeds were everywhere, but Gregor saw few nationally recognizable faces. Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson were probably still enmeshed in presidential scandals. Dan Rather had. never had a taste for this kind of thing.

“I was hoping we'd get somebody famous,” Stacey Spratz said, “but none of the really big reporters came. You figure it's the elections?”

“Probably,” Gregor said.

Stacey got out of the car. “There's some guys in there want to talk to you. Mark Cashman. He's on the PD here. Tom Royce. He's with the ME's office. You know we got a central state medical examiner's office?”

“No.”

“Yeah, well, we have. Dozens of small towns like this. Each of them gets a murder maybe once every twenty years. I think if we go around back we can avoid all the cameras until the press conference starts. And it won't start until the governor gets here.”

“How are you sure he's not already here?”

“No limousines.”

This made sense. Gregor let Stacey Spratz lead him up the street past the parking lot and then around the back on the lawn. There was a door back there, but no path going to it. It made Gregor wonder if the door had been put there only to cover contingencies, like fires or raids. Who would raid the police station in Washington, Connecticut?

Stacey climbed the two little steps in front of the door and knocked. After a certain amount of fuss, it was opened to them. Gregor wondered irritably why they didn't just establish a ritual—
Halt! Who goes there?
—and be done with it.

The door opened onto a back hall, all white walls and shiny fixtures. There was a stainless steel water fountain along one wall. There were also too many people here for a Sunday afternoon, and way too many people in suits.

“Security for the governor,” Stacey said, waving at the men as they passed.

Gregor let himself be led into a small room with a large table in it—a small conference room, maybe, or a place to eat lunch. The two men sitting at the table rose when he entered. One of them was as young as Stacey Spratz, but far less raw. The other was middle-aged and in a bad mood.

“Mark Cashman,” Stacey Spratz said, pointing to the young one. He turned to the other and said, “Tom Royce. This is Gregor Demarkian. Our consultant.”