Skeleton Key (25 page)

“Because it would have gotten embedded in the skin,” Gregor answered. “What about signs of struggle? You said that with Kayla Anson—”

“In this case, there's no way to tell, assuming she was actually murdered in that garage. Which I think is a very good assumption, this time. Kayla Anson could have been murdered anywhere and then her body could have been driven home. This one, though, with all those reporters outside—”

“There would have been a very small window of opportunity when she could have been brought here, or come here, without being noticed,” Gregor said. “Has anybody checked with the press to find out if somebody did see her?”

“I'll get somebody on it,” Stacey Spratz said.

“How about what she got here on,” Gregor said. “Or in. She lived—where? You've mentioned her before, but I didn't quite get the geography.”

“On the Litchfield Road,” Mark Cashman said. “In Watertown.”

“And that's how far from here?” Gregor asked.

“About ten, fifteen miles,” Stacey Spratz said.

Gregor stared at the two of them in astonishment. “Ten or fifteen miles? But how did she get here? There isn't a car in the place that doesn't belong to the Ansons that I can see. Did she hitchhike? Did somebody give her a ride? How did she get all the way out here?”

On the day that Peter Greer was formally admitted to the Swamp Tree Country Club, he came into the clubhouse bar at exactly six o'clock and had a double Glenfidditch whiskey, neat. That was two years and four months ago, and now, sitting alone in a booth in the bar's far corner, he could remember it in perfect detail. That was the day my life changed, he had sometimes told himself. The thought did not embarrass him, even though he knew it would sound overdramatic to anyone who might hear it. It
was
the day his life changed, the day he had passed through an invisible barrier that separated
that
part of Litchfield County from
this
one. It had been the day he had started thinking of himself as something other than a poor boy making good. Later that week he had gone down to South Street in Litchfield and walked it from one end to the other. He had a fantasy of living in the big white-columned house there, the one that almost looked like the White House transplanted—except that it was better. Now he thought it might be just as well if he didn't think of the White House, because it also made him think of bimbo eruptions, which he was somewhat prone to himself. He had five messages from Deirdre on his machine back at the house. He knew that if he were to go back there now, he would find her in his hot tub, floating naked in the swirling water and ready to cut his throat.

“You really can't discard me like waste paper,” she had told him the night before. “What is it that you think you're dealing with?”

“The police are going to want to talk to you just as much as they want to talk to me,” Margaret Anson had said, also the night before.

Margaret had called. She never came to his house, and
Peter never expected her to come. Deirdre had been on his living room couch, having one of her patented tirades.

“You've got a woman there with you,” Margaret had said. “How very sweet.”

“I have a friend here who's a little upset. As you should be able to hear.”

“I hear more than you think I do. But you were Kayla's lover, Peter. They're going to want to talk to you. They're going to be very interested in anything you-have to say.”

“I'm very easy to find, Margaret.”

“So am I,” Margaret said. “That may be my trouble.”

The television in the bar was full of the story of the death of Zara Anne Moss. The graphic behind Ann Nyberg's head showed a folk Victorian farmhouse with the
words Death, House
stenciled over it. Margaret's house was nothing like a folk Victorian, Peter thought irrelevantly. Then the screen went to a large picture of Zara Anne Moss's head, except that she looked far younger than she was supposed to be. Peter supposed it was a high school graduation photograph. It had that kind of posed quality to it.

A waiter went by, and Peter snagged him. He pointed to his glass and the waiter nodded. This was one of the good things about the club. They kept tabs on what you were eating or drinking. You never had to give elaborate orders or worry that what you ordered would be translated by the staff into something you didn't want.

Peter finished the rest of the whiskey in his glass in a single gulp. There wasn't much of it, less than a quarter of what he'd started with, but it went down as a shock nonetheless. He watched the waiter come back to him with another glass on a tray and sat still and polite while it was delivered to him. Then he signed the check he was presented with. Everything at the club was on account. You could sign for anything, and the charges were simply piled on and on, until the end of the month, when the bill came. Peter had heard rumors that there were members who let their bills go from month to month, who ran up thousands
of dollars in charges and never seemed to get around to paying it, but he had never felt secure enough to let a bill slip for even a single month. With his luck, he would be called into the bursar's office and given a lecture the very first thing. You probably had to have a name like Ridenour to get away with something like that. Peter wondered if he'd feel differently about it, if he had serious money, like Bill Gates. Somehow, he thought he wouldn't.

When the waiter had gone, Peter picked up his drink and made his way to the bar. The stools there were mostly empty, but Sally Martindale was sitting at one end, nursing what looked like an elaborate ladies' drink. Pousse-café. Piña colada. Caté frappé. Peter couldn't remember what they were all called. They were just silly drinks, with too much fluff and not enough alcohol in them.

Ordinarily, Peter would not have made an effort to talk to Sally Martindale. Since Sally's divorce, she had had too much of the smell of failure about her, too much of an air of desperation. You could see it in what was happening to her body. She had always been thin. Now she was emaciated, and it was the wrong kind of emaciated. Her body looked hard and undernourished. Her arms and legs seemed to be made of interlocking strings. Her face was a mess. A few years ago, she had had a network of fine lines at the sides of her eyes. Now the skin there was a holocaust of folds and gashes, as if someone had come along and cut it with a razor, and it had only inadequately healed.

Peter put his whiskey down on the bar next to Sally's stool and took a stool himself. He needed to talk to someone, and there was no one else to talk to. There was certainly no one who was safe. He had been revved up and in high gear all afternoon. There wasn't anywhere to put his energy.

At the other end of the bar, the television news had turned to something less combative than the death of Kayla Anson. Peter thought it was a consumer report on baby car seats.

“Well,” Peter said.

Sally slid her eyes sideways to look at him, rather than turning right around. She sucked at her drink, which seemed to be all foam.

“Hello,” she said.

“Do you think Margaret Anson has gone on some kind of killing spree?” Peter asked. “Maybe she's offing debutantes in her garage.”

Sally Martindale twisted on her stool. “I didn't know this girl was a debutante. I thought she was some kind of hippie.”

“I was being metaphorical. I think she was the right age.”

“Mallory's decided she doesn't want to be a debutante. She wants to sell her dress to Annabel Crawford.”

“I think a fair number of girls don't want to be debutantes these days. I don't think there's anything unusual in that.”

“There's nothing unusual about it. It's just a disaster, that's all. She can't see that yet, but she will. And then I don't know what she's going to do.”

“Maybe she just doesn't want to live a social life.”

“Oh, they all think they don't want that when they're seventeen. They all think they're too pure and noble, and they just want to be authentic, and all the rest of it. It's all rot. You know it's all rot. They change their minds as soon as they grow up, and then if you haven't forced them, they're doomed.”

Peter looked back at the television. There was an announcement on, highlighting a coming retrospective on the Monica Lewinsky affair.
All Monica All the Time,
Kayla had called it, when she'd gotten fed up with the way the story seemed to jam even her favorite radio stations. He had a sudden vision of her, the last time he had seen her alive: her hair blowing a little in the wind, her wide eyes so perfectly blue. Then he thought that that might be a trick of his memory. That might not have been the last time he saw her alive.

“Well,” he said, looking down into his drink.

Sally finished hers. “I know how desperately important it all is, so of course I do a lot of work to make sure it comes out right. That only makes sense. Wouldn't you agree that that only makes sense?”

“Sure.”

“Sometimes you have to do what you have to do to get what you want. You have to understand that. I know you understand it.”

“Anybody would understand it.”

“No, not anybody would,” Sally said. “Those people, the ones who belong here, the ones who got into the club because their grandparents belonged and their mothers came out here, they wouldn't understand it. Annabel Crawford. Kayla Anson. Everybody says you were sleeping with Kayla Anson.”

“Do they?”

“Mallory even says it's true.”

“It was true. For a time.”

“It wouldn't have lasted,” Sally said. “She wouldn't have stayed with you. Those kind never do. When it comes time to marry they always find one of their own.”

“Nobody was talking about marriage.”

“I'll bet you were thinking about it,” Sally said. She caught the eye of the bartender and signaled him. “I don't think Mallory is ever going to marry. She's never going to marry one of
them.
Too fat. Too stupid. Too sullen. Way too sullen. She takes a Nobel Prize in sullenness.”

“What an ugly thing to say about your own daughter.”

The bartender had arrived with another frothing drink. Sally signed for it and took a long pull on it. Then she hopped off her bar stool and brushed out the wrinkles in her skirt.

“I'm not saying anything everybody else isn't saying. I hear it all, sitting in that goddamned bursar's room. And it suddenly hit me today, that I've gone through it all, I've done everything I could and more than I should have and it's not going to matter. It's not going to matter at all. It's all going to be for nothing.”

“Right,” Peter said.

“Like you and Kayla Anson,” Sally said.

She picked up her drink and started off with it, swaying a little as she went. It was the first time Peter realized that she was drunk.

No, Peter thought, he really did not like Sally Martin-dale. She was a dangerous woman, at the moment. She had lost her nerve.

Peter did not think it was possible for him ever to lose his own.

Her name was Zara Anne Moss, and she had graduated from Nonnewaug High School in Woodbury in the class of 1992. Faye Dallmer kept repeating that information to herself, over and over again, as if it had some kind of special significance. She wasn't too sure what that might be. They had given her a lot of information about Zara Anne, these policemen who had come to sit in her living room this early evening. They had told her things
she
had never expected to know. Zara Anne was much younger than she had thought she was, for instance. Zara Anne had been part of a local dramatic group for two years and taken the lead in a production of
The Glass Menagerie.
Zara Anne had spent a year at Trinity College in Hartford and been required to leave when her grade point average dipped consistently below a D.

There were so many policemen in the living room, Faye didn't know what to do about them all. There were policemen from Washington, where Zara Anne's body had been found. There were policemen from Watertown, where Faye's house was. There were state policemen. Faye concentrated on the one civilian, the big man she now knew to be Gregor Demarkian.

“This is only preliminary information,” he was saying. “The things that have popped up automatically once the
news of her death became generally known. We'll know much more about her in the next few days.”

“I didn't know very much about her at all,” Faye said. Then she blushed and looked away. She had never been so ashamed of having to say anything in her life. She rubbed her hands together in her lap. “We met at a natural foods fair. At the Hartford Civic Center. I was giving a speech, you see, and I showed up a little early to look around, and we ran into each other.”

“She was interested in natural foods.” It was a statement, not a question.

Faye sighed. “I don't know what she was interested in, really. In being—a certain kind of person, I think. In having a certain kind of life. And she was very devoted to Wicca.”

“What's Wicca?” one of the policemen said.

“Oh, well,” Faye said. “Witchcraft, I suppose you'd call it. It's the name of what's supposed to be an ancient religion, to which the witches in the Middle Ages and later were supposed to belong. I've never credited the analysis much myself. I don't mean that I don't think there was a religion called Wicca. There was. We can document that. I mean I don't think that the witches they burned in the witch-hunts were practicing Wicca. I think they were ordinary Christian women who got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. If you see the difference. I'm not making any sense, am I? I'm going on and on.”

“You're doing fine,” Gregor Demarkian said.

She was swimming in Jell-O, that's what she was doing. She had been doing it since the moment she had turned on the news and heard Zara Anne's name coming across on a bulletin, coming across with no warning at all. It shouldn't have happened like that. Somebody had messed up. They should have sent a message to her privately one way or the other before they released Zara Anne's name to the press.