Skeleton Key (36 page)

“I didn't even mind answering police questions,” Annabel said. “Although I suppose I shouldn't have. I should have called my father and gotten him to get me a lawyer. But it wouldn't have worked, you know, because he's never at home. My father. My father is never at home. And my mother is hopeless.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “Can you tell me what you were doing here? Were you a friend of the family? Did you come out to visit Margaret?”

“What? Oh, not exactly. I mean, I did come out to visit Margaret, yes, but not to just visit. And I was Kayla's friend, her best friend, I guess. We were in boarding school together.” Annabel flushed. “We got expelled together, too. And I guess it was my fault.”

“So you came out to pay your condolences to Margaret Anson.”

“No,” Annabel said. “No, I didn't. She wouldn't have wanted to hear them. She wouldn't have let me into the house.”

“Then why did you come out?”

“I did call before I came. I wasn't going to. I was at the club, you see, and the whole thing was bothering me. So I got in the car and started out here, but then I changed my mind and I drove around a little. And then I stopped at Popeye's in Morris and used the phone and called Margaret. And she told me to come right out.”

“Very good. This was when?”

“Right before I came out.”

“I meant what time,” Gregor said. “Can you remember the time?”

“Oh, no. No, I can't. I never wear a watch, you see. I don't—I don't like what they look like. But it was right before I came out. I went right back to my car from the phone and then I drove straight here. It couldn't have taken five minutes.”

“We might be able to work it out,” Mark Cashman said. “If she called the police more or less as soon as she got here—”

“We'll think about that in a moment,” Gregor said. “I want to do this in order. You talked to Margaret Anson and she agreed to let you come out. But you say she wouldn't have been amenable to a condolence visit.”

“It wasn't a condolence visit. It wasn't anything like that. It was about money.”

“Money?”

“Kayla's money,” Annabel Crawford said. “I knew that as soon as she knew it was about Kayla's money, she would let me come. It was all she cared about, really. Money. She said she cared about family and tradition and all the rest of it, but it wasn't true. She only really ever cared about money.”

“And there was something you knew about Kayla Anson's
money that Margaret Anson didn't know.”

“I don't know if she didn't know it,” Annabel said, sounding anguished. “That was the point. I didn't know if anybody knew it but me. And I thought I had to tell. You know. I just thought I had to.”

“You thought you had to tell what?”

“It was about six months ago, I think. And Kayla and I were down at the Danbury Fair Mall. I don't know. We were bored. You know how that is. And we were sitting at a table in the food court, and she was going through her bag looking for something. She had this big tote bag she carried around a lot. And she spilled a bunch of stuff all over the floor. So I bent over to help her pick it up. And there it was. I couldn't miss it.”

“There what was?”

“A receipt for a certified check. For one hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars.”

Gregor sat back in the wing chair. “That's a lot of money. Do you know who the check was written out to?”

“It was written out to herself. To Kayla Anson.”

“To herself?”

“I think she wanted it in cash.” Annabel looked confused. “I know this doesn't make any sense. It didn't make any sense to me at the time. But it's what she said. She said she needed the money to help a friend and she needed it in cash. Oh, and that it was only a loan. But I didn't understand why she had to have it like that, you know, instead of writing out a regular check.”

“And this was when?”

“I'd guess about six months ago. At the very end of spring or the start of summer. We were sort of at loose ends.”

“In May.”

“Maybe more like June.”

“Did she ever mention this money to you again?”

“No,” Annabel said. “But I mentioned it to her. Just about four weeks ago. I asked her if her friend she'd loaned the money to had ever paid her back.”

“And what did she say?”

“She said that it didn't have anything to do with her anymore. And I asked her what that meant, but she wouldn't tell me. She just kept saying that she didn't need to talk about it because it wasn't her problem any longer. And that was that.”

“That was that.”

“I just wanted Margaret to know,” Annabel said. “Because it was such an awful lot of money. And I kept thinking there was something strange about the whole thing. And I didn't just sort of want to let it drop. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do.”

Annabel Crawford took a deep breath. “So I came out here to talk to Margaret,” she said. “Except when I got here Margaret was dead. I pulled my car into the drive and I got out and I looked through the garage doors just by accident, you know, and there she was.”

“There was no policeman guarding the drive?”

“When I came in? No.”

“What about reporters?”

“There was one van down at the bottom of the road, but that was it. I don't think whoever was in there was paying much attention to me.”

“And after you found the body, you did what?”

“I came in the house and called the police.”

“Right away?”

“Yes. Yes. I didn't want to be here alone with—with that.”

“The door to the house was unlocked?”

Annabel Crawford looked momentarily confused. “Well, yes, it was,” she said. “Shouldn't it have been? I mean, I don't know anybody out here who locks their doors. Especially not in the middle of the day. Why would they bother?”

“One more thing,” Gregor said. “Did you tell anybody, anybody at all, that you were coming out here? Did you tell anybody why?”

“Not a single person,” Annabel said. “I didn't even see anybody to tell.”

“Fine,” Gregor Demarkian said.

He got out of his chair and motioned Mark Cashman to follow him. When he got to the hall, he motioned back in the direction of the living room and said, “You'd better find that young woman a doctor. She's in shock, and if she goes long enough without having it treated, it's going to matter.”

The first thing Eve Wachinsky noticed when she entered Grace Feinmann's apartment was the piano—except that it wasn't a piano, exactly. It was hard to tell what it was. Grace had taken her keys and run across the hall to get some things for her to wear while she was recuperating on the sofa bed. Eve went over to the “piano” and ran her hand across the top of it. It had two keyboards, one on top of the other. That was one strange thing. It was painted so elaborately, it looked like one of those movie animations of an LSD trip. Its legs were longer and thinner than the legs on a regular piano, too, so that it looked less like a musical instrument than like a piece of furniture. Eve wondered if Grace played it. Grace played a lot of classical music. Eve had heard it coming through the walls. She had always assumed it was coming from CDs and audio cassettes.

Grace came back through the door, carrying Eve's green polyester pajamas and her red terrycloth bathrobe.

“Here,” she said, putting them down on the arm of the couch. “You'll feel much better once you've had a real shower. You can never shower for real in a hospital room. I'll get across the hall and clean up tomorrow. I'd do it today, but I'm just exhausted. I've got a performance in two weeks. I've been practicing until I drop.”

Eve ran her hand over the “piano” again. “Is this what you perform on? It's not like any piano I've ever seen before.”

“That's because it's not a piano. It's a Peter Redstone harpsichord. And that's what I perform on, yes. That and the virginals. Except that I started out on the piano. Everybody does.”

“I'm sorry,” Eve said. “I'm very ignorant, really. I never, you know, went to school much.”

“Well, I wouldn't worry about it if I were you. Not everybody has heard of the harpsichord even if they did go to school a lot. And practically nobody has heard of the virginals. That's my project at the moment. I'm trying to buy a mother-and-child virginals.”

“It sounds like something you'd hear about in church.”

“It's an instrument like the harpsichord, actually. It's smaller, though. And with the mother and child, you have the main instrument that you sit at and then there's what looks like a drawer in the side, and when you pull it out it's another virginal. That you can play. If you see what I mean.”

“I see why they call it mother and child.”

“It's what's keeping me broke at the moment. Buying the virginals, I mean. I really wanted to do it right this time, so I'm having the Hubbard people make them for me, and then I'm having Sheridan Germann decorate it for me, and by the time it's all done it's going to cost nearly thirty thousand dollars. That's why I'm living here. I teach at Fairfield University in the music department, and they pay really well, for a music department. But not well enough to afford something like that without very low expenses and a second job.”

Thirty thousand dollars. Eve had never made all of thirty thousand dollars in a year. She took her hand off the harpsichord. It hadn't occurred to her that it might be expensive. Now it seemed as if it could be worth a fortune. She moved away from it toward the couch. There was a picture on the end table in a frame, showing Grace in what looked like a leotard under a long black skirt, with a harpsichord on one side and a large man on the other. The photograph was signed
All my best, Igor Kipnis.

“That's me at the Connecticut Early Music Festival,” Grace said. “Last year. I played a selection of songs written by Henry the Eighth. And that's Igor Kipnis, who is one of the two greatest harpsichordists now working. He kept
trying to get me to go back to performing full-time.”

“Why don't you perform full-time?” Eve asked.

“Because no matter how hard I practice, I'm never going to play like Igor Kipnis. Or Gustav Leonhardt. Or any of those people. I'm just not a world-class player. I'm good enough to teach. Why don't you sit down and I'll make you a cup of coffee. Or tea. Or even hot chocolate. I can always drink hot chocolate.”

“Oh, yes,” Eve said. “Tea, I guess. I really wish you wouldn't go to any trouble.”

“It's no trouble. Why don't you turn on the TV and check around. I'll bet at least one of the stations has more on that murder we were talking about. Except it's two murders now.”

Grace hurried off into the back of the apartment. Eve found the television remote on the table and pushed the power button. A picture popped up on the small screen, wavered for a moment, and then settled. The set seemed to have been left at News Channel 8. Eve sat down on the couch and hunched forward to watch.

It took a moment or two to figure out what was going on. Eve hated news bulletins. She found them far too confusing. During The Monica Lewinsky Mess, as Darla had called it, Eve had taken to playing movies on the television at work. It was the only way she could make sure that whatever she was watching would not be interrupted by “late-breaking news.” Eve hated late-breaking news even more than she hated news bulletins.

Grace came back into the living room, saw what was on television, and stopped.

“What's this?” she asked. Then she hunched forward and listened.

“There's been another murder,” Eve said, because this was something she had managed to figure out. Another murder, of someone named Margaret Anson, in her own garage. Wasn't Margaret Anson Kayla Anson's mother?

Grace was looking a little green. “This is terrible,” she said. “This is really terrible.”

Ann Nyberg was manning the anchor desk for what looked like a long special report Every once in a while, a map would flash on the screen, but Eve couldn't make head or tail of it She had never been very good at reading maps.

“We must stress,” Ann Nyberg said, “that there are a lot of unanswered questions in this case. Police still do not know who was driving the 1996 Jeep Wrangler that was seen following Kayla Anson's car on the night of her murder, or how the Jeep became badly damaged, or who dumped it in the Fairchild Family Cemetery in Morris. Police also do not know—”

“Don't you love Ann Nyberg?” Grace said. “I always watch her when she's on. She's my favorite one.”

“The Capernaum Road,” Eve said.

“What?”

Eve bit down on the knuckle of her right index finger. It was so hard for her to think. It had always been so hard for her to think. She would never have been able to put together the kind of life Grace had, with different jobs and different friends and projects that stretched years into the future. She had a hard time dealing with the crossword puzzles in the
Waterbury Republican,
and those were crossword puzzles for dummies, not hard ones like some people did.

“Kayla Anson was murdered on Friday night. Didn't you say that?” Eve said.

“That's right.”

“And this thing with the Jeep. That happened on Friday night, too? That the Jeep got messed up and was found in the Fairchild Family Cemetery?”

“I think so. But I've kept all the news stories. We could look at them and find out for sure. Why?”

“Somebody would have told, don't you think? I mean, it was an official report. It came through the town of Watertown. It would have been written down somewhere and somebody would have seen it.”

Out in the kitchen, the kettle began to blow. Grace
looked over her shoulder in that direction with more than a little impatience.