Skeleton Key (39 page)

“Even though she had good reason to believe that this person had killed somebody and she had evidence that could send him or her to jail.” Mark Cashman shook his head.

“I doubt if that occurred to her,” Gregor said. “She was very naive, really, in a lot of ways. She was also somewhat detached from reality—again, given what everybody says.”

“Everybody says right,” Stacey said. “She was spacey as hell. Talking all the time about having visions and being able to see into the heart of evil and auras coming from the Jeep. None of us took her seriously.”

“The murderer did,” Gregor said. “The murderer probably also realized that he or she had been spotted. The murder of Zara Anne Moss would have been easy, as long as there's a back way into that barn, which I think there is. There's a door, remember?”

“It opens onto a lot of vegetation,” Mark Cashman said. “That wouldn't have been easy.”

“It wouldn't have been hard, either,” Gregor said. “I've been meaning to ask you or Stacey to send somebody out there to look around. I don't think anybody will find anything, except maybe the grass being tamped down in a couple of places, but I'll bet you anything that you can get to another road that way, someplace to park a car—”

“There is another road,” Mark Cashman said. “Jewelry Lane. It's dirt and there's nothing on it close to One-oh-nine, but it's there.”

“A perfect place to park a car,” Gregor pointed out, “if you're trying to get into that barn without being seen by the reporters in the street. Of course, with Margaret Anson the murderer wouldn't have had to go to that much trouble. He would only have had to come the back way himself. And Margaret was no Zara Anne Moss. She would have known that our murderer was probably dangerous.”

“And she would have turned her back on this person anyway?” Stacey asked.

“Well, she did,” Gregor said. “Arrogance, maybe. Or possibly the mistaken impression that murder is hard to commit. It would be for most people, of course. It isn't for some people. Anyway, that's the way I think it all lays out. It's too bad I can't prove any of it.”

“You don't have to prove it all,” Mark Cashman said. “You don't really have to prove any of it in the sense of any of the particulars. We just need to find something that will connect this person to Kayla Anson and to Kayla Anson's death. That could be—anything.”

“I know,” Gregor said.

“If you told us who it was, we might be able to do it,” Stacey said. “Once you have an idea of who the perpetrator is, it's a lot easier—”

“I know,” Gregor said again. He thought for a moment and pulled his notebook closer to him. Then he ripped out a blank page and wrote down a name.

“Do me a couple of favors,” he said, pushing the page into the middle of the table. “Check this person's bank accounts. And check the car ownership records. Find out if
this person owns an unusual and easily recognizable car.”

Stacey Spratz picked up the paper and stared at it. “Jesus Christ” he said.

Mark Cashman sighed. “I already know about the car. It's a Ferrari Testarosa. Four hundred thousand dollars' worth of vehicle and bright red. And I didn't even
think
of it”

Gregor Demarkian took a long drink of his café mocha, thinking at once that it was too sweet for coffee and that he would really like to go somewhere and lie down.

Gregor also wanted to go someplace and talk to Bennis, and so he had Stacey drive him out to the inn. It wasn't the most convenient of arrangements—Stacey was going to have to come out and pick him up again in a couple of hours—but Gregor was beyond caring about convenience. He couldn't remember being this tired since he got back from North Carolina, and yet this case was far less awful than that one had been. At least here, he was dealing with adults, instead of an infant. At least here, he knew what was going on.

He picked up his keys at the desk and went upstairs. He let himself into the suite and looked around. He could tell as soon as he stepped into the little living room that something was different, but he couldn't tell what. He went into the bedroom and paused. Then he went into the bathroom and saw the note.

Had to go back to Philadelphia. Love you, Bennis.

Gregor pulled it off the bathroom mirror and stared at it. Then he went back into the bedroom and looked into the closet. It was empty of all of Bennis's clothes. Bennis's one small suitcase was gone from the bench at the end of the bed. Bennis's mess was gone from the single bedroom chair. That was why the suite had seemed different. Bennis's clutter was missing. The place was neat.

Gregor sat down on the edge of the bed and tried to think. The worst-case scenario was that he had done something terribly wrong and didn't even know it. Bennis was angry with him. Bennis was furious with him. Bennis was never going to speak to him again. The second worst-case scenario was that something had happened to someone on Cavanaugh Street, and Bennis had gone back to help out. Maybe they had been trying to get him all day, and he had been unreachable because he had been in police cruisers and country clubs. Maybe something had happened to Tibor. Maybe something had happened to old George Tekemanian, who was well into his eighties now and no longer in good health.

Gregor picked up the phone and dialed Tibor's number. The phone rang and rang. Tibor might be out, but he also might be deep in a book. Gregor had once sat in his living room and watched him not hear the phone ringing for twelve full rings, because he was reading his way through
The Stranger Beside Me
by Ann Rule.

Gregor let the phone ring twelve times, and then fourteen, and then twenty. He asked himself if he was being sensible here—even if Tibor was there, if he were that involved in a book he would never hear the phone anyway—when the phone was finally picked up.

“Yes?” Tibor said.

Gregor relaxed immediately. It had gotten to the point where Armenian accents always made him relax completely.

“Tibor,” he said.

“Ah,” Tibor said. “Krekor. It is you. It is good that you have called.”

“Is Bennis there with you?”

“No, Krekor. I don't even think she could be in Philadelphia yet. It hasn't been that long. And she wouldn't be here. She is going to her doctor's.”

“Which doctor?”

Tibor appeared to think about this for a moment. “Not the lady doctor. The other one.”

“Gerald Harrison.”

“Yes, that one.”

“Why?”

“I don't know, Krekor. But she had me call him for her. To tell him she was coming. And she said to tell him it was an emergency.”

Gregor took a deep breath. “How could it have been an emergency?” he asked reasonably. “She drove down to Philadelphia, didn't she? She took her car.”

“Yes, Krekor, she is driving.”

“Then she must be well enough to drive. What kind of an emergency could there be that would make it necessary to see her doctor—when? When do you figure she'll get to Philadelphia?”

“Around seven o'clock, Krekor. Yes, I know. It's crazy. I can't make it out. But that was what she wanted. I am surprised she didn't tell you.”

“I was out”

“You were investigating a murder, Krekor, yes. I understand that. But I think you'd better come home as soon as you can. Because Bennis does not panic for no reason. So I think it possible that this is serious.”

Gregor ran his hands through his hair. Serious. Yes, he could see that it might be serious. There was always the chance that a health problem could be serious. Even a little health problem that you didn't think much about at all.

Suddenly, he couldn't stop thinking about Bennis's cough.

Somebody—Mallory, probably—had put a jack-o'-lantern on the top of the steps that led to the front door, and lit a candle in it. Sally Martindale parked the car halfway up the drive and sat looking at the light. There were lights on in the house, too, in the keeping room and beyond. The car was making that rattling noise that said it was almost out of gas. Sally Martindale was out of money. She thought she should have kept some of it to get home on, considering how much she had started with, but in the end she hadn't been able to stop trying. That was what mattered, trying. She had always believed that. It just seemed, sometimes, as if trying didn't work for her. She tried and tried, and everything came apart.

This was the way the house looked best, in the almost dark, with the lights on. You couldn't see anything at all of the fact that she hadn't had enough money to keep it up in the last year or two. The paint peeling on the northern side didn't show up in the dark. Neither did the sag in the railing on the little porch that led to the side door. Even the windows might as well have been washed. When she and Frank had still been together, she had had people in to take care of what needed to be taken care of: Ray's Remodeling to repair sags and rebuilt porches; Proe's Lawn Service to do the grass and the shrubbery and the gutters; Martin and Sheedy to paint inside as well as out. Now she didn't even have the lawn service. Mallory had gone to Sears and bought a lawn mower. She shaved the grass short once a week when she had a little time away from her classes.

I'm going to go to jail, Sally thought and then she rubbed the palms of her hands over her face, over and over again, as if she were trying to rub out a makeup stain. Her
head hurt. Her body felt drained of blood. She had cried off and on on the drive home—cried bitterly and without shame, since no one was able to hear her—but now she was just tired, and beyond caring. What she couldn't get out of her mind was herself at Mallory's age, standing at the mailbox of her parents' plain asphalt driveway, opening the letter that told her she had been accepted at Smith. She could see the houses that surrounded her, ordinary little Cape Cod houses with plastic awnings over the windows and plastic flower boxes attached beneath them. She could hear Didi McConneky and Linda Giametti laughing in that high-pitched way they had when they were talking about boys. She was, she had thought then, on a long and exciting journey out—out of a life in little houses like these, out of too many pregnancies too early, out of following soap operas instead of the exhibition season at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She had had a vision of herself, grown up and on her own, and in the end it had been a vision about money. Later, at the end of her second year at Smith, she had gone to Linda Giametti's wedding, and that had been about money, too—money spent on a wedding dress and a reception that was as much as some people used for the down payment on a house, money charged to credit cards and taken out in loans, money thrown away on a spectacle that lasted only a few hours on a single day. She had felt as if she had a secret that no one else could share. She knew what really mattered, and how to make sure that her life would have some meaning. She knew how to get away from all this.

Now she got out of the car and looked around. It was cold, this late in October. Tomorrow was Halloween. If Linda Giametti could see this house, she would not know that there was something about it that was better than her own. She would like the size, but she would think that its age spoke against it. She wouldn't be able to understand why Sally hadn't opted for vinyl siding. Maybe the truth was that you could never get out. You always ended where you started, even if it seemed you didn't.

Mallory was in the kitchen. Sally could see her moving around in there. She looked at the sag in the porch rail near the kitchen door and the jack-o'-lantern near the front one and opted for the sag. Everything in her life sagged these days. What difference did it make?

The kitchen door actually let her into the pantry. Sally put her pocketbook on the floor and called out, “Mallory?”

“In here.”

Sally picked her pocketbook up again. She didn't know what she was doing. She wasn't thinking straight. She went into the kitchen and saw Mallory with her back to her, working at the big black eight-burner restaurant stove.

“Well,” she said.

“Ruth Grandmere called,” Mallory said, without turning around. “She said it was important. In fact, she said it was urgent.”

Sally pulled out one of the chairs at the kitchen table and sat down. It was an Eldred Wheeler chair and an Eldred Wheeler trestle table. The set had cost something like fifteen thousand dollars, new.

Mallory turned around and faced her. “I think you've been caught,” she said.

“Maybe,” Sally said carefully. “Maybe not. As of this morning, they knew somebody had been taking the money. They didn't know it was me.”

“From Kayla Anson's account.”

“Oh, from all the accounts, or a lot of them. I never took from men. They pay too much attention. I never took from women lawyers, either. The housewives were the best. Most of the time, they didn't have the faintest idea what was going on.”

“Do you know how much?”

“Before today?”

“You took some money today?” Mallory looked startled. “After you already knew they knew that something was wrong?”

“I was going to fix it,” Sally said. “I thought that if I
could only do it right, if I could go out to Ledyard and really make a stand—”

“Oh, for God's sake.”

“If I could do it right, I could fix it. So I took—I don't know. Some money. Fifteen hundred, maybe. Or twenty-five hundred. I can't remember.”

“How can you not remember?”

“Because I can't.”

“Jesus.”

Sally started to rub her face again. Mallory was pacing back and forth. This was all so complicated. Mallory just didn't understand it.

“It was because it wasn't fair,” Sally said finally. “They just—those people—the Ansons and the Crawfords and the Ridenours—those people just are, if you know what I mean. They don't have to do anything. They just are. But people like me have to work at it. And luck isn't evenly distributed.”