The Girl In The Glass (26 page)

Chapter 54

From the journal of Edward Whitby Jr.

Entry dated July 30, 1924

I will never forget the frightful image I saw as I peered silently through the studio window on that summer morning so long ago. On the far wall, the naked body of Mark Garrison, his eyes bulging, his mouth agape, hung by a leather belt from a stout hook attached to the wall on the far side. Directly in front of me, equally naked, her back to the window, Aimée stood gazing at herself in a mirror. In her hand she held the Tanto, the ancient, short-­bladed Samurai dagger my grandfather brought home many years earlier from a voyage to Japan.

Aimée brought the razor-­sharp blade up and began carving a letter into the top of her own chest as carefully and deliberately as if she’d been creating one of her works of art. My beautiful wife was concentrating so completely on her task that she failed to notice the reflection of my stricken face in the window behind her. I stood for a moment, frozen in place by what I was witnessing. But then I stirred myself and went to the door of the studio. I threw it open to discover Aimée holding the blade in the air, pointed toward her own body. I rushed to grab it before she could act, but before I could reach her to wrest the Tanto from her hands, she’d already thrust it down in an arc. The blade entered her body a few inches above and to the right of her navel. Then she pulled it out and raised the blade, intent on stabbing herself once again. Before she could, I managed to grab her wrist and pull the dagger from her hands.

“Why?” I shouted, looking into her anguished eyes. “For God’s sake, why?”

She stared at me for a second and then, without a word, ran from the house, bleeding from her wounds. Stunned, I stood there, watching her go, before I finally followed. It was my failure to move faster that made all the difference. When I did at last give chase, she was well ahead of me, running far faster than I would have imagined possible, wounded as she was. She was headed directly toward the cliff. I ran as fast as I could, calling her name, and managed to close the distance between us. But then, a split second before I could reach out and grab her, she stopped and turned. She was standing at the edge of the cliff.

“Don’t come another step,” she warned me.

I stood frozen, afraid any movement on my part, any movement at all, would force her over the edge.

“Aimée, please,” I said. “Come away from there.”

“It was you, Edward!” she hissed. “It was you who killed Mark! And I helped you.”

“Please come away from there and tell me what happened.” I spoke in the calmest voice I could muster, my words as soothing and gentle as I could make them.

“You
know
what happened.” She spat the words at my face. “I played your fool, Edward. I did exactly what you wanted. Exactly what you
forced
me to do if I ever wanted to see my children again. I told the man I loved as I have never loved another that I could never be with him again. My words broke his heart. He told me that he wouldn’t, that he couldn’t go on living without me. I told him that was how it would have to be. He pleaded with me to allow him to make love to me one last time. I said yes. Afterwards I slept. Hours later, when I awoke, I saw it.”

“Saw what?” I asked.

“His body. His body hanging dead from that hook. As I’d slept, he’d taken his own life. And it was my fault. I spoke the words, the words you put in my mouth, that killed him.”

I reached out to take hold of her arm, to bring her back from the precipice. I will never know whether it was the small movement of my arm or simply her own determination to join her lover in death that pushed her over the edge.

I did my best to grab her, but my best was not, as it never had been for Aimée, nearly good enough. I watched her body fall and land hard on the rocks below.

Certain she was dead and equally certain her death was my fault, I fell to my knees and wept for a long time. Perhaps hours.

Finally I rose and walked in a kind of daze back to the studio. I stood in the room, gazing at Garrison’s lifeless body hanging from the hook, silently cursing him for ever having lived. For ever having met my beloved Aimée. And for seducing her and taking her from me.

Finally, I picked up the Tanto from the floor where I had dropped it. The blade was still red with Aimée’s blood. I held it in my hands, strongly tempted to join my beloved wife in death. But the thought of Charlotte, Teddy and Annabelle growing up as orphans, believing neither of their parents loved them enough to forgo death on their behalf, stayed my hand.

I picked up the handwritten note I saw sitting on Aimée’s painting table. She must have read it as soon as she woke from her slumber to find Garrison’s lifeless body.

My Darling Aimée,

I am so sorry for what I am about to do. I understand your reasons for wanting to break off our relationship and return to your husband. But understanding your reasons doesn’t mean I can live with them. I can only hope that we will see each other again either in heaven or in hell. Whichever God intends for us.

I read the note a dozen times and then wrote another, mimicking Garrison’s hand as best I could in which he admitted killing her in rage and then himself in remorse. I left the second note for the police, tore up the first and stuffed the pieces in my pocket.

Before leaving the island, I walked back one last time to the cliff to gaze down at my beloved Aimée. As I looked, I saw some fishermen lifting her body into their boat. Presumably they were taking her back to the mainland. I went to my own boat and sailed home. There was nothing left for me to do here.

Chapter 55

D
EIRDRE WAS SEATED
comfortably in an oversized chair when Edward Whitby entered the room. She was dressed in a knee-­length skirt, and she had her shoes off and her legs tucked up under her. She was sipping Scotch from a large cut-­crystal glass and reading a copy of
Vanity Fair.
She glanced up when he came in, then turned back to her magazine without acknowledging his presence.

Edward walked to the drinks cupboard, tossed a handful of ice cubes into an identical glass and poured a Scotch for himself. He took the chair opposite his wife.

“What took you so long?” Deirdre’s voice emerged from behind the photograph of whichever beautiful actress
Vanity Fair
was featuring on that month’s cover.

“Will you put that damned magazine down?”

“Are we angry?” she asked, looking over the top with raised eyebrows.

“Just put it down. Please.”

Deirdre closed the magazine and laid it on her lap, one finger tucked between the pages, holding her place, as if she planned to go back to reading any second. “I was in the middle of a very interesting article.”

“Please. We need to talk.”

She tossed the magazine onto the table at the side of the chair with an audible sigh. “So talk.”

“Tracy and I have finalized funeral arrangements with Bishop Crocker.” Whitby told her about the plans for the ser­vice at St. Luke’s and for burying Aimée’s ashes in the Bishop’s Garden.

“Is that it? Is that what you wanted to talk about?”

Whitby’s eyes turned away from his wife. He took a sip from his Scotch and stared down at the pattern in the antique Persian rug. The rug he had grown up with. He was struggling to find the right words to ask the question that had to be asked.

“Deirdre, how did you feel when you learned about Aimée’s death?”

“Devastated, of course. We all were devastated.”

“But what was your first reaction? Your immediate reaction?”

“Edward, what on earth are you getting at?”

“Have you ever heard how in wartime, a soldier’s first reaction when the soldier next to him is shot and killed is often a fleeting sense of relief that it was the other guy and not him? Even if they were close friends.”

“Are you asking me if I felt relieved that it was Aimée who was murdered and not Julia?”

“Yes.”

She seemed to weigh her response before answering. “I suppose I did. A little. I think the reason for that is obvious. Julia is my own child. Aimée isn’t . . . wasn’t.”

“Would you say you loved Julia more?”

“I wouldn’t want to put it that way. I loved both of them.”

“But did you?”

Deirdre’s eyes turned to the large window that overlooked the ancient garden and the rose bushes growing profusely just beyond. A hundred blooms, large, luscious and bloodred. It had been a long time since Edward had brought her roses. Or made love to her, for that matter. She wondered briefly who he was making love to these days. Some ambitious young thing at the company? Or perhaps several ambitious young things.

“I suppose I did. Julia is my child. Sprung, as they say, from my loins. Aimée wasn’t. But you don’t have the same excuse. They were both your children, and I know that you loved Aimée more. You always have. Ever since they were little girls.”

“I didn’t. I swear to you I didn’t.”

“Don’t lie to me, Edward. Just take another look at that painting you’re so enthralled with.”

“It’s a painting of my great-­grandmother.”

“No. It’s a painting of your daughter, and you know it. Aimée always had that Whitby look. Julia is a McClure through and through.”

“I have always loved both my daughters equally,” Whitby said, knowing even as he said it that it was a lie.

“Once again bullshit. Complete, utter and total bullshit. I know it and you know it. I could see it in your eyes at the party when your ‘dearest, favorite’ daughter came prancing down the stairs eager to steal the show. Julia could see it in your eyes as well. And so could every other person in the room. Julia has always adored you, and it hurt her very deeply to see that.”

Whitby looked down and stared at his shoes. “I’m so sorry. I never meant for that to happen.”

“I have a strong suspicion that you paid two and a half million dollars for that painting, far more than it’s worth, not because it’s a painting of your great-­grandmother and not because it’s a famous painting by a well-­known artist. I think you had to have it because it’s a portrait of Aimée. Not the first Aimée. Your Aimée.”

“That’s ridiculous. If I wanted a painting of my ‘favorite’ daughter, as you put it, I could have commissioned one far more cheaply.”

“Yes. But then you would have had to commission paintings of both your daughters. Or one painting of the two of them. And no way would you have wanted the other daughter, the not quite so beautiful one, to share wall space with the girl, the woman who is—­and let’s be honest about it—­the one true love of your life.”

Deirdre finished her whiskey, went to the drinks cupboard, added a handful of ice cubes to her glass, and poured four more ounces of Johnnie Walker Black over them. Edward finished his own drink, got up and did the same.

“In fact, Edward,” she said as he put the bottle back in its place, “I’ve often wondered, at least since she started growing breasts, if your love for that child . . . let me see, how can I put it delicately? Ever strayed beyond the bounds of propriety.”

“How dare you?” Whitby roared. “How dare you even hint at such a thing?”

“It’s true, isn’t it, Edward?” said Deirdre, hissing out the words like an angry cat. “Not only did you love your little Aimée more than you loved me or Julia or anyone, you’ve been proving your love by fucking her all these years, haven’t you?”

Edward Whitby’s face reddened with rage. He drew back and slapped his wife across the face with all the strength he could muster. The blow was hard enough to knock her to the floor in front of the fireplace. The glass she was holding fell upon the stone hearth and broke into a thousand pieces.

“You’re blind, aren’t you, Edward?” she said, spitting the words up at him, “totally blind to the fact that your ‘dearest, favorite’ daughter . . . the one you loved so much, was not only a slut who fucked every man she could get her hands on but also a total bitch.”

Whitby stood over his wife, his fists clenched, his face scarlet. “You killed her, didn’t you?” he roared. “You called your fucking brother and paid some fucking
contractor
to kill my daughter, didn’t you?”

“No, of course I didn’t,” Deirdre screamed. “I don’t do things like that.”

“Don’t lie to me, you fucking bitch. You killed her!”

“You know something? I didn’t kill her, but I’m glad somebody did! That dirty little slut deserved to die.”

Because Deirdre McClure Whitby turned away from her husband at that instant and covered her face with her hands, she never saw Edward pick up the poker from the fireplace and swing it with all his might against the side of her head, striking her just above her right ear. She did, however, feel a brief explosion of pain as the pointed hook at the end of the poker entered her brain.

Edward Whitby stared down at his dead wife, the rage drained out of him by this singular act of violence, barely believing what he had done.

He slid to the floor and sat next to where she lay, his hand on her shoulder, blood leaking from her head and staining his trousers. He sat for a full ten minutes. The curse, he thought. The stain. It had come again. Finally he rose, took a business card from his breast pocket and punched in the number on his cell.

“This is McCabe,” said a voice on the other end.

“You’d best come and get me, Sergeant. I’m afraid I just killed my wife.”

Chapter 56

M
C
C
ABE AND
K
YRA
had been sitting in the living room of the apartment on the Eastern Prom for the last half hour, rehashing ground they’d been over a dozen times before. He asking, or perhaps pleading was the better word, for her to come home from San Francisco. She asking him to join her out there.

“You haven’t found someone else?” he asked.

“I told you I haven’t been looking. It’ll take me a while before I get to a point where I want to start a new relationship. What about you?”

“No. I still love you.”

“What about Maggie? I could always tell there was something there by the way you looked at her, spoke of her.”

“That’s something that might have been but never has. At least not so far.”

The insistent ringing of the phone in his pocket cut the conversation short. He resisted the temptation just to let it go to voice mail when he checked caller ID.

“This is McCabe,” he said.

“You’d best come and get me, Sergeant. I’m afraid I just killed my wife.”

“Where are you?”

“At the house.”

“Stay right where you are,” McCabe said. “Don’t go anywhere.”

“Who was it?” asked Kyra. “What is it?”

“Another murder. Edward Whitby just killed his wife. And I have the awful feeling it might be, at least partly, my fault.”

McCabe dialed 911. Andrea Simon, the PPD day shift dispatcher, came on the line.

“Get a MEDCU unit and a ­couple of cruisers over to the Whitby mansion on the Western Prom. ASAP. Lights and siren all the way. Get an evidence team over there as well.”

McCabe next called Maggie. “Whitby just killed Deirdre.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Not kidding. He’s at his house. Where are you?”

“109.”

“Okay. Meet you there in five.”

He ended the call. Got his jacket and weapon. “Gotta go,” he told Kyra.

“I understand. I won’t be here when you get back.”

McCabe paused, thought about it and nodded. “I’m sorry about that.”

T
H
E
T
W
O
D
E
T
E
C
T
I
V
E
S
reached the Western Prom within seconds of each other. Two cruisers and an ambulance were already there. A young cop McCabe didn’t recognize was stringing yellow crime scene tape across the front of the house. Some passersby had gathered on the Prom to watch. Sergeant Pete Kenney came out to greet them. Probably his last crisis call, McCabe thought. His last homicide.

“It’s pretty much a mess in there,” said Kenney. “The body is in the living room to the right of the front door. She’s lying by the fireplace. Had her head bashed in with a fire iron. The hook on the end went through her temple. EMTs say she died instantly. Murder weapon’s lying next to her.”

“Where’s Whitby?” asked Maggie.

“Sitting on a chair looking at the vic. We’ve got him cuffed. But he’s totally docile. Hasn’t said a word except ‘I killed her,’ which he’s said two or three times.”

“You read him his rights?”

“No. Thought I’d let you guys do the honors.”

“Anybody else in the house?”

“A woman. Name’s Brenda Boatwright. Says she’s the Whitbys’ housekeeper. She said she heard a lot of screaming but was afraid to go into the room. Says the Whitbys fought a lot and she knew enough not to interfere. She didn’t find out what happened in there until things quieted down. She’s pretty much in shock herself.”

The PPD evidence van pulled up. Bill Jacoby and two techs climbed out. Maggie filled them in and told them to go into the living room and start doing their thing.

Maggie and McCabe entered the house. McCabe escorted Whitby out of the living room, sat him down on a bench, then sat next to him. He turned on a small digital recording device and placed it between them. Neither man looked at the other.

“I told you we were cursed,” said Whitby. “In spite of our wealth, or perhaps because of it.”

“This is Detective Sergeant Michael McCabe. Today is Saturday, June 16, 2012. I’m at the home of Edward Whitby at number 22 Western Promenade, Portland, Maine. Please state your name.”

“Edward Whitby.”

“Edward Whitby,” McCabe said, “I’m arresting you for the murder of your wife, Deirdre McClure Whitby. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.” He went through the rest of the Miranda script, asking the required questions at the end. “Do you understand each of these rights I have explained to you?”

“Yes.”

“Having these rights in mind, do you wish to talk to us now?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Whitby, would you please tell me in your own words what occurred in the living room of your home at number 22 Western Prom at approximately five fifteen this afternoon?”

Whitby began not at five fifteen but with his conversation with McCabe earlier that afternoon. He ended with his picking up the poker and killing his wife in an uncontrollable rage.

Whitby turned and looked at McCabe for the first time. “She is dead, isn’t she?”

“Yes, she’s dead. Prior to hitting your wife with the poker, did you ask her if she was involved in the murder this past Friday of your daughter, Veronica Aimée Whitby?”

“Yes.”

McCabe took a deep breath and asked the question he knew he had to ask even though it might mean the end of his career. “And why did you do that?”

“Because of you,” Whitby said. “You planted the seed in my mind when we spoke earlier. When I gave you the journal.”

“How did your wife respond to your question?”

“She denied having any involvement in Aimée’s death.”

“Do you think she was telling the truth?”

“I don’t know. She seemed to be. But then Deirdre was always an accomplished liar.”

“So can you tell me what exactly made you so angry that you picked up the poker and struck her?”

“She accused me of loving Aimée.”

“Of course you loved her. I love my daughter. That’s part of being a father.”

“I don’t mean that kind of love.” Whitby swallowed hard. “She accused me of sexually abusing my daughter.”

McCabe frowned. “Was there any truth to what she said?”

Edward Whitby didn’t answer.

“Was there any truth to what she said?”

“None whatsoever. But . . .”

“But what?” McCabe asked again.

“She was right when she accused me of loving Aimée more. More than Julia. More than Deirdre. I did love her more. She was so beautiful. Not just physically but in every way,” Whitby said in little more than a whisper.

McCabe waited for more, but Whitby just sat, slumped on the bench, no longer an arrogant master of the universe but someone emotionally and, it seemed to McCabe, even physically diminished.

“Mr. Whitby,” McCabe finally said, “you’ve admitted to killing your wife. Did you also kill Byron Knowles and your daughter Veronica Aimée Whitby at approximately
2:00
a.m. Friday morning?”

Whitby turned and looked at McCabe as if he had understood nothing “Of course not. How could I kill Aimée? She was the one person I’ve always loved more than anyone else in the world. The one person to whom I could refuse nothing. I don’t think someone like you could possibly understand how deeply a father’s love for his child can run.”

Whitby was wrong. McCabe understood perfectly.

“What could possibly lead me to harm someone I loved so much?”

“The same thing that might have led your great-­grandfather to kill the person he loved more than anyone else in the world. And to kill
her
lover. Rage driven by jealousy.”

“But he didn’t kill her. Haven’t you read the journal?”

“Not all of it. Not yet.”

“It doesn’t matter. The answer to your question is still no. I didn’t kill my daughter. Nor would I. No matter what her faults, and they were many, I would have killed myself before hurting her in any way.”

McCabe turned off the recorder and went over to Sergeant Pete Kenney.

“I’ve arrested Edward Whitby on charges of murder,” he said to Kenney. “He knows and understands his rights. I would appreciate it if you would please deliver him to the Cumberland County jail and make sure they put him on suicide watch. I don’t want him escaping his guilt by killing himself.”

Kenney gave McCabe an odd look but said nothing. He walked over to Whitby, took him by the elbow and led him out of the house.