'Til Death Do Us Part (6 page)

“What was Miss Hanes hoping
you
could do?” Pichowski asked when I finished.

“I’m a reporter,” I revealed. “I write true crime articles, and I think Ashley thought I might be able to offer some insight. She told me she’d shared her fears with the police here, but they hadn’t seen any evidence of foul play.”

I saw Michaels shoot a glance at Pichowski. I figured they had to be familiar with Robin’s death, but they didn’t give any verbal confirmation of that. They asked me then for anything I knew about Jamie’s situation, which of course wasn’t much.

“Let’s get back to today,” Pichowski said. “Did you see anybody around when Miss Hanes headed over to the silo—or when you went back there looking for her?”

“No, it looked deserted over there. But I find it hard to believe that this could be a
third
fatal accident. Don’t you?”

“What about the people who work here?” he asked, ignoring my question. “Did you see anybody leave the kitchen when you were sitting here waiting?”

I thought carefully about how to answer because I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble needlessly. I stated that Phillipa and Mary had gone off at some point but I wasn’t sure if they’d left the building entirely.

Suddenly I remembered the incident with Robin’s ex-husband, and I told the detectives about that as well. Michaels stopped his note taking to shoot Pichowski another fast look.

Pichowski went through a few more basic questions—had Ms. Cross and I touched anything, had the lights been on, had we noticed anything odd or heard any sounds? As he was finishing up, he took his wallet from his jacket pocket and, with a hand the size of a bear paw, withdrew one of his business cards.

“If you think of anything else over the next few days, I want you to call me. I’d also appreciate it if you hung around for just a bit today. Once I hear what the others have to say, I might want to ask you another question or two.”

By all appearances he was a decent guy, a straight shooter, yet I couldn’t tell how he was viewing the situation.

“Doesn’t it all seem odd to you?” I asked, trying to feel him out again. “I mean, the first two deaths could be considered a horrible coincidence, but three—that seems to defy the laws of probability.”

“Well, we’re certainly going to look into it, Miss Weggins,” he said pleasantly but the tiniest bit patronizingly. “Until we know more, I’d ask you to please be careful.”

Oh sure, I thought. Let me just give Britney Spears a call and see if she’d loan me one of those four-hundred-pound bodyguards I’d seen in paparazzi shots of her. Michaels rose from the table and directed me out of the main kitchen along a narrow corridor to a small room in the back. Mary and the rest of the staff were sitting around a table, with a uniformed cop holding up the far wall. Peyton was nowhere in sight.

“Where’s Ms. Cross?” Michaels asked after a quick glance around the room.

“I think she went to the ladies’ room,” Phillipa said sullenly. “It’s down the hall.”

Michaels strode off, looking slightly annoyed.

For the next hour I waited in that small room, ready to jump out of my skin. I felt a strong urge to be on the move and find things out, but I didn’t know
what
. Every ten minutes or so Michaels would pop in and collect someone for her interview with the police, while the others waited behind silently. All the women seemed stunned. The one who had sniffled earlier continued to do so off and on, and periodically several others followed suit. I wasn’t sure whether it was because they were close to Ashley or were just completely distressed by their proximity to her death. Mary, her expression impenetrable, turned her attention to a pile of paperwork she’d brought in with her. With her reading glasses perched on the end of her nose, she went through the stack methodically, sometimes scribbling notes in the margin. And Phillipa chose the most interesting pastime of all: She gave herself a mani. Filling the air with the overpowering scent of nail polish remover, she stripped off her color with cotton balls and painted the nails on her surprisingly slim hands with three coats of dark pink polish. Though she was careful with each stroke, there was a manic quality to her work, as if she had chosen to concentrate intensely on this one task so she wouldn’t have to focus on the tragedy at the farm.

As for me, I sat there sullenly, sickened by the thought of Ashley’s death and also feeling guilty as hell. Just three hours earlier I had stood in Ashley’s kitchen and advised her not to worry. Now she was dead. I was desperate to know what had actually happened to her. I was also nervous about my own safety. Three of Peyton’s bridesmaids were dead, which left me, Maverick, and the maid of honor, Prudence.

Periodically I glanced out the window. From this end of the barn I couldn’t see any of the police activity, but I could watch the storm. It had turned into a real nightmare, and driving back to the city would be hairy. I decided that the smartest thing would be to ask Peyton if I could spend the night at her place. That would also give me a chance to talk to her and discuss everything that had transpired.

Gradually the space emptied. Since no one came back into the room after being summoned, I assumed the cops let them go home before the storm worsened. Peyton never returned to the sitting area, either, but at one point I spotted her in a small kitchen across the hall, about a quarter the size of the main one. A couple of minutes after the last employee had been summoned, the uniformed cop left, too.

“Am I allowed to leave now?” I called out to him as he headed down the corridor.

“You need to check with Detective Pichowski.”

I stuffed my belongings into my bags and hurried down the corridor to the big kitchen. The two detectives, both of them now bundled up in their coats, were standing by the door, talking to Peyton. She looked weary and frazzled. Strands of strawberry blond hair had come loose from her updo, as if she’d just played several rounds of Twister.

“I have a reputation to protect,” she nearly shrieked as I strode across the room. “You have to figure out what happened.”

“I understand,” Pichowski said. “We have our best people on it.”

The two detectives said good-bye to Peyton and nodded in my direction. Obviously they didn’t have any additional questions for me.

“Have you found anything out?” I asked before they could leave.

“We aren’t at liberty to say right now. As I said to you before, please be careful until we know further.”

“Did they tell you
anything
?” I asked Peyton after the two detectives had stepped out into the storm.

“All I know is that they’re going to be over at the silo for the rest of the afternoon and maybe tomorrow. I tried to explain to them that this could be very damaging for business, but they don’t seem to care.”

“How much later are you planning on staying?”

“I’m getting out of here
now
. Mary’s staying on in the office, and she’s going to make sure things get locked up after the police leave. They asked that we not open up until tomorrow afternoon. I can’t imagine how we’re going to pull off the party.”

I hit her with my request to spend the night at her place.

“Of course,” she said. “I’m sorry you even had to ask—but you were so adamant earlier about getting back.”

“What about David? Have you called him?”

“I’ve left a million messages for him, but he’s apparently en route from New Haven and his cell phone isn’t picking up. I tried his partner, Trip, too, but he’s gone off somewhere and no one knows where he is.”

I stepped closer and touched her shoulder. “And what about
you
? How are you doing, anyway?”

“Not good. Look, we had better get out of here.”

A few minutes later I was in my Jeep, headed past several police vehicles in the parking lot. My windshield wipers groaned as they worked, shoving more than an inch of snow to each side. I glanced at the silo one last time. It turned my stomach to imagine Ashley’s body inside, being photographed and pored over by crime scene experts.

I’d never been to Peyton’s house before—it had been under renovation at the time of the wedding—but I knew it was just a few miles from the farm. I followed carefully behind her green Range Rover, fearful that even with my four-wheel drive on, I’d end up skidding or getting stuck in a snowdrift.

My jaw dropped when we finally pulled through the stone-and-wrought-iron gate and I caught a glimpse of the house through the snow. It was colossal, a mansion, really—white-painted brick, black shutters, and endless rows of shining windows. I knew David was loaded, so I should have realized Peyton was living like a princess. But I was still stuck in the single-girl, one-bedroom-apartment mind-set, and my brain hadn’t stretched far enough to imagine this for her.

She pulled up directly in front of the house, and I jumped out of my car right behind her. “Just leave your car here,” she yelled as she unlocked the door. “Someone will get it later.”

Inside, the house looked like an English manor, the kind I’d seen while writing a travel article about the English Cotswolds. There was an enormous hall with a six-foot-high fireplace hosting the proverbial roaring fire. I wouldn’t have been surprised if a couple of corgis had come bounding in our direction. Instead, a middle-aged housekeeper appeared, dressed in a simple black dress.

“Is David here, Clara?” Peyton asked impatiently.

“No, Mrs. Slavin. I haven’t heard from him today.”

“All right, then, I need you to show Miss Weggins to the guest room and then bring some chilled white wine to the library.

“Can you make do without me for a while?” Peyton asked, turning to me. “There are calls I’m going to have to make. But I’ll join you later in the library. Clara will tell you where it is.”

As Peyton flounced off toward the back of the house, I was led up a huge staircase. The house appeared to be decorated fairly classically, but with some quirky touches that kept it from being stodgy. The guest room, or at least the guest room I’d been assigned to, was at the end of a long hallway on the second floor and was about three times the size of my living room. It had a huge four-poster bed with a little step stool beside it and was decorated in florals and yellow and white stripes. Peyton, I realized, must have believed that yellow was a color that flattered and soothed everyone. Unfortunately, nothing was going to soothe me tonight.

Seeing I was without bags, Clara asked if I needed anything and promised to find me a toothbrush. After she was gone I dug my cell phone out of my purse and called Jack. There was no answer at his college office, his apartment, or his cell phone. I left messages for him to call me as soon as he could.

After splashing some water on my face in the adjoining bathroom, I found my way to the library using the directions Clara had provided. It was painted a deep, mossy green, not only the walls, but the bookshelves, though they had been treated some way that made them look like leather. There were several nubby green sofas, and the floors were covered in a soft green-and-beige-checked wall-to-wall carpeting. Accenting the room were antique Chinese pieces, including a red-lacquer chest used as a coffee table and a red desk painted with willows and pagodas.

I helped myself to the French white wine being chilled in a bucket on the coffee table. The phone on the end table by the couch rang often but was immediately intercepted by someone in another room.

I took a large swig of wine, though I could tell that alcohol wasn’t going to be able to take the edge off. Just as I was about to flop down on one of the sofas, I caught sight of a row of photos lining the mantel and walked over to inspect them. Though there were some shots of family members, most were of Peyton and David leading the good life—on sailboats and terraces and in the kinds of outdoor cafés they had only in France and Italy. One especially large photo was of them on their wedding day. It was a formal pose from the waist up—Peyton in that fantastic crumb-catcher bodice, David in his tux with a simple white rose boutonniere. They looked triumphant.

Sinking into the couch, I opened the composition book that I had brought down with me. What I was anxious to do right now, before things got any crazier, was to make a time line of Peyton’s wedding. Robin had asked Ashley if she had noticed anything strange at the wedding, and it was time for me to dredge the recesses of my memory.

The weekend had kicked off with a bridesmaids’ luncheon, held on Friday afternoon—and it was actually the first time that several of us had met one another. Robin, Ashley, and Prudence were all childhood friends of Peyton’s. I hadn’t met any of them before, nor had Jamie. Maverick, Peyton’s PR person, had seemed familiar with Robin, but I wasn’t sure if she’d known the others. Bridesmaids who were strangers was a fairly typical situation, but in other weddings I’d been in, you at least got to know the rest of the wedding party in the weeks before the big day—either while planning a shower or hosting a bachelorette party.