Valentine (30 page)

There were three people in the room, a lone woman and a couple seated across from each other by the fire, and she heard banging and clattering from the kitchen: Gwen. The small, pretty, middle-aged woman in tweed was Barbara Benson, the romance writer who had been something of a national institution for nearly thirty years now. Her hair was wavy and slightly blue-tinged, and Jill noted the double ropes of pearls and the scent of lavender, both of which were trademarks. Barbara had published nearly sixty books so far, and she was probably fabulously wealthy. The same could be assumed of the small, dark-haired, goateed man across from her: Jeffrey Monk was a world-class horror novelist. He was rather intense-looking, and Jill noticed that he rarely spoke. The attractive, friendly woman next to him was his wife, Ruth, who always seemed to smile. She’d made an impression on Jill the evening she’d arrived here from New York, leaning over after dinner and confiding to Jill that she couldn’t stand her husband’s books. All three of them had gone out of their way to be friendly to Jill, which made her wonder
if Gwen and Mike had, perhaps, told them something of her recent ordeal. Jill also knew that both writers, successful as they were, could easily afford to be anywhere else but here, and that their participation in the opening weeks of the colony was more for Gwen and Mike’s sake than their own. Cachet, not to mention publicity: all-important for a business just getting under way. Jill understood that Barbara and Jeffrey were trying to help their young colleagues, and she immediately liked them for it.

“Good morning,” she said to the three.

“Hello, dear,” Barbara cooed. “Don’t you look well rested! The peace and quiet here is just heavenly.”

“Yes, isn’t it?” Ruth chimed in. “I think we’ve found a cure for Jeff’s insomnia.”

The horror writer agreed, smiling.

“Come and get it!”

The cheerful voice that uttered this belonged to the cheerful little blond woman in the black-and-white polka-dotted granny dress who now bustled in from the kitchen with a heaping tray. She set the massive pile of scrambled eggs down on the long sideboard near the dinner table and trotted over to peck Jill’s cheek. “Hello there!”

Jill grinned. Gwen Feldman was easily the most energetic person she knew, with the possible exception of her husband. As everyone rose and went to the sideboard, she asked, “Where’s Mike?”

“At the train station,” her hostess sang, handing out plates and checking for serving utensils in all the dishes: eggs, bacon, sausage, waffles, toast, fruit, hot and cold cereal. “I am happy to announce that we will soon have two new recruits joining us any moment. Craig Palmer, the mystery writer—you know him, don’t you, Jill?—and Wendy Singer, who has that detective series about the woman veterinarian. And someone else called this morning to book a cottage for Thursday. We’re turning into quite a little crowd! And speaking of that, the Valentine’s Day party, originally scheduled for Valentine’s Day, has become the Day Before Valentine’s Day party, courtesy of Ms. Barbara Benson and Mr. and Mrs. Jeffrey Monk, who will be leaving us on Saturday afternoon. So get your dancing shoes ready for Friday night. Mike will be at the turntable, playing his entire collection of big band records. Champagne, door prizes, and dancing till dawn. We’ve invited several of our new neighbors, too, so it’s your only chance to meet some of the locals. I hope you all plan to attend. Now, let’s eat.”

Jill, following the strict instructions of Dr. Chang, abstained from the delicious-looking heavy foods and settled for half a grapefruit and a bowl of corn flakes. It was an effort, however: she noted again how strongly her appetite had returned the moment she’d left New York City. She got a cup and saucer,
poured decaf from a pot at the end of the sideboard, and sat next to Gwen, who was at the head of the table.

They had barely begun the meal when they heard the approaching van, and in moments the door swung open and three people bustled in, laden with suitcases, laughing and chatting. The biggest of the three was Mike, in flannel shirt and overalls and stocking cap, his bushy black beard covering his face. He resembled nothing so much as Paul Bunyan.

“Here we are, folks!” he boomed, dropping several bags to the floor and instructing his charges to do the same. “We’ll get all this stowed away later. But first, grub!”

They all headed for the sideboard. Jill knew the aristocratic, fiftyish Craig Palmer: they’d met on several occasions, having not only a mutual publisher but a mutual editor. The lovely young woman, Wendy Singer, was fairly familiar to her as well, from meetings of Sisters in Crime that Jill occasionally attended.

Craig and Wendy were introduced to the other celebrities at the table, and Mike dropped into the seat on the other side of the table from Jill, next to his wife. As he dug into his breakfast, Jill leaned toward him and said, “Are we still on for today?”

“What? Oh, yeah, sure. How about three o’clock? I’ll be finished with my chores by then. The range is
on the other side of the baseball field, just inside the woods.”

“Okay,” Jill said. “Three o’clock.”

Gwen frowned at the two of them. “Are you sure about this, Jill?”

“Oh, yes.” Jill smiled to placate her peace-loving friend. “Your husband’s going to show me how to defend myself.”

Barney was on the highway again, heading northeast, away from Pittsburgh. The weather today was cold but remarkably clear, and the rental car was not as annoying as rental cars usually were. A couple more like this, he thought as he drove, and I might actually get to like automatic shifts.

He glanced down at the road map on the passenger seat with the route outlined in ink. Yes, take this highway to that exit, then Mill Road right into the town. He could ask there for directions to Franklin Street.

He yawned luxuriously, thankful for the fact that he’d stopped for a sandwich and coffee after leaving the prison. The early morning flight from New York had necessitated his being up at six
A.M.
It was now two-thirty. He’d left the roadside diner twenty-five minutes ago, but it already seemed to him that he’d been driving for hours.

The highway was fairly empty at this hour, and the
flat, gray landscape of southwestern Pennsylvania in midwinter held no allure. He reached over to the seat next to him and moved the gas station map aside. Under it were the copies the warden’s secretary had made of Victor Dimorta’s mug shots. He looked at the photos again, a full-front and a profile. A long, thin, pockmarked face with a dull expression. Lank, greasy hair. Large, dark eyes that revealed nothing but a vague disinterest. A long, sharp, almost hawk-like nose over a thin, straight line of a mouth. The prominence of the Adam’s apple and the marked hollowness of the cheeks indicated that this eighteen-year-old was underweight.

A thoroughly unremarkable young man, Barney thought. A kid you’d never notice; a kid who looked exactly like a hundred other kids you saw every day on the streets of New York. And yet, this particular run-of-the-mill, nondescript individual had just murdered his parents in their sleep mere hours before these pictures were taken.

He wondered what the kid looked like now.

It was the warden, a genial, almost fatherly man named Sanford, who had suggested that Barney talk to the stoolie. Now, Barney was grateful for the warden’s intelligence.

When the small, elderly con had been brought into the office, he’d stood staring at the warden and at the enormous, gray-haired man who sat on the other
side of the desk. He was not handcuffed, Barney had noted, making him realize that this old man had spent most of his adult life in this facility. He was not a security risk, and he had certain privileges. He was introduced to the detective merely as Ed.

For the apparent price of a pack of cigarettes, tossed to him by the warden, Ed told Barney what he knew about Victor Dimorta. Very quiet, he said, kept to himself. But he’d been liked and respected by everyone, especially the cons he’d taught to read and write. And he’d had a couple of particular friends, two guys who had since departed: well, one had left this prison and the other this earth. After his release, Victor came back to visit his buddies once, and word went around the yard that he was planning to get a face-lift. That was all Ed knew.

Ed had been dismissed, and Barney had thanked the warden and left for Mill City.

A face-lift, he thought as he drove. Reconstructive surgery. This man is a blank: no face, no fingerprints.

There had been no fingerprints in the room across from Jillian’s apartment. Barney knew Juan Escalera of the Sixth from the old days, and Juan had no objection to Barney’s presence at the scene. In fact, the sergeant greeted him as an old friend, which he supposed he was.

The table, the ashtray, the doorknobs: all had been dusted, but only partial smudges appeared, nothing
dear. The bathroom on the floor below his room—shared with the two elderly men in the rooms on that floor—had been cleaned the day before, and only one set of fingerprints had been found on the sink. They belonged to Mr. Abrams in 6A. The old men had only gotten brief glimpses of their tall, dark-haired upstairs neighbor.

Escalera had thanked everyone for their cooperation. Then, with a hearty handshake and a promise of dinner together real soon, the sergeant and his associates had gone back to work on another, more immediate problem: the clinical psychologist who had been murdered on Tenth Street. The press was having a field day with it. Barney had promised to call Escalera if he found anything interesting in Pennsylvania.

Now, as he drove toward Mill City, Barney wondered what he was going to do when he got there. Find the house, certainly. Talk to neighbors, local tradespeople, anyone who might have known the family. Anyone who might have known—or still knew—Victor Dimorta.

He had to see Victor’s new face.

“Beginner’s luck!” Mike cried as he retrieved the paper target from the post in the trench at the other end of the clearing and brought it over. “Look at this!”

Jill stood on the wooden platform of the shooting range, clutching the small handgun as she stared down at the square of paper Mike held up for her inspection. She had fired four shots, all of them hitting within the second circle, two in the bull’s-eye.

Mike grinned. “Are you sure you’ve never done this before?”

“Positive,” she said. “Let me try again.”

He nodded and went to post another target as she reloaded. When he was back beside her, she stood straight, feet apart, and extended her arms in front of her. Her right hand held the gun; her left hand clutched her right wrist, steadying it. She gazed down the length of her arm and the short barrel, and past them to the tiny white square some twenty feet away. She didn’t see the paper: in her mind, she saw a tall, skinny, dark-haired phantom without a face. When she was ready, she squeezed the trigger.

“Bull’s-eye!” Mike shouted.

Seven Franklin Street was a shabby little two-story wood structure, vaguely Victorian in design, its front porch sagging, the once-white paint peeling away. Even the
FOR SALE
sign sticking hopefully up from the dirt next to the porch steps was faded. It was virtually identical to the others in the row in which it stood on one side of the small road overlooking the valley that contained the rest of the town, such
as it was. Beyond the little clump of buildings that covered an area of four square blocks below him, Barney saw the remains of the paper factory, a crumbling cement skeleton with broken rows of windows and empty smokestacks pointing up into the gray sky. Gray, he thought: everything in this place is gray. The factory, the town, the sky, and this row of houses on this gray drive above the gray valley.

He turned from the depressing view and went back across the road and up the steps to the porch of number seven. The door was locked, the windows shuttered. He left the porch and circled the house. The tiny, fenced-in backyard—like the others in the row—was overgrown with weeds, its two trees dry and naked. The back door of the house was locked. A tiny, rock-lined strip of black earth along the back of the house next to the kitchen door bore witness to Angela Dimorta’s long-ago attempt at flower gardening.

Back on the road, he noticed that two or three other houses on either side had cars parked in front of them. On a porch two houses away to the left sat an old woman in a rocking chair. She had knitting in her lap, and she was watching him with the steady gaze of one who has seen everything and found precious little of it to be of much interest. He smiled and waved to her. She nodded. He took this as encouragement
and walked up the road to stand below her porch.

“Good afternoon,” he said.

She nodded again, her knitting needles clacking. “You fixin’ to buy the haunted house?”

He smiled. “Number seven? Why do you call it that?”

“Ev’body calls it that. Crazy kid lived there, killed his father and mother. ’Course,
they
were crazy, too. . . .”

“Did you know them?” he asked.

She eyed him. “Sure. My late husband and Big Joe Dimorta were the foremen at the paper plant.”

Barney came up the steps to her. “What about the kid?”

“Victor?” She uttered a dry laugh. “He was always a strange one, even when he was little. Used to throw rocks at dogs, see if he could hit em. Got bit a couple of times, too.” She chuckled again. “Bothered the girls in school—and the other boys beat him up, just like his daddy did. Big Joe used to whale on him and Angela somethin’ fierce! Two doors away, and sometimes I had to put my hands over my ears. Victor ran away from home, off to some college, then got thrown out of there. I heard that had to do with botherin’ girls, too. They didn’t mention that at the arraignment.”