“And did you? Check them out, I mean.”
“Oh, sure. We have to take all reports of threats seriously, even if they come from crazies. But he had no evidence. Nothing whatsoever. It was all in his head. Besides, all of that was at least a year before Jenny Hamlin was killed, maybe longer. Trust me, there’s no connection.”
“I see. Well, thank you anyway.” Pulling a silver Montblanc pen out of her Balenciaga purse, Alexia smiled sweetly. “I appreciate that the information is sensitive and I can’t make copies. But I wonder, Chief Dublowski, would you mind terribly if I took a couple of notes?”
Chief Harry Dublowski hadn’t been kidding when he said the police had had little to go on. The smattering of personal information they had on Jenny had almost all been gleaned from a single interview with her former roommate, a girl named Kelly Dupree.
Alexia paid Kelly a visit at work. Kelly’s Nails was a hole-in-the-wall manicure place, squeezed into a sliver of a building between a convenience store and a pharmacy in a nondescript Brooklyn neighborhood. But its proprietress had made an effort to bring the place to life. There were stylish leather chairs, the gleaming white walls were newly painted, and an appetizing array of Essie nail colors were arranged in the shape of a rainbow along the back wall, giving the salon the look of an old-fashioned candy store.
“I’ll be right with you!” the eponymous Kelly announced cheerfully. She lost some of her sparkle when Alexia explained that she wasn’t a customer, that she was here about Jenny.
“Look, I’m working, okay? I don’t have time. I already told the cops everything I know.”
“I appreciate that. I’m just concerned that maybe the police gave up a little easily.”
Kelly’s eyes narrowed skeptically. “Uh-huh. You’re concerned. Right.”
“I’m not a reporter. I’m a friend of a friend.”
“Listen, lady. If this is a scam and you misquote me in some salacious bullshit article, I swear to God . . .”
“It’s not a scam. A few minutes of your time, that’s all I need.”
Kelly had to admit that the polished older lady with the British accent didn’t look like a reporter.
“Okay,” she said, against her better judgment. “I’ll meet you in Starbucks when I’m done here. Right across the street. Say five o’clock?”
She was as good as her word. At five on the dot, Alexia ordered coffees and the two women sat down to talk.
Kelly Dupree was red-haired with pale Irish skin and a smattering of freckles across her nose that made her look younger than her twenty-eight years. She had the overplucked eyebrows of a professional beautician, and she tapped her acrylic nails loudly and nervously on the table as she spoke.
“I’m sorry if I was a little abrupt before. It was awful what happened to Jen. But a lot of the newspapers and TV people treated her death like entertainment. As if it were some sort of sick reality show, you know? It’s made me wary of talking about her.”
“I don’t blame you,” Alexia said. “I used to be a politician—I’m retired now—but I certainly understand how manipulative the media can be.”
“So what is your interest in Jenny? No offense, but I’m having trouble believing you’re a ‘friend of a friend.’ Jen didn’t know too many people like you.”
“I knew her father, many years ago. We lost touch. When I heard about Jennifer’s death and what happened, I felt I owed it to Billy to try and find out the truth. Perhaps I’m wrong, but it seemed to me as if the police kind of let things slide.”
Kelly Dupree laughed bitterly. “You’re not wrong. The cops were as bad as the media. Worse in a way. For a few weeks Jen’s murder was a hot story. Then everybody forgot about it and moved on to something new. They had no leads. Their so-called investigation was a joke. As soon as they realized it wasn’t Luca, that was it. They gave up.”
“Luca Minotti? Jenny’s boyfriend?”
“Fiancé. Right. Sweetest guy on earth. Luca wouldn’t step on a spider if he could help it. Lucky for him he was in Italy when she went missing, otherwise the NYPD would have pinned it on him for sure. They wanted it to be Luca so bad. That’s all they asked me about.”
Alexia sipped her Americano. “And what about you. Do you have any theories, any thoughts as to who might have killed her?”
Kelly shook her head. “Not really. Some psycho. I mean she wasn’t robbed. She wasn’t raped. There was no reason for it. It was so senseless.”
“Was Jenny troubled at all before her death?”
“She was cut up about her dad. You knew he was murdered too, right? In London, the year before Jenny.”
“Yes,” Alexia said quietly, banishing an image of Teddy from her mind. “I knew that. Were they close?”
“Oh God, yes. Very. Billy was a little odd, you know, but Jen was his only child. He adored her. She worried about him a lot.”
“About his mental health, you mean?”
Kelly nodded. “Yes, that. And his loneliness. But you know, there were other things. He’d been in jail a long time ago, before Jenny was born. I never quite knew the details, but Jenny seemed convinced he was innocent of whatever it was he got sent down for. It made him paranoid. Right before he died, I remember he called the apartment and told Jenny that the British government was out to get him. That they’d drugged him and put him on a plane or some nonsense. He was really frightened.”
Alexia’s hand tightened on her coffee mug. Poor Billy! He came to me for help and I scared him out of his wits. And then to have nobody believe him, not even his own family. The guilt was like a stone around her neck.
Kelly Dupree went on. “Things were amicable between Jenny’s parents, but her dad never fully got over the divorce. And then there was the business going down the tubes. And his best friend, his business partner, taking off and leaving Billy holding the bag.”
Alexia cast her mind back to Edward Manning’s file on Billy. She dimly remembered something about a business partner—was the name Bates? But she hadn’t realized he and Billy had been close friends.
“Jen used to say it was like her dad was cursed. And we were all like ‘no, no, that’s crazy.’ But it did sort of seem that way, you know?”
Alexia knew.
“The irony was, toward the end Billy became totally obsessed with Jenny’s safety. Like, she was here, worrying about him, and Billy was on the other side of the world, obsessing about something happening to her. We all thought he was crazy, to be perfectly honest with you. But maybe he knew something we didn’t.”
“ ‘We all’?”
“Me. Luca. Jenny’s friends. Her mom.”
“So Jenny’s mother didn’t believe her daughter was in any danger?”
“No. None of us did. Why would she be? We thought Billy was just rambling. Maybe he was. But it does seem kind of odd that Billy gets knifed to death in London and then a year later some psycho does this to Jenny, don’t you think? Like, maybe someone out there really really doesn’t like that family.”
Family.
For some reason, the word struck a chord with Alexia. She and Teddy had been a family once. Back in the mists of time, when Michael and Roxie were children, untouched by tragedy, blissfully unaware of the misery the future held for all of them. It occurred to her that in some ways, her own experiences mirrored Billy’s. The sense of being cursed, of having somehow brought calamity down on themselves and their families. Both she and Billy had lost their marriages, both lost their children. Billy’s business had failed; Alexia’s career had collapsed. When Kelly Dupree spoke about someone holding a grudge against the Hamlin family, Alexia thought, That’s how I feel. As if my family are all puppets, and some sadistic, malevolent puppeteer is up their pulling the strings, picking us off one by one.
Of course, she knew it was nonsense. Teddy had killed Billy. And Teddy knew nothing about Jennifer’s death. So there was no connection. Just like there was no connection between Roxie’s suicide attempt and Michael’s accident, or between
Teddy’s imprisonment and her own ruined political career. It’s human nature to try and tie these things together. To find a pattern, to believe there must be a purpose behind the misery. It’s what Summer Meyer had been trying to do with Michael’s accident. And now I’m doing the same, with Jenny Hamlin’s murder. But the truth is there is no reason, no connection, no mysterious person pulling the strings.
It was almost seven by the time Alexia left the Starbucks. Kelly Dupree had given her addresses for Jennifer Hamlin’s fiancé, Luca, and for her mother, Sally, but it was too late to pay either of them a visit tonight. Alexia would eat, sleep, and see what more she could find out in the morning.
Back at her hotel, a town-house boutique in the East Village, Alexia collapsed onto her bed, suddenly exhausted. After the slow pace of life on the Vineyard, just being in New York tired her. The lights, the noise, the relentless energy of the city. I’m too old for this. Maybe Lucy was right. I should have stayed at the Gables and let sleeping dogs lie.
Nothing she’d heard today encouraged her to believe that she was going to succeed where Chief Harry Dublowski and his men had failed. She wasn’t going to find Jennifer Hamlin’s killer. Suddenly the whole enterprise seemed pointless. What the hell am I doing, raking around in another family’s grief? As if I don’t have enough grief of my own.
She checked her messages. Since their bonding session at Michael’s bedside, Summer Meyer had taken to texting Alexia regularly from London, just to check in, or send pictures of a sleeping Michael. But today there was nothing. Summer’s mother, Lucy, had called twice, but left no message. It was odd, Alexia reflected, the degree to which the Meyers had filled the void left by her own crumbling family. Lucy, Arnie, and Summer were all she had now. Alexia thanked God for them.
She considered calling Summer herself, just to make sure everything was okay. But before she could figure out what time it was in England, exhaustion overtook her. The phone slipped from her hand and she sank into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Sally Hamlin patted down the earth around the newly planted hydrangeas and surveyed her front yard with satisfaction. Spring had fully sprung in Tuckahoe, the quiet Westchester suburb Sally had retired to three years ago, and the scent of summer already hung tantalizingly in the air. Back in Queens, Sally had never had a yard and had always wanted one. Now she derived deep, intense pleasure from her little rectangular patch of grass and flower beds. The simple satisfaction of planting something, tending it, and watching it grow filled her with contentment and peace, and gave a much-needed sense of control and order to her world. After so much loss, so much horror, Sally had learned to take pleasure in the small, predictable joys of life.
Sally saw the woman approaching from a block away. Tall and elegantly dressed, with a purposeful walk and an erect, almost regal bearing, this was no local Tuckahoe housewife out for a Sunday-morning stroll. The woman slowed as she approached Sally’s fence, obviously looking for something.
“Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for a Mrs. Sally Hamlin.”
It was the British accent that gave it away. Sally knew at once who the glamorous stranger must be. Brushing the soil off her pants, she stood up and proffered her hand.
“You found her. I’m Sally Hamlin. You’d better come in, Mrs. De Vere.”
The house was as neat as a pin. Alexia took off her jacket and hung it carefully on the back of a kitchen chair while Sally made them coffee. Pictures of Jennifer were everywhere, on the refrigerator, the bookshelves, even perched on top of the television set in the living room. There were none of Billy.
Sally sat down, and Alexia immediately noticed the deep grooves etched around her eyes. She was an attractive woman, perhaps a decade younger than Alexia herself, with carefully dyed chestnut-brown hair and a trim, girlish figure. But grief had taken its toll on Sally Hamlin’s face.
“You’ve come about Billy, I suppose,” Sally said. “I heard he’d been bothering you and your family in England, before he died. I’m sorry about that.”
“There’s nothing to apologize for, believe me.”
“He used to talk about you all the time. Alexia De Vere this, Alexia De Vere that. He was convinced he knew you. That the two of you were friends. I think he had you confused with an old girlfriend or something. But he was so ill.”
Alexia thought, So she doesn’t know the truth. She doesn’t know my past. Billy protected me right to the end. Protected both of us.
“I did see your husband briefly,” she said. “When he was in London.”
“Ex-husband,” Sally corrected her. “Billy and I divorced a long time ago.”
“And that is why I’m here, in a way. He mentioned something to me then about your daughter. I got the sense that he felt she might have been in danger. That somebody might have been trying to hurt her.”
At the mention of Jennifer, Sally Hamlin visibly shrank in her seat, her shoulders slumping. The pain was clearly still desperately raw.
“I’m afraid I didn’t take it seriously at the time,” said Alexia. “But after I heard about what happened to Jennifer, I . . . well, I wondered if I could have done more. It played on my mind.”
Sally Hamlin looked surprised. “Don’t take this the wrong way. I mean, it’s very kind of you to care and all. But I don’t understand why my family’s troubles would seem important to you. You didn’t even know Billy.”
“No,” Alexia lied, “I didn’t. But my encounter with him stuck in my mind. I’m retired from politics now—I’ve had some family problems of my own—so I had time to follow it up.”
Sally nodded. Her mind had already drifted away, to her daughter and the awful nightmare that had overtaken her.
“If it’s not too painful,” Alexia prodded gently, “perhaps you could tell me a bit more about Jennifer?”
“Of course.”
Once Sally started talking, she couldn’t stop. She told Alexia everything, from the story of Jennifer’s birth to the divorce and how it had affected Jenny, to her daughter’s happy relationship with Luca Minotti. She also spoke about the special bond that Jennifer had shared with her father. Despite the obvious problems posed by Billy’s schizophrenia, it struck Alexia that his ex-wife still spoke of him with sincere warmth and affection.
Thank God he married someone kind and selfless like Sally, and not someone selfish and ambitious like me. I hope they were happy, for a while at least. Billy deserved that.
When she finally ran out of words, Sally went upstairs and returned with a box file of Billy’s old papers and photographs. “For what it’s worth. It’s mostly business stuff, and I highly doubt it has any bearing on Jennifer’s murder. But it’s all I have.”
Alexia took the file. “Thank you.”
“I think Billy’s real psychotic break happened when Milo took off,” said Sally. “Milo Bates was his best friend. His only real friend, other than me. The divorce wasn’t easy on Billy, but Milo leaving the way he did, abandoning Billy to deal with the debts and the business collapsing on his own? That crushed him. That was when the voices started, and the paranoia. He developed these awful morbid fantasies.”
“What sort of fantasies?”
Sally shook her head. “Oh, it was crazy. At first he talked about Milo being ‘taken.’ Abducted, you know. He couldn’t accept the fact that Milo had left deliberately. Then it was that Milo had been killed. Eventually Billy started saying that he’d been abducted, that he’d actually witnessed Milo being murdered. The fantasy kept getting bigger and more elaborate. It was awful.”
“Did he ever say who he thought had taken Milo?”
Sally smiled. “Oh yes. ‘The voice.’ ”
“I’m sorry?”
“The voice. The voice was to blame for everything. We all knew it was in his head, of course, but to Billy it was totally real, as real as you or me. The minute he came off his antipsychotic drugs, boom: the voice was back. It started right around the time that Milo left town and it pretty much never stopped.
He’d call the cops to tell them the voice was on the phone. He complained constantly about threatening calls.”
“But he never saw this person. Only heard them?”
“That’s right. Auditory hallucinations are very common with schizophrenics.”
“Did he tell you what it sounded like?”
Sally looked Alexia in the eye. “Like a robot. Like a machine. Synthesized.”
The hairs on Alexia’s forearms stood on end, like a thousand tiny soldiers called to attention. Her mind jumped back to another phone call. One she’d received herself two years ago, back home in Cheyne Walk. She remembered the call as if it were yesterday. The sinister, synthesized voice:
“The day is coming. The day when the Lord’s anger will be poured out. Because you have sinned against the Lord, I will make you as helpless as a blind man searching for a path.”
Her throat felt dry. “Did he ever say anything about the voice using religious language? Fire and brimstone, that sort of thing?”
Sally’s eyes widened. “Yes! That’s amazing. How did you know that?”
Alexia wasn’t sure how she made it back to her rental car. Climbing into the driver’s seat, she sat motionless, staring straight ahead.
The voice wasn’t in Billy’s head.
It was real.
It called me too.
What else had been real? Milo Bates’s murder? Had Billy really been forced to watch his friend die, like he told the police? And what about the threats to his daughter?
“Was that what you were you trying to tell me, Billy?” Alexia said aloud, her cracking voice echoing round the empty car. “Why didn’t I listen?”
She must find out who “the voice” really was. Not just for Billy and Jennifer Hamlin’s sake, but for her own.
Sidney Sheldon's the Tides of Memory Page 32
