Last Day

by Luanne Rice

  Sam held the tiny glass shard and made one long, shallow slit on the inside of her left wrist. It didn’t go deep, but it allowed a flower of blood to bloom. A trumpet blossom, bright and red. Cutting had always given her relief, and she needed that right now—to release the pent-up tension and grief. But the first cut did nothing, so she tried again. She stared at the blood, saw the red feeder clustered with the hummingbirds her mother had so mystically called from their hiding places, and she missed her mother so much she began to scream.

  Loud, loud, louder, deep in the cellar where no one could hear, screaming as if the house were falling down around her, because the person she loved most in the world had died, was gone forever, would never feed the birds again, would never hug Sam again. Screaming because the world had ended.

  27

  The New London soup kitchen was located in the parish house of Saint Ignatius Loyola Church at the foot of Bank Street. The Whaling City Shelter was right around the corner. Kate had had to fly to Los Angeles twice in the last week, but today was the first of four days off. The church and shelter were a five-minute walk from her loft. She’d passed them countless times, seeing clients and residents lined up around the block, waiting for a hot meal or a safe bed. Just before lunch, she headed over.

  Although Beth had volunteered at both for many years, Kate had never stopped in. Sometimes when Beth was working in town, if Kate wasn’t flying, the sisters would meet at the Witchfire Teahouse on the water side of Bank Street, a place where they could drink Darjeeling and Beth could have her tarot cards read.

  Kate passed it now. The storefront was painted violet, the sign dark pink with swirling black letters. Purple taffeta curtained the windows, intended by the owner to create an air of mystery for people who wanted to believe.

  “An occult thrill for the suburban set,” Kate had said one snowy afternoon last winter, when they were seated inside on a shabby amber velvet love seat, the space lit by candles and Victorian lamps with fringed silk shades.

  “It’s not that,” Beth said. “It’s just fun. Thessaly!” She tried to catch the owner’s eye.

  “Thessaly?” Kate asked, her tone translating into, How contrived.

  “It’s the name of the thousand-year-old witch in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. She adopted it.”

  “Okay then,” Kate said. “She knows how to play the part.”

  Tall and thin, too young for the long silver hair that Kate was sure was a wig, Thessaly wore a crocheted black dress, black lace-up boots, and big glasses with round black frames.

  “If you don’t like it here, why don’t we meet somewhere else?” Beth asked. “You make me feel like an idiot.”

  “What are you talking about?” Kate asked.

  “You’re so technical, scientific. You don’t have faith; you don’t believe in anything except instruments and gauges, and I respect that. I never tell you to lighten up, to be more spiritual. But you condescend to me. I can tell you think I’m a fool.”

  “I do not!”

  “Yeah, you do. If I asked Thessaly to read my cards, you’d sit there with a smirk on your face just like you did when I told you her name.”

  Kate stared at Beth and knew she was right. She did think the whole Witchfire vibe was bogus, that Thessaly knew how to appeal to bored women who wished they had more in their lives.

  “And all your comments about the ‘suburban set.’ What was it you said last week? ‘Housewives having their fortunes told and looking for love.’”

  “I wasn’t even talking about you!”

  “Well, I’m a housewife.”

  “Who runs an art gallery!”

  “But what was the crack about looking for love?”

  “I don’t know. I was kidding around.”

  “You make it sound as if you think I want to have an affair. Looking for love, and truly, what’s so wrong about that?” She narrowed her eyes at Kate as if challenging her.

  “Actually, I think I said, ‘Looking for love advice.’”

  “No, you didn’t. You said love.”

  “I don’t remember. I’m sorry,” Kate said.

  “I get belittled enough at home.”

  “Pete?” Kate asked. She wanted to Pete bash, to defuse the discomfort.

  “Let’s not talk about it,” Beth said. Then, with a sharp gaze, “Maybe you should look for love. It might help you understand what the rest of us go through.”

  When Thessaly came over, she refilled their teapot with hot water, but Beth didn’t ask her to throw the tarot. That was the last time the sisters had met here. Beth had never suggested it again, and they’d started going to Dutch’s Tavern, more Kate’s style, for red wine and burgers. Now, passing the teahouse and looking back on the odd conversation, Kate wondered if Beth had wanted to tell her about the man who had so lovingly captured her beauty and soul in that charcoal drawing. Jed.

  Lunch was underway at Saint Ignatius. Two women stood behind a long counter, serving what looked like Thanksgiving dinner: turkey with gravy, mashed potatoes, and peas. But it was August in Connecticut, so there was also corn on the cob.

  The clientele ranged in age from teenage to elderly. They lined up with trays, carrying their meals to long folding tables set up in two rows. The room had basketball hoops at either end, as well as five easels folded in the corner. It obviously had multiple uses, from dining room to gymnasium to art studio. Was this where Beth and Sam had worked with people on art projects? Kate looked around, scanning all the men’s faces, wondering which one was JH.

  “Hey! Kate!”

  She turned to see Scotty emerging from the kitchen, carrying a tray of sliced tomatoes and basil.

  “I forgot you worked here,” Kate said.

  “Beth got me started.”

  “Did you grow those?” Kate asked, looking at the ripe, red slices.

  “Yes, but the basil is Beth’s. I stopped at her garden to pick some on my way over. She always did things to make the meals special. People here loved her. They miss her.” She gestured at a bulletin board across the room on the wall. A photo of Beth in her gray shirt and white cap, her arms around two beaming women, had been tacked to the board. Beneath it was a banner that said FOREVER LOVED. It was covered with signatures.

  “Everyone who comes in is invited to sign it,” Scotty said. “They all do.”

  Kate drifted over to look at the names. Scotty put the tray down on the serving station and followed her. Kate read every name, but she didn’t find what she was looking for.

  “What brings you here?” Scotty asked.

  “I was hoping to see a friend of Beth’s. In fact, I sent you a text about him—didn’t you get it?”

  Kate turned to see Scotty hovering nervously behind her. A few tendrils of blonde hair fell from her cap. She had a very slight tan and faint lines around her brown eyes. They had been friends for a lifetime, and Kate knew those eyes so well. They were full of remorse.

  “Sorry, I thought I replied,” Scotty said.

  “Who’s Jed Hilliard?” Kate asked.

  Scotty blushed and looked away.

  “Both you and Lulu knew, didn’t you?”

  “Beth would have told you eventually,” Scotty said. “She was afraid you wouldn’t approve.”

  “Of course I would have,” Kate said. “Anything that made her happy.” But their last conversation at Witchfire, the defensive tone in Beth’s voice, echoed in her mind: You think I want to have an affair.

  “Is he here now?”

  “No,” Scotty said. “He hasn’t been back once since she died.”

  It felt like a blow. Kate had thought if she could meet him today, ask him about Beth and the drawing, she might find some peace. She’d wanted to hear that he’d loved Beth and she’d loved him, that life had become happier for her. “Were they together?”

  “Not like that! They were just good friends,” Scotty said, but Kate wasn’t sure she could believe her.

  “Was he Matthew’s father?”


  “Oh, come on, Kate! Why would you even ask that?”

  “Do you know where he lives?” Kate asked.

  “For a long time, he was a handyman at the Academy, and they gave him a room in the attic. Then he was living here in New London—on State Street, in that building they’re converting into artists’ studios.”

  “Is he there now?” Kate asked.

  “I don’t know,” Scotty said. “If he was, I can’t imagine why he wouldn’t be showing up for food.”

  “She met him at the Academy? When he was working there?” Kate asked.

  Scotty bit her lip. Her eyelids fluttered in a way that brought a sinking to Kate’s heart. She could read sorrow in her old friend’s eyes.

  “No,” Scotty said. “He never even knew Black Hall until Beth brought him there.”

  “Then how?”

  “She met him at the prison, when she was visiting your father. He was there at the same time.”

  “Working there?” Kate asked, her stomach churning to think of her father being connected in any way. “Volunteering?”

  “An inmate,” Scotty said.

  Kate let that sink in. “What did he do?”

  “He got caught selling marijuana. She said your father would talk to him. They had art in common.”

  Kate couldn’t speak. Beth had stayed in touch with their father all along, and even though Kate half knew she had visited him, Beth had understood that Kate hadn’t wanted to hear anything about him. She had cut him out of her life the day she’d learned the part he’d played in those twenty-two hours. Beth had regularly gone to the prison, and she’d met a man there, and now she was dead. Kate felt sick. Her sister had had a secret life, and it had involved her father and another convict.

  Maybe Pete wasn’t the killer after all.

  “Thanks, Scotty,” she said.

  “Kate . . .”

  Kate gave her old friend a quick hug, then walked out of the room. The spicy, pungent scent of basil from Beth’s garden hung in the air. She smelled it when she walked out onto the street, into the bright sun, and all the way home to her loft, and her eyes burned with tears as she thought of all the things her sister had never told her.

  28

  Reid’s search of Martin Harris’s room at Osprey House four days earlier hadn’t turned up anything of interest, but that of the shared bathroom at the end of the hall had. The walls were lined with blue tiles probably as old as the two-hundred-year-old hotel itself—some of them cracked, pieces missing, caulk chipped away. The housekeeper obviously tried to keep it clean, but the mildew created by years of seaside fog and the steam of thousands of showers made it a losing battle.

  The floor was covered with yellowed linoleum. Reid noticed how the corner under the sink was curled up, so he pulled on the edge and found a cache of porn. Whole magazines wouldn’t fit, so pages had been torn out and slid under the loose floor. Reid called for a team to process the scene.

  The pages came from different kinds of publications, from soft- to hard-core porn, suggestive photos of celebrities and models ripped from mainstream magazines, and even photos of models in pajamas and bathing suits ripped from the J. Jill and Sundance catalogs. Among the stash were images of naked women tied up, bound with their own underwear, gagged and blindfolded.

  Because the bathroom was shared by all eight rooms on the fourth floor, and residents from the other three floors could use it as well, Reid couldn’t immediately link the pages to Harris. The state police lab found twenty-two different sets of fingerprints—the Osprey House version of a dirty magazine being passed around a camp cabin—and one was Harris’s.

  Harris had not been sent back to Ainsworth, the state’s highest-security prison, but he was being held at Avery, the local jail on the road between Silver Bay and Black Hall, used to hold prisoners waiting for trial, usually on lesser offenses. Reid had checked his alibi for Beth’s last day; Harris claimed to have been drinking with some Osprey House buddies in the first-floor TV room. Three of them confirmed it, but all three admitted to having passed out drunk, so how good were their stories?

  “This isn’t looking good for you,” Reid said, sitting opposite Harris and Lisa Lewiston, his attorney.

  “I didn’t do anything,” Harris said.

  “Mr. Harris,” Lewiston said, her hand on his arm.

  “I need to tell him,” Harris said. “So he understands. And I’m going to.” He gave his lawyer a stern look. He hadn’t had a drink in the four days since he’d left Osprey House and been held at Avery, and his eyes looked clearer. His voice had an echo of the authority it might have had when he was still a professor.

  “I’m listening,” Reid said.

  “Those were not my pictures,” Harris said.

  “But your fingerprints were on them.”

  “I know.” Harris took a deep breath. “I can’t help what other people do. There are plenty of guys not on parole at Osprey House, and they can buy whatever magazines they want and keep them in their rooms.”

  “But not you.”

  “Right. But not everyone can afford to buy magazines, so when people are finished with theirs, they share. Doris, the housekeeper, wouldn’t allow things like that lying around, so guys tear out the pages they like and hide them in the bathrooms.”

  “Where you found them.”

  “Yes,” Harris said. “I didn’t know what it was at first. I saw the corners of some papers sticking out from under the linoleum, and I pulled them out. Detective Reid, I was shocked.”

  “I bet.”

  “No, I mean, really. I haven’t looked at pornography in twenty years. Since I was arrested. With all the treatment I’ve been through, honestly, it makes me sick.”

  Honestly. Reid kept a straight face.

  “So that’s what happened. I saw the pictures, and I put them right back. It was only that one time. I should have reported it to Robin, or even Paul downstairs, but I just wanted nothing to do with it. Wanted to wipe the whole thing from my mind.”

  “Mr. Harris, do you think you’re in jail because of those pictures?”

  “Yes,” he said, looking confused.

  “They’re just the reason we can put you in jail. But the real trouble is, you had that postcard of the art gallery in Black Hall. You know, the one Beth Lathrop’s family owns.”

  “I told you I just like pretty towns.”

  “Yes, you did tell me that,” Reid said. He opened his briefcase and took out the postcard in a cellophane wrapper. He felt confident but on edge. What Harris had to tell him would make or break the theory that had been growing stronger. “But I’m wondering why you wrote the names Beth, Judy, Alissa, Gennifer, Rose, and Faith on the back? And at the top of the card, the names Pete and Martin?”

  Reid stared at Harris as the blood drained from his face. He pushed the postcard, picture side down, across the table.

  “That is your handwriting, isn’t it?” Reid asked.

  “Hmm,” Harris said.

  “Is that a yes?” Reid asked.

  “Uh, yes.” The professorial authority had gone from his voice.

  “So why do you have Beth’s name at the top of that list?”

  “No reason.”

  “Those others are the names of the women you were convicted of sexually assaulting, right? Judith Lane, Alissa Fratelli, Gennifer Mornay . . .”

  “It’s a coincidence,” he said.

  “So, you sexually assaulted every woman on that list except Beth Lathrop?”

  Harris nodded, looking miserable.

  “We’ll come back to that in a minute,” Reid said. “I see that you’ve put these two men’s names at the top, and you’ve written them in bolder ink. Like you must have really pressed down, to make the names nice and strong. Read me the names, will you?”

  Harris coughed. He looked away, then back at the postcard. “Martin and Pete,” he said finally.

  “Martin and Pete,” Reid said. “Martin . . . that’s you, right?”

 
“Yeah.”

  “So what about Pete? Who’s he?”

  “I guess it’s Pete Lathrop.”

  “You guess? Or you know? Considering you wrote it.”

  “I know,” he said. “It’s Pete Lathrop.”

  “But I thought you said you don’t know him,” Reid said, watching for even a blink that might give him away.

  “That’s true. I don’t.”

  “Never met him?”

  Harris shook his head.

  “So what is Pete Lathrop’s name doing on this list you made of the women you assaulted?”

  “Except Beth,” Harris interjected. “I did not assault her. We need to be clear on that.”

  “Well, let’s say we are. Still, what is Pete’s name doing here?”

  Martin Harris glanced at his lawyer. A little color had returned to his face, two pink patches on his round cheeks. His eyes were full of anxiety.

  “I advise you not to answer,” Lewiston said.

  “But otherwise he’ll think . . . ,” Harris whispered. “And it will be worse.”

  Lewiston shrugged. “I’ve given you my advice.”

  Harris seemed to make up his mind. He sat taller, folded his hands on the table in front of him.

  “I wanted to help you solve the crime,” he said, staring into Reid’s eyes.

  Reid tried not to show his disbelief.

  “And how would you help me?” Reid asked.

  “Unfortunately, from my past behavior, I know too much about people who do . . . things to women. Such as those that were done to Beth.”

  Beth. Reid controlled his breathing. He had been careful about what was reported in the case. The department had held back certain details of the crime scene, including the fact that lace impressions had been left by the force of strangulation.

  “What things were done to her?” Reid asked.

  The pink patches on Harris’s cheeks were turning red. Temperature rising: he’s getting excited, Reid thought.