by Lee Harris
“Of course. And it may be a made-up one. But thanks for the hard work, Mrs. Brooks. Looks like you’re not resigning the case after all.”
“It’s in my blood, Joe. What can I do?”
What can I do? was the operative phrase I hear them say all the time on TV. I had the bank and I had the location of their mailbox, both of which Joe’s men would check out. And now I couldn’t think for the life of me what to do next. With Social Security numbers the police might be able to trace the Mitchells’ previous residence, but I suspected they changed numbers as regularly as they changed addresses. I had never encountered a case with so many dead ends. It was a lesson for me. Change your names and numbers and move frequently, and you’re very hard to find. Except a killer had managed to do it.
8
It was an enjoyable weekend. I worked in the garden, took Eddie to the town pool, and watched him regain the skills of last year. He was as enthusiastic a swimmer as his parents, which delighted me. There was no news from any source about the Mitchells, and I had begun to wonder whether their pasts had been so well hidden that they would never be uncovered.
On Saturday, while Jack and Eddie were spending time together, I took myself to the place along the creek where Peter Mitchell’s body had been found. It was farther down the creek than the woman’s and better hidden, just over the town line. His killer had dug a shallow grave, while she had just been pushed under shrubs and then covered with branches, leaves, and other vegetation. The man’s body was discovered after a rain, when his foot, clad in a black sock, began to protrude from the damp earth. A dog, who had stopped and sniffed, motivated its owner to have a look.
By the time I arrived on the scene, four days after the discovery, the crime scene tape and uniformed police were gone. But it had become a tourist site, with a few visitors leaving small bouquets. I listened to the conversation of the people standing around, but it was clear they knew a lot less about the case than I did.
The autopsies could not determine the exact time of the deaths of the two victims, and the medical examiner did not know which person had been murdered first or buried first. The best he could do was approximate, and the time spans he gave were the same.
On Monday, when I was straightening up after a hectic Sunday that had seen my cousin Gene and Eddie running around with abandon, the phone rang.
“Mrs. Brooks?” A man.
“Yes.”
“Hi, this is Larry Stone, the building manager, remember?”
“Larry, yes. Good morning. What’s up?”
“I’ve got someone here I think you should talk to.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. She hasn’t given me a name but she doesn’t want to talk to the police and I don’t blame her. I told her about you and maybe she’ll talk to you. You want to drive over and pick her up?”
“She doesn’t have a car?”
“She came by taxi.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
I had no idea what to expect but it sounded as though the woman might be from out of town. Either that or she was elderly. Anyone else around here would have a car.
I parked near Larry Stone’s office and walked around to his entrance. The door was half open, a doorstop in place. It was going to be a warm day but still possible to get fresh air in the morning as long as the door or window didn’t face due east.
“Mrs. Brooks, hi.”
“Hi, Larry.” He had stood from his desk chair. I looked to the left and saw a slim, fragile-looking girl with dark hair pulled back sitting in a wooden chair near the filing cabinet. She looked at me with curious eyes, but said nothing.
“That’s her. She won’t give me a name. She’s all yours.”
I estimated her age as early twenties. “I’m Chris Bennett Brooks,” I said. “You’re here about Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell?”
“I’m looking for them. I went to the apartment last night and no one answered. I waited until midnight and they didn’t come home.”
I turned to Larry. “What have you told her?”
“Nothin’. I’m not getting involved.”
“Are you their daughter?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you come with me? I’ll tell you all about it. Do you have any luggage?”
“It’s at the motel.”
I said, “Thanks, Larry,” and led the unnamed young woman to my car.
“Where are we going?” she asked in a nervous voice. “I want to stay here and wait for them.”
“They’re not coming back here. We’ll go to my house and I’ll explain everything.”
“They moved again.”
“That’s part of it.”
“I went inside the apartment last night and again this morning. It’s empty. I can’t understand why they didn’t tell me where they were going.”
I didn’t want to tell her in the car, partly because I could not foresee her reaction and partly because I hadn’t prepared myself for this. I was about to inform a young woman that both of her parents were not only dead, but murdered. It was a burden I did not want, but I thought it might be better coming from me than from Larry Stone or the cop he couldn’t stand.
We drove in silence to my house. I left the car in the drive and took her inside. “Would you like something cool to drink?” I asked.
“Water?” she said.
“Sure. Or you could have homemade lemonade.” Mel had given me a recipe and we all loved it.
“That would be nice.” She smiled, and I thought I saw a resemblance between her face and the sketch of Holly Mitchell.
I poured two glasses and led her to the family room. When she was sitting with her lemonade on the table beside her, I said, “Your parents aren’t coming back to Oakwood.”
“Something’s happened.”
“Something terrible. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you. Your—”
“They’ve been murdered, haven’t they?”
And suddenly I was the one who was shocked. “Yes. How did you know that?”
Her lips trembled and she pressed them together. Her eyes were full. “It’s what they feared,” she said in a whisper.
“Someone was after them?”
She nodded, unable to speak. She put her hands up to her face and breathed through sobs. “Yes,” she was finally able to say. “Yes. Someone was after them. I don’t know who, but they did.”
“Miss Mitchell—”
“Ariana. My name’s Ariana.”
“Ariana, you don’t have to talk about it now. I know this is a terrible shock. But when you’re ready, we should talk. The police are investigating the case. I’m an amateur with some experience and I’m looking into it because of a phone call I got telling me there was going to be a body found. I don’t know who it came from or why the woman called me, but I got the police over there and we found the empty apartment.”
“I’d like to wash my face, please.”
I took her to the downstairs bathroom, grateful that I kept a guest towel on an extra rack. I wasn’t sure how to proceed. The proper action would be to call Joe Fox and have him take over, but Larry Stone had said she didn’t want the police called. I felt uneasy keeping her existence a secret, but I didn’t want to betray her. While I waited, I refilled the lemonade glasses.
She was gone almost ten minutes and when she returned, her face looked damp. “Thank you,” she said. “I think I can talk now. I don’t want anything to do with the police. If you promise me you won’t call them, I’ll tell you what I know—and what I don’t know.”
“For now I won’t call them. And the building manager over at the apartments won’t call them either. One of the cops was annoying him, which is why he called me this morning.”
“First tell me what you know of my parents’ deaths.”
I went through it from the moment I picked up the telephone that afternoon in May. I had taken the trouble to write down what I recalled of the conversation so that I would get it right
if I was questioned again by another branch of law enforcement. Jack had intimated that the FBI might be called in at some point, but that had not happened. I brought my notebook into the family room and read to her the conversation as I had recorded it.
She watched me with a face that looked mystified and horrified. “This woman called and said a murder was going to take place?” she asked.
“Not exactly. I wasn’t even sure whether it had taken place or it was going to. Then I heard the explosion and then the phone was hung up.”
“And that’s when you called the police.”
“That’s when I went to the police station to try to get someone to figure out who had called me and from where.”
“I see.”
When I reached the point of the discovery of Holly Mitchell’s body, she began to cry again. I asked her if she wanted to see the sketch and she nodded. She held it with trembling fingers, tears running down her face. “That’s my mother,” she whispered. She ran her fingers over the hardened drops of pink nail polish and I explained where that came from.
“She always had her nails done,” Ariana said. “She said they made a lady of a woman.” She looked down at her own well-shaped nails, glossy with colorless polish. Ariana was also a lady.
I handed her the sketch of the man. I could feel her agony.
“Where are they?” she asked.
“In the morgue, but I don’t know the location. I can find out.”
“I don’t want to see them in that condition. I want to remember them alive. I want to remember them as the active, loving people they were.”
“I understand.”
I continued my narrative, telling her everything I had learned on my own and everything Joe Fox had told me. She asked almost no questions, content to listen intently. Suddenly I said, “Have you had breakfast?”
“No. But the lemonade is fine.”
“Let me give you something more substantial. Juice? English muffin? Coffee?”
“No coffee, thanks. But the rest would be fine.”
I prepared it quickly and gave it to her, setting it on a tray table I kept in a closet. I sat quietly while she spread butter and jam on the toasted muffin.
“The juice is good.”
“It’s real. It’s one of our small pleasures.”
She smiled at that. When she had finished eating, she said, “So you don’t know how my mother died.”
“Not yet. I’ll get a report from the detective in charge as soon as he knows. Things move somewhat slowly here. This isn’t New York with its high-tech equipment and many experienced medical examiners.”
“And Dad had a bullet in him?”
“Yes.”
“So that could have been the sound you heard on the phone.”
“It could have, but more and more I think that’s not what happened. I think they were both dead when the phone call was made. I think the phone call was to alert me—and through me the police—that a homicide had taken place; a double homicide, as it turned out. We’ll never know exactly when they were murdered unless we catch the killers and they tell us the truth. But I suspect the bodies had been hidden before I got the call, and as soon as the call ended, the killer or killers took off. I have no idea where they could be now.”
“I don’t either. But it’s possible my parents knew they were close, which is why they had moved their possessions out of the apartment.”
“It’s possible. I think that might have happened.”
“They always seemed to sense when they got close.”
“Then this happened before?”
“Many times. Well, several times. But they always let me know when and where they were going. I might have been able to help them.” Her eyes teared up. “Now it’s too late.”
“Who were they running from, Ariana?”
She shrugged. “I wish I knew.”
“Did they know? I mean, did they know the name of the person who was after them?”
“I think so. But they kept it to themselves. They didn’t want to worry me any more than they had to.”
“Do you know where your parents worked?”
“My mother worked in White Plains for a small public relations company. She had a lot of experience in that. She had done it in other cities. Dad changed jobs recently and I’m not sure where he worked.”
“Do you know the name of the firm your mother worked for?”
She picked her large bag up off the floor. It was one of those Italian straw slings that can be stuffed and overstuffed, although finding something often meant digging. I watched her dig. Finally, she pulled out a small black book and leafed through the pages. “I have the address and phone number here,” she said. “I wrote it in my calendar on the date of Mom’s birthday. That way I didn’t have to put it under her name.”
“You live a careful life.”
“They trained me to be careful. Here.”
I reached for the book and wrote down the information in my notebook. “Did you ever call her there?” I asked.
“Yes. I probably talked to her a day or so before they . . . disappeared. I remember now that Mom sounded a little funny, as though she might be keeping something from me. She said we’d talk again in a couple of days and I shouldn’t call her at work again. So I didn’t. I called the number at the apartment. They didn’t have an answering machine because they didn’t want people to leave messages. I let it ring and ring but no one answered. It wasn’t the first time this had happened so I assumed I’d hear from them eventually. But I didn’t. I thought about it and worried and finally I called the office in White Plains. I got my mother’s voice mail but that didn’t tell me anything. It was the usual. ‘I’m away from my desk, da-dah, da-dah.’ I didn’t leave a message. Finally, at the end of last week, I called again and someone else answered. That scared me. I realized she might not be there anymore. No one was answering at the apartment, so I came here and went to the apartment.”
“And found it empty.”
“Yes.” It was almost a whisper.
I was about to ask her something when the phone rang. “Excuse me,” I said and jumped up. It was Jack.
“I heard from Joe Fox. He tells me they’re—”
“Quickly,” I said in a low voice. “I’m interviewing someone.”
“In the house?”
“It’s OK. Go on.”
“Watch it, Chris. You never know—”
“I know.”
“Joe says they got back some of the toxicology results and the cause of death of the woman is still a mystery. They’re bringing someone else in to do a second autopsy.”
“That’s surprising. When will it take place?” I glanced toward the family room where Ariana sat almost unmoving.
“Today, I think. Maybe we’ll know something tonight. I thought some kind of poison might show up but it hasn’t.”
“Thanks, honey,” I said.
“Can you tell me who you’re talking to?”
“A kid,” I said, hoping the syllable would not carry.
“A child of the Mitchells?”
“Yes.”
“Who turned up this morning?”
“Yes.”
“You call Joe?”
“Absolutely not.”
There was one of those silences that let me know he disagreed with me. “You know how I feel about holding back information.”
“I do. But for the moment I have no choice.”
“Well, for the moment then, my lips are sealed.”
I hoped the same thing would not be true of Joe Fox’s.
9
“Sorry,” I said, sitting down again.
“That’s all right.”
“Ariana, what I’d like to know from you is essentially a biography of your life: when you realized something was strange in your parents’ lives, what they told you, every place you’ve lived in, where they worked, what you’ve done with yourself.”
“And the reason you want to know all th
is is—?”
“Because somewhere in the past is an event or a group of events that made someone want to kill your parents.”
“Yes.” She didn’t look at me. Perhaps she was considering the consequences of telling me the things I wanted to know. Perhaps it had occurred to her that her parents, these wonderful people whom she loved so much, had once done another person a terrible injustice. She might think that it was better to let the killer go free than to have to own up to her parents’ indiscretions, to allow them to become public.
“If you’re up to it.”
“Chris, my parents were good people,” she said, confirming my suspicion.
“I’m sure they were. You of all people would know. Do you have brothers or sisters?”
She shook her head. “My mother once said something about not being able to have more children.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Where do you work?”
“In Chicago. I went there after college and got a job in a bookstore.”
“I bet that’s fun.”
“It is. It’s a wonderful store, near the university. We get so many interesting people coming in.” She spoke with an enthusiasm any employer would delight in.
“I’ve never been to Chicago,” I said.
“It’s a beautiful city. The lake is so lovely. You can drive along it to all the beautiful towns north of Chicago.” She stopped. “You’re not interested in all this. You want to find a killer. All right. I want to find him, too. I’ll tell you everything I remember.”
I flipped to a new page in my notebook. “Start as far back as you can recall.”
She drank some lemonade and pressed the napkin delicately to her lips. She came across as a well-behaved young woman who had learned the niceties of life and practiced them easily. She was wearing a long beige skirt with the texture of chambray and a matching blouse of the same fabric that covered the waist. The two top buttons were open but she still retained a demure look. Her fingers were ringless but two silver bracelets encircled her right wrist while on her left was a watch that she glanced at frequently. A pair of thin gold hoop earrings adorned her ear-lobes. They were so fine, I hadn’t noticed them till a few minutes ago.
