Cold Case

by Linda Barnes

  I should’ve taken Donovan’s advice, checked in.

  If not for the chaos caused by Manley’s death, I doubt I’d have caught a glimpse of the wood-paneled records room, disguised to look like a library. Surely I’d never have had the opportunity to glance at Beryl’s chart long enough to determine that she’d been a “client” for twenty-seven years. Three years outpatient. Twenty-four residential. A very long interval of rest had carried her through her teens, dumped her at the door to middle age.

  “Put that down,” Jannie said. “Follow me.”

  Twenty-four years rang the coincidence bell too loudly … Had the already disturbed older sister, jealous of the younger Thea’s success, killed her? Had MacAvoy been paid for a cover-up, with the Camerons agreeing to Beryl’s perpetual incarceration as part of the price for his silence?

  A college-like quadrangle separated the buildings. A pickup volleyball game was in progress.

  Inside Hydrangea Court the quiet was broken only by the soothing sounds of classical piano, so acoustically true it could have been live. By this time, a Steinway in each building, equipped with a concert pianist, wouldn’t have surprised me. I wanted to see the glossy brochures this place sent out. I wanted to see a “client”’s monthly bill!

  An image of Pix, so desperate, so full of life, invaded my skull. Would she wind up in an institution, not an eighth so well run as this one?

  The ground-floor rooms were grand, but perhaps the upstairs accommodations were spartan. I’d declined to meet Miss Beryl in the sunroom, insisting that her room would be the only acceptable locale. Garnet Cameron must have okayed it because Jannie unlocked and relocked a door, led me silently to a staircase.

  I felt a slight tickle at my back and wondered if I could overpower the robust Jannie in a pinch and run for the gates, scale them. Just a reaction to locked doors. I’d felt it at the prison, too.

  Jannie guided me down a wide plushly carpeted corridor. Doors to either side were numbered. Fancy hotel with double-keyed RABB locks.

  She stopped at the end of the hallway, clanked her key ring, and entered a corner suite. At first, I thought it was empty. Then I noticed Jannie staring at the bed.

  Beryl’s hair was pulled back from her face, combed and rolled into a chignon. White as snow. She was slack and plump, with pimpled pallid skin. Her eyes had no sparkle, no light.

  Lost, I thought. Her mother said she was lost.

  Beryl didn’t look like either aged portrait of “Thea.” Both of Roz’s efforts glimmered with intelligence, showed liveliness in their widely spaced eyes. I knew that drugs, especially strong antipsychotics, could dramatically change a person’s appearance, adding pounds, puffing features. I tried to see beyond the bloated outline, to find the girl of the early news photos, the one who resembled Franklin more than Tessa. I gave it up.

  She had brown staring eyes, shadows beneath them. Darker than Tessa’s.

  “Hi, Beryl,” I said. “Mind if I sit down?”

  Nothing.

  Jannie made a noise, a polite snort.

  I pulled a chair closer to the bed. Not an institutional chair. Beryl’s sunny room was filled with polished mahogany. Her bed had a flowered canopy. There was nothing remotely institutional in the graceful lines of the furniture. Her own? The chair I sat in was deeply cushioned, slightly worn, comfortable.

  “Have you seen Garnet lately?” I asked, as though we were continuing a friendly conversation.

  Nothing.

  “What about Marissa? His wife.”

  Nothing.

  I gave Jannie a look. If she snorted again, I’d smack her.

  “Do you remember your sister, Thea?”

  Beryl hummed a little tune. Her voice sounded oddly unused, like a kid’s music box opened after years of dusty silence.

  “Is she medicated?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Jannie responded.

  “Sedated?”

  “Mildly.”

  “Is she always like this? Did Garnet Cameron order extra medication for her today?”

  “Mr. Cameron is not a doctor.”

  “And she hasn’t seen her doctor today.”

  Jannie bit her lip. “No.”

  “Because her doctor is Andrew Manley.”

  I used present tense. I wasn’t sure what Beryl absorbed, but I didn’t want to be the one to bring her bad news.

  What had Andrew Manley said about writing, that writing was the way Thea experienced the world, communicated with it?

  Had the two sisters always been so different?

  What had happened to Beryl?

  I should have begged Donovan to come with me. He’d have known what to ask, where to look. Did reputable psychiatrists condone lobotomies? Had they in the early seventies?

  “Has Beryl ever had electroconvulsive therapy?” I asked.

  Jannie shrugged. I was getting extremely tired of her matter-of-fact shrug.

  If this was Beryl—Beryl as she normally existed—she couldn’t have written the new manuscript. Not this colorless woman with dead eyes.

  Could she have written the first manuscript? Had Thea taken credit for it? Why? The girl who’d written Nightmare’s Dawn was sexually precocious. Maybe in another age, in Victorian times, such a child might have been shut away, punished.

  I stared down at Beryl. She hadn’t acknowledged my presense in any way. She hummed tunelessly, moved her fingers rhythmically, in a way that seemed more indicative of autism than schizophrenia to me, but what did I know about such complex labels?

  All I knew was that my questions would go unanswered. Where was she when her sister died? Did she see her die, perhaps help her along in her journey out to sea?

  “Were you jealous of Thea?” I asked sharply.

  No reaction. Nothing. I didn’t look at Jannie.

  Instead I stared at the furnishings. From home. If Beryl could tell me nothing of her earlier life, maybe her possessions would. Surely she’d collected things, written things. A sample of her handwriting might prove interesting.

  I expected Jannie to jump down my throat when I opened a drawer. She didn’t, just stared listlessly out the window. If she’d cracked it an inch, Beryl could have heard the noise from the volleyball game.

  Beryl watched, devoid of curiosity, as if her personal privacy had been violated so often she no longer had the right to any secrets.

  Maybe she had no secrets. Just neatly folded cotton underwear and uniformly pink nightgowns, smelling faintly of camellias, as though Tessa had folded them, or selected the sachet bags. A collection of stuffed bears peeked from one drawer; dolls, some with broken arms, twisted legs, filled another. I kept looking, methodically searching for a diary, a notebook, until I came upon unexpected treasure: a scented wooden box. Large, made of sandalwood, filled with family photos, neatly inscribed on the back. If Beryl had printed the captions, the ink light and feathery, bearing no resemblance to the heavy definite strokes with which Thea had penned her prose and verse, I’d have the answer to one question.

  I lifted the heavy box out of the drawer, arranged it at Beryl’s side.

  “What are you doing?” Jannie asked.

  “Refreshing her memory.”

  “Good luck.”

  “This could take time. No reason for you to stay. Want a cigarette break?” I was sure I’d smelled tobacco in her hair.

  She gazed longingly toward the window.

  “I won’t tell,” I said. “I mean, what’s the big deal?”

  “Five minutes,” whispered Jannie, her hands already patting her pocket. Addiction, what’re you gonna do about it?

  As soon as she left the room, the desire, the compulsion to rid myself of all Manley’s stuff, to dump it in Beryl’s bureau, was almost overwhelming. No. It would be too easy to prove I’d been here, too easy to backtrack his wallet to me. I had to find out if Manley’d kept an office here, better yet a room, a place to stay when he and Tessa were on the outs or playing it cool.

  I took the t
wo sketches of “Thea,” and the written document I’d stolen from Pix, blended them into the photos.

  “Let’s look at these, Beryl,” I said. “Is this your mom?”

  It was labeled Tourmaline Cameron. I’d almost forgotten Tessa’s given name.

  Beryl didn’t seem unhappy or distressed. She hardly seemed there at all.

  “Did you write this?” I pointed at the caption.

  Her whispered “yes” caught me off guard.

  We went through the photo box together, item by item. Garnet and Thea and Beryl as children. “Father, 1962” showed Franklin Cameron as a huge hulking man. Garnet had always looked like his mother. Once, when the kids had been very young, they’d had a spaniel named Beanie.

  I tried out the thin version of “Thea” first.

  “Have you seen this lady, Beryl?”

  She put her hand to her throat, pointed at herself. I wondered if she’d looked like her sister once, before the medication had altered her shape.

  The heavy-set “Thea” got no reaction.

  “Can you read this?”

  I gave her the page I’d taken from Pix, the page “for b.” She read it once, read it again, folded it, and pressed it against her breast. “Mine,” she whispered. “My white ribbons.”

  Jannie entered and with the uncanny skill of prisoners everywhere, Beryl secreted the paper beneath her nightgown, more quickly than I could have done.

  “Getting anywhere?” Jannie asked derisively.

  “There sure are a lot of photos,” I said with a sigh, wanting her to know she was in for an extraordinarily boring time if she stayed.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Guess so.” She watched the volleyball game, staring out the window. I got the feeling that the window was as far as she planned to go now that her nicotine demon slept.

  I went back to the photos.

  They seemed curiously impersonal. I could find no family member missing from the shots. Were they works done on commission? Had a servant taken them, perhaps the chauffeur? Had they been used as campaign fodder, stylishly shot by some public relations maven? “The perfect family picnics in style.” “The perfect family poses at the beach.” “The perfect children play leapfrog on the lawn.”

  Beryl patted her breast. One tear rolled slowly down her cheek.

  “Are you a therapist?” I asked Jannie.

  “No.”

  “A nurse?”

  “No.”

  “Who’ll be her—”

  She cut me off. “That decision hasn’t been made yet. You’d better leave. You seem to be upsetting her.”

  Beryl caught me by the hand, hung on tight.

  Jannie shrugged. “Stay,” she said.

  I righted a photo facedown in the box. A handsome man with laughing foreign eyes, dark complexion. It was a snapshot, but it wasn’t like the others. It lacked their curious formality, looked like it had been held, handled. Its edges had been bent and straightened.

  There was no caption.

  “Who’s this?”

  No answer. What did I expect?

  “Have you seen this man?” I asked Jannie, walking to the window, lowering my voice.

  Beryl followed me with her eyes. Her hands plucked at the sheet.

  “No,” Jannie said. There was some secret satisfaction behind her complacency. She was telling the technical truth, but she knew something.

  “How long have you worked here?” I asked.

  “Eleven years next March the first,” she said as if she’d been counting every day.

  “Who’s worked here the longest?” I asked. “I need to see that person.”

  “You can only visit with Miss Beryl,” Jannie said stubbornly.

  “Don’t give me any crap,” I said.

  “How dare you?”

  “Just get me the right person.”

  “I take it you want to know who’s in the picture.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I could tell you, if you weren’t so rude.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s been a long week. I would really appreciate it if you’d tell me.”

  Her tongue peeked out of the corner of her mouth. She was making up her mind.

  “I won’t tell anyone that you told me,” I said encouragingly. “If anyone asks, I’ll say Beryl let it slip. She does speak occasionally.”

  Jannie drew closer, ready to gossip. “He was a gardener here.” Her eyes were amused, above it all. “The clients often, well, they don’t see men of their own, um, social class, and they get crushes, especially the younger ones.”

  “It’s an old photo,” I remarked.

  “She’s always had it. Since I came. Some days it’s faceup, some days facedown. Sometimes it’s on top of the box. Once I found it in the trash, but I didn’t throw it away. Means something to her,” Jannie said with an elaborate shrug. “I guess.”

  She’s always had it.

  Always dating back eleven years next March first.

  “Does the man still work here?”

  “No.”

  “Did he work here when you started.”

  “No.”

  “How long ago did he leave?”

  She shrugged again. “He was just day labor, I think.”

  “Are there records?”

  “There are rumors.”

  “Yes?”

  “You can see how he’s so good-looking …”

  “I see.”

  “One day he was gone. And the rumor was his past had caught up with him. Can’t have men working around the place with that kind of reputation.”

  “What kind? Was he a thief?”

  “Nothing like that.” She smiled; she was enjoying this, drawing it out. “In his previous position he’d fooled around with one of the lady clients.”

  “Do you think he fooled with Beryl?”

  “Can’t say.”

  “Won’t or can’t?”

  “Unconfirmed rumor,” Jannie said. “What’s that worth in a place where half the people talk crazy—excuse me, I’m not supposed to use that word.”

  She stroked the picture. “Looking like he did,” she went on with a giggle, “kind of like that movie star, you know, Omar Sharif, I always thought he coulda messed with at least half the clients. Don’t I wish he was still here when I came. Coulda maybe messed with me, too.”

  Beryl said, “Come here,” not clear as a bell, but a definite summons.

  Jannie was all over her in an instant. Did she want her pillows plumped? Did she want a glass of water? A doctor to talk to?

  With a curt nod, Beryl indicated me.

  “Give me,” she mouthed, “Alonso’s picture.”

  “Alonso,” I repeated.

  Another tear fell, beading for an instant on her cheek, rolling toward the pillow.

  Jannie, rebuffed, stalked back to the window.

  I whispered, “Trade with me, Beryl, for a little while. Let me keep Alonso’s photo. It’s very important. And you can keep what you have.”

  “Always,” she said.

  “Yes. You can keep the paper always. And I’ll bring Alonso’s picture back to you.”

  “Promise.”

  I promised.

  “Cross your heart and hope to die.” Her voice was like a memory, a ghost of a voice. As I promised, I thought about all the things she’d lost in her life, lost to illness, lost to fate.

  “I’ll bring it back,” I said, making a child’s-promise cross above my heart, sliding the snapshot into my back pocket with my other hand.

  We kept sifting through the photo box; several times I asked Jannie to identify Garnet or Franklin as a young man, so that she wouldn’t fix on the photo of Alonso as the sole item that had caught my interest.

  It was the only photo of a nonfamily member. A gardener who’d been fired from a previous gardening job. Alonso.

  At last I thought the time was right to replace the sandalwood box in the drawer. Beryl had long since released her hold on me. She seemed to be
sleeping, but her eyes were wide and staring.

  “Good-bye, Beryl,” I said. “I’ll visit you again soon.”

  She didn’t react, but Jannie did, with a deep sigh of relief, as though I’d been keeping her from her favorite TV show of the decade.

  Quickly I made a decision. The complex was too vast to search. If it came to court, it would be Jannie’s word against mine. She wasn’t a therapist; she wasn’t a nurse; she’d already taken an illegal cigarette break. I’d take my word over hers any day.

  Bet I lie better than she does.

  “I’d like to see Dr. Manley’s office,” I said, once we were in the hallway, ears buffeted by piano concertos.

  “Wouldn’t you? Well, I could have bounced you half an hour ago. The minute a tear fell down her cheek—”

  “But you didn’t bounce me, Jannie. You like Beryl. You’d like her to get better, wouldn’t you?”

  “Course I would. Who’d like to be shut up for life, even here?”

  “What’s the harm in letting me into the doctor’s office, for two minutes, while you have another cigarette?”

  “You’d take something.”

  “I wouldn’t. On my honor.”

  “Not good enough.”

  “Is fifty dollars good enough?”

  “Let’s see it.”

  I had two twenties and a ten ready in my pocket.

  She could have turned me over to security. I wouldn’t have tried it if she hadn’t taken her ciggie break, if she hadn’t been so gossipy about Alonso’s photo.

  She wasn’t going to risk going over to another building. She could get caught, fired. But she’d give me directions, a key. I should leave the key in the lock, and she’d get it back in ten minutes. Ten minutes. No more than that. Did I understand?

  I did. After placing the good doctor’s wallet and appointment book at the back of his desk drawer, where they could have easily been overlooked, I wiped my prints off every surface I’d touched, and then some.

  Outside I started shaking. That place scared me more than any prison I’ve ever entered.

  41

  I spent too much time trying to locate Mooney, to see if he’d traced the number erased from Thea’s file. No luck at one o’clock, at two, at three. Yes, I was snatching at straws, but why those careful erasures in a file covered with wite-out and scrawling black marker? Had someone wanted to be able to find that number again? Why?