by Jane Haddam
And that, of course, was impossible.
The driver pulled through the drive-through at some godforsaken fast-food place, and Gregor got a hamburger and a little bag of French fries. The stuff was so awful, he couldn’t even feel any satisfaction in the fact that Bennis and Donna wouldn’t approve.
He went back to his examination of documents, but the examination always came out the same. There should be the remains of a remote timer mechanism to start the fire, or there should be security tape of somebody entering the pool house just before or after Arthur Heydreich did on the morning the fire started. There was neither of those things.
The car got him back to Cavanaugh Street, and Gregor got out just as people began wandering out of the Ararat in little clumps. With his luck, Bennis would already have eaten. He did not count what he had done as eating, and he didn’t think anybody else should, either.
He paid the driver and made arrangements for the morning. Then he walked down the street toward the restaurant. Donna had been active while he’d been out and around. Her own house was neatly done up as a gigantic Thanksgiving turkey. Most of the other houses on the block had little dangly things of turkeys and pilgrims and Indian corn. Whatever had happened to Indian corn? It had been a staple of public school Thanksgiving decorations when he’d been growing up. He couldn’t remember seeing it for years.
He got to the Ararat and walked in, looking around the tables to see if he recognized anyone. In the morning and for most of the afternoon, the Ararat was the special province of the people who lived on Cavanaugh Street, but in the evenings they got a tourist trade, and they were very happy with it. Tourists meant money, and money meant a family restaurant that was not going out of business anytime soon.
Tibor and Bennis were sitting at a small table against the wall. Gregor almost missed them because he didn’t expect to see them outside the window booth. There they were, though, Bennis leaning against the wall at her side, having coffee.
Gregor made his way to the back and looked around for a chair. There wasn’t a single empty chair anywhere.
“Ah,” he said, when Linda Melajian came running out to him. She had a chair in her hand, and she looked flustered.
“It’s because it’s for you,” she said, “but you know how my mother is. There are fire regulations for capacity—”
“Oh, I’ll take him home if you’re going to have a problem,” Bennis said. “I feel like I’ve been here all night as it is.”
“No, no, we’re just going to have to pull a chair from one of the tables when somebody leaves. With any luck, there won’t be a line, or there’ll be a couple in the line, or something. Gregor, do you know what you want to eat? Should I give you a menu?”
Gregor considered the hamburger from earlier in the evening. There were very few things in the world that could make him want to eat green vegetables. That hamburger was one of them.
“You could get me an Armenian salad and a cup of coffee,” he said. “Unless that’s too complicated.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Linda said. “It’s been an incredible day, let me tell you. And you’ve been on the news.”
Gregor looked at Bennis and Tibor. Tibor said, “It was not you per se, Krekor, it was that woman who is missing. They had a picture of her and then a little story about the investigation. And you were mentioned.”
“Well,” Gregor said. “I suppose that’s good news. Larry Farmer was telling me the truth about getting out an all-points bulletin. I’ve had an incredible day, too. I’ve been lied to, yelled at, accused of almost everything you can think of, and I’ve only just reached the conclusion that Sherlock Holmes was right. I want you to look at this.”
He took his own homemade map of Waldorf Pines out of his briefcase and put it on the table.
“Who lied to you?” Bennis asked.
“A woman who calls herself Caroline Stanford-Pyrie told me that she recognized the manager of Waldorf Pines, a man who calls himself Horace Wingard, because she’d seen him once being processed at a police station in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, during spring break. She was there getting her own son out of jail.”
“And you knew that was a lie?” Bennis said.
“Of course I did,” Gregor said, “and if you don’t, you’ve never been at spring break. But whether you’ve been or not, you’d know that they don’t take down the information about what your father does for a living when you’re being arrested for being drunk and disorderly. I do not as yet know where she recognized him from, but since she gave me that story while trying to divert suspicion from herself after she’d been discovered to have paid one of the murder victims twenty-five thousand dollars in cash in blackmail money, I’m going to find out.”
“Right,” Bennis said. “Are you going to be okay?”
“I’m fine,” Gregor said.
Linda was back with his salad. He took it from her and shoved it over to the side of the table so that he was able to look at his map.
“Take a look at this,” he said. “This is Waldorf Pines. On the night of the murders, the security camera system went down between ten forty-five and half past twelve. They didn’t break, you understand. After twelve thirty, they were operating normally. They were operating when Arthur Heydreich went into the pool house the next morning. They just stopped working for that particular period.”
“Well,” Bennis said.
“There’s no ‘well’ about it,” Gregor said. “The cameras are not secure. The master switch that turns them on and off is right inside the door of Horace Wingard’s office. Horace was there late and alone, but he went in and out often, and he never bothers to lock that door. Well, he wouldn’t, of course, if he was in and working.”
“And that means?”
“That means,” Gregor said, “that somebody who was in the clubhouse that night walked into Horace Wingard’s office when he wasn’t there and turned the cameras off. And then, an hour and forty-five minutes later, that person came back and turned the cameras on again.”
“And nobody saw this person? Ever?”
“Everybody saw this person. It just didn’t matter, because there was nothing out of the ordinary in seeing him. Or her. Nobody saw this person going in or out of Horace Wingard’s office, or actually throwing the switch, but the chances that that would happen are small anyway.”
“All right,” Bennis said.
“During that two-hour period,” Gregor said, “somebody saw Martha Heydreich walking with Michael Platte on the golf green. Other people were wandering around. But that’s not the kicker. The kicker is this: On the morning Arthur Heydreich found the bodies, the security cameras trained on the green show nobody else going into the pool house. What do you think of that?”
“Maybe whoever committed the murders stayed in the pool house all night,” Bennis said. “Then, you know, the next morning—”
Gregor took the coffee cup and half drained it. “I suppose that’s just possible, but that’s not what happened.”
“What happened?”
“Exactly what was supposed to,” Gregor said. “And that’s what makes me so angry.”
FOUR
1
Martha Heydreich’s picture was all over the news. This was not so surprising. It had already been all over the news, on the days after the murders were discovered, when everybody was convinced that the second body had to be hers. Fanny Bullman still found it hard to watch. The news stories were so different now. And there was something that just felt so … wrong about the whole thing. Fanny tried to think of Martha Out There, Somewhere. She came up blank. She’d never been able to understand Martha at the best of times. Now, the woman just seemed bizarre. Characters in books did the kinds of things Martha was supposed to have done. Characters in movies did them. People who lived in places like Waldorf Pines just got up and went to work and did the chores and thought about sex.
There were no chores to do in the house now. Everything was quiet. Dinner had been made and eaten and th
e dishes put away. Homework had been done at the dining room table and carefully checked. Clothes had been chosen and fought over and laid out in the bedrooms upstairs for tomorrow morning. Debris had been picked up in the family room. Three dropped socks had been picked up from the stairs. The children were settled in for the night in their beds, even if they weren’t asleep. The lunch boxes were set out on the counter in the kitchen, waiting to be filled in the morning. No matter what happened, or when it happened, or how it happened, life in a place like Waldorf Pines was always the same.
Fanny went to the sliding glass doors of the family room and stepped out onto her deck. Across the way, she could see lights in Arthur Heydreich’s family room. He had the curtains open over there. It could have been any night anytime anywhere. It could have been last July, except that it was definitely getting colder, and Fanny felt a little frozen standing on the deck in her bare feet.
She went back into the house and locked up. She went to the front door and made sure that was locked, too. She thought about all the things that could possibly go wrong. There were a lot of them.
Fanny looked around her foyer. There was nothing there. There was nothing anywhere. She went up the stairs and into the hall and down the hall to the master bedroom. Josh was sleeping. She could hear him breathing. Mindy was humming something to herself.
Fanny closed the master bedroom door behind her and looked around. Her parents had never had a master bedroom like this, even though they had always had much more money than she and Charlie did. Her father always said a house like this was not worth the trouble it caused. Fanny did not think it was the house that had caused the trouble.
She went to the back of the master suite and into the little hall with the walk-in closets on both sides. She opened Charlie’s closet and stared at the things inside. There were clothes there. There were shoes there. There were belts and ties and cuff links and handkerchiefs and a little stack of pajamas that Charlie never wore. There was a built-in drawer full of boxer shorts. Three times a week, Fanny washed all the clothes and ironed them and folded them and put them up here in their proper places in their proper closets. If she opened the closet on the other side of the hall, there would be clothes like these in stacks there, too.
Fanny walked farther into the closet and looked around. She reached out for the suit jackets on the hangers and pulled at them. Suit jackets fell to the ground. She pulled at more. More fell to the ground. Suit pants were still hanging, still folded over the hanger arm where they had been hidden under the jackets. Fanny pulled and pulled and pulled some more. She pulled until all the suits, the pants as well as the jackets, were on the floor.
The heap of clothes at her feet looked awful. They looked like the aftermath of a fire. She reached out for the ties and pulled half a dozen of them at once. The ties fell to the floor on top of the suits. She opened the built-in drawer and took out the boxer shorts in big stacks. She put her hands on the handkerchiefs and tipped them over. They cascaded past empty hanger rods and landed on top of everything else, spilling out, being somehow too white next to everything else that was around them.
I could light a fire here, Fanny thought. I could take a match and drop it on these clothes, and they would burn. Nobody would see me do it. There are no security cameras here. I wouldn’t need kerosene or gasoline or any of that stuff. I wouldn’t need anything but an ordinary kitchen match.
And nobody would be able to tell.
Fanny thought about the fire in the pool house. She hadn’t seen the aftermath of it, of course. Nobody had been allowed inside once the firemen and the police got there. Still, she could imagine it. Nail polish, the news had said—it was nail polish that had made that fire burn so brightly. Maybe no fire burned that hotly unless there was something to make it worse than just an ordinary fire would be.
Fanny looked down at the pile of clothes on the closet floor. Then she turned away and headed out of the master bedroom again. She went down the hall—Josh still snoring, Mindy still singing—and down the front stairs. She went back into the kitchen and opened the cabinet under the sink. There was a big box of garbage bags in the cabinet, the kind of garbage bags that came in rolls of a hundred or more. She took one out. She thought about it. She took another. Then she headed back upstairs.
Back in the master bedroom, Fanny threw one of the bags on the floor and kept the other. She went into the closet and opened the bag as widely as she could. She knelt down and started stuffing clothes into the bag, one handful of them after the other.
When the bag was full there were still clothes on the floor, and there were the shoes. She had forgotten about the shoes. She was out of breath, and no matter how hard she worked at it, she couldn’t stop herself from shaking. People did things like this all the time. They did them in real life and they did them in movies. How did they get through it without dying?
She got the other bag and started throwing shoes into it, one pair after the other. They fell into the back and hit the floor beneath it with a thud. Fanny wished she could just breathe, just a little. She wished she had the courage to start a fire. She could throw a match on all this and then get the children and get out.
She tried to visualize the world made perfect, the world with all her problems erased. She saw only the memory of a bumper sticker: FORGET WORLD PEACE, VISUALIZE USING YOUR TURN SIGNAL.
The bag was full and the clothes were almost all gone. The clothes that were left on the floor were not important enough to pick up.
She had no idea what to do next, or why she would want to do anything.
There was a noise in the room and she looked up to see Mindy standing in the doorway.
Mindy was wearing Strawberry Shortcake pajamas. She should have been carrying a Teddy bear, but she wasn’t. Mindy didn’t go in for teddy bears. She only wore Strawberry Shortcake because she liked the color.
Mindy looked down at the two enormous black trash bags full of clothes and said, “Everybody at school says Daddy is dead.”
2
Eileen Platte had been in the hospital most of the day, and most of the day she had been in this room, which was very carefully designed to have nothing in it that she could use to try to kill herself again. She had tried to tell the psychiatrist they had sent in to see her that she hadn’t really been intending to kill herself, no matter what it looked like. Yes, she had stood on the chair. And yes, she had made a noose from a rope she had found in the garage, a rope Stephen and Michael had both used at one time or the other, to lash things to the roof rack of the bigger car. Of course, they weren’t cars anymore. That wasn’t what you called them. They were SUVs, or trucks, or “recreational vehicles.” Eileen couldn’t keep track of it all anymore. It made her tired.
For a while this afternoon, she had been able to hear Stephen, his harsh, booming voice traveling down the hall, saying things that should have embarrassed her.
“Always been a little off her nut,” was one of the things he said, and “telling the police crazy stories that are likely to get me arrested.”
It was obvious, though, that he hadn’t been arrested. She didn’t see why he ought to be. If they were going to arrest somebody, they should arrest her. Wasn’t it always the mother’s fault if the child turned out badly?
That was what she had been thinking about, sitting here all these hours. Michael had turned out badly. That was the conclusion she had reached this morning. But if Michael had turned out badly, it had to be for a reason. People were not just born bad. She must have done something. She must have said the wrong thing at the wrong time and turned some switch in his head, and now she ought to be grateful that it hadn’t been worse.
“He’s going to say I imagined it,” she told the psychiatrist. “He’s going to tell the police that I just made it all up, that it never existed, that the shoe box never existed, that the money never existed. I think he wants to keep the money. I think that’s what that’s about. He kept the money he found before.”
The ps
ychiatrist hadn’t said anything. Eileen had read enough women’s magazines to know that he wasn’t supposed to. She wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do.
“The other money wasn’t so much,” she said. “It wasn’t any huge amount. It was just a couple of thousand dollars. And there was a key. Gregor Demarkian asked me about the key, but I didn’t tell him. I didn’t lie, but I didn’t tell him. It was Martha Heydreich’s key. Stephen didn’t find it.”
The psychiatrist still said nothing, and Eileen found herself drifting off. It was very peaceful, sitting in the chair the way she was. She felt as if she were floating in a vast ocean, and nothing and nobody would ever be able to find her. She would float away, and when she had floated away far enough, there would be mermaids singing. There were mermaids in the Odyssey. There were mermaids in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” She had never paid enough attention in school.
When she got back to her room, the sun was shining. There were birds making fretful noises outside her window. They had given her a pill. It had made her sleep. She lay down in her bed and drifted off again.
Here was something she liked more than any of the rest of it. She liked the way this made her feel that she could sleep and sleep, sleep and sleep, forever, without anybody being able to wake her up. She would be like a princess in a tower, and some day a prince would come to kiss her awake. What she really wanted was for no prince to come at all. She would just sleep. And if a fairy godmother ever asked to know where she was, people could say that she’d left on vacation, and never come back.
Stephen’s voice at the end of the hall had been strident, insistent, a little panicked.
“She tells all these stories,” it said. “She tells them and she has no idea whether they’re true or not. She tells them and then she can’t remember if she made them up or not, and then everything goes to hell.”
