by Nancy Martin
I cast her a glance and noticed that Libby’s complexion was pinker than usual. “You sound a tiny bit jealous. Or have you enjoyed the company of a doctor yourself in the last twenty-four hours?”
Libby fluffed the fur trim on her coat and sat down at the table. “I may have met a perfectly nice gentleman, yes.”
“Did you play spin the bottle with Dr. Quartermaine last night?”
“Don’t blow a gasket, please. I’m entitled to a sex life.”
“Sex life? My God, you met this man yesterday and immediately took him home to your bed?”
“Of course not! Not with the children in the house. Good grief, what kind of mother do you think I am?”
“One who wants to try Tantric sex before menopause.”
Serenely, she stirred her coffee. “I do, as a matter of fact. I’m not made of marble. But that has nothing to do with Melvin.”
“Melvin? Why do I have a bad feeling about this?”
“I have no idea. He’s interested in my goddess ambitions, and was extremely polite the whole time we were together. Not to mention generous. He bought me these boots when we left the hospital, so I invited him for dinner. Do you need help with that animal?”
From a safe distance, she watched me struggle Spike into a bath towel and wrap him up before he could fight himself out of captivity.
Buffing Spike while he attacked the towel, I said, “You have no willpower, Libby.”
“We had a perfectly innocent evening! We discussed medical matters. For example, Melvin says it’s important for me to maintain my weight while I’m nursing. He was firm about that, especially when he saw how much milk the baby requires and the quantity I’m donating to the milk bank.”
My suspicions were instantly aroused. “Melvin watched you nurse the baby?”
“He’s a doctor, for heaven’s sake. He had dinner with us. Well, the kids had pizza in front of the television while Melvin and I had the dining room to ourselves. It felt very festive. I even lit candles. Bayberry scented.”
“And then?”
“Nothing. Really. He stayed while I took care of the baby, and we had a very pleasant discussion. Do you know how hard it is to find a man you’d actually spend more than half an hour with? Of course you do, if you ended up with—Well, we might see each other again. He was very forthcoming about medical subjects—things I’d never dreamed I should be thinking about.”
“Such as?”
“Discipline, for one thing. He thinks I’m too permissive with the children, but he believes I can improve.”
Anybody who thought he could inch Libby closer to becoming a more disciplined parent had my vote.
I put Spike on the floor. He headed straight for the pond and began to splash in the shallows. I pulled my envelopes and photos out of a kitchen drawer and put them on the table in front of Libby. “Take a look at these.”
With astonishment, Libby stared at the photographs of Tim and me. “What’s going on? Are you seeing Tim Naftzinger now? You make a nice couple, but—well, together, you’re like the walking wounded or something.”
“I’m not seeing Tim,” I snapped. “Read this.”
She scanned the blackmail letter. “Trooble? What’s trooble?”
“Read it again.”
Eventually, Libby caught on. After an explosion of omigods, I calmed her down by pointing out the past-due date on the letter and explaining my theory.
“I’m not the only person who received a threatening letter like this.” Without mentioning Claudine’s name, I told my sister about the other blackmail scam I’d heard about, as well as Lexie’s suspicion that more blackmail was occurring in our social circle. Then I asked, “Are these envelopes like the one you saw with Rush’s body?”
“Yes, they are. Except his had been folded in half.” Libby struggled to absorb the deluge of information. “But Rush was such a nice man. He wouldn’t misspell a simple word like trouble.”
“Unless he was dyslexic, which Delilah Fairweather says he was.”
Libby smiled with pleasure. “How is dear Delilah? I haven’t seen her in ages!”
“Focus, Libby. This is important. Do you see what it all means?”
Libby frowned at the photos again. “I get it. You think Rush was blackmailing people and somebody killed him for it!”
I showed her the extra white envelope. “That’s my guess. Except I found a slew of these envelopes in Kitty Keough’s desk drawer.”
Libby looked confused. “What does Kitty have to do with anything?”
“I don’t know yet.”
We were prevented from discussing the matter further by the arrival of another car in my driveway. I told Libby to hide the evidence in a drawer, and I took Spike into the pantry to make sure he couldn’t stage an ambush.
Detective Bloom was at the door when I came out of the pantry. Libby had greeted him with an offer of coffee, which he politely refused.
“Good morning,” I said. “This is a surprise.”
“I’m sorry to bother you at home.” He glanced around the cavernous kitchen. “This is quite a place. I had no idea you lived like this.”
Blackbird Farm had a way of astonishing first-time visitors. The massive house had been built by my ancestors two hundred years ago out of fieldstone dug from the fertile farmland that stretched along the Delaware River. Twin oaks that had shaded William Penn when he dropped by for a picnic still towered over the front yard, and the split-rail fences ran more than half a mile along the riverfront. The house itself had eight bedrooms, two parlors, and a dining room where John Adams had dined during the yellow fever outbreak of 1793 and Teddy Roosevelt wolfed a quick dinner after buying a horse from my great-great-uncle Blackie. There was also a rambling assortment of added-on rooms—some of them still unheated—that generations of Blackbirds had needed for purposes of privacy, entertaining or subterfuge. There were no cellars where runaway slaves were hidden, but my great-great-grandfather had supposedly concealed a mistress from his wife for four months in one of the attics.
The kitchen was adequate for preparing a banquet for fifty, with a scullery, larder, laundry and a butler’s pantry large enough for storing several sets of china and glassware in the glass-fronted cabinets. The kitchen’s chandelier had come from France, and the Aga was the size of a rhinoceros. The basic decorative scheme was decrepit opulence, including fusty toile curtains that depicted the ravishment of shepherdesses by Frenchmen in powdered wigs.
Detective Bloom seemed surprised to find me in the faded splendors of Blackbird Farm.
“Wow,” he said. “Did George Washington sleep here?”
“For all we know, he’s still upstairs,” I said. “Come in.”
“That’s a lot of water.”
The pond was now a lake that reached the middle of the kitchen floor and seemed to be inching toward the butler’s pantry.
“We’re going to break out our bathing suits soon,” I said.
Spike threw himself at the pantry door with a frenzy of barking, furious that he couldn’t properly greet our guests.
Over the noise, Bloom said, “I’m glad you’re both here. We need to talk.”
Through the doorway behind him came two uniformed officers. I realized Bloom was not giving off his usual aura of a boy who wanted to invite me out to the playground to trade baseball cards.
“What’s this about?”
“Your sister Emma.”
Libby sat down at the table with a cry. “What’s wrong? Is she—? What happened?”
“She’s missing. She left the hospital sometime during the night.”
“Oh, my God!”
“She left?” I repeated. “She had a police guard!”
“Yes.”
“Did she leave, or was she kidnapped?”
“There are no signs of coercion. We believe she departed of her own free will.”
Libby said, “You were watching her! The police had her surrounded in that hospital room. You had armed guards ma
king sure she didn’t go anywhere.”
Bloom visibly controlled an urge to respond to the accusation. “She isn’t in our custody, and we’d like to know where she is. For her own safety.”
“She isn’t here,” I said.
Libby said, “She could be in danger!”
Bloom continued to look at me. “We’d like to look around your house, if we may. To make sure Emma is all right.”
“You think I’m harboring a fugitive?”
“It will only take a few minutes.”
“Do you have a search warrant?”
“I felt sure you wouldn’t want us to wait for a warrant. We’re as concerned about her as you are.”
“Bullshit,” said Libby. “You’re going to arrest her.”
Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. Emma was missing. Detective Bloom guided me to a chair, and I sat down hard. He pushed my head between my knees.
I heard Libby arguing with him. “You can’t barge in here without a warrant. I watch Law and Order. You need a judge’s permission to come in here with your storm troopers. Look what you’ve done to my sister! Nora? Nora, are you all right?”
“Go look around,” I said from between my knees. “Look anywhere you want. She isn’t here.”
“Don’t let them, Nora. You should never let the police in your house.”
“Emma’s gone, Libby. We need to find her. The sooner they figure out she’s not here, the sooner they’ll go looking in the right places.”
“Why don’t you go upstairs with the officers, Mrs. Kintswell? You can supervise their movements. I’ll take care of Miss Blackbird.”
He went to the sink and ran some tap water into a drinking glass. Libby led the other two officers out of the kitchen, warning them to keep their boots off the carpets. Spike stopped barking and began to dig. I could hear his claws scratching at the stone floor inside the pantry. I hated being such an emotional idiot.
Bloom came back and pushed the glass into my hands. He sat down at the table and watched me take a tentative sip.
When I could speak, I said, “When did she escape?”
Bloom’s tone was much less formal without Libby or his colleagues listening. “Between one and two in the morning. She must have walked out when the nurses were busy with another patient.”
“Where was the guard?”
“The officer on duty received a phone call that his car was being vandalized in the parking lot. Which turned out to be false.”
With my head still spinning, I squinted at Bloom, trying to make sense of what he’d just said. “A phone call about his car caused him to leave his post? That sounds suspicious.”
Bloom shrugged. “We’re a small police force. We hire moonlighters for duty like this. It was his private vehicle, and he felt it necessary to check.”
“Who phoned him?”
“We don’t know.”
From Bloom’s grim expression, I gathered one moonlighter was out of a job. I said, “Did Emma leave alone? Or did somebody help her?”
“I thought you might have information on that subject.”
“I was here last night.”
“Can you prove it?”
“I was on the telephone for a while. You could—No, I guess not.”
Bloom watched my face intently, and I saw that he had managed to combine two high-profile cases into one illegal search of my house. The detective said, “He’s still out of the country?”
“If you mean Michael, yes.”
“And you talked to him last night? Do you know where he is? Or what he’s doing?”
With a quick flame of anger suddenly warm inside me, I said, “I know he wasn’t at the hospital helping Emma tie bedsheets together so they could climb out a third-story window, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Do you have any idea who might have helped her?”
“If Emma wanted to get out of that room, she could have done it all by herself, Detective.”
“So where is she now?”
“Her apartment?”
He shook his head.
I said, “Maybe she just wanted . . .”
“A drink?”
“Some fresh air.”
He continued to look grim. “Nora, this is a serious situation. We didn’t arrest Emma earlier because she was hurt. But her escape combined with some other evidence is enough.”
He took a sheet of paper from his coat pocket and unfolded it. On the page were three photocopied pictures.
I didn’t want to look.
But Emma’s image drew me at once. She had always been the beautiful sister, the one whose face was truly arresting when captured on camera. Her smoky blue eyes had a soft, sensual flicker in them as she put her arms around a man’s shoulders.
Rush Strawcutter’s shoulders.
Rush, looking more handsome than in real life, smiled awkwardly down at my sister, who sent a quiet, sexual message back up at him. By the angle of the photograph, it was difficult to be sure, but she appeared to be naked.
The second and third pictures were equally unclear about her lack of clothing. But the aesthetics were the same as the first. They were romantic pictures. Soft focus, with a greeting card quality.
The same photographer had captured me with Tim Naftzinger.
“Where did you find these?” I asked.
“Three separate photographs were in Rush Strawcutter’s coat pocket when we went through his clothes. We’re keeping the originals for evidence, of course.”
“Who took the pictures?” I asked.
“I hoped you would know.”
I turned the photocopy facedown on the table. “They’re very pretty.”
For a moment, I contemplated showing Bloom the photographs that had been taken of Tim Naftzinger and me. But I knew Bloom would use the photographs to delve into my life—ostensibly to help find the person who was blackmailing me. He’d use that excuse to dig into the people around me, including Michael Abruzzo and, by extension, his family.
I decided to play dumb. “What do the pictures mean?”
“I don’t know yet. But I have an idea. I hear your sister is having trouble making ends meet.”
“The economy has been tough for everyone.”
“She rides horses for a guy who uses her sporadically. I understand she teaches riding lessons to teenage girls sometimes, too, and coaches other people. But that’s hardly enough income to live on.”
“What does this have to do with her disappearance?”
Gently, he said, “Her landlord says she’s a couple months behind in her rent.”
Suddenly, I knew where he was headed. “If Emma needs money, she has property she could sell,” I said. “We all received something when our parents left the country. I got this house, Libby got all the family furniture, and Emma received the collection of paintings the family accumulated. She could sell one and pay her rent for the next ten years.”
“Why doesn’t she?”
“We have trouble parting with anything that comes from the family,” I admitted. “It’s stupid, maybe, but it’s true. I could afford to fix up this house if I sold it, but you see the catch-22. I don’t want to lose the house. Emma doesn’t want to break up the art collection either. It’s worth more than money to us.”
He glanced around the kitchen, which could have passed for the cavern of an epicurean vampire. “So you’re all broke.”
“Essentially, yes.”
“So maybe Emma has a few leaks to fix, too.” He gestured at the water pooling on the floor. “If she doesn’t want to sell anything, maybe she’s looking for another source of income.”
I tried to summon up some indignation. “What are you suggesting?”
“Just that your sister could have hired a photographer, might have tried to make some money off her rich boyfriend.”
“My sister is not a blackmailer.”
“Are you sure?” Bloom reached for the paper and turned it over so I could see the photographs again. “I think she
found an easy way to shake down a guy for a few bucks.”
Coldly, I said, “I hate to ruin your theory, Detective, but Rush Strawcutter was even more broke than Emma. It’s common knowledge that he hardly carried enough pocket money to buy himself a cup of coffee. Besides, if Emma were blackmailing him, it makes no sense for her to kill him. So which crime do you think she committed?”
For the first time since his arrival, Bloom looked uncertain. Spike gave up digging at the floor and began to claw at the pantry door, growling as if possessed.
“Okay,” Bloom said finally. “So maybe it was the other way around.”
“What do you mean?”
“If Strawcutter was the one who needed money, maybe he hired a photographer. Maybe he was blackmailing her.”
“He would have been smarter to pick somebody who actually had some cash.”
“He could have been pressuring her to sell off a painting. And she didn’t want to sell, so she did what she had to do to avoid paying him.”
I wanted to encourage the detective to investigate Rush. Whereas I couldn’t gather enough evidence to prove my theory about him, the police had the resources to learn if Rush had been blackmailing his friends or not. But Bloom had already made the leap I didn’t want him to make: that Emma might have been Rush’s latest target.
“So Emma killed him?” I asked lightly. “You’re back to that theory? You’ve got to choose one, Detective.”
He sighed. Then he picked up the photocopy and folded it in half. He tucked it into his pocket, avoiding my gaze. “Don’t be mad at me. We’re running around in circles, and I thought you might know something that could help.”
“I don’t like your tactics.”
He shrugged.
“You’re still going to hunt down my sister, aren’t you?”
“We don’t have any other leads at this point. Emma’s the key to this, no matter which way you look at it. We need to talk to her.”
“We’d all like to talk to her.”
Bloom still didn’t meet my eye, but suddenly he put his hand over mine on the table and pinned me there. “Nora,” he said. “I’m really not the bad guy here. I can help.”
“You and your merry band upstairs?” I asked. “What kind of mental anguish are they inflicting on Libby?”
