„The artist was her father, right?“
Riker nodded. „Her rich father. I guess that’s why the whole thing blew over – one headline in the papers, then nothing. Some of the books about Red Winter figured her for a runaway because Daddy was a freak. And some say she killed him.“
„And everyone else in the house?“ Mallory shook her head. „A little girl on a murder spree doesn’t work for me.“
That had been predictable. His partner favored money motives.
„Hey,“ said Riker, „I can only tell this story the way it was told to me. You wanna hear it or not?“
He knew that she did. Her chin lifted slightly, a vow to behave, and she was his old Kathy for a moment, just another little girl sitting around a cop-shop, surrounded by men with guns and human scum in handcuffs.
Riker had sometimes done midget duty in the after-school hours, making sure the tiny, semireformed street thief would not rob the place while her old man had been occupied with more hard-core criminals. Riker had kept Lou’s foster child honest by telling her all of his handed-down family stories from the days of Legs Diamond, Lucky Luciano and Murder Incorporated – murders by the dozen in every tale.
What a deal.
Young Kathy had never gotten such bloody treats at home. Her foster mother would never have allowed it. Gentle Helen Markowitz had always held the strange notion that Kathy Mallory was a normal child, one who might have bad dreams of the bogeyman. What Helen had never understood was that little Kathy had the early makings of the bogeyman’s nightmare.
„Anyway,“ said Riker, „after the raid on the art show, Quentin Winter’s daughter is famous. Everybody, uptown and down, has a theory on what goes on inside Winter House. Then one day, a year later, the cops get a call from another litde girl. She tells ‘em she just got home from the park with her brother, Lionel. The whole house is dead – that’s the way she put it – except for the baby. And the baby’s crying. The litde girl on the phone says her name is Cleo. She was only five years old.“
When Charles rang the bell, it was Sheldon Smyth who responded. The older man had won a footrace to the door, beating a young woman in a maid’s costume, who rushed up behind him with a tray of hors d’oeuvres in hand.
„Not now,“ said Smyth, flicking his fingers at her to shoo her away as if she were an insect. „Hello, Charles.“ He glanced back, satisfied to see the maid in retreat. „Not the best caterers, I’m afraid. Short notice and all.“
Charles wondered why Smyth would tell such a lie. The truck parked outside the house belonged to the most exclusive caterer in Manhattan, one who was booked months in advance and not the sort to do impromptu dinner parties-unless of course, the fee had been doubled or tripled.
With the old lawyer’s hand on his back, Charles was gently but firmly propelled into the front room, and his eyes were once again drawn to the wildly impractical staircase. The architect must have hailed from a school that regarded clients as parasites in the home, only grudgingly deferring to them by allotting space for kitchens, bathrooms and the like. And now he had exhausted every sane rationale for his sudden discomfort. In a less pragmatic part of his mind, he thought the house was hostile. How ludicrous.
At the foot of the stairs was a fully stocked bar, and here introductions were made to Bitty’s uncle. While Charles was shaking hands with Lionel Winter, he felt that his host was missing something – oh, perhaps a pulse. The man was simply not present, that or his personality was in hiding. Given the snow-white hair, the face was younger than it should be, and Charles wondered if the lack of age lines was due to the absence of an emotional life. It was pathos and comedy that creased a face with personal history.
Sheldon Smyth dismissed a young man from the caterer’s staff and assumed the role of bartender. „Let me guess your poison, Charles.“ He poured a double shot of Chivas Regal into a brandy glass. „Neat, am I right?“
„Yes, thank you.“ This was indeed Charles’s usual fare, but he had not ordered Chivas at lunch today. He was given further proof that Smyth had gone to a great deal of trouble over this dinner party, for now he learned that his favorite foods were on the menu. However, the elderly lawyer had not discerned that Charles’s taste in music was strictly classical, though this extended to the vintage jazz that Nedda Winter had played on the radio during his last visit to this house. Tonight, he was forced to listen to elevator music, popular tunes played as boring instrumentals by an uninspired orchestra. Even the tonal quality had changed overnight. The sound surrounded him. He did not have to look at the antique radio to see that the dial was dark, that the music did not come from there.
Lionel Winter made his first attempt at conversation, going on at length about the elaborate sound system that played in every room of the house.
And when Charles mentioned the jazz tunes of the previous evening, his host fell silent and only stared at him.
Sheldon Smyth filled this uncomfortable void, saying, „The ladies should be joining us any minute now. Ah, women – never on time. Well, what’s the use of a grand staircase if you can’t make a stunning entrance?“
And now the ladies were coming, gliding down the stairs in long gowns. The tall woman could only be Cleo Winter-Smyth. Resplendent in a dark-blue gown the color of her eyes, she towered over her daughter.
Poor little Bitty. Her strapless dress of iridescent colors was reminiscent of a disco ball on prom night, and her gamin charm had been destroyed by a gash of lipstick, a rouge pot on each cheek, and hair lacquered into appalling spit curls. Aghast, Sheldon Smyth turned from his daughter to his ex-wife, and Charles wondered if Bitty had been transformed into a circus pony under duress. The tiny woman flinched, needing no more than her father’s expression to tell her how foolish she looked.
Cleo Winter-Smyth resembled her brother, Lionel. Both were tall and fair and absent any human aspect in their eyes. The woman tilted her head to one side, and this was the only indication that she was surprised by her ex-husband’s attitude. Turning away from him, she managed a floodlight white smile for their guest.
During the ensuing small talk of weather and dead burglars, Charles felt more and more ill at ease. Again, he tried to blame this on the staircase that was always in the act of running off to the top of the house. And all those tall mirrors – they picked up each gesture of a head half turned, repeating it in a herd of heads all giving alarm as animals will do when they turn to the sound or the scent of danger. Even the small painting over the bar had a manic quality of stroke and line and color. Between one drink and the next, he learned that Bitty Smyth had grown up in this unsettling house. And so, if there was an easily startled air about her, in her eyes and in her manner, this was to be excused.
Cleo Winter-Smyth lifted her face ever so slightly as she peered into one of the mirrors lining the walls. She spoke to the reflection of another woman on the staircase behind her. „Nedda, I didn’t know you’d be joining us tonight.“
Was there something in her tone that implied the older woman was unwelcome?
Nedda Winter drifted down the stairs in a long black satin dress that called to mind a black-and-white movie from a more elegant era. A loose-woven shawl of silver threads was draped over her shoulders, and her braided white hair served as a coiled crown. She was another paradox of the house. The lines of her gown were sylvan and classical, the lady statuesque, her posture unbowed, and, despite the wrinkles and the hair gone white, the total effect was beautiful. And what quiet authority this woman had, sufficient to reduce Sheldon Smyth to a fidgeting child on best behavior. Her pale blue eyes took in the drastic alterations to her niece. If the sight was unpleasing, she never let on, but, while Bitty was looking elsewhere, Miss Winter glanced at Cleo with mild disapproval. The younger sister would not look at her.
Upon reaching the bottom step, the elder lady inclined her head and extended one veined hand to Charles. „How nice to see you again. I’m sorry we didn’t have a chance to talk last night.“
�
�Well,“ said Sheldon Smyth, „we’ll make up for that this evening.“ And with those words, the occasion of a man’s violent death had been reduced to a previous social event.
Nedda placed a protective arm about Bitty’s shoulders, then guided her niece into the dining room, and the rest of the party followed them to the table.
A waiter pulled out a chair to seat Cleo Winter-Smyth beside Charles. „I met your parents years and years ago,“ she said. „Sheldon and I were enrolling Bitty at the Marshal Frampton Institute.“ Left off this long name were the words for gifted children. „They seemed to dote on you.“
The woman had more grace than to mention that Marion Butler had been a bit old for motherhood. Charles’s birth had been a shock to his parents, a pregnancy so late in life. His parents had died of old age before he was out of his teens. And, yes, they had doted upon him and sent him to schools that would cater to his freak’s IQ. He looked down at his place setting, wondering how he could have forgotten Bitty Smyth among the limited enrollment of the Frampton Institute.
„Stop racking your brain, my boy,“ said Sheldon Smyth. „The moment my back was turned, Bitty’s mother pulled her out of school. I don’t think she attended for more than two days.“
The subject came up again as the first course was being served.
„It wasn’t the right school for Bitty.“ Cleo’s tone was somewhat defensive. „I sent her to a better one where she could make all the right connections.“
„Connections?“ Smyth laughed. „She was a five-year-old, not a socialite.“
Bitty seemed to be growing smaller, sinking down in her chair as she was talked about, but never acknowledged as a person in this room. She was so small, so easily overlooked in a family of giants. Charles imagined her life as a mouse in this house, scurrying from one bolt – hole to another. He waited for her to look his way, then smiled and said, „It’s a pity you didn’t stay at Frampton. We might’ve gotten to know one another much earlier.“
Bitty smiled and spilled her water glass. While a waiter mopped up the table, Nedda Winter nodded her approval of Charles. The subject was closed and peace was restored – for a time.
Before the last entree had been served, the house and all its company, all save Nedda, had begun to wear on Charles. He hardly tasted his food while eating his way toward the final course. Cleo and Lionel’s smiles were flashing on and off like lightbulbs, and, by this odd behavior, he determined that the history of the house was a subject to be avoided. Every foray into this area was sharply cut off and the conversation directed elsewhere.
Odder still was the bond between brother and sister. In some respects, Lionel and Cleo brought to mind an old married couple who could finish one another’s sentences or altogether do away with the spoken word. However, there was no apparent affection between them. They simply came as a set. If you got one, you got the other.
Charles picked up the challenge of cleaving the pair. „Lionel, what sort of work do you do?“
„Work?“
Cleo translated for her brother. „Investments, dear, the stocks and bonds.“
„So you work on Wall Street,“ said Charles in an attempt to be helpful. Oh, wait. There was that pesky word again. Work? Us?
„No, we manage our own investments,“ said Lionel. „But it is time consuming.“
Somewhere between the chocolate mousse and postprandial brandy, the conversation had turned to the subject of fortunetellers. Where this topic had come from, Charles could not say, but he suspected that Bitty had raised it in a small voice and wafted it across the table to her mother, a willing receptacle.
„I’ve had a few tarot card readings,“ said Cleo, „and it was worth years of therapy. But there’s nothing mystical about it. The fortuneteller reads the person, not the cards. Some readers are remarkably intuitive.“
And Charles took this to mean that a fortuneteller had once flattered her. No, that was unkind and in conflict with his heightened sense of empathy. He suspected a wound at the core of this woman, some serious misadventure of the psyche. It was a certainty that she shared this affliction with her brother, hence the odd bond between them. Something had happened to them, some great trauma.
Bitty gulped down her brandy and reached for the decanter, saying, „Aunt Nedda can read tarot cards.“ Out of the entire company, Nedda Winter was the most surprised by this news. Bitty quietly slipped away from the table and left the dining room door ajar as she made her way across the front room, wobbly but stumbling only once.
Upon finally noticing her daughter’s absence, Cleo shrugged her apologies to Charles. „I’m sure she’ll come back.“
„It might be better if she didn’t,“ said Lionel. „She’s had way too much to drink.“ He turned to Charles, saying, „My niece isn’t accustomed to alcohol. The religious life, I suppose. Her current church – “
„Religious?“ Sheldon Smyth pronounced this word as if he had never heard it before. „Bitty? She’s never even been to Sunday school.“
„It’s a phase she’s been going through,“ said his ex-wife, „for the past three years.“ There was a clear comment here on Sheldon Smyth’s apparent lack of interest in his own child.
Lionel turned to his erstwhile brother-in-law. „So Bitty never told you when she joined the Catholics.“ There was nothing in his voice to say that Sheldon’s ignorance surprised him. „Well, that’s old news.“
In an aside to Charles, Cleo said, „Bitty’s a Protestant now – Bloody Heart of the Redeemer, I think. Something like that. It’s a sect – no, actually, more like a cult. Lots of traveling on holy missions to recruit heathens.“
„I’m sure,“ said Lionel, „Bitty finds it a damn shame that the Protestants have no nunneries.“
„It’s a shame they have no confessionals,“ said Bitty, reappearing from behind her uncle’s chair, weaving slightly and producing an awkward silence all around the table. „Imagine a little room where you can take your soul to get it cleaned.“
This comment was met with dead quiet. Charles affected the distance of outsider status. Eyes cast down, his spoon served only to move the dessert about on his plate.
„You’ve had quite enough to drink.“ Cleo was firm and apparently still had the power to forbid her forty-year-old child, for now she moved the brandy snifter far from her daughter’s place setting.
Ignoring her mother, Bitty passed by her own chair and moved toward Nedda in a slow, somewhat unsteady march. She held a boxed deck of cards in her hands. The cardboard was worn with ages of handling and bore a tarot illustration of the hanged man. She set it down on the table before her aunt, as though bestowing a precious artifact. „Maybe you could read the tarot cards for Charles.“
Nedda Winter stared at the deck with a trace of alarm. This might as well be a dead animal that her niece had laid on the dinner table. She was slow to recover her composure, and then she slipped the deck into her lap beneath the cover of the tablecloth. „Not tonight, dear. I’m rather tired.“
„What you need is a good stiff drink.“ Sheldon Smyth rose to gallantly pull out her chair, then led her away from the table, and the rest of the party followed them to gather around the bar in the front room. While the lawyer poured out their drinks, Charles renewed his fascination with the staircase.
„You feel it, too,“ said Bitty, nodding. „It’s haunted.“
He noticed a sudden dismay about her and turned to see what she was staring at – another damned mirror. It was impossible not to encounter one’s self at every turn. Bitty had caught her reflection alongside his own. How he dwarfed her in size. They resembled a sideshow team of giant and midget. She turned her eyes this way and that, finding the same tableau in every direction.
They both looked up to escape the mirrors, and now they shared a view of the winding banister encircling a skylight dome at the top of the house. In another era of horse-drawn carriages and clearer skies, there might have been stars up there.
„Lots of history in this hou
se,“ he said.
„You mean all the murders,“ said Bitty.
Cleo’s smile clicked on slightly out of sync and all for Charles. „I’m sure you know the story of Winter House. Everyone does.“ Glancing back at her daughter, she said. „It’s a tired old story, dear.“
Every pair of eyes was fixed on Charles, reading the stunned surprise on his face. He was recalling a bit of history that appeared in newspapers every ten years or so, the regurgitation of a mass murder for the reading pleasure of the public on a Sunday afternoon.
Oh, bloody hell.
Riker and Mallory should have told him, warned him.
Forgetting his manners, he looked over Bitty’s head to gape at the surviving Winter children all grown up.
„There was another murder that wasn’t famous.“ Bitty addressed Charles’s shoes. „You’re standing on the place where Edwina Winter died. She was Aunt Nedda’s mother.“
He backed up a few steps. „She fell?“ He looked straight up. The body could not have landed in that spot, not after falling down the stairs. The woman must have gone over the -
„Nedda is our half sister,“ said Cleo, as if this might be what puzzled her guest. „Different mothers. And her mother drank quite a bit. Well, there you have it, the oldest family scandal. Edwina Winter was drunk when she went over the banister.“
„My father and his brother, James, saw her fall,“ said Lionel, directing his gaze upward to a large picture hanging on the second-floor landing. „That’s their portrait.“
Charles looked up at the oil painting of two adolescents. Even at this distance, he would call it a very bad piece of work, almost a cartoon.
„Their account wasn’t quite accurate,“ said Bitty.
„Daddy and Uncle James gave the only account,“ said Cleo. „How can it – “
„Quentin and his first wife hated each other.“ Bitty sipped sherry, stocking up on a little bravery from a glass. „I found the divorce papers filed just before Edwina died. They were charging each other with infidelity.“
Winter House Page 9
