Skeleton Key

by Jane Haddam

  Critical Acclaim for Jane Haddan’s

  Greger Bemarkian Movels

  “A sophisticated style, excellent delivery, and riveting plot

  make this an excellent choice for all collections.”

  —Library Journal on Skeleton Key

  “A real winner . . . Sure to grab readers from the first page. . . . A fine entry in a a fine series.”

  —Booklist on Skeleton Key

  “Bound to satisfy any reader who likes multiple murders mixed with miraculous apparitions and a perfectly damnable puzzle.”

  —Chicago Tribune on A Great Day for the Deadly

  “A rattling good good puzzle, a varied and appealing cast, and a detective whose work carries a rare stamp of authority . . . This one is a treat.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) on Bleeding Hearts

  “NOT A CREATURE STIRRING will puzzle, perplex, and please the most discriminating reader.”

  —Murder Ad Lib

  “Juicy gossip abounds, tension builds, and all present are suitably suspect as Demarkian expertly wraps up loose ends in this entertaining, satisfying mystery.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Act of Darkness

  “An absorbing, good-humored tale complete with vivid characters, multiple murders, and a couple of juicy subplots.”

  —Orlando Sentinel on Bleeding Hearts

  “Go ahead, have this one wrapped and waiting with your name on it”

  —Detroit Free Press on A Stillness in Bethlehem

  “Haddam’s usual deft writing, skillful plotting, and gentle humor… Refreshing and entertaining.”

  —Booklist on Bleeding Hearts

  The Gregor Demarkian novels by Jane Haddam

  Conspiracy Theory

  Somebody Else’s Music

  Skeleton Key

  True Believers

  Available from

  St. Martin’s/Minotaur Paperbacks

  SKELETON

  KEY

  Jane Haddam

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  SKELETON KEY

  Copyright © 2000 by Orania Papazoglou

  Excerpt from True Believers copyright © 2000 by Orania Papazoglou.

  Cover photograph of house by © Bret Morgan/Esto

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-054816

  ISBN: 0-312-97865-0

  EAN: 80312-97865-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  St Martin’s Press hardcover edition / February 2000

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / March 2001

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

  To Bill DeAndrea,

  July l, 1952-October 9, 1996

  who gave me everything important in my life,

  including Gregor Demarkian

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Three

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  In this book, I have given the town of Washington, Connecticut, a police department and a police station it doesn’t have. What it does have is two wonderful resident troopers who have been of great help to me when my car has broken down, my tires have exploded, and I’ve gotten lost on all those back roads with no road signs on them. Omitting them from this book was a judgment call on my part, and I don’t want them to think 1 don’t appreciate their work because I haven’t put them here.

  When this book started, the character of Grace Feinman and the matter of her harpsichord took up much more room and was of much more importance. Grace and her instruments have moved on to another book, but I would like to thank the invaluable help I have received for all things related to early music from Peter Redstone of Peter Redstone Harpsichords in Claremont, Virginia; Claire Hammett of Harpsichord Services of London (U.K.); and especially Igor Kipnis, harpsichordist, teacher, lecturer, and tireless advocate for the harpsichord and all it can do.

  SKELETON

  KEY

  PROLOGUE

  1

  Kayla Anson didn’t know when she first realized she was being followed, but by the time she reached the Litchfield Road, the signs were unmistakable. It was seven o’clock on the evening of Friday, October 27, and the roads were awful. Three days of drizzle had been followed by three nights of below-freezing temperatures. There was patch ice everywhere, black and slick. The sky was cloudless and infinite. The moon was full. Lined up on the side of the road here and there, now that she was beyond the last little clump of houses, were harbingers of Halloween in the country: clothes stuffed with straw to look like corpses, skeletons made of plastic, jack-o’-lanterns with no candles in them, so that their faces looked like visions, etched in black. It all made her wish she had never come out tonight, on her own, even though she knew there couldn’t be any-thing really wrong. Kayla Anson was nineteen and she got followed a lot. People recognized her car. People recognized her, too, from the picture that had appeared in Town and Country and been reprinted in the Waterbury Republican. Next week there would be a picture in the Torrington Register-Citizen and it would start all over again. “Debutante of the Year,” the captions always read, and “the beautiful legacy of a graceful tradition.” It made Kayla want to scream. She wouldn’t have been a debutante at all if she had been able to go away to college this year. She would have been safely settled at Stanford if it hadn’t been for Annabel. And Annabel—

  Kayla slowed a little to get a look at whoever it was who was coming up behind her. For a moment there, she had started to be afraid. Once she saw the vehicle, she relaxed. It was one of those farm things with the big wheels. Kayla had never known the name of them. This one was relatively fast, although most of them were much slower than ordinary cars. Some of them crawled along the blacktop at only a couple of miles an hour, so that traffic got backed up behind them so far it took half an hour to straighten it out after they pulled over to the side of the road. There were dairy farms all over this tiny northwest corner of the state, although a lot of them were moving out You saw stories about it every other day in the local papers. The weather was bad and the soil was rotten and the taxes were much too high. People got tired of holding on.

  This particular farm vehicle was very, very fast. It had come up behind her now and was staying a single car length behind. Kayla squinted into the rearview mirror and tried to get a look at the driver. All she saw were very bright headlights and the dark shape of something vaguely human. The headlights were so bright, she had to switch the mir
ror into night position just to go on driving. The vehicle had that grumbly roar of something with a muffler that wasn’t working properly. Kayla wished she knew what to call it. It was so much easier not to be afraid of things when they had names.

  The problem with all the publicity she’d been getting about being a debutante was that it was also publicity about other things, and the other things could be dangerous. Kayla Anson, only surviving child of multibillionaire venture capitalist Robert Mark Anson and his only heir. Kayla Anson, poor little rich girl, rich girl with everything, rich girl without direction, rich, rich, rich. Once, when Kayla was seven and her father was still alive, she had been almost kidnapped on the sidewalk in front of the Brearley School in Manhattan. She had just come out of the building with her books in a book bag when the long black car pulled up to the curb. She had just turned down the street in the direction of the bus stop when the man got out and came running through the crowd of children toward her. She hadn’t been afraid then, either. She hadn’t even been aware of what was happening. Her best friend at the time, Linda Markman, had pulled her out of the way. The man who was chasing her had gone careening out of control and fallen on his side. After that, everyone seemed to be jumping on him. Kayla had felt only this: that the whole thing was stupid, and that it should be happening to anyone on earth except her.

  The farm vehicle was now only half a car length behind her. Kayla could finally see some things for sure. It wasn’t an ordinary farm vehicle, in spite of the big wheels, because it was made by Jeep. It seemed to be a bright metallic blue. Kayla punched the buttons on her car radio and got Big D 103 FM out of Hartford. The Rolling Stones were singing “Under My Thumb,” but that was beginning to fade. What was coming up next was the Beach Boys doing “Fun, Fun, Fun.” Right up ahead of her on her left was the Victory Independent Baptist Church. The sign out front said: HELL IS TRUTH, SEEN TOO LATE.

  “Crap,” Kayla said out loud. She pressed her foot down on the gas and felt the car underneath her speed up. It was a good car, and it could be fast: a BMW two-door with a German engine, imported, literally. Her lawyers had had it shipped over from Frankfurt in May. She streaked on up the hill in the direction of Litchfield and thought about her mother, who had been so very opposed to the whole idea of Kayla’s buying a car.

  “You could always get someone to drive you,” Margaret Anson had said, in that pinched-face, salt-of-New-England way of hers. “A car like that would only be calling attention to yourself.”

  Some men marry for love, and some men marry for position. In Kayla’s father’s case, it had definitely been for position. Margaret was the last living descendant of two signers of the Declaration of Independence and a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, as well. She had roots in Boston and Connecticut and Philadelphia and social connections everywhere. Kayla had always thought that if her father had lived long enough, he would have divorced and married again, this time for sex. God only knew there was never much to do with sex around Margaret Bell Anson.

  Kayla looked in the rearview mirror again, but the vehicle was still there. In fact, it was closer than ever. She was really beyond it now, on that long stretch past White Flowers Farms with nothing in the way of buildings on it at all. Even the Halloween decorations were missing. No one had thought to come out here to scatter straw corpses on the grass. No one had thought to use this empty place to play a practical joke. No one was walking by the side of the road, hoping for a ride. Kayla felt a thin line of sweat make its way across her neck and swiped at it. She tried looking in the side mirror and got only the vehicle’s headlights. She thought of the way her mother was always trying to get her to carry a cell phone and how she always refused, because she hated cell phones, and because they seemed like such a rich-snot thing to have.

  The Beach Boys had become the Supremes, singing “You Can’t Hurry Love.” Kayla pressed down even harder on the accelerator. She heard the vehicle come up even closer behind her, its unmuffled engine making a sound like spitting nails. This was beginning to feel crazy. If he wanted to pass her, he should pass her. The road was empty. There was nothing holding him back. She tried to pull over a little to the right-hand side of the road, without actually stopping. It didn’t work. He came closer still, and then he bumped her from behind.

  Kayla’s little BMW did a shudder and a jerk. It was incredible that she’d never realized how dark it got out here. Every once in a while there were streetlights, but they seemed to do more harm than good. Mostly there were trees and grass and bits of rock littering the edges of the blacktop. Kayla was sure it couldn’t be all that far to Litchfield from where she was. In Litchfield, there would be lights and people and restaurants that stayed open into the night, so that she would be able to get to a phone.

  The vehicle came up behind her and bumped her again. This time the bump was hard and deliberate. The force of it made Kayla’s back wheels sway as if she had hit an ice patch. She tried to put her foot on the gas again, but when she did the car seemed to go out of control. The vehicle stayed right behind her anyway. Then suddenly it swerved out to her left and came up on her side. Kayla thought it was going to pass. Whoever it was would turn out to be just some local yokel, all pissed off because the rich girl hadn’t been going fast enough on the Litchfield Road. When he got in front of her, she would get his license plate number and be sure to remember it. Tomorrow or the next day she would go into the Department of Motor Vehicles and have his ass.

  The vehicle drifted closer and closer to her on her left. It bumped against her sideways and made the BMW rock madly. Kayla thought she was going to turn over. The vehicle got its nose a little ahead of hers and began to edge into her lane—except that he didn’t have enough room to go there. Kayla couldn’t just slow down and let him in. She couldn’t go sideways in either direction. To her right there was a ditch. To her left there was still the vehicle, flanking her, boxing her in.

  Kayla pumped the horn.

  The vehicle got closer.

  Kayla pumper her horn again, long and loud.

  Up ahead there was a side road, on her right. She had never noticed it before. There was no sign on the road and no lights to light it. It looked like one of those town access things where the paving only went a few feet from the main blacktop and then stopped. Kayla put the flat of her hand on her horn and held it there, letting out a long, wailing shriek. There had to be someone around to hear this. There had to be. This wasn’t the middle of nowhere. This was Connecticut.

  “Crap,” Kayla said again, but this time it was a whisper. She was so frightened, she could barely breathe. The vehicle was coming closer and closer on her left. It hit her broadside again and again. Its wheels were bigger and thicker than ordinary wheels. It didn’t even rock when it hit. The BMW did dances all over the road.

  “Son of a bitch,” Kayla said, and then, because there was nothing else she could do unless she wanted to die right there, she pulled off to her right, onto the dark side road.

  As soon as she had done it, she knew she had made a mistake. It was what he had wanted her to do. He was coming right up behind her. The BMW was not suited for this kind of road. The ruts were too deep and the weeds were too high. She was jouncing and shaking over the un-paved surface. She had lost all semblance of control over the wheel. She tried to remember what it was she had gone to Waterbury for, but all that came to mind was the Barnes & Noble near the new Brass Mill Center Mall, and she hadn’t even gone inside it. She wasn’t thinking straight. She wasn’t thinking. Everything inside her seemed to have frozen up.

  Kayla put her foot on the accelerator to give it one more try, but she was stuck in a rut. Her wheels wouldn’t move. She even thought she heard the sound of a puncture.

  Then the vehicle came up behind her, fast, and smashed into her back end. She was thrown forward in a rush. Her seat belt locked into place. Her horn went off, and only seconds later did she realize she was pressing it.

  “Now what?” Kayla asked the air—and then
she turned around and tried to see who was coming for her, in the dark.

  2

  Margaret Bell Anson had always believed that life had rules, and one of the most important of those rules had to do with the duty a person owed her friends. Cordelia Day Hannaford had been a good friend of Margaret’s until the day she died. They had gone to boarding school together and come out together in Philadelphia, too, because Margaret had been doing a national season. It wasn’t Cordelia’s fault that she had married That Man and been shut away from everybody in Bryn Mawr for decades. It wasn’t Cordelia’s fault that so many of her children had grown up to be psychopaths, either—although, Margaret admitted to herself, you had to wonder about that one. There were two children in jail, from what Margaret had heard, and another one who was some kind of failed academic. The two in jail had both been part of really enormous scandals. It went around and around, in spite of the fact that Cordelia’s husband had been far better off in the family department than Margaret’s. One of the rules Margaret had been brought up with was the one that said Blood Will Out, and it bothered her no end when something made it seem as if it weren’t true.

  At the moment, it was after nine o’clock at night and Margaret wanted to be in bed. What she was doing instead was sitting in her own living room, dressed in a good shirtwaist and a pair of heels, making small talk with Cordelia’s third-oldest daughter. That was the other thing about Cordelia that Margaret had never been able to get used to. She bred like a nineteenth-century matriarch or a welfare queen. She had baby after baby, seven of them in all, so that it wasn’t strange that some of them had turned out badly. Margaret had had exactly one child, Kayla, and she had never wanted to have another. The idea of being weighed down by pregnancy and bloodied by delivery sickened her. She was sure it sickened all decent women everywhere, and that they only put up with it for the survival of the species.