Winter House

by Carol O'Connell

  Charles, however, had nowhere to hide. He stared at the journals as Mallory pressed them into his hands. He shook his head. “Bitty Smyth impressed me as a very fragile personality. Reading her diaries would be rather like an assault.”

  “Read fast and she’ll never know.” Mallory turned away from him to rifle the contents of the closet shelves.

  He sat down on the unmade bed as he took in all the items of the room. Bitty’s interests were not limited to himself. His photographs shared a bit of wall space with the Virgin Mary, and small statues of saints decorated her dresser alongside lipstick tubes and other toilet articles. There was also a collection of equestrian figurines from a young girl’s horse-crazy stage of life, and stuffed bears abounded here. Apart from the religious themes, the underlying decor was that of a teenage girl, who was approximately forty years old.

  He opened the earliest of the diaries and read it as fast as he could turn pages. Even given his skill as a speed reader, this was a waste of time. All the famed diarists in history had written with posterity and an audience in mind, and so did damn near everyone else on the planet. Consequently, the entries were usually absent anything as embarrassing as truth. In a matter of minutes, he was reading the final page of handwriting, small and neat, and not one line to support the idea of Bitty Smyth as an obsessive stalker. “I’m not in any of these diaries,” he said. “Satisfied?”

  “No.” Mallory stood before the open closet, holding a sheaf of papers bound in clear plastic. “This is a Ph.D. dissertation—yours. Think she read it?” Mallory held up a worn sock with a hole in it. “Or did she just want another souvenir like this one?” She tossed the sock into his lap. “Your size, I think.”

  Charles shrugged this off. “Bitty moved on to another obsession two years ago.” He stacked the diaries on the bedside table. “All she wrote about were her religious retreats on the weekends.”

  His Ph.D. dissertation flew across the room to join the holey sock in his lap, and he looked down at the cover sheet of this paper authored before he was out of his teens. The subject was prodigies, his own peer group. Charles rose from the bed, drawn to the wall of framed pictures and another sort of peer group—children ganged by age and social strata. “This one,” he said, staring at the group photograph taken at his tenth birthday party. “This is the connection between Bitty and me.”

  Mallory crossed the room to stand beside him as he pointed to the smirking face of one child in the crowd.

  “That boy is Paul Smyth. Must be a relative. I don’t remember meeting Bitty Smyth as a child, but I suppose she could have been at this party. Though . . . I don’t see her in the picture. Odd. She has the kind of face that never changes—gamine, all eyes. Maybe she was the one with the camera. The shot angles upward, a child’s point of view—a child smaller than the others.”

  Mallory stepped closer to the photograph. “There must’ve been fifty kids at that party.”

  “At least,” said Charles.

  “So you don’t remember Bitty—very distinctive face—but you remember Paul Smyth, the ordinary-looking kid. He was a friend of yours?”

  “Hardly.” All of his childhood friends had been adults. “I didn’t even know most of these children.” This had been a family experiment in social interaction with youngsters of normal intelligence. All such experiments had ended in disaster. Children were so good at sussing out and torturing the alien in their midst, the child with the freakish large brain. “But I knew Paul Smyth too well. He called me Froggy all morning.”

  Of course Mallory would not ask why. So obvious. His bulging eyes did call to mind a bullfrog.

  “Froggy—only nickname I ever had. So that was memorable. It caught on with all the other children that day, and that’s what he wanted. He was setting me up. I figured that out when it came time to open my presents.”

  “He gave you a frog?”

  “A big one.” The huge frog had leapt from the open gift box, initiating a scream from one of the mothers. For six seconds, that amphibian had been the only pet that Charles had ever owned. But then, of course, the other children had converged upon the creature and slaughtered it—slowly—smashing it out of existence under sandals and sneakers and patent-leather shoes. The frog-stomping had been the highlight of his birthday party, for normally the children were not encouraged to kill living things. Later in the day, they had turned their sights on him—froggy number two.

  “All right—back to Bitty.” Mallory picked up the stack of diaries. “She’s a religious fanatic. I think I guessed that. What else can you tell me?”

  Charles absently stared at the stuffed toys on the bed. The teddy bears were quite old. A child—Bitty, no doubt—had loved the small leather noses off their faces, rubbed them all away with kisses. And then there was the little bird hiding beneath the bed, a metaphor for its mistress who shared the trait of extreme timidity. “I can’t believe this woman could kill anyone.”

  “Bitty? Of course not,” said Mallory, oh so casually. “It was the old woman who did the stabbing. Nedda Winter confessed to the first cop on the scene.”

  Charles turned his eyes heavenward. He was not praying. “Then why—” He paused a moment to dial back the frustration. “Why did you put me through this? Invading this woman’s—”

  “Because she’s a stalker.”

  “No, Mallory, that’s not quite it. Try again.”

  “I want you to talk to Bitty Smyth. You said you didn’t know her.” Mallory stacked the journals on a closet shelf. “Well, now you do.”

  He shook his head, but denial was futile. “You set me up!”

  She raised one eyebrow in a silent acknowledgment of Yeah? So?

  “You seriously expect me to make use of this woman’s personal diaries to interrogate her?”

  “She won’t talk to cops. She just throws out quotations from the Bible.”

  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death? Given Mallory’s effect on the woman, that might be—

  “It’s like biblical Tourette’s,” said Mallory. “So just go down there and talk to her. Get her to open up.”

  “I have no intention of—”

  “You do it, or I do it.”

  Her tone implied a threat. No—cancel that—it was a solid promise to do some damage to that fragile little woman downstairs. Bitty Smyth was most likely in shock, and Mallory would be best described as sociopathic on a good day—not that he adored her less for that. And, even understanding that emotional blackmail was Mallory’s idea of sport, he said, “All right.”

  When the door had closed on the detective, a small voice from the darkness beneath the bed said, “What?”

  Charles looked down to see the bird emerge from its hiding place. It limped badly on one leg and could not travel in a straight line, but veered in curving paths and circles. One of its wings was missing a full complement of flight feathers, and the raggedy tail feathers dragging along behind the creature were more proof of a walking bird, hence the cage on the floor to accommodate the handicap of being earthbound.

  He picked up a bottle of pills, the vitamin prescription of a veterinarian. He had nearly guessed the bird’s name—Rags. A second bottle of tablets carried the prescription of a doctor who catered to humans, and this one was filled with sleeping pills. He read the pharmacist’s date, then shook the bottle out in his hand and counted the tablets.

  All there.

  For the past month, Bitty Smyth had not required a sleep aid. Or had she been afraid to sleep?

  The bolt on the bedroom door was a great sturdy thing, thick as a steel cigar, and it had the shiny look of a recent installation. The woman was certainly afraid of something or someone.

  Detective Riker wondered if Miss Winter knew how many mistakes she had made tonight. He decided that a few of those errors must have occurred to her, for their suspicion was mutual as they stared at one another across the kitchen table.

  He smiled. And she smiled.

  “Well,
ma’am—”

  “Call me Nedda.”

  “Unusual name.” And unforgettable to Riker. His younger brother was called Ned. But Nedda was not the name that most people would know this woman by, not even those old enough to remember the lurid tabloid stories. Though given names were often passed down through generations of a family, he was certain of her identity now, and he planned to bludgeon her with it later on.

  “Maybe we can straighten out some of these loose ends,” said Riker. “Then we’ll just pack up and get out of your life.”

  Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.

  He flipped through the pages of a small notebook, as if he might need this reminder. “You had a break-in last week. And, tonight, we find a body in your house—after another break-in. Now the ice pick next to the body—looks like he brought it with him.”

  “But I shouldn’t jump to that conclusion?”

  More pages flipped by. “Lucky guess.” He looked up at her smiling face. “Did I mention that the guy on your rug was charged with three counts of murder? Now what are the odds that we wrap up three homicides and a break-in with minimal paperwork? You see, we almost never get this kind of happy ending. But we’d be willing to buy it if the guy brought that ice pick into your house. Now here’s the problem. It looks expensive. The trim is real silver.”

  “Doesn’t really go with his ensemble, does it? The torn, sweaty T-shirt and all.”

  “Where’s your ice pick, Nedda? We checked the wet bar in the front room. No luck. Maybe you keep it in the kitchen?”

  “No idea, Detective. I rarely drink hard liquor.”

  “So you wouldn’t know if that was his ice pick or yours?”

  “It’s a mystery.” She placed an ashtray on the table as an invitation for Riker to pull out the pack of cigarettes that he had been longing for all night.

  Remembering his manners, he first offered the pack to the lady. “You smoke?”

  She surprised him by accepting one, then bending down to his match flame. In answer to his question, she inhaled deeply and blew a perfect smoke ring. Riker found her entirely too cool for a woman with a houseful of police and a dead body on her living-room floor. He finished his iced tea, then casually perused the written statement that Nedda Winter had signed for the West Side detectives. “Ma’am? Does anybody else live in this house? I don’t see anything here about—”

  “Yes. There’s my sister. Her name is Cleo Winter-Smyth.”

  Riker’s pen hovered over his open notebook. “Is she one of those hyphenated people?”

  “I’m afraid so. My brother, Lionel, lives here, too. But tonight they’re both at the summer house in the Hamptons.”

  “Why don’t we give ’em a call and ask where the ice pick is?”

  “You could leave a message on their machine. They never pick up the phone out there. They have privacy issues.”

  Riker turned toward the sound of heavy footsteps from the hallway. He was surprised to see the head of Forensics making a personal appearance. Heller, a great bear of a man, hovered in the doorway. A baby-faced technician stood by his side, and this was a new face. A trainee? The chief crime-scene investigator had always taken great pride in the hands-on training of his crews. This might explain his presence here tonight. The man owed none of the detectives any favors that would warrant turning out for a penny-ante burglary gone wrong.

  Heller remained in the hall as his new recruit entered the kitchen with a fingerprint kit. The younger man was shaking his head and muttering, “Why elimination prints? The perp’s dead.”

  “Just do it, kid.” Heller’s tone conveyed that he would deal with the youngster’s attitude problem later. He turned his back and ambled away down the hall.

  The rookie opened his kit on the table, then laid out his white cards, an ink pad and a roller. When he picked up Miss Winter’s right hand, he treated it as an inanimate object. Without a word spoken, no May I? or Excuse me, ma’am, he bent over his work, inking her thumb, then rolling it across a small square on the card.

  Nedda Winter looked up at the young man’s face, but the technician clearly did not see her. She bowed her head in resignation, understanding that she was invisible to him, all but the fingers of her captive hand. It was a revealing moment and not the response that Riker would have predicted, not at this posh address. Ensconced in a mansion, this grande dame was accustomed to indifferent manhandling by minions. And so he needed no psychiatrist to tell him that she had spent some time in an institution—a long time.

  Prison? Or the nuthouse?

  As her hand was being manipulated by the technician, so carelessly, impersonally, the sleeve of her robe slipped down her right arm, exposing a long and jagged welt of old scar tissue that told a story of a body torn to the bone.

  Riker rose quickly, knocking over his chair as he turned on the crime-scene technician. “Let her alone! Tell Heller I want someone else to do it.” When the younger man only gawked at him, the detective yelled, “Get out!”

  Bitty Smyth sat alone in the dining room, waiting for someone, anyone, to give her life direction, or that was Charles Butler’s impression when he sat down on the other side of the table. If he could caption the look on her face, her unspoken words would be—at last—as if she had been expecting him for all of the thirty years that had passed since his tenth birthday party, waiting in absolute faith that he would come.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “The police dragging you here so late and all. It was because of the pictures in my room, wasn’t it?”

  His one and only stalker seemed not at all embarrassed about the shrine in her bedroom, and he wondered if this was a first warning sign. He gravitated toward the possibility of a harmless, almost magical fixation that would not interfere with the everyday function of her life. He preferred this to the darker diagnosis of an obsessive psychotic. For a moment, he was lost in her eyes, so large, so dark, the antithesis of his own small blue irises. Physically pulling away from her, he sat well back in his chair.

  It was his everyday job to observe people and pass judgments upon their mental well-being before marrying them to the proper think tanks, but there was something at work here that was quite beyond him for the present.

  Her face was heart shaped. He would not call it pretty, and yet he was charmed by it and leaning toward her once more without understanding why. Perhaps magical thinking worked both ways tonight, for he was reverting to his earlier impression of a pointed-eared elf.

  “I can’t imagine,” she said, “what the police must have thought of my little gallery of photographs.”

  “Yes, the pictures,” he said. “I’m sure they assumed I was a friend of the family.” He handed her a business card for Butler and Company. An earlier version of the card had born the name Mallory and Butler, but NYPD had ordered her to dissolve the business partnership. In Mallory’s version of compliance, she had removed her name from the stationery.

  Bitty Smyth never glanced at the card. “I was at your birthday party in Gramercy Park.”

  “I know,” said Charles, though he still had no memory of her. Granted, she would be inclined to remember him, the tallest boy, the one with the beak of an eagle, the eyes of a frog. But he had been blessed with eidetic memory, and he wondered how he could have forgotten her. She would have been unusually small, given her camera’s low point of view when she had taken the party photograph. All the other children had been normal size—at least a head smaller than himself. Gradually, he formed a portrait of a little person who did her best to blend into every wall she leaned against. And now he imagined her as a little girl watching from behind the foliage of Gramercy Park, hiding out—the shy child and perhaps the only one not to take part in the incident of the unfortunate frog.

  She leaned toward him. “Wasn’t it your uncle who did the magic show?”

  “No, he was my cousin, Max Candle. Old enough to be my uncle, though. So . . . how’s Paul? Forgive me if I don’t recall the relationship. Was Paul your—”
>
  “My brother,” said Bitty, “half brother. We have the same father.”

  “So now you look after your aunt, is that right?” He wondered if she had forgotten to breathe for a moment. Why should her aunt’s health be a touchy subject? “I’m told there’s a lot of medication in Miss Winter’s room. I assumed you were—”

  “Yes, you must have been talking to the medical examiner. He wanted to give me a sedative, but I can’t swallow pills. Now what was I—Oh, Aunt Nedda. Yes. End-stage cancer.”

  “But she appeared to be in rather good health.”

  Bitty lowered her eyes with a modest smile, as if taking this as a personal compliment. “You should have seen her six months ago. Her skin was all yellow.”

  “So she had a successful surgery, something like that?”

  “No.”

  And now he noticed something new in her eyes: the pupils were dilating. This was the unconscious tactic of a small child anxious to curry favor with an adult, and it usually worked, enhancing the unwitting adult’s concern and affection. It was a child’s act of self-preservation carried into adulthood. He wondered what other tactics she might have, both instinctive and deliberate ones for negotiating her way through a forest of taller beings.

  “How do you account for your aunt’s recovery? A miracle? Or the wrong diagnosis?” This was a trick question, a trap, and he wondered if she had guessed that.

  She was staring at her Bible, reaching toward it and its pious explanations for all things miraculous, but then she pushed it away, electing not to play the Bible-thumping zealot, not with him.

  It occurred to him, in that moment, that the Bible and the journals were props for an illusion, rather like the trick of the eyes. More survival tactics? This intuition posed an ethical dilemma: either this woman was more vulnerable than anyone imagined, or she was a worthy adversary for Mallory. He decided to keep his silence. If he guessed wrong, Mallory might shred this woman into pieces.

  Ah, but what if he was right about Bitty? Well, in that event, Mallory would certainly shred her.