Winter House

by Carol O'Connell

  No—they would cry.

  Nedda Winter pulled back the sheer white drape of the front window for a better view of the old Rolls-Royce. Once it had been her father’s car, and now it belonged to her brother. A dozen suitcases were disgorged from the car’s trunk. Tall Lionel, sixty-nine on his last birthday, handled the bags with surprising ease, though he did this service grudgingly, for most or all of the luggage would belong to his sister Cleo Winter-Smyth. Bitty’s description of the summer house in the Hamptons filled its closets and drawers with her mother’s clothing. And Cleo’s room upstairs was packed with more designer dresses like the one that she wore now.

  So why this spectacle of suitcases? What was the point of two houses if one could not travel lightly from one to the other?

  Without taking her eyes from the window, Nedda spoke to the small woman behind her. “They’re here, Bitty.” She glanced back at her niece, who was still holding the Bible. “Go up to your room if you like. I’ll deal with them.”

  This arrangement was very agreeable to her niece, who stole up the staircase with exaggerated stealth, perhaps on the off chance that Cleo and Lionel could hear escaping footsteps through the solid walls of the house.

  Nedda turned her eyes back to the sidewalk activity. Her brother stood beside the car, shaking his head. He was refusing to lug the suitcases up the stairs. Lionel put two fingers to his lips and whistled. The doorman from the neighboring condominium came running, smiling as a dog would smile if it only could. Money changed hands, and Lionel slipped behind the wheel of the Rolls and drove off to the parking garage, leaving his sister to supervise the doorman, who gathered up her bags. Cleo looked up at the parlor window, saw her elder sister standing there, then quickly looked away. This was only one small slight of many.

  Nedda understood. She might never be forgiven for coming home again.

  Though Cleo and Lionel had been to town only a week ago, Nedda was amazed anew each time she saw her sister and brother, these chic people so little affected by time. In her early sixties, Cleo appeared closer in age to her forty-year-old daughter. There was not a single strand of gray in the perfectly coiffed ash blond hair, and her flesh was suspiciously smooth and firm.

  Nedda let the drape fall, then sank down to the window seat. The front door opened, and the foyer was filled with the sound of dueling accents, American diva and Spanish immigrant. The doorman was making short work of the bags, stacking them inside the door, while Cleo surveyed the front room, checking for signs of sudden death. Or would she be more concerned with possible breakage?

  Cleo turned to her sister with a vacuous smile; one might call it professional, the way a stewardess can smile at her passengers though she hates them and hopes they will die. “You look wonderful. Your color’s so much better.”

  The yellow cast had passed off months ago in the hospice, where Nedda’s siblings had expected her to pass away from natural causes.

  Fooled you all. So sorry. I never meant to.

  “But you’re still a little pale, Nedda. You really must get some sun and fresh air. We’ll have to get you out to the Hamptons one day.”

  The sisters both knew that day would never come. There would be too many questions from the Long Island neighbors. It was so much easier to hide embarrassing relatives in the more anonymous city. And now, small talk exhausted, they fell into a silence—awkward for Nedda, easy for her sister.

  When the doorman had lugged the last suitcase indoors, he learned to his dismay that he had not yet earned his money, not until he carried them up the stairs to a bedroom. He looked up at the winding steps—and up, and up, shaking his head in denial. Finally, the job was done, and her brother had returned from the garage on the next block. Lionel preened for a moment before a mirror, running one tanned hand through hair as white as her own.

  Her brother could still be called a handsome man and surprisingly youthful in the way that a waxwork can never age. So this was what sixty-nine years looked like in the twenty-first century. Nedda rarely consulted a mirror on her own account, for she was a different creature now, and no such comparison to her former self was possible. Though she had made good use of the third-floor gymnasium, the treadmill and the weights would not give her back any of the time she had lost. She was marked by the wrinkles and stitched-up scars of a difficult life.

  Not so for Lionel and Cleo.

  Nedda had returned to find her siblings well preserved in the amber of younger days. Every creature so preserved was dead, and still the simile held true. There was no life in their dark blue eyes, dead eyes, flies in the amber.

  “Neddy” was all that Lionel said to her by way of a greeting.

  She could see that it irked him to slip and call her Neddy, but he had never known her by any but that childhood name. In a cruel departure from a good-natured boy of eleven, Lionel the man reminded her of their father now. Quentin Winter had been a cold one, too. It had been said of Daddy, in his youth, that he left footprints of ice across the floor of a warm room on a summer day. She recalled Lionel as a child of five, following his father about in the month of July to see if this was true.

  In part it was.

  She turned to her sister, always searching Cleo’s face for evidence of the child she had been. Up to the age of five, young Cleo had danced through the average day, always in motion to music that had played round the clock, a laughing child who had no bones, who moved to the beat of drums and cornets with fluid joy. Daddy’s little Boogie Woogie Wunderkind had never been able to pronounce this mouthful, and so she had been called Jitterbug by one and all. But Nedda never forgot herself and called her sister by this old pet name. It was unsuitable now, for Cleo had become somewhat stiff on several levels.

  Nedda wondered how she was remembered by her siblings. She shuddered, and this thought passed off like a chill.

  Lionel walked to the center of the carpet. “Was it here? Bitty wasn’t all that clear on the phone.”

  “Yes, that’s where the man died.” Nedda turned from one sibling to the other, saying, “Charles Butler was here last night. Did Bitty tell you that?”

  Cleo broke into a rare wide smile. “The frog prince? No, Bitty never said a word.” And now something dark had occurred to her, no doubt linked to the shrine in Bitty’s room. The woman sat down, more solemn in her tone, saying, “My God, did the police see the—”

  Nedda nodded.

  “And they brought Charles Butler here? They showed him—”

  “The shrine in Bitty’s room? Yes, he saw it.”

  Lionel and Cleo turned to one another to hold one of their eerie conversations of the eyes. It was something akin to the made-up languages of small children bonding in secret alliance against the adult—herself. This time, it was easy for her to guess the content of their discussion, and, in answer to their unspoken question, she said, “The police believe that Bitty was stalking Mr. Butler.”

  “Charles Butler,” said Lionel. “Wasn’t he one of the Gramercy Park Butlers?”

  “Yes, dear,” said Cleo, the keeper of the social register.

  “Charles is the last one, but there haven’t been any Butlers in Gramercy Park for ages. He lives in SoHo, of all places. He owns an apartment building there.”

  Trust Cleo to know the details of wealthy families who would not take her phone calls and the environs where she was not welcome. The Winter family had fallen away from polite society long before the massacre.

  “Charles Butler,” said Cleo. “Bitty must’ve been thrilled.” And, by inflection, she conveyed the opposite meaning. “Well, we must do something before this business gets out of hand. I’ll call Bitty’s father. Sheldon will know how to handle it.”

  “Oh, Christ,” said Lionel, at this mention of his erstwhile brother-in-law, the attorney. “Did the police take Bitty away?”

  Both faces turned to Nedda. They were almost twins in expressing the horror of publicity.

  She shook her head and stood with them in cold silence, the natural
state of their every reunion, until a movement in one of the many mirrors caught her eye. Nedda turned around to see her niece slowly coming down the grand staircase, hesitating now, eyes wide and wondering if it was safe yet. Bitty had never outgrown a child’s stature and a child’s issues, the cowering deference to her mother and her uncle. And yet, one day, brave as any knight, this tiny woman had marched into a hellhole and plucked Nedda out of it, soul and all.

  “Hello, dear. Kiss, kiss,” said Cleo in lieu of actual affection for her daughter. “I’ve decided that we’ll have a small dinner party tonight. I think I can arrange for the frog prince to come.”

  Bitty’s feet were frozen in place on the last step, and one hand drifted to her heart, as if her mother had shot her there.

  “Yes, dear,” said Cleo. “Your beloved Charles Butler. Won’t that be nice?”

  Bitty nodded meekly, then turned away from them and crept back up the stairs.

  Lieutenant Coffey was enjoying a rare hour of calm. Two homicides had been closed out before noon, a banner day. There would have been three cases closed by now if Riker and Mallory had only cooperated. But they were both exhausted and badly in need of a rest. They had logged more overtime than anyone else on the squad. And this was how Jack Coffey rationalized his irrational behavior of the morning, allowing them three days to work a bogus case.

  Red Winter, my ass.

  When he stood up to stretch his legs, he saw the wadded balls of paper he had tossed on the floor. Sooner or later, he would have to uncrumple them. He gathered them up and smoothed the pages out across his desk. Next, he picked up Mallory’s report. He had the time to read it now, but his eyes could not move past the address for the crime scene. She had included the landmark credit with the formal name of the property. Miss Winter was not just another taxpayer with a common surname. She lived in Winter House.

  The lieutenant stole guilty glances at the glowing computer screen only a few feet from his desk. The cold-case file would not be there, not a case dating back to the forties. Almost against his will, the chair slowly wheeled toward the computer workstation. He typed Red Winter’s name into the search engine and came up with a selection of several hundred Web sites. After weeding out the sellers of books, videotapes and memorabilia, he settled upon a site for true-crime junkies.

  Colorful.

  Bloodred skulls marked every selection on the menu, and the Winter House Massacre was listed near the end of this alphabet of bones. When the screen changed again, he was staring at the famous nude portrait of a child with long red hair, and he could see that she had been tall for her age, all out of proportion to the surrounding furniture. Civilians and cops who knew the case had always called her Red Winter. Here, her true name was given as Nedda, the same as the woman—a tall woman—who had stabbed Willy Roy Boyd. Riker had guessed her height at five ten or eleven, and Mallory had placed her age at seventy. Nedda would have been a twelve-year-old girl in the year that Red Winter had disappeared.

  No, no, no!

  It was easier to believe that he was being set up for an elaborate pratfall. And how many bets were being made on him this time?

  Though his blinds were not drawn and the door was not closed, no one disturbed him. His people had sensed that he was best left alone as he sat there staring at a blank space on the wall. From time to time, the men would approach the glass of the goldfish bowl to see if the position of the boss’s body had changed any. And now Jack Coffey gave them a little thrill. His head moved slowly from side to side as his chair rolled back and away from the computer.

  It seemed that two of his detectives had found the lost child, Red Winter, the most enduring mystery in the annals of NYPD. And he had only given them three days to expose Stick Man and break the case of the century.

  3

  RIKER WAS TELLING HIS PARTNER A STORY TO DISTRACT her from a favorite sport of near-death adventures in traffic, and so the tan sedan rolled safely down Madison Avenue.

  Mallory pulled up to the curb. Legal parking spaces were impossible to come by in midtown, but bus stops like this one were plentiful. She cut the engine. “Why did they call him Stick Man?”

  “The lead detective on the Winter House Massacre—he named the freak.” Riker stepped out onto the sidewalk. “There’re only two or three cops who’d remember why he picked that name, and they’re in nursing homes.”

  He paused to light a cigarette, striking three matches in the wind. Impatient, Mallory slammed her car door, and still he took his time, exhaling a cloud of smoke as he walked toward an office building at the middle of the block. “One of the Winter kids was holding a crayon drawing when they found him. It was a stick figure, no detail. You know the way kids draw, and this little boy was only four years old. There was one small hole in the paper and some blood from the stab wound to his heart. So the lead detective—Fitzgerald was his name—he framed the kid’s picture and hung it up in the squad room. At first, only the cops on the case knew how important that drawing was.”

  “So Fitzgerald thought the boy drew a portrait of his killer?”

  “Yeah,” said Riker, “and, in a way, he did. There were thirty detectives assigned to the massacre. They worked it for a solid year, and they never had one lead to flesh out a suspect. You see? The kid’s drawing of a stick man fit the case. It hung on that wall for years. It drove them all nuts.”

  He stopped and looked up at the sky, as if he gave a damn about the weather. He was wondering how much of the story he should hold back. In Mallory’s puppy days, when he was still allowed to call her Kathy, she had loved his grisly cop stories, the more blood the better—but never ghost stories. Eventually, he would have to tell her that Stick Man’s killings had begun in 1860.

  And then she would have to shoot him.

  “My grandfather didn’t work the case,” said Riker, “but it was all he ever talked about.” And it was all that Granddad had really cared about. The old man had made a science of ice-pick wounds that spanned a full century. But Mallory did not need to know that, not yet. And now that they had reached the address of Willy Roy Boyd’s attorney, the story hour was over.

  The two detectives pushed through the glass doors of the rat maze, floor upon floor of lawyers’ offices stacked up to the moon. Riker flashed a badge at the security guard who wanted to stop them from using the penthouse elevator. They stepped inside a carpeted box paneled with mirrors and lit by a tiny crystal chandelier. It was a style that New Yorkers would call piss elegant. The elevator doors closed and they rode upward through the tower of law firms, aiming for the most expensive one. Riker was looking forward to this meeting, and he had no plans to restrain Mallory’s enthusiasm for payback.

  They exited at the last stop and breezed on by a young woman at the reception desk, paying no attention to her as she called after them, asking if they had an appointment. The next woman to ask this question was a more formidable brunette, whose desk stood guard before a lawyer’s door. The secretary spoke only to Mallory, or, more accurately, to Mallory’s clothes, the silk T-shirt and tailored blazer, money on the hoof that blended well with the luxurious surroundings. The brunette made it clear that Riker’s suit really ought to have arrived on the delivery elevator at the rear.

  Mallory’s clothes leaned over the desk and said, “We don’t need an appointment.”

  Did the dark-haired woman find her unsettling, possibly dangerous?

  Oh, yeah.

  The secretary sat very still, hands tightly folded and knuckles turning white, as the young detective reached across her desk to press the button that would admit them to the inner sanctum of Sid Henry, Esquire. Riker followed his partner through the door, glancing back at the cowed woman behind the desk.

  Good job.

  The door swung open on panoramic windows and brilliant light. The lawyer was reclining in a leather chair and sunning himself like a lizard in very expensive threads. The man even moved like a reptile, his head jerking upward, startled. As the attorney rose from his
desk, preparing his first verbal assault, he suddenly shut his gaping mouth. Was it the sight of Mallory’s lovely face? No, Riker guessed it was probably the very large gun, a .357 Smith and Wesson revolver. She had one hand on her hip, her blazer open and pulled to one side, and there was no way he could fail to see that cannon.

  Sid Henry sat down—quietly.

  Riker luxuriated in these passing seconds, for Mallory had not yet produced her shield, and, considering this attorney’s recent client, a serial killer, the poor bastard sincerely did not know if she was crazy or a cop. Would he live or die?

  It was Riker who ended the suspense, holding up his own gold shield.

  Mallory pulled a manila envelope from her knapsack, tore it open, and held up the morgue photograph of a body on the dissection table—after the dissection, minus all the vital organs, and looking very pale. “Recognize your former client? No? Well, it’s a bad photo. Willy Roy Boyd was the psycho who butchered three women, gutted them with a hunting knife. And you got him out on bail.” She dropped the photo on his desk. “Remember now?”

  “Blame it on NYPD.” Sid Henry grinned at her, entirely too confident that she would not hurt him. “The case against my client wasn’t exactly flawless.”

  Mallory slammed her fist down on the desk with the force of a hammer. “My case was perfect!”

  The attorney flinched, and his eyes widened with sudden clarity, for now he understood his error: she was the lead detective on that case—and she did not respond well to criticism.

  “I looked up every precedent you cited at that bail hearing,” she said. “You had nothing. It was all smoke. You knew that judge would never admit he didn’t know case law on search and seizure. You were right on the edge of perjury.”

  “So,” said Sid Henry, “this is retribution? You plan to scare me to death?” He tapped the photograph. “This is so unnecessary.” He turned the picture over. “The dramatics, this disgusting picture.”