“He loved her?”
“Madly. Once, before I was born, they were separated for a week. They wrote to each other every day. Their love letters are in her trunk up in the attic. You should read them. I know all the lines by heart.”
A small voice screamed, “What?” It was Rags. The lame cockatiel had left its cage and now worked its way up the bedspread, climbing toward its mistress by beak and claw.
“Poor thing,” said Nedda. “What happened to him? Why can’t he fly?”
“His wing was crushed by the window sash. It just fell on him. No, it slammed on him. I saw it happen. Mother said the house doesn’t like birds.”
“No, it doesn’t,” said Nedda. “Every year after the first frost, we’d find a dead bird outside on one of the window ledges. The house doesn’t like flies, either.” She stared at the dead dry insect on Bitty’s sill. “That’s what old Mrs. Tully used to say. She was the housekeeper when I was a little girl. Tully always said, ‘You might see a dead fly every now and then, but you’ll never hear a live one buzz—at least, not for long.’ ”
“Was she insane?” Bitty’s hand flew up to cover her mouth, as if she had just committed a social faux pas, calling attention to an infirmity in front of a cripple. And now, realizing her blunder, she seemed on the verge of tears.
Nedda gave her niece a smile of reassurance, then dipped one hand into the pocket of her robe. “There’s something else we have to talk about.” She withdrew a small worn box and held it up for Bitty to see. “Remember this? Last night at dinner?” The box was heavily lacquered cardboard, not machine made, but one of a kind, handcrafted and painted with the tarot image of the hanged man.
A memento mori from days in hell.
Nedda opened the box and pulled out the deck. The card of destruction, an image of a burning tower, was on the top. “Tell me where you found my tarot cards.”
The bookcases that lined Charles Butler’s library were fifteen feet tall, necessitating a ladder slanting from the top-shelf railing to the floor. High in the air, he rolled along on its wheels as he searched for the volume that Mallory wanted. “A friend of my father’s gave it to me. He said my New York History section would be incomplete without it.”
Though he had never considered reading the book, it had been stored on the upper shelf with similar volumes. After perusing the first page, he had found the writing inferior, but it would have been bad manners and literary heresy to toss the book in the trash. Now where was it?
Well, this was embarrassing.
The book was not where it ought to be. A few years might have passed since he had placed it here, but how could it be lost? After generations of librarians had inculcated him with rules, he was virtually incapable of losing a book by placing it on a shelf out of order. Each volume’s spine was tagged with the Library of Congress number to ensure against such losses. But now he noticed that none of the books on the top shelf were in their proper places.
No, this could not happen, not to him.
He glanced down at Mallory. She was staring at his recently delivered club chairs, six of them arranged in a circle. In their midst one might expect to find—oh, say, a priceless piece of furniture with a provenance dating back to 1846 and great historical significance. However, inside the wide circle of chairs there was nothing but his memory of a page from an antique catalogue.
She lifted her face to his. “Charles, you’ve been robbed.”
“No, I gave away my card table after I bought another one. It would’ve been delivered this morning . . . if not for a warehouse fire last night.”
He turned back to his problem of the lost book and discovered that the top shelf was free of dust. All was clear to him now. Apparently, his cleaning woman had actually dusted up here, fifteen feet in the air, then rearranged all the books by height so the line of the topmost shelf would not appear so uneven. Mrs. Ortega’s mania for neatness was second only to Mallory’s. Rather than undo all of the woman’s hard work, he politely memorized the new order of his books.
Mallory called up to him from the foot of the ladder. “So you thought a new table might improve your poker game?”
“No.” Well—yes. Charles was not as crippled by magical thinking as some people, but historical memorabilia could be psychologically empowering. And in the game of poker—
“You know,” she said, “you’d have to cheat to beat those bastards.”
He sighed.
She was right. Psychology would not save him. He had the wrong sort of face for the game, expressions that gave up every thought and emotion. Worse, he had inherited his mother’s deep red blush that made a lie or a bluff nearly impossible to pull off. Regrettably, he had been genetically programmed to be an honest man and a poor poker player.
The bastards, as Mallory affectionately called them, were the charter members of a very old floating poker game. Upon the death of her foster father, Louis Markowitz, Charles had inherited a seat in the game and three new friends. Next week, the poker game would have been in his apartment, played at an antique table once graced by a famous politician and world-class card player. “The table wasn’t exactly new. President Ulysses S. Grant once sat in on a game at—”
Oh, what the hell. That bit of history was burned to a crisp.
He knew that Mallory took a dim view of the weekly poker game. It was entirely too friendly for her tastes, only penny-ante stakes, or, as she would say, chump change. She also objected to wild cards that changed with the phases of the moon or the dates for recycled trash pickups. Once, she had complained that the game was a close cousin to an old lady’s Bingo night at church.
“This week,” said Charles, “the game’s at Robin’s house. If you want to come, I’m sure they’ll all be happy to play by your rules.”
Apparently, fleecing her father’s old friends in a fast game of cutthroat, rob-and-run poker was hardly tempting. Fat chance, said her eyes. However, she did run one hand over the new chairs, approving the grade of leather.
He rolled the ladder down to the end of the wall, and his eyes locked onto the title he had been searching for. “Found it. It’s roughly a thousand pages.”
This news seemed to pain her. “Can you give me the gist of it?”
“I never read it.” He looked down at his copy of The Winter House Massacre. “Not my sort of thing.”
“It’s that bad?”
“Well, the information should be sound enough. The author’s an accredited historian. Now I wish I had read it. Would’ve saved me some embarrassment last night.” He climbed down the ladder to stand beside Mallory. “You might’ve warned me that Nedda was Red Winter.”
“Honest surprise worked better.” She stared at the dust jacket and its single drop of illustrated blood
“But I knew the story of Winter House.” What New Yorker, born and bred, did not? “Where does the advantage of surprise come in?”
Mallory patiently waited him out, and now he must admit that he had not even recognized the address while visiting the crime scene. And, like most people who believe they know all the details of historical events, he had not understood the significance of an ice pick in Winter House of all houses.
“Last night,” she said, “it would’ve been suspicious if you knew who Nedda was.”
“She’s right,” said a voice behind him.
Charles turned to see Riker walking across the library, a cup of coffee in hand and probably wondering when the rest of his breakfast would be ready. The detective lacked the patience for homemade croissants.
“Don’t feel bad,” said Riker. “After fifty-eight years, only a cop would’ve made the connection to Nedda Winter—and not just any cop. It even took me a while, and I was raised on that story. The only name most people knew her by was Red Winter.”
Mrs. Ortega’s vacuum cleaner preceded her into the library, and all conversation stopped. The wiry little woman with dark Spanish eyes and a Brooklyn accent said, “Pick up your damn feet,” as she moved the sucking nozzle peril
ously close to Riker’s scruffy shoes. She switched the machine off just long enough to curl her lip while passing judgment on his suit. After pulling a wad of paper slips from her apron, she stuffed them into the man’s breast pocket. “Those are dry-cleaning coupons. You know what you have to do.” And now the vacuum powered up to move back and forth across the rug.
Charles handed the book to Riker and raised his voice to be heard over the noise. “Here, a gift. Might be rather dry reading. This author is known for that.”
“I read it,” said Riker.
“You what?” The vacuum cleaner switched off, and Mrs. Ortega observed a moment of silent disbelief. Previously, this detective had only admitted to reading the sports pages. And never mind the book’s cover art. Lurid drop of painted blood aside, this was a thick book. She steered the vacuum cleaner out of the room with mutterings of damn miracles.
As an apology for literacy, Riker shrugged and said, “I had to read it. The massacre was my bedtime story when I was a kid.” He hefted the book in one hand. “But this wouldn’t have helped you last night. The guy who wrote it never mentioned Nedda’s real name. He only calls her Red Winter. So much for historians, huh?” He opened the volume to the title page. “My copy’s autographed.”
When they were all seated around the table in Charles’s kitchen, the batch of oven-warm croissants quickly disappeared. The detectives had not paused to savor the buttery flakes; they had inhaled them with their coffee, then made short work of the crepes. Now and then, one of them would stop feeding to extract information from him, rather than relying on his recollection of events. Perhaps he was inclined to be too wordy, possibly trying their short—
“At the time of the murders,” said Mallory, keeper of the body count, “there were nine children and four adults living in Winter House.”
“And four children survived the massacre.” Charles used a napkin to mark the book page that would allow him to recite their names in birth order.
“But there’re only three left,” said Mallory. “You didn’t buy the story of Sally Winter as a runaway?”
“I didn’t say that. I said it didn’t quite ring true in all the details. Lionel had an odd reaction that I couldn’t put down to—Oh, how should I put this?”
“Put it briefly,” said Riker. “If you weren’t such a good cook, Mallory would’ve shot you twenty minutes ago.”
She nodded, as if in agreement, while reading the marked passage on the youngest Winter child. “This author follows Cleo and Lionel from grammar school through the college years. He’s got dates of enrollments and graduations. But all he’s got on Sally is her date of birth.” She looked up at Charles. “Could be another homicide. Did you question them about it?”
“Well . . . no. After Bitty’s little exhibition on the staircase, the rest of them were sliding into shock. It would have been rude to ask if they’d murdered Baby Sally.”
By the rapid clicking of Mallory’s pen, he deduced that a simple no would have sufficed.
“Good for Bitty,” said Riker, who was apparently allowed to make extraneous remarks between forkfuls of strawberry crepes. “I never thought she had it in her.”
“She had to get drunk to do it,” said Charles. “She’s a passive-aggressive personality. It was wildly out of character to—”
“How aggressive?” Mallory leaned forward, liking this detail.
“Oh, not in the physical sense. She’ll take a sniper shot from the woods, but it’s strictly verbal. I think Nedda was being truthful when she confessed to killing that burglar the other night. Bitty simply could not have done that.”
“I never thought she did,” said Mallory, and her tone was a rather pointed reminder that she had said as much the other night and disliked repeating herself. “Bitty’s a mouse.”
Riker was more charitable. “But last night she nailed her whole family.”
“I’m guessing that was a tactic to get attention,” said Charles. “Bitty’s emotional maturity is a bit stunted.”
“What gave her away?” asked Riker. “Was it the prom dress or the teddy bears in her room?”
Charles ducked this sarcasm by filling his mouth with food. Last night, the significance of Bitty’s outlandish makeup and dinner dress had nearly escaped him. At first, he had believed that her mother must have engineered that fashion travesty. Later, he had realized his error. Cleo Winter-Smyth would never have taken that much interest in her daughter. The mother had simply neglected to save her child from ridicule. The absence of parental bonding would explain a great deal. And now he quietly cleaned his plate, having learned not to volunteer any more elaborate explanations.
Riker wore a satisfied smile as he laid his napkin to one side. “So it’s a dysfunctional family.”
“A bit more bizarre than that,” said Charles, filling Riker’s coffee cup and instantly forgetting all his lessons in brevity. “There’s no real family dynamic. They’re like islands, all of them. I had the distinct feeling that Sheldon Smyth was only going through the motions of playing a father to Bitty. Same thing with Cleo and Lionel. Correct responses without any matching nuances in tone or expression.”
“I got it,” said Riker. “Like a pack of aliens imitating a human family?”
“Exactly. It suggests—”
“You haven’t mentioned Nedda yet.” Mallory tapped her pen on the table. “How did she fit in?”
“She didn’t. I’d say she was more of a watcher on the sidelines. Though I did see genuine affection for Bitty. And there was a bit of tension with her sister and brother. Nedda never exhibited any aberrant behavior—if that’s what you’re asking.”
“But she’s been away for a long time,” said Riker. “We think she’s been institutionalized.”
“Well, I could be wrong,” said Charles, “but in a case like that, you’d expect to see more signs of—”
“I’m positive,” said Mallory, “and I know it wasn’t prison. We ran her prints. No criminal record.”
Charles pushed back from the table. “So you think she’s been in an asylum all these years? Well then—that dinner party should’ve made her feel quite at home. But she was the normal one at the table. And quite charming.”
He could see that Riker was also rejecting Mallory’s idea of Nedda as a certified lunatic with a bloody past. This detective was Charles’s only ally in the theory of an innocent runaway child. The man seemed very much on Nedda’s side, wanting to believe in her.
However, when the subject turned to an old deck of tarot cards produced at the dinner table last night, a deck belonging to Nedda Winter, the light in Riker’s eyes simply died.
A light breakfast had revitalized Bitty Smyth, and now she climbed toward the top of the house, almost cheerful as she led the expedition to the attic.
Following close behind her niece, Nedda Winter pressed close to the banister to avoid treading upon the corpses of her stepmother and her father. On the third floor, they passed the door to Henry’s room, where the budding artist, four years of age, lay dead among his sticks of chalk and pencils and drawing papers. Her little brother Wendell, only seven when he died, lay on the floor of the next room.
Upward they climbed, passing a hall closet where her nine-year-old sister, Erica, huddled in terror and absolute darkness, listening for the footsteps of a monster and hoping that death would pass her by. Nedda trod quietly past this door and fancied that she could hear the beat of a child’s wild heart.
I’m so sorry.
The staircase narrowed as they approached the last landing below the attic. Here she skirted a small corpse on the stairs. Mary had escaped the nursery in a two-year-old’s version of mad flight, and she had died in a toddle down the steps.
The dead were invisible to Bitty, who resided solidly in the present. Nedda lived much of her life in the past, where the nanny on the hallway carpet was more recently deceased, the flesh still warm and the bit of blood on her breast had not yet dried. Nedda looked down at the face of this tee
nager, Gwen Rawly, who had previously believed that she was immortal. The girl’s lips were parted, as if to ask Why? Beyond the young nanny’s body was the door of the nursery.
It was closed in the current century.
Bitty and Nedda paused beneath the great glass dome that crowned the fourth floor and divided the two attics. Here the stairs were split like a forked tongue. The steps curving to their right led to the north attic used for storage. Bitty climbed toward the south attic, a repository for personal effects of the dead. This was a family custom begun in the eighteen hundreds.
Following her niece, Nedda entered the narrow room of slanting rafters and the old familiar smells of rotting history and dust. It was illuminated by a row of small gabled windows, and appeared to be unchanged. Early memories were clear pictures in her mind, all that she had had to feed upon for so many years.
She looked at the trunks stacked in rows and representing generations of her forebearers. The contents were the odds and ends of life on earth. Her eyes gravitated to her mother’s trunk. As a child, she had spent many hours counting up the dresses, lace handkerchiefs, hairpins and such, souvenirs of a woman who had loved her, a woman who had died when Nedda was too young to memorize her living face. This morning, she passed it by, following her niece between the rows of the murdered Winters, adults and children.
“You know what this place reminds me of?” Bitty reached up to pull on strings that switched on the overhead bulbs as she walked the length of the attic. “Early Christian catacombs, corpses stacked up like cordwood. Of course, there are no actual bodies.”
All the brass plates on this row of trunks had been polished by a finger through the dust, the better to make out the letters etched in old-fashioned script. Nedda knelt on the floor to read the names.
Bitty squatted down beside her. “I couldn’t find a trunk for Baby Sally. It’s not in the north attic or the basement.” She looked up at her aunt. “Sally had a trunk of her own, didn’t she?”
“Yes, dear, we all did. I remember Sally’s trunk was at the foot of her crib.”
Winter House Page 12
