Winter House

by Carol O'Connell

  Unmindful of their silent conversation, Pinwitty continued his thought, saying, “The stabbing wasn’t premeditated either. So that was another indication that my theory wouldn’t work. The police put it down to self-defense. It seems that the man broke into this woman’s bedroom and attacked her. However, I should mention that I got this information many years after the fact. Originally, I only had one source for the story, a very old man who later died in a nursing home. There was no police report on file.”

  Mallory and Riker were both paying edge-of-the-chair attention.

  “Oh, I know what you’re thinking,” said the author. “I also thought it was odd. But this was a small town, more like a truck stop. And I couldn’t interview the residents because there weren’t any. A new highway project wiped out all the houses and public buildings. The records of births, deaths and taxes were relocated, but police records simply didn’t exist. You see, the town had a police force of one. That was Chief Walter McReedy. I thought he might have taken the records with him when he retired. So I hunted down his daughter, Susan. She was rather young at the time of this incident. Barely remembers it. Now the woman who stabbed Humboldt was a redhead, and Chief McReedy’s daughter agreed with that much, but after she had a minute or two to think it over, she couldn’t swear that red was the woman’s natural hair color. In fact, a minute later, she thought otherwise. She did recall that the woman was a local, but couldn’t remember her name. Susan McReedy thought the redhead might’ve been middle-aged, but then everyone seems old to a child of seven. At any rate, it was a wasted trip for me.”

  Mallory held up her copy of The Winter House Massacre. “So there’s nothing in your book about Humboldt?”

  “Well, no. What would be the point? He was only the cellmate of a man wrongly accused of an ice-pick murder. That doesn’t confer even a peripheral significance.”

  But the author had failed to see the significance of Humboldt’s death by ice pick; he had tripped over this large messy fact and not seen it. Mallory was undecided: either Martin Pinwitty was more inclined to believe in coincidence than the average cop—or he had not told them everything. There was something not right about this little man. And she could say the same for her own partner.

  After warding off more stale doughnuts and bad tea, the detectives escaped from the author’s apartment with the borrowed file on the incident in Maine. Riker paused on the stoop outside the building, as if unable to go on.

  “Nedda killed Stick Man,” said Mallory.

  He hanged himself with a slow nod. Riker was definitely holding out on her, just as the daughter of the cop from Maine had held out on Martin Pinwitty.

  On the drive back to SoHo, she waited for her partner to save himself, to explain how he had recognized Humboldt’s name, a name he had never read in any book.

  And he said nothing.

  Cleo appeared in the dining room with a coffee cup in hand, nodding in Nedda’s general direction as she sat down on Lionel’s side of the dining room table. The line of demarcation was always drawn this way—two united against one.

  “Did you sleep well, Nedda?”

  Her sister’s tone of voice might better fit the question Why aren’t you dead yet? After all, Nedda had unwittingly reneged on the prognosis, the virtual promise, of an early demise.

  Cleo’s eyes narrowed. “Bitty’s not joining us this morning?”

  “She had an early breakfast,” said Nedda.

  “She’s hiding, isn’t she?” Not waiting for a response, Cleo rose from her chair and quit the room, followed by Lionel.

  Nedda was left alone and lonely. The fantasy of her homecoming was in ashes. She pulled the tarot deck from her pocket and bowed her head as she spread the cards on the table, looking there for hope and finding the burning tower in every arrangement of painted images. An old woman had given this deck to a very young Nedda, tapping the box illustration of the hanged man and saying, “Memento mori, a reminder of your mortality.” It had been a warning then, but the child had failed to recognize it as such.

  Charles Butler politely ended his long-distance telephone call to Susan McReedy in the state of Maine, then replaced the receiver in its antique cradle and shrugged his apologies to the two homicide detectives seated on the other side of his desk. “Sorry. Miss McReedy wasn’t very helpful.”

  “What do you think?” asked Riker. “Is the lady holding out?”

  “Oh, definitely,” said Charles. “The fact that she was suspicious and guarded would indicate as much. And she had a few questions of her own. Where did I meet the redheaded woman? What name did she go by now? And how did I know the dead man was called Humboldt? She wasn’t very happy when I didn’t give her any answers.”

  “You’re a shrink,” said Riker. “Can’t you give us more than that?”

  “Based on a telephone conversation?” Charles sighed. He hated the word shrink, and it would not apply to him. Although he had the proper credentials and a special interest in abnormal bents of mind, he had never had a private practice and never treated a single patient.

  Mallory leaned forward. “McReedy lied to Pinwitty, didn’t she?”

  It was a mistake to encourage her idea that he was a human lie detector. Her belief was founded on the fact that he could always tell when she was lying. However, this time she was correct. Ten years ago, Miss McReedy had lied in her interview with the author. The proof was all here in the folder that lay open on his desk. Pinwitty had been a word-for-word recorder of conversations.

  “Well, if we begin by assuming this woman wanted to mislead Pinwitty—”

  “She did,” said Mallory.

  “Fine. Then the redhead who killed Humboldt was young, not middle-aged. I’d say the mystery woman’s hair was naturally red, not dyed. Otherwise Susan McReedy wouldn’t have made a point of mentioning that small detail—while pretending to forget the woman’s name or what had become of her. Rather difficult to misplace a local murderess in a small town described as a truck stop. And her defensive posturing on the phone might suggest a protective relationship with the missing redhead.” He shrugged to say that was all he had. “So you’ll be going up to Maine to interview her?”

  “No,” said Mallory. “She’ll call you back. And when she does, you’ll get more out of her than we would.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “She didn’t brush you off,” said Riker. “She asked a lot of questions. That means you’ve got something she wants.”

  “And she’s wanted it for a long time,” said Mallory.

  “Good logic.” Charles turned to the window, looking up to a blue October sky and wondering where his own logic had flown. How could he have been so far off the mark in his initial assessment of Nedda Winter? “I nearly forgot. I gave Miss McReedy a date for the stabbing. I was off by two days, and she corrected me. I think that was a slip on her part. What’s her profession? A teacher, something like that?”

  “A librarian,” said Mallory. “Retired.”

  “Close enough. So Nedda Winter was a fourteen-year-old child when Humboldt was stabbed to death. You really believe that she—”

  “Yeah,” said Riker. “Everything fits. Ice picks seem to be her lifelong weapon of choice.”

  Mallory leaned far back in her chair, and Charles was immediately on guard. If she were a cat, her tail would be switching like mad.

  “You like Nedda Winter, don’t you.” This was not a question. She was making an accusation, for Miss Winter was now solidly in the enemy camp. Mallory also turned a cold eye on Riker, no doubt suspecting him of the same treason.

  “I do like her,” said Charles. “Can’t say I thought much of the rest of Nedda’s relatives.” Though Bitty certainly deserved his pity.

  “You know it’s a dysfunctional family,” said Riker, “when the one you like the best is a mass murderer.”

  5

  NEDDA’S BODY REMAINED AT REST. THERE WAS NO anxious wringing of hands, nor was there any furtive sign of panic—though
she was alone.

  The new housekeeper, the latest in a parade of transient hires, was out grocery shopping, and Bitty was off on some errand. Nedda had no idea where her brother and sister had gone. Lionel and Cleo had simply walked out the door without a word to her. And why not? She was dead to them. One did not consult with the dead about the day’s plans. The sadness of this slight never showed in her eyes. She continued to behave as if she were constantly being observed from all quarters of every room and would not betray any emotion that might be noted or charted.

  Poor Bitty.

  Her niece must have had great hopes for the first family reunion. Nedda recalled the startled faces of Cleo and Lionel on the day they had visited the hospice. What a grand surprise that had been. Bitty had dramatically thrown open the door to the private room and exposed their long-lost sister, whom they had always believed to be—hoped to be—dead. True horror had set in after their barrage of questions which only a true sister could have answered. Finally, Cleo and Lionel had been convinced that Nedda was no grifter, no fraudulent heiress, and they had asked, almost in unison, “Why did you come back?”

  Nedda’s joyful face had frozen into a fool’s grin, and she had been trapped in that expression until her brother and sister had quit the room. How mad she must have seemed to Bitty in that next moment. Anguished crying—foolish smiling.

  Mallory turned her small tan sedan eastward into the center lane of Houston at the optimum time for the greatest flow of commuter traffic. Riker sat beside her unaware that anything was amiss in their relationship.

  She braked to a full stop and killed the engine. Vehicles in flanking lanes whizzed by, the drivers craning their necks at the odd sight of her stationary car in the middle of rush hour when all New York motorists went insane en masse. The yellow cab behind her screeched to a halt, and a long line of cars behind that one were also unable to change lanes. Mallory only stared at the windshield, as if checking it for spots and bugs, unruffled by the song of the city—drivers honking, putting great feeling into their horns, leaning on them for maximum noise, and the rising lyrics of shouted obscenities. In peripheral vision, she watched Riker’s head swivel in her direction, silently asking, What are you doing?

  “You’re holding out on me.” She never raised her voice to be heard over the hell choir of honking and screaming, and this forced Riker to lean toward her, straining to hear every word.

  Good.

  She had his attention now. “When Pinwitty mentioned Humboldt’s name, I know you recognized it, but you didn’t get it from a book or a—”

  “Oh, sure,” said Riker. “I know all of Stick Man’s names.”

  Bastard!

  While she waited for him to elaborate on this little throwaway bombshell of his, the trapped cars were stacked up all the way back to a gridlocked intersection. The horns had doubled their number and volume, and now a new note was added to the mix. She could hear the angry, tinny slams of compact cars and the heavy-metal sound of trucks as drivers left their vehicles, intent on laying some blame and taking some satisfaction out of her hide.

  Yeah, right.

  But one glance at Riker told her that he was a believer in road rage. A traffic jam like this one could make killers out of the best-tempered nuns.

  “So tell me something.” Mallory’s words were slow and dead calm, as if she had all damn day for this conversation. “When were you planning to share all these names?”

  An old man stood on the cement strip that divided the traffic bound east and west. The elderly pedestrian had no stake in this event, yet he was as outraged as any of the drivers gathering around her car. He shook his fist and mouthed toothless angry words that were lost in the fray. Other men were massing near the windows on all sides. Riker held up his badge, as if that would fix everything.

  Mallory slowly turned her head to glare at him, to warn him. He had better start talking and fast. The people surrounding this car were murderously angry, and this was definitely not the time for one of his long-winded stories.

  And so Riker told her a story.

  Charles Butler sat at his desk, reviewing paperwork n the latest client of Butler and Company. This one was the most brilliant to date—and the most troubled. The teenager had dropped out of college, descended into profound depression, and continued his fall by dropping off the planet. Mallory had found a lead with an illegal perusal-for-profit of police reports on missing persons. She had then tracked the boy down to a hole in the swamp at the edge of the world (her euphemism for a motel in New Jersey).

  During the employment evaluation, all the right answers had been provided for every question on the personality profile, and that had been a clue to a problem; no one was so well balanced. However, the first warning had been the boy’s rolled down sleeves on an unseasonably warm day. Mallory had suspected drugs. Charles had believed the sleeves would hide the scars of an attempted suicide.

  He looked up from his reading and noticed his copy of The Winter House Massacre lying on the end table by the couch. So Mallory had decided not to read it after all. Wise. What a deadly bore was history in the hands of a bad writer. He turned back to the matter at hand, reading his business partner’s most recent research on their young job candidate.

  She had turned up a history of no less than six therapists, thus explaining how the youngster had sailed through all the psychological examinations—practice. Charles read the headings for each of Mallory’s documents; all of them had been raided from hospital computers in the tristate area. She could not have gotten them by any other means. Even as one removed from the theft, it would be unethical to read this material. And what would Mallory’s foster father have said of this—theft of confidential patient files?

  That’s my kid.

  And Louis would have said that with great pride.

  Thoughts of this dead man linked up with the image of Nedda Winter skirting her ghosts on the staircase the night of the dinner party. He had never mentioned that to Mallory as an indication of a mind gone awry. If that held true, then he must count himself as a loon and a half.

  The brown armchair beside the couch was the most comfortable seat in this office, and yet he never sat there. It was Louis’s chair even now. That good old man had sat in this room on many a night when sleep was impossible because his wife was dead. In a way, all of Louis’s stories of life with the incomparable Helen Markowitz had been ghost stories. Had she not come alive in this room? After a time, Charles had also come to grieve for Helen, though he had never met her. And he still grieved sorely for Louis. He missed that great soul every day.

  And Charles could see his old friend, clear as day, seated beside him now, gathering up hound-dog jowls in a dazzling smile. And was there just a touch of pity in the old man’s crinkled brown eyes? Oh, yes. Only Louis could fully appreciate Charles’s predicament with Mallory’s purloined documents. As the former commander of Special Crimes Unit, Inspector Markowitz had made such good use of his foster child’s skill with computer lock picks.

  Charles looked down at the raided information, poisonous fruit from Mallory’s hand. Well, it was definitely in a good cause—life and death—if his suspicions about their client proved true. He read every line of the stolen data and discovered that each of the boy’s psychiatric examinations had followed police custody for a suicide attempt on Halloween. And what were the odds that he might forgo his yearly wrist-slashing?

  Well, job placement was out of the question, but now he could make the proper referral for long-term therapy. Mallory may have saved the boy’s life with this information, stolen or not. Charles looked up at the armchair—Louis’s chair. His old friend, the dead man, shrugged, then splayed one hand to say, This is how it begins—the seduction.

  Charles found himself nodding in agreement with a man who was not there. Yes, he had actually rationalized a breach of ethics, an unnecessary violation. In truth, Mallory’s theft had only supported his own suspicions. He was actually quite good at his craft, though he
applied his skill to analyzing a potential client’s gifts and suitability for employment.

  Retiring to the couch, he stretched out to finish his reading in comfort. He was surprised to turn a page and find Mallory’s job proposal for placing the boy in a remote scientific community. There, he would not be a solitary freak, but one of many such freaks, and he would cease his ritual attempts to kill himself every Halloween; this had been Mallory’s argument for selling an unbalanced job candidate.

  Oh, of course. Never mind the fee. And here he countered with her own trademark line, “Yeah, right.”

  Mallory, the humanitarian, had also secured the client on the profit side of this transaction. The New Mexico think tank was funded with a truly obscene amount of grant money. Best of all—and this was her final salvo—the personnel director had not balked at the disclosure of the boy’s suicidal ideation, and the project would provide long-term therapy.

  Thus far, this was the only argument for job placement.

  All that remained was the detail of signing off on Mallory’s paperwork. He slowed his reading to a normal person’s pace, for his partner sometimes deviated from the standard boilerplate contract, and he had learned to go slowly and scrutinize every line before signing anything. True to form, she had named a staggering fee that he would never have had the gall to charge, and her conditions straddled a borderland between ethics and all that the traffic would bear. She had added a penalty clause, doubling their fee if the New Mexico project failed to keep the boy alive through Halloween.

  Charles stared at the ceiling, averting his eyes from the laughing dead man.

  Reading that final contract clause in the best possible light, Mallory was not actually planning to profit on a death. No, she only wanted to ensure the boy’s ongoing survival. He turned to face his memory of the late Louis Markowitz, who knew her best.