Winter House

by Carol O'Connell

  “Find another way,” said Charles. “This has to stop right now. You can see how fragile she is.” And badly wounded. Indeed, Nedda had just been flayed to the bone of psyche.

  Mallory returned to the interview room, but not to end the interrogation. She started up the machine again, and Nedda lifted her head, slowly, sadly, to face her interrogator.

  Let’s get back to the man you stabbed the other night.” Mallory turned the machine on again. “Do you think your relatives hired that man to kill you?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “You don’t think they’re capable of murder?”

  Nedda shook her head.

  “Somebody hired him to kill you. Think about it, Nedda. Your brother and sister are always out of town when something happens. How many people knew you were back? And what happened to your baby sister? We can’t find any school records for Sally Winter. You think she lived long enough to go to school?” Mallory looked down at the machine. “You’re heart is racing, Nedda.”

  “Stop it!”

  “Maybe they committed the perfect murder. That little girl was—”

  “Detective Mallory, please stop.”

  “Now, the attempt on your life—that was a total screwup. But what about your baby sister? What do you suppose they did with her body? Don’t you care? We can’t find any trace of her dead or alive.”

  Nedda’s hands rose to her head, warding off the words, her head making small jerking movements, hands rising like white fluttered wings, playing bird to Mallory’s cat.

  The detective pushed her chair back from the table. Her work was done. She could roughly predict the moment when Charles Butler would come barreling through the door. Oh, and here he was now. Such a gentleman, and so angry.

  . . .

  Mallory joined Riker in the observation room. They watched the ongoing show from the dark side of the glass. Charles removed all the mechanical devices that had bound Nedda Winter to the chair and the machine.

  “She’ll talk to Charles.”

  “Yeah,” said Riker, “but I’m not sure there’s anything left for her to tell.”

  Her partner had been against this idea of replacing the niece with a brand-new confidant for the old woman, but he had come up with no better plan.

  Nedda preceded Charles as he quit the interview room, slamming the door behind him, loud as a gunshot. Mallory, his unintended target, tensed every muscle in her body. She turned to face Riker, but he looked away, not wanting to meet her eyes anymore. These small things, the slam of a door, the turn of Riker’s head—they would remain with her for the rest of the day as a portent of things to come.

  She was always losing people.

  Edward Slope strolled up to the SoHo police station, and a uniformed officer rushed to open the door for him, though the younger man had no reason to recognize the chief medical examiner, a rare visitor in this precinct. Dr. Slope’s austere presence and excellent suit always commanded instant respect.

  As he approached the front desk, he wore his eyeglasses riding low on the bridge of his nose, not caring that his vision was blurred. The doctor had finished a morning’s pro bono work at the free clinic two blocks away, and he had seen quite enough for one day—homeless people dying of old age in their thirties and forties.

  Impaired vision or not, he could never have missed the physically imposing figure of Charles Butler—no more than he could fail to notice a Kodiak bear in his shower stall. The man stood on the other side of the wide room, a head above the police officers gathered here and there in loose groups of twos and threes. Charles was deep in conversation with a tall white-haired woman and a child with pointed ears.

  Well, that was interesting.

  Dr. Slope raised his spectacles the better to see the latter as a more mundane person, a very small woman with a pixie haircut and ears that were disappointingly normal.

  Ah, and now he had attracted Charles Butler’s attention. Dr. Slope had never before seen this man angry. Charles had always impressed him as the most congenial of oversized humans, one who seemed embarrassed when he dwarfed other people. Well, this was a sight to behold, the wide-shouldered giant marching toward him with such grim resolution, hands curled into fists—and all the surrounding policemen seemed to agree. Their heads were turning, sensing trouble. So impressive was Charles that, all about the room, hands were lightly resting on guns.

  7

  WHEN RIKER FOLLOWED HIS PARTNER INTO LIEUtenant Coffey’s office, the chief medical examiner was waiting for them. The pathologist was not a happy man, and neither was their lieutenant.

  Dr. Slope fixed his eye on Mallory, reprimanding her with a cold stare, and Riker had to crack a smile. This was a reminder of her kiddy days when the doctor had suspected her of some new criminal act each time they met. Slope’s worst grievance against her was cheating at poker on those nights when Lou Markowitz had been on midget duty and taken his foster child along to the weekly penny-ante game. By Lou Markowitz’s account, his daughter had regularly cleaned out the doctor’s pockets, and this had set the tone for Slope’s relationship with Mallory down through the years.

  “So, Kathy,” said the doctor, absolutely fearless in this forbidden use of her first name, “what have you done to Charles Butler?” Predicting her trademark line, I didn’t do it, he gave her no time to answer. “I saw Charles downstairs a few minutes ago. He all but slammed me up against a wall and demanded a prescription for Valium. And so, of course . . . I thought of you.”

  Mallory’s only response was to fold her arms, shutting him out and making it clear that she was not going to play games with him today.

  Slope’s expression was more suspicious than usual, and he was puzzled, too, as if he knew he had caught her at something; though, as yet, the doctor could have no idea what her most recent wrongdoing might be. “Nothing to say for yourself, Kathy?”

  “Mallory,” she said, correcting him as she always did, and her eyes were promising payback for breaking this rule.

  Did the doctor care? Not at all.

  Slope handed an envelope to Riker. “That’s the report on your corpse. Are we still calling him a John Doe burglar?”

  “Yeah,” said the senior detective. “We can’t afford any leaks to the media.”

  “I can keep Willy Roy Boyd in paperwork limbo indefinitely,” said Slope. “But it’s just a matter of time before somebody recognizes the corpse as Mallory’s lady-killer. I examined the wound to his heart. The sewing shears masked everything but the tip of another object, something sharper, narrower. It wouldn’t be inconsistent with an ice pick.”

  “And what about the comparisons?”

  “To Stick Man?” The doctor took a bundle of yellowed papers from his medical bag. “Here—your grandfather’s notes. I must compliment him on that signature strike. Superb police work. I also read his summaries on the other autopsies. However, in this case, there was so much damage done by the scissors, there’s no way to find any sign of it on Boyd’s corpse. And nothing stood out in the old autopsy reports on the Winter House Massacre. Of course, with an exhumation, the absence of any chips to the bone would—”

  “No way,” said Jack Coffey. “I’m not spending money to dig up people who died back in the forties.” He looked up at his senior detective. “I can’t believe you expected a Stick Man signature on Mallory’s perp.”

  “I did,” said Riker, “for about six minutes. But now I think Nedda was—”

  “Nedda Winter?” Slope stared at Riker. “That was the name Charles wanted on the Valium prescription.” The doctor turned to Mallory with a fresh accusation on his face, though he could not name it—not yet.

  Riker wished he could call his words back. So little got by Edward Slope. He could tell that the doctor was putting it all together now: the passage of time, a recent murder in Winter House, the old massacre investigation, an elderly woman he had met downstairs, someone with Mallory’s interrogation footprints all over her face and the doctor’s best guess
at that woman’s age—Red Winter’s age.

  “Oh, my God. You found her.”

  Charles Butler’s mood had improved, perhaps due to drugs. After filling the Valium prescription at the pharmacy, Nedda Winter had insisted upon sharing it with him, rightly suspecting that his morning had been nearly as bad as hers.

  He had already begun the work of undoing Mallory’s damage while collecting Nedda’s belongings at Winter House, and now he had provided a safe refuge for the woman so that she could do further mending. And, in part, he supposed that Mallory’s doomsday warning had spooked him. And Nedda, too? It had come as a surprise when she had accepted his offer of sanctuary so readily. He set her suitcase down inside the door of his guest room, and, upon turning around, noticed that his houseguest had been misplaced. He walked down the hallway calling out, “Nedda?”

  “In here,” she said.

  He entered the library and found her seated in the circle of new club chairs. She seemed quite at home in this setting, but then, by her account, she had spent most of her life inside of books—a secondhand life she had called it.

  “Is this where you do group therapy?”

  “No,” he said, “I’ve never had a patient practice. This is where I play poker.” Charles sat down beside her and stretched out his long legs. “Now, in this big empty space, try to imagine a gaming table made in 1839.”

  “Should I imagine the cards as well?”

  “No, I’m not that far gone. I gave away my old card table so I’d have room for one I bought at an auction. The very next day, the antique table was destroyed in a warehouse fire.”

  “An antique. You take your poker seriously.”

  “And I always lose, but I love the game—and the company. When my friend Louis Markowitz died, I inherited his chair in a floating weekly poker game. Tonight will be the first time it’s ever been canceled.”

  “Because of me?”

  “Oh, no. I wasn’t the one who canceled the game.”

  Nedda smiled. “Well, not to waste these wonderful chairs—if you can’t find the right table, you might open up a private practice. You’re a natural. I’m something of an expert in therapists, and I say you’ve got the gift.” She looked around at the other chairs, which did indeed resemble a therapy group arrangement. “This was my life for decades, one hospital after another and more doctors than I care to remember.”

  “Could’ve fooled me,” he said. “You don’t strike me as someone who’s been institutionalized. But then, I suppose it makes a difference that you were never insane.”

  “As I said, you have the gift.”

  And now he picked up the threads of their earlier conversation. “So you believed that you could never go home again. But then you did.”

  “Thanks to my niece. But now I think it would’ve been better if I’d never come back.”

  “Well, a few criminal intrusions, a violent death—that’s quite a bit of trauma. But that’s not what you meant, is it?”

  “No. You’re a good listener, Charles. You can hear things between the words. I meant that it would’ve been better if my brother and sister never had to set eyes on me again. I’m the intruder at Winter House.”

  In this unguarded moment, there was more sadness in her eyes than he could bear.

  Empathy was his strength and his weakness; it was what suited him to a therapist’s role and what prevented him from ever treating a patient. He would never be able to affect the professional detachment so key to the well-being of a therapist’s own mind. He was already dying by degrees, imagining every shock that Nedda Winter had born, the cost of every death—all the pain that she was feeling now and her terrible sense of isolation. And then he pulled back, emotionally and even physically. He rose from his chair and unconsciously rubbed his hands together, as if in the act of washing them clean of this woman. “Well, what you need now is rest.”

  This was what he also told himself—this lie. In reality, he had just shut her down and shut her out. He knew it, and she knew it.

  Nedda was all alone again.

  Mallory sat in the front room of Winter House, sipping coffee and becoming acquainted with Nedda’s siblings. Riker had begged off on this interview, and she had only thought about his possible reasons in every other minute. And now she made her final judgment on her partner: he was losing the stomach for this case—and for her company.

  “I don’t understand,” said Cleo Winter-Smyth. “Why should Nedda be staying at Charles Butler’s house?”

  “Was that your doing?” asked Lionel Winter.

  “No.” Mallory put down the teacup. The time for good manners was fast passing. “It was Dr. Butler’s idea. He didn’t say why. Do you think he might have some reason to believe that Nedda wouldn’t be safe in this house?”

  Brother and sister looked to one another for answers.

  And now that she had knocked them off balance, Mallory continued, addressing Cleo. “Maybe it was something your daughter said to him? Is she here?”

  “She’s not at home,” said Lionel Winter.

  Mallory understood his meaning. His niece was not at home to the police.

  The detective pulled out a small notebook. “A few questions came up in our investigation. You had a younger sister who survived the massacre.” She looked down at the notebook page. There was nothing written there. “Sally? Was that her name? I understand that she ran away from home.”

  Cleo wore a frozen smile. “Oh, the dinner party. That’s what set Charles Butler off—all those stories.” She spoke to Mallory, but would not look at her anymore. “Lionel and I were away at school when Sally left.”

  “Yes,” said the detective, “you’re always away when things happen in this house.” She studied more blank pages in her notebook, then faced Lionel. “You fired Sally’s nurse shortly before the girl ran away?”

  He nodded.

  Mallory waited for him to fill in the silence with nervous explanations, but soon realized that this was not going to happen. He was simply tolerating her presence in the house. She went for the soft spot, moving her chair closer to his sister. She leaned toward Cleo Winter-Smyth. “But, ma’am, you said you weren’t here. Are you sure that Sally ran away? Who was looking after her if the nurse—”

  “Our guardian.” Lionel raised his voice. “He was looking after Sally that day. And yes, we’re quite sure that she ran away.”

  While sister and brother were silently communing with one another, Mallory caught sight of Bitty Smyth’s reflection in a mirror that angled toward the grand staircase. The tiny woman was gripping the banister and shaking her head. Mallory pressed on with Cleo and Lionel. “So there must’ve been a report filed with Missing Persons. What year was that?”

  Brother and sister were having identical reactions, and Mallory knew they were doing the math in their heads. This was the response of teenagers forced by a bartender to recall the date of a fictional birth on a fake driver’s license.

  So much pressure counting backward.

  Cleo fielded this one. “It was maybe fifty years ago.” She turned to her brother. “Lionel?”

  “Give or take a few years,” he said. “Our guardian would have filed the report with the police.”

  The detective appreciated guile. Prescient Lionel Winter had looked ahead to the next problem. When the police came back to tell him that no missing-person report had been found, then that bit of negligence could be blamed on a dead man, Uncle James.

  Mallory added Sally Winter to the body count for Winter House. “That clears up most of my loose ends.” She produced a yellow pad, the format for a murderer’s confession on a typical day in Special Crimes Unit. “If you could just write out the details and the dates in your own words. Then sign it—both of you.”

  She waited out the minutes it took for Lionel’s terse written account of Sally Winter’s disappearance. Glancing at the mirror again, she caught sight of Bitty crouched below the banister rail on the second-floor landing—odd behavior for a
lawyer. That little woman should be rushing down the stairs to caution her mother and her uncle against signing anything for the police.

  Too late.

  Lionel was done committing this small crime, the falsification of a police statement, and both signatures were on the page. Mallory read the carefully printed words. The faint erasure of numbers was barely visible in the margin. He had finally worked out a year that would match up with the dinner party conversation. “There’s something odd about this date. If Sally Winter ran away forty-eight years ago, she would’ve been just under ten years old. Now that’s odd. Most runaways are teenagers. I’ve never—”

  “Sally might’ve wandered off,” said Cleo. And she continued on in this classic mistake of explaining too much. “Our uncle wasn’t very good with children.” The woman looked down at her folded hands, and the tone of her voice was more wistful now. “I had always hoped that some Good Samaritan had found Sally—lost, maybe hurt. And maybe—”

  Lionel Winter silenced his sister with one look.

  “Right,” said Mallory, not bothering to disguise a tone of disbelief. However, Cleo’s last words had the ring of something true. “Well, I’ll check it out with Missing Persons.”

  The detective stood up and walked to the foot of the stairs, pretending to admire a large painting hanging high above her on the second-floor landing. Below it, Bitty Smyth was crouching behind the rail. Startled, the little woman slowly rose to a stand. Though there was an ocean of air between them, with Mallory’s every step forward, Bitty stepped back. In this fashion, the smaller woman was driven to the wall. She edged slowly toward the door of an open room and disappeared. The door closed softly.

  How much had the little eavesdropper learned over all the years of growing up in this house? Was this how Bitty knew where to look for Nedda, a woman who had disappeared long before she was born? What other conversations had she overheard this way?