Winter House

by Carol O'Connell

  Like Nedda’s dead burglar. Are you listening, Charles?

  Edward Slope studied the hand she had dealt him. “The first reaction would be stunned surprise. The heart is shredded, blood draining. Shock sets in. I’ll take two cards.”

  She dealt them out, and they were good ones.

  Happier now, the doctor continued. “Next, the sensation of cold is followed by sudden weakness throughout the body, then loss of consciousness. A quiet death.”

  Charles would be wondering if Nedda’s burglar had died quietly. And now he must realize that she had never needed to ask these questions of the doctor. Who knew more about violent death than she did? Yes, at last, he understood that she was maligning Nedda Winter for his own sake.

  Their eyes met across the table. Almost imperceptibly, he moved his head from side to side to tell her that this was not working.

  The rabbi folded his cards, saying, “I’m out.” He then went off to the kitchen in search of another cold beer.

  Mallory leaned toward the medical examiner, saying, “So the hitman wasn’t a stranger to that family.”

  “And that narrows it down,” said Charles, “to a hundred gangland types who attended parties at Winter House.”

  “Yeah,” said Robin. “Nedda told us that Lucky Luciano came to dinner one night. Can you imagine that? But you can cross that bum off the list. His murders were messy.”

  Mallory was thinking about a little boy, just four years old, and his drawing of a stick figure. She pictured a bit of blood and one tiny hole where the ice pick had pierced the paper and a child’s heart in one strike. There was only one scenario. In the moment before his death, the boy had been holding up that drawing, showing it to someone he knew, maybe someone he loved, saying a child’s ritual line, “Look what I did.”

  The front windows were dark as Nedda climbed the stairs to the front door of Winter House.

  Her hopes died.

  Lionel and Cleo had no doubt bolted for the summer house in the Hamptons. There would be no family gathering, no reconciliation tonight.

  She unlocked the door and opened it onto a dark foyer, calling out, “Bitty? Are you home?”

  Upon crossing the threshold, she saw a dim light coming from the hallway that led to the kitchen, but the front room was pitch black. She was turning round with the intention of finding the wall switch for the chandelier when she heard the sound of footsteps rushing up behind her.

  She could hear the voice of Uncle James coming from a long ways off and many years ago, yelling, “Nedda, drop the ice pick! Drop it now!”

  9

  THE FRONT ROOM FLOODED WITH LIGHT FROM THE chandelier. Lionel ran past her to the front door. Nedda had forgotten to turn off the alarm. She murmured apologies to her brother as he madly tapped the button pad on the foyer wall, entering the code that would prevent it from going off.

  Crisis over.

  And now that they were spared another visit from the NYPD, he said, “Neddy, we couldn’t reach Dr. Butler. We thought you might’ve gone back to the police station—possibly under arrest. We couldn’t get anything out of Bitty.”

  Arrest? For which of her crimes? Did he mean the stabbing death of a man in this same room or the other man she had planned to kill in the park? Or was her brother alluding to the mass murder of their family members?

  She turned to the sound of more footsteps. Cleo entered the front room, followed closely by her ex-husband. Sheldon was no doubt here by design; her brother and sister had no wish to be alone with her tonight. She was wondering where her niece might be hiding when a weak voice called down from the staircase, “Here. Up here.”

  Four heads were turning, lifting to the sight of Bitty dragging herself to the edge of the stairs. In a childish gesture, one small hand raised slowly, as if to wave bye-bye, and then she laid her head down on the floor and closed her eyes. Nedda was the first to reach her. None of them could wake her.

  Charles was holding a rather mediocre hand of cards when he answered the knock at his door. His unexpected visitor was a stout woman from a more Luddite-friendly century. An old-fashioned carpetbag sat on the floor at her feet.

  O pioneer.

  She had the well-muscled arms of a woman who labored hard for her living, and the iron-gray hair was bound in braids. Her walking shoes were sturdy, and the blue dress had great integrity, so plain and serviceable. He half expected her to produce a pitchfork or some other farm implement. She stared him down with great sensible brown eyes, then extended a hand to greet him, albeit somewhat reluctantly. The calluses on her palms fitted so well with the social slot he had created for her.

  Later, he would learn that the hobby of her retirement years was rock climbing, hence the good muscle tone and calluses; that she hailed from a large city in the state of Maine, so much for the farm life; that she held advanced degrees in library science and was a denizen of cyberspace.

  “Susan McReedy,” she began, not one for unnecessary pronouns and verbs of introduction. “I don’t take you for a sneak, Mr. Butler, and I’ll tell you why. When I asked you blunt questions on the phone, you didn’t lie to me. You wouldn’t tell me the truth, Lord knows, but you wouldn’t lie. And I suspect that goes against the grain with you. So tell me straight out. Is she still alive?”

  After escorting their new interview subject into Charles Butler’s private office, Riker sat down in an armchair beside the librarian from Maine. Mallory regretted agreeing to second chair in this interview. Out in the hallway, her partner had argued that little old ladies were his forte, that they loved him on sight. This might well be true, but Susan McReedy was not little, nor did she look all that old, and she could probably take Riker down in two falls out of three.

  Riker began with small talk and offers of coffee or tea. The woman from Maine tapped one shoe, barely tolerating this waste of her time. Off his game today, he had missed the other signs of her fidgeting fingers and lips pressed tight. He compounded his error by pausing a beat too long to allow her the full impact of his widest smile. Miss McReedy did not respond in kind. Her mouth dipped down on one side, and now both shoes tapped the floor with irritation. This baffled him. He must wonder what foot he had put wrong.

  So obvious.

  “You’re sure I can’t get you a cup of coffee?”

  The woman only glared at him, finding him suspicious because of his engaging grin—too quick and easy, too professionally charming.

  Mallory had a cure for excess charm.

  She rose from the couch and moved into that narrow area between their chairs, too close to allow this woman any personal space—and closer. She put her hands on the arms of Miss McReedy’s chair and bent low until their eyes were level. Closer. “So your father was a cop? Was he a lousy cop? Didn’t he raise you right?” Every inflection dropped out of her tone, and each word had equal weight when she said, “I—am—the—law. I don’t have time to mess with you. Start talking.”

  Though Susan McReedy never twitched or blinked, she did smile in approval. “You want the whole story, or just the salient points?”

  Riker stood up, conceding his chair to the new champion of senior-citizen interviews, and Mallory sat down, saying, “I want everything you’ve got on the red-haired girl. Don’t leave anything out.”

  “All right. The girl’s hair wasn’t red the first time I saw her. It was shoe-polish black—dyed and cut real short.” Miss McReedy had lost her edge, almost mellowing as she described the night, fifty-eight years ago, when two local boys had seen the yellow stalks of headlights beaming up beyond the rim of a bottomless quarry pool. “The car was hung up on an outcrop of rocks twenty feet below the rim, just hanging there, smashed to bits, all turned around and ready to fall another fifty feet to the water. When Dad and the neighbors got to the lip of the quarry, it looked like it was going down any second. There were six flashlights altogether, all aiming straight down through a broken windshield, and they could see the girl plain as day. So much blood. The twisted metal pinned he
r down on the passenger side. It was a sheer drop between the edge of the rock face and that car.”

  Riker interrupted her, leaning in, asking, “How did your dad read the scene that night? Did he take it for an accident?”

  Susan McReedy turned to Mallory with a raised eyebrow to ask if this interruption was necessary. Mallory only stared at her in silence, and the woman took this for an affirmative.

  “My father had two different theories, two years apart. That night, he figured it for an accident. The quarry pool was a good place to lose a car—a body, too—but leaving the headlights on would defeat that purpose, wouldn’t it? Now the door on the driver side hung open and angled down toward the water. So he figured the driver—Dad was guessing a teenage boy—ten wrecks out of ten were teenagers—well, he thought the driver must’ve dropped into the pool and drowned. That was assuming the crash didn’t kill him first. You could expect a corpse to bloat up with gas and rise to the surface after a while, but that one never did.”

  Mallory made a rolling motion with one hand to move the story back on track.

  “Well, a sheer drop like that one, you’d need a rope to get down to where the car was. Dad and my uncle were rock-climbing fools. They had all the gear in the trunks of their cars, and pretty soon, both of them were rappelling down that rock wall by the light of the neighbors’ flashlights. They worked for hours to free the girl from that car. One wrong move, the car would drop and the girl would be lost. Nothing has ever come out of that pool—except bloated dead bodies, animals mostly, and a few suicide jumpers.

  “All the while they worked, they did a balancing act to keep the car from teetering off that outcrop of rock. Hooked their own lifelines onto the metal. They could’ve died that night. They didn’t care. They were going to carry that girl out if it killed them both to do it.

  “So the ambulance crew lowered the stretcher, then Dad and Uncle Henry strapped her in. After they hauled her up, the ambulance driver took one look at that poor broken girl and told my dad she’d never make it. Well, Dad climbed into that ambulance and rode with her to the hospital, talking to her all the while, demanding that she survive. And she did. But it was a few years before she was mended. It was one operation after another. She was real brave—all that pain—years of it.”

  Riker asked, “What about the car?”

  “It fell into the quarry pool. Dad and his brother were on the way up when the car went down. It was that close.”

  “So your dad never traced the car?”

  “No need. He knew whose car it was while he was still up on the rim. It was stolen from my uncle’s parking lot. Uncle Henry had a little restaurant, the only one for miles around.”

  Riker exchanged looks with Mallory.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” said Miss McReedy, “but you’re getting ahead of the story. You said every detail, right? Well, Dad figured the girl was at least eighteen if not older, full grown. She was a tall one. So that’s what he put in his report. If the doctors thought different they never said, or maybe they just couldn’t tell. She was so smashed up, poor thing. No part of her was whole. And she could never tell Dad anything helpful, not her name or who the driver was, nothing at all. The hospital called her Jane Doe. We called her our Jane. She lived at our house between hospital stays. Dad could never quite let go of that girl until the day he died, and his brother felt the same way. The three of them were forever tied together in a way that wasn’t quite like family. In some ways, it was a closer bond. I know that sounds odd.”

  “I understand it,” said Riker.

  Mallory knew she had missed something important here, but she let it slide away, for it had nothing to do with her case.

  Susan McReedy was less annoyed with Riker when he asked about her father’s second theory. “I’m getting to that,” she said. “The poor girl had gone through four operations before she was off the crutches for good. Then she wanted to earn her own keep. Two years had gone by. We thought she was at least twenty years old by then.”

  The woman reached down and pulled a paperback book from the carpetbag at her feet. “But I guess we all know better now. She was only twelve when we found her. Isn’t that right?” Miss McReedy turned from Mallory to Riker. Her expression was almost a challenge to contradict her. She was satisfied by their silence and continued. “So she was just fourteen years old when my uncle gave her that little apartment over the restaurant. I wish that we had known she was just a little girl.”

  The woman stared at her shoes, overcome by sadness. Mallory and Riker kept their silence.

  “Everyone admired our Jane for working in the restaurant—so public and all. Customers tended to stare at her in all the wounded places that showed, but she soldiered on. Looked them all right in the eye as if her face were normal, good as theirs. That’s when we came to believe she was really on the mend.”

  Mallory stared at the cover illustration of the book in the woman’s hand. It was a reproduction of the Red Winter painting. A store receipt stood for a bookmark. This woman had only recently worked it all out.

  “I guess,” said Susan McReedy, “I can put one thing and another together pretty well. First that New York author calls me a few years back. And then Mr. Butler—the same questions.” The librarian held up the book when she said, “I’m sure you guessed—our Jane didn’t look anything like this on the night of the accident—or anytime after that. Her face was broken, nose, cheekbones, her jaw—and that child’s legs. Oh, Lord. They rebuilt her with steel pins and sewing needles.”

  Susan McReedy paused, but not to any dramatic effect. She was having difficulty going on with her story, and she had not yet come to the most important part. Riker was leaning forward to interrupt one more time. Mallory glared at him to warn him off.

  “So one day, all of us were going up to Bangor to see my grandma. But Jane wanted to stay behind. Well, my uncle closed the restaurant that weekend, and he guessed the girl wanted to spend her free time reading. Always had her nose in a book, that one—a habit she picked up in the hospital, I guess.

  “Two days later, we came home and found her in that little apartment over the restaurant. She was sitting on her bedroom floor beside a dead body—a man with an ice pick in his chest. Flies everywhere, but our Jane didn’t seem to notice them—or him, either. She’d gone all the way crazy. Just rocking back and forth. I don’t think she could hear us when we spoke to her.”

  It was all too clear that Miss McReedy was seeing that tableau again, fresh as yesterday’s blood and blowflies.

  “And your dad,” said Riker, “how did he read that crime scene?”

  “It was obvious. The man she’d killed—he’d broken into her place. No doubt about it. He broke down the bedroom door to get at her. It was off its damn hinge. She must’ve been so frightened.”

  “And,” said Mallory, “she just happened to keep an ice pick in her bedroom.”

  “Yes, and that was the saddest part. That nearly killed my father. And that’s how he put the whole thing together.” She fell silent for a moment.

  “So that’s when he worked out his second theory,” said Riker, gently prompting her.

  Susan McReedy nodded. “It was an old ice pick he found in the dead man’s chest. The painted handle was flaking. It used to be in Uncle Henry’s restaurant. He told Dad he tossed it out just after our Jane moved in upstairs. The girl must have found it in the trash and kept it all that time. Dad saw flakes of that same color paint on the underside of her pillowcase. And that’s how he knew, for all that time, she’d gone to sleep every night with that pick underneath her pillow. All that time she’d been waiting for that man, the one who’d left her for dead at the quarry. She’d been waiting for him to come back and finish her off.”

  The retired librarian looked down at her hands as she folded the paperback book into a fat cylinder. “And then came the second theory of what happened at the quarry pool. Dad figured our Jane was the only one in the car when it went over the rim that nig
ht. So that was no accident. It was attempted murder. Dad didn’t see the driver as a local man, nobody who lived in walking distance. He’d stolen that car because he’d be needing his own car to make a getaway. So he was a stranger, just like our Jane.

  “After she killed that man with the ice pick—if Dad had only known—how young she was. Well, if he’d known, then I don’t think he would’ve let them take her to the hospital that day or any other day. From there she went to a state asylum. That made Dad and my uncle so crazy. They tried, time after time, to get her out of there and bring her home. But every time they got a new sanity hearing, she’d do something to mess it up. Once she slashed her wrists. Another time it was her throat. Finally, Dad had to let go of her. He came to understand—” Susan McReedy’s hands were clasped tightly around her paperback and squeezing it. “This really hurt him—but he realized that our Jane felt safer in that place than home with us. He didn’t protect her when she needed him most. My father went to visit her every weekend until he died. Then the asylum was closed down for Medicare fraud, and the patients were scattered all over creation. Years later, I tracked one Jane Doe to a nursing home north of Auburn—but it wasn’t our Jane.”

  “All right,” said Mallory, moving on, “your father must’ve traced the dead man’s fingerprints.”

  “Yes, he did. It took a while. No national data base in those days. The dead man had a record in three southern states, con games and stealing. Never killed anybody that we knew of. He was jailed under a slew of names, but never for any great length of time.”

  “What about Humboldt,” said Riker, “remember that one?”

  “And all his other names.” She bent down to the carpetbag at her feet and pulled out a thick envelope. Opening it, she emptied the file folders onto the coffee table.