Winter House

by Carol O'Connell

  Mallory leafed through the decades of yellowed documents, one man’s search for a red-haired girl’s past, an ongoing inquiry that had lasted another twenty years after Nedda had killed Stick Man. And now she was staring at the original cards bearing the dead man’s fingerprints.

  “So,” said Susan McReedy, regaining her poise, “you think that man, Humboldt, killed her family. You think that’s why our Jane took him down with an ice pick.” She held tight to the paperback book with the painted image of a naked child, Red Winter, her Jane. “So she saw that—her family murdered. Twelve years old and she—” Words had failed the woman from Maine.

  “Yeah,” said Riker. “If the reporters get hold of this story . . .” He knew that he would not have to finish that thought for her.

  The woman was nodding, saying, “I understand. We never talked, and I was never here.” She turned to Mallory. “But could I see her—just a picture of her?”

  Mallory held up one finger to tell the woman to remain where she was, then rose from her chair and left the room—taking the files of Jane Doe along with her. When she returned, she held out a crime-scene photo, and not the one that pictured Nedda Winter seated near a more recent corpse. It was a simple shot of the old woman standing before the grand staircase, majestic, her face and body no longer broken as they were in Miss McReedy’s memories. “Here, take it. Keep it.”

  “Thank you.” The woman stared at the image of her Jane grown old. “She looks good, doesn’t she? I never saw her face after—” She looked up at Mallory, smiling at a sudden recollection. “My father paid for that, you know—after she was committed to the asylum. Three more operations with a plastic surgeon, and it cost the moon to do it. But Dad just had to finish putting her back together again.” Miss McReedy became lost in the photograph once more. “Oh, what a pretty robe she’s wearing. And that looks like a real fine house.”

  “Yeah,” said Riker, “a mansion.”

  The woman looked up from this treasure that marked the end of her own family quest. “This story doesn’t have a happy ending, does it?”

  “No,” said Mallory. “Don’t expect that.”

  And now that Susan McReedy’s usefulness was over, the young detective turned her back and left the room and went to her own office, where she began to pin the contents of the Maine file to her cork wall. Fifteen minutes had passed, and she was not yet done marrying these pages to those in the file made by Riker’s grandfather when her partner sang out, “Hey, Mallory! You gotta hear this.”

  She walked into the reception room to find Robin Duffy and Riker bent over the answering machine. They were playing back the messages from Bitty Smyth slurring her words more with each call and asking when her aunt was coming back home.

  “Nedda’s gone,” said Robin. “And so is Charles. A little while ago, Nedda called him on the phone in his apartment. He was off like a shot. Going to the hospital, he said. Something about an overdose of pills.”

  Cleo Winter-Smyth, her brother and her ex-husband were seated in the hospital lounge, and all three heads were slowly turning to follow the progress of Charles Butler’s march from the street door to the front desk. A nurse assured him that, yes, he was on the restricted list of visitors.

  He could feel three pairs of eyes on his back as he walked to the elevator. Apparently these family members had not made the cut.

  Curious.

  Riker folded his cell phone. “They’re all at the hospital. The whole family came in together. Sheldon Smyth’s there, too.”

  “Good.” Mallory double-parked her car in front of Winter House. “Then there’s nobody home to mess with the crime scene.”

  According to Riker’s source at the hospital, the only crime had been an attempted suicide, but his partner loosely translated this to an attempted murder that would give them free access to the house without the tedium of chasing down a warrant.

  They climbed the short flight of stone steps to the front door. Mallory was unwrapping the small velvet pouch that held her favorite lock picks.

  “Hold it.” Riker turned the knob. The door opened. “I’d say that speaks well for the family.” He entered the foyer and looked around. “Nobody home. They were in such a hurry to get Bitty to the hospital, they forgot to lock up.”

  “Not quite. One of them stopped to set the alarm.” She punched in the numbers and the glowing light went out.

  “How’d you know the code?” He held up both hands. “Never mind, I never asked.”

  A door was closing on the floor above them.

  “There’s someone in the house.” Mallory raced up the stairs and reached Bitty Smyth’s bedroom in time to hear the toilet flush and smell the vomit beneath a layer of cleaning solvent. The evidence was now swirling down the drain.

  A woman in a shapeless dress, hired help by the looks of her, emerged from the private bathroom to see Mallory standing there, angry.

  And the woman screamed.

  “You cleaned up after Bitty Smyth,” said Mallory, unperturbed by the high-pitched wailing. “Who told you to do that?”

  “Police!” the woman screamed. “Help! Police!”

  Riker was in the doorway, panting and reaching into his back pocket for the badge that would shut this woman up. He could not yet speak. Heavy breathing was all that he could manage.

  The woman screamed again, louder this time.

  Bitty had been drifting in and out of consciousness. When she was fully awake, the hospital’s resident psychiatrist ordered the room cleared. The two visitors retreated, going off in search of the cafeteria.

  Nedda relied on Charles to follow the signs and arrows that would lead them to hot coffee. He guided her into a brightly lit room of Formica tables, sparsely populated with people in street clothes, some sitting alone, others huddled in twos and threes. Only matters of life and death could account for the laymen gathered here at this late hour.

  Charles seated his companion at a secluded island table close to the wall and far from eavesdroppers. When he returned with their coffee in paper cups, he picked up the conversation begun in the corridor. “So you’re quite sure it was a suicide attempt?”

  She nodded. “Bitty’s not a strong person. I remember when I was drowning in despair. I know all the signs. My own suicide attempt took years. I used to swallow pills that other patients spit out on the floor.”

  “But your niece has a prescription for sleeping pills. No chance of an accidental overdose?”

  “None. Bitty also has a phobia. She can’t swallow tablets. They have to be crushed in water before she can get them down. You see how unlikely it is that she could lose track of them.”

  “Did you mention that to—”

  “The psychiatrist? Yes. Bitty gave my name as next of kin. I’m sure my sister didn’t appreciate that.”

  And consequently this would not be the time for any family meeting with the object of reconciliation.

  “What triggered the attempt? Any ideas?”

  “My fault,” said Nedda. “Looking at this through Bitty’s eyes, I blame myself. She worked so hard to do this wonderful thing for Cleo and Lionel. She found their lost sister. It should have been a magnificent present. Poor Bitty. She couldn’t know that I was the last person they would ever want to see.”

  “Why such animosity?”

  “Because of the murders—their parents, their brothers and sisters. Every time they look at me, it hurts them more than knives cutting into their eyes.”

  When Charles and Nedda returned to Bitty’s hospital room, her attending physician was waiting for them, saying, “It’s all settled. She’ll be with us for a few days.”

  “And there’ll be a cop posted on the door,” said Mallory striding into the room. She glared at the tiny woman on the bed as if this attempt at suicide had been a ploy simply to annoy her.

  Charles could tell that Bitty was only feigning sleep this time, but he said nothing to give her away.

  Mallory turned her attention to Nedda. “You
should’ve called the police first. Now it’s too late. All the evidence is gone. No one told those idiots in the emergency room to save the stomach contents.”

  The doctor was about to take offense at this, for she was referring to his idiots. But now, thinking better of that, with perhaps a keen eye for disturbing personalities who carried guns, he was edging away from Mallory and toward the door, then gone.

  “There’s no mystery about her stomach contents,” said Nedda. “Prescription sleeping pills. My niece took an accidental overdose.” She lied nearly as well as her opponent. “Calling the police never entered my mind.”

  That much was certainly true.

  Oh, no.

  Mallory was leaning over Bitty for a closer look, saying, “She’s faking. She’s awake.”

  “That’s enough,” said Nedda. “My niece needs rest, and you need to leave this room.”

  The young detective was squaring off against the older woman when Charles appeared at Nedda’s side, lending support to the idea that Mallory should leave, and right now. It was an unsettling moment. Charles looked into Mallory’s eyes and roughly guessed her thoughts. She was wondering if he would humiliate her, if he would physically move her out of this room, laying hands on her for the second time in one day. And, no, he would not have the heart for that. But she chose not to give him the benefit of that doubt in her mind. She turned and left the room.

  Mallory could commit any sort of bad act and depend upon him to feel the guilt.

  How did she do that?

  Riker sat with the family members in the reception area of the hospital. His pen moved across the page of his notebook, taking down their statements on Bitty’s overdose. “Any idea how many pills she took?”

  “No, we never thought to ask,” said Bitty’s mother. “It was quite a scene. Nedda was jamming her fingers down my daughter’s throat to induce vomiting. I was—”

  “On the phone,” said Lionel, finishing the sentence, “calling for an ambulance.”

  Sheldon Smyth was being unusually quiet for a lawyer. Riker wanted to stick a knife in the old man by asking exactly when Cleo and Lionel had discovered that the law firm was ripping off their trust fund, but Mallory would shoot him for tipping their hand too soon.

  He looked up to see his partner marching across the lobby, heading toward this little family with all the deadly resolution of a train on the way to a wreck. He turned back to Cleo, resident of a planet where people communicated via telepathy. The woman was staring at her brother. Something passed between them, and they were of one mind, Riker was sure of that, before their heads turned in unison to stare at Mallory.

  These people were creeping him out.

  This time, Bitty was not faking. She had fallen into a natural state of sleep, and there was no conversation between Charles and Nedda, neither of them wanting to disturb her rest.

  But now the patient stirred, eyes opening to smile at her aunt. “I knew you’d come.”

  “To the rescue?” said Charles. “So you knew you were in trouble tonight.”

  “I must have taken too many sleeping pills.” All the signs of a lie were there, eyes shifting away from his, fingers fidgeting on the blanket, so uncomfortable in this falsehood.

  “You’re not sure?” He smiled to say never mind. “I heard your messages on my machine. It seems like you knew what was happening, but you waited for Nedda. Why not call an ambulance yourself?”

  “I wasn’t thinking very clearly?”

  Perhaps she had not believed that her family would have opened the door to an ambulance. That was one possibility, the one that Kathy Mallory would have liked best.

  Mallory sat in the hospital lounge, facing Cleo and Lionel with the clear understanding that they were a unit. What they had suffered as children might have formed that weird bond. Or it might have developed while they were murdering their little sister, the only Winter child still unaccounted for. Bitty Smyth’s near death had expanded the possible scenarios for Sally Winter’s disappearance.

  Where would two children hide a little corpse? Not in the hat closet that had so intrigued Mrs. Ortega. Children did not wall up bodies. They buried them as they buried family pets. The dead girl would have taken up no more ground than a good-size dog.

  Child’s play.

  Brother and sister sat together with the same body language, arms folded, eyes level and calm, meeting her gaze and awaiting the inevitable interrogation. She let them wait. Sheldon Smyth seemed sober now. The old lawyer was tensing, also bracing for an onslaught of questions. His brow was lightly filmed with sweat, though the hospital lounge was cool and dry.

  This old man was going to be so easy to break.

  She could watch the works of his brain churning behind his eyes, trying to anticipate her first question, heart racing. All three of them were waiting for her, wondering when she would begin the inquisition. The three of them were leaning slightly forward, expectant crows on a wire.

  Mallory stood up and turned her back on the trio, then crossed the lobby in tandem with her partner—and without a single word spoken.

  The documents raided from the Smyth firm gave Mallory’s private office at Butler and Company the look of a temporary warehouse, but one located in that other dimension where Chinese puzzle blocks were born. She was stacking cartons of varied sizes to form an enormous cardboard cube at the center of the room.

  While she explained that the outer shell was made with as-yet unread documents, Riker admired the walls of her structure from all sides. It was a maniacally efficient use of space, and very disturbing to a man who tossed discarded beer cartons into the corners of his apartment so he could readily discern the empties from the partially emptied.

  Riker wrecked her perfect symmetry by dragging a carton out of formation.

  An hour later, he was sitting on the floor, almost done, gently laying out the last of the brittle pieces of paper from the middle years of the previous century. These canceled checks bore the signature of the guardian, James Winter, and they were arranged in the order of their dates. “If Sally Winter didn’t die of natural causes, we can rule out Uncle James for the killer.” He looked up at his partner. She was engrossed in Pinwitty’s book and paying no attention to him. “Aren’t you going to ask me why?”

  “Hmm.” Mallory turned another page.

  Riker had finished working backward in time to lay out the last check. “It looks like James skipped town before Sally died. All the signatures in this group were traced. Every one of them exactly the same. I guess the Smyth firm didn’t want to break in a new guardian so they kept him around on paper. But these forged checks are still making payouts for doctor’s visits and home nursing for the kid.”

  “I never thought James Winter killed Sally.” Mallory held her place, marking the page with one finger as she closed the book. “This text is unreadable, but the pictures are interesting. Were there any prints on Stick Man’s ice pick? There’s nothing about it in this book or your grandfather’s notes.”

  “Who knows? I told you, all the evidence boxes were robbed, gutted for souvenirs. That ice pick disappeared fifty years ago.”

  One long red fingernail tapped the book cover. “So how did Pinwitty get a photograph of the pick?”

  “What? There aren’t any photographs in that book.”

  “Then Charles’s copy must be a revised edition.” Mallory opened the volume and showed him the clear picture of an ice pick in an evidence bag. “You can even read the detective’s signature on the label.”

  Upon their second visit to Martin Pinwitty’s one-room apartment, the first thing the detectives noticed was an elaborate profusion of flowers, exotic blooms well beyond the author’s purse.

  “It’s a sympathy bouquet. My mother died yesterday.” Pinwitty rushed to the stove and began a lame attempt at hospitality, lighting a flame under his teakettle.

  This time, the detectives did not feel obliged to eat stale pastries and drink cheap swill. Riker turned off the gas bu
rner. “Just give us the ice pick, and we’ll go.”

  Pinwitty’s lips parted as if to scream.

  Riker was holding up the book, and it was opened to the picture of the murder weapon in an evidence bag. “This pick.”

  “I bought that photograph. I never actually had the—”

  “No,” said Riker, “you don’t wanna lie to a cop.” He flipped through the pages of the picture section. “You took all these shots yourself. Cheaper that way, right? Your publishers even gave you a photographer’s credit.”

  “I don’t have the pick anymore.”

  “Yeah, you do,” said Riker. “The Winter House Massacre is your whole life. Once you had that pick, you’d never let it go.”

  “My mother’s illness was very costly. I had to sell off a lot of things.”

  Riker shook his head to let the man know that he was not buying this excuse. “You would’ve sold your mother for medical experiments before you sold that pick.”

  Pinwitty was backing away, when he made eye contact with Mallory. He turned back to face Riker, finding him less threatening—a mistake—and now the author made a little stand of sorts. He straightened what passed for a spine and thrust out his chin, what there was of it. “The pick is mine. I bought and paid for it.”

  “Well,” said Riker, “that makes my job a lot easier. You just admitted to buying stolen goods. Give me the pick or we tack on a few more charges.”

  “Statute of limitations,” said the author. “I bought it more than seven years ago.”

  “You got me there, pal. I can see that I just don’t watch enough cop shows on television. So I guess all we’ve got on you is concealing evidence in an ongoing case. No, wait a minute. If you broke the seal on the bag, we can add tampering with evidence. And then there’s my personal favorite, obstruction of a homicide investigation.” He stepped toward Pinwitty, and the man fell back into a chair, startled to be suddenly sitting down and looking up at the detective’s angry face. Riker put his hands on the padded arms of the chair and leaned into the author’s face as he explained the worst of this man’s crimes. “And you’re pissing off my partner.”