Winter House

by Carol O'Connell

  Oh, yes, Mallory had believed that this woman had been driven insane long ago, but now she said, “No.”

  “You’ve seen the trunk with Sally’s bones?”

  Mallory nodded.

  “You risked your life to save me tonight,” said Nedda. “It’s greedy, I know . . . but I have a favor to ask.”

  “Name it.”

  “Mercy for Lionel and Cleo.” Her words were more labored now. “See them as I do . . . as they were . . . children with no one to love them. All they ever had was each other. I promise you . . . they didn’t kill Sally . . . They could never—” She coughed up a bit of blood, but stayed Mallory’s hand as the detective reached for the nurse’s call button. “Please, listen. . . . Those three children shared a bond of abandonment . . . and loss. Can you understand that?”

  Mallory understood it too well. She was always losing people. “All right. I’ll never go near them. I promise. I’ll leave them in peace.”

  “No, Mallory . . . I want you to talk to them. Tell them about the massacre . . . what really happened. And tell them . . . I didn’t know they survived it.”

  The old woman faltered, drawing breath and creasing her face with deepening lines of great pain. What was it costing her to say these words?

  She reached out for Mallory’s hand and wound her weak fingers around it. “There’s a metal suitcase under my bed. . . . Maybe it survived the fire. Find it. It’ll help you . . . make them understand that I never abandoned them . . . never stopped loving them.” Her fingers tightened on the detective’s hand. “They’ll believe it . . . if it comes from you.”

  Mallory nodded. Of course they would. She was the one person who would never stand accused of insincere platitudes and lies of kindness. Nedda had chosen her messenger well—but too late. “I promise. I’ll tell them everything.” The words sounded awkward and false, and she credited this to her lack of practice in her attempt to lie with good intention—to be kind.

  And yet she was believed.

  Nedda Winter’s mouth twisted between a smile and a grimace. “At least, at the end, I was there for Bitty. . . . My life wasn’t really wasted. And I understand Walter McReedy so much better now. . . . If saving Bitty was all that I had ever done with my time on earth . . . it’s enough. I finally found out what I was made of . . . and I was better than I knew.”

  The eyes closed, and the muscles of the face relaxed in the absence of pain, years fading off with the loss of agony lines. The lines of life signs on two of the bedside monitors went flat, and a third continued on with its recording of a body function displayed in electric-orange waves of light. But Mallory knew that the technology lied. There was no mistaking death for even the deepest sleep. It was the unnatural stillness that gave it away, that frozen quality of a bird photographed in flight.

  Good night, Red Winter.

  Mallory’s left hand was slowly rising, closing to a fist—a hammer. She rammed it into the wall above the bed, wanting the pain.

  This was not right! It was not fair!

  Again and again, she attacked and cracked the plaster as she counted up all of the dead on her watch. She was bleeding when the doctors came to take her away and to mend her broken hand.

  12

  SLEEPLESS, CHARLES BUTLER HAD TAKEN TO BAREFOOT wanderings at all hours. It was five o’clock in the morning when he padded down the narrow hall of Butler and Company to the office in the rear.

  Mallory’s computer monitors were all aglow, and her knapsack lay on the desk alongside the remains of a take-out meal. The half-filled coffee cup was still warm. He faced her cork wall and the penultimate symptom of a neat-freak spiraling out of control—a violent sprawl of paperwork. Her case elements were pinned in a horizontal splatter pattern. How many hours had she spent on this? All night long? Yes, her loss of sleep was apparent in the abandonment of perfect alignments. The wall was so messy that, at first, he thought this must be Riker’s work. But no—there was a rudimentary order in the chaos. However primitive, this linear progression was very un-Riker-like and all Mallory. Her signature ruthlessness survived in the single-minded march of data across the wall.

  When would she ever let it go?

  When would he?

  Charles sat down at the desk and covered his face with both hands, somewhat surprised to discover that he had grown a three-day stubble of beard. And how many days had he worn this bathrobe?

  Grief and profound depression were exhausting him. Guilt was even more tiring, and he was not yet done second-guessing his time with Nedda Winter. That was the horror of hindsight: there were always a hundred different paths that one might have taken to a different outcome. What truly drove him mad was that he had not listened to Mallory. How many times had she warned him that Nedda might die? Accidental death or not, if he had only kept Nedda close, she would be alive.

  At odd moments, tears streamed down his face. He had no control over them. Before him, there was always a picture of Nedda happy in the realization of a simple little dream, Nedda free of sorrow and pain—what might have been. He laid his head on the desk. He would never take on another patient.

  Her burden was more difficult, more death than he was accountable for. Unaccustomed to failure, Mallory had never acquired the emotional muscles necessary to pick herself up when she tripped and fell from grace. How well he could empathize with that, but he could not help her. Spliced together, he doubted that he and she would make one complete and healthy human. The other impediment was their friendship. Friends did not call attention to one another’s bloodstained souls and psyches.

  Half the contents of her knapsack had been spilled across the desk blotter. He picked up a bottle with the hospital’s pharmacy label. It was filled with pain medication prescribed for her broken hand. There was no need to count out the tablets; he knew that she had taken none of them. Mallory would not want to dull her beautiful brain, not while she was obsessing over all the details of one terrible night gone awry. However, he was also assured that she was not suffering, not likely to pay much attention to the aching throb of broken bones and damaged muscle. To paraphrase an old song from his youth, she did not have time for the pain.

  And so—he felt the pain.

  Thus crippled, he picked up her pen and passed an hour writing letters to Mallory, long sorry lines of apology, taking all the blame for Nedda’s death. And then he had the good sense to lay down the pen. How unfair to burden her with his own obsession. Charles smashed the pages into the pockets of his robe, then rose from the chair to stretch his legs. He walked the length of the giant bulletin board, a disaster zone on several levels.

  Well . . . maybe not.

  At first, her pushpin style had been perfect in every alignment of paper, and then, as she had continued down the wall, pinning up new documents, they hung increasingly askew, as if she had become more and more agitated in her rush from one end of the wall to the other. The new configurations of diagrams and photographs, text and sundry bits of paper were laid out like a jigsaw puzzle without any helpful irregularities in the pieces. He had only the gist of the thing: neither of them could quite let go of Nedda Winter. And, truly, it seemed impossible that such a person could be removed from the planet by a freak accident. Mallory’s linear paper storm relentlessly moved on down the wall toward that same conclusion.

  At the very end of the wall, a report from the fire marshal knocked everything else out of his head. This was not possible. He read it twice. There were no portable radios in Winter House, none that would work without current, and the antique radio in the front room had not been in working condition for many years.

  Oh, no. Madness was a recent thing with him, and there was nothing wrong with his memory.

  Charles returned to the desk, took up pen and paper once more, then left a note pinned over the technical report. The bold lines of red marking pen stood out from all the rest, and this bit of tampering with her wall could not fail to annoy her the moment she walked in the door. It was a simple messag
e—Mallory loved brevity—only three words writ large, This is wrong.

  It was late afternoon when Bitty Smyth approached her own home like a thief, stealing through the park, keeping to the elongating shadows of rock formations and evergreens. The police vehicles were no longer parked in front of Winter House. The reporters were long gone, and there was a sense of emptiness about the place.

  And desolation. As Aunt Nedda would say, “Poor house.”

  Bitty eased herself over the low stone wall and sprinted across the wide boulevard, dodging traffic, her fugitive brown eyes darting left and right. She raced up the front steps and faltered with the keys, dropping them twice before she could undo the locks. Finally, she opened the door to an acrid smell of stale smoke and mildew. Three days later, the air was still dank from the water hoses. Fearing an electrical fire, she hesitated to turn on the foyer light. Fear of the dark finally weighted her decision to flip the wall switch. The lights flickered on and off.

  And Bitty sucked in her breath.

  Vandals.

  The smoke-stained walls of the foyer had suffered fresh damage. They were cracked by huge nails driven into the plaster with great force. Each nail staked a sheet of paper.

  Senseless violence.

  As she scanned the papers, Bitty fancied that she could hear the echo of every nail hammered in anger: BANG!—a fire marshal’s diagram of her bedroom, the point of origin for the blaze; BANG!—another diagram showing the location of the cellar fuse box; BANG!—an official finding of arson.

  Impossible.

  The fire had been the pure accident of a candle falling into a wastebasket. Neither she nor Aunt Nedda had been near the candlestick when it had fallen off the bureau.

  BANG!—a drawing of the cellar that marked the place where the pulled-out fuses and the spares had been hidden; BANG!—a forensic report on a flashlight recovered from the ashes of a bedroom closet; its round head matched to paint chips and a circular pattern of dust on the fuse box in the cellar.

  BANG, BANG, BANG! A score of documents led to the end of the wall and turned a corner.

  Bitty screamed.

  No, no, no!

  Rags. This was too cruel. Her pet cockatiel had been staked to the next wall, one nail for each tattered wing, and, for a few moments, the flickering lights gave the dead bird the illusion of flapping feathers and flight.

  BANG!—beside Rags’s tiny carcass was Mallory’s witness statement. The detective had found three prone victims trapped above the fire’s point of origin. Most damning were the final words: The only survivor will inherit millions.

  BANG!—an application to freeze the assets of the Winter fortune in probate limbo.

  Though the house was utterly silent, absent all but imaginary hammers, Bitty’s hands rose up to cover her ears.

  And then she held her breath—the better to listen.

  She heard no voice or footfall, yet Bitty knew that she was not alone in the house. Creeping toward the threshold of the front room, her eyes were slowly adapting to the soft remains of sunlight slanting through the parted drapes and falling from the skylight dome at the top of the house. Now she could see every detail of a workman’s scaffolding inside the curve of the blackened staircase. It was a network of wooden planks and buttressing metal rods swirling upward.

  Mallory, dressed in dusty blue jeans, a T-shirt and a gun, hung there in midair.

  Bitty blinked.

  No, the detective stood on a high platform at the center of this giant skeleton of wood and steel, a suitcase resting at her feet, so like a woman waiting for a train or a bus to pass by high in the air. And so patiently—as though Mallory had been waiting there all this time, days and days. One crippled hand in a plaster cast dangled at her left side. Her hair and clothes bore a darker dust of ashes that had come down from the second floor with the metal suitcase, the one that Aunt Nedda had kept under her bed.

  Always locked.

  The detective picked up the suitcase, held it high over her head and sent it crashing to the floor below. It fell open, disgorging leather-bound journals, the sort that came with small locks and keys—decades of diaries.

  “I like money motives,” said Mallory. “And now . . . you have one.”

  Bitty was shocked into a calmer state than she could otherwise have managed. She moved farther into the room, drawn along, as people are drawn to accident scenes. The lawyer in her was surfacing, and it wanted a look at those diaries. At last, she stood before the scaffolding, believing that there was hardly any fear in her voice when she forced a smile and looked upward, saying, “What a droll sense of humor.”

  “I’m not known for that.”

  Still smiling, Bitty splayed her hands. “But I haven’t committed any crimes.”

  “No?” Mallory bent down to pick up two electrical cords. “Let’s count them.” In a sleight of her one good hand, she joined the cords together, plug and socket. The room flooded with light from all quarters, brilliant spotlights, a dozen or more white-hot suns perched atop high poles. Bitty covered her face with both hands and closed her blinded eyes.

  When she could see again, she turned in the direction that every light was focused upon. All the mirrors had been taken down from one wall. It was covered over with hundreds of papers and nails and cracks running jagged down the plaster. After a full minute of stunned silence, she looked back over one shoulder. The detective had not changed her stance, but was she at least one platform lower—closer?

  “How did you get these trust documents?” Bitty strived to convey a suspicion of theft. “No judge would ever sign a warrant to raid a law firm for—”

  “Your father didn’t tell you? Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Mallory stepped off the narrow wooden plank and dropped to the wider platform below. This time, her running shoes made noise with contact. “Old Sheldon didn’t like you much, did he? Well, maybe you pissed him off when you tried to blackmail his law firm.”

  “You can’t be—”

  “You threatened him with a very old crime.” Mallory pointed to the wall. “Right below the trust documents, you’ll find the warrant for your father’s safety-deposit box. That’s where I found the restitution agreement for the embezzled trust fund. It proves that the law firm stole money from the Winter children. That was my partner’s favorite piece of evidence—proof of lawyers robbing orphans.”

  Bitty turned to face the scaffold, one hand shading her eyes from the bright lights. “I swear to you, I never—”

  “You knew. When you worked in your father’s firm, you had lots of time to study the trust fund documents. I also found a copy of his will. Two years ago, he cut you off without a cent. That’s how I know you didn’t leave on sabbatical. He fired you. I’ve seen the firm’s financials—yours, too. He paid you hush money—your allowance. That’s what he called it—ten percent of your old salary. You actually made less money as a blackmailer.” The detective’s smile was derisive. “You just couldn’t stand up to him, could you? He called your bluff, and you folded. You crept away with a few pathetic crumbs like a good little mouse.”

  Mallory stepped to the edge of the platform.

  Bitty’s head snapped left toward the distraction of a faulty pole light blinking on and off. When she turned back to the scaffold, Mallory was gone, and this silent piece of work was more alarming than the sound of the crashing suitcase. Could Mallory have dropped to earth from such a high place without making the slightest noise?

  Or could she fly?

  “I know everything now,” said Mallory.

  Bitty jumped. Her heart banged. Her eyes went everywhere. Where had—

  “When blackmail didn’t work, you came up with a new swindle.”

  Bitty slowly revolved, her eyes alternately squinting at bright lights and peering into shadows. “I have no idea what you’re—”

  “I know how you found your aunt.” The detective stood under a spotlight at one end of the wall, as if she had simply materialized there. “It was a job that gen
erations of good cops couldn’t do. That bothered me from the beginning.”

  “If you had only asked—” Bitty’s hands joined tightly, fingers interlaced, but not in prayer. “I would’ve told you about the investigator.”

  “Joshua Addison?”

  “Yes, my private investigator.”

  “No, he’s mine now.” Mallory ripped a sheaf of papers from the wall. “This is his statement—all your requirements for the job.”

  Bitty nodded unconsciously. She knew this list by heart: find an old woman approximately seventy years of age, tall and fair and blue of eye, a woman without documents or memories of family and home.

  “It was a shopping list for a doppelgänger,” said Mallory. “You weren’t even looking for your aunt. Any old woman would do, as long as Cleo and Lionel believed she was their sister. You didn’t even have to worry about a DNA test. By the time—”

  “I wanted to please them.”

  “No, you didn’t. They were horrified. That’s the way Nedda put it in her last diary, the one she started in the hospice. She mentioned you, too—in detail. It was her impression that you weren’t all that surprised by the reception she got from Cleo and Lionel. Now back to your PI’s shopping list. Addison told me you were only interested in nursing homes. Good hunting grounds for old women who can’t even remember their names.”

  Bitty eased herself down to the floor, fearing that if she did not sit down, she might fall on weakening knees. Mallory had erred on one point. Not just any old woman would do to separate her family from their money. It had taken years and all of her savings to find just the right one, a senile old crone with a resemblance to the Winter family. How astonished she had been to discover that the best candidate of the lot was the genuine article.

  “I even know why you picked the state of Maine.” Mallory was moving across the room, and it seemed to Bitty that the detective would walk over her or through her, but the young woman stopped suddenly, as a train would stop just short of collision. “Maine was close enough to keep tabs on your search,” said Mallory. “But it was far enough from New York City so you wouldn’t have to worry about the Smyth name being linked to the Winter family. The PI was pretty lame, and I’m guessing that’s why you picked him. But he finally made that connection.”