Death in a Cold Hard Light

by Francine Mathews

“I don’t know.”

  Merry sighed and closed her eyes. “Look, Sue—you can’t stay up all night because Margot St. John is seeing things. She probably sees things all the time. You’re just the one who got the call.”

  “Okay.” Sue Morningstar sounded relieved. “I’m sorry I bothered you, but—”

  “You didn’t bother me. I’ll drive out to Sconset tomorrow and talk to Margot. Then I’ll call and let you know how she is.”

  “Good night, Detective.”

  Merry hung up the phone and looked blearily around the room. She had fallen asleep over Matt Bailey’s manuscripts—like their author, they were less than riveting—and the scattered white pages shone like ghosts in the steady moonlight. She gathered them into an untidy sheaf, then got out of bed to draw the blinds. At the window she stood a moment with her hand on the sill, staring out at the beckoning night; and felt as though she were the only person alive. She’d had no word from Peter in nearly three days. He must be very angry, then, and nursing his anger in private.

  She walked into her small kitchen. Drinking a glass of water in the dark, with only a leaking tap for company, she heard Sue Morningstar’s voice in her head. Someone called Katia had come for Jay, and they would both he hack for her soon.

  Margot had asked for help, until her plea was interrupted. Merry shivered, and felt her thin nightdress waft against the back of her legs. Almost human in its caress.

  She tossed the last of the water back into the sink and went in search of her clothes.

  The drive out to Sconset was probably absurd. Merry raced as though all the hounds of hell were at her heels down the deserted length of the Milestone Road at one o’clock in the morning. The moon shone so brightly on the macadam that she barely needed her headlights, and the undulating folds of the moors stretched to either side like a piece of rumpled bed linen. She might almost have been dreaming, with the dreamer’s pell-mell sense of urgency. But as her car slowed at the outskirts of Sconset, turning almost of itself toward Baxter Road, it struck her that even Margot St. John might consider her visit a trifle bizarre.

  The girl was probably asleep.

  Merry halted the car in the middle of a street turned spectral by moonlight, and weighed her options. She suddenly felt very foolish.

  If everything about Margot’s house looked perfectly normal, Merry decided, she would turn around and go home. She would drink a glass of wine, which never failed to send her straight to sleep. She would ascribe her behavior to excessive tension and the power of midnight suggestion; and she would undertake never to answer the phone after twelve, whoever the caller. That done, she put the car in gear and crawled toward the address Sue Morningstar had given her.

  Margot St. John’s house was the only one on Baxter Road that still had lights shining in the windows. It was as though all the life of Sconset had been obliterated in an instant by the cold hard light of that December moon.

  She stood blankly on the brick steps for a few moments, listening to the stillness. Her ears were straining for the sound of some movement beyond the storm door’s glass—some rustle or snatch of music that might betray a covert habitation. But there was nothing. She glanced first over one shoulder and then the other, registering the dark desertion behind neighboring windows. Their blind panes reflected fitful snatches of moonlight. Even Betsy Osborne’s old home, three doors down from this one, was shuttered and silent. The Markham family, who now owned it, had moved to Back Bay for the school year. Merry’s eyes drifted over the freshly shingled Markham facade, and she shuddered.

  A broad swath of light swept across the fronts of the houses and was gone. Sankaty Light carving up the night, from its sandy height at the end of Baxter Road.

  Merry dismissed the ghosts of last spring and turned back to the storm door. Her eyes focused on a tear in its screen—a curious rip formed of two lines at right angles to one another, just beyond the latch, as though someone had forgotten a key, and had forced an entry with a pocketknife. She pressed Margot St. John’s bell and waited for the echoes, hollow in the stillness. Then she crept quietly around to the rear of the house.

  Here was a deserted deck, with a cheap green lawn chair. Someone—Margot, perhaps?—was in the habit of sitting there, legs propped up on the railing, and staring out to sea. Like all summer things caught in the shore wrack of a different season, the chaise looked conscious of being past its prime.

  The lighthouse beam swept by her once more, dazzling her eyes.

  Merry turned and looked out over the deck’s rail.

  Here was the sea itself, rolling from Portugal to the foot of the Sconset bluff. The curling surf gleamed phosphorescent under the brilliant moon. A boardwalk, feet buried in the dunes, led from the deck on which Merry stood to the bluff’s eroding edge; and then a staircase, tangled with beach plum and rosa rugosa in the summer months, plummeted crazily to the beach below. Spectacular. A site to die for, even in the wintry dark. But the house itself was what the real estate industry would have labeled a smart buyer’s investment opportunity. Particularly in the present climate of soaring home prices. Its condition verged on the shabby.

  At the back elevation, a scattering of double-hung windows, asymmetrical and out of proportion to one another, revealed the house’s age. Modern architects were rarely so thoughtless of appearances; even their asymmetricality looked intentional. Four stumbling chimneys, and a fanlight in the peak of the roof. Sliding doors from kitchen to deck. A decrepit loggia tottering under the weight of a pathological wisteria vine, dormant now and crabbed.

  The lighthouse beam again, as inexorable as the waves.

  She mounted the deck steps, ignoring the embarrassed chaise longue, and peered through the sliding doors into the kitchen. It was sunk in darkness, but her straining eyes picked out a jumble of every sort of canned good and grocery box, thrown willy-nilly about the room in a paroxysm of rage. She drew a sharp breath and bit her lip.

  Someone had gone through the pantry like a whirlwind, tearing food from the shelves and overturning chairs. Broken crackers were stewn underfoot, paper toweling trailed dizzily from a countertop, raspberry preserves smeared the tiles.

  And a pile of white powder—flour?—spilled obscenely across the sink.

  Just beyond the kitchen’s side door, almost as an afterthought, she saw the trailing length of terry-cloth robe. A foot extended beyond it.

  It was a slender foot, and long, the pale skin almost translucent. The foot of a relatively young girl.

  The hair rose slowly along the back of Merry’s neck. It was possible, she supposed, that Margot St. John had merely passed out from a too-intense tango with heroin. But she knew instinctively that the girl was dead. The second sense that had sent her down the moonlit Milestone Road had proved unerring. It led straight through the right-angled tear in the storm-door screen directly to Mar-got St. John’s corpse.

  Merry closed her eyes and pressed her forehead for a moment against the cold, smooth glass of the door. And then, quite deliberately, she returned to her car and with a single call set in motion the forces that would rouse her crime scene team from their well-deserved sleep.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  “Bashed her head in,” John Fairborn said matter-of-factly. He brushed back a matted length of dark hair and pointed to a shard of bone that emerged sickeningly from the victim’s scalp. “Sharp-edged object, probably metal, swung from above and behind her. By a right-handed person.”

  “That sounded just like all the murdah books,” Clarence Strangerfield called approvingly from the front hallway, where he was on his knees dusting the door for fingerprints.

  The official response to death had transformed the silent, dreaming house. Strong lights, mounted on metal stands, glared from the center of every room. Camera bulbs flashed. Howie Seitz—who had seen two friends dead in a matter of days—was stoically dusting the kitchen’s scattered canned goods and cereal boxes for latent prints. Upstairs, Nat Coffin was similarly engaged. Evidence coll
ection would take them both hours to complete.

  A young uniformed policewoman was crouched with a large sketchpad a few yards from Margot St. John’s body. Triangulating the position of the corpse, Merry thought, remembering her own early days as a uniformed rookie. Ten years ago, now.

  “She couldn’t have fallen backwards and hit her head on something?” she asked Fairborn.

  “Like what? The edge of a garden hoe? I don’t see one lying around, do you? Besides, the angle of the wound suggests a downward slice. She would have had to have fallen on your garden hoe upside down.”

  “Okay,” Merry said mildly, “I was just checking. Any idea how long ago it happened, Doc?”

  “Hour or two at the most. She’s barely cooled. And no rigor to speak of.” He thought a moment, lips pursed and gaze wandering, as though the stench of blood had no power to affect his senses. “But time of death is a crap-shoot. I often wonder why anybody bothers to ask.”

  “You know why we ask.”

  “The persistence of hope over experience.”

  Merry stared down at Margot St. John’s lifeless face. Her staring eyes were full of unsaid words, a secret she had nearly divulged. They reminded Merry of a clock whose pendulum has stopped, freezing one moment in perpetuity—and of something she had almost forgotten: a girl’s terrified gaze, dark with kohl, shining in the light of Federal Street.

  “I’ve seen this girl before.”

  Howie looked up from the box of soap powder he was dusting, suddenly alert.

  “She was frightened of something. I know it,” Merry insisted.

  Fairborn closed his medical bag and retrieved his coat. “Looks like she had reason to be.”

  What had Dave Haddenfield said? That Margot wanted Jay at the Baxter Road house for protection as much as anything else? “I meant to talk to her this morning. I should have.”

  “You can’t save everybody, Meredith.” The doctor’s voice was uncharacteristically gentle. “Where would I be for business?”

  “Get out of here, Doc.”

  He swung his jacket over his shoulders and grimaced. “I should have left this in the car. There’s always an unpleasant odor of blood after one of our little chats.”

  “It matches your clothes, then.” Merry followed the doctor to the door.

  “Not to mention my hair. I only hope the ladies waiting in my office tomorrow don’t have a highly developed sense of smell. It could induce more than morning sickness.” When he wasn’t on call for the police, Fairborn maintained a thriving gynecological practice.

  “Take a shower, Doc,” Merry advised. “Before you get back in bed.”

  Fairborn gave her a lazy smile. “You ever notice these murders seem to come in a rush?”

  “We don’t know that the drowning was a murder,” Merry objected carefully.

  He waved that away. “We go for months with nothing, and then…”

  “Boom. Like plane crashes. In threes,” Clarence observed from his position by the door.

  Threes. Just like last May. Merry frowned at the crime scene chief, and misunderstanding her message, Clarence thrust himself to his feet.

  “Let me open the door farh yah, Doc. Wouldn’t wancha destroyin’ the evidence.”

  When Fairborn had slid behind the wheel of his teal-blue BMW and roared away, Merry wheeled on Clarence irritably. “Why do we call that guy in, anyway? He never tells us anything except what we already know—that the victim’s dead. I could have recited that bit about the sharp-edged metal object before I even made a call to the station.”

  Clarence didn’t bother to answer this directly. “Didja see the needle mahrks on her arm?”

  Merry nodded. “No surprise there.”

  “They were a lot mahr pronounced than that young fellah’s we pulled outta the harbah.”

  “So was her habit, from what I hear. But why kill her?”

  Merry’s eyes traveled thoughtfully around the house’s barren interior. Very little furniture, fewer pictures on the walls, and a set of sheets serving as curtains on the front windows.

  “I wouldn’t think there was much money in the case,” Clarence offered skeptically.

  “It’s weird, isn’t it?” Merry agreed. “This girl was supposed to be house-sitting. But it’s as though she never really inhabited the place at all. Not a shred of anything personal, except in her bedroom.”

  “House-sittin’, huh? I’da thought it was somethin’ less respectable.”

  Merry turned. “Why?”

  “There’s men’s clothing in one o’ the closets upstayahs.” Trust Clarence to make a quick survey of the house, and draw his own conclusions. But she had done a survey herself, while waiting for his van to arrive.

  “There are no men’s toiletries in the bathroom. The clothes could belong to the house’s owner—left here off-season. Or … Seitz?”

  Howie’s curly head poked around the kitchen door-jamb. “Yes, Detective?”

  “Run upstairs and tell me whether the men’s clothes in the guest-room closet could belong to Jay Santorski.”

  “Speakin’ o’ that young man,” Clarence volunteered while they waited for Seitz to fulfill his commission, “I traced that 617 phone numbah.”

  “From the matchbook?”

  “Ayeh. Registahed to a woman in Cambridge by the name o’ Purcell. Catherine Purcell. Elderly widow. She still summahs on the island.”

  “You spoke to her?”

  “Had to. Otherwise, we’d nevah know why Santorski had her numbah, would we?”

  “And?”

  “Mrs. Purcell had never heard of ‘im.”

  Disappointment made Merry’s tone a little sharp. “You needn’t sound so triumphant, Clare. That’s not exactly a rabbit you’ve pulled out of your hat.”

  “But she told me somethin’ that might be of interest.”

  “Yes?”

  “The address of her summah house on Nantucket. I could discuss the mattah with her house-sittah, she said.” The gleam in Clarence’s brown eyes was unmistakably self-congratulatory.

  “Don’t tell me. Let me guess.”

  “318 Baxtah Road. Yahr standin’ in Catherine Purcell’s front hall, Marradith.”

  Howie chose this moment to call over the upstairs banister. “Couldn’t be Jay’s stuff. Wrong size.”

  “Too small?” Merry asked, remembering the lifeless Michelangelo.

  “By about four sizes.”

  Merry looked back at Clarence. “So if the home owner is a widow, and the clothes aren’t Jay’s …”

  “We’re dealin’ with an unknown quantity.”

  Merry looked for Howie. He was just galloping down the stairs. “Seitz! Did Margot have a frequent male visitor, by any chance?”

  The patrolman frowned. “None I ever heard of.”

  Merry sighed in exasperation. “Maybe he’s a sporadic male visitor. Or maybe we’re making a mountain out of a molehill.”

  Clarence pursed his lips. “Could fly ovah on weekends from Bahston.”

  “Leaving corpses in his wake.” Sunday was, after all, the end of Christmas Stroll. A good time to head back to the mainland, particularly if the holiday hadn’t gone as planned.

  “Any reason to think he had a tempah?”

  Merry shrugged. “Other than the victim’s tendency to crash on her friends’ couches rather than turn up at home, I couldn’t really say. We don’t even know this guy’s name.”

  “Might find it on somethin’ lyin’ around the house.”

  “If we can find anything in this chaos.”

  “Ayeh,” Clarence agreed, “not yarh usual breakin’ and enterin’. Don’t often see a burglah who raids the pantry and leaves the stereo in the neighbahin’ room. Looks like a crime o’ passion to me.”

  “Or a drug-crazed rampage. He—or she—was searching for something.”

  “Heroin?”

  “Why not? There’s a lot of white stuff spilled. Flour in the sink, powder on the bathroom floor.” Merry considered
this theory in silence, then shook her head dismissively. “Margot died because she knew something. I’m sure of it.”

  “About young Jays death?”

  “Possibly. Or maybe they both knew too much about something else.”

  Merry left Clarence standing in the hall, and took a last look at Margot St. John’s face. A paramedic from Cottage Hospital was just about to zip a black body bag over the tangled mass of auburn hair. Merry saw that he had closed Margot’s eyes. She felt curiously relieved.

  “There must be a property manager, Clare,” she said briskly, and turned away from the corpse. “Someone to call when the pipes break in January, or a tree falls on the garage. A real estate agency, maybe, or a local handyman. They could probably tell us a lot.”

  “I’ll get onto it, Marradith.”

  “Hey, boss,” Nat Coffin called urgently from the top of the stairs. “Look at this. I found it in her bedroom.”

  Merry and Clarence glanced upward.

  “It’s an ATM slip dated Saturday. Somebody tried to pull a hundred bucks out of Pacific National Bank. Insufficient funds, it says.”

  “That slip of paper you were hoping for,” Merry told Clarence. “Although with our luck, it probably belongs not to an unknown male, but to Margot herself. Everything about her screams insufficient funds.”

  “Make a copy o’ the account numbah,” Clarence called upward, “and check it with the bank.”

  “Detective Folger?”

  This time it was Howie, standing white-faced in the kitchen doorway with a can of stewed tomatoes held gingerly in one gloved hand. A damaged can, apparently. Even at the distance of twenty feet, Merry saw the dried smear where the tomatoes had leaked from the seam.

  “I think I just found our murder weapon.”

  When the shrouded body of Margot St. John had been loaded onto a gurney and wheeled away to the waiting ambulance, the small crowd of Sconset residents still lingered on the fringes of the scene. All were bundled into coats and wore hats against the perpetual Sconset wind. By this time, the moon had set somewhere over the mainland, its cold hard light giving way to dawn.