by Jane Haddam
For most of her growing up, Eileen Platte had envied her older sister. Eileen Platte had been Eileen O’Brien then, and her older sister had been named Margaret Mary. Margaret Mary was a special name. It was the name of the nun who had seen the Virgin Mary on an altar in her convent and been given the design of the Miraculous Medal to reveal to the world. All the girls at St. Rose of Lima School loved the Miraculous Medal best, because it was the most beautiful of all the medals. There was a picture of the Blessed Virgin on the front of it with her arms outstretched. Rays of light come from her fingertips, and words came from the rays of light: O MARY, CONCEIVED WITHOUT SIN, PRAY FOR US WHO HAVE RECOURSE TO THEE. Neither Eileen nor her sister nor anybody else they knew understood what “recourse” meant, but it didn’t really matter.
Now Eileen stood in the middle of her kitchen, looking down at the long granite counter, and wondering what she had been thinking. She knew what “recourse” meant now, but it seemed to her that it was a trick, and always had been. The Virgin Mother would pray for those of the human family who had a right to ask her to pray for them. If you didn’t have a right to ask—well. You could ask away forever, and none of your prayers would be answered.
It was odd the way things had been, all these weeks since Michael had died. At first, Eileen had barely felt it. There was no body she could look at. There was no funeral. There wasn’t even a death notice in the papers. The whole thing was drifting and unreal, as if she’d dreamed it. Dream was the wrong word, but she didn’t know what else to call it. Sometimes she had nightmares that woke her up screaming. Sometimes she had the same nightmares, but all the emotion was gone. Michael was gone. A policewoman had come to the door and told her that. They had both sat down at the kitchen table. The policewoman had touched her hand, and Eileen had had to force herself not to recoil at the touch. There was something wrong with that policewoman’s hand, she was sure of it. There was flecks of black and green across the knuckles, that looked like they’d been poisoned.
After about a week, Eileen had found herself thinking of it as actual. That wasn’t quite the same thing as real, but it was close. The house was big and silent and empty. Michael was not in his bedroom snoring off a night doing God only knew what. Stephen was not storming around the house, delivering lectures about Michael’s faults and all the awful things that would happen to him if he didn’t straighten up. Stephen was not saying anything, really, and that was the strangest thing of all the things that had happened so far.
Actually, there was one thing Stephen did say, and it mattered. Eileen couldn’t make herself forget it.
“You shouldn’t be helping the police,” he said. “They’re professionals. They’ve got a job to do. You should let them do it.”
“But what if I have information,” Eileen had said. “Don’t the police always want information? Don’t you want to see the person who did this go to prison?”
“They got the person who did this,” Stephen said. “They don’t need any more help from us.”
That conversation had happened at the kitchen table, too. It seemed to Eileen that all conversations happened at the kitchen table now. Except that they weren’t really conversations, because she didn’t really take part in them. She said things. Other people said things. There was no connection. She knew what Stephen was thinking of when he gave her his orders. She’d been thinking about it herself ever since the policewoman had come to the door. She had no idea why she hadn’t told the policewoman about it then and there. Maybe it was instinct. Maybe she had just known, without having to ask, that Stephen would hate the entire idea of her telling the policewoman about what she had found in Michael’s bedroom.
For a while after that, Eileen had relied on the news. There were news reports every day about the “progress of the investigation,” and lots of speculation about what Arthur Heydreich had done and why. There was one terrible picture of Martha, made-up like a circus clown, that they played over and over again. Eileen wondered if they used that one because it was so extremely bizarre, or just because it was the only one they could find. The few other shots that appeared anywhere had been taken in groups at club events, with Martha as usual in the background, tall and thin, but the wrong kind of thin. Eileen had stared at all the pictures and wondered what Michael had found so fascinating in the woman. It didn’t matter if he was sleeping with her or not. It didn’t matter if he was gay. There must have been something that had drawn him there.
Eileen thought she might have gone on feeling like that forever, if it hadn’t been for yesterday. Yesterday there were other stories in the news, and suddenly nothing seemed to be settled at all. Arthur Heydreich was out of jail and not even charged with one of the murders anymore. The television stations said he would soon have the charges dropped on Michael’s murder. Now it was Martha herself everybody was asking about. There was a poster showed on television, and a “nationwide campaign” to discover her “whereabouts.” It sounded even less real than the rest of it had. It sounded like a movie.
When Stephen came home last night, Eileen had tried to put it to him again. There was something about this new circumstance, about Arthur Heydreich getting out of jail, that made it through the thick fog of defense around her and let her know that this was final. Michael would never be coming home. She could stay up night after night. She could get in the car and drive into Philadelphia and look through all his old neighborhoods until she was sure somebody was going to murder her for whatever she had in her purse. She could do all the things she had always done, but this time, at the end of them, there would be no Michael needing to be rushed to the emergency room and no Michael needing to be left to sleep it off and no Michael angry and mocking because she’d appeared out of nowhere to spoil his fun.
Eileen had sat down at the kitchen table one more time and tried to talk sense. She was aware that talking sense was not something Stephen thought her capable of doing. It was important, though. It was important to make things work out right.
“It will be different now,” she’d said, rubbing her palms together over and over and over again. This was not something she was doing just because this was the subject she was trying to talk about. This was the way she always was when she talked to Stephen. “It will be different now,” she said again. “There are going to be more questions. And they’ve hired this man, this Gregor Demarkian. I don’t think they hire somebody like Gregor Demarkian unless they mean to do a serious investigation.”
“I don’t care about Gregor Demarkian,” Stephen had said.
Eileen had tried again. It was, really, very difficult. The house felt like a huge prison rising up around her head. It was endless. It had too many rooms. All the rooms were full of people whispering.
“Don’t you see,” she said. “It might be important. It might be a clue. Or—or evidence. It might be something they need to convict whoever killed him. You have to know somebody killed him. It couldn’t have been drugs that bashed his head in.”
“She was a cunt, that woman,” Stephen said. “I don’t care what happens to her.”
“You don’t care if she goes free and is never punished for Michael’s murder?”
“What difference does it make if anybody is punished for Michael’s murder? For God’s sake, Eileen. The kid was a wreck. He’d have died sooner rather than later anyway. What’s a month or two ahead of time?”
“But it matters if it was a month or two ahead of time,” Eileen said. “Something might have happened. He might have turned himself around. He might have gone to rehab again and had it stick—”
“Rehab doesn’t stick,” Stephen had said. He’d used that voice she’d come to think of as “patience in the face of wanting to kill somebody.” “Rehab is a fraud. You know how many people get off drugs and stay off drugs when they go to rehab? Five percent of all the people who start. Five percent. You know how many people get off drugs and stay off drugs without rehab, just because they want to do it and do it on their own? Five percent. If Michael had ever wanted
to get off drugs and to be off drugs, he’d have done it, with rehab or without. You just can’t accept the fact that he never wanted to get off drugs.”
“I don’t think what’s upstairs had to do with drugs,” Eileen said. “I think it had to do with her. I think she gave it to him.”
“Gave it to him,” Stephen said. “And why would she do that?”
“I don’t know,” Eileen said.
Actually, she did know. At least, she had a suspicion. She had been working it out in her head ever since she heard that the other body in the pool house didn’t belong to Martha Heydreich. It was very hard to make it come clear in her head. There were so many turns and wrinkles in it. Still, she had an idea.
“I think,” she said.
Stephen got up from the table. “I think you just don’t get it,” he said. “You can’t tell the police about something like this. You can’t go off and get us into the papers this way. They can throw us out of Waldorf Pines for something like this. Did you know that?”
“They didn’t throw out Arthur Heydreich,” Eileen said.
“They were afraid they’d get sued,” Stephen said. “Innocent until proven guilty and all that kind of thing. But they won’t have any trouble sticking it to us. They’ve been wanting to get us out of here for a year. That Horace Wingard. He’s been ready to give us the shove at the first excuse.”
“Horace Wingard was always very good about Michael,” Eileen said. “He gave him that job. And he kept him on that job, you know, even though Michael—”
“Even though Michael didn’t show up half the time?”
“It was just a phase,” Eileen said. “He was young, that was all. He thought he knew everything. He’d have grown up eventually…”
Her voice had trailed off. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d believed that.
“The trouble with you,” Stephen had said, “is that you just can’t face reality.”
Then he had gotten up from the table and walked away, out the swinging doors to the dining room. Across the foyer. Eileen had heard his feet on the stairs. Everything in this house echoed. There was a television in nearly every room, but she never put them on.
She heard a door open upstairs. That would be the door to Michael’s room. It was a very clean room. She kept it clean. When Michael came home, he threw things on the floor and messed it up.
The footsteps were in the hall again. Then they were on the stairs. Eileen looked down at her hands and waited.
Stephen came back across the dining room and into the kitchen. He had a Bass Weejun shoe box in his right hand. It flopped and shuddered as he moved. Eileen thought that it was going to fall, and then everything would be all over the place, right there in the kitchen.
Stephen put the shoe box down in the middle of the table.
“I’m going to take this out of here,” he said. “I’m going to move this somewhere, and you won’t find it. And if you ever tell the police, or anybody else, that it was in Michael’s room, or that I’ve got it, I’ll say you’re lying. And make no mistake about it, Eileen. They won’t believe you. They’ll believe me.”
Eileen did not see how there was any way to deny this. This is what had always been true.
2
Caroline Stanford-Pyrie was not the kind of person who panicked, ever. If she had been, she would not have landed safely at Waldorf Pines, and she would not have been able to bring Susan Carstairs with her. She had long been of the opinion that any catastrophe could be survived if it was handled properly. The difficulty lay in knowing what “properly” was meant to be. There was also the rule that you had to be most careful when the police were involved. The police were always the enemy.
Of course, at the moment, her problem was not the police, who had no reason to be thinking about her. Her problem was Susan, who was doing her usual fluttery, addled thing when danger approached. It had started with the news, yesterday, that the charred body in the pool house was no longer thought to be Martha Heydreich, and that the charges against Arthur Heydreich for the murder of his wife had been dropped. Then Arthur Heydreich had been released, and Susan had had something like a nervous breakdown.
“You can’t say it doesn’t matter,” Susan had wailed. “How can it not matter? It was different when he was dead and she was dead and everybody knew who did it. They don’t ask questions when they know who did it. But now what, Alison? Now what?”
“Caroline,” Caroline had said automatically.
Susan had blushed.
“I’m not worried about the police asking questions,” Caroline said. “I’m worried about that. I’m worried about you—”
“I won’t do it again,” Susan said. “I’m sorry. I just get upset. I can’t understand how you can blame me for being upset. After everything that’s happened—”
“After everything that’s happened, I should think you’d know better than to get upset at every little thing,” Caroline said. “And it is a little thing, Susan. The situation hasn’t really changed. There are still two dead bodies, and the police still think they know who the murderer is. It’s just a different murderer.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Susan said. “How can they know who the murderer is? They let Arthur Heydreich go.”
“Yes, they did,” Caroline said. “They let him go, because now they’re looking for Martha. There are two dead bodies and Martha’s missing, so naturally they think it was Martha who killed them. It’s what I’d think.”
Caroline watched Susan try to process this. It was like watching an old woman trying to knead bread dough. It was painful. Susan thought about it. Susan thought about it again. Caroline wanted to tear the hair out of her head.
“Do you think that’s possible?” Susan asked finally. “Do you really think Martha could have done something like that, killed two people?”
“I think Martha could have had sex with the devil if it would have gotten her where she wanted to go,” Caroline said.
Susan shuddered. “I didn’t like that movie. I never like movies with the devil in them. I just can’t see it. They said Michael Platte was hit over the head and thrown into the pool. I know Martha was athletic, but could she have done something like that? And what about the other one? Whoever it was. Burned to a crisp is what they said on television. Burned down to nothing but ash. It just sounds crazy, that’s all.
“It doesn’t matter if it sounds crazy,” Caroline said. “It’s what happened.”
“But how would she do that?” Susan insisted. “She must have been there at the same time Arthur was. To start the fire. Or almost at the same time, anyway. He must have seen her. Somebody must have. It was the middle of the morning commute. There are people everywhere. And you know what people are. They pry.”
“Well, these people didn’t pry,” Caroline said. “Maybe they were talking on their cell phones. Maybe they were texting while driving. What does it matter? Let the police do their jobs. Sit tight. Don’t talk too much. Let it pass. They’ll find Martha. They’ll put her in jail. Nobody will have paid the least attention to us.”
“What if they don’t find Martha?” Susan said. “What if she’s dead, too?”
Caroline had wanted to scream. “Then,” she’d said, “maybe it will turn out that Arthur Heydreich killed all three of them. It has nothing to do with us.”
Maybe, Caroline thought now, it would have been easier to convince Susan if it had been true. Susan had been up all night with it, pacing around in her room, crying when she thought Caroline couldn’t hear her. There had been times during the night when Caroline had wanted to burst into that bedroom and have a complete and unalloyed fit. Only the possibility that somebody might hear her and call security had stopped her.
It didn’t help that, if somebody called security, Caroline knew who it would be. Everybody said they could make a list of the people willing to kill off Martha Heydreich, but Caroline was willing to bet that the list of people willing to kill off Walter Dunbar w
ould be longer.
She got coffee going in the percolator and set out the cups and saucers on the kitchen table. She had always been careful to set the table for breakfast as she was used to having it set, just as she set the table for dinner as she was used to having it set. She sometimes thought of herself as one of those representatives of the British Empire in the deep jungles of Africa. It didn’t matter if there was no toilet and lions were lurking in wait just outside the comforting ring of the fire. She would don her tuxedo and be served like a gentleman.
Except that lions didn’t live in the jungle. They lived in the grasslands. She remembered that from The Lion King, which was the last movie she had seen in a theater. She had been with her youngest son that day. She had not been angry at him.
Susan was moving slowly this morning, as if she hated the idea of coming downstairs to start the day. Fortunately, there were no committee meetings to attend today. There had been very few committee meetings since the murders. People didn’t like the idea of spending time with each other when one of them had two bodies on his conscience.
“It’s going to get worse now,” Caroline said, not meaning to say it out loud.
Susan appeared in the kitchen and blinked. “What’s going to get much worse now?” she asked. “You said yesterday that it wouldn’t matter. You said it had nothing to do with us. You said the police had already decided it was Martha who committed the murders and then ran away.”
The coffee was finished. Caroline brought the percolator to the table. She sat down in front of her own place mat with her own set of silverware. It was her own silverware, too, brought from the house, carefully wrapped in that fuzzy warm blue cloth from Tiffany’s. Caroline used to have a service for thirty-six in this pattern.
“I wasn’t thinking about the police,” she said. “I was thinking about the people. The people who live here. They’ve been skittish with each other since this started. Now it’s going to be worse.”
“Why would it be worse?” Susan asked. “They’ll still know who killed them. You said that yourself. You said they used to think that it was Arthur Heydreich who killed them, and now they’ll think it was Martha.”
