“All right. I guess it started after that meeting.”
“The one at the mansion,” said Edie, gently, probing, but gently—
“Yes. When Eve—when that woman––”
“We know. We know about the meeting. Now go on.”
“Well. Paul was furious.”
“Paul Cox.”
“Yes. Paul felt betrayed. He kept cursing at her––”
“At Eve Ivory?”
“Yes.”
“When was he cursing her?”
“In the car, on the way home.”
“To your home?”
“Yes. He had to take me home.”
“You didn’t go to his home?”
“No. He said he had to go to some meetings. Emergency meetings. The school board. I don’t’ know.”
“All right. Go on.”
“But he did drop me at home, and he told me to stay there. He said the town might be going crazy, after what –that woman—had said. He said, just stay in bed.”
“Okay.”
“And I was going to do that. I’d drunk a glass of milk and was getting ready to get into my pajamas, when the phone rang.”
“The phone?”
“Yes. I wasn’t expecting a call, and Paul had just left—so I let it ring several times. I didn’t know who it might be. Finally I picked it up, though, and it was—it was her!”
Jackson, Nina noted, bent forward upon hearing this.
Of course there was nothing surprising in that, she realized, because she herself was leaning forward.
“It was who?”
“It was that woman.”
“Eve Ivory?”
“Yes.”
“Eve Ivory called you?”
“Yes.”
“Macy,” asked Jackson, ‘what time was this?”
“I’m not sure exactly.”
“About what time?”
“Maybe about—well it would have had to be about—eleven thirty.”
“All right, Macy,” said Edie Towler, “just go on.”
“She said—and I remember it very clearly—she said, ‘Is this Macy Peterson?’ I told her it was. She said, “This is Eve Ivory.” I was—well, kind of shocked—I didn’t know exactly what to say. But she went on and said: ‘We need to talk about Paul. He and I are lovers. It can’t go on this way. We need to talk.”
Several molecules of dust came crashing from the ceiling down to the floor.
Nothing else made a sound.
Nina thought she could hear herself breathing.
Then she realized she was holding her breath, and that the clatter from inside her body must have been something else, maybe blood running through veins, arteries, etc.
“She told you that she had made love to Paul Cox?”
“Yes.”
“Macy, had Paul ever told you this?”
“No. He said they had met, and that she had offered to hire him. But I asked him straight out, ‘Paul, does this woman mean anything to you?’ And he said ‘no’.”
“Macy,” asked Nina, “when did you ask him this?”
“On the morning after the shower. You know—you and I talked that night.”
“Yes.”
“And that morning we––well, we made everything all right.”
The phantom forty five minutes, thought Nina.
“She said, I had to come over. I didn’t know what to do. I said that probably wasn’t a good idea. But she was—crazy sounding, kind of.”
Nina found herself remembering the Eve Ivory who had stood, and had paced, in her own living room.
Perhaps an hour or so before this call.
Yes.
She had been crazy.
Psychotic?
Who knew?
“Go on, Macy,” said Edie.
“She said I had no choice. She was cursing. Saying awful things. But she said she had pictures of her and Paul. Recordings. Things they had done in bed. She said if I didn’t come over right away, right then, she would ruin Paul.”
“And so you went.”
“I had to.”
“Certainly.”
“But—she said she didn’t want it known that I was coming. She said there were security people everywhere around the mansion. And that I should come up a secret way.”
“A secret way?”
“Yes. She said that, about fifty yards from the house, shaded by some oak trees, there was a greenhouse. And that there was a tunnel leading from the greenhouse that you could enter unseen and get into the house. The people who had built the house—well, I guess they were afraid, somehow.”
“They were afraid,” said Jackson, quietly, “of organized crime. They thought someone might come down out of Chicago and kill them. And that’s what happened.”
The tunnel, thought Nina. She remembered Eve Ivory telling her about that weeks before.
“So anyway, after that it was like a dream. I called a cab. It was hard to get one. But I did.”
“Do you remember the cab company.”
“One of the red ones.”
“Red Circle. They’ll have a record.”
“We had to drive around the park some; but I saw the greenhouse. He dropped me there, and I paid.”
“Go on.”
“Then—well then I was really scared. I didn’t know what I would do when I saw her. I couldn’t believe it about Paul. I just wanted to tell her it was all lies. But—if it had happened, I couldn’t let Paul––”
“I know, honey. Just go on.”
“Oh, that tunnel! There were cobwebs everywhere. And I could barely see. And the worst things were—the toys.”
“Toys?”
“Old, rusty—children’s toys. Dolls. Dump trucks. Lying there on the steps leading up into the mansion. Rusted toys. Raggedy Anns, coming apart, and just staring––”
“All right. So finally you got to the top.”
Macy shook her head:
“She had told me over the phone where the tunnel would come out. And how to get to her bedroom. I walked down a hall and knocked on the door to what I thought must have been her bedroom. I knew there were guards in the house, so I didn’t want to make much noise. I knocked on the door and said:
“Miss Ivory?”
“There was no answer, so I knocked again. But the door moved. It wasn’t locked. It wasn’t even shut. So I just—I just pushed it open.”
“And was she there, Macy?” asked Nina.
To which Macy Peterson merely stared, a blank stare, a stare through Nina and out into nothing at all:
“She was dead. There was a desk in the middle of the room. A big desk. She was slumped over it. Her eyes were staring straight at me. But they were dead eyes. Blood was everywhere. On the papers covering the desk. On her white gown. It was still dripping down, onto the carpet. And, and––”
“Go on, Macy. You have to get this out.”
“I couldn’t help it. I just started walking over to her. As though she were, like, sitting there smiling and ready to shake my hand. Finally I was beside the desk and she was there, spread out below me. But—this thing was sticking out from her neck. It’s so funny. I couldn’t stop thinking of the old monster movie. The Frankenstein one. He had a bolt in his neck. It was like that. She had a bolt in her neck. I think I was screaming then. But I had to pull it out. I was screaming and screaming and—I grabbed the bolt and pulled it out of the monster’s neck.”
“And I just kept standing there, screaming. With the bolt, that I’d pulled out of the monster’s neck.”
Macy looked around the room, slowly, and said.
“And that’s my statement.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: SCAPEGOAT
“A community needs a soul if it is to become a home for human beings. You, the community, must get it this soul.”
Pope John Paul II
The day, as days are wont to do, worsened.
Having begun with a confession, it progressed to a meeting, and then a confer
ence, and then a little temper tantrum, and then, thankfully, bed.
But as for the meeting—
––it took place on the beach, where, at two P.M., she had persuaded Jackson Bennett to go walking with her.
It was a wintry sea, not cold particularly, but cold looking, with its waves sullen and ill humored, and disguising themselves to resemble the sky, which roiled and darkened and rumbled and harbinged no good.
“So how is she, Jackson?”
He was ill-placed, with his suit on and shiny black shoes.
But they were on the hard-packed sand, and so it mattered little.
“Good as could be expected. They got some lunch in her.”
“That’s something.”
“Yeah. Thanks for coming down this morning.”
“Of course. How did her formal statement go?”
“All right. Good that she’d rehearsed it. She keeps asking for you.”
“Well. Maybe I can go back down again this afternoon.”
He shook his head:
“Too much going on. That girl is going to have herself a busy day.”
“Tomorrow morning?”
“Yeah. Much better.”
“So how does it look?”
“How does what look?”
“Jackson! The case! You think I’m talking about the Super Bowl?”
He smiled, despite himself.
“No. No, I guess not.”
“How does it look?”
“I think it looks pretty good; I’ve been on the phone with several doctors.”
“What kind of doctors?”
“Psychiatrists.”
“And they say?”
“It’s possible she could have—well, just zoned out.”
“What do you mean?”
“Dissociative response, is what they call it. She confronted the woman—and just lost control of herself.”
“Without remembering it? Any of it?”
“It has happened.”
“So what does this mean regarding the plea?”
“Temporary insanity.”
“And that would mean?”
He shook his head:
“Incarceration, certainly. But in a medical facility. And not for too long.”
“What is ‘too long’?”
“Two years. Maybe three.”
“My God.”
“Nina, she killed somebody.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Do you have another explanation?”
“She says she didn’t do it.”
“Like I say, do you have another explanation? If so, I’m all eyes and ears.”
They walked for a time.
“What,” asked Nina, “have you been able to learn about Macy’s story?”
“Oh, it checks out. Checks out just fine. Phone records verify that the woman called her, and at almost precisely the time Macy says. Eleven thirty four, precisely. Call lasted forty five seconds, so that would fit. Taxi driver confirms taking Macy over there, and dropping her just about where she said. Security people found that tunnel. Of course, they’re kicking themselves that they didn’t always know about it; but then Eve Ivory never told anybody about it. So it’s not really their fault.”
“Now why was this tunnel built again?”
“That’s the interesting part. A lot of mansions were built around the middle of the nineteenth century with similar exit tunnels. But most of them were in Ohio, states like that.”
“Why Ohio?”
“Part slave, part free. These kinds of tunnels were built mostly by folks who wanted to help runaway slaves. But the Robinsons used it differently.”
“They wanted to be able to run from the Mafia.”
“Or some similar organization. But like we said this morning: it didn’t work.”
“Big crime got them anyway.”
“Yes,” he said, “it did. The pitiable thing was the toys.”
“Were they found?”
“Yes. Her security, then our people. Dolls, toy trucks—apparently the Robinson kids used the tunnel as a play area, before––”
He let the rest hang out, and it floated, the unseen description of what must have been machine gun killings, over the ocean, which seemed troubled enough without adding more.
“So this woman,” said Nina, “called Macy about eleven thirty.”
“Right.”
“Macy went over.”
“Right.”
“Macy entered through this strange tunnel, just as she told us she did.”
“Yes.”
“And found Eve Ivory in the bedroom, sitting at her desk with her throat punctured.”
Jackson Bennett shook his head.
“That’s where it gets difficult.”
“How?”
“How? Nina, Macy’s letter opener killed Eve Ivory. And Macy was clutching that letter opener when security forces opened the bedroom door.”
“They’re sure it was the letter opener?”
“Absolutely. I just read the autopsy report. As though there were any doubt. It was the same ivory letter opener that, apparently, Macy received, in front of the whole town, at her wedding shower.”
“Yes. I know the letter opener. Tom Broussard and Penelope Royale gave it to her. We all saw it. We saw her take it home too.”
“Which is where it was, where it must have been, when Eve Ivory called her.”
“So she took it over there.”
“She had to, Nina! There’s no other explanation.”
“No. Doesn’t seem to be.”
“In fact, every way you look at it, Macy’s story is ninety percent true. She got called, went over, went in—but then that last ten per cent comes in.”
“Yes. There is that ten per cent.”
“The ten per cent that would have us believe: Eve Ivory called Macy. Someone—apparently having overheard the call—slipped into Eve Ivory’s room, through a tunnel that only Eve Ivory knew about, took out the jade letter opener that only Macy could have been in possession of, and, with no signs of a struggle, stuck the letter opener precisely in Eve Ivory’s jugular. Then watched the woman bleed to death and left.”
A ragtag patch of gulls had sighted a school of fish some fifty yards out, and were dive bombing a foaming matrix of flash-white and gills, screeching gleefully as they did so.
“That doesn’t seem very likely, does it?”
“No. The problem is, Macy keeps sticking to the story.”
“And that’s a problem?”
“You bet that’s a problem.”
“Why, Jackson?”
“Because it means neither I nor any other lawyer she can get, can plead her guilty. She would have to plead not guilty, and hope the jury believes a story that on its surface can’t be believed.”
“And if the jury doesn’t believe it?”
He shrugged.
“They’d have no choice. She’d have to be executed.”
That was the meeting.
The conference took place in Nina’s house.
Margot was the first to arrive, bringing food.
“They say, Nina, that you are the only one who can get in to see Macy.”
“Well. I’m as close to a mother as she’s got. And sometimes, you need your mother.”
“I baked some brownies for her.”
“You don’t bake.”
“I bought some brownies for her, took them out of the box, and put them in an antique container I had in the shop.”
“That’s good of you. Except the grounds around the jail look like a supermarket now.”
“Well. Everybody is pulling for Macy.”
“I know. She’s the town’s most popular killer in quite a long time.”
The conversation with Margot idled back and forth for a time, until it was enlivened by the arrival of Allana Delafosse, who’d brought pound cake.
“I thought,” she said, “that we might put a saw in it.”
“Not too fu
nny, Allana, given the circumstances.”
“I’m sorry, darling. But I’m not certain the circumstances are as dire as they might seem.”
“How do you mean that?”
“Our little schoolteacher deserves every iota of our support. So she murdered the woman; good for her! I should have done it myself!”
“Allana––”
“Nina, tell me: where is the boat that housed the millionaire who was about to buy our town right out from under us? Where is it, darling Nina? You don’t know, do you? Then let me tell you that no one else does either! It’s gone! The woman is dead, and, as far as I can learn or anyone else in the village can learn, the old will is now back in force. We own our own destinies.”
“As though,” Nina found herself whispering, “anybody does that.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“All right, then: so tell me why we should be so glum. One brave young woman did what none of the rest of us had the courage to do!”
“And may,” said Nina, quietly, “have to go to prison for it.”
“‘Stone walls do not a prison make,’ I believe the poem goes, ‘nor iron bars a cage’.”
“No. Not if you’re outside writing poems. If you’re inside the walls and the bars, they do a pretty good job.”
“But Nina––”
She was in turn interrupted by the arrival of Tom Broussard and Penelope Royale, who brought lamb casserole and many apologies for having given Macy the letter opener in the first place.
“We thought it would be—well, appropriate.”
No one said anything to that.
“Nina––”
“Yes, Tom?”
“Word around town is—well, that Macy actually killed this woman. But that she was insane when she did it.”
“I don’t know, Tom.”
“We have,” Penelope said, “some money available.”
“My book royalties are up.”
“And,” Penelope interjected, “my family left me something years ago. I know it doesn’t look like it, the way I live––”
“—but, Nina, you need to know, and you need to tell Macy when you see her. We can help with legal defenses, if we need to.”
The room was growing dark. Somehow Margot managed to find a candle, which she put it on the table between the four of them.
Wine appeared also.
They sipped, and listened to the mournful sound of the waves.
Sea Change (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 1) Page 20
