by Jane Haddam
“To the problem of the Health Care Access thing?”
“Exactly,” Kyle said. “Let me just hit a restroom and we’ll go somewhere and talk.”
3
Hope Matlock had ridden the train into New York dozens of times when she was in high school and college. It was one of the things they did as a group, over and over again, because it annoyed the hell out of their parents. She could remember herself on those trains, looking out windows as Westport and Stamford and Greenwich rolled by, mentally counting up her money in her head. She’d never had as much money as the rest of them. She’d always been afraid that they would want to go somewhere where she couldn’t handle the freight.
Today she had been worried about money, too, and she was right to worry. The trains were a lot more expensive than they had been thirty years ago. They were nicer, too, but Hope only cared about the expense. Everything in Manhattan had been more expensive, too, especially the buses and the subways. It hadn’t taken her long to realize that if the day didn’t work out, she wasn’t going to have enough to get back to Grand Central Station.
As it turned out, the day had worked out fine. It was quarter past six, and she was sitting in a Metro-North car, watching the towns go by again in reverse order.
The outskirts of Alwych began rolling by, the big red barn that was now a farmers’ market every Saturday afternoon in the spring and summer, the “smaller” houses with their postage stamp lawns where new people lived when they really couldn’t afford to live in Alwych. Hope waited to see the facade of Lanyard’s going by. Then she began to get up and move into the aisle, even though the conductor had yet to call the stop.
She knew better than to look into her pocketbook where people could see her. She was afraid that she’d held it much to close to her during the trip. The conductor came through and had to squeeze by her, which was embarrassing. The train began to slow and other people began to get up out of their seats. Hope shoved the embarrassment down her throat and made for the door.
When the train came to a stop, Hope got off onto the cement platform and then made her way to the stairs to the depot. She got to the depot waiting room and made for one of the benches at the front. She sat down and closed her eyes. She was still hugging her pocketbook. There was sweat on her forehead. She could feel it. She was having trouble breathing. This was all she needed. She’d pass out here and be hauled off to the emergency room or Tim’s clinic, and somebody would steal her purse.
She was willing herself not to pass out when a familiar voice said, “Hope? Is that you? Are you feeling all right?”
“I’m fine,” Hope said, opening her eyes and looking into Evaline Veer’s. Evaline was bending over her.
Hope sat up a little straighter in her chair. “I’m exhausted,” she said. “I was just getting myself psyched up for the long walk home.”
“Walk?” Evaline said. “You walked all the way here from your place? Whatever for?”
“Parking around the depot is ridiculous,” Hope said. She meant parking around the depot was expensive, and she didn’t have one of those monthly parking passes. “And I knew I was going to be back before dark.”
“Oh, you went in to the city,” Evaline said.
“Just for lunch,” Hope said. “I’d forgotten how tiring it was. And now I’m back and all I want to do is go to sleep.”
“Well, go to sleep in your own bed,” Evaline said. “I’ll walk you out to your place and make sure you’re settled. You really don’t look all that well.”
“I”m fine, really.”
“Nonsense,” Evaline said. “And the walk will do me good. I’m beyond agitated, I hate to tell you. Gregor Demarkian got here.”
“I heard it on the news this morning,” Hope said.
“Yes, well. I still haven’t met the man, and he’s already made my life one huge complication. I’ve had Jason Battlesea on the phone all day, reporting in when so much as a leaf falls in the forest, and then of course there had to be an Incident. There always has to be an Incident.”
“What kind of incident?” Hope asked, stalling for time. She really didn’t want to get up and get moving just yet.
“Oh, the alarm went off over at the Waring house,” Evaline said. “I know we’re all supposed to be on hyperalert since the murder, but that alarm goes off all the time and everybody knows it. The police had to go check it out anyway, of course, and then Caroline Holder came roaring in, being her usual Waring self. And then Caroline came to see me, right at the end of the day, as if I had nothing to do in the world except listen to her screech about how the police are complete idiots.”
“I remember going off to college and then to graduate school and coming back, and almost nobody ever talked about Chapin,” Hope said.
“Oh, of course they did,” Evaline said. “They just didn’t talk about it around us. I think they’re all crazy, all the Warings. Holding on to that house all these years. What did they think was going to happen? Chapin was going to walk through the front doors one day and then—what? Go on trial for murdering two people in a bank robbery?”
“I don’t think they did,” Hope said. “Mr. and Mrs. Waring, I mean. I don’t think they wanted her to come back.”
“I always thought they wanted her dead.” Evaline said, “I’d have wanted her dead if I was them. But you knew them better than I did.”
“It wasn’t the way everybody is always saying it was,” Hope said. She was getting her wind back. She felt better. “Everybody talks about it as if we all knew about the robberies when they were going on. But we didn’t. I didn’t. And I don’t think Tim did, either.”
“And you think I knew?” Evaline said. “Is that it?”
Hope shook her head. “I think it was a secret, just between the two of them,” she said. “I think they liked having a secret so they could laugh at the rest of us.”
“Well, that would have been in character.”
“Do you know what the very worst thing about the murder is?” Hope asked. “The very worst thing is that you can’t stop thinking about it.”
“And,” Evaline said, “you’re right, I can’t stop thinking about it. Although mostly I remember what came just before we knew about the robberies. I remember the police coming to the door of the house to tell us about the accident, and that Marty was in the hospital. I remember thinking that the hospital was a good sign, because you didn’t take someone to the hospital if he was dead. And then he was dead. It turned out that you did take somebody to the hospital if he was dead, because the morgue was in the hospital basement.”
“Is it?” Hope said.
“Not the real morgue,” Evaline said. “We’ve got a state facility for that. It’s just the place we put bodies while we’re waiting for a transfer. That’s a terrible thing to think of, isn’t it? A transfer. Like you’re hauling meat. Marty was transferred to the funeral home that used to be next to the Congregational Church. I don’t even remember what it was called anymore.”
“They took all of us to the hospital that night,” Hope said. “Chapin was in the backseat and she was barely even scratched. I remember Tim getting out from the back and walking around the car. Just walking around it and around it. And the car was all crumpled up. They made a big deal in the papers about how Marty had been drinking that night, but I didn’t think it made any difference. We were always drinking in those days. Nobody thought anything of it. It wasn’t like now.”
“No,” Evaline agreed. “It wasn’t like now.”
“Sometimes I look back on it and I realize that they must have been acting crazy because of the two people who were killed,” Hope said. “Chapin and Marty, I mean. They were high as kites and we hadn’t taken anything. We’d just had a few drinks, these pink cocktail things Chapin liked to make. But at the time, it just seemed like Chapin being Chapin.”
“I know what you mean,” Evaline said.
“I’m not surprised someone stabbed her in the back,” Hope said. “She was always stabb
ing everybody else in the back.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say anything like that too loudly around here at the moment,” Evaline said. “That Mr. Demarkian is here now. You could turn yourself into a prime suspect.”
Hope was definitely feeling better now. Her lungs were full of air. Her muscles were willing to move on their own.
She got up off the bench very carefully, holding on to the armrest with one hand and praying to God she wouldn’t tip the thing over. She had her other arm still clutching her pocketbook to her chest.
“There you go,” Evaline said cheerfully. “Let’s walk home, then. Maybe we can walk over to my house and get my car.”
THREE
1
Gregor had his dinner out on the terrace. He brought his laptop and his phone and all the papers he had brought with him and spread himself out across two chairs, a chaise, and the round metal table.
He’d been staring at the black blank space that was the Waring house for half an hour before he decided that he was being an idiot. He picked up the phone and called Bennis. He listened to the ring and ring that went on long enough to make him wonder if she’d left her phone someplace, and then she picked up.
“I was wondering when you were going to call,” she said.
“I’ve been calling,” Gregor said. “I’ve been calling every chance I’ve gotten. I wish you were here.”
“I thought you didn’t like me interfering in your professional life.”
“I didn’t say I wanted you to interfere. I just said I wished you were here. And I do. And it’s only partly because I miss you.”
“Are all the people awful?” Bennis asked. “I thought about it after you went up there, and it occurred to me that you were probably headed for Connecticut’s version of the Main Line. And all the people would be awful.”
“The people are strange enough,” Gregor said, “but that’s not the big issue. The big issue is that I have nobody to talk to.”
“I thought they always hired you drivers and you talked to them,” Bennis said.
“I do sometimes,” Gregor agreed, “but in this case, my driver does not seem to speak any English. His name is Juan Valdez—”
“Wait? Like the coffee guy? From the commercials?”
“I knew the name was familiar,” Gregor said. “Well, that’s his name. I don’t know if he’s legal or illegal. I don’t know if he understands a word I say. He sits in the front of the car and gives me a lot of rapid-fire Spanish and I have no idea what it means, and then he drives me around. He must understand something, because we always get where we’re going. But he’s symptomatic of this whole thing, if you ask me.”
“Symptomatic how?”
“Well,” Gregor said, “let’s just say that I’ve felt as if everybody I’ve met came from central casting. Juan Valdez seems less like a person than the worst kind of stereotype. It’s been like that with a lot of these people. I met a woman named Caroline Waring Holder—”
“Is that the youngest sister?” Bennis asked. “I’ve heard about her. She’s gotten all social consciency or something and sends her kids to the local public school.”
“The local public school can out-Eton Eton,” Gregor said. “And yes, she’s the youngest sister. The other two sisters don’t live in the area. I think one of them is in Chicago. Anyway, that’s been checked out, by both the local police and the Bureau, so that’s all right. But she felt like somebody from central casting, too.”
“Do I feel like something from central casting?”
“No,” Gregor said. “You’re sui generis. And I always thought so. But I just feel up against a wall here. I’ve talked to two Bureau people, one retired and one very much on the case. I’ve talked to all the police officers locally who’ve had anything to do with the murder. And in all of that, I’ve only got one significant piece of information.”
“What’s that?”
“The uniform that went to the Waring house on the night of the murder is a woman named Angela Harkin. She says that when she was checking the place out, before she actually knew there was something wrong, she went around to the back and looked through a gap in the curtains and saw a single foot, wearing an espadrille.”
“And espadrilles mean something important?”
“When she found the body of Chapin Waring, Chapin Waring was wearing tennis shoes.”
“But that is interesting,” Bennis said. “That must have been the murderer. And the murderer must have been a woman.”
“Maybe,” Gregor said.
“But if there was another person there while the officer was looking around, how did she get out? Wouldn’t she have been seen?”
“Not necessarily,” Gregor said. “The place isn’t as big as Engine House, but it’s big. There are lots of ways to get in and out. And the alarm wasn’t tripped that night, so whoever got in knew how to turn it on and off. There was just the one officer there at the time. What bothers me the most is that that wasn’t in the notes I got, and the officers on the case didn’t seem to make anything of it. Everybody here is so wrapped up in discussing what happened thirty years ago, they lose sight of the obvious.”
“They probably just think that if Chapin Waring was murdered in her own hometown, it probably had something to do with what happened thirty years ago. Don’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s interesting,” Bennis said.
“Everybody loses sight of the fact that Chapin Waring may have been missing for thirty years, but that doesn’t mean she’d ceased to exist for thirty years. She was doing something all that time. And there’s really no reason to suppose that she’d been murdered now for something that old. From what I hear about her—in the notes and out—she was something of a juvenile delinquent all her life, except that she never was called that and she didn’t end up in reform school, because her family had too much money. But the general feeling seems to be that she was never good for herself or for other people. She was the kind of person who got people wrapped up in things they couldn’t really handle.”
“Well, that seems true enough.”
“I know,” Gregor said. “I’m just saying there’s no reason to suppose she stopped doing that when she left here. That leads me back to the other brick wall, and that’s the question of what she was actually doing for those thirty years.”
“And then you’re the one who’s bringing the whole thing back to what happened thirty years ago.”
“I know,” Gregor said. “This is why I need somebody to talk to. If I don’t talk, I end up going around and around in circles in my head. Today, the alarm went off at the house. We all hauled ourselves out there, and I do mean all of us, and all we found was the front door, slightly open. The alarm had gone off, so either the person who opened the door didn’t know how to disengage it or didn’t want to. But there were no signs of forced entry anywhere in the place, which would seem to indicate that whoever opened the door had the key. And there was absolutely no reason for this that I could tell.”
“Maybe somebody came to steal something?”
“If they did, it was nothing immediately discernible. Caroline Holder didn’t look around and go, ‘Oh, my God! The family credenza is missing!’”
“Maybe whoever it was took something not immediately evident,” Bennis said. “Maybe they took something from upstairs, or in the kitchen.”
“I’ve got every intention of asking Caroline Holder to make a revised inventory,” Gregor said. “But if whoever broke in didn’t know how to disarm the alarm, then she didn’t have enough time to look much farther than the foyer. And if she did know how to disarm the alarm, then that means she had to have come into the house, disarmed the alarm, done whatever it was she had to do, reset the alarm, and then left and let it go off. Does that sequence of events sound plausible?”
“She could have made a mistake,” Bennis said. “Although I don’t think we should go on calling her ‘she.’ We’ll get in the habit and then we won’
t see it when the murderer turns out to be some big guy with a mustache who likes to dress up in women’s shoes.”
“There is no such big guy that I know of,” Gregor said. “There are only two guys in this case, and I haven’t met either of them yet. One is Dr. Timothy Brand. The other is Kyle Westervan. They were two of the six.”
“Two of the six?”
“There were six people in the group Chapin Waring ran around with in those days,” Gregor said. “There was Chapin Waring herself. There was Martin Veer, the one who wrecked the car on the night of the fifth robbery and died in the crash. Then there was Timothy Brand, his sister Virginia Brand, a girl named Hope Matlock, and then Kyle Westervan. All local kids, all in their first year of college. And they’d all been hanging out together since grammar school.”
“I see.”
“The Bureau checked them all out at the time,” Gregor said, “but the conclusion was that Chapin Waring and Martin Veer had committed the robberies together, and the rest of the group didn’t know anything about them. You look at the case notes and start to wonder if it was ever really possible that anybody came to that conclusion.”
“You couldn’t change that conclusion?” Bennis asked in surprise.
“I could change the conclusion,” Gregor said, “but I can’t go back in time and ask the questions I’d want asked and do the checking I’d want checked. Like it or not, there’s going to be a lot of evidence that has disappeared into the mists. And then we’re left with all the same questions we had before, plus the new ones. I keep telling myself to concentrate on what’s been happening here, right now. But not enough has been happening.”
“Well, you do have a dead body.”
“I do have that,” Gregor said. “And that tells me even less than it usually does. I have a dead body and it was stabbed in the back—actually, in the left shoulder blade. The instrument used was a large kitchen knife, serrated, that probably came from the Waring house kitchen.”
“Probably?”
“There’s nothing to say that it did, and nothing to say that it didn’t. It wasn’t part of a set, although it was similar to the ones in the kitchen. That makes the police here think it must have come from outside, but I don’t think so. The house is—the Warings have maintained that house like something in a Faulkner story. They didn’t just not sell the place; they maintained it. They paid ground crews and maids to clean it and keep it up. All the furniture is there and dusted and in perfectly good repair. The kitchen still has all the kitchen equipment in it. The dining room has two large glass display cabinets with china in them. And that’s what I saw without doing a search. I got the impression that if I’d started opening drawers or if I’d gone up to the bedrooms, there would be clothes and bedspreads and everything else all set out and ready to go.”
