by Jane Haddam
“Yeah,” Andy said. “There’s that. All right. We’ll do it that way.”
“Then I’ll talk to you later.”
“There’s just one thing,” Andy said.
Gregor looked at the hash browns. They were real hash browns.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It’s about Kyle Westervan,” Andy said. “He was like Joan of Arc. In that old movie, you know it? It starred Ingrid Bergman, and she played Joan of Arc. And right from the beginning, that was who Kyle Westervan reminded me of. As if he’d seen God, or talked to God and God talked back, and now he was on some kind of a crusade. He didn’t ever say that, you know. He didn’t go around talking about visions or giving speeches about justice and truth and right, but there was something about him that made me think he was thinking all those things. And that’s part of the reason why I’m so unnerved about this. Because those kinds of people, the people who are acting for justice and truth and right, well, in operations like the one we’ve been running here, those people tend to get killed. And there’s Kyle, dead.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “That’s what he is. Dead.”
3
It took a good ten minutes to convince Jason Battlesea that he was going to have to stop whatever he was doing and get to the Alwych Police Department. It took another five to get Juan Valdez to bring around the car.
By then, Gregor was dressed and carrying his attaché case. He had his laptop and his first headache of the morning. He stepped out of the Switch and Shingle and saw his next headache gearing up. Down at the end of the driveway, there were people. There were lots of people. Some of them were a band.
Gregor gave Juan Valdez directions and sat back to see how bad the problems would be. The people at the end of the drive were gearing up for a parade, but the parade wasn’t due to start for an hour. The police keeping the road clear all knew who Gregor Demarkian was and what he was doing in Alwych. They passed him on from one watch post to the next as if he were visiting royalty.
The arrangement was worse when they got into the middle of town. The parade would be coming right down the middle of Main Street, and although that meant the police were more or less keeping Main Street clear, it really was only more or less. There were hundreds of people milling around, waiting for the parade to start. Some of these people were children, who didn’t care at all that cars needed to move or that the barriers had been put up to keep the marchers safe. Some of these people were vendors, who only wanted to sell as much red, white, and blue cotton candy and little flags as they possibly could.
They got to the Alwych Police Department, but literally at a crawl. When they got there, Gregor found most of the police force that wasn’t out dealing with the streets lined up in formation to march, too. At the head of that contingent was Jason Battlesea.
“For God’s sake,” Battlesea said after Juan Valdez got the car into an uninhabited part of the parking lot and Gregor got out. “What do you think you’re doing? We’re supposed to march in an hour and we’re supposed to be lined up to march in half an hour. You can’t tell me that this is something that couldn’t have waited until after noon.”
“Are Mike Held and Jack Mann marching?”
“They’re right over there. Are you saying you want them, too? Want them for what?”
“To look at something,” Gregor said.
“It’s the God damned Fourth of July.”
Gregor took his attaché and laptop and marched himself into police headquarters. He did not bother to go looking for the interrogation room they had used before or for Jason Battlesea’s office. He put his things down on one of the countertops and began to plug things in. He not only had the laptop up and working, but the three files he wanted them to see already running before they came in.
They landed at his side like a comedy group from a 1930s movie. They were all flustered, and Jason Battlesea was angry.
“This had better be important,” he said. “This had better be the God damned Second Coming, because we are all due somewhere or the other practically immediately.”
Gregor pointed to the screen of his laptop. “Look at that,” he said. “Those are three of the security tape sequences from the robberies. The thin figure is Chapin Waring. The lumpy figure is Martin Veer.”
“We already knew that,” Jason Battlesea said.
“Why is the lumpy figure lumpy?” Gregor asked.
“To make a disguise,” Jason Battlesea said. “What the hell. We already knew that, too. They knew that back when the robberies happened.”
“But there are lots of ways to make a disguise,” Gregor said. “Why use that one? Why make Martin Veer look lumpy?”
“Because that was what they thought of?” Jason Battlesea asked. “Because they had some padding handy and they could use it? Who the hell knows? Who the hell knows why Chapin Waring and Martin Veer did anything? They were crazy as loons, if you ask me, and from what you’ve told me about what Chapin Waring was doing for the thirty years since, I’d say she got crazier as time went on.”
“It doesn’t remind you of anything?” Gregor asked, pointing at the lumpy figure on all three parts of the screen. The figure skittered and lumbered and almost lost its balance. It righted itself, and then the loop brought it back to the beginning. It skittered again.
“For God’s sake,” Jack Mann said. “We really do have to go.”
“If there’s something here that’s urgent,” Jason Battlesea said, “then get it out and we’ll do something about it. If there’s going to be another murder—”
“No,” Gregor said, “I think I can guarantee that there isn’t going to be another murder.”
“Then there’s no point in going into this now,” Jason Battlesea said. “So if you would excuse us—”
“It doesn’t matter to you that that film provides the last link that explains the reason for two murders and tells you who committed them?”
“It will still explain it after noon,” Jason Battlesea said. “We’re going to go now. I’ll just point out that we were right after all. The murder of Chapin Waring was committed because of something having to do with those robberies.”
“Oh,” Gregor said. “In a way.”
FOUR
1
Caroline Waring Holder had gotten the first of the telephone calls about the death of Kyle Westervan barely an hour after the police arrived to take possession of the crime scene, and she’d gotten telephone call after telephone call after that. It was well into the small hours of the night before she decided that she had to do something or go crazy. What she’d done was to go from place to place, turning off all possible connections to the outside world. She turned off the ringers on all the landline extensions. She turned off the cell phones. She shut down the computers. She didn’t want to hear from anybody about anything.
Caroline had always liked Kyle Westervan. He was old enough to be entirely off her radar when she was a child, but she had run into him since, and he was one of the better ones. Since coming back to Alwych, Caroline had always tended to judge people by the way they approached the Waring case. Most people didn’t bring it up at all. They gave her long, “significant” looks when they talked to her, and waited too long before answering her questions or responding to her comments to see if she would do something “inappropriate.” The idea seemed to be that she must be traumatized by All That, and as a traumatized person she would have to show signs of wear and tear.
It was just after five thirty in the morning when Caroline’s alarm went off. Caroline got the children up and dressed. Then she got Dan up and dressed. She saw Dan pick up his cell phone and realize it was off.
“I couldn’t take it anymore,” she told him. “There were people calling all night, on your phone as well as mine, on the landlines, everywhere. So I turned everything off.”
Dan got his phone up and running again. “Well,” he said, “there’s nothing on here that looks at all important. I do have about forty missed calls,
but they all seem to be from people we know socially.”
“Socially,” Caroline said. “They’ll all be about Kyle.”
“Why do people think we’ll know what happened to Kyle Westervan?”
“It’s the Waring case,” Caroline said. “He was in the car the night Martin Veer died. He was part of Chapin’s clique at school. I suppose they think we live in each other’s pockets.”
“You weren’t part of Chapin’s clique at school,” Dan pointed out. “You were eight. People are very, very odd sometimes.”
Caroline agreed that people were very, very odd sometimes, and then went back to getting packed up for the day.
Then she turned on her own cell phone and found a total of 114 missed calls. She was staring at the phone when it vibrated to let her know another call was coming in. The number belonged to Reverend Harper at the church.
She answered the call, on the off chance that it had something to do with the picnic. She stood in the open front door of her house and looked at the Cross Country packed with children and gear. As soon as Chapin’s body had been found, she should have packed up the entire family and taken them to California.
“Yes,” she said into the phone. It was rude. She didn’t care.
Reverend Harper cleared his throat.
“Good morning, Caroline,” he said. “I do know that you’re very busy right now. I hope you’re not taking this call while driving.”
“I haven’t even gotten into the car yet.”
“Ah, yes, good, I suppose, although I suppose it means you’re running behind. Let me be quick about this, then, and we can talk it through at the picnic, when the rush is over and we have some time. Your sister Cordelia called me yesterday.”
“Did she,” Caroline said.
“Oh, yes,” the Reverend Harper said. “She made a point of telling me how concerned she was about you, and how concerned your other sister was about you. I know you don’t like people to fuss over you. And I think it’s admirable. But I do think you may not realize just how deeply you’ve been affected by your sister’s dying. So deeply that you may not realize that you are having a difficult time thinking clearly. And now, of course, with this other murder. I believe he was a friend of the family—”
“He was somebody I barely knew,” Caroline said. “He was a friend of my sister’s, the one who recently died. Who was recently murdered. Who was stabbed in the back with a kitchen knife.”
“Yes,” the Reverend Harper said. “Yes, of course. I do know the circumstances. It’s difficult to know how to proceed in cases like this. One doesn’t want to be too forward, of course, but on the other hand—”
“Is there a point to this phone call, Reverend Harper? Or did you just call because Cor decided to make a nuisance of herself?”
“Oh, oh no! Cordelia didn’t make a nuisance of herself at all. Listening to people in their time of darkness is what I’m here for.”
“Cordelia has never had a time of darkness in her life.”
“I do understand how you might think that, Caroline, but I believe you’re wrong. Of course, Cordelia, being an older sister, worked very hard to appear calm and unfrightened in the wake of all that tragedy, but that’s not to say that she was unaffected. I’m sure this whole situation has been very difficult for all of you. And she’s really only concerned, you understand, that your other sister, that your sister Chapin, be given a Christian burial. It would bring closure to you all.”
Dan was standing up next to the driver’s side door of the car, trying not to be too obvious about rushing her. Caroline wished he’d be a lot more obvious.
“Did you know my sister Chapin?” she asked the Reverend Harper.
“Well, no—of course, I didn’t come to Alwych until many years later—”
“If you’d known my sister Chapin, you’d know that she wouldn’t have wanted a Christian anything. She wasn’t a believer. And don’t tell me that a lot could have happened in thirty years. I’ve got nothing to show that she ever changed her mind about religion, or God, or anything else. And if what Cordelia called you about was seeing to Chapin’s funeral, then as far as I’m concerned, we’ve got nothing to talk about. There will be no funeral. There will be no memorial service. There will be nothing that could bring down a hurricane of photographers and reporters to make yet another circus out of all of this. I’ve told Cordelia this several times. If she wants Chapin to have a funeral, then she can come out here herself and give Chapin a funeral. I will not attend.”
“Oh,” the Reverend Harper said. “I know that’s how you feel about it now—”
“That’s how I’ve felt about it since the beginning. It’s how I’m going to feel about it ten years from now and twenty years from now and thirty years from now. And if you try to bring this up at the picnic, I will walk right out on it.”
“Yes,” the Reverend Harper said. “I can see—I’m sure the death of Mr. Westervan has upset you—maybe I’ll just—”
“Don’t just anything,” Caroline said. “This is the way I feel about this, and it is none of your business.”
She snapped the cell phone shut. Then she looked at it, lying dead and black in her hand.
The problem was that Caroline didn’t want to get on with things. She didn’t want to go to the parade. She didn’t want to go to the picnic. She didn’t want to talk to anybody she knew.
2
Kyle Westervan was dead. It was the first thing Tim Brand thought of when he woke up on the Fourth of July, and the only thing he could make himself think about as he started his day.
He showered and shaved and dressed and drank a glass of orange juice, and then he headed out across town. With all the road blockages and the crowds, it was easier, and he didn’t really want to drive when he was this distracted.
He got to the clinic feeling bone tired and looked inside to see if anybody was around. The reception desk was unmanned. The corridors were sparkling clean and uninhabited. Tim went out to the back and stopped when he saw the yellow crime scene tape over the back door.
He went back out to the reception area and found Marcie standing there, holding an enormous straw tote bag and wearing an enormous straw hat.
She looked up from something she’d been writing on a pad and smiled. “I thought I could find you here,” she said. “I tried calling your house. Are you going to go up to the parade? I know you must feel like hell, but virtually every one of the kids from the children’s clinic is marching in one capacity or the other, and it would mean a lot to them for you to be there.”
“I know,” Tim said. “I did intend to be there. And there’s still time. I’ve just been wandering around a little aimlessly.”
“Because of Kyle.” It was not a question.
Tim sat down in one of the molded plastic chairs meant for people waiting to be called for clinic and winced, for the hundredth time, at just how hard they were.
“Tim?” Marcie said.
“I’ve just been wandering around thinking it was odd,” he said. “Alwych without Kyle in it. I’ve known Kyle all my life, almost. Almost as long as I’ve known Virginia. We were in a nursery school play group together when we were two.”
“It’s not odd,” Marcie said. “It’s horrible. The whole thing is horrible, from start to finish.”
“I agree. But it’s also odd. Just before my father died, he told me that he’d outlived all his brothers and sisters and his aunts and uncles and even the two people he was closest to as friends, and that he felt as if he were adrift in a sea of forgetfulness. He was the only one left who remembered, and so he couldn’t know if he was really remembering at all.”
“There’s Virginia,” Marcie said. “She remembers. And there’s Hope Matlock.”
“It’s different for women and men.”
“Is it really?”
“Don’t start that,” Tim said. “I was never all that close to Hope, and Virginia—well, Virginia is Virginia. And she’s my sister.”
�
�I’ll admit I never did understand the thing with Hope,” Marcie said. “I know I didn’t know her when she was younger—but still. She seems to me the most unlikely person in the world to belong to the popular crowd in a place like Alwych Country Day. She seems like an unlikely person to have gone to Alwych Country Day.”
Tim shrugged. “Her family is one of the oldest in New England,” he said. “They were here before the Revolutionary War. They’ve had members fight in every war the United States has ever been in. When I was growing up, all that was more important than the things you’re thinking of. It was starting to change even then, but it was still more important.”
“And then it changed to just being about money,” Marcie said.
“Something like that,” Tim agreed. “But there’s a scholarship at Alwych Country Day that’s named after her great-grandfather, and there’s a scholarship at Miss Porter’s that was named after her grandmother, and she got both of those because there were stipulations in the endowments that said she would. Not her specifically, you understand, but—”
“I know. Somebody in the family.”
“Exactly.”
“I still say I can’t see it,” Marcie said. “She’s so mousy. It’s all well and good to have an old money name, but she doesn’t seem to have any money and she’s got almost no personality at all. Even in fancy private schools, I’ll bet you have to have personality to be part of the popular crowd. And now you’ll tell me that she was the life of the party back then, and it was all that stuff that changed her.”
“No,” Tim said. “Hope was always Hope. Not just mousy but almost morbidly self-conscious. But Marty was part of Chapin’s crowd, and Hope was Marty’s girlfriend.”
“And you were Chapin Waring’s boyfriend. I can’t see that, either.”
“I can’t see it myself at this late date,” Tim said, “but at the time, it felt almost inevitable. I get surprised sometimes at how much seemed inevitable then that doesn’t seem inevitable anymore. I don’t think Chapin and I even liked each other much. Everybody knew from dancing school that I’d be her escort at her debut, and it just went from there. I think I was a little relieved not to have to go looking for a girlfriend.”
