28 Hearts of Sand

by Jane Haddam

  There was a sound of a car, and Hope thought she was hallucinating it.

  Then she turned and saw a sedan parked at the curb, with its motor idling.

  SEVEN

  1

  In the beginning, Gregor Demarkian was sure that Hope Matlock was going to fall down dead on the sidewalk. She was swaying the way people did when their hearts were giving out and their heads were like balloons and just as stable. Jason Battlesea thought something was wrong, too. He stuck his head out toward the passenger side window as soon as he pulled to the curb.

  “What’s wrong with her?” he asked. “Should we be getting her to a hospital?”

  “I don’t know,” Gregor said.

  He pushed the button that rolled down the window and stuck his head into the thick, humid air. Hope Matlock had come to a stop, if she could be said to have been walking before that. She looked at him with puzzlement.

  “Are you all right?” Gregor asked her. “Do you need medical attention?”

  The look on Hope Matlock’s face said he might as well have been speaking in Mandarin. She stood swaying where she was and looking. She answered nothing.

  Gregor made a decision. He looked around behind him to make sure the back passenger door was unlocked. Then he twisted his arm around and popped it open.

  “Why don’t you get in,” he said. “We were headed over to your house in any event. We can drive you home.”

  There was more swaying, and more of that faraway vacant look. Gregor came close to deciding that she hadn’t heard him. Then Hope shuddered, and moved.

  She was, Gregor thought, a very lumbering person. She walked by swaying back and forth and sort of pitching herself forward.

  Hope got into the backseat, folding herself up very carefully. She had a small purse. She put it on the floor. Then she closed the door behind her and waited.

  “We can take you to the hospital, Miss Matlock,” Jason Battlesea said. “Gregor Demarkian here has a few questions he wants to ask you, he says it will sort of clear things up, but we can take you to the hospital instead if you need to go. You don’t look well.”

  “I’m fine,” Hope said, rasping a little.

  Gregor thought “not looking well” was something of an understatement. The woman’s face was both flushed and gray. Gregor hadn’t even known that was possible. There were large round beads of sweat on her forehead.

  “I’m fine,” she said again.

  Jason Battlesea got the car into drive and pulled away from the curb. “You’ll be better in the air-conditioning,” he said. “Do you have air-conditioning in that house of yours?”

  “I’m fine,” Hope Matlock said yet again.

  This time, Gregor thought she was approaching telling the truth. Sitting down and the cold air were doing her good. The gray was leaving her complexion, even if the flush was not. She took a great deep gulp of air that sounded as if she hadn’t had oxygen for hours.

  “We were surprised to see you,” Jason Battlesea said, moving through the side streets and the neat little neighborhoods of neat little houses. “We came this way because we wanted to avoid all the fuss left over from the parade. I never would have thought anybody was crazy enough to walk this way. I mean, it’s out of your way, isn’t it? And you’re on foot.”

  Hope looked out the window. “I just started walking,” she said. “The parade was over and I wanted to go home. I don’t think I was paying attention to the way I was going.”

  “Well, you must not have been,” Jason Battlesea said. “You could have killed yourself. Even a young person who was relatively healthy—I’m not saying you’re not healthy, Miss Matlock—could get heat stroke in this weather.”

  She was looking out the car window as the streets went by. They were going by very quickly.

  “When we get home, I want you to put your feet up,” Jason Battlesea said. “Is there any air-conditioning in your house?”

  “It doesn’t need air-conditioning,” Hope said. “These old houses, they were meant to keep out the weather.”

  “The weather is ninety-three degrees and humid as hell,” Jason Battlesea said. “Do you at least have ice? Lots of nice big ice cube trays full of ice?”

  “Of course there’s ice,” Hope said, but she didn’t sound certain.

  “I’ve got Jack and Mike coming over. Mr. Demarkian here wanted them on hand. I’ll have them pick up some ice at Lanyard’s or somewhere. You’ve got to take care of yourself.”

  Hope was still looking out the window. Her eyes did not look glazed, but they did not look focused, either.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said finally. “I’m all right. I’m going to be all right. I just need to sit down at home and rest for a while.”

  Gregor pulled down the visor in front of him. There was a mirror clipped onto the back of that. It made it much easier for him to see Hope in the backseat. He got the side of her face, now fading from the flush. She looked, oddly enough, very cold.

  Jason Battlesea had pulled into yet another road. This one distinctive in that most of the houses on it were right up next to the pavement. They were also all old. He pulled up in front of a small brown one.

  Hope got her door open quickly and started to get out.

  “I’ll be all right,” she said. Gregor was tired of hearing it.

  “I just need to lie down,” Hope said. “I need to lie down for an hour and then I can talk to Mr. Demarkian.”

  Gregor sighed. “You know you can’t lie down for an hour,” he said, “and you know I’m not going to let you.”

  “Why not?” Jason Battlesea said. “Do you want to kill her?”

  “I don’t want her to kill herself,” Gregor said, “and that’s where this is going.”

  “Hope Matlock is going to kill herself,” Jason Battlesea said.

  “No,” Hope said.

  “I don’t think you are either,” Gregor said, “at least not as long as we’re here. But I’d really like you to tell me why you killed Chapin Waring and Kyle Westervan before you decide to give it a shot.”

  Hot air was coming in through the open passenger door. Hope put her face in her hands and bent over.

  It took a little while before Gregor realized that what he was hearing was sobs.

  2

  When they got her inside, the first thing Gregor could think of was how small the house was. It wasn’t square-foot small. Gregor could tell from looking at the outside that no matter what size the building was when it was first erected, it had been added on to over and over again through the years. There was a lot of it sprawling out along the road and back toward what looked like a stand of trees.

  It was the rooms that were small, the ceilings lower than the modern custom of at least eight feet, the total dimensions cramped and strictly limited by thick walls with doors in them.

  They came through the front door directly into the living room. There was a great wing chair near the fireplace. Jason Battlesea helped Hope Matlock into that, and she went without protest. She was bent over when she went into the chair. She stayed bent over once she was settled in it.

  Gregor looked around and saw that there were papers and books everywhere, as if someone had taken the contents of a small office and thrown them over the furniture without caring where they landed.

  Hope had stopped sobbing, but she was still crying. Gregor could see her shoulders going up and down above the face she still had hidden in her hands. He walked through the living room into the dining room. This room, too, was full of papers and books. Nobody could have found a place to eat at the dining room table.

  He went through the dining room into the kitchen. This room was just a mess. There were dishes piled up in the sink. There were bags of chemicalized snack foods on all the counters and on top of the refrigerators. On an impulse, he opened the refrigerator. There were things in there in bowls that looked like they might have been there for a decade. He opened the little freezer compartment above that and found big bags of something ca
lled Pizza Rolls, a stack of Swanson Hungry Man TV dinners, and a big bag of frozen chicken nuggets.

  When Gregor got back to the living room, Jason was waiting for him, scowling. “You can’t go looking around the place as if you owned it,” he said. “We don’t have a search warrant.”

  “I wasn’t searching for anything,” Gregor said. This was actually true, although beside the point. “I was just noticing the obvious. Aside from some on the dining room table, that don’t look as if they’ve ever been displayed anywhere, there are no photographs.”

  Hope looked up at the two of them.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” she said. “You’re going to say it was wrong of me to kill Kyle. With Chapin, and with Marty—”

  “Marty? Jason Battlesea asked.

  “I told you we were looking at the wrong crime,” Gregor said. “Chapin Waring wasn’t killed because of the robberies, or at least not directly because of the robberies. She was killed because of the murder of Marty Veer.”

  “Marty Veer died in an accident,” Jason Battlesea said.

  Hope was staring at a small window on the other side of the room. “I grabbed the wheel,” she said. “We were in the car, sitting right next to each other, and he was drunk as hell, and I knew, I knew from seeing the tapes on the news, I knew what they were doing. Chapin and Marty. Chapin and everybody. I’d seen it coming for months. I wasn’t stupid. But then they started to air those tapes from the banks and I could see what they’d done. And they’d gone out and done it deliberately.”

  “I expect this makes sense to you,” Jason Battlesea said.

  “Of course it does,” Gregor said. “Look at those tapes again. Chapin Waring is wearing black and a mask, but not doing much to disguise her identity. Martin Veer is not only wearing black and a mask, he’s padded up in odd places to make him look bulky, and to almost force him to walk in a way that wasn’t natural to him. The point wasn’t just to make sure nobody recognized him, but to make sure that if somebody thought they did recognize him, it wouldn’t be him they’d recognize.”

  “They did it on purpose,” Hope said again. She rubbed her hands together and blew on them, as if they were cold. “I didn’t know about the robberies, but I knew there was something going on between Chapin and Marty. There was always something going on between Chapin and everybody. You’d think she had enough in her life without having to go after everybody else’s boyfriends and without staging one drama after another in the long soap opera that was Being Who Counted at Alwych Country Day, but Chapin could never relax. And I’d started to see the signs all the way back in February. That she was looking to get rid of me. That she was trying to get Marty to dump me and take up with her and then she’d pick him out another girlfriend she’d like better.”

  “I take it you knew about the robberies before the police did,” Gregor said.

  “I knew the first time I saw one of those security tapes on television,” Hope said. “You couldn’t miss Chapin. She wasn’t even really disguised, just obscured sort of, enough so that if you didn’t know her, you wouldn’t be able to describe her very well. I never understood why nobody else saw it but me.”

  “Maybe they did,” Gregor said.

  Hope sniffled. “The night of the last robbery, after those people died, that night Marty was crazy. Marty wasn’t like Chapin, you know. He wasn’t a good person, not really, but he wasn’t like Chapin. He wouldn’t do just anything for the rush. So when I heard that two people had died, I was expecting something. And I got it. Marty started drinking early. He had a flask, and then we went to a roadhouse in New York State because, you know, in those days the drinking age over there was eighteen. And he was just drinking and drinking and going crazy. And I kept trying to talk to him. And then he got sick. We were on our way out to the car, and he bolted around the side of the roadhouse and got sick. And I went back there to talk to him.”

  “And?” Gregor said.

  Hope shrugged. “And I went back there and I waited for him to stop heaving and then I asked him. And he was too drunk to play around with it. He just told me right out front. About how I was completely sickening, as far as he was concerned. I was completely ridiculous, prancing around, pretending to be a debutante when I wasn’t anybody and my family wasn’t anybody and never had been, and all those things. ‘Prancing around’ was how he put it. And even at the time, I thought it was ridiculous. I mean, he was nobody and his family was nobody, too. They were more nobody than my family was. They didn’t even have the history. His father had just made a bunch of money in kitchen fixtures. But it wasn’t Beach Drive kind of money. It wasn’t Waring and Brand kind of money.”

  Gregor was getting tired of standing. He pushed some papers to the side on the sagging old couch and sat down. “Did you tell him all that? About his family not being anybody?”

  “I don’t know,” Hope said. “I think I might have tried. But I was drunk, too, and it was late and everybody was yelling at us to go and I was feeling a little crazy. Because there wasn’t anybody else. I didn’t have other friends. I didn’t have a place to be or anything like that. I had college, but I didn’t have anybody there and then when I went to grad school later, I didn’t have anybody there. And I didn’t know what I was going to do. So I think maybe I just got back into the car and sat still and didn’t say anything.”

  “I don’t understand,” Jason Battlesea said. “What did she know as soon as she saw the security tapes? What could she have known that the police wouldn’t have known at the same time?”

  “Marty Veer wasn’t disguised just to be disguised,” Gregor explained. “He was disguised deliberately in order to make him look as much like Hope as possible. He was bulked up in ways to make it seem as if it was Hope committing the robberies along with Chapin Waring. Hope and Marty were close to the same height and they had similar body types.”

  “He wouldn’t have liked her so much if he’d heard what she said about him when he wasn’t around,” Hope said. “She was always going on and on about how he was ‘squat’ and how you could really tell what class people were in from how tall they were and how lean and it was like racehorses or something. She didn’t really like him. She didn’t even like him a little bit. She was just playing games with him to get rid of me, and once she was rid of me she’d have found a way to get rid of him. She’d have killed him if she had to.”

  “But she didn’t kill him,” Gregor said. “You did.”

  “I just grabbed the wheel,” Hope said. “We were driving, and we were going faster and faster, and Tim was completely furious about it, telling Marty to stop and slow down and all that kind of thing. But Marty wasn’t slowing down, and we came around Clapboard Ridge on the curve there and I thought if I could just make myself do it, if I could just make myself move for once, we’d all be dead and it wouldn’t matter anymore.”

  “You did expect you’d all be dead?” Gregor asked.

  “It seemed like the most likely thing,” Hope said. “We were going very, very fast—crazy fast—and I was right there on the seat next to him and I leaned over and grabbed the wheel and just pulled at it. I pulled and the car just spun off the road. We did a complete circle, like some kind of carnival ride. And we spun and we spun and then we hit a tree, but we did it kind of sideways, not head-on. And then I heard the smash and I looked up and for one second Marty was just there, and then his head exploded. It did. It just blew up.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Jason Battlesea said.

  “I think I must have passed out,” Hope said. “I thought we were all going to be dead. And then we weren’t. Then only Marty was dead, and Kyle and I had bruises, and I think Kyle had minor broken bones in his arm, and everybody in the back was all right. And there we were. And everybody was saying it was an accident, and blaming it all on Marty, and I didn’t see any reason not to let them.”

  “But other people had seen what you’d done,” Gregor said.

  Hope nodded. “Kyle had seen it but he didn’t
say anything then,” she said. “He was on the other side of me, so I knew he had to have seen it. I didn’t realize Chapin had seen it until later. After Marty’s funeral, I mean. Just before she ran away. She came here after the funeral, really late at night, and my mother—you would have to have known my mother. This was Chapin Waring coming to the house. My mother would never have believed that a Waring could do something really wrong. Chapin came and we went upstairs to my room to talk and then she just sort of laid it all out. She said she’d been sitting in the middle in the back and she’d seen everything I’d done, even if Tim and Virginia hadn’t, and she could call the police right that second and I’d go to jail for murder. My whole life would be ruined. I wouldn’t be able to go back to college. I wouldn’t even be able to stay in Alwych, because everybody would know I’d killed him and they’d hate me for it. And I thought that that was true. Almost everybody liked Marty more than they liked me.”

  “And that,” Gregor said, “is when she asked you to hide the money.”

  “This house was searched,” Jason Battlesea said. “It was searched by the local police and it was searched by Federal agents. Granted, it was before my time, but are you really trying to tell me that two sets of law enforcement officers couldn’t find a stash of over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash in a house this size?”

  Hope looked contemptuous. “They came in and searched,” she said, “but they searched like it was an ordinary house. I was afraid when they first came, because I thought they’d find it, too, but they never got near it. I don’t think it ever even occurred to them.”

  “What didn’t occur to them?” Jason Battlesea said. “How isn’t this an ordinary house?”

  “In the seventeenth century, most people here didn’t have access to banks as we know them,” Gregor said. “A lot of people didn’t think the banks they did have access to were safe. It wasn’t unusual for people to build into their houses some kind of hiding place to keep money and other valuables in.”