by Jane Haddam
“Now, Alice,” Clayton said. “What have you done with her? Is she still in the clearing?”
“Of course she isn’t in the clearing,” Alice said. “She’s never been in the clearing. She’s upstairs in her own room.”
“Did you move her, Alice? I know it’s natural, with a suicide—”
“She didn’t die in the clearing,” a woman said, a small woman with a black braid down her back and a flowered dress. “She died upstairs in her room. We didn’t move her.”
“We didn’t want anybody to be able to say we’d messed everything up,” Alice said. “We didn’t want to read in the papers that the reason you were never able to catch Zhondra’s murderer was that we destroyed all the evidence.”
“She’s up there hanging,” the small woman with the black braid said. “She has the rope swung over the chandelier hook. We would have taken her down if we could. None of us could figure out how.”
“It’s just as well that you didn’t,” Clayton said. “Alice was right. It would destroy evidence.”
The woman with the braid blushed deep scarlet. “There’s one other thing,” she said, looking from Gregor to Clayton and back again. “She left a note.”
“She left it upstairs?” Gregor asked. “Near where you found the body?”
The small woman nodded.
“Is it still there?” Gregor said.
The small woman looked at Alice and blushed again.
“Well, it made sense to read it, didn’t it?” Alice demanded defiantly. “It was right there out in the open where anybody could see.”
“It had ‘to the police’ written on the envelope,” one of the other women said, a middle-aged one with lines of disapproval on either side of her mouth. “I thought it was like opening somebody else’s mail.”
“It wasn’t mail,” Alice said. “It was a note. It was probably a forged note. We had to see what it said.”
“I think we should have left it where it was,” the small woman with the braid said stubbornly. “I know how you feel about it, Alice, but it just makes sense. There was no hurry for us to read if. We could have let the police handle it and read it later when it was released.”
“If it ever was released,” Alice said. “And how would we have known that the same letter was released as the one they got? Once they had it and none of us had read it, they could have said anything. They could have made up whatever they wanted.”
“Do you have the letter?” Clayton asked, holding out his hand. “Come on now, Alice. No matter what’s happened to Zhondra and what hasn’t happened to her, there have already been two murders on or near this property. Let’s go at this with a little common sense.”
Alice hesitated, looking more mulish by the second. Then she plunged her hand into the pocket of her jeans and came up with a crumpled envelope. Even in the battered state it was in, Gregor could see that it was made of very good, very expensive paper, the kind people ordered from jewelry stores with their initials engraved on it. It was almost as thick as cardboard and made of cream linen, but Zhondra Meyer’s initials were nowhere to be seen.
Clayton took four small sheets of paper out of the envelope and began to read them over. Gregor could see that the words on them had been typed, and that there were no initials on these pages, either. He tried to remember if he had ever seen notepaper with Zhondra’s initials on it anywhere at Bonaventura, but it wasn’t the kind of thing he noticed if he had no reason to, and up until now he had no reason to. Still, Gregor thought it was odd, the first solid piece of evidence he had seen that Alice and his own instincts might be right, that it made no sense at all for Zhondra Meyer to have committed suicide. Zhondra Meyer was the kind of person who should have had good notepaper with her initials engraved on it. Clayton handed the little typewritten note to him, and Gregor took it.
“To Whom It May Concern,” it said, and then:
I have tried as long as I could to go on with this, but it really isn’t any good, and it isn’t going to get any better. For the past few weeks, ever since Tiffany died, I have been in agony. Many of us here have been. I’m not going to name any names. As impossible as it might be for the police and others of that kind, we never intended to kill anyone. We never expected that to happen. We thought we were just going out to the woods to worship the Goddess, to be part of nature and to glory in it. We should have realized. The Goddess has always been worshipped with blood. When the Jesuits dug through the pits of the Incan ziggurats they found piles of skulls of infants, piled up at the bottom where the fire had been. Maybe Henry Holborn is right. The Goddess calls to you, and what she wants is something more dramatic than allegiance. We gave her what she wanted, Carol Littleton and I.
Just to make sure that everybody understands what has to be understood: Carol and I were the only ones involved when Tiffany died. Carol found her in her carrier seat, set up on the long table in the hall. Ginny wasn’t there at the time; I don’t know where she’d gone. It was my idea to dedicate her to the Goddess, to baptize her in blood. Carol and I were both going to cut little notches in our wrists, and sprinkle the blood on Tiffany’s head, and make her ours instead of Henry Holborn’s God’s. We took her out to the side terrace near the dining room. Nobody ever goes near there anymore, except to eat when we have formal dinners, and there is an altar there that Dinah and Stelle set up a couple of months ago. After that, I’m not entirely sure what happened. We have a chant we sing that Carol found in an old book in my grandfather’s library. You can find it in there if you look, laid out on the desk near the fire, with a brown leather cover. I forget what the name of it is. We had the chant to sing and we sang it, and then everything seemed to get out of control. I’m not sure I could tell you what happened after that, except that after it was over, Tiffany was dead.
There is nothing on earth that can sober you up like holding the corpse of an infant in your hands. We were standing there on the terrace with a dead baby, and for a while we didn’t know what to do. That was when we decided to put it up in the clearing, near the circle of stones. That was a place that belonged to the Goddess. That was a place where we thought the baby would be at peace. We wrapped Tiffany up in a blanket and started up the hill toward the clearing, going around the back way. There were dozens of people in the study by then and in the living room, too, and we didn’t want to be seen.
Nobody in their right mind would have been out in that weather, but Ginny was, in the woods, just popping out at us where we didn’t expect it. Carol screamed when Ginny ran into us. She was holding the baby and she dropped it. When the baby fell she twisted in the air. The blanket fell off. When Ginny saw the baby hit the ground, she jumped on her, and that was when I first realized we had cut her up. There was blood everywhere, I don’t know where it came from, we all seemed to have too much of it on ourselves. Ginny was just nuts, and I was frantic. I pushed her out of the way and grabbed the body and ran. I went up into the woods as far as I could go, but it wasn’t as far as I wanted to go. I kept thinking that if I could only make it to the circle of stones, everything would be all right. God only knows why I thought that. In the end, though, I could hear Ginny coming back, and David and the others. I couldn’t see much of anything in the wind and the rain. My clothes were soaked through and there was hail coming down. I dropped the baby and started running back to the house. I wanted to be away before they could find me, even though I didn’t think then that they would suspect me of anything.
After that, there isn’t much to tell, except, of course, that I killed Carol, because she was so nervous and because she wanted so much to confess. Yesterday, I still thought that mattered. I still thought I could go on with my life as if nothing at all had happened. Now I realize that I don’t even want to go on with my life. Sometimes I lie in bed and listen to the voice of the Goddess speaking to me, but it is a wicked voice, and I don’t want to talk to it anymore.
You have to be careful, I think, about what you let into
your soul, more careful than I have been. Henry Holborn would say that, the way things have been with me, I will spend the rest of eternity hearing the voice of the Goddess, but even at this late date and with everything that has happened, I don’t think he’s right. God or Goddess, Christ or Satan, it all works out the same for me. After this there is nothing but blackness and the rest that is the obliteration, finally, of even the will to move. That’s what I want to be part of now, and that’s what I will be going to, and no matter how anybody reading this may feel about it, I am very glad.
Ginny Marsh had nothing to do with any of this. Her only real crime was to panic so badly that she didn’t know who she was seeing and what she was doing, and under the circumstances, that seems entirely natural to me.
—Zhondra
Gregor put the little stack of papers into a neat pile and stuffed them back into their small square envelope. Clayton Hall was staring at him. So were the women on the terrace. In the background, he could hear the shrill wailing of sirens. Any minute now, the house would be full of people. Gregor knew they had to get to work before then.
“Well?” Clayton Hall demanded. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s a very interesting letter,” Gregor said carefully. “I think it’s one of the few sincerely genuine confessions I’ve ever read. Don’t you?”
“You think it’s genuine?” Clayton Hall said.
Alice exploded. “I knew it was going to be like this! I knew it. Zhondra never killed anyone in her life. And she didn’t kill herself. It’s just what you want to think. It gets you off the hook. It makes it so that you don’t have to go after some man.”
“I can’t believe you think it’s genuine,” Clayton Hall insisted. “It’s typed, for God’s sake. Whoever heard of a suicide who typed her farewell note?”
“I’m sure there are some who have,” Gregor replied, “but it doesn’t matter in this case, because a suicide didn’t write it. Can we look at the body now?”
The small woman with the black braid scurried forward. “I’ll take you up there,” she said. “You ought to get a look at it. She shouldn’t just be left there, as if she weren’t anybody, and nobody cared for her.”
“What’s your name?” Gregor asked her.
“Grace,” she said.
“Well, Grace,” Gregor said, “maybe you ought to lead the way up, and Clayton and I will follow.”
2
ZHONDRA MEYER’S BEDROOM WAS like Zhondra Meyer’s study. There were other bedrooms in the house, and other studies, but Zhondra had chosen the best and most important ones. It was an instinct Gregor had noticed in her from the first. Magnificence was Zhondra Meyer’s birthright. She had been born into a world where the van Goghs on the dining room walls were real.
She was, as Grace had said downstairs, hanging from a rope that had been swung over the chandelier hook in the middle of the fifteen-foot ceiling. Gregor looked around and saw that the other end of it had been weighted to the sash of the window that overlooked the front drive. That had been very smart. Furniture, no matter how heavy, could move. If you weighted a suicide rope to a piece of furniture, you might jump off your chair and find that you dragged it all with you, so that you landed on the ground with nothing awful happening to you at all. There was a chair, too, a high-backed, heavily carved wooden thing with a thick green seat cushion made of velvet. It looked a lot like the ones Gregor had seen downstairs. Maybe one of the matriarchs who had come to Bonaventura before Zhondra had been the kind of women who liked “sets.” Maybe, if Gregor went carefully through the house, he would find the infamous “twelve of monogrammed everything” it had once been thought necessary for every bride to bring to her first marriage house.
Gregor looked up at the body. Zhondra Meyer was hanging fairly high in the air, making it difficult to get a good look at her face. Everything in the room conspired to make it difficult to get a good look at anything. What was it the Victorians had loved so much about the dark? The big white marble fireplace surround was the only touch of lightness in this sea of dark. The bedspread and the bed curtains were both made of heavily embroidered, wine-dark damask. The bed itself was made of thick dark wood, ornately carved. The curtains were deep green damask. The carpet was a muddy, jumbled mess of dark red and dark green, in a paisley. Even the painting over the fireplace was dark. It was, Gregor saw, an authentic Caravaggio, and Caravaggio in one of his least optimistic moods.
The ambulance was now at the front of the house, right under the windows of the room. Gregor went to the center window and looked out. The reporters were here, too, but not as many townspeople as he had expected. Maybe they had begun to get tired of it all, it was happening so frequently.
“Gregor?” Clayton Hall said.
“The ambulance just arrived,” Gregor said.
“That’s good. I’ll be happier still when the state police get here.”
“So will I. What do you think of all this?” Clayton gestured to take in the whole room, almost making the corpse seem a matter of decoration. “Does it make sense to you?”
“Some things make sense to me,” Gregor said. “Have you seen her face?”
“I’ve been trying to.”
“It’s hard, I know, but if you tilt back you can just make it. Get a good look. Get a good look at her tongue.”
“I can’t see her tongue.”
“Exactly. Neither can I. You ever see a hanging victim before?”
Clayton Hall stroked the side of his face thoughtfully. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “I have. A couple of times.”
“And?”
Clayton Hall walked around the body, to see if he could get a better look from the other side. “You think that woman Alice had it right,” he said. “You think Zhondra Meyer was actually murdered.”
“I think she didn’t die by hanging,” Gregor said. “And I think she didn’t get up there on her own.”
“But I thought you said that you thought the confession was genuine.”
“I did. I do.”
“But what’s all this about then? Was she killed like the others? Was her throat cut?”
Gregor tried walking all the way around the body in a big circle. Usually it was terrible to look at the corpses of people who had been hanged. Their tongues stuck out. Their eyes protruded. Zhondra Meyer’s face was almost as smooth and undamaged now as it had been in life.
“You can’t tell,” Gregor said finally. “The rope gets in the way, and she’s just too far up. But I don’t see any blood on the rope, and that’s probably significant. My guess is that she’s had her neck broken. Either she broke it herself or it was broken for her.”
“Do people commit suicide by breaking their own necks? Except by hanging, I mean.”
“It didn’t have to be suicide. It didn’t have to be murder. It might just have been an accident.”
“That woman didn’t end up swinging from a chandelier hook by accident.”
“I didn’t say she did. I said she might have broken her neck by accident. A very lucky accident for somebody. The chandelier hook would have come later.”
“You can’t tell me you really believe that,” Clayton Hall said. “You sound like one of those murder mysteries from the twenties, with a million and a half coincidences and then one big blowout of a revelation scene at the end.”
Gregor Demarkian looked up at the body one more time and sighed. “No, I don’t really believe that. I just don’t understand—I wish we had some gloves. We should have brought them with us. I want to start looking for things.”
“What things?”
“I don’t know.”
The door to the bedroom opened and the first of the ambulance men came in, a very young man in a white uniform with a cocky manner. He took one look at Zhondra’s body hanging on the hook and went white.
“Ah,” he said. “Oh.”
“Jesus Christ,” another ambulance man said, coming in behind the first.
The secon
d man was older, though, and better at controlling his emotions than the first. He brushed by the younger man and put the chair at Zhondra’s feet upright.
“You two need me not to touch anything so you can keep your crime scene?” he asked.
“You shouldn’t touch anything you don’t have to,” Clayton told him, “but you can get her down. Do you have gloves so you don’t—”
“—mess up the fingerprints on the chandelier or the hook. Yeah, I know. I’ve got gloves and we’re not going to have to touch the hook anyhow. Hey, Sheldon. Get ahold of yourself.”
Sheldon was the younger man. He didn’t look as if he was going to get ahold of himself anytime soon, but he did break out of his trance and start fumbling at his uniform, looking for the requisite gloves.
Gregor stepped away from the body, giving the ambulance men room to move and himself room to wait.
3
IT TOOK NEARLY HALF an hour of waiting, but eventually the time came. What had to be done had been done. The tech men had their hair samples and fingerprint possibilities and little pieces of dust that could only be picked up in special, miniature vacuum cleaners. This was the kind of evidence the FBI almost never had anything to do with—or at least not in the cases Gregor had been asked to handle. Over the last few years, Gregor had found that he liked this routine. There was something steadying about it, the way funerals were steadying. It took the apocalyptic and whittled it into shards, making it manageable.
The tech men had just gone over the dresser and the big wardrobe for fingerprints. There seemed to be little piles of dust everywhere. Gregor put on the gloves Clayton brought him, and tugged at the fingers, trying to make them stretch. The gloves were made of cotton and wouldn’t budge.
“All right,” Clayton said. “What do we do now? I suppose you’ve got a mind to make a search.”
