Murder Scene

by Richard Montanari

  He took out his phone, shot off a text to Detta.

  I’m here. Where are you?

  Almost instantly:

  Up the stairs, down the hall to the right. In the gallery!!

  Will climbed the winding stairs to the second floor, a bit taken aback at the opulence of it all. He’d thought the old house majestic when seeing it on his cycling rides around the Fairgrounds, but he hadn’t imagined it like this. This was real money.

  He stepped into the windowless room at the end of the hall. As he was about to send his daughter another text he heard another notification sound from his phone.

  He looked at the screen. There was an email and a voicemail message, both from Trevor Butler. Both had, apparently, taken time to download. Both were flagged urgent.

  Will tapped on the email. The subject line was Anthony Torres phone.

  The email had no fewer than a dozen photograph attachments.

  Somehow, they were photographs of Will’s family. Pictures of Amanda coming and going from the brownstone. Pictures of Will on the NYU campus. Pictures of Detta.

  The last picture was of Amanda on the corner of Sixth and Washington. She wore her favorite denim jacket and black jeans, a white scarf.

  For so many reasons Will’s heart ached. He was seeing a new image of Amanda. He thought he’d seen them all, and that they were all gone. For the moment it didn’t matter why they were on the cell phone of the young man who had killed the love of his life.

  But as he took in the emotion of seeing his wife in a new picture, his heartbeat hammered in his chest.

  In the photograph, Jakob van Laar stood behind Amanda.

  Before Will could tap on the icon to call Trevor Butler, he heard a sound coming from behind him. Metal on metal.

  He turned. The door behind him had closed. He tried the knob on the door.

  It was locked.

  81

  Will tried the door again. It did not open. He turned, looked at the other side of the room, saw a second door. It was slightly ajar. He crossed the room, opened the door, which led to a short, dimly lighted hallway. At the other end was a staircase leading up.

  He climbed the steps to the landing, turned, and climbed the remaining steps. He walked to the end of the corridor, pushed open the door. Here was a small square room, with two chairs near the center. Next to one of the chairs was a table covered with a white cloth.

  Will stepped inside. On each of the walls were what looked like a live video feed of the Fairgrounds. The room had no windows, but was as bright as if he were outside.

  ‘Welcome to camera lucida,’ a voice said.

  Startled, Will turned around.

  Jakob van Laar closed and locked the door behind him.

  ‘Where is my daughter?’

  ‘In time.’

  ‘What? Where is my daughter?’

  Will took a single step forward. As he did this, Jakob lifted the white cloth from the table. Beneath the cloth was a ceramic plate and a single red apple. There was also a silver pistol.

  Will stopped in his tracks.

  Jakob held out a hand. ‘Your phone.’

  Will had no choice. He handed it over.

  Jakob van Laar touched a button on a panel near the door. In an instant the four screens went dark.

  ‘Where is my daughter?’

  ‘You and I must settle the books today. Then I will take you to your daughter.’

  Jakob gestured to the chair in front of Will.

  ‘Please.’

  Will glanced at the pistol. He sat.

  Jakob turned his attention to the small, perfectly round apple, a deep red with an almost silvery sheen to it.

  ‘Do you know what they call this variety of apple?’

  Will had to keep the man engaged. He said, simply, ‘No.’

  ‘It did not have a name for many years. The naming of things is often quite complicated, an ordeal as complex as the creation of the fruit to begin with. God, of course, creates the fruit. We are merely instruments in his hands: the spade, the hoe, the rake.’

  Jakob took from his vest pocket a small silver pocketknife. He unfolded it. The blade looked to be razor-sharp. He began to peel the apple.

  ‘When my grandfather was a boy, a young man really, he worked in the orchard. It was his job, in those days, to help with the grafting for the new seedlings. It was that year when this apple – a variety that did not exist – was born. Every year, since that time, the trees have grown stronger, reaching ever towards the sky, beckoning the rain, producing more and more fruit.’

  Jakob finished peeling the apple. He had done it in one long, perfect strip. He picked up one of the folded white cloths on the table, and dried the blade. He returned the pocketknife to his vest pocket. He then picked up the apple peel by one end and gently lowered the top onto the bottom. In this light, for one fleeting moment, the apple appeared to be once again whole. Will could not see where the cuts had been made.

  Then, in an instant, the illusion was gone.

  Jakob put the peel on the white plate. He continued.

  ‘Consider this, if you will. Something that began its journey to our table centuries ago is here today for you and I to enjoy. In its flesh is a raindrop that fell when my grandfather’s grandfather was just a boy. The very same. Without the inexorable turning of the earth, the seasons, the four winds, the equinox and solstice, it would not be as sweet. One cannot rush nature. We have tried this, and the results are not good.’

  Will had to bring the man back to the moment. He tried to keep the urgency from his voice.

  ‘Where’s my daughter, Jakob?’

  ‘We are all compost, in the end. We do not matter. The soil remembers. Think of Shiloh, Vicksburg, Ypres Salient, Omaha Beach. Dare we walk on that soil and not shiver with each step?’

  Jakob touched a button on the console. On the wall behind him there was now an old photograph. In it stood a boy of maybe eighteen or so. He wore a white shirt that still had the creases pressed into it. When Will looked into the boy’s eyes he felt something stir inside.

  ‘His name was Willem Schuyler,’ Jakob said.

  Another photograph. This time, a girl. It was a picture of Eva Larssen, taken behind Godwin Hall. It looked to have been taken at the same time as the group photo Will had seen at the Historical Society. Except this one was a close- up.

  He saw clearly for the first time Eva Larssen’s beautiful face.

  It was Detta’s face.

  Eva Larssen and Willem Schuyler were his blood.

  ‘Rinus van Laar loved her dearly, you see. After he was widowed, he wanted her to be his.’

  ‘He killed her.’

  The man bristled at the word.

  ‘He gave her immortality.’ He gestured outward, toward the orchards and fields. ‘He gave her the turn of seasons. The sun and the rain.’ Jakob van Laar stood, took the pistol in hand. ‘He raised his son, teaching him the ways of the land. Together they built Zeven Farms.’

  Will stood up. Whatever was coming, whatever was going to happen to him, he was not going to let it happen while sitting down.

  ‘You engineered all of it. You sent Anthony to me. You sent me that email as a man named Kessel.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jakob said. ‘A small folly.’

  ‘You knew I would take Anthony on. You knew I would try to help him.’

  ‘We are all of our nature. It is nature that lights our way. Or, should I say, it is fire.’

  ‘All these years. All these dead girls.’

  Jakob said nothing. Will thought he saw a tell in the man’s eyes, a flicker of something close to conscience.

  ‘Why Paulette Graham? Why Josefina Mollo?’

  ‘They were full of virtue,’ Jakob said. ‘Surely someone in your line of work knows how rare that is to find.’

  Jakob stood on the other side of the room, near the door.

  ‘The day your mother died,’ Jakob said. ‘What happened that day?’

  For a moment, Wi
ll thought he did not hear the man correctly. ‘What?’

  Suddenly, on the wall, was the article in the Times.

  Fire in Dobb’s Ferry Claims One.

  The next photograph took Will’s legs away.

  It was picture taken of the thirteen-year-old Will Hardy standing outside the burning house.

  ‘You were there,’ Will said.

  ‘My father and I. Yes.’ Jakob continued. ‘There were no guarantees that all these events would lead us to this day. You and I in this room. We plant our seedlings, prune our trees. We water and fertilize and cultivate. Still, sometimes, the trees do not bear fruit. The fact that we now stand together, with all the chance that may have conspired against us, must tell you that this was meant to be.’

  Will again looked at the wall. It now showed the young Jakob van Laar next to the smoldering ruins of his house.

  When Will turned back, Jakob was gone.

  Will ran across the room, tried the lock, banged on the door. ‘Open this fucking door!’

  As the four walls began to change, Will looked for something, anything, to pry open the door. On the walls, the photos now strobed between the house in Dobb’s Ferry, the news articles about his father as a hero, pictures of Detta and her school class in Manhattan.

  The only furniture in the room were the two chairs and the small table. The table was a mahogany pedestal candle stand with a wrought iron base.

  Will upended the table, sending the ceramic plate crashing to the floor. He swung the table by the legs into the wall, over and over, until the top splintered away.

  He ran back to the door, inserted the top of the base between the door and the jamb, just above the lock. It would not budge. He removed it, slid the base a few inches higher. With all his strength he pushed against the bottom until the door began to splinter.

  For the next five minutes he continued to eat away at the door frame until he had the top of the lock mechanism exposed.

  It was then short work to pry the mortise lock free. When he had the lock off he put his ear against the door, then immediately stepped back.

  The door was warm.

  Almost hot.

  Will looked down, saw smoke seeping along the carpet.

  Veldhoeve was burning.

  82

  There were no fewer than five mini-emergencies that Ivy encountered between the time she talked to Will Hardy and the moment she walked onto the front porch at Godwin Hall.

  A five-year-old girl scraped her knee at the corner of Platteville and Jericho Lane, and Ivy directed her overreacting mother to the first aid tent on the Fairgrounds. An SUV decided that it did not want to pay for parking, and parked on the sidewalk in front of Uncle Joe’s.

  When Ivy finally stepped through the door at Godwin Hall she was immediately struck by her lingering sense of dread. She had not been inside since Delia disappeared, had indeed avoided looking at the structure, which had been shuttered all of her adult and professional life. The few times she had been called to the grounds – mostly to deal with trespassing kids – she had gotten onto and off the grounds as quickly as possible. She knew that these feelings were irrational, that whatever had happened to her sister did not live in the stone and mortar and timber of Godwin Hall, but that knowledge had never stopped the feelings.

  ‘Bernadette?’ she called out.

  There was no response.

  She looked around the first floor; the dining room, front room, kitchen, the small bedroom off the dining room. A quick scan of each space revealed nothing.

  She stopped again in the kitchen. She put her hand to both the toaster on the countertop and the grates on the top of the stove. Neither were warm. Neither had just been used.

  She crossed the foyer to the stairs, and called out once again before heading up.

  There was no reply.

  Of the six rooms on the second floor, Ivy quickly determined that five of them were set up to be guest rooms for when Godwin Hall opened. All five were simply laid out with a double bed, dresser, chair, writing desk. All had recently been plastered and painted. She checked each bathroom. Empty.

  The door at the end of the hall was partly closed. As Ivy approached she found that she was holding her breath. She had no idea why. Maybe it was just being inside Godwin Hall for the first time in years. Maybe it was the fact that a number of teenaged girls had gone missing or had been attacked and left for dead.

  Maybe it was the fact that, all those years ago, Delia had walked this very hall.

  She called out one more time.

  ‘Bernadette? It’s Ivy Holgrave.’

  Nothing.

  She edged open the door.

  What she saw was a completely benign, empty room. It was spare, by teenage girl standards. A queen-size bed, carefully made. Shoes arrayed beneath the side rail.

  On one wall were drawings. Ivy recognized a few of the locations, landmarks around the Abbeville town square: the front of the library, the small, ivy-covered post office, the view coming toward the square from the south, on Platteville Road. They were all quite good, finely detailed, drawn with a sure hand.

  There were only two posters on the walls. Museum reprints of Kandinsky and Paul Klee.

  Ivy checked the top of the dresser. She saw the power cord for an iPhone. Wherever Bernadette Hardy had gone, it seems she had taken her phone with her. Ivy did not know too many fifteen-year-olds who left their phones at home.

  She picked up the note on the bed, the note Will Hardy had referenced. She then noticed the large Strathmore sketch pads on the desk. She crossed the room, picked up one of the pads, began to turn over the pages.

  Some of the drawings were extraordinary. Most were quickly drawn, but a few were quite detailed. These had what looked like a page number written in the upper right corner.

  Beneath the pads was a large coffee table book. Bruegel: The Complete Paintings, Drawings and Prints.

  She glanced at one of the sketches, at the page number. She turned to the corresponding page in the large book, and felt an icy hand close around her heart.

  The seven discarded pails. The tied bundles of branches, the ladders.

  It was the Paulette Graham crime scene.

  Prudence.

  She turned a few pages, to the section on Bruegel’s vices.

  In the first drawing, amid all the items scattered throughout, were the two dice, rolled to one and three.

  It was the Lonnie Combs crime scene.

  Sloth.

  Next was another drawing. In this Bruegel had rendered a man with a drill bit through his head.

  Chevy Deacon.

  Gluttony.

  Ivy took out her phone with a trembling hand. She scrolled down through the recent photographs, the pictures she had taken in Jakob van Laar’s living room. The books in the bookcase.

  There were two dozen books on Bruegel.

  As Ivy ran down the steps it came to her.

  Julie Hansen hadn’t said Richard.

  She’d said orchard.

  83

  In that moment he remembered it all, and it filled him with terror. The horrid smell of smoke, the fury of the blaze.

  Photographs of his mother strobed on the walls around him. One of them was of the teenaged Sarah Hardy standing in front of Godwin Hall.

  And Will understood.

  None of the memories that had come to him since arriving in Abbeville had been his own. He knew these things about the village and Godwin Hall because of his mother’s stories. She had told him of Daniel Troyer. She had told him of the needles and thread in the drawer of the breakfront in the dining room at Godwin Hall.

  The concussion he suffered on the night of Anthony Torres killed Amanda had stolen the memories of his mother’s girlhood remembrances.

  Now they were back.

  With them came the sense-memory of his father; the way Michael Hardy would smell when he came home late from a job. Will could always see the weariness and fatigue in the man’s eyes, but it was the sme
ll that scared young Will. The smell of fire and death. No matter how many hot showers his father took, the smell never really left.

  And now the fire was coming for him.

  By the time Will got the door open the flames had begun to climb the walls. The heat was monstrous.

  ‘Detta!’

  He looked down the hallway to the left. The door at the end of the hall was open. Will tore off his shirt, held it over his mouth and nose.

  Before long he couldn’t see anything. He had gotten turned around and could not remember which way the stairs were.

  Then, a fluttering, a flare of bright white light to his right. Paper cuts of sound across the air, like the sound of beating wings.

  Will crawled in that direction, found the stairs. The smoke was so thick he could not see the bottom.

  He tried to hold his breath as he pulled himself down, down. Behind him he could feel the flames at his back.

  He blacked out for a moment, was brought back by the searing heat. When he reached the bottom he could no longer hold his breath.

  Again the flash of white, disappearing into the flames to his right. He continued to crawl in that direction

  He was now in the foyer. Fire filled the world.

  When the front door blew open, Will saw something flutter out, into the darkening sky.

  Then his world went as dark as the smoke.

  84

  When Ivy was halfway across the Fairgrounds she saw the smoke billowing from the gable end of Veldhoeve. She also heard the sirens.

  By the time she reached the driveway she saw that there were two ladder trucks already on scene.

  Walt Barnstable was herding onlookers away from the structure, out of the potential collapse zone.

  Ivy looked across the front lawn and saw that one of the firefighters had Will Hardy. Within seconds the firefighter had an oxygen mask over Will’s face. Ivy could see that Will was fighting with the man, struggling to stand up.

  Ivy spotted the fire officer in command. He was with the Cleveland Fire Department. His crew had been on scene as part of the festival. Ivy introduced herself.

  ‘Didn’t expect to be working today, Chief.’

  Ivy pointed at Will Hardy. ‘Anyone besides him come out?’