I agreed, but I didn’t want to think past that, to what that meant, so I waited as patiently as I could for the police to arrive, and luckily, it was a blessedly brief time.
They were all business, moving into the house at the ready, searching it thoroughly, finding nobody on the premises except poor, broken Toy. After checking the carpet for whatever they check it for, they allowed us back in and kept us standing close to the front window, an area that looked relatively untouched, while a square-headed, burly man who identified himself as “Collins” asked us questions as his fellow officers dusted and photographed the area, moving in and out the front door.
We explained who Toy was, and luckily Sasha still had her business card, as I’d forgotten her last name and the name of her company. We explained what staging was, and who had hired Toy, and why we didn’t know much about her, and how we’d already removed sentimental objects.
I say “we” said all that, and we did, but I did most of the talking because Sasha was in some other place. Not quite in a state of shock, but unable to truly be present. Her mind had shut down on the scene, and words came only with great difficulty.
And so I also said, with Sasha nodding and adding the occasional word, that no, we didn’t have any idea who might have done this, or why.
Sasha tried again to plead the case for Phoebe’s having been murdered. “Don’t you see?” she asked. “Too much for coincidence, don’t you see?”
I took over, filling in the many blanks she’d left, but it didn’t matter.
“All in good time,” Officer Collins said in the most patronizing tone possible. He wanted to talk about Toy Rasmussen. She had definitely been murdered. He did not want to cater to a freaked-out witness’s half-baked theories about a death that had already been determined to be a suicide. “I assure you, we’ll look at everything that’s germane to this investigation.”
He didn’t have to say that Phoebe was not germane.
I could see how mistakes geometrically expand and build upon themselves. Nobody—including me, including Mackenzie—would listen to Sasha’s convictions the first time. We humored her rather than believed her. So Phoebe’s death had been officially “solved.” Now she was a closed and tidily disposed of non-case that would not therefore be relevant to this new occurrence.
“Why were you here if you hired her to clean out the house?” Collins asked. I was pretty sure it was the second or third time for that same question.
“We hadn’t officially signed anything. I didn’t know the price or her plans. She was going to stop in during the day and decide whether anything major—like painting or whatever—was necessary, and how much of the furniture would stay. That kind of thing. We were going to talk it over this evening. Right about now, in fact.”
“What was your precise relationship to the deceased owner of this house?” he asked—definitely again.
Sasha had to repeat her unorthodox family history and what part Phoebe had played in it. “She was my stepmother for a few years. I lived with her and my father. My mother was married to a Norwegian at the time. I didn’t want to move to Oslo.”
“How is it, do you think, that you came to be the person who stumbled upon both of these women’s deaths?”
Sasha was agape, shaking her head in disbelief. “You can’t think—please!”
“Officer,” I said, “we didn’t harm this woman. We came here and found her and phoned you. Would we do this if we’d had anything to do with the crime?”
His look and his silence made it clear that my question was not worth answering.
I could see intricately worked criminal machinations on our part playing through his mind. We’d murdered her, then gone away, then returned and phoned the police, hoping it would make us appear innocent. And what the devil—maybe he would find out that the first woman was murdered as well, and pin both on Sasha, the demon of 570 Hutchinson Court. A serial killer for anyone unwise enough to come into or own this house.
Collins wasn’t going to let us pull this fast one on him.
Because of Toy’s fate, I now believed Sasha’s theory about Phoebe’s death, but that gave us two inexplicable deaths. The living and dining rooms had been trashed. What was somebody looking for? What could somebody want?
And which of those visitors, those semi-known outsiders, would know about Phoebe’s possessions—the one or ones worth this horrifying outcome? I certainly didn’t. Sasha didn’t.
I spoke out of turn again, but it was so clear what must have happened that I couldn’t understand why Collins wasn’t operating under this theory. “It seems to me that somebody came here thinking the house was vacant, and wanted to rob it. And they interrupted Toy, whose presence couldn’t have been anticipated.”
“Where were you the past two hours?” he asked. “You first,” he said to Sasha, showing how much he cared about how anything seemed to me.
Sasha explained her job, the corporate client she’d been with earlier. She named the company, its CEO, and much more than Collins seemed to welcome. “They’ll tell you I didn’t leave till four-thirty-five,” she said.
“How can you be so precise about the time?” he asked, a touch of scorn underlying his words.
“I checked it. Obsessively. I was running late. I was going to keep my friend waiting.”
“Your friend Toy?”
“My friend Amanda,” she said with great precision, pointing at me in case he was as stupid as he seemed. “Amanda didn’t have a key to the house, and it’s cold out.”
“How did you know that Toy wouldn’t be able to let her in?”
Sasha’s mouth opened in surprise, then worry. She looked as if she now doubted herself, and I had a bad moment when I feared that she had no answer for him, but I was wrong. “I…I didn’t, but I wasn’t sure Toy would still be here then. She was supposed to be, but I don’t know her well enough to know how reliable she is.”
He scratched his head. “So I don’t get this part. How long’s the owner—this Phoebe Ennis—been dead?”
“Three weeks,” Sasha said. “Just about.”
“And who’s lived in the house since then?”
“Nobody.”
He grinned, an unhappy expression that suggested we’d both just fallen into his diabolically clever trap. “So how come, it just happens by coincidence that the same day you are both here in the neighborhood, plus this lady, this stager, after all those weeks when nobody was here, that somebody decides to burglarize the place—or make it look that way?”
Was that actually a question?
“You know anything about her insurance?” he asked Sasha, ignoring me.
She shook her head. And then she looked directly at him, allowing her irritation to register. “Why would this help any insurance claim? And who would it help?”
“The people who’ll inherit from her.” He turned to me. “Are you also involved in this woman’s will? I’ll find it out, so no reason to play around with the truth, in case that idea crossed your mind.”
I wanted to shake him, or be like one of those women in old films who slap men’s faces. They always seemed to get away with it and, though it always surprised me, I could now feel how satisfying it could be in the right situation. Instead, I swallowed my growing anger, and shook my head. “Only a friend. And Sasha is right. I didn’t have a key, so I guess my whereabouts are irrelevant since I could have been anywhere but inside this house.”
But I suddenly felt sick to my stomach. The words: “Are you also involved in this woman’s will?” echoed in my head, and I could see myself—see the imaginary Ruby Osgood blinking her eyelashes and talking about all the money her godmother Phoebe had left her in her will.
Had I goaded Marc Wilkins into coming here to find proof that Phoebe had robbed him?
Collins was looking at me with a gotcha! smirk. “There are such things as having the person inside the house open the door,” he said.
“What?” I had completely lost the thread.
“Not having a key. So what? Where were you? Outside shivering for how long?”
“Barely any time. Sasha wasn’t late. I was visiting with a neighbor before that.”
“Oh, yes? Which neighbor?”
“She’s an investigator!” Sasha said before I could think to stop her.
He looked suddenly alert and annoyed.
“I work at a P.I. firm,” I explained. “I’m training. Sasha asked me to see what I could find out.”
“About Phoebe’s death,” Sasha added emphatically.
I nodded.
“This neighbor?” he asked.
“She lives up and across the street. Sally Molinari. I don’t know the address, but it’s the house with yellow shutters.” I thought about Sally’s intense relationship with her wine cellar, and wondered if she’d even remember my visit, when the police checked my story. And if she did, I was in trouble, since she thought I was working with a law firm about Phoebe’s inheritance.
I was one great investigator. While I was sitting across the street, somebody, possibly somebody I’d goaded into doing it, was in this house, murdering Toy.
“How’d you get here?” Collins asked me.
It seemed a stupid and obvious question. “I drove. My car’s outside Sally’s house. A VW bug.”
He frowned. Maybe he didn’t approve of my having such a relic of a car. “You drove separately, correct?” he asked Sasha, who nodded. “Alone?” he asked.
She nodded again.
“Then how did she”—his head inclined toward the dining room—“get here?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “She had a little sports car last night.” I thought back, tried to remember looking through the open door, down to the street. “A BMW, I think, but I’m not sure.”
“Where is it?” he asked.
I realized that it hadn’t been in the driveway or on the street. That’s why we’d assumed nobody was there. Collins had asked a good question.
He waited.
“Maybe somebody dropped her off,” Sasha said. “Somebody was going to have to haul things away. Somebody with a truck, or a big car. Maybe they’ll come to pick her up. Or else they were the one who…” She let the obvious idea drift off.
He called someone over and handed him Toy’s business card, and sent him off to call her office and coworkers, see where they were and where they had been. And then he turned back to us. I was beyond uncomfortable by now, standing near the front door. The house hadn’t been sufficiently insulated, and I kept my coat on to protect against the chill coming off the window next to the door—the inverse twin of the window through which Ramona Fulgham had watched me.
Ramona! “There’s a woman next door,” I said. “She watches the comings and goings here. She’d probably know if a truck was here, or whatever. Whoever. You need to talk to her.”
Whoops. I had overstepped my bounds with the “need to” and his expression showed it. He didn’t “need” to do anything he didn’t want to do, and he did need me to understand that.
“We’re already on that,” he said after he’d silently made his point. “It’s what we do. Question potential witnesses.” He looked as if he was stifling a yawn. We bored him to tears.
I tried to ignore him and, instead, once again looked at what had been touched, dislodged, and overturned, hoping to find a theme, an idea the intruder was pursuing. I couldn’t find one. I knew, from yesterday’s inventory, that there was nothing of particular value in either room, at least, not by any means I knew to set value on objects. Sasha had taken the silver with the “B” monogram. “I can use it. It’s my initial, after all,” she’d said. But other than that, any valuations Phoebe or Sasha put upon those treasures were not relevant to what the market would say.
The officer who’d been delegated to make the phone call came back in and spoke to our guy in a low voice. My eavesdropping powers didn’t work as well as they normally did, or cops were better at being surreptitious than high school students. I couldn’t catch what he whispered behind his hand.
The officer turned to us. “She drove the BMW here,” he said, peering at each of us in turn, as if he’d catch us in our bald-faced lies about this murder. “Where is it?”
“The murderer must have taken it away,” I said.
He frowned. “How did that person get here, then?”
We were both silent. More than one person had been involved. Someone to either drop off the killer, or someone to steal Toy’s car while the other drove his own away.
A second officer came over to whisper, turning his back to us and making himself inaudible.
Collins nodded, sighed, and when his fellow officer was gone, he looked at us with no expression and asked, “Which of you drives the SUV?”
“As I said, my VW is across the street,” I muttered.
“I drive a Prius,” Sasha said, her scorn for SUVs audible though not spoken.
I expected a lecture on buying American, perhaps even incarceration for not doing so, but Collins just sighed again and let the matter drop.
A person didn’t need to be Sherlock to figure out why there was interest in an SUV. I was sure Ramona would have been more than happy to describe every movement in and out of this house to the policeman. “Not that I was watching, you know,” she’d say between details. So somebody with an SUV had been there at some point in the day. Could be a person with whom Toy worked. Could be half the populace. I never knew why anybody, driving in the flat, temperate city of Philadelphia required four-wheel drive and a massive carriage. But they did. Even Philly Prep parents were gifting their children with these behemoths, because, they said, they were “safer.” Perhaps they were, for their drivers, but when I was in my ancient VW, low to the ground, surrounded by dinosaurs that blocked my view of signs and lights and oncoming dangers, they certainly made my driving more hazardous.
Who was it? For a moment, I was glad to think it was somebody with whom Toy had worked. But almost instantly, I realized that wasn’t probable if the two deaths were connected, and I had to let the thought back in, had to admit and believe that they had to be.
“So,” Collins said after yet another conference, this time with a policewoman. “A question: You said the deceased was coming here to make a plan for what would stay and what wouldn’t, correct?”
We nodded.
“And she would do this at her convenience, then meet up with you about now. Correct?”
More nods.
“So I take it you didn’t leave the house unlocked overnight and into the next day. Correct?”
I didn’t bother to nod this time. He didn’t need such obvious confirmation, and my head was too full of a sense of where this was going to be bothered with appeasing him.
“So it was locked, then. Correct?”
“Yes,” Sasha said, “but what do you want to know?”
“You gave her a key.”
Sasha nodded.
“Where is it?”
That was where I’d feared he was going, and I had no answer. Except that whoever had tried to rob the house and had surprised Toy and wound up killing her now had the key.
He hadn’t gotten what he wanted and despite two casualties, he was coming back again. Or he had gotten whatever it was, but wanted access to more.
I was surrounded by the police, but I’d never felt as vulnerable as I did right then. I wanted nothing so much as to be home.
Eleven
* * *
* * *
Collins was a creep,” I told Mackenzie. “And stupid. Why behave as if you suspect Sasha or me? There was no logical reason to do that. It was all about making him feel all-powerful and wise. There’s nothing more pathetic than a slow-thinking man pretending to be a whiz kid.”
“Now, look,” Mackenzie said. “He has to go through certain procedures, and in reality, there could be reason to suspect Sasha if you didn’t know her.”
“Why? She’s going to inherit the stuff. Dennis wants none of it. Wh
y trash the place and why kill somebody you just hired?”
He shrugged and sputtered, trying to justify Collins’s behavior. No longer a cop, Mackenzie nonetheless was still overly sensitive to insults against the men in blue. That, at least, was how I interpreted some of his reactions. He felt he was simply being sensitive to the realities of the job. He was closer to the truth of it than I was, but that didn’t make me any more eager to hear his defense of Officer Collins. I wanted to stay angry with Collins’s stupidity and rudeness, and I didn’t want that anger balanced out by my husband’s rational thoughts. I tuned him out.
“Somebody drove an SUV to the house today,” I said.
“He told you that?”
“Not exactly, but he was so inept, it was obvious the busybody next door had said so.”
“It could be anybody, mean anything. I’m sure people she worked with drove trucks or SUVs so they could carry whatever they needed for the houses. Or cart away things. Or it might have had nothing to do with that house.”
“I suspect that Ramona—the neighbor—mentioned it because she saw its driver go into the house.”
“Suspect, suspect,” he said in a barely audible voice.
I shrugged. “You have to admit—or at least I do—that the two deaths now seem linked, and if so, it’s more likely to me now that Phoebe was murdered.”
“Wait! I thought those high heels in the tush had convinced you days ago.”
“I will ignore the dig,” I said.
He grinned. “She must have ignored it, too.”
“May we move on? If Phoebe was murdered, would Toy be involved in that? No matter how desperate you are for clients, you don’t drug them to death in order to get a job staging their house.”
“So what do you suggest? That we pull in SUV drivers?”
“Merilee drives one. Maybe Marc does, too.”
“So does half the metropolitan area’s population.”
I didn’t have any ideas how to use the SUV, and I knew the existence of a suspicious SUV was only what I thought had been discussed between the cop, the invisible Ramona, and Officer Collins. “How about this? Somebody stole Toy’s BMW. Why would a murderer do that?”
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