The Bad Sister

by Kevin O'Brien

  “Excuse me,” Nate said. “Are you Vivien Houghton?”

  She finally looked up. “Yes, I’m Ms. Houghton. Who are you?”

  He hesitated and then glanced down at his visitor ID: “I’m Sidney. You don’t know me, Ms. Houghton. I was friends with a girl named Molly Driscoll from Portland, Oregon. Actually, she was my babysitter when I was a kid. Does that name sound familiar to you? Molly Driscoll?”

  She gave a tiny smile—almost like she saw right through him and was amused by his pathetic charade. “How are you at jigsaw puzzles, Mr. Falco?” she asked.

  Nate shrugged. “Okay, I guess.”

  “Well, why don’t you sit down and help me out? You can set aside the blue and black pieces in separate piles, and I’ll take the orange, yellow, and all the other colors.” She grabbed the box off the chair and set it on the floor.

  Nate sat down. “Does that name, Molly Driscoll, ring a bell?” he asked.

  Staring down at the puzzle, she nodded while she sorted her pieces in stacks.

  Nate wasn’t sure she completely understood. But he went on with his excuse for why Molly Driscoll was so important to him. “Molly saved my life when I was seven. I’d gotten a hold of a lighter and set my bed on fire. She rescued me. I still have some scars from where I got burned . . .” He pointed to his forehead. “I’m sure I would have died if it weren’t for her . . .”

  She frowned at him. “I thought you agreed to help me. Why aren’t you picking out the black or blue pieces?” With her bony finger she pointed out several of them.

  Nate got to work collecting the puzzle pieces and separating them by color. He wasn’t sure if she followed anything he said. “Anyway, I know Molly died. I was also able to find out that she had a baby when she was nineteen, and she gave it up for adoption. I tracked the child to Richard and Candace Bonner.”

  “And how did you do that?” Ms. Houghton asked, her old eyes studying the puzzle.

  “I hired a private detective, and he got a lot of the information for me. But he was killed in a—an accident before he got everything I wanted to find out.”

  “Yes, accidents happen, don’t they?” she said, not looking up. “Just what were you hoping to find out?”

  “Well, I understand you worked for the Bonners for many years.”

  “Most of my life,” she said. “I was the head housekeeper for the Pierces at their Lake Shore Drive house for seventeen years before Mr. Bonner came upon the scene.” She suddenly slapped him on the hand. “That piece has yellow in it! Put the two-color ones in a separate stack. For pity’s sake . . .”

  “Sorry,” Nate muttered. “So you’ve known Candace Pierce Bonner since she was a young girl . . .”

  Ms. Houghton nodded. “I had a hand in her upbringing—along with her mother, of course, and a series of nannies. Candace grew into a very lovely young woman. Then twenty-six years ago, she married Mr. Bonner. And when Mr. Pierce became ill, Mr. Bonner took over his father-in-law’s business. After Mr. Pierce died, Candace and her husband moved back into the house. Mrs. Pierce, the poor thing, she outlived her husband by only a couple of years. She never got to become a grandmother—and she really wanted that, too. We used to say a novena every night together, praying for a granddaughter. Candace was trying everything to conceive for the longest time. They finally arranged a private adoption. But I suppose you know this already, don’t you?”

  Nate nodded. “Some of it.”

  “Then you must already know that the infant girl they adopted from your former babysitter is their daughter, Rachel.”

  Nate stopped collecting the puzzle pieces. “Yes, but it wasn’t quite that simple, was it? I have a feeling there were complications, other things involved that no one knows about.”

  Hunched over the puzzle, she smiled cryptically. “The Bonners pay certain people a lot of money to control what the public knows and doesn’t know about them.”

  “Yes, I tried to find out who handles public relations and security for them—you know, keeping secrets secret and all that. But they’re doing such a good job I couldn’t even get the name of their public relations firm or security specialists.”

  “My niece gave me this jigsaw puzzle,” Ms. Houghton said, fitting together some orange pieces. “She lives in Columbus, Ohio. Would you believe I have a niece who is seventy-eight years old? Well, I’m ninety-four, so I guess it figures.” She looked up and scowled at him. “But what I can’t figure, Mr. Falco, is just what you’re after.”

  His eyes wrestled with hers, and then he took a deep breath. “I have a feeling something happened with this adoption that the Bonners need to keep secret,” he admitted. “In fact, I think they’d stop at nothing to keep it under wraps.”

  “You might even say it’s dangerous for people to go poking around asking questions about it.” Ms. Houghton looked at something past Nate’s left shoulder.

  He glanced back and noticed a camera up near the ceiling in the corner of the room. He figured it was there for the staff to keep an eye on the patients. It didn’t seem likely the camera had a direct feed to some nefarious security company working for the Bonners.

  Nate turned forward again and caught a tiny smirk on Ms. Houghton’s wrinkled face. The smart old lady was messing around with him.

  “You had me going for a minute there,” Nate said.

  “I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it,” she said, her smile fading. She studied her jigsaw puzzle again. “Donald Sloane and his people have eyes and ears in many, many places.”

  “Donald Sloane?”

  “He’s the keeper of secrets. His company handles security for the Bonners. And you’re right, he’s very good, though I suppose ‘good’ isn’t how I’d describe the work he does. Maybe ‘thorough’ is a better word.” She added another piece to an orange section she’d fit together. “In your research into what happened to your former babysitter, did you ever come across the name Marcia Lindahl?”

  Nate shook his head. “No.” He wondered about the spelling, and tried to commit the name to memory—along with Donald Sloane.

  “Marcia was a very nice lady who died in a rather mysterious car accident. Mr. Sloane and his associates did a thorough job keeping the story out of the newspapers. Marcia Lindahl worked as Mrs. Bonner’s personal assistant for twelve years. They kept that out of the newspapers, too. Marcia was fiercely loyal to Candace—up to a point.”

  “Was she involved in the adoption process?”

  “No. Mr. Bonner handled most of it through his attorneys and Sloane. He tracked down your babysitter friend. Molly Driscoll was a college student in Eugene at the time. The story was that she was pregnant with her brother-in-law’s baby, but he knew nothing about it. Molly was paid a good deal of money to give up her infant baby to the Bonners. But some time later, Molly demanded more money. Of course, by that time, the Bonners had come to regard Rachel as their own child. The Driscoll girl raised such a fuss that Candace and Marcia flew to Portland to meet with her. It was summer, and the girl was living with her sickly mother in a high-rise. They hoped to reason or negotiate with her. It was all very secret. Sloane had someone in Portland working with them, acting as a chauffeur and bodyguard of sorts. I hear he was in on the negotiations, too.”

  “And this was—what—twenty years ago?” Nate asked.

  “Yes, just about. Rachel was eighteen months old at the time,” Ms. Houghton said. She’d been holding the same puzzle piece in her hand for the last couple of minutes. “As head housekeeper, I was aware of practically everything that happened with the Bonners. But regarding that Portland trip, all I heard were rumors. While these ‘negotiations’ went on, something happened. Molly Driscoll fell—or jumped—off the roof of her mother’s seventeen-story apartment building.”

  “Or she might have been thrown off,” Nate suggested.

  “Or pushed,” Ms. Houghton said, finally fixing the puzzle piece to a corner section of the picture. “Whatever happened there, Sloane kept a tight lid on it for
years and years afterward. Still, Marcia was never the same after that trip, and neither was Mrs. Bonner. Marcia kept working for her—right up until about eight years ago, shortly after I retired. At eighty-five, I was getting too old to run a household that size. The Bonners set me up in my own apartment for a while, but then that got to be too much for me. I had a couple of falls. So the Bonners moved me here two years ago. One of my first visitors was Marcia. In fact, we were sitting right here . . .”

  Ms. Houghton nodded at him. “Yes, I recall she was right where you are now. And I was working on another jigsaw puzzle. I think it was a Klimt. Or maybe it was a Matisse. It was one of the masterpieces. They’re a little more expensive than the others, but those are the jigsaw puzzles I like best . . .”

  “So Marcia was sitting right here,” Nate said, trying to get her back on track.

  Ms. Houghton sighed. “And she was scared. She told me about that night Molly Driscoll was killed. Marcia went with Mrs. Bonner and Sloane’s man to meet Molly at a restaurant in downtown Portland. They’d hoped to reason with her. They’d paid her a lot of money up front to sign over her baby to them. But apparently, Molly had gone through the money like grease through a tin horn. And she was demanding more . . .”

  “Well, if she’d signed a contract, how could she make all these new demands? Why didn’t the Bonners put their attorneys to work on it?”

  “Molly Driscoll had something on them that she was using as—a bargaining tool. It gave her some leverage to negotiate.”

  “What was it?” Nate asked. “Did it have something to do with the baby’s father?”

  Ms. Houghton raised her eyebrows and nodded.

  “Was it because Dylan O’Rourke didn’t know about the baby? Was that what Molly lorded over them?”

  Ms. Houghton didn’t answer. But she frowned a bit—as if his speculation was a bit off. “The negotiations didn’t go well for Candace and company,” she continued, letting Nate’s question go unanswered. “Sloane’s man followed Molly back to her mother’s apartment building, and the girl was dead two hours later. The police weren’t sure if it was an accident or suicide. Marcia told me when she was visiting here that she always knew the girl didn’t jump or fall. It was Sloane’s man. It might have even been Candace—along with Sloane’s man, up there on the roof with that girl. Marcia said she couldn’t really account for Mrs. Bonner’s whereabouts after they took a taxi back to their Portland hotel. Marcia never asked her about it. She never said anything to me either, and Marcia and I were close. For the longest time, certainly for the duration of her employment with the Bonners, Marcia diligently kept mum on the subject. Then she met a man about two years ago. He was a very charming salesman named Gil. At least, he said he was a salesman . . .”

  Nate tried not to flinch or give away that the name meant something to him.

  “This Gil character swept Marcia off her feet,” Ms. Houghton continued. “She was a very smart woman, but not worldly—if you know what I mean. She was also rather plain looking, mousy. This smooth-talking man—about ten years younger—came into her life, and she simply lost her head. She was so foolish. She thought it was love. He asked her about the Bonners and kept digging and digging until she told him everything. Shortly after that, he dumped her. He just disappeared. As I mentioned, Marcia was a smart woman, and eventually, she did some digging of her own and put it together that this Gil fellow was a private investigator. That was when Marcia came to me. She was terrified it would get back to the Bonners that she’d talked.”

  Ms. Houghton let out a long sigh and looked down at the jigsaw puzzle again. “A few days after her visit here, Marcia died in that car wreck. Like I said, accidents will happen. But this one was very strange. She hit a utility pole on an open, lonely road in the middle of the night. No one else was around, and there was no reason she would be out driving at such an hour . . .”

  Nate thought about Kayla Kennedy’s bizarre “accident.” He wondered how long Marcia Lindahl had been dead. “Do you remember when she visited you here—and when this accident happened?”

  She nodded. “Marcia was killed early in the morning of October third, two years ago.”

  Nate felt a little stab to his heart. That was just three days before Gil, Rene, and Gil’s girlfriend died in the explosion at the cabin—and his entire world was blown apart.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Thursday, 12:14 P.M.

  Ellie pulled over and parked her car in front of Pamela Rothschild’s modest mid-century modern split-level house. A red Hyundai was parked in the driveway. Everything looked quiet. But Ellie noticed the outside light above the front door was still on—in the middle of the day.

  Climbing out of her car, she started up the driveway. She saw the Our Lady of the Cove parking sticker on the Hyundai’s windshield. So it must have been Pamela’s car—and an indication that she was home right now.

  Pamela Rothschild, a professor in the Department of Psychology, was the only absent teacher who hadn’t called in today. Jeanne had given Ellie her address and phone number. “Good luck getting a hold of her,” Jeanne had said. “We tried to call and email, but didn’t get an answer. We had to cancel her morning class.”

  Ellie remembered meeting Pamela at the New Teachers’ Open House last year. She was in her mid-forties, which made her at least a decade older than Valerie Toomey at the time of her death in 1970. But they were both brunettes. Ellie remembered Pamela telling her at the open house: “Well, it’s nice to meet another divorcée. You’ll find the rest of the faculty here aren’t exactly all warm, fuzzy, and friendly toward us fallen women. The few single ones view us as competition, and the married ones don’t want us anywhere near their husbands. So—welcome to the very exclusive sorority . . .”

  At the time, Ellie had thought she and Pamela might end up as friends, but that wasn’t the case. Being in different departments, they simply hadn’t run into each other much after that. But Pamela had been right about how ostracizing it could be for a divorcée teaching at Our Lady of the Cove.

  As Ellie approached the front door—and frowned at the light glowing above it—she had a feeling she’d missed her chance of ever making friends with Pamela Rothschild.

  She rang the doorbell and waited.

  She didn’t hear any activity inside the house. She rang the bell again and then knocked.

  Nothing.

  Biting her lip, Ellie tried the door handle. Locked.

  She was almost relieved. Then again, if the tribute killer wanted this latest murder to look like an accident, he wouldn’t leave doors unlocked.

  The curtains in the front windows were open, and Ellie could see into the living room. She didn’t spot anyone in there. But then she realized, if the killer had struck last night, Pamela wouldn’t be in the living room.

  Ellie headed down a narrow walkway beside the garage to the back of the house. A tall fence separated Pamela’s yard from her neighbors. By the back door and right up to the kitchen windows was a leaf-littered patio with some slightly beat-up plastic furniture.

  The light was on in the kitchen, and it didn’t need to be at this hour.

  Ellie stopped and stood in the middle of the patio—about five feet from the window. She didn’t want to look.

  All she could see now were the cupboards, the top half of the refrigerator, and a Tiffany-style light fixture, which hung over a kitchen table or breakfast nook.

  “Please, God,” she whispered.

  She didn’t want to be right about a teacher getting killed last night.

  Forcing herself to step closer to the window, Ellie moved aside a plastic patio chair and peered through the glass.

  The white Formica breakfast table had been set for one. The place mat was askew. A plate held the remnants of a small chicken and a cluster of grapes. A bowl of cherries had been tipped over. Several grapes and cherries were scattered over the table.

  There were three chairs; but the fourth—for the place setting—was missing.<
br />
  Ellie took one more step closer to the window—until her face was almost against the glass. She could see the black-and-white-tiled floor. The fourth chair had tipped over. Pamela Rothschild was spread out beside it. She wore a white terrycloth robe. Her face was turned toward the window. Her hand was on her throat, and her mouth was open.

  Her sad, dead eyes stared back at Ellie.

  * * *

  A bell chimed, but Ms. Houghton didn’t look up from her jigsaw puzzle.

  “What was that?” Nate asked.

  “Lunch is being served in the dining room.” She frowned. “I already saw the menu. The fish here is terrible. They serve it with canned string beans and some sort of potatoes swimming in artery-hardening death sauce. I swear, they’re trying to kill us. I’d just as soon starve.”

  “May I take you out someplace for lunch?” Nate offered.

  Ms. Houghton had a puzzle piece in her hand. She dropped it on the table. “Let me freshen up and get my coat.”

  With her four-prong cane, she slowly shuffled away. Nate realized he’d have plenty of time to take out his phone and Google Donald Sloane. Among the results, he didn’t see anyone who seemed even remotely connected to the Bonners or any security specialist firm. He tried the spelling, Slone, and even added security to the keywords. But his luck wasn’t any better. Either Ms. Houghton had given him the wrong name, or Donald Sloane was so “thorough” about managing the flow of information that he and his firm didn’t even exist on the Internet.

  Nate tried looking up Marcia Lindahl, and got her obituary from the Chicago Tribune. It was dated October 6, 2018, the same date the cabin had exploded. She was forty-nine. There was no mention of a car crash. She’d simply “died suddenly.” There was a list of survivors, a brother and sister, and their families; her parents were both deceased. But there was nothing about her employment history. The Bonners weren’t mentioned.