by Jane Haddam
Gregor Demarkian stopped in the middle of the foyer and looked up. The man he was with stopped with him. Greta Bellamy blushed.
“Oh,” she said. “Mr. Demarkian. Um. Could I come down and talk to you a minute?”
“Of course.”
Greta’s blush seemed to be getting worse, if that was possible. Dessa and Cindi were looking up at her curiously. So were Gregor Demarkian and his friend. Greta rubbed her palms on the sides of her leotard and took a deep breath.
“Just a minute,” she said.
Dessa and Cindi seemed to lose interest. Greta ran down the curving balcony stair and arrived panting at the bottom, feeling foolish.
“Oh,” she said. “Excuse me. It probably isn’t even important.”
I’d do better if the man didn’t seem so damned amused, Grace told herself—but it wasn’t Gregor Demarkian who seemed amused. It was his friend. Gregor Demarkian looked polite.
Greta rubbed the palms of her hands on the sides of her leotard again. “Well,” she said. “The thing is. It’s about that boy. The one who used to work here and he died?”
“Yes?” Gregor Demarkian said.
This was not the way Greta had imagined this working out. She bit her lip and twisted her right leg behind her left. She wished she could stop fidgeting. It was better than just as well that Bennis Hannaford wasn’t here. Bennis Hannaford would think she was some kind of silly little hick.
“Well,” Greta said again. “The thing is, I knew him. Sort of. I mean, it probably isn’t anything, of course, you know, but I thought I ought to tell you because he is dead and that woman is dead too and I thought—I thought—”
“You thought you’d better tell me, just in case,” Gregor Demarkian said.
“I didn’t really know him know him,” Greta blurted out. “He was too young. And the time I’m talking about, it was in February of 1988. He must have been in high school.”
“He must have been in high school when what?” This was Gregor Demarkian’s friend, whom Greta had already decided she didn’t like. Greta tried to pretend he wasn’t there.
“I got the picture from The New Haven Register,” she said. “I went to the library and had it copied off the microfilm. We were in a singing group together, you see. The New Haven County All-Country Choir. We were all in church groups.”
“What church group was Tim Bradbury in?” Gregor Demarkian asked.
“Baptist,” Greta said. “I wouldn’t have remembered on my own, but it was in the caption. To the picture I looked up. I made a copy of the caption, too. Anyway, I remembered because his mother used to come to all our performances, and it was really sad. She was this huge woman who wore tent dresses all the time and cut her own hair, you know the kind of woman I mean. And Tim was so embarrassed.”
“Nineteen eighty-eight, Gregor Demarkian said. “That’s interesting.”
“I don’t think he was just being snobbish,” Greta said. “I mean, it wasn’t just the way she looked. She was drunk nearly all the time. And then she’d come to these things and fall asleep in her chair, and everybody could hear her snore.”
“Nineteen eighty-eight, Gregor Demarkian said again. “You said you had a copy of this picture: Where is it?”
“In my purse. In my locker.”
“Where’s your locker?”
Greta pointed down the corridor at the side. “It’s not very far. I could go get it for you right now if you wanted me to.”
“Do you have time?”
“Oh, yes,” Greta said.
Greta didn’t know if she had time. The breaks were ten minutes long. She had no idea when the class had been dismissed for this one. She had no idea how long they had all been sitting around on the balcony. She ran down the corridor to the locker room. It was a very elegant locker room, not like the one off the gym in high school. The lockers had combination locks, but they were built in.
Greta went thirty-four right, twenty two left, nineteen right and opened the locker door. Her purse was right where she had left it. She felt in the outside pocket and came up with both the copy of the choir photograph and the newspaper picture of Tim Bradbury she had used to make sure it was the same person. She put the more recent picture of Tim back and locked up again. Then she ran back out to the foyer.
“Here you are,” she said, handing the photograph over. “I tried to tell that other detective about it, the one from the New Haven police department—”
“Tony Bandero?” Gregor Demarkian’s friend asked.
“That’s right,” Greta said. “Detective Bandero. I did try to tell him, but he wasn’t very interested. He said it was all so long ago it couldn’t have anything to do with what happened now. And that’s probably true. But I thought about it, you know, and it didn’t feel right. On television things like this matter all the time. So I thought I’d give it to you and let you decide what to do with it. You’re the one who’s supposed to be the expert.”
Gregor Demarkian looked long and hard at the choir photograph. Then he folded it carefully into quarters and put it into the pocket of his coat.
“Thank you,” he said. “I don’t think this is necessarily unimportant.”
“You don’t?” Greta was thrilled. “Oh. Well. I’m glad I stopped you. I’d tell you more, you know, but that’s all I really remember. And I don’t suppose Tim’s mother has anything to do with it.”
“What’s your name?” Gregor Demarkian asked.
“Greta Bellamy.”
“Thank you again, Miss Bellamy,” Gregor Demarkian said.
The gong sounded upstairs. The break was over. Greta hesitated for just another moment—she had done something right; she had done something right for the great Mr. Gregor Demarkian—and then raced back up the stairs, back to the balcony where Dessa and Cindi were waiting for her. Of course, that other detective had probably been right. It probably hadn’t been really important. Gregor Demarkian had probably just been polite. It felt good anyway.
In fact, Greta thought, sailing down the hallway to the studio, it felt great. She hadn’t spent a lot of time feeling great in her life.
She was going to have to find out how to turn this into a habit.
2
NICK BANNERMAN HAD HAD a headache all morning. By lunchtime—sitting at the picnic table in the kitchen with a glass of Perrier and a brown paper bag from Goldman’s Deli sitting in front of him; waiting for Frannie Jay—his skull felt like the diamond mine for Snow White’s seven dwarves. Maybe it was the workshop for Santa’s elves. Something was pounding and pounding in there. Even two double-strength Advils hadn’t helped. In half an hour, Nick had to go back upstairs and lead another aerobic dance. What was in the bag from Goldman’s Deli was a corned beef sandwich on rye with mustard, a bag of potato chips, and a garlic pickle. He’d been feeling a lot better when he came into work this morning.
They were inching up on the New Year, and there were starting to be signs. Someone had tied little blue banner ribbons to all the cabinet handles. The little blue banner ribbons were the preprinted kind from Hallmark with “HAPPY NEW YEAR” written across them in tiny letters made of glitter. Someone had put a big cardboard magnet-backed card on the door of the refrigerator, too. The card showed a bleary-eyed drunk collapsed on the floor under a pile of champagne bottles under the words IS IT NEW YEAR’S YET? The card was supposed to be funny. There was going to be a New Year’s Eve party for all the women who had attended this seminar week, although it was going to be held too early in the day for anybody to see the New Year in. Nick didn’t imagine the party would include alcohol. Too fattening.
The weather outside was getting worse. It had been blustery and gray and cold all week. Now the sky was thick with clouds and the air was heavy with snow. Sometime soon, they were going to have an ice storm.
The kitchen door swung open and Frannie Jay came in. Nick took a long pull on his Perrier and watched her move across the room to him in her leotard. He had been aware of that from the beginning: what F
rannie looked like in her leotard. Then she had begun to seem strange to him, and he had been put off. Now he knew her better, and she didn’t seem strange anymore—just tense.
Very, very tense.
Right now, Frannie was as tense as he had ever seen her.
Maybe we should stop meeting in this kitchen, Nick thought. Maybe it’s just looking out on the lawn where she saw Tim Bradbury’s body that makes her get this way.
Frannie came over to the table and sat down. Usually she got something to eat first, alfalfa sprouts or raw spinach or yogurt mixed with raisins, but this time she didn’t even glance at the refrigerator. Nick felt himself getting tense, too, in reaction. It was impossible not to. Whatever Frannie had was catching.
Frannie put her palms flat on the table and spread her fingers out. She had very long fingers, but her nails were short and bitten off.
“Listen, I’ve got something I’ve got to tell you. In view of last night.”
What had happened last night was that Nick and Frannie had gone to bed. They had gone to bed here, in Frannie’s room at Fountain of Youth, because Nick was still staying with his friend Tom and there wasn’t any privacy in that apartment. There wasn’t a whole lot of privacy at Fountain of Youth, either, but there was enough. They had had what Nick considered to be a very good night.
Now what? Nick wondered. She’s married. She has herpes. She has AIDS. She can’t go on seeing me because her family would never accept anyone black. His family would never accept anyone white, but he figured he’d worry about that when he had to.
“All right,” he said, as calmly as he could. “Tell me something. In view of last night.”
“In view of the fact that I think you might want it to be more than just last night.”
“I do.”
“I thought so. I hoped so. It’s about something that happened in California.”
Nick’s brain immediately switched gears. This was going to be a victim story, then. He could see it coming. She would tell him the intimate details of the time she was raped or the time she was stalked or the time she was beaten up by two black guys who wanted her wallet, and if he was sensitive enough, he would have passed the test.
“All right,” he said. “What happened in California?”
Frannie looked up at him quickly, and then looked just as quickly away. At the backyard. At nothing.
“In California,” she said evenly, “I was arrested for a murder.”
“What?”
“I was convicted of negligent homicide. I went to jail for six months and a day.”
Nick was desperately trying to switch gears again, but for some reason it wasn’t working. Frannie was still staring out the window. Her face was impassive.
“What are you talking about?” he asked finally. “Do you mean you had some kind of accident? Isn’t negligent homicide what people get convicted of when they’ve been drunk driving?”
“I wasn’t drunk driving.”
“Then what happened? And when was this? Last week? Last year?”
Frannie was flexing her long fingers, first her right hand, then her left, over and over again.
“It happened six and a half years ago,” she said, very distinctly. “In the summer. When I was living at the beach. That’s what I remember most of all about it, sick as it is. The beach.”
“Who did you kill?”
“My daughter. She was seven months old at the time.”
The air was as thick as mayonnaise. That was the problem. The air was as thick as mayonnaise, and Nick couldn’t breathe it in. His headache was suddenly a volcano, bellowing and hot.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
Frannie was rubbing her hands together, top to bottom, back to back. There were thick salt tears welling in her eyes.
“I’d like to tell you I remember just what I did or what she was like or even what she looked like, but I can’t. I can’t. I don’t even have a picture of her. I never had one taken. Her name was Marilee. I remember that.”
The air was something worse than mayonnaise. It was poison gas.
“I don’t understand,” Nick said. “Seven months. What did you do? Were you careless with fire? Did you leave her too long in the car?”
“As far as anyone could tell, I drowned her.”
Whoosh, Nick thought.
Frannie took a ragged breath. “I was doing about sixteen vials of crack a day at the time,” she said, still evenly, still calmly. Everything else about her was agitated, but her voice was eerily calm. “I was doing enough to kill myself, if you want to know the truth, and I wasn’t conscious most of the time, and one day, the way it looked afterward, one day I decided to give her a bath and I lost interest in the middle.”
“Oh,” Nick said.
“Anyway,” Frannie said, “later that day I ran out, and I started to need it again, you know, so I was going around the house, looking for some cash, and when I went into the bathroom there she was, just floating in the water. So I got scared, you know, and I picked her up and tried to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, except it was too late, she’d been dead for hours, and I didn’t know resuscitation anyway. And then I started screaming, screaming, and screaming, and someone heard me and called the cops. My lawyer said later that it was a good thing it happened that way, because if I’d done anything to try to cover it up, I probably couldn’t have gotten off with negligent homicide. I would just have gone to jail for murder.”
“Were you thinking of covering it up?”
Frannie shuddered. “I wasn’t thinking at all. I was just screaming and screaming. And I was coming off, you know. The police came and I just went and sat on the steps and looked out at the ocean, and I was shaking and crying the whole time, and they thought I was for real. They thought I was a real grief-stricken mother. They knew better later, of course.”
“So you went to jail,” Nick said—which was stupid, because he already knew that. His brain was on hold. He couldn’t work out what was important here.
“I just got off probation about two months ago,” Frannie said. “If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to take the job here. I thought I’d come back home, you know, and it would be like I’d never been to California at all, it would be like it never happened. And I could start over again.”
“Have you? Started over again?”
“I don’t think it’s possible.” Frannie stood up. “I don’t feel much like eating lunch, Nick. I think I’m going to go work the machines for a while.”
“All right. Good idea.”
“That’s why I don’t do dope anymore. I can’t do dope and work the machines.”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “I can see that.”
Frannie wrapped her arms around her body and rocked a little. “Well,” she said finally. “See you around.”
The drunk on the magnetic refrigerator card had bubbles rising over his head. The bubbles were supposed to make him look as drunk as he could possibly be. Nick looked around and saw that Frannie was gone. He couldn’t remember her leaving.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, out loud, into the mayonnaise. His lungs must have collapsed by now. He must be living on his own carbon dioxide.
“Jesus Christ,” he said again.
Once, hours ago, he had thought he was falling in love with a WASP American princess.
3
WHEN VIRGINIA HANLEY HAD first imagined doing what she was about to do, she had seen herself doing it in the dark. She saw herself doing everything in the dark. She was a natural night person. Then she thought it through and realized that doing it at night would be impossible. Unless she wanted to wait for Steve and Linda to go on vacation—or stake out the house for months until they decided to eat at a restaurant and she knew for sure they would be gone for hours—she would have to do what she wanted to do in the daytime, when they were both at work. She had no trouble at all buying the gun. She had gone about it just the way they said you could on those news stories that ran during sweeps week
on Channel 11 in New York, and the method had turned out to be applicable to New Haven with no variations at all. Capitalism was a wonderful thing. It would get you anything you wanted, with no trouble whatsoever as long as you had the money.
Virginia had chosen to come out to the Litchfield house because the Litchfield house was where Steve and Linda were mostly living, and where they intended to go on living after the first of the year, when Linda left her job to go back to the land. Or whatever Linda thought she was doing. The Milford house was part of an old life. It didn’t count anymore. The Litchfield house was what Steve had fallen in love with, more than he had fallen in love with Linda.
Virginia pulled her car up the long drive and parked it next to the barn, out by the back porch. The house wasn’t much, but there was lots of land around it, acres and acres. There were lots of trees around it, too, hiding it from the road and its nearest neighbor, who was three miles away anyway. If you wanted to be isolated, this was the place to be.
Virginia got her shiny new Colt .45 and her brown paper bag from The Card Store off the front seat and climbed out of the car onto the drive. The air was frigid and wet. The stones in the gravel drive had begun to slick up. Virginia walked over to the back door, tried the knob, and found it locked. She raised the Colt and fired four times into the door, separating the lock from the wood.
“That’s very nice,” she said to nobody at all. She had a whole box of ammunition in the brown paper bag. She wasn’t worried about running out. She was even feeling pleasantly proud of herself. The Card Store didn’t sell ammunition. It sold cards and “party materials.” The ammunition was in The Card Store’s paper bag in case the police stopped her. Although why they would, Virginia couldn’t imagine.
Steve has probably got a restraining order out on you by now, Virginia told herself. Coming through the back door led you directly into the kitchen. There wasn’t a vestibule or a pantry to go through first. Virginia looked around at the old-fashioned refrigerator and the antiquated stove. Everything was so out of date and shabby. She put the brown paper bag down on the kitchen table and took the Happy New Year streamers out of it. She hung one of the streamers from the light over the kitchen table. She hung another from the door handle of the microwave oven. She put the rest of the streamers back into the paper bag. Then she took the Colt, aimed it at a shelf of decorative plates, and blew two of those plates into shards of glass.
