Disillusions

by Seth Margolis

  “I’m escorting Miss Amiel home,” he said. “Then I’m heading out to the high school to meet the FBI helicopter.”

  Gwen Amiel looked at him, her face pale, eyes red-ridged. She’d just witnessed a murder, and the child she took care of was missing. And yet he saw something else on her face, something more than horror or fear or even grief.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  He nodded and watched her walk toward her car. She turned back, briefly, perhaps to see if he was following her, and suddenly he knew exactly what he’d seen in her face a moment ago, in addition to the horror and the fear and the grief.

  He’d seen guilt.

  Chapter 12

  Gwen drove home slowly, checking every few minutes to make sure Dwight Hawkins was following. Her heart was pumping furiously as her mind raced through the horrible events of the past hours, trying to find some way to exonerate herself, searching for a sequence of events leading up to Priscilla’s murder that didn’t include her stumbling onto the scene and screwing up what would otherwise have been nothing more than a transfer of money.

  If only Tess hadn’t cried out, and so loudly and pitifully. If only she hadn’t called her name.

  Jimmy was sitting cross-legged at the end of the front walk when she pulled up to the curb. She recognized the sour, accusatory expression he always wore when she was late, but his face brightened when he saw the police car park behind her.

  She got out of the Honda and hugged him, letting go reluctantly.

  “This is Jimmy,” she said when Dwight Hawkins joined them on the sidewalk.

  He offered his hand, which Jimmy shook. “Chief of Police Hawkins. Nice to meet you, Jimmy.”

  Gwen studied Hawkins a moment, curious about a man who would stop to introduce himself to a six-year-old when he had a fresh murder and kidnapping to deal with. His eyes were dark brown and hooded by heavy lids, his thick white hair was combed in a neat part. His lips were narrow and turned down at the edges, but the frown seemed directed inward, somehow.

  “I just need to run in and make arrangements for my son.” She took Jimmy’s hand and practically dragged him up the walkway.

  “How come the police are here?” he asked.

  “Because there was some trouble at Penaquoit today,” she said.

  “What kind of trouble?”

  Well, he’d hear about it sooner or later.

  “Priscilla Lawrence, the mother of the little girl I look after? She was shot.”

  His eyes widened. “Who shot her?”

  “We don’t know, but the police want me to answer some questions. So I’m going to call the Pearsons and see if they can watch you for a few hours while I—”

  “But I have to tell you something. I saw—”

  “We’ll talk later, okay?” She unlocked the front door.

  “Today at the diner? I—”

  She covered Jimmy’s mouth with her hand as she pulled him to her.

  “Sounds like a baby crying in here,” he said when she let go.

  The wailing was coming from the living room, just a few steps away.

  “Go outside, Jimmy. Tell Chief Hawkins to come in here right away.”

  “But—”

  “Now!”

  He turned and ran outside. When the screen door closed behind him she walked to the living room. Tess Lawrence was sobbing in the middle of the living-room floor, strapped in a car seat, her arms and legs flailing. Gwen ran to her and fumbled with the strap before managing to unfasten it.

  “Gen?” Tess gasped between sobs.

  Tess felt hot and damp in her arms as she hugged the child to her, cooing softly. She smelled clean, though. Thank God, she smelled clean.

  Tess was still whimpering when Dwight Hawkins entered the room a few seconds later.

  “Is that—”

  She could only nod as she stroked Tess’s sweat-soaked back. “Mother of God,” he said as Jimmy ran to Gwen’s side and grabbed her free hand. “You have a hell of a lot of questions to answer, Mrs. Amiel.”

  Part II

  Chapter 13

  Gwen waited for the Pearsons to pick up Jimmy, trying to calm a still traumatized Tess. Dwight Hawkins called the crime scene to inform Nick Lawrence that his daughter was safe, and agreed to meet him later at Penaquoit. He asked Gwen to arrange for Jimmy’s pediatrician to examine Tess at the estate.

  “How come she’s here?” Jimmy walked across the living room and pointed at Tess, who was fussing in Gwen’s arms.

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you wait outside like I asked?”

  “But what’s she doing here?” Jimmy couldn’t take his eyes off the baby.

  “Please, Jimmy?” Seeing the two of them in the same room, now of all times, made her very nervous.

  “Where is her father?”

  “Not here, okay?”

  Jimmy frowned and left. She’d apologize for snapping at him later.

  The Pearsons arrived fifteen minutes later and took Jimmy back to their house. Hawkins drove her and Tess to Penaquoit in his car, stopping at the high school just as a helicopter landed in the center of the football field. Two men got out the moment it touched ground and ran over to the car. Don Reeves, head of the FBI’s Albany field office, was on the short side, and stocky, with a pale complexion that emphasized a five o’clock shadow so dark it formed a perfect template for a beard. He wore a shapeless black suit, white shirt, and a blue-and-red-striped tie. His associate, too, resembled a Russian bureaucrat, though Peter Annison, who introduced himself as the deputy field director, was less heavily built and looked as if he’d spent at least a few recent hours out of doors.

  “We’ll set up headquarters at the scene of the abduction,” Reeves said as they drove. “I’ve got a crew on their way by chopper, should be here momentarily. I’ll walk the transfer site later on.”

  During the five-minute drive to Penaquoit Gwen listened quietly as Dwight Hawkins reviewed the events of the past hours. Tess had fallen asleep in her arms.

  “So what we’re dealing with,” Reeves said as they drove through the open gates of Penaquoit, “is one dead, five million dollars missing. Is that correct?”

  “Well, yes, I guess that about sums it up,” Hawkins said. “I had two of my men make sure the—”

  “Where’s the body?”

  “Still at the scene. We’ll take her to the county morgue, over in Whitesville, once we—”

  “The father and husband?”

  “Should be here at the house any minute.”

  Peter Annison whistled as they drove up to the mansion. “Lifestyles of the rich and famous,” he said in a voice that had the flat twang of an airline pilot.

  The two FBI men set up temporary local headquarters in the dining room. Soon the house and grounds were swarming with people. Teams of policemen—county men from Whitesville, Gwen guessed—dusted for fingerprints in the kitchen, along the banisters of both stairways, in the music room. Others combed the grounds in teams of three, heads down, walking slowly over every inch of the vast lawn. As she wandered, dazed, from room to room, carrying a sleeping Tess, waiting to be interrogated, it occurred to her that the house was fully alive at last—and all because of the death of its mistress.

  She handed Tess to the pediatrician when he arrived several minutes later.

  “Use the piano room,” Don Reeves told him. “The kid’s room is being dusted.” Gwen started to follow the doctor but was stopped by Don Reeves.

  “I should stay with her,” she said.

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” Reeves replied. He stood between Gwen and the hallway to the music room, arms folded, watching her.

  “She needs me.”

  Reeves just stared, but the look in his eyes was anything but neutral. She turned and ran upstairs and pounded the wall on the second-floor hallway. Her hand was still throbbing when she entered the nursery and found a woman on her knees before Tess’s crib, aiming a flashlight at a portion of the crib rail.

&nb
sp; “Hello,” Gwen said as she crossed the room.

  “Wendy Frist, county crime-scene unit,” the woman said without turning around. She was heavyset, with short brown hair, wearing a khaki shirt and pants and thick-soled black shoes. She flicked off the flashlight, dipped a tiny brush into a tin of blue powder, and gently swept it across a small portion of the rail. Gwen stepped closer.

  “Don’t touch anything,” the agent said over her shoulder. Very carefully she placed a small length of clear tape over the powdered area, smoothed it with her index finger, and slowly pulled it off the rail. Standing a foot or so from the crib, Gwen could just make out a blue fingerprint. The agent reaffixed the tape to a blank index card and scribbled a few words on it. She immediately turned on the flashlight again and began inspecting the rest of the crib rail.

  Gwen glanced at the card, which the agent had placed on top of a small pile, and wondered if the print above the words Crib rail, left side, front was hers, and, if so, what the FBI would make of it.

  She left the nursery, went downstairs, and was crossing the foyer when Nick Lawrence and his father-in-law were escorted into the mansion by two county policemen.

  “Tess?” Nick shouted. “Where’s Tess?” The old man glanced around the big foyer with unblinking eyes, his mouth half open, as if he couldn’t quite recall ever being there before.

  “Tess is in the music room with the pediatrician,” Gwen said.

  Nick started for the hallway when Rosa Piacevic appeared, carrying Tess.

  “The doctor says she is excellent,” Rosa said.

  Nick grabbed his daughter, squeezing her to his chest. Russell Cunningham was still glancing around the foyer like a lost tourist.

  “Mr. Lawrence?” Dwight Hawkins had emerged from the dining room. “The FBI would like to talk to you.”

  Nick looked momentarily dazed. “I’d like some time with my daughter,” he said weakly.

  “Not now,” Hawkins replied.

  Nick frowned and handed Tess back to Rosa, then followed Hawkins into the dining room.

  They interviewed him for a half hour, then Russell. Gwen heard occasional shouts from him as she continued to roam the house, waiting her turn.

  “…My daughter and five million bucks!”

  “…Bet your ass I’ll cooperate. Just get that son of a bitch.”

  “…Call the police? I’d have lost my daughter and my granddaughter.”

  When he stormed out his face was raw and red.

  “Where’s my granddaughter?” he bellowed at Gwen.

  “Upstairs, with her father.”

  He took the stairs two at a time.

  “Miss Amiel?” Peter Annison stuck his head out the door. “Come in, please.”

  They were seated around the long mahogany table: the dour and pale Don Reeves at the far end, Dwight Hawkins a few chairs down from him, and a third man she didn’t recognize.

  “This is Fred Barnes,” Dwight Hawkins said as she sat at the end of the table nearest the door, and farthest from Don Reeves. “Detective Barnes, from the county sheriff’s division.”

  She glanced at Barnes, who didn’t take his eyes off his notepad. He was completely bald, his head perfectly round—a pink basketball with a human profile carved into one side. A bead of clammy sweat trickled between her shoulder blades.

  “Why don’t you start from the beginning?” Reeves said. Four sets of eyes turned to her.

  “I was in the laundry room,” she said, “when I heard voices over the baby monitor. I—”

  “The beginning, Miss Amiel.” Reeves’s voice was deep but flat. “How did you come to work at Penaquoit?”

  “Oh.” When she lifted her right hand from the table to wipe her forehead she left a sweat imprint. Why were they interested in how she’d ended up working for the Lawrences?

  “You don’t think that I was involved in any—”

  “From the beginning.” Reeves’s voice was like the EKG readout of a dead person.

  “I was working at the Mecca Diner,” she began. And the appropriate words somehow followed, though she felt curiously uninvolved in the account, as if she’d memorized it earlier and was now merely reciting it. She finished fifteen minutes later, with the 911 call.

  “You said the baby was crying,” Reeves said. “Yet neither Mr. Cunningham nor Mr. Lawrence recall hearing the child.”

  “They’d already left.”

  “But they came back.”

  “And the crying stopped.”

  She saw the two FBI men lock eyes for an ominous second.

  “She was wailing,” Gwen said. “Crying hysterically.”

  “In your experience with children, Miss Amiel, do babies stop crying suddenly, all at once, just like that?”

  “That’s why I was so alarmed, because it is unusual for a child to suddenly stop crying. I thought…”

  “You thought what?”

  “I thought she’d been smothered,” she said quietly.

  “You’re not from around here, are you?” asked Fred Barnes, the county detective.

  “No, I’m from Long Island originally. I lived in the city—New York City—up until this spring, when I moved here.”

  “Why did you move here?” Barnes asked. Another accusation.

  “I couldn’t take the city any longer,” she said. “I wanted a small town, good schools…”

  “And your husband?”

  “We’re separated. He lives in the city. What does he have to do with this?”

  “Do you know much about gardening, Ms. Amiel?”

  She shook her head.

  “Yet you recognized the flower in Mrs. Lawrence’s hand,” Reeves said.

  She glanced quickly at Dwight Hawkins. “A thistle, everyone knows what a thistle looks like.”

  Reeves arched his eyebrows. “I see. We’d like to search your house for prints. The kidnapper was there—at least once, when he dropped off the child.”

  At least once.

  “I had nothing to do with this,” she said.

  “But you were at the scene. The baby was found at your house.”

  “I found Tess at my house.”

  “We could get a warrant,” Reeves said. “I don’t foresee any problems convincing a judge to issue one, but it would expedite matters if we could have your permission instead.”

  “Can I be there when you search?”

  The FBI men looked at each other before the younger agent, Peter Annison, responded with a begrudging nod.

  Dwight Hawkins observed the two FBI men as Gwen Amiel left the room. They followed her closely, eyes narrowed, lips pinched in distrust. Did they expect her to wheel around and open fire with a semiautomatic? Fred Barnes continued to scribble on his yellow pad; the county boys always walked into court with reams of notes. Through the closed French doors he heard the muted thump-thump of low-flying helicopters.

  “I don’t believe her,” Reeves said when the dining-room door closed behind Gwen Amiel. His colleague, Peter Annison, quickly nodded.

  “What don’t you believe?” Hawkins asked, immediately regretting the defensive tone. Still, hadn’t he been the first at the murder scene, the first to see Gwen Amiel after the shooting? She’d seemed terrified, haunted.

  “She just happened to overhear her employers discussing the exchange?” Reeves said, each word hitting precisely the same tone. “She just happened to spot them driving along Twenty-four? She just happened to hear the baby screaming—when no one else did? And then she just happened to find the baby inside her own house?” He offered a pained smile. “I don’t think so.”

  “She didn’t have time to bring the baby to her place,” Hawkins said.

  “She didn’t need to, the kid was there the entire time.”

  “But the crying at the ravine…”

  “Maybe there was no crying.”

  “Or maybe—” Hawkins bit the inside of his lip. What was the point of defending her? He’d never laid eyes on Gwen Amiel before that day. For all he kne
w she had a record, abused drugs, cheated at Bingo.

  And yet Gwen Amiel was local, damn it, even if she was a newcomer. These guys were outsiders, and arrogant bastards at that.

  “If anyone has five million dollars in this town,” Hawkins said, “we’ll know soon enough. You could buy all of Sohegan ten times over with that kind of money.” He waited for the smiles that never came. “We only have the one bank in town. I’ll make sure they’re alert for any large cash deposits.”

  “That would be helpful,” Reeves said with a patronizing smirk. “Though the money’s long gone from Sohegan, I’m certain of that.”

  “Then Gwen Amiel couldn’t—”

  “Gwen Amiel must have an accomplice.”

  “Nick Lawrence said he thought the voice on the phone was male.”

  “He also said it sounded metallic, almost mechanical,” Reeves said. “The kidnapper was probably using a digital voice mask. Your higher-end DVMs can make a man sound like a woman.” He smiled tightly at Dwight. “Though they’re better at making a woman sound like a man.”

  Fred Barnes, the county man, dropped his pen and pushed the pad away from him.

  “I, for one, would like to take a look at the scene,” Barnes said. “Anyone else coming?”

  The FBI clones stood up together.

  “Pete, have one of our boys do a trace metal on Miss Amiel, then take a criminalist over to her house,” Reeves said. “I’ll accompany Detective Barnes to the scene.” He turned to Hawkins. “Care to join us?”

  “I think I’ll stay here and talk to the servants.”

  “Our people have already interrogated them,” Annison said.

  “Sometimes a local perspective can help.”

  “They’re Rumanian.”

  “Albanian,” Hawkins said. The Piacevics were familiar figures in town, though they said little to the shopkeepers they dealt with.

  The FBI men considered him a moment. He met their gaze without budging. Finally, as if obeying a silent signal, they turned in unison and walked out of the room, Barnes close behind. They left the door open, and he became immediately aware of music from somewhere in the house. Piano music, slow and melancholy and expertly played.