by Nina Post
This job was everything to him. He was aware of how isolating it was, feeling like whatever he alone didn’t get done, didn’t figure out or track down would result in disaster. People thought they understood his job, having seen it on TV, but there was still a gulf between his experience and their conception of it.
He pushed in another cartridge into the console. The picture changed, slowly, to other tortoises, possibly in a zoo or tortoise habitat.
This console was, Shawn supposed, entertainment for the tortoise. ‘You can watch an hour of TV after you do your homework, then you have to brush your beak and get ready for bed.’
The screen flickered. It was still in black and white, but the screen showed a different habitat. The tortoises were gone. Now it was just a garden, but it was sideways, like a camera was left on the ground, on its side.
The screen flickered, then straightened. Shawn caught the corner of something that looked familiar. The little mermaid statue he had seen in the back.
The screen crept to the right and showed a little more of it. There was no doubt in Shawn’s mind that it was the same statue. Whatever was recording the garden moved forward, slowly. The picture was wobbly, and then it stopped.
The view angled down and a fuzzy cat leg and paw stretched out.
“What?” Shawn thought of Comet.
The recorder kept the shot of the garden for a moment, then blanked out.
Shawn hustled downstairs and out to the back garden. It was going to be a sunny day. He located the mermaid statue, then jogged to the same location he saw on the tortoise’s screen. But the only thing there was an herb garden, planted with mint, maybe some rosemary, some others he didn’t recognize. He didn’t know much about plants. He glanced at the statue again to reassure himself he was in the right spot. He rustled some of the herbs with his hand just in case, but there was nothing out of the ordinary there.
He ran back into the house, garnering some attention from the remaining techs and officers, and back up to the room on the second floor. He turned off the TV and took the cartridge out of the console. Maybe it was just a malfunctioning or defective cartridge. He peeled off a white label sticker and pressed it on the otherwise unmarked cartridge so he could tell which one had made that happen, then placed it with the others.
He crossed the hall to the master bedroom, bypassed the debris on the floor, and went into the heiress’s closet. After more intensive searching, he found another photo album placed high on one of the closet shelves, covered with some cashmere sweaters.
He wanted to see if the heiress only smiled when she was with her tortoise.
She did.
Who was taking these pictures — a husband? A servant? Someone in her family? The victim looked serious, even fearful in any photo that didn’t have a tortoise in it. He balanced the album on his left hand and turned the pages, the liner separating from the opposite page with a sticky, peeling noise.
There were a few faded Polaroids taken in what looked like an agrarian, poverty-stricken piece of land, possibly in a different country, with a tiny shack backed by tall woods in the background and a furious child in the foreground, around eight years old, though he was certainly no expert. Her hands were curled into tight fists at her sides, she wore a dirty white undershirt and brown pants, no shoes. Her expression implied that the person with the camera had just messed with her territory.
The child bore a physical resemblance to the heiress, possibly with red hair, though it was difficult to tell with the old Polaroid. A relative? But what relative of the heiress’s would even be allowed to live like this? Was it blackmail? ‘You’re rich, we’re poor, give us money’?
In another instant photo from the same place, the child was stalking off towards the shack.
He stayed in the closet, leaning against the door frame, and flipped the page over. The same girl, he was almost certain, and older. She looked more like the photos he had seen of Haviland Sylvain. He pulled off the plastic page cover and flipped the photo to look at the back. ‘HF, age 19.’ Her skin was perfectly smooth, more filled out. She was sitting in a bus, a wide-open, flat landscape viewable out the opposite window.
Shawn guessed she had a stranger take this photo. She didn’t seem the type of person who liked having her picture taken, but Shawn supposed she knew that particular time on the bus was important, and wanted to be in control of her own image. To make the moment, what she was doing on the bus, more real. Maybe she was afraid that if she didn’t preserve herself on film, it wasn’t really happening.
Her eyes looked straight into the camera, direct and bright, a determined seriousness around her blue eyes, chin held slightly up, back straight. Maybe she was leaving — leaving that shack, leaving her family.
Her life during this period wasn’t well-documented, but on the next page, she was standing behind a bank teller desk, wearing a dark blue tie-neck blouse, possibly a uniform shirt or dress. Her hair was up in a chignon and she had small gold stud earrings. She wasn’t rich yet. He was no expert, or even an amateur, but he could tell.
Besides, she was working a bank teller job.
There was just that one photo of her working, like the one was enough, and she made it look like serious business. It was like those daguerrotypes where the family saved up and had a traveling photographer come to their house, for one of the few times in their lives, to line up the whole family or take photos of one person.
After that, there was the photo with the man from the framed photo downstairs. The trepidation in her eyes was more evident.
Then the wedding, held on the back lawn of the mansion. Her husband wore white tie. She wore a slim column of an ivory dress, her hair in ringlets on top of her head — Shawn thought of her now, the back of that head crushed, that hair matted with blood.
Her expression was composed. There was family around them, likely his. They had the same stockiness, the same cold, distant eyes, whereas she was slim and graceful, and her eyes made him want to rescue her then set her free to be herself.
Or maybe he was over-thinking it.
The next page was the honeymoon. Amalfi Coast, was all the back of one photo read. Bright flowers, the rich aquamarine waters of the ocean, a rocky outcropping, boats, a yellow and white booth way in the background selling something, maybe ice or gelato. An Italian woman on a bicycle, also in the background.
She looked rich now, in that expensive dress, expensive shoes and small clutch purse — again, he knew he was no expert, but he could tell.
They were photographed again in those clothes dining on a boat, champagne glasses in front of them. They were dancing, her hand lightly perched on his upper back, face unsmiling, hair in a chignon, eyes looking at something beyond the camera. She was pretty whatever her expression, but radiant when she smiled. Which was rarely.
They must have gone on a long trip, because there the couple was again in Venice, and in Pamplona watching the matadors, and in Africa on safari (she was petting a giraffe and it was the first real smile he saw on her during the trip), and in Egypt in front of the pyramids. They were in India in front of the Taj Mahal, in China on the Great Wall, in Athens in front of the Acropolis; they were also in Paris, London, Rome, and Amsterdam.
“Some honeymoon,” he muttered to himself.
In most of the photos they both had fairly serious expressions, like honeymooning was serious business and they had a job to do. Shawn had never had a honeymoon, never been married. Becoming a cop, then especially a homicide detective felt like a calling, like he had joined a sort of seminary, albeit one that let him sleep around. Probably it was because he had never met the right woman.
And he had seen the families of those who were killed in the line of duty, and he never wanted to shatter someone’s life like that. That way, no one would be shattered. There would just be the other detectives, the department, who would treat his death accordingly, with solemn ritual, then as an excuse for a lot of drinking, when they would swap stories about how weird
he was. And Comet, who would be confused, who would possibly miss him as much as a cat can miss a human, but who’d mostly be concerned about getting food.
Who knew what went on the mind of a cat. Not him.
The next page. The heiress and her husband were back at home, standing in front of the mansion. Then they were standing in rows with what was obviously his family in the back gardens, the heiress and her husband in the front center.
Then a funeral. Flower arrangements. The family, looking appropriately somber. Service placard. The mother-in-law.
Another funeral, same deal. This time, the husband.
A few years later, a graduation. The heiress wore a cap and gown and a gold-color shawl, unlike most of the other students around her. There was one of her accepting the degree, and another with her class. She looked a little older. Then a few photos of the heiress in a school, in a physics club, with some classmates.
Then another graduation. He checked the backs. Three years after the first.
Shawn put the album back in the closet, put the sweaters back over it. He jogged up to the third floor of the house and peeked into the ballroom, with its musician’s balcony and oak flooring that could use a refinishing. There was also a bathroom, a billiard room, a few large closets, and another sitting room.
A couple of techs were dusting for prints at the doors, but Shawn didn’t think they would find much of anything.
It was time to canvass.
“If neighbors aren’t home,” Shawn told the group of patrol officers, “I want you to find out why, and when that person will be back in their residence so you can go back and get their statement. Document the hell out of everything — this is how a case lives or dies in the courtroom. Put every name down on your lead sheet. Those leads will be numbered and assigned, and a report will be attached to every sheet.” The troops nodded.
“You never know what could turn out to be important,” Shawn continued, “so note everything. Ask who their vendors are —food, pizza, gas, water, landscaping, babysitters, letter carriers, dog walkers, Avon lady. Do a vehicle canvass, while you’re at it. Finally, don’t dismiss your hunches — if a detail seems off or you think someone is lying, write it down. If nothing else, maybe it’ll help me.”
He gestured them away and the troops went their different directions.
The patrol officers did a witness and vehicle canvass in the area around the house, spiraling out to a wide area. The estate was so large and the neighbors so far that some of them drove. It was right around shift change, so Shawn told the patrol sergeant to inform the other patrol officers in their area what had happened – and that if any of them knew something, any connection at all, they should call him.
Getting people to keep you apprised of information felt like half of his job.
Shawn took his collected trash bags into the mudroom off the kitchen. He left the trash in the individual bags and rummaged through each one. In the kitchen, most of the items were very neatly compressed and folded, but there were some tossed in as-is without any consideration for landfill space – almost certainly disposed of by a different person. There were a lot of used facial tissue, paper towels, cotton swabs, a few tampon wrappers – and in the bag from Lyle’s bathroom, an empty package of store-bought cake doughnuts and an empty plastic bottle of strawberry-flavored milk.
“Ew.” Why were these things in the trash in Lyle’s bathroom? He returned the items to the bag and dug through a couple dozen other small white trash bags, though the ones from the master suite were lavender-colored. The lavenders contained tissues, a used toothbrush, a soap wrapper, a birth control wrapper, a few wadded up pieces of scribbled notes (some equations), and what looked like a list of things she intended to do, written in an elegant but friendly-looking cursive:
— Get own mail from box
— Answer own door
— Group tour, maybe bicycle. France.
— Volunteer: research boat?
Maybe the heiress decided not to do any of those things, or she despaired of ever achieving them. Or something happened to make her lose her initiative or sense of hope. But it looked as though she wanted to take steps to not be so isolated.
He thought he’d make his own list real quick, so he jotted some down on his notebook:
— Find someone who can put up with me and my job, who’s not a groupie
— Make a friend, like on TV, who isn’t a cat (no offense, Comet)
— Take a vacation (ha)
— See family less
Haviland Sylvain lived in a tiny world, albeit in a huge mansion. Shawn felt the same way. He had the world of his work, of solving homicides. The other world was the one his family and everyone else lived in, and he couldn’t communicate, at least not well, with anyone in that world. His family didn’t understand what he did, or why it was so important, or why he couldn’t make it to family events, or why he couldn’t just run over to his mother’s house and water her plants, or why he couldn’t talk on the phone.
Even if they asked, he would say one thing and they would ignore that then immediately compare it to something they saw on TV, and ask if it was like that, or ask which show was the most like his job. But despite this repeated line of conversation, they had zero interest in his real life.
It was hard for him to go into their world, like he had come very, very far, ‘Ground Control to Major Tom’ far, and just wanted to get back to his because that was the reality he knew. He wasn’t friends, not really, with any of the other detectives. They were all biding their time until their pensions, always talking about how great it would be to retire (the thought horrified him) or how they could finally use their boat or take that vacation.
Shawn knew it wouldn’t be like that. He knew that once they took that pension, they would miss the job, would feel directionless, without anchor.
The job was isolating, and sometimes he didn’t feel like he was really living, like there should be more, but he had a quiet, comfortable life. And he liked to work on cases in his off-time, too. Once he took his pension or if, for some reason he couldn’t imagine, switched to something less demanding, maybe in the DA’s office as an investigator, he would put more of his time into cold cases. He didn’t fantasize about getting out of the job, with or without a damn boat. He just wanted to feel connected to something else, wanted to find some kind of bridge between the two worlds he lived in. The difference between the two was jarring.
And he wanted to try feeling, if only for a few days, that the world didn’t rest on his shoulders. He also wanted someone to enjoy that time with, if that wasn’t asking too much from the universe.
When he was done with the trash, Shawn went back outside then entered the house like he imagined the killer had.
First by turning off the lights, because that’s how they found the scene. He heard a few shouts of protest about the lights, but someone must have shut them up. He walked around to the glass-domed solarium on the north side of the mansion then crawled in through the wide, hinged tortoise door.
It was possible the killer had already been in the house, and didn’t use a key or have to enter through the tortoise door in the solarium. They didn’t have to break a window, so it was either a jimmy job, the swinging tortoise door, a door they left open, a key in a known location, or a partner on the inside.
Nothing was broken on the inside of the house, on the first floor — no vase or lamp was toppled, no painting moved and left that way — so whoever killed the heiress either knew their way around in the dark or was dumb enough to use a flashlight.
Then they had found her, upstairs. Did they know that she was in the sitting room at the same time every night? Or that she would be in her bedroom? How they entered a scene and made his way to the victim was crucial, as far as he was concerned. He could learn more about why they chose her, what their relationship was. And it was pretty clear that they had been there before.
Shawn paused to enjoy the sun on his face before inspecting the grou
nd close to the front of the house. To his surprise, a car — a rickety, boxy orange thing, like a pumpkin — drove down the driveway with a ticking sound, like something was loose and bits were about to fall off. It pulled up in front of the house, gleeful fifties music softly emanating from the half-open windows, the gears like an old man hawking up saliva in the morning.
A woman – a very cute one – got out and closed the creaky door, which involved lifting it about two inches. She was maybe five-four, not much over a hundred pounds, dressed in gray corduroy jeans, off-white Converse sneakers, and a loose sweater over a shirt, and holding a file folder. He noted unpainted fingernails and how her shiny brown hair swept across her narrow shoulders, and how her brown eyes widened when she saw him by the door.
“Who are you?”
“Who are you?” Shawn returned.
He had the advantage of a well-honed authority and the added height of the steps leading to the door. Which didn’t seem like much of an advantage when she stalked up the steps to get right in front of him, sticking out a firm-set chin in a pale, heart-shaped face. “I am losing patience with bullshit today, mister suit, and it is not even noon yet.” She jabbed her finger toward the ground. “I have a right to be here, and I have a job to do, which requires knocking on this door.” She pointed at the door, then at his chest. “And don’t think I’m easy to intimidate because I’m smaller than you, because if you mess with me right now, there will be hell to pay.”
Shawn grinned, and tried not to say that she was adorable and he wanted to put her in his pocket. She would probably punch him in the throat. Instead, he said – he hoped with some gravitas, “This is a crime scene.”
