by Kate Wilhelm
“A couple are seeing to things, but they don’t know what needs to be done unless I tell them. And someone has to make sure the kids picking the crops aren’t leaving as much as they’re picking. Time to get things started in the greenhouse, things I’ve got to do myself.”
“You and your brother are sharing an apartment here, aren’t you? Is that working out?’
His face darkened and he gave Tricia a hard look, then picked up his sandwich. “It’s okay. When I come back I’ll get my own place, though. Not used to living with someone.”
“Ted, for heaven’s sake, let it go,” Tricia said. “You’ll both cool down in a day or two.”
“If I spend another night with that loon, I’ll strangle him with my bare hands,” he said. “He wants to start a school, for meditation or some other crap.” He looked at the sandwich. “I’ll finish this in the car. It’s a long drive, nearly up to Rochester.” Walking through the kitchen toward the hall, he said, “I’ll be back late this week. Good luck to you guys. Think Mac will want to take this apart to see if I’m smuggling anything in it?” He held up the sandwich, then walked out.
“Does Lawrence understand that anyone who causes destruction of the property will be kicked out and banned entry afterward?” Charlie asked Tricia as soon as Ted left.
Tricia nodded wearily. “We went all over it this morning. He knows. He said if he found the checks he didn’t give a damn what they tried to do, he’d have enough money to fight them.”
“Did Howard have any experience working with tools, doing woodwork, house repairs, anything of that kind?”
“Not that I know. He owned three auto-parts stores that didn’t require his carpentry. He probably knew how to drive a nail with a hammer, but I doubt he ever did more than that.”
“The Slocum guys know all about baseboards, house trim,” Charlie said. “They know how to tell if someone has done any dismantling and repairing. A master craftsman could get past that, but not an amateur.”
“Tell Lawrence,” she said. “He won’t listen to the rest of us.”
“I will,” Charlie said. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know. In the house somewhere.”
“How about Pamela and Stuart?”
She gestured toward the hall. “Wandering about. I don’t know.” She hesitated, then said, “You should know this. Pamela is encouraging Lawrence. I think she wants to get him banned, make the shares go up for the rest of us. And she probably is confident that if William comes into a million dollars or more, she’ll get her hands on it.”
As she talked, Constance went to the door where Ted had been. It was open and screened. There was a large terrace with a table, chairs, and a big shade umbrella. The space could have held half a dozen tables without being crowded. Floored with paving stones, with a few small trees, a few plants in stone planters, and surrounded by high shrubs, it was well sheltered, and apparently mostly unused. At that moment what held her attention was Pamela. She was standing about ten feet from the shrub barrier, and she was throwing rocks or something over it. Constance motioned to Charlie to come look.
#
Together they watched Pamela heave another object over the barrier. Drawing closer to them, Tricia said, “It’s our prison exercise yard. We’re permitted to go out there at will.”
Whether it was the sound of Tricia’s voice, or perhaps a movement at the open door, something made Pamela stop moving for a second, then turn and go to the table, sit down with her back to the house, and light a cigarette.
Charlie moved slightly in order for Tricia to see out. She took a quick look and returned to the middle of the kitchen. “No smoking allowed inside the house,” she said. “I might have guessed that’s where she’d be. Anyway, the terrace is enclosed with all those bushes hiding an electrified fence connected to the security system. On the other side, they tell me, it’s mostly brambles. Sleeping Beauty’s protective barrier or something. Buried in all that mess there’s a high gate that’s electrified, and it’s sensitive. Ted tested it the day we arrived. The system’s never turned off, although the house system is off through the day. I guess since it’s state forest out there, hikers, intruders, deer, maybe even bears could come and go freely and a previous owner stopped that.”
Charlie squeezed Constance’s hand slightly and neither of them mentioned what Pamela had been doing.
4
WHEN CONSTANCE AND CHARLIE TURNED from the door Tricia said, “I have that information you asked for when we talked about the death of William’s first wife, the drive-by shooting, and Lori’s disappearance from Ted’s farm. And a lot of clippings about Mary Beth’s drowning. Dan, my husband, drove down on Saturday and brought my folder where I had it all.”
She noticeably stiffened as a woman appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. “Oh, Alice, hello,” she said. “This is Dr. Leidl and Mr. Meiklejohn. Alice Knudsen. They’ll be joining us for a few days.”
Alice was carrying two grocery bags. She was tall and broad, with a bony, wide face, and pale hair that was short and straight, pulled back behind her ears. She nodded. Looking at Charlie she said, “A doctor?”
“She is,” Charlie said, motioning toward Constance. “Not a medical doctor, a psychologist.”
The woman looked either disgusted or disappointed.
“I’m happy to meet you, Ms. Knudsen,” Constance said. “I hope it’s not too much trouble, having two more people.”
Alice looked her over, shrugged slightly, and walked on into the room. “Two more don’t make no difference,” she said. “On the table about five.”
“We’ll see you later,” Tricia said. “I’m giving them a tour of the house. Want to start upstairs?” she asked Charlie.
“Yes indeed, upstairs first,” he said. He waved to Alice and followed Constance and Tricia out into the hall again.
No one spoke until midway up the stairs when Tricia said in a low voice, “That material I mentioned is in my car, along with my purse. Locked car.” She glanced at Constance. “Dr. Leidl, another unasked-for warning—Alice snoops. She gets here between two and three most days. After that the only place you can be sure you can speak in confidence is out on the terrace, well away from the house. The only thing I bring in with me are my keys.”
Constance nodded. No corners to lurk around, no doors to press an ear to, and no purse to examine. “Noted,” she said. “Thanks. We can retrieve your folder when we leave. And please, it’s Constance and Charlie. Maybe a little less formality will let everyone relax a bit.”
Tricia gave her a fleeting smile. “I guess I do seem overwound, don’t I? Tricia,” she added. “Even Stuart calls me Tricia. I’m not the aunt type, I guess.”
In the upper hall she motioned right and left. “Four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a dressing room, another little room that might have been a sewing room or even a nursery at one time. And most of them are completely empty. Let’s start with Howard’s bedroom. This way.”
The room was furnished with a king-sized bed, two bureaus, an easy chair and lamp, bedside tables. It all appeared to be out of a Sears catalog. “All new?” Charlie asked.
“It seems so. Old bedroom furniture is in the other furnished room up here. Mr. Paley is using it. I assume it all came from Howard’s apartment. The detectives did a thorough job of examining it, of course.”
The room was dim with heavy, dark-blue closed drapes at the windows. Tricia clicked on a lamp. There was an adjoining dressing room, a closet with three suits, two pairs of khaki pants, one pair of ankle-high boots that looked well worn, and two pairs of shoes. Charlie didn’t spend any time poking into drawers. He did little more than cast a swift look at the tiled bathroom with a separate shower. They moved on to the other furnished bedroom, the room Paley was using. The furnishings were old and looked as if everything had been picked up at a yard sale
or an estate sale. No two pieces matched. After a quick walk through to an adjoining bathroom, where Charlie disconnected an electric razor almost reflexively, they returned to the hall. There was no point in searching, Charlie knew. It had been searched.
They glanced into the other bedrooms, bare, uncarpeted, with tan window shades down all the way. The rooms were large, bleak and uninviting. Another door in the hall opened to a walk-in linen closet with enough shelving to store bedding and towels for a family of a dozen, and now holding a few towels and sheets, with most of the shelves stripped down to bare wood.
“Why buy such a house and not furnish it, use it?” Charlie muttered.
“Who knows?” Tricia said. “It’s a beautiful house, a wonderful family house, great for entertaining, overnight guests, teenage sleepovers… He seemed to have lived in it exactly as he lived for years in an apartment.” She was hugging her arms about herself as if chilled. “It’s unsettling,” she said in a low voice. “It gives me the creeps.” She looked at Charlie. “There’s an attic, but it’s more of the same, just empty space. Do you want to see it?”
He shook his head.
Back on the ground floor they started with a large living room that was sparsely furnished with a dark-blue sofa and two brown easy chairs, a coffee table, two chairs with a game table, and several lamps. No pictures were on the walls, nothing on the coffee table, no ornamentation or decorative touch anywhere. It was a dismal, unwelcoming space, like a waiting room without the magazines.
“It sure wouldn’t have taken appraisers long to do their job,” Charlie commented. “Onward.”
Across the hall Tricia opened another door and they all stopped. This was a library, and there were many books on shelves, magazines and more books on an end table by a good chair and lamp. But what held Charlie’s gaze was a man sitting in lotus in the center of the room. He glanced their way without rising.
“Lawrence,” Tricia said in a strained voice. “Constance Leidl and Charlie Meiklejohn. My brother Lawrence.”
“I’m putting myself in his head,” Lawrence said. “Zen.”
He resembled Tricia and Stuart. His hair was down to his shoulders, auburn, with a slight wave, and he appeared to be much lighter in weight than Ted. With him in his lotus position, it was hard to guess his height, but Charlie assumed he was tall and well built. Handsome, single, not yet fifty, with his kind of good looks there must have been many opportunities to partner with someone. Charlie scowled as what Constance had said about curses came to mind. They could be effective for those cursed if they believed in them. He tilted his head toward the hall.
“We’ll catch you later,” he said to Lawrence.
“Not much more,” Tricia said in the hall. “We think Howard spent most of his time in the library or in the den or television room, whatever you want to call it.” She opened the other door to show them into the den.
This room held a big flat-screen television and a rack of CDs, two easy chairs and lamps, and a reclining chair with Stuart in it. He jumped up when they entered.
“Hi,” he said. “I thought you’d get to this room eventually. I was in the basement when you got here. I took the filter on the furnace apart, and considered taking the exhaust hose off the clothes dryer, but gave it up. You wouldn’t put anything in a space where it would get blown outside.”
Charlie’s nod was sympathetic. “Good thinking about the filter,” he said and didn’t add that the detectives had thought of that.
“He liked movies?” Constance asked, walking to the rack that might have held a hundred CDs.
“Seems he did,” Stuart said. “John Wayne, Sherlock Holmes, a complete run of some old television shows. The Avengers, The Prisoner, some Hitchcock movies. I spent a week going through them, started each one to make sure it was what the jacket said it was.”
“Is that your bike out front?” Charlie asked.
“Yes. After the reading of the will I flew home, then drove back in my van. Outfitted for camping, which I’m doing up in the state park. I brought the bike back with me. The van’s great, home away from home, but it’s a gas guzzler and a little big for driving in town.”
Charlie understood exactly what he meant. He was keeping his expenses to a minimum, living on the cheap. He suspected that Stuart made the most of whatever meals Alice prepared.
“What else should we see in the house?” Constance asked Tricia.
“The dining room, I guess. You saw Mr. Paley’s office, previously a breakfast room. There’s a pantry, and the basement.”
Past Tricia, near the kitchen door, Constance glimpsed Pamela. She stepped back into the kitchen. “Let’s have a look at the dining room and call the tour quits,” Constance said. “Afterward, any chance of getting a cup of coffee, maybe sitting out on the terrace for a few minutes?”
“I’d love a cup of coffee along about now,” Tricia said. “Alice keeps coffee ready all afternoon.”
“Charlie, after we look at the dining room, do you want to check out the garage? Maybe Stuart would be willing to be your guide.”
His marching orders, Charlie understood. “Sounds good,” he said. “Remind me to bring some beer along tomorrow.”
“I have beer in the fridge,” Stuart said. “We all bring anything extra we want, snacks, drinks, whatever.”
A quick look at the dining room was enough. There was a table with six mismatched chairs, nothing else. “We brought chairs in from all over the house,” Tricia said in a tight voice. “I don’t think Howard ever used this room. Probably the breakfast room was his preferred choice. Alice sets her dishes on the table, buffet style, and we help ourselves.”
Charlie opened a door on the side wall; it was to the terrace. He was arranging rooms in his head as they toured the house, and now he had a clear picture of the whole building. The breakfast room across the hall from the kitchen overlooked the terrace. Drapes had been drawn when they met Paley there. The den, library and breakfast room, master bedroom, rooms where Howard had spent time, had drapes. The bedroom Paley was using had ugly shades on the windows.
“Garage,” he said to Stuart. “Then beer.”
Constance and Tricia went back to the kitchen, where Alice was dicing vegetables on the counter. She looked up but didn’t speak. A coffee carafe and cups were on the worktable.
“Cream? Sugar?” Tricia asked Constance as she poured coffee.
“Black is fine.”
Tricia hesitated a moment, then said, “Let’s take the carafe out with us. There’s another one if Alice makes another pot.”
She carried the carafe and her coffee and Constance held the screen door open and managed to reach the table first and position herself facing the house.
“Tricia, I don’t want to come on as an interrogator. Why don’t you just talk about growing up with your four brothers, what you remember about Howard as a child, an adolescent. Ramble all you want. If I’d like clarification on anything, I’ll interrupt, not otherwise.”
At first haltingly, then with more and more fluency but in a disjointed manner, Tricia described a noisy, boisterous family of four lively boys and a girl who had seemed almost an afterthought. Lawrence, the youngest boy, had been five when she came along, and Howard, the oldest, had been fourteen. Their father was a dentist in Buffalo and there were no financial problems although neither had they been rich. They had all gone to the university in Buffalo and lived at home until graduation. William had gone on to the Rochester Institute of Technology for a master’s degree in electrical engineering, and Howard had earned an MBA.
“Every summer,” she said, “Dad rented a fishing camp here at Stillwater Lake and we spent late August through Labor Day there. It was a rough camp, not like the fancy resorts around here now. Howard had a job in Trenton working for a car-parts dealer, the company he eventually bought out and expanded. He was a go
od businessman. I think we all knew that summer that it would probably be the last summer we’d all be together. Howard was engaged. William was really working hard at R.I.T. with little time for vacations. I was fourteen that summer.”
While Tricia was talking, Constance saw the drape pulled aside a little in Paley’s office, and she had seen Pamela standing at the kitchen door for several minutes. She poured coffee when the cups were empty and listened to the rambling discourse without interrupting.
When Tricia stopped speaking and looked down at her cup, Constance said, “Keep talking, Tricia. Tell me about that last day.”
“It was Friday,” Tricia said. “Howard had said he and Mary Beth couldn’t make it much before three or four in the afternoon. They both had jobs in Trenton.” She drank some coffee, put it down and looked past Constance at the green barrier surrounding the terrace. “It’s peaceful out here, isn’t it? So quiet.” Then, shaking herself, she went on. “We’d met Mary Beth in June, when Howard brought her home to meet the family, to announce that they were planning to marry. She was very pretty, with long blond hair. Shy. I remember how shy she was, almost as if she was intimidated by my brothers. I guess she was. Her family was well off, private schools, Bennington. She was an only child and had never been around four guys like that. They were full of tricks and jokes all the time, loud… Anyway, that day we had all been swimming, playing water games. Dad had been out fishing early that morning. I remember that he brought home some perch or blue gill or something and Mother fried them for lunch. We were always hungry, especially out at the camp. After lunch the boys were playing football or something by the water’s edge and I went inside to shower and change.”
“Howard and Mary Beth arrived and Lawrence was flirting with her, and all three were following her and Howard, joking, teasing, making nuisances of themselves. I felt sorry for her. She and Howard were both in city clothes. Heels and a pretty blue dress for her, suit and tie for him, and we were all in shorts or scruffy jeans, old sneakers or flip-flops, camp clothes. The teasing was really too much, it was getting ugly. I think she was embarrassed. Someone said the only place to be alone was in the middle of the lake. Howard grabbed her hand and said that’s where they’d be. They ran out together. They were laughing.”
