by Kate Wilhelm
Engleman’s eyes narrowed. “Bainbridge again.”
“Just one big happy family,” Charlie said. “Chief, you and I both know that this is going to be close to an all-nighter here with forensics, the doctor on call, your sheriff and his boys, the whole shebang. There’s no place in here for me to hang out while they go about their business, and I don’t intend to leave my wife sitting in that car for the next six hours while I’m being grilled. You know where to find us if the sheriff wants to hear firsthand what I just told you. Innocent bystander role for me—just happened to be the one to find a body. You know how that goes.”
Chief Engleman spoke to someone outside the door, then motioned to Charlie to come with him. “I want a word with your wife,” he said.
A uniformed officer moved aside for them and took the chief’s place at the door, and they walked to where Constance was sitting in the passenger seat of the car. She rolled down the window as they approached.
“Charlie, what in heaven’s name is going on? I called the police and they came. Now let’s go. I want to get out of here. Now. A killer might be lurking about watching my every move.”
“My wife,” Charlie said to Engleman. “Honey, this is Chief Engleman.”
“I don’t care if he’s Santa Claus! I want to get out of here.”
“Mrs. Meiklejohn,” the chief said, “I just want to ask you a couple of questions. If you don’t mind.”
“I do mind! She asked us to come and we did, and she was dead. My God! She was dead and he told me to sit in the car by myself. Who knows where the killer is? He could be watching us right now.” She was looking at the used car lot adjacent to the motel parking area. “He could be lurking in a car over there.”
“Please, Mrs. Meiklejohn, calm down. Where were you before you came here?”
“Talking to that lawyer, and the guard up there let us out, and we came here, and before that we were at some miserable hole-in-the-wall restaurant, and then we came here and she was dead. She told us to come. Twice. So we did.”
“Honey, pull yourself together,” Charlie said. “You’re safe now. Just don’t start crying, okay?”
“I might start screaming if we don’t get out of here!” she cried in a loud voice.
A couple had pulled in at the motel and stood outside the door of another unit, staring.
Charlie looked at the chief helplessly and spread his hands apart. “Maybe we can give a statement tomorrow.”
“Yeah, tomorrow’s time enough. Plenty to do here tonight. You’re up at Millie’s bed-and-breakfast, aren’t you? I have your telephone number. We’ll give you a call tomorrow.”
Charlie slid in behind the wheel.
“Lock your door!” Constance cried. “For God’s sake, lock your door!”
He locked his door and turned on the engine. “Tomorrow, Chief,” he said. The chief turned and walked back to Pamela’s room and Charlie backed out of the parking slot.
“I think you have a point about the used-car lot,” he said as he drove out to the highway. “Bet that’s where the murderer parked and waited for the right time to make a call.”
“Now I know why you wanted to call the chief of police and not the sheriff.”
“I’ll always wonder why you didn’t take up acting in the theater,” he said and gave her thigh a little squeeze.
17
“SEE YOU IN THE DINING ROOM,” Charlie said on Saturday morning. Constance was not quite finished dressing as he left. He started down the stairs, but midway he halted, listening.
“I won’t leave her here! She can’t stay here with all this going on.”
He couldn’t see the woman speaking, but the panic in her voice was loud and clear. He took another step or two down, enough to see several clusters of people standing outside the breakfast room, some of them holding newspapers, all of them looking agitated, frightened. With a sigh he went on to the foyer that served as a lobby, picked up a newspaper on the registration desk, then headed back to the stairs and up to their room.
“It’s started,” he said as he entered. The front page of the local newspaper, The Herald, had a banner headline: Is There A Bainbridge Curse? Under it a second line read: Second Woman Murdered.
Together he and Constance scanned the brief article. “I say we get the hell out of here and find breakfast somewhere down the road,” Charlie said. “Do you have the map?”
“In my bag,” she said, picking it up.
They went down and were almost to the door when Charlie spotted Millie Olaf hurrying toward them, he suspected with a message from the sheriff or Chief Engleman. He quickened their pace out the door and to the car.
“Onward,” he said, leaving the parking lot. “I imagine the Lakeview Resort has breakfast for its guests. Let’s eat there and then hit the road. A nice leisurely drive in the country to calm your nerves.”
#
They pulled in at the curb at Teresa Briacchi March’s house a few minutes before eleven. This was a working-class neighborhood, the houses small and for the most part well maintained, but the signs of financial trouble were all around with a foreclosure sign on one house, one boarded up, and two For Sale signs within a block. The recession had hit hard here apparently.
The woman who opened the door for them was tired-looking and anxious. “Mrs. March?” Constance asked, and at the woman’s nod she introduced herself and Charlie.
“Come in,” Teresa March said. “What did you mean, it’s something about Andrea?”
She had big dark eyes and black hair showing a gray strand or two, drawn back in a loose ponytail. Although a little too thin, she looked fit and had a nice suntan. She took them to a living room comfortably furnished with old easy chairs, a coffee table at a sofa, and several shelves of books. Library books were on the coffee table. Several framed photographs were on shelves and tables.
“Please, make yourselves comfortable,” she said, gesturing toward the chairs. She perched on the edge of the sofa.
“Mrs. March,” Charlie said, “we’re private investigators and a matter we’ve been looking into seemed to involve your daughter and Earl Marshall, and possibly his sister Dorothy Dumond. What we’re really interested in was the period when your daughter was attending Stillwater College, when she stopped, and if possible to learn why she dropped out when she had a scholarship for another full year.”
Teresa’s expression was of bewilderment and disappointment. “I thought… I hoped you had something to tell me about her death,” she said.
“I hope you can tell us something about that,” Constance said. “Did you believe it was an accident?”
She shook her head. “Why? How could she have done that accidentally? Dorothy suggested that she did it on purpose, but she didn’t. I know that much. She would not have killed herself. She didn’t. And neither was she seeing someone secretly.”
“Please tell us what you can of that period,” Constance said, her voice gentle and low.
Teresa looked from her to Charlie, moistened her lips, and in a near whisper asked, “Do you think it was an accident? First, you tell me that much.”
“No, Mrs. March, we’re inclined to believe that it was not an accident. But we know so little about that last year of her life, we have very little to base a conclusion on.”
“Thank God,” Teresa said and closed her eyes for a moment as if her words had been a true expression of gratitude. Words that needed a silent Amen.
“At last someone might look into it,” she said in a low voice. “I wanted an investigation, a real investigation at the time. They told me there was nothing to indicate that additional inquiries were necessary. Earl was talking to Mr. Wasserman, Dorothy was in bed, people saw the lights go down the hillside. They said it was all reported, checked and verified, nothing more could be done. They called it an a
ccident and closed the case.”
“Mrs. March, do you know why she dropped out of college when she did?” Charlie asked.
She shook her head. “She called me just before she dropped out. She was upset. She wanted to know if it was true that Howard Bainbridge had provided the scholarship, but I couldn’t tell her anything. I didn’t know, and I hadn’t thought of him in years. I asked her what difference it made and she said it made a big difference, but she wouldn’t say more than that. She stopped going that same week. I tried to get her to reconsider, but she said her mind was made up.” She drew in a breath. “She should not have married Earl. They were both too young. She had been happy, doing well in school, planning a future. She had an apartment, small, but her own apartment. She was so pleased by that, so happy. The scholarship gave her enough to live on by herself, but after she married him, it wasn’t enough for two. There were always money worries, and it got worse after she gave up that scholarship. She hardly ever called during that last year, and when she did, she had little to say. They were planning to move, be by themselves after he graduated and got a job. That’s what she wanted to do, live by themselves, not in that house with Dorothy. She said Earl wanted it too, to live by themselves somewhere else.”
“Didn’t Earl have money of his own?” Charlie asked.
“A little, not enough. Andrea said that when his mother died, he was a minor and Dorothy was his guardian, and continued to control whatever money there was even after they were married. He wanted Dorothy to sell the house, split the money, but she refused. It was left to them both equally and neither could do anything without the other’s consent, and she wouldn’t sell. I think for the year Andrea was still collecting living expenses, she was pretty much supporting all three of them. I never did know how much money Dorothy had, or if she simply wouldn’t touch it, or what was going on, but I do know that Andrea and Earl had practically nothing.”
Answering one of Charlie’s questions she said that Mr. and Mrs. Wasserman were good people. She had worked for him from time to time, and they both had been terribly sorry for her loss. Mr. Wasserman wouldn’t have lied about seeing taillights.
“Mrs. March,” Constance said, “you said Andrea had been happy before she married Earl. Did she love him? Did he love her?”
“I know she loved him,” Teresa said after a moment. “And I think he loved her as much as he could love any woman. It wasn’t their relationship that was failing them. It was the living arrangement. He had always been taken care of by his sister and his mother, and then he was being taken care of by Dorothy and Andrea. Nothing had changed for him, and I think he was happy. She wouldn’t hear a word against him and really believed that once they were by themselves, responsible only for themselves, he would change. She said once, just a few months before… They were counting the days until he would graduate, get a job, and they would move.” She looked at her hands tightly clasped in her lap. “Maybe he would have changed if it had happened. He was so immature. Maybe taking responsibility would have helped him grow up. Newlyweds should not live with relatives. It would have been better if they had moved out, no matter how little money they had. They could have found part-time jobs or something.”
Charlie brought up the day that Howard Bainbridge had given Andrea the bicycle when she was a child. “Will you tell us about that?”
Startled, Teresa looked from him to Constance, back. “Why? What does that have to do with her death?” Color flamed on her cheeks suddenly and she jumped up. “You can’t believe he was seeing her later, that she met him. That’s what Dorothy hinted at, but it’s a lie!”
“We don’t think that,” Constance said. “We don’t know if that incident with the bicycle means anything, but we have to fill in blanks however and whenever we come across them, and that’s a blank.”
Slowly Teresa sank back down to the sofa and cleared her throat. “One day he came to our apartment and asked to speak to me for a minute. I had never met him before and I was suspicious, I guess. He said he wanted to express his gratitude to the little girl who had saved his life, and he thought a bicycle might be appropriate, if I had no objection. He was quiet spoken and, I don’t know, very sad maybe. He looked like a young man who had suffered, and was still suffering.” She paused, then added, “He was kind and gentle, and he was like that when he saw Andrea and told her what he had for her. Kind and gentle. I told him she never had ridden a bicycle, that she didn’t know how. He asked if I minded if he made sure she could handle it, that he didn’t want her to get hurt, to try riding it before she was ready. I went with them and watched him teach her how to ride a bicycle. She was overjoyed, and pretty soon he was laughing with her, running to keep up with her, and he seemed to be enjoying it almost as much as she was. He was a young man, in his twenties, I think, but he was like a boy that day, running and laughing at her side as she pedaled. He bought her ice cream and he wheeled the bike so she could eat it as they came back to where I was waiting. At first she had been shy with him, but she was talking easily by then, as they walked down the block toward me. I could tell that he was different, more serious or something, and really listening to her talk. Most adults don’t really listen to kids. They just pretend, indulge them, but they don’t listen, treat them seriously, but he did. I could see them, see how she must have been prattling, licking ice cream, and how he changed, with his head turned toward her, smiling at first, then more and more serious or something. It made me suspicious again. You know, a stranger giving your little girl presents, paying such attention to her. I was afraid that maybe he really did have something else on his mind. He didn’t stay more than a minute after that. He shook her hand as if she were an adult and said thank you to her. He thanked me, and he got in his car and left.
“I thought about it a lot over the next months, of course, and even kept an eye out for him, in case he came back, and she did too. She wanted him to come back She’d hear a car stop out front and run to the window, but gradually it faded. She stopped talking about him and I stopped worrying. It became just another one of those memories of the past. That’s why, when she asked if he had given her the scholarship, I was surprised and couldn’t say. I simply hadn’t thought about him in years. But I guess he must have done it. I didn’t know anyone else who could have afforded such a gift.”
They stayed for a while longer and learned that after high school Andrea had taken a job clerking in a department store. “She never had a chance to meet Mr. Bainbridge,” her mother said in answer to Charlie’s question. “We moved here to Newton when she was thirteen, she babysat, there was high school, a job. There simply wasn’t time. Then a letter came asking her to verify her identity, and telling her about the scholarship.” She looked down at her hands as she said bitterly, “At first I thought maybe it was from her father. He abandoned us when she was an infant. I thought, maybe hoped, that he’d had a change of heart, wanted to bear some of his responsibility. Wrong. I had his number and called him, but he was drinking, kids crying in the background. I hung up. I never learned who provided the scholarship, or why. Now you say it was Howard Bainbridge because she saved his life. But why would that have caused her to drop out of school the way she did? There must have been something else.”
“That’s one of the things we’re trying to find out,” Constance said. “Thank you, Mrs. March. You’ve been very helpful in filling in some of the details. We appreciate it.”
“If you learn anything more, will you tell me?”
“Absolutely we will,” Constance said.
Teresa pointed to one of the photographs on an end table. “Her high school graduation picture with me,” she said.
In the photograph Andrea was lovely, shorter and more delicate-looking than her mother, with the same big dark eyes and black hair. She was smiling broadly, holding her cap as if ready to fling it into the air.
When they reached the car, Charlie got behind the wheel.
“Two stops,” he said. “A store and then down the road and find a place to eat.”
He bought a deck of cards at the store he drove straight to, told the clerk he didn’t need a bag, and slipped the cards into his pocket. They had lunch and then he started the drive back to Stillwater.
“It’s going to be a long afternoon,” he said. “Hang out at the house as long as necessary. Give Paley a pat on the head and tell him to sit tight or I’ll grind him into meatballs. Sooner or later I’ll meet you back at the gingerbread house.” He sounded morose, contemplating his reception by the sheriff when they finally connected.
Constance laughed. “If I had to pity anyone right now, it would be Sheriff DeLaura.”
He turned a scowling gaze on her and she laughed again.
“You have never been grilled by an arm of the law,” he said.
“I know, dear. Be brave.”
His scowl deepened.
They were both surprised that no media were parked outside the Bainbridge house, and less surprised that neither was Alice’s old Ford.
“I suppose that since the press couldn’t get inside and no one would come out, they decided there was no point in camping out here,” Constance said. “Probably Alice is holding court in town, filling in ghastly details about the Bainbridge curse.”
He grunted. There was a sheriff’s car parked at the house.
It turned out to be a deputy, not the sheriff himself, who stood in their way inside the door.
“Meiklejohn?” he said. He didn’t wait for an answer. “Sheriff wants you downtown. Let’s go.”
Charlie shrugged. “See you later, honey,” he said and left with the deputy.
As soon as the door closed behind them, Tricia and the others came from various rooms to surround Constance. They all looked to be in a state of shock.
“Where have you been?” Lawrence demanded. “Do you know what’s going on?”
