Remember Me

by Mary Higgins Clark

  Once again Menley felt the perspiration drenching her body. She began to shiver. She pressed her hands on her legs to control the trembling spasms of her limbs.

  Adam glanced at her. “Oh my God.” They were approaching a rest stop. He pulled into it, braked the car and turned to wrap his arms around her. “It’s okay, sweetheart. It’s okay.”

  In the backseat, Hannah began to wail.

  Bobby wailing. “Mommy, Mommy.”

  Hannah wailing . . .

  “Make her stop!” Menley screamed. “Make her stop!”

  7

  It was quarter of twelve, Elaine realized, glancing at the dashboard clock. Adam and Menley should be arriving any minute, and she wanted to check the house before they got there to make sure everything was in order. One of the services she offered her clients was that a rental property would be thoroughly cleaned before and after a tenancy. She pressed her foot more firmly on the accelerator. She was running late because of attending the funeral service for Vivian Carpenter Covey.

  Impulsively, she stopped at the supermarket.

  I’ll pick up some of the smoked salmon that Adam loves, she thought. It would go nicely with the bottle of chilled champagne she always left for high-ticket clients. Then she could just scribble a welcoming note and be out of the house before they arrived.

  The overcast morning had evolved into a splendid day, sunny, in the mid-seventies, sparkling clear. Elaine reached up, opened the sunroof and thought about what she had told the television reporter. As the funeral cortege was preparing to leave the church, she had noticed him stopping people at random to ask for comments. Deliberately, she’d gone over to him.

  “May I say something?”

  She’d looked into the camera squarely. “I’m Elaine Atkins. I sold Vivian Carpenter her home in Chatham three years ago, and the day before her death I was showing larger places to her and her husband. They were very happy and planning to start a family. What has happened is a tragedy, not a mystery. I think the people who are spreading ugly rumors about Mr. Covey should just check to see how many people there were in boats that day who hadn’t heard the Coast Guard warning and were nearly swamped when the squall hit.”

  The memory brought a satisfied smile. She was sure Scott Covey had been watching from inside the limo.

  She drove past the lighthouse to the Quitnesset section of Morris Island, down past the Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge; she turned onto Awarks Trail, then veered onto the private road that led to Remember House. When she rounded the bend, and the place came into view, she tried to imagine Menley’s reaction upon seeing it for the first time.

  Larger and more graceful than much of the architecture of the early eighteenth century, it stood as a tribute to the love Captain Andrew Freeman had initially felt for his young bride. With its starkly beautiful lines, and perched as it was on the bluff, it made a majestic silhouette against the background of sky and sea. Morning glories and holly berries vied with wild roses to splash color throughout the property. Locust trees and oaks, heavy with age, offered oases of shade from the brilliant sunshine.

  The paved driveway led from the side of the house to the parking area behind the kitchen. Elaine frowned as Carrie Bell’s van came into view. Carrie was an excellent cleaning woman, but she was always late. She should have been out of there by now.

  Elaine found Carrie in the kitchen, her purse under her arm. Her thin, strong-featured face was pale. When she spoke, her voice, always a shade too loud, was rushed and subdued. “Oh, Miss Atkins. I know I’m a little behind, but I had to drop Tommy off at my mother’s. Everything’s shipshape, but let me tell you I’m glad to be getting out of here.”

  “What’s wrong?” Elaine asked quickly.

  “I got the fright of my life,” Carrie said, her voice still tremulous. “I was in the dining room when I was sure I heard footsteps upstairs. I thought you might have come in so I called out to you. When nobody answered, I went up to take a look. Miss Atkins, you know that antique cradle that’s in the bedroom with the single bed and crib?”

  “Of course I know it.”

  Carrie’s face went a shade paler. She clutched Elaine’s arm. “Miss Atkins, the windows were closed. There was absolutely no breeze. But the spread on the bed was a little wrinkled, the way it would be if someone was sitting on it. And the cradle was moving. Someone I couldn’t see was sitting on the side of that bed, rocking the cradle!”

  “Now, Carrie, you’ve just heard those silly stories people made up about this house when it was abandoned,” Elaine told her. “Those old floors are uneven. If that cradle was moving, it’s because you’re so heavy footed and probably stepped on a loose board.”

  From behind she could hear the sound of a car coming up the driveway. Adam and his family were here. “The whole idea is ridiculous,” she said sternly. “Don’t you dare say a word about that to the Nicholses,” she warned, turning to watch as Adam and Menley got out of the station wagon. She knew her warning was pointless, however—Carrie Bell would share that story with everyone she met.

  8

  Nathaniel Coogan had been on the Chatham police force for eighteen years. A Brooklyn native, Nat had been attending John Jay College in Manhattan, working toward a degree in criminal science, when he met his wife, a lifelong resident of Hyannis. Deb had no interest in living in New York, so after graduation he had willingly applied for a job in police work on the Cape. Now a detective and the forty-year-old father of two teenage sons, he was one of those rare birds, an easygoing, happy man, content with his family and job, his only major concern being the unwanted fifteen or so pounds his wife’s excellent cooking had added to his already ample frame.

  Earlier that day, however, another concern had surfaced. Actually it had been bothering him for some time. Nat knew that his boss, Chief of Police Frank Shea, firmly believed that Vivian Carpenter Covey’s death had been an accident. “We had two other near-drownings that day,” Frank pointed out. “It was Vivian Carpenter’s boat. She knew those waters better than her husband did. If anyone should have thought to turn on the radio, she was the one.” Still it bothered Nat, and like a dog worrying a bone, he was unwilling to let go until his suspicions were justified or put to rest.

  That morning, Nat had gotten into the office early and studied the autopsy pictures the ME had sent from Boston. Even though he had long ago taught himself to be clinically objective about the photographs of victims, the sight of the slender body—or what was left of it—swollen with water, mangled by fish bites, hit him like a dentist’s drill on an exposed nerve. Murder victim or accident victim? Which was it?

  At nine o’clock he went into Frank’s office and asked to be assigned to the case. “I really want to stay on it. It’s important.”

  “One of your hunches?” Shea asked.

  “Yep.”

  “I think you’re wrong, but it won’t hurt to be thorough. Go ahead.”

  At ten Nat was at the memorial service. No eulogy for the poor kid, he thought. What did the stony faces of Vivian Carpenter’s parents and sisters hide? Grief that it was noblesse oblige to conceal from prying eyes? Anger at a senseless tragedy? Guilt? The media had written plenty about Vivian Carpenter’s forlorn history. It was nothing like that of her older sisters, one of them a surgeon, one a diplomat, both suitably married, whereas Vivian, thrown out of boarding school for smoking pot, later became a college dropout. Although she didn’t need the money, when she moved to the Cape she took a job, then gave it up, something she would do a half-dozen times.

  Scott Covey sat alone in the first pew, weeping through the service. He looks the way I’d feel if something happened to Deb, Nat Coogan thought. Almost convinced that he was barking up the wrong tree, he left the church at the end of the service, then hung around outside to pick up the remarks people were making.

  They made good listening. “Poor Vivian. I’m so sorry for her, but she kind of wore you out, didn’t she?”

  The middle-aged woman who had
been addressed sighed. “I know. She could never just relax.”

  Nat remembered that Covey had said that he had unsuccessfully urged his wife to keep napping while he went scuba diving.

  A television reporter was rounding up people to tape. Nat watched as an attractive blond woman went to the reporter on her own. He recognized her, Elaine Atkins, the real estate agent. He sidled over to hear her comments.

  When she was finished, Nat jotted down a note. Elaine Atkins said that the Coveys had been looking for a new house and were planning to start a family. She seemed to know them reasonably well. He decided he would have to talk to Miss Atkins himself.

  When he got back to the office, he took out the autopsy pictures again, trying to figure out what it was that bothered him about them.

  9

  Mently wiggled from under Adam’s arm and moved quietly to her side of the bed. He half murmured her name but did not awaken. She got up, slipped on her robe and looked down at him, a smile tugging at her lips.

  The dynamic criminal lawyer who could sway juries with his rhetoric looked utterly defenseless in sleep. He was lying on his side, his head pillowed on one arm. His hair was tousled, the patches of gray more apparent, the faint beginning of a tonsure clearly visible.

  The room was chilly, so Menley leaned down and drew the blanket over his shoulders, brushing her lips against his forehead. On her twenty-fifth birthday she’d decided that she’d probably never find anyone she wanted to marry. Two weeks later, she’d met Adam on an ocean liner, the Sagafjord. The ship was making a round-the-world tour, and because she had written extensively about the Far East, Menley had been invited to lecture on the leg between Bali and Singapore.

  On the second day out, Adam had stopped by her deck chair to chat. He’d been taking depositions in Australia and impulsively signed up for the same leg of the voyage. “Great stops along the way, and I can use a week’s vacation,” he’d explained. By the end of that day, she had realized that Adam was the reason she’d broken her engagement three years earlier.

  It had been different for him. He’d fallen in love with her gradually, over the course of the next year. Menley sometimes wondered whether she would ever have heard from him again if they hadn’t lived three blocks apart in Manhattan.

  It helped that they had some important things in common. Both were active New Yorkers and each was passionate about Manhattan, although they had been raised in distinctly different worlds. Adam’s family had a Park Avenue duplex, and he’d gone to Collegiate. She had been brought up in Stuyvesant Town, on Fourteenth Street, where her mother still lived, and she had attended the local parochial schools. But by coincidence they both had graduated from Georgetown University, although eight years apart. They both loved the ocean, and Adam had spent his summers on Cape Cod, while she had gone swimming on day trips to Jones Beach.

  When they started dating it was obvious to Menley that at thirty-two Adam was very content with his bachelor life. And why not? He was a successful defense attorney. He had a handsome apartment; a string of girlfriends. Sometimes weeks would go by between his calls.

  When he had proposed, Menley suspected that it had something to do with his approaching thirty-third birthday. She didn’t care. When they were married something her grandmother had told her years before echoed in her ears: “In marriage, one often is more in love than the other. It’s better if the woman is the one who doesn’t love as deeply.”

  Why is it better? Menley had wondered, and asked herself again as she looked at him sleeping so peacefully. What’s wrong with being the one who loves the most?

  It was seven o’clock. The strong sunlight was forcing its way into the room around the edges of the drawn shades. The spacious room was simply furnished with a four-poster, a two-on-three dresser, an armoire, a night table and a straight-backed chair. All the pieces were obviously authentic. Elaine had told her that just before Mr. Paley died, he and his wife had been going to auctions to collect early-eighteenth-century furniture.

  Menley loved the fact that each of the bedrooms had a fireplace, although they were unlikely to need them in August. The room next to theirs was small, but it seemed perfect for the baby. Menley wrapped the robe around her more tightly as she stepped into the hall.

  When she opened the door to Hannah’s room, a brisk breeze greeted her. I should have covered her with a quilt, Menley thought, dismayed at her omission. They’d looked in on the baby at eleven when they went to bed, debated about the quilt, then decided it wasn’t necessary. Obviously it had gotten much cooler than expected during the night.

  Menley hurried over to the crib. Hannah was sleeping soundly; the quilt was tucked securely around her. Surely I couldn’t have forgotten coming in during the night, Menley thought. Who covered her?

  Then she felt foolish. Adam must have gotten up and looked in on the baby, although it was something that rarely happened, since he was a heavy sleeper. Or I might have come in myself, she realized. The doctors had prescribed a bedtime sedative that made her terribly groggy.

  She wanted to kiss Hannah but knew if she did she risked instant awakening. “See you later, babe,” she whispered. “I need a peaceful cup of coffee first.”

  At the bottom of the staircase she paused, suddenly aware of the rapid beating of her heart, of a sensation of overwhelming sadness. The thought leaped into her head: I’m going to lose Hannah too. No! No! That’s ridiculous, she told herself fiercely. Why even think like that?

  She went into the kitchen and put the coffee on to perk. Ten minutes later, a steaming cup in her hand, she stood in the front parlor, looking out at the Atlantic Ocean as the sun rose higher in the sky.

  The house faced Monomoy Strip, the narrow sandbar between ocean and bay that Menley had been told was the scene of countless shipwrecks. A few years ago the ocean had broken through the sandbar; Adam had pointed out where houses had tumbled into the sea. But Remember House, he assured her, was set far enough back so that it would always be safe.

  Menley watched as the ocean charged against the sandbar, spraying fountains of salt-filled mist into the air. Sunbeams danced on the whitecaps. The horizon was already dotted with fishing boats. She opened the window and listened to the hawking of the gulls, the thin, noisy chirping of the sparrows.

  Smiling, she turned from the window. After three days she felt comfortably settled here. She walked from room to room, planning what she would do if she were decorating them. The master bedroom contained the only authentic furniture. Most of the furnishings in the other rooms were the kind people put in homes that they are planning to rent—inexpensive couches, Formica tables, lamps that looked like they might have been purchased at a garage sale. But the deacon’s bench, now painted a garish green, could be sanded down and refinished. She ran her hand over it, imagining the velvety walnut grain.

  The Paleys had done massive structural repairs to the building. There was a new roof, new plumbing, new wiring, a new heating system. A lot of cosmetic work remained to be done—faded wallpaper in a jarring modern design was an eyesore in the dining room; dropped acoustical ceilings destroyed the noble height of the parlors and library—but none of those things mattered. The house itself was the important thing. It would be a joy to complete the restoration. There was a double parlor, for example—if she owned the house, she’d use one of them as a den. Later on Hannah and her friends would enjoy having a gathering place.

  She ran her fingers over the minister’s cabinet that was built into the wall next to the fireplace. She’d heard the stories of the early settlers and how a little glass of spirits was offered to the minister when he came to call. The poor man probably needed it, she thought. In those days there was rarely a fire laid in parlors. The ordained must have been blue with cold.

  Early Cape families lived in the keeping room, as the kitchen was called, the room where the great fireplace gave warmth, where the air was inviting with the aroma of cooking, where children did their school-work by candlelight on the refectory
table, where the family passed the long winter evenings together. She wondered about the generations of families who had replaced the original ill-fated owners here.

  She heard footsteps on the stairs and went into the foyer. Adam was coming down, Hannah in his arms. “Who says I don’t hear her when she cries?” He sounded very pleased with himself. “She’s changed and hungry.”

  Menley reached for the baby. “Give her to me. Isn’t it wonderful to have her to ourselves with only a part-time baby-sitter? If Elaine’s future stepdaughter is half as good a sitter as she’s supposed to be, we’ll have a terrific summer.”

  “What time is she coming?”

  “Around ten, I think.”

  * * *

  At exactly ten o’clock, a small, blue car pulled into the driveway. Menley watched Amy as she came up the walk, noting her slim figure, her long ash blond hair clipped into a ponytail. It struck Menley that there was something aggressive about the girl’s posture, the way her hands were jammed into the pockets of her cutoffs, the belligerent thrust of her shoulders.

  “I don’t know,” Menley murmured as she went to open the door.

  Adam looked up from the office work he had spread out on the table. “You don’t know what?”

  “Ssh,” Menley cautioned.