The elegant old woman looked around the room as if searching for a polite response to my half-muttered questions. “Would you care for a cup of tea?” she said finally.
I was exhausted from the flood of memories, my mind hazy with the drug. “Would coffee be too much trouble?”
“Not at all.” The woman hesitated. “I would have to go into the kitchen, though.”
“Go anywhere you like. It’s your house.”
She started across the foyer—then pulled up short, wary, as I rose from my chair.
“I thought I would come in with you,” I told her. “So we can talk while you make coffee. You don’t have to be afraid of me. Really.”
“Of course not. Come this way.”
She started walking again, turning on lights as she went. I followed her down a hall into the kitchen. It was a broad, bright country kitchen: white walls, wooden floors, and a big gray granite-topped island in the center. I sat at one of the tall stools by the island. I watched her as she moved with womanly briskness and efficiency from cupboard to counter to sink. She was eighty if she was a day but there was a vitality and sureness to her movements you don’t see all that often, even in much younger people. I admired her. She was sort of like one of those antiques you look at and think, They don’t make them like that anymore.
“So ask your questions, Detective Champion,” she said—at the sink, running water into a china pitcher, her back to me.
“Inspector. You can call me Dan—although somehow I don’t think you will.”
She showed me just enough of her face to let me see her small answering smile.
“I’m sorry I had to break in, Mrs. Longstreet,” I said. “I wanted to make sure I wasn’t being followed. There are some bad people after me and I didn’t want them to see me talking to you.”
“Well, that was very thoughtful of you. Though really, I suppose, if they were going to bother me, they’d have done it a long time ago. They haven’t much reason to trouble themselves. I don’t really know very much—nothing that can hurt them anyway.” The pitcher full, she carried it across the counter. She poured some water into a coffeemaker and some more into an electric kettle, speaking as she did. “On the other hand, they seem to have given
you
quite a working over.”
I raised my bruised hand to touch the gash on my cheek. “We had some areas of disagreement.”
“Yes, I imagine you did.” She set the coffeemaker and the kettle working. Then she faced me, leaning her back against the counter. She fiddled with a little silver cross she wore on a plain steel chain around her neck. “In any case . . . your questions.”
“Thank you,” I said. “According to the archives of the local paper, your late husband, Adam Longstreet, was the coroner here thirty years ago.”
Mrs. Longstreet shuddered, glancing away. “I can’t bear to look at those old papers. I can’t bear to see his name in them.”
“He declared Sadie Trader dead. Said she died in the fire at her house.”
“Yes. Yes, he did.”
“But she didn’t die, did she?” I said.
“No,” said Mrs. Longstreet flatly. “She did not. As, of course, you know.”
She gave me a bland, patrician look. I didn’t think she was going to stonewall me. She had already spoken to Samantha. And anyway, I could see she had been raised in the old way, to respect the virtues, honesty among them. But she had been raised to dignity as well, and she didn’t want to feel she was being interrogated.
So I said, “You know, I remember him, I think. Your husband.” And when I saw her widen her eyes, properly startled, I went on, “It’s possible I just imagined it after the fact, but I really think I do. I think he showed up at the house while they were still fighting the fire. Samantha and I were still there on the front lawn and I think he showed up just as they were carrying the Fat Woman—Trader—out to the ambulance.”
“That would make sense,” she murmured, impressed. “He did go out to the scene that night. Well, of course, he was the only doctor in town.”
The kettle snapped off automatically, drawing her back to her work. She turned away from me, rooting briskly in the cupboards for coffee mugs and drawing a tea bag out of a glass jar.
“If it
was
him,” I said, “I overheard him talking to . . . the police chief, I guess it was.”
She set the tea bag in its mug, poured the water, poured the coffee. “Yes, Bob Finch,” she said. “He died five years ago.”
I watched her hands as she worked. They were swift and expert but quavery with age—or maybe with grief, I don’t know. They were quavery with something.
“I remember your husband told the chief, ‘I want those children taken someplace safe. I’m going to check on it. This ends tonight.’”
She paused, the coffeepot in her hand. She seemed about to glance over her shoulder at me, but she didn’t. She kept her face turned away. “Did he really say that? ‘This ends tonight?’ You’re not just telling me that?”
“That’s the way I remember it.”
She sniffed and set the pot back in the coffeemaker. Paused thoughtfully and looked at it there a moment. “Well. That’s something, I suppose.” She came to the granite island, carrying the two mugs. Set one in front of me. Her eyes were not as guarded now. “Milk and sugar, Inspector?”
“No, thanks. I take it black.”
“Of course. What was I thinking? Tough-guy detectives don’t use milk or sugar.”
“It’s bad for business if it gets around.”
She smiled—kind of sweetly, I thought. Like her grandchild had said something cute. Then she perched herself on a stool across from me, warming her hands on her mug of tea, blowing on the surface of it.
“Poor Adam,” she said after a moment. “He wanted so much to be a good man. He really did. I think he would have been too, except for the alcohol. I’m not making any excuses for him, mind. Or for me. But drink does take the soul out of a person. Literally. It wraps itself around him like strangling vines and chokes the image of God right out of him. I believe that. I saw it happen with my own eyes.” She drank, looking over her mug at me. “You might want to remember that, by the way, the next time you take a dose of whatever it is
you’re
on.”
I gave a short laugh. “I took a drug to help me remember,” I said. She was the sort of woman who made you feel you ought to explain yourself. “Now that I do remember, I’ll get off it.”
“Mm.”
Properly reprimanded, I sipped my coffee. It was strong, solid, no-nonsense stuff, appropriate to the woman.
“In any case,” she went on, “my powers to save Adam were limited. And
her
powers . . . her money . . .”
“The Fat Woman, you mean. Sadie Trader.”
“She corrupted everybody. Absolutely everybody. I don’t imagine there were ten people in that town who didn’t know what was going on—or who couldn’t at least have found out if they’d wanted to or allowed themselves to. That was her trick, you see. Her secret. She made it so you didn’t
have
to see. You didn’t have to know unless you wanted to, unless you made the effort—and who would? All you had to do was look away and take the money—or the investment or the job or the donation or whatever it was you needed from her. And that was how the town thrived—on her money. Her ill-gotten wealth. That was why, when it was over, and the new highway came, it was so easy for all of us to just leave the old places behind and go on to the new homes and stores we’d already built in the better locations. I suppose we were trying to move away from what we knew, but of course that was foolish. We took it with us. In some way, this whole town is still hers, Inspector Champion. This whole town is built on what we never admitted to ourselves. What we never saw happening right in front of us—but what we knew nevertheless, every single one of us.”
I had been raising my coffee mug again but paused with my hand half-lifted. “There must’ve been . . . To declare her dead like that. To make it stick. It must’ve taken so many people.”
Mrs. Longstreet lifted her slender shoulders. “Not so many really. My husband was the only doctor, as I say. For miles and miles. We were in the middle of nowhere then. Bob Finch and the rest of the police, of course, had to protect themselves . . . As I say, everyone was involved. By the time they got her to the hospital in Sawnee, they had given her a false name. She had prepared for that. She had any number of aliases ready, complete with social security numbers and so on. Not surprising, when you think about it. All those children who disappeared. All those little souls who fell into her clutches. Then my husband or Bob made up some story about her . . . There was another woman in the Trader house who had survived the fire . . . Something like that. Adam never told me the details, and I never made much of an effort to find them out. But it was all apparently much simpler than you would think.” She drew a long, unsteady breath of steam. “My husband always insisted he only went along with it to insure your safety—protecting the police in return for making sure you and the little girl would be taken care of. But of course . . .”
“. . . it protected him too.”
“Yes. And me. All of us.”
I brought the mug the rest of the way to my lips—and froze again, just holding the mug there, not drinking, feeling the heat of the coffee on my face, my mind three decades away.
“I remember her hand moving,” I murmured.
Mrs. Longstreet observed me from her critical height.
“No, I do,” I said. “On the stretcher. As they were taking her to the ambulance. I remember seeing her lift her finger. I didn’t tell Samantha. Samantha was crying and she kept saying, ‘She’s dead, she’s dead, she can’t hurt us anymore.’ I wanted her to go on believing that. So she wouldn’t be afraid.”
“Of course.”
“But I saw her finger move. That’s how I knew. All this time—I knew she was alive, I knew she was still out there somewhere, still in the wind. That’s why I was hunting her. Without even knowing it. I didn’t remember, but I knew.”
For a long while after that, we both sat there without speaking, both of us holding our mugs on the counter, both of us gazing distractedly into space, into our own thoughts and memories.
“If it’s any consolation,” Mrs. Longstreet said finally, “it finished him—my husband. That night—it killed him as surely as a bullet. The drinking after that—it became outrageous. Truly, it beggared belief. It only took him a year to make an end of it.” She frowned. “I felt that very deeply. If
that’s
any consolation. I took his death—his suicide really—as a personal failure. I suppose it sounds horribly old-fashioned now, but I had tried to make a better man of him. I felt it was my duty as his wife. We still did that then in these backward parts.” She shook her head at something I couldn’t see. A strand of silver hair fell across her brow. She lifted a finger and set it back in place—an unconscious gesture, girlish and appealing. “I did always intend to make it right, you know. To tell someone. The state police. Or some newspaper somewhere. Somehow, there were always so many . . . considerations. Loyalty to my husband. Just . . . the
number
of people involved. One wondered sometimes if one even had the
right
to clear one’s conscience at the expense of so many other people. Especially after they became old and were sick and suffering, so many of them. Most of them are gone now—the key players . . .” Her hand rose absently to touch the silver cross at her throat. “And so the days go by . . .”
With a sharp intake of breath, she came back from whatever distant place she’d been, and I came back, as far as I could. She sipped her tea. She smiled very faintly, a sad smile. I remembered when I’d been sitting in the house alone, waiting for her, how the house had seemed to have a personality: dignified and self-possessed and melancholy with time. It was her personality, I realized now.
“And here we are,” she said.
“Here we are.”
She cocked her head a little and regarded me in what I thought was an odd sort of way, inward and distant. “So then . . . what else?”
“I need her name,” I said. “The alias your husband gave her. I need to know what it is.”
“Oh, I don’t know that,” said Mrs. Longstreet. “I never did. You’ll have to go to the hospital to find it. St. Mary’s.”
“St. Mary’s,” I echoed in a low murmur. I remembered the words scrawled on Samantha’s notes.
“In Sawnee. It was the closest place with a burn unit, where they thought they might be able to help her. They’ll have her alias there. They’ll have everything you’re looking for.”
I shook my head. “A patient’s records. They’re confidential. They won’t give them to me. And it was thirty-one years ago. They might not even have them anymore.”
She smiled at me—a strange smile too, I thought. Gentle, but somehow . . . just strange. “They’ll have them. They’ll give them to you. Trust me. It isn’t far. A hundred miles or so.”
I found myself gazing at her. I felt she was trying to tell me something—that there was something hidden beneath her words. But she spoke again before I could think it through.
“Are you a merciful man, Inspector?” she asked me.
I thought about it. “Not really. More of a justice guy, I think.”