A Penny for Your Thoughts (44 page)

“Nick, stop!”

The voice of Marion Smythe rang out across the water. She stood at the edge of the pool, watching in horror as Nick’s arm pressed more tightly against my throat.

He was startled enough by her appearance that he loosened his grip. I chose that moment to wrench myself away, sprinting from the pool. Feeling him lunge after me, I grabbed for the only thing I could reach—a wrought iron footstool beside the pool—which I lifted and swung around in an arc, catching him sharply on the side of his head.

He went down in a heap, blood spurting from the gash on his head. He was out cold, and for a moment, I was afraid I had killed him.

“No!” Marion yelled, seemingly frozen in place. I knelt down and felt for his pulse, which was strong and regular.

“The towel!” I said. “Hand me that towel!”

After a moment’s hesitation, Marion did as I said. She tossed it to me, and I wadded it up and pressed it against the cut on his head. I held it there firmly, trying to catch my breath, watching Nick for signs of consciousness.

“Call the police,” I barked to Marion, but she remained frozen where she was.

“You have to call,” I said, looking at her.
“Now,
Marion. Nick’s the murderer. He killed your husband.”

She shook her head, whispering softly to herself.

“No,” she said.

“Call them, Marion,” I said. “Then bring me some rope. We’ll tie him up while he’s still unconscious.”

“No.”

“Marion!” I yelled. She seemed to snap back to attention, looking at me, pain in her eyes. “You
have
to call the police! But get me some rope first.”

“Callie,” Marion said softly, shaking her head. “Nick didn’t kill my husband.”

“Yes, he did. And just now he nearly killed me.”

“He was only protecting me. He didn’t kill Wendell.”

“How do you know that?” I demanded.

“Because
I
did it,” Marion said. “I killed my husband.”

Fifty-Two

I sat in the drawing room with the door tightly closed as Angelina tended to Nick on the couch. He had regained consciousness, and the cut on his head had finally stopped bleeding. I knew he would need to see a doctor soon to get stitches and check for a concussion. For
now, he was subdued, his eyes closed, his sister weeping softly as she cleaned the blood from his face and beard.

Marion stood in front of me, holding out the piece of paper that she had sworn would explain it all. I took it from her, noting the wildly shaking fingers and the pale, pale skin of her face.

What she handed me was a suicide note written by Wendell. He had penned it from the hospital bed on Sunday night, the night before he was killed.

My dear family, I write this with a heavy heart, my sorrow so deep I can scarcely find the words to say what I must say. This is my final goodbye, my suicide anthem. I only pray that one day you will all find it in your hearts to forgive me.

I offer no justification for what I am doing, only the hope that you won’t hate me for my actions. Unlike all of you, I witnessed my own mother’s demise this way. In my nightmares, I still hear her screams of pain. I cannot and will not let that happen to me. I am afraid of the suffering that begins tomorrow and will only end in death anyway.

My only regret is all of this business with the company and my disappointment with those responsible. I will make things right, and then I will do what I have to do. But once I’m gone, let this weigh on you, Alan, for the rest of your life: I thought you were a trusted friend and employee, but you broke this dying old man’s heart.

As for you, Marion, I can only ask for your forgiveness for this, the coward’s way out. Surely once the pain of my death has receded, you will understand that it was for the best. You have given me a loving home and family and more wonderful years together than any man has the right to ask for. I love you with all of my heart and always will. Better I die now and leave you with memories of me intact and whole.

Derek, Judith, Sidra, Carlos—I love you. To everyone, I say, God bless you all. You have loved and cared for me for many years, and if the Lord can forgive me for this one final, desperate act, I await that day that we are all joined together again in heaven.

With love and deep affection,

Wendell (Dad and Grandpa)

I looked up, tears filling my eyes. Wendell had been planning to kill himself. He sat in that hospital bed awaiting his operation, knowing it wasn’t going to happen, knowing he would kill himself first, as soon as he finished setting things right in his company.

“Nick went to see Wendell Sunday evening after the rest of us had left the hospital,” Marion said. “When he got there, Wendell gave him this note in a sealed envelope and told him he was to hang onto it until the operation and then give it to me.”

“I didn’t wait,” Nick interjected softly from the couch. “He was so depressed; I was worried.”

“I was worried, too,” Marion added. “That it was a suicide note didn’t really come as a surprise.”

“But Marion—”

“Of course, Nick didn’t know what I would do about it,” Marion continued softly, sitting next to me dry-eyed on the couch. According to her, she spent that night pacing the floor at home, confused and tormented. In the end, she felt she had no choice but to kill Wendell herself.

“I loved him, Callie,” she said simply. “I had to spare him that final act of anguish.”

The next morning, after Wendell checked himself out of the local hospital and headed to the office, Marion got Nick to drive her into Philadelphia as well, ostensibly to shop for a robe and some new pajamas for Wendell’s return to the hospital. She picked a large
department store that was about two miles from Wendell’s office, and she left Nick with the car while she went inside. But rather than shop, she simply walked through the store and out the other side, catching a cab to Wendell’s building.

She had gone up the back stairs, giving Wendell a pleasant surprise when she came in through the bathroom door. They had chatted briefly, lovingly, and then she had offered to give him his morning insulin shot. Once the massive dosage had been given, she quickly kissed him and left him there to die.

When she reached Nick’s waiting car, he had known immediately that something was terribly wrong. Sitting in the car, sobbing, she finally confessed what she had done. Without much thought, Nick drove to the Smythe building and raced up the back stairs, reentering the room where Wendell now lay, dead, on the floor. Very quickly, Nick made sure there was no evidence there to incriminate Marion. He wiped away her fingerprints from all possible surfaces; then, as a red herring, he slid a short blond hair he saw on the floor under Wendell’s shirt. Apparently, it was just pure luck that the hair was Alan’s and that a needle bearing Alan’s fingerprint was in the trash from an insulin dose he had administered to Wendell earlier.

When I had first come into Wendell’s office, Nick was still there in the bathroom, trying to wipe fingerprints away from the sink, counters, and doorknobs. Hearing me, he had bolted, but the fact that he was left-handed had kept him safely to the left side of the stairwell, out of my range of vision, as I chased him down. When he reached the bottom, he simply exited the stairwell, walked to the car that he had left waiting in a loading zone around the side of the building, and drove away. Nick and Marion drove around for about 20 minutes before returning to the Smythe offices. This time, Marion came up on the elevator, acting confused about the presence of emergency personnel and feigning surprise at the news of her husband’s death.

“When I realized you would be investigating the murder,” Marion said to me, “I was worried at first. But then I knew the best way to distract you might be to bring Alan’s crimes to light, since
that was all happening at the same time anyway. I put the records together in a box and locked it in the safe. I knew the time would come when I could show it to you, and that you would take it from there.”

I had bought her story, the day of the funeral, that she had “just discovered” the incriminating papers in Wendell’s safe. As Harriet would say, like a bloodhound on the scent of a grouse, I
had
taken things from there, pursuing Alan with a vengeance. Little had either Marion or I known at the time, of course, that Alan hadn’t finished yet; his subsequent theft and attempted escape had only helped solidify Marion’s plan and my suspicions.

I knew that I had played right into Marion’s hands. Yet, oddly, I wasn’t as angry with her as I was with Nick. When he realized I was coming too close to the truth, he panicked. Loyalty for his beloved friend and employer had made him act out of desperation.

“I was not going to kill you,” he rasped mournfully from his place on the couch. “I just wanted to scare you into keeping quiet.”

I looked over at him, thinking that perhaps I would never know for sure. I was going to let a jury decide that one.

“We had no choice, you see,” Marion said. “Wendell was planning to kill himself. Better I do it for him, Callie. Better I give him one last kiss and then fill him with insulin and let him die from that. Better his death at my hand than at his own.”

“But why?” I asked, struggling to understand.

Marion didn’t reply for a long while.

“Because I loved him,” she said finally, simply. “I didn’t want his life to end in suicide.”

And then I understood. Like gears shifting into place, I realized now that almost the entire family had known the true circumstances of Wendell’s death—or at least had suspected as much. That explained why they didn’t talk about the murder, why they all acted as if he had died of natural causes. Their mother had killed their father to save him from the misery of committing suicide. Somehow, in her mind and maybe theirs, too, the crime was justified.

“You made a big mistake, Marion,” I said, shaking my head. She looked up at me through tear-filled eyes.

“Perhaps,” she whispered. “But I’m still alive. I still have time to atone for my sin.”

“We have to call the police,” I said, reaching for the phone. She placed one trembling, manicured hand over the receiver and looked up at me pleadingly as if willing me to understand.

“Don’t you understand? It doesn’t matter what happens now,” she said. “I don’t care what they do to me. My punishment is living the rest of my life with the memory of what I did.”

“Marion—”

“I loved Wendell so much, Callie,” she said, lifting the receiver and handing it to me. “I loved him enough to kill him.”

Fifty-Three

In the morning, I went to see Judith.

The jail wasn’t nearly as big or intimidating as I had expected. Judith was fortunate that the police were holding her in a county facility rather than the Philadelphia city jail. She was facing charges of theft and fraud, and though I didn’t know what would happen to her eventually, I knew she was in serious trouble. The IRS, for one, was none too happy about her using nonprofit money to fund a for-profit enterprise. I thought she might end up doing some difficult time—or at least end up with community service and some hefty fines—particularly as Alan was now trying to push as much blame as possible from his shoulders to hers. We reap what we sow, I supposed.

There were a few chairs lining the walls of the reception area of the jail, and beyond them a window with inch-thick glass and a uniformed police officer sitting behind it. Speaking into a wire mesh rectangle, I told him I was an attorney here to see Judith Smythe. He
dutifully wrote down her name before pointing to a door where I was to go in and wait.

It was a small room with four chairs around a table and no windows except in the door. I sat, trying to breathe through my mouth, ignoring the strong smell of cleaning ammonia that permeated the room. The table was scratched and scarred but shining, and I set my briefcase on top of it, thinking about all that I had managed to accomplish in the last 12 hours.