At this distance from the porch I couldn’t make out details of the facial structure of the body, but I was fairly sure the victim wasn’t old Sam. The Fergusons had had their boys a little older than most parents of that time, and were probably now close to eighty years old. The dead man seemed much younger, around the twins’ age.
I felt Maddie shudder and rubbed her arm. I wished I could protect her from anything that brought her shivers, but I felt my duty was to stay at the scene.
What if Sam and Lillian were at home, a few yards away, injured or dead? As much as I wanted to go through the gate, at least to check on them, I felt glued to my spot, with no choice but to wait until Skip arrived. What few passersby I saw were on the other side of the street, and none of them seemed old enough for me to enlist for crime scene inspection.
The teens had gone into a huddle. Not a good sign, in my vast experience with adolescents. I needed to maintain some control over them.
“I’m Mrs. Porter, from the high school,” I said, approaching the group. I didn’t bother to amend the statement to include the fact of my retirement several years ago. “Is everyone okay here?”
Two of the girls remained silent, moving their thumbs with great speed over a tiny keyboard on their cell phones. The others answered me with murmurings of “I guess” and “Kinda.”
“I have some water in my car if anyone needs it,” I said. The suggestion spurred no verbal response, but several bottles of water appeared from their backpacks. “I called the police and they’ll be here any minute,” I continued. “I’m sure they’ll want to talk to each of you.”
“No way,” one boy said, and he and the girl who’d been clinging to him rushed off toward Hanks Road before I could convince them otherwise or even get their names.
Bad start. To contain the remaining four teens, I’d need my strongest teacher voice. “Now, listen to me, please. By all accounts, this was not a death by natural causes, and you can all be considered witnesses after the fact. You can’t run away from that.” (Sad to say, it wasn’t the first time I’d made up an official-sounding phrase to fool a group of freshmen.)
“I have to get home. My mom will be totally worried,” said the girl who’d screamed. I sympathized with her sudden need for her mother’s comfort, but I had a job to do as an unofficial representative of the Lincoln Point Police Department.
“You can call her and explain that you’ll be home very soon. I’m sure you’ll be able to get a ride home in a police car, in fact.”
“Cool,” said one boy. An ally, as I’d hoped for, and one who used an old-fashioned word, I noted.
“Colin!” said more than one of his companions, with accusatory looks.
“What if the dude just killed himself? That’s not a crime, is it?” Colin asked, turning to me.
It was not the time to voice my opinion, but I’d always thought it strange that attempted suicide was a felony in some states. As for successful suicide, well, it was a moot point from the point of view of the victim. “Only the police will be able to tell us for sure,” I said. I sounded lame even to myself, but so far no one else was moving away.
I was aware of Maddie’s arm, linked into mine, but otherwise, she remained in the background. I’d deliberately taken a position facing the corpse so the youngsters would be looking at me, in the opposite direction. Even so, all their faces had pinched and serious expressions.
The twinkling lights that decorated the lawns and porches of the other houses on the darkening Sangamon River Road took on a more eerie look than even their owners had intended, I was sure. A light breeze swept through the neighborhood and I had the sensation that all the filmy ghosts and stiff bats had come alive for a moment and blew out a breath or fluttered their wings.
I took a breath myself, then got back to matters at hand. I pulled a notebook and pen from my large purse, working my way around glue sticks, tweezers, a sewing kit, and a miniature set of knives I’d forgotten to unload after a shopping trip.
“To speed things up, let me take your names and addresses,” I said, as if it were attendance time on a normal day in homeroom.
They responded well, straightening up and preparing to identify themselves, leading me to believe that my guess was correct—they were freshmen, and therefore malleable.
“Ashley Gordon, Two-two-one Lee Street,” said the screamer, shivering in a long-sleeved red T-shirt with stamps of the great landmarks of Europe. I took off my unfashionable Irish knit cardigan and put it on Ashley’s slight shoulders. She gave me a weak smile of gratitude as she pulled it up past her chin. Thin as I was, my hip-length sweater reached beyond the petite girl’s knees.
“Chelsea Sheridan,” said a heavy girl with equally heavy makeup in a semi-Goth style. “I live on Merrimac, and I didn’t see anything.”
“Sometimes we’re not aware of what our brains pick up at a time like this, Chelsea,” I said, in the best Detective Skip Gowen tradition.
“It’s true,” Maddie said, surprising me. She’d had to let go of my arm as I transferred my sweater to Ashley, and now she was ready to stand on her own. “Wait till my uncle gets here and starts asking questions. You’ll be smarter than you think.”
I wished Skip, who was in fact not Maddie’s uncle, but her first cousin once-removed, had been present to hear her. The two had had an unbreakable mutual admiration society going since Maddie was born.
I reinforced Maddie’s words. “You might have picked up on a detail you didn’t think was important but could be a major clue in the case.”
Chelsea’s face brightened, her cheeks puffing up. The ego of a freshman was no smaller than the ego of a senior.
“I’m Rob Wellington,” said the fourth and last teen to speak, through a mouthful of braces. “I saw a boy on a bike at the other end of the street just before we got here.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Chelsea said. I had the feeling it wasn’t the first time she’d put Rob in his place.
Rob countered. “He was riding really fast and he didn’t have any lights on.”
Chelsea screwed up her nose and made a gesture of dismissal with her hand. “So?” she asked.
“I still think it could be suicide. The gun is right there in his hand. Just look,” said Colin, who did not turn to look. I made a note: Colin was the boy who’d gotten closest to the corpse and had testified to the bullet hole and the gun in the victim’s hand. “Oh, I’m Colin McKeon,” he said. “I didn’t touch anything.”
I didn’t doubt him for a minute.
“And your friends who ran off?” I asked. “Who are they?” I made it sound as though they’d be considered fugitives, finally captured and sitting outside the principal’s office on Monday, while the four exemplary students who’d stayed behind would be honored and applauded at the next school-wide assembly.
They looked at each other. To tell or not to tell?
“Garrett Cox and Amber Frederich,” blurted Ashley.
I made a show of writing down the information, flicking my wrist after an imaginary exclamation point. “Were any of you here on Sangamon recently, before this evening?” I asked.
“We came by the other night, but not all the decorations were ready yet,” Chelsea said.
“Old Sam was still wiring things up,” Rob said. He pointed over his shoulder, not venturing another look at the scene. I was glad of that.
“Did you talk to Mr. Ferguson?” I asked, looking from one to the other, pen still poised over my notepad.
“We just waved,” Colin said. His hands were in the pockets of his sweatshirt, and I thought I caught him stifling a shiver.
“Me and my boyfriend, Noah, came by again today,” Ashley said, testing my patience with her grammar.
“What time?”
“Lunchtime. We have open campus on Fridays and then we have study hall so we rode our bikes over here.”
“Did you look at this house?”
“Uh-huh. It was normal. I mean the straw man was there and jumped around the way he was supposed to. That’s not Mr. Ferguson with the . . .”—Ashley touched her forehead—“on the porch. That man is younger,” she offered, long after the fact.
“I know it’s hard to think about, but just from your brief glimpse, does the man on the steps look like anyone you know, Ashley? You were the first to see him.” She shook her head. Once again, I scanned each of the teenagers. “Does anyone here recognize him?”
No, no, and no. The two girls picked up their backpacks. I sensed I was losing them, and I couldn’t think of another reasonable question.
An unmarked sedan that I recognized as belonging to the LPPD pulled up behind me. I turned and saw two other LPPD vehicles arriving also.
Leave it to my nephew and his buddies to show up in the nick of time.
Uniformed officers and crime scene technicians, who’d
followed Skip to the location, entered the Fergusons’ home. They wasted no time waiting for a doorbell to be answered. I assumed this fell under the guideline of “exigent circumstances” and the need to check for evidence or additional victims. I felt a little guilty that I hadn’t made an effort to do that myself, but Skip assured me otherwise.
“You did good, Aunt Gerry,” he said, as the crime scene technicians took over. “It was important to keep the kids here.” He leaned down and kissed Maddie’s forehead. “And I hear you were a great partner,” he told her. When their heads touched, it was hard to tell where one thicket of red hair ended and the other began, except that Maddie’s was curlier.
After administering that compliment, Skip sent Maddie into the care of a female officer I recognized from my trips through the halls of the police department. I expected instant bonding since Maddie made friends easily, and especially with law enforcement. I checked back and saw the two were sitting in the patrol car, engaged in conversation that seemed to involve an examination of the bells and whistles of the vehicle. I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear the siren soon and see the lights flash. My granddaughter had negotiating skills far beyond her years.
So far, no neighbors had made themselves known. With all the special lighting, it was nearly impossible to tell which houses were occupied this evening. It was a little too early for returning commuters, and perhaps those who did hear the activity thought the Fergusons had enlisted the LPPD to be part of their contest entry this year.
We all breathed sighs of relief when we learned that there was no one at home, neither alive nor dead, inside the Ferguson residence.
Skip’s interviews with the teenagers, though brief, was painful to witness. He took each frightened teen, gently, one by one, as close to the body as possible until he determined that they were all sure they didn’t know the man. Then he took their phone numbers (I’d forgotten about that) and the addresses I’d missed and sent them off feeling relieved and important.
When it was my turn to approach the dead man, I took my time and looked (gulping) not only at his body but around the porch, thinking something might jog my memory about the victim or about the Fergusons. When had I last seen any of the family? I recalled that Lillian attended a miniatures show I organized and bought a dollhouse. It had been almost a year ago, but I remembered the enormous Victorian being carried out of the school hall by her twin boys. I hadn’t seen Sam to talk to in a while.
I looked at the position of the gun, still in the victim’s hand. I hoped the LPPD could do some magic or trigonometry (which amounted to the same thing to my math-challenged brain) and determine whether the man could have killed himself.
Everything on the porch seemed related to Halloween, from the stubby orange battery-operated candles to the fake hay strewn around the floorboards. The two-seater metal swing held rag dolls dressed to look like farmers and farmers’ wives and children. Although they were the size of regular toddlers’ dolls, I had to resist the temptation to poke them to verify that they were indeed dolls and not more, if tiny, victims.
I walked past the body again, holding my breath all the way. Nothing came to me. Back on the sidewalk, when I finally exhaled, a wave of exhaustion washed over me. My stomach felt nauseous, as if I’d eaten a whole bowl of the chocolate candy.
“It’s going to be hard for you to get an investigation going with no identification of the victim,” I said to Skip.
“Oh, we know who he is,” he said. “The techs gave me his wallet right away. His name is Oliver Halbert. He’s a building inspector with the city, lives in an apartment right around the corner on Hanks. Has a wife and two daughters, if you can go by the photographs he was carrying.”
I grunted in surprise. “If you already had all that information, why did you put those children though that dreadful rigmarole?”
Skip slapped his notebook against his hand. “For one thing, it tells me something about the kids, who, after all, were at the crime scene. For another—well, you never know what you can learn even when you think you already know it.”
Words of wisdom, widely applicable, I thought.
Maddie got out of the patrol car when she saw me back on the sidewalk. Her face had gotten more and more drawn and pale. “Maddie and I have things to do,” I told Skip. “Can we go? You know where to find us.”
Skip’s “sure” was hardly out of his mouth before Maddie headed for my car. A far cry from normal, when Maddie would be clinging to her uncle Skip, offering to help him, and suggesting that she ride home in a patrol car for safety.
Maybe her oft-expressed desire to follow in his footsteps had been squelched at last. Not that I wasn’t proud of Skip and his career, but his mother and I both would have preferred not to worry every time he left for work.
If being this close to a corpse was enough to dissuade Maddie from a profession that involved a gun, maybe it was fortuitous that we’d come by when we did.
A call to Maddie’s parents when we arrived home was
our first order of business. I listened to Maddie’s end of the conversation, her tone alternating between matter-of-fact and excited. I could tell she was trying to sound casual, lest she be summoned home, away from the action.