T
he rain continued into Thursday morning—wonderful for Mariah’s plants—and with the ground so well soaked, putting in the paths
and edging the next couple of days would go more easily. It was supposed to stay coolish, too, always a blessing for the heavy
work. Things should be substantially finished before I went to the Cape.
I got to Jake’s around 9:30 and we spent about half an hour finalizing our proposal, then headed south. For the occasion he
was wearing the newest-looking plaid shirt I’d ever seen on him, and pants with hardly any spots. I’d reluctantly decided
to wear a skirt again, a different one, with a white peasant blouse that hadn’t been in style for fifteen years, at least.
We looked like we were on our way to a hoedown.
As we turned into the Cutlers’ driveway, my uneasiness about potential second thoughts came rushing back. Would we return
to square one? The quick and easy answer turned out to be no. They’d used their second batch of mulling-over time to come
up with an imposing list of questions, but these all started from the assumption that the project was a go. I’m a sucker for
intelligent questions about my work. An hour or so into things, I upgraded my projection that the Cutlers would be tolerable
clients—I was looking forward to working with them.
We had to have lunch to celebrate, one of those artistic-looking, screamingly healthful spreads with lots of veggies and some
or other Mideastern grain. Jake grimly got down most of his one and only helping. I let myself be talked into seconds, halfway
liking this sort of stuff, though not to the point of asking for recipes. There was wine, naturally, two glasses of which
noticeably improved Jake’s spirits. I’m up for a glass of white if sociability demands, as opposed to coffee, which you’d
have to force down my throat. For dessert Janet brought out Bavarian cream, a tasty concoction even if the closest thing to
cream in it, she proudly assured us, was skim milk. “So why don’t you call it Bavarian skim milk?” Jake inquired sourly. Janet
declined to discuss the merits of the idea.
As we were finishing up, Sam mentioned that they’d been at Hudson Heights a couple of weekends previously, playing in a mixed
foursome. “You’ve spent a lot of time there this summer, right? Do you have any idea when they’re going to have the last nine
holes ready? I thought it was supposed to be the beginning of this month.”
“I believe they’re shooting for mid-September now. That’s not too bad a delay, as these things go.”
“You mustn’t have any money in it.”
I couldn’t help chuckling, thinking of the grief Mariah would give me over that. “It’s not my type of investment. How about
you?”
“I passed, too. Back when they were putting the funding together, a couple of clients asked me to take a look at it. Your
district attorney was organizing an investment group good for ten percent ownership. He didn’t have much trouble filling it,
apparently, though neither of my people bought in.”
“On your advice?”
“I generally don’t tell clients go for this or steer clear of that. What I do is give them as much as I can of the picture,
pointing out the pluses and minuses. Hudson Heights could turn out to be a good proposition, though not any time soon. And
the longer it takes to get things up and running, the further into the future you’ll need to look. To establish that course,
obviously they’ve got to have all eighteen holes playable. And to attract out-of-area golfers—this is too expensive an operation
to make it just on locals—the inn needs to be operational. That building did not look like it could possibly be ready for
a mid-September opening.”
“I’d guess next spring.”
“The point is the money’s still mostly flowing out, not in. And this isn’t Florida or South Carolina. You can only count on
a six-, seven-month playing season.”
“Well, there’s the cross-country skiing. They plan to really go into that.”
“With serious expectations of making a profit? A hundred miles farther north, where you can count on snow cover, this would
be a workable proposition. Janet and I cross-country ski. The last several winters we’ve been able to get out what, dear,
maybe three, four times on the average around here? Oh, it sounds great; you’ve got the terrain, you’ve got facilities that
won’t need much adapting. But you’ve also got to pay up front for a bunch of equipment that’ll be unmarketable long before
it wears out. Some years they may do a decent business; some, they’ll take a bath. Nobody’s yet found a way to put together
a consistently reliable year-round resort in this area.”
“So then how do you figure an investment’s ever going to be profitable? The individual houses?”
“Including those in the package would have made things a lot more interesting. Almost everywhere today your oversized, overpriced
housing is both popular and profitable as hell. That part of the project, though, Donnelly Construction kept for itself. No,
when I said Hudson Heights could turn a good long-term profit, I meant as a tour-quality golf course and resort, which is
how it was pitched. They may bring it off. It’s a beautiful, well-designed course, going by the part that’s open now. Certainly
challenging. And you can’t knock the scenery.”
“It’s starting to look a lot better up around the clubhouse,” Janet put in. “That’s such a … strong building. Gorgeous views
of the Hudson while you eat, but from the outside it certainly did need softening. That’s the area you were working in, right?”
“Mm-hum. It was a design challenge even for Willem Etlinger, but he loves to work on a large scale and he’s truly gifted.”
“It couldn’t hurt, either, that Clete Donnelly happens to be his father-in-law,” Sam said dryly.
“That’s the popular wisdom. It didn’t necessarily help. Not too many men would find Clete the father-in-law of their dreams.
Or want to hand him a judgment call.”
Sam raised an eyebrow. “What’s the man like? One hears stories.”
Jake beat me to it. “Clete Donnelly is a law unto himself— and as many other people as he can bully into going along. Ask
Val to tell you how come she and Willem needed to order my plants through a middleman.”
“Jake, we don’t want to overdose these people on our quaint local ways,” I said, grinning. “Let’s just say Clete’s flamboyant.
He’s better at concepts than at carry-through, but he has good people for that—at least when it comes to housing construction,
which is what he’s concentrated on until now.”
“So one question would be, does he have the support staff for anything as complex as Hudson Heights? It is not reassuring
that he’s kept for himself the element most likely to be profitable. Or how closemouthed he was—presumably still is—on details
of the operation. The prospectus only reads well if you don’t have an inquisitive mind. I don’t know. Hudson Heights is a
neat concept. Well-connected politically, too— the county perks are extremely generous, and they got a hefty economic development
grant from the state. To invest in it, though, I’d want a better way to evaluate the prospects and more access to what’s going
on with my money.”
While we were indoors the weather had both brightened and warmed up, so afterwards we went out into the yard and spent close
to two more hours fine-tuning. As soon as we were in the Bronco, Jake announced: “I’m game for the Wayside Diner and some
real food.”
I laughed. “It isn’t much of a detour. You can tell it’s their brains that do the working.”
“Overtime,” he grumbled.
• • •
It was closing on 6:30 when I got back to the village. I made straight for the Price Chopper parking lot—I hadn’t grocery-shopped
in over a week, and it was starting to show. So was I, apparently. I merited a number of stares and one comment, from somewhere
behind me in the produce aisle, of “Look—there’s that woman.”
At home I put the groceries away and sauntered back to the bedroom to check my answering machine. Nobody had wanted me all
day until, by her announcement, Mariah called at ten minutes after four. She’d left a curious message: “Something we were
talking about got me to wondering. I’ve been doing some truly dreary research, but I do believe it’s paid off. I’m not sure
how it all fits in. We need to discuss. I’ll be home the rest of the day—come over when you can.”
Her voice sounded, well, not excited, exactly, since Mariah considered that bad form. Involved, certainly. Dreary research—that
must’ve been what she was up to in Albany. I wondered what I’d said that had got her into it. Well, I’d change into something
more comfortable, drive on over, and find out.
I parked out front, beyond the wall, the only vehicle there. Unlike the two side gates, the front one, which faces east, can
be opened electronically from inside the house. I pushed the buzzer. When there was no response after a couple of minutes
I tried again, holding the button down longer. She still didn’t buzz me in.
Retracing my steps, I headed on around toward the south gate, the one I had a key for. I was starting to feel uneasy. Though
Mariah liked to think of herself as a free spirit, she was more a creature of routine than she would ever admit. There were
her four to six
P.M.
receiving hours, rarely deviated from. The long weekends of parties. She didn’t usually go out nights earlier in the week,
and besides, she’d specifically said she’d be home. Of course she could be in the shower or, in the garden. Or really where
else?
Reaching the south gate, I fished in my jeans pocket for my key ring and let myself in, making plenty of noise so she wouldn’t
feel that I’d sneaked up on her.
“Mariah,” I called, locking the gate behind me. No response. The new plantings were looking all right, I remember thinking.
The macleayas were wilting, but they always did—in two or three days they should straighten right up. “Mariah?”
As I climbed the steps to the spa patio, the first thing jarringly out of place was a long orange heavy-duty connecting cord
extending from a wall socket across the tiles toward the spa. Another step higher, and I could see that it stopped short of
the spa, where it was joined to another cord. Closer still, I saw that this second cord belonged to a large, blunt-shaped
hair dryer, which was suspended maybe a foot beneath the surface of the water. Mariah was sprawled on her favorite seat, head
tipped back toward me, only half out of the water.
I lurched to the phone behind the bar and dialed 911. A woman in her spa, a hair dryer had fallen in with her, I sputtered.
She wasn’t moving, I couldn’t see any breathing. She looked dead but I wasn’t sure. Should I try to pull her out? “God, no!”
the dispatcher told me in alarm. “Don’t touch her. Just give me the address and the rescue squad will be right over.”
After hanging up I made myself return to the spa and check again, willing there to be some sign of movement. Mariah’s left
hand gripped the stem and jagged remaining top of a martini glass; it must’ve broken against the wall of the spa. Unlike Ryan,
she didn’t show major injury, though there were reddish marks on both shoulders. Also unlike him, her facial expression was
anything but blank. You could interpret it as startled. Or terrified.
I went back to the phone and called Baxter’s office. He was on his way home, I was told. When they offered to relay a message
I made it “Come to Mariah’s right away.”
I couldn’t bring myself to stay there with Mariah’s body, unable to do anything for her. I stumbled back down the steps and
into the garden, my mind a jumble of things, careening together, bouncing off one another. Finding Ryan’s body had left me
close to throwing up. I didn’t feel like that at all now; I didn’t seem to feel much of anything. Except awful. It was a much
stronger reaction than I’d experienced finding Ryan, but also curiously less powerful. Nothing came through at full strength.
I waited out front so the ambulance crew would know where to go. It couldn’t have been even ten minutes from the time of my
phone call until I heard the siren out on Mariah’s road. Baxter got there only a couple of minutes later, in time to see us
heading around the side of the wall. He followed, looking hard but saying little until they’d determined that Mariah could
not be revived. At that point he ordered everyone off the patio before anything else got disturbed and, unholstering his cellular
phone, began calling people in.
I was more or less just standing there, not getting in the way, when he came over and said, “Val, why don’t you go out and
wait in my car?”
“I can’t just sit. Baxter, that wasn’t an accident. Somebody killed her! There was this message on my machine when I got home—”
“I’ll want to hear about that later,” he said with a brusqueness that startled me. “Right now, please wait in my car.”
Was my finding two bodies a little much for him? Maybe he bore more resemblance to Columbo that I’d thought. Maybe what he’d
been doing dropping by all the time was trying to get me to cross myself up. I stalked out through the gate with every intention
of jumping in my Bronco and getting the hell out of there. When he got around to talking to me he could damn well do it on
my turf. But rounding the side of the enclosure, I saw that unless the Bronco sprouted stilts that was not going to be workable.
The ambulance had pulled up on one side, Baxter on the other, and two vehicles had filled in behind. Well, shit, I wasn’t
about to sit in any sheriff’s car and twiddle my thumbs while everybody coming and going wondered what the hell … Not as long
as my legs worked.
I strode out the long driveway and onto the road, heading the opposite direction from which the still-accumulating death scene
traffic was coming. I couldn’t make it very much past the point where Mariah’s property was out of sight; something compelled
me to turn around and go back. But I couldn’t stay there, either. After maybe half a dozen similar circuits I saw the ambulance
loading up and heading off, this time without sirens. For a while there continued to be more vehicles arriving than departing.
Then the flow of traffic reversed. After that, for a long, fatiguing time, whatever was left that might move didn’t. Finally
Baxter and several of his deputies came around the house. He looked at his empty car, at the Bronco, then started to scan,
spotting me midway along the driveway on a return loop. He waited.