“Well, my mother’s. I’d been at Birchwood a couple of years when she did something that really ticked me. They had this obscenely
open front lawn, and the night after they left on a cruise—I’d signed out to stay with Vicky—I went over with spray paint
and did some decorating.”
“Was that how she viewed it?”
“Not exactly. It was lettering, basically: what you saw out front this afternoon, minus the first two words. Much, much larger
letters, and embellished. Very visible from the street. It took a couple of days before anybody could get in touch, to let
them know. They cut short the cruise and came back.”
“Wanting to fry you, probably.”
“Or at least put me in a cage with a stronger lock. They tried to use that political influence that, as you pointed out, the
Keegans have.”
He opened the stove door and added a couple of intermediate pieces of wood. Closing it again, he stood up and looked at me.
“What happened?”
“Fortunately the program administrator had a low tolerance for getting leaned on by outsiders. Besides, he was under civil
service protection. So I was allowed to stay at Birchwood.” There was a bouncy metallic noise from the kitchen. “Oops— I’d
better check the spaghetti.”
“The fire should hold for a while. I’ll come along and make the salad. You got off cheap.”
“Did not. I was grounded for two months, and Pete came up with this primitive version of community service: Since I’d messed
up a lawn, I had to do something to improve one. The town garden club had been bugging him about doing what they called a
garden therapy project with us troubled teens—to get us interested in something wholesome. The grounds at Birchwood were screaming
for rehab, but those ladies were pushing sixty on the average and not up for any serious digging. Pete decided I was. The
ladies told me where they wanted the beds and I had to get them ready to plant. The right way, which I discovered required
three times as much work as just spading them out.”
“And you loved every minute of it.”
“Nowhere near. There’s a damn good reason somebody invented the backhoe. Still, even if I wasn’t getting paid it was more
fun than the housecleaning I’d been doing to earn pocket money. And it was duly noted that I became easier to get along with,
evenings. Pete and Janey figured we were on to something.”
“I thought there was a miracle missing somewhere in the newspaper account.”
“Oh, Jack saw the hole right away, but no way was I going to drag out that old family business. So we let the yard rehab be
my miracle. It was, really. The way it came about isn’t the important part.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“So okay, I was far enough along in my own rehab to sense what getting bounced from Birchwood would mean. You could even say
I was extraordinarily open to deliverance just then. If ditch digging had been Pete’s sentence, you’d be looking at an irrigation
specialist. Satisfied?”
Baxter cut up salad ingredients faster than anybody I’d ever seen. “But you know,” he commented thoughtfully, “since she did
get you to Birchwood, you can’t say your mother never did anything for you. And maybe it wasn’t entirely inadvertent on her
part. Was your stepfather molesting you?”
I felt myself freeze up. “It would go as that today,” I managed.
“Maybe she wanted you out of the household because she couldn’t protect you from him.”
“Or didn’t choose to. It was the best option for both of us. So—” A little too vigorously, I dumped the spaghetti out into
the colander. “—we look to be about set. Want a beer?”
“Of course. I also have a subject moratorium request.”
“Shoot.”
“The cellular phone is out in the RV where I can’t hear it. Along with those twenty-three binders and a bunch of rolled-up
plans. Your telephone is silenced. Short of mounting an invasion, nobody can bug us till we let them. I know we’ve got a few
things to talk about, but it’s been nice taking a break from the murders for a while. Do you think we can stretch it through
supper?”
“Piece of cake.”
Technically, we succeeded, though the conversation got to be so stumbly, it seemed he was unable to keep his mind properly
channeled either. He helped clear the table and found a towel to dry the dishes as I washed. That and the low-level rate of
talking, you could mistake us for a long-married couple.
Dishes finished, we opened a couple more beers and carried them in to sit facing the fire. This time I more or less automatically
picked the middle of the sofa, where I sit with the boys, so each gets a side. He sat beside me. “I didn’t want to say anything
before dinner,” he began. “That bone you had me test? Depending on how much meat she gnawed off it, Roxy would be one sick
dog now, or—”
I reached down to pet her, my hand unsteady. “I guess it shouldn’t be surprising they’d try to kill a dog—I mean, they’ve
already killed two people.”
But Roxy
, I thought to myself.
Who only wants everybody to love her.
“I’ll be sure to always check her run before I let her out. No, best I go out with her.”
“When I’m not here there’ll be a patrol car toward the end of your driveway. It should be okay. But Val, we do have to realize:
they’re escalating. Maybe close to panicking. Which means we’ve got to find a way to escalate, too. Did you get anything useful
from Emil Kanser?”
I told him about the two branches of the track and the bat cave, then about my speculation as to what it might have been used
for.
“That sounds like a higher part of the track than we could get to. I don’t know. My first thought is it seems a little farfetched.”
“That’s been my second, third, and so on thoughts.”
“Still … It fits the parameters for a secret somebody would pay to have kept. If that plateau was known to be sitting on top
of a toxic waste dump, Hudson Heights would not be viable. Did you get hold of Skip?”
“I left two messages on his answering machine. He can at least tell us if it’s feasible.”
“If he says yes, is this something we can check out?”
“My best guess is that cave is now somewhere under the parking lot. Mr. Kanser could narrow down the possibilities on a map,
but could he pinpoint it? It would be a long way to bore in from the side, and as for drilling holes in the parking lot—”
“Unless we can show a compelling reason, we’ll never get permission to do either.”
“Say we did, and found this cave chock full of noxious chemicals. It torpedoes Hudson Heights, most likely, but it doesn’t
prove who did the murders. There’ll still be the same old suspect pool. Or did today’s alibis pare down the list? Willem and
Matt both said you were asking around. By the way, have you any idea why Matt’s got a big bandage on his left hand?”
“He cut it handling a broken piece of siding on Tuesday; five stitches. There were witnesses. And no, today’s alibis weren’t
much of an improvement. These folks do spend a lot of time in one another’s company. Everybody was paired off except Willem,
as you know, and his father, who has a reasonable claim to having been home alone since Eleanor and Kate went shopping for
glassware in Albany. They didn’t find anything they liked enough to buy. Clete and Matt were checking lot boundaries in Sector
C of Hudson Heights. Kyle was helping Thurman take soil samples up by the north entrance, after which they unofficially admit
to having done a little outof-season rabbit hunting. They showed me a bunch of labeled jars and a fresh pelt. The only verified
scratch is Johnny Armitage. He was working at Hudson Heights till quarter to six.”
“You’re still keeping Willem in your mix?”
“I’ve never considered Willem a very serious suspect— frankly, he seems too inept. But the man keeps refusing to eliminate
himself. It’s his ‘How could you possibly suppose I need an alibi?’ that frosts me.”
“That’s not arrogance. It’s just so far beyond his conception that he could possibly kill anybody.”
“It must be hard going through life needing an interpreter.”
“He didn’t usually, until his relatives started screwing up. Which, though? All of them? Some of them? One with an outside
helper?”
“I wish I could claim to be closer to telling you than I was a week ago.”
“I assume nothing you’ve found out about Mariah narrows it down?”
“Not yet. Steve’s taken her picture to all the places in Albany we talked about. No flash of recognition. The Department of
Commerce and the SUNY Albany library he has to go back to—the people she’d most likely have encountered earlier in the week
weren’t there. They might or might not be tomorrow.”
“If it’s toxics, dating back that far, it’ll be Commerce.”
“I’ll have him stop there first. The hair dryer was a two-year-old model which went to most of the discount stores and drug
chains. Last Christmas season several of them featured it as a sale item. We’ve checked as far as Riverton and East Greenbush;
nobody had any left, or remembers selling their last one recently. My guess is one of our killers already had it on hand.”
“It doesn’t sound like there’s much hope of tracing it.”
“There never was. It was going cheap enough that most men and a fair percentage of women wouldn’t put it on plastic. Something
like that works better backwards, if at all: we find our killers, maybe we can locate somebody who’ll remember one of them
making the purchase and be willing to say so. We have some lab results. There wasn’t much of a fiber harvest, with all that
water involved, so it’s not looking promising. My men found a slew of fingerprints it’ll take us weeks to identify from all
around the patio area, but none on any critical item. The most interesting on-site evidence was her answering machine—it didn’t
have a tape in it. From what you said about her being on the phone so much, that seems off.”
“Way off.”
“It would’ve been easy enough to use a pencil or something of that shape to push the button that opens the tape compartment
and close the lid again. There were also no prints, not even Mariah’s, on the gate that’s around the other side from the patio.
A little farther over, though, we found some not quite smoothed over indentations that would fit a ladder. On both sides of
the wall. Maybe she didn’t let her killers in.”
“There’s plenty of cover on that side for someone who didn’t want to be seen.”
“And it’s a straight shot through the woods, on all those goddamn pine needles, over to Agway’s back parking lot.”
“That’s dirt, so aren’t there tire tracks? Forget it—there must be zillions.”
“Somewhere in that range. Though again, we might come up with corroborating, working-back sort of evidence. Somebody seeing
a car, or a person, they recognized, around the right time. If we get the chance.”
“What do you mean?”
“Val, there’s some heavy big-bucks worrying going on here. Serious power lined up behind the scenario that Mariah’s death
was accidental and totally unconnected to Ryan Jessup’s. I was given to understand this morning that if I subscribe to this
version, all will be well, regarding my place in the scheme of things.”
“But you didn’t subscribe.”
“No, and the district attorney’s office will not back me on investigating Mariah’s death as a possible homicide. Which means—Phil
made this amply clear this morning—warrants and subpoenas are going to be damn hard to come by. For example, Patroon Tel needs
that sort of authorization before they’ll provide a record of her telephone activity.”
“So you won’t be able to get any numbers?”
“With that answering machine tape missing? I’ll have the past two weeks’ worth tomorrow. I called in a big favor.”
“Can’t Phil make defying him pretty expensive?”
“Sure, but he knows he won’t be looking at a one-way flow. The point is, I’m the only sheriff this county’s got. All right,
so I didn’t want to be. I still took an oath of office swearing to enforce the law, and nowhere does the law say it’s okay
to commit murder. I am not going to call a murder an accident, and I am not going to stop searching for who did either murder
because the truth is likely to make problems for some VIPS.” He reddened. “End of impassioned speech,” he muttered, getting
up and going to put more wood in the fire.
“What’re you doing, jockeying for top spot on the target list?”
“You’ve been alone there long enough. Maybe I should write my memoirs, too.” He sat back down.
“That reminds me. Jack Garrett was the first and thus far only person to ask if I had an alibi for Mariah. How come you told
those TV people I was ‘definitely not’ a suspect without finding out where I was at the time?”
“Because I know you didn’t kill her.”
“You make a habit of giving people blanket clearance? That doesn’t seem like very sound sheriffing.”
“I don’t make a habit of that, and I may yet turn out to be a damn good sheriff. Besides, your pal Jake called to explain
to me where you were till almost six.” His expression was somewhere between a grin and—I couldn’t identify the other component
until: “I also don’t go around stashing people in my house or camping out in their yards, which maybe should tell you something.”
This isn’t likely to be a good idea, was my first thought as he made his move. Once into the kiss I decided (if verdicts based
ninety-plus percent on flushes of warmth can be termed decisions), that it also wasn’t likely to be a very bad one. And anyhow
I wanted this.
Pulling apart, we gave each other a decent amount of back-out time, then moved together again, working into a less awkward
configuration. Our bodies got busier and busier, the layers of clothing separating us progressively thinner. “My bed?” I suggested
when he drew back to fish in his discarded pants for his wallet, then extracted a condom.
In my room I watched as he slipped the condom on before lying down beside me on top of the covers. “I’m a little tight,” I
apologized, after a bit, reaching down to help. “It’s been a while.”
“For me, too,” he said.
And a little later—I must’ve moaned—“Did I hurt you?”
“Oh no,” I assured him, smiling. “That’s a nice smile,” he said, and then we were too focused on moving together to bother
talking.