28 Hearts of Sand (27 page)

“I needed the money,” she said finally. “And he would pay for things. If you told him things. If you gave him an interview about the robberies, you know, and knowing Chapin and that kind of thing. And if you had pictures.”

“And you’d been going to see him for quite some time?”

Hope blushed. “No, no,” she said. “He asked me right after it all happened, of course. He asked all of us, but none of us agreed to it. After a while he stopped asking. Then after Chapin was murdered, he started asking again. And I—well, I didn’t get any summer teaching, and summer is always really bad, so this time I said yes. And I went into the city, you know, and talked to him.”

“What did you talk to him about?”

“About what you’d expect,” Hope said. “Growing up with Chapin. What Chapin was like. What I knew about the robberies. Except I didn’t know anything about the robberies. I think I was disappointing all around. He wanted to know what it was like to grow up in one of the ‘thirteen richest families,’ but I hadn’t grown up in a rich family at all. My family had lots of history, you know, but we never had very much money. I got to do everything because my mother really worked at it, that’s all. And I was only part of Chapin’s group because of Marty. She just put up with me.”

They had reached Beach Drive. They were all the way on the wrong end of it, but just being here made Hope feel better.

“When I heard Kyle was dead, I thought—well, I thought there might be some connection. You know, that something I said, when I talked to him, might have set something off. I couldn’t think of what it could be. We just talked a bit about all the old stuff. I didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know. It felt strange that he’d give me money for it.”

“Did you give him any pictures?”

“I brought some with me,” she said, “but they weren’t the kind of thing he was looking for. He wanted pictures of people in their deb dresses and people riding horses and all that kind of thing. My mother did the best she could, and I even came out, but mostly we couldn’t manage it. I spent four years in boarding school as the only person in my house who wasn’t boarding her horse.”

The Switch and Shingle was right up ahead. Hope felt so relieved, she almost cried. She turned into the drive and slowed to a crawl again. The hedges went by her on either side, looking dark and blank, like the trees that lined the drive at Manderley.

The house came into view, lit up at the front door and in several of the windows on the second floor. Hope cut the engine.

“I was just worried,” she said again, “that it was something I said, something I did, going to see Ray Guy Pearce. I thought, you know, that I may have said something I didn’t realize, and now—now Kyle is dead—and—”

“I can absolutely assure you that Ray Guy Pearce did not kill Kyle Westervan,” Gregor Demarkian said. “It would have been entirely impossible. I can’t be exactly that positive with the murder of Chapin Waring, but I’d give you odds that he wasn’t in any way involved. I don’t think you have to worry about the kind of information Ray Guy Pearce was looking for.”

“Really?” Hope said.

“Really,” Gregor Demarkian said.

He opened the passenger side door and got out onto the gravel driveway. “Thank you for chauffeuring me around,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” Hope said automatically.

Gregor Demarkian slammed the passenger side door shut and walked away without looking back.

Hope took a few moments, and then she turned the car around very carefully.

She drove slowly back down the drive, trying to ignore the hulking darkness all around her. She got out onto Beach Drive and found that it was a little more crowded now. There were people on foot on their way out to see the fireworks.

She wondered what time it was.

What felt like a few moments later, but must have been longer, she began to wonder where she was. She was back on the two-lane blacktop. She didn’t remember getting there.

She pulled off to the side of the road and cut the engine.

She put her head down on the steering wheel and closed her eyes. She had forgotten to turn the headlights off. They were gleaming into the distance, like lighthouse beacons. She kept her eyes closed and her head down.

Then she started to cry.

3

Jason Battlesea called Evaline Veer and from the moment Evaline hung up the phone until the moment the midnight fireworks began to go off, she brooded.

When she knew she wasn’t getting to sleep, she got a cotton sweater and went out.

She walked across the center of town, all the way to the Green, and sat down on one of the polished wooden benches near the War Memorial. She got her cell phone out. There was nobody else on the Green within hearing distance.

Evaline flicked through her address book and found Caroline Holder’s number. Then she pressed the Call button and waited.

The phone was picked up by Caroline herself, and Evaline relaxed a little.

“I’m sorry to call you so late,” she said, “but I thought—well, I thought you’d like to know. And I didn’t know if anybody would tell you.”

“If you mean did anybody tell me that Kyle Westervan is dead,” Caroline said, “I’d say you’re about the twentieth call I’ve had.”

“Demarkian was right there, on the scene, when it happened,” Evaline said. “He was talking to Tim Brand, and then two of the girls from the clinic went out back, and there was Kyle on the ground. Jason Battlesea says Demarkian thinks that Kyle was killed in the overflow parking lot at the hospital and then pushed over the retaining wall, and that the ME’s people thought that seemed likely, too, on first look. But we won’t really know for days.”

“I don’t understand why they still run my life,” Caroline said. “It’s been thirty years, for God’s sake.”

“It keeps feeling to me as if I should have done something about all this long ago, but I don’t know what,” Evaline said. “I felt that way when Marty died, too. I remember sitting in the pew at the church during the funeral and wondering what I was supposed to do next. I never came up with anything.”

“I remember sitting in California while the entire world was looking for my oldest sister and wondering if I’d ever be able to have a normal life again,” Caroline said. “And do you know what the answer to that is? The answer is that I never was able to, and I’m still not. And now there’s this, and earlier—did you hear about earlier? That man was sneaking into our house and taking our photographs? And of course we never noticed, because we don’t like looking at photographs. We’ve got too much we don’t want to be reminded of. My whole childhood is a big wash of stuff we don’t want to be reminded of.”

“Mine just stopped when Marty died,” Evaline said. “Did you ever wonder if they all knew about it? Not just Marty and Chapin, but all of them. Kyle and Virginia and Tim and Hope Matlock.”

“Of course I never wondered,” Caroline said. “I just assumed. Didn’t you?”

“I never understood how she got caught for those robberies,” Evaline said. “I remember my mother explaining it. She was at the funeral, and for some reason the press paid more attention to her than they did to the rest of us—”

“It wasn’t ‘for some reason.’ They did because she was Chapin,” Caroline said.

“Well, that time it meant that she was on the news a lot and somebody spotted her, because she wasn’t really well disguised.”

“And then she lived in obscurity for thirty years,” Caroline said. “I couldn’t sit still all night. I even drove into town and tried to do some shopping, but it wasn’t any use. I finally just sat down on a bench in front of the hospital and let myself go limp. There was some kind of event going on. It was a pain in the ass.”

“It was a talk Virginia Westervan was giving,” Evaline said. “I was there. I wonder how she feels. I never got the impression that she and Kyle were on bad terms.”

“I think they were annoyed with each other a lot,” Caroline said. “It was like they were still married.”

“I can’t imagine she killed him, though, can you?” Evaline said. “I don’t think she gets a lot of time to herself, for one thing, and what would they be doing meeting in the parking lot anyway? They’d go out to dinner together or he’d come to her place, or they’d meet in New York.”

Evaline wondered why she’d called Caroline. Caroline was an angry woman. She’d been angry almost all the time Evaline had known her.

“Well,” Evaline said.

There was nothing at all from the other end of the line.

“Well,” Evaline said again. “I suppose I’d better go do something. There must be something to do.”

“It’s damn near midnight,” Caroline said, hanging up.

Evaline put her cell phone away, and stayed put. She didn’t want to go home. She didn’t want to go anywhere she knew people.

She thought of Kyle Westervan, dead, with a knife in his back. She saw the knife rise up from the shoulder blade, just as it had when Chapin Waring died.

Then she leaned over the side of the bench and threw up.

THREE

1

When the phone rang at two o’clock in the morning, Gregor Demarkian almost didn’t answer it. He was lying flat on his back on the big bed in his suite at the Switch and Shingle. The idea that anybody would call him at this hour and after the day he’d had was somehow seriously offensive.

The ringtone and the name in the photo ID belonged to Bennis, however, and his marriage was still too new for him to feel all right about not picking up for her.

Of course, his friendship with Bennis had lasted longer than any other relationship in his life except for his first marriage, so there was something to be said for the idea that he’d earned the right to a little slacking off.

He picked up and said, “Hello?”

Bennis chuckled and said, “I knew you wouldn’t want me calling in the middle of the night, but I did call you at least twice before and you didn’t return, and then there’s this news on the CNN Web page about another murder out in Alwych. I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t you.”

“It wasn’t me,” Gregor said, yawning. “If it had been me, CNN would probably have said so.”

“Only if they knew,” Bennis said. “I don’t understand how we got along before the Internet and cable news and all the rest of it. Think of all the things that happened before we had all that. The
Challenger
disaster. The Kennedy assassination.”

“You weren’t alive for the Kennedy assassination.”

“I know, but think about it. Three broadcast television networks and maybe PBS. And that was it. How did anybody ever get any information?”

“There were newspapers.”

“Newspapers come out a couple of times a day and then you have to wait for the next day,” Bennis said. “I got this in real time. Who got murdered?”

“A man named Kyle Westervan. He worked as a lawyer on Wall Street. He was on my interview list, but I never got a chance to talk to him.”

“And is it all part of the Chapin Waring thing?”

Gregor moved a little on the bed. It was a very good bed, and he could feel himself beginning to sink into sleepiness.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “It was a stabbing, like the Chapin Waring murder. I got a look at the knife in the body, and at the knife wound later. If you look at the pictures from the Waring murder, you see the knife in the victim’s back and it’s going slightly downward, if that makes sense. This wound was going slightly upward.”

“I know what that is,” Bennis said. “That’s height. Was Kyle Westervan very tall?”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “I thought of that, too. Kyle Westervan was tall. Chapin Waring was a little short. And both of the knifings were done from up close—”

“How could they not be done from up close?” Bennis asked.

“A knife can be thrown,” Gregor said. “I’ll admit, I’ve never seen a murder done with a thrown knife. But these weren’t thrown. Whoever it was came right up to the back of both the victims and stabbed. And that’s an interesting point.”

“Is it? Why?”

“Because the murderer would have to be very close up to make it work,” Gregor said. “Whoever this was got right up to the bodies of the victims and then stabbed. Can you imagine letting somebody get that close to you from the back?”

“You do it all the time.”

“We’re married,” Gregor said. “And I can see you allowing it with, say, Tibor, or Donna, or maybe even Linda. But even with people you know on Cavanaugh Street, I think you’d mostly get uncomfortable if they got that close. And that leaves me back where I was. The victims have to know the murderer very well. And the murderer has to be someone who would not cause fear or suspicion in any way, at least for those two people. Has to not cause suspicion in Kyle Westervan even after Chapin Waring’s murder.”

“In other words, someone Kyle Westervan has known forever.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “I suppose so. But almost everybody involved in this has known almost everybody else ‘forever.’ Let’s say someone Kyle Westervan wouldn’t suspect of killing Chapin Waring. Or somebody who, even if he did suspect, he wouldn’t feel threatened by.”

“I take it Ray Guy Pearce isn’t the kind of person Kyle Westervan would allow to come right up behind him,” Bennis said.

“I think squirrels would be opposed to Ray Guy Pearce coming up behind them,” Gregor said, “but in this case, it doesn’t matter, because he has an ironclad alibi for Kyle Westervan’s murder. He was spouting conspiracy delusions to several hundred people in a hotel. I never liked him for the Waring murder either, though. It was all wrong. Chapin Waring was his one and only live zoo exhibit, a member of the thirteen richest families willing to tell him that everything he’d ever believed was true.”

“The Warings are hardly one of the thirteen richest families in the country,” Bennis said. “I mean, they’re members of the club, so to speak, but they’re not—”

“I’ll have to get up tomorrow morning and do a good job sorting through it all,” Gregor said. “The problem with this one is that I can’t make the thirty-year thing fit. With Chapin Waring, there were plenty of people who might want to kill her, including all the people who were involved in the robberies or affected by the robberies. But I’m positive that none of the pictures in the security tapes were of Kyle Westervan. He was much too tall. So if he wasn’t involved in the robberies, and everybody is telling me the truth when they say that Chapin Waring didn’t inform anybody but her accomplice of what was going on—”