28 Hearts of Sand (33 page)

“I wasn’t searching for anything,” Gregor said. This was actually true, although beside the point. “I was just noticing the obvious. Aside from some on the dining room table, that don’t look as if they’ve ever been displayed anywhere, there are no photographs.”

Hope looked up at the two of them.

“I know what you’re going to say,” she said. “You’re going to say it was wrong of me to kill Kyle. With Chapin, and with Marty—”

“Marty? Jason Battlesea asked.

“I told you we were looking at the wrong crime,” Gregor said. “Chapin Waring wasn’t killed because of the robberies, or at least not directly because of the robberies. She was killed because of the murder of Marty Veer.”

“Marty Veer died in an accident,” Jason Battlesea said.

Hope was staring at a small window on the other side of the room. “I grabbed the wheel,” she said. “We were in the car, sitting right next to each other, and he was drunk as hell, and I knew, I knew from seeing the tapes on the news, I knew what they were doing. Chapin and Marty. Chapin and everybody. I’d seen it coming for months. I wasn’t stupid. But then they started to air those tapes from the banks and I could see what they’d done. And they’d gone out and done it deliberately.”

“I expect this makes sense to you,” Jason Battlesea said.

“Of course it does,” Gregor said. “Look at those tapes again. Chapin Waring is wearing black and a mask, but not doing much to disguise her identity. Martin Veer is not only wearing black and a mask, he’s padded up in odd places to make him look bulky, and to almost force him to walk in a way that wasn’t natural to him. The point wasn’t just to make sure nobody recognized him, but to make sure that if somebody thought they did recognize him, it wouldn’t be him they’d recognize.”

“They did it on purpose,” Hope said again. She rubbed her hands together and blew on them, as if they were cold. “I didn’t know about the robberies, but I knew there was something going on between Chapin and Marty. There was always something going on between Chapin and everybody. You’d think she had enough in her life without having to go after everybody else’s boyfriends and without staging one drama after another in the long soap opera that was Being Who Counted at Alwych Country Day, but Chapin could never relax. And I’d started to see the signs all the way back in February. That she was looking to get rid of me. That she was trying to get Marty to dump me and take up with her and then she’d pick him out another girlfriend she’d like better.”

“I take it you knew about the robberies before the police did,” Gregor said.

“I knew the first time I saw one of those security tapes on television,” Hope said. “You couldn’t miss Chapin. She wasn’t even really disguised, just
obscured
sort of, enough so that if you didn’t know her, you wouldn’t be able to describe her very well. I never understood why nobody else saw it but me.”

“Maybe they did,” Gregor said.

Hope sniffled. “The night of the last robbery, after those people died, that night Marty was crazy. Marty wasn’t like Chapin, you know. He wasn’t a good person, not really, but he wasn’t like Chapin. He wouldn’t do just anything for the rush. So when I heard that two people had died, I was expecting something. And I got it. Marty started drinking early. He had a flask, and then we went to a roadhouse in New York State because, you know, in those days the drinking age over there was eighteen. And he was just drinking and drinking and going crazy. And I kept trying to talk to him. And then he got sick. We were on our way out to the car, and he bolted around the side of the roadhouse and got sick. And I went back there to talk to him.”

“And?” Gregor said.

Hope shrugged. “And I went back there and I waited for him to stop heaving and then I asked him. And he was too drunk to play around with it. He just told me right out front. About how I was completely sickening, as far as he was concerned. I was completely ridiculous, prancing around, pretending to be a debutante when I wasn’t anybody and my family wasn’t anybody and never had been, and all those things. ‘Prancing around’ was how he put it. And even at the time, I thought it was ridiculous. I mean, he was nobody and his family was nobody, too. They were more nobody than my family was. They didn’t even have the history. His father had just made a bunch of money in kitchen fixtures. But it wasn’t Beach Drive kind of money. It wasn’t Waring and Brand kind of money.”

Gregor was getting tired of standing. He pushed some papers to the side on the sagging old couch and sat down. “Did you tell him all that? About his family not being anybody?”

“I don’t know,” Hope said. “I think I might have tried. But I was drunk, too, and it was late and everybody was yelling at us to go and I was feeling a little crazy. Because there wasn’t anybody else. I didn’t have other friends. I didn’t have a place to be or anything like that. I had college, but I didn’t have anybody there and then when I went to grad school later, I didn’t have anybody there. And I didn’t know what I was going to do. So I think maybe I just got back into the car and sat still and didn’t say anything.”

“I don’t understand,” Jason Battlesea said. “What did she know as soon as she saw the security tapes? What could she have known that the police wouldn’t have known at the same time?”

“Marty Veer wasn’t disguised just to be disguised,” Gregor explained. “He was disguised deliberately in order to make him look as much like Hope as possible. He was bulked up in ways to make it seem as if it was Hope committing the robberies along with Chapin Waring. Hope and Marty were close to the same height and they had similar body types.”

“He wouldn’t have liked her so much if he’d heard what she said about him when he wasn’t around,” Hope said. “She was always going on and on about how he was ‘squat’ and how you could really tell what class people were in from how tall they were and how lean and it was like racehorses or something. She didn’t really like him. She didn’t even like him a little bit. She was just playing games with him to get rid of me, and once she was rid of me she’d have found a way to get rid of him. She’d have killed him if she had to.”

“But she didn’t kill him,” Gregor said. “You did.”

“I just grabbed the wheel,” Hope said. “We were driving, and we were going faster and faster, and Tim was completely furious about it, telling Marty to stop and slow down and all that kind of thing. But Marty wasn’t slowing down, and we came around Clapboard Ridge on the curve there and I thought if I could just make myself do it, if I could just make myself move for once, we’d all be dead and it wouldn’t matter anymore.”

“You did expect you’d all be dead?” Gregor asked.

“It seemed like the most likely thing,” Hope said. “We were going very, very fast—crazy fast—and I was right there on the seat next to him and I leaned over and grabbed the wheel and just pulled at it. I pulled and the car just spun off the road. We did a complete circle, like some kind of carnival ride. And we spun and we spun and then we hit a tree, but we did it kind of sideways, not head-on. And then I heard the smash and I looked up and for one second Marty was just there, and then his head exploded. It did. It just blew up.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jason Battlesea said.

“I think I must have passed out,” Hope said. “I thought we were all going to be dead. And then we weren’t. Then only Marty was dead, and Kyle and I had bruises, and I think Kyle had minor broken bones in his arm, and everybody in the back was all right. And there we were. And everybody was saying it was an accident, and blaming it all on Marty, and I didn’t see any reason not to let them.”

“But other people had seen what you’d done,” Gregor said.

Hope nodded. “Kyle had seen it but he didn’t say anything then,” she said. “He was on the other side of me, so I knew he had to have seen it. I didn’t realize Chapin had seen it until later. After Marty’s funeral, I mean. Just before she ran away. She came here after the funeral, really late at night, and my mother—you would have to have known my mother. This was Chapin Waring coming to the house. My mother would never have believed that a Waring could do something really wrong. Chapin came and we went upstairs to my room to talk and then she just sort of laid it all out. She said she’d been sitting in the middle in the back and she’d seen everything I’d done, even if Tim and Virginia hadn’t, and she could call the police right that second and I’d go to jail for murder. My whole life would be ruined. I wouldn’t be able to go back to college. I wouldn’t even be able to stay in Alwych, because everybody would know I’d killed him and they’d hate me for it. And I thought that that was true. Almost everybody liked Marty more than they liked me.”

“And that,” Gregor said, “is when she asked you to hide the money.”

“This house was searched,” Jason Battlesea said. “It was searched by the local police and it was searched by Federal agents. Granted, it was before my time, but are you really trying to tell me that two sets of law enforcement officers couldn’t find a stash of over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash in a house this size?”

Hope looked contemptuous. “They came in and searched,” she said, “but they searched like it was an ordinary house. I was afraid when they first came, because I thought they’d find it, too, but they never got near it. I don’t think it ever even occurred to them.”

“What didn’t occur to them?” Jason Battlesea said. “How isn’t this an ordinary house?”

“In the seventeenth century, most people here didn’t have access to banks as we know them,” Gregor said. “A lot of people didn’t think the banks they did have access to were safe. It wasn’t unusual for people to build into their houses some kind of hiding place to keep money and other valuables in.”

“They’d have found it,” Jason Battlesea said.

Hope got up off her chair and went to the fireplace. The mantel was made of a thick plank. The surround was made of what seemed like the same wood, but polished.

Hope fiddled with a space just to the left of the surround itself. A big hunk of wood came off all at once. She put the hunk of wood on the floor and reached into the opening. Her arm went in all the way up to her shoulder, and when it came out she was holding a bound stack of one-hundred-dollar bills.

She put them on the floor in front of her and looked around, at nothing. Then she went back to her chair and sat down again.

“It never even occurred to them,” she said again. “They didn’t even ask. Maybe they didn’t really take me seriously. By then everybody knew it was Marty and Chapin who had done the robberies anyway.”

Jason Battlesea went over to the fireplace and looked into the hole. “Jesus Christ,” he said.

“It isn’t all there anymore,” Hope said. “I burned some of it. I never liked having it here. The television news kept saying that the money was worthless because the police had all the serial numbers and if anybody ever spent any of those bills, they’d be caught right away. It didn’t even feel like real money to me. But then my parents died and I kept trying to make a living and it kept being so damned impossible and I’d take some of the money out sometimes and look at it. And then I’d burn it, so I wouldn’t try to use it. She said she’d tell the police what happened in the car if I ever used it.”

“And she’d come back every once in a while to remind you of it?” Gregor asked.

“Not right away,” Hope said. “It was maybe ten or fifteen years. And then she’d show up all of a sudden and ask me to go over to the house. And I would, because I was afraid not to. And she always had a way to get into the house so the alarm wouldn’t go off. And it was just like that. I thought she was going to ask for the money someday, but she never did.”

“But something must have changed, this time,” Gregor said.

Hope nodded. “She wanted to come back home, that’s what she said. She said she didn’t care if she had to spend the rest of her life in prison, she just wanted to stop all this and come home, and she was going to tell the police everything so that it could all get worked out and she wanted me to know that. I don’t know what she expected. I don’t know why she would have thought I’d just listen to her and nod and let anything that was going to happen happen, but that’s what she must have thought. So I said I had to go to the bathroom and she said the water wasn’t on and I said it didn’t matter anyway, and I got the knife from the kitchen and I came back in. And I stabbed her. And she had a gun. I stabbed her and she sort of reeled back and then the gun was there. I don’t know where she kept it. But it was there and she started shooting up the place and I just ran. I thought she’d follow me, but she didn’t. She just kept shooting at the mirrors and then all of that just stopped. And I didn’t know what to do. So I just waited. And there was no more noise. And I went back into the living room and she was dead on the floor. And then I just sat down and tried to think.”

“You sat there?” Jason Battlesea said. “With Chapin Waring dead on the floor?”

“I sat there until somebody came around,” Hope said. “I don’t know who it was, but I could hear them walking around on the terrace and in the bushes. I waited until whoever it was went a little bit away and then I went out through the kitchen and then across to the beach.”

“Angela Harkin saw her shoes through the glass doors to the terrace,” Gregor said. “The curtains were a little ruffled, and she saw a woman’s feet in espadrilles.”

“Everybody out here wears espadrilles.”

“I thought Angela was imagining things,” Jason Battlesea said.

“I wouldn’t have killed Kyle if he hadn’t said all those things about how we should tell the whole story and bring an end to it,” Hope said. “I really didn’t think he remembered seeing anything at all, and then he came to talk to me and said he knew what was going on, because he just knew, because he knew about Marty. I don’t even understand why he did it. He called me just after it happened and asked me to hold some things for him and said he’d pay me to hold them, some tapes he said needed to be secret, but then he changed his mind. And all that time, he didn’t say anything about Chapin or about Marty and I just thought he didn’t know. We had the crash and the shock and he didn’t remember. But then he started talking about how I’d never feel right unless we all told the truth about everything, and I just didn’t know what else to do.”