All's Well That Ends (16 page)

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the time to have hair down to the rear end like a teenager. Skirt was too short and her high heels nearly sank into the grass by the curb. That’s all I remember, I was almost in shock with nearly being killed by her, and she didn’t even look at me or apologize or anything. I never did find out who she was, because the next thing I hear is about poor Phoebe.”

“Wait—do you know which day you saw this redhead with the big car?”

Sally laughed. “You’re bad with names, and me? Rotten with numbers, and that includes dates.” She shrugged. “I have no idea.”

I nodded, gave up on that tack. “So we don’t know if Phoebe and Gregory ever arranged a second date.”

Sally shook her head. “I worry about the whole situation, about that one terrible evening, and worry that maybe she set too much stock by it. Pinned too many hopes on Gregory. And then, when it was such a disappointment, especially since she herself was the cause of the date’s fizzle, so to speak, not that she could help being sick. I’m not saying that, but maybe it set her off, made her so depressed—”

“But you said he wasn’t the only man in her life.”

“Kids don’t count.”

“What are you saying? Her son visited her?”

She shook her head.

“Little children?”

“Jus’ an expression. Too young to be anything serious. I think. Not that I knew who or anything much.”

I wondered how Sally filled her long, solo evenings. Mondays she went to her daughter’s house, but there were six other nights in a week. She said she was content with her own company, but I feared she was more content with a wine bottle as companion.

“You know, I’m old-fashioned. Once I was a widow, I stayed a widow, so don’t listen to me! But I really hoped that Gregory . . .

and maybe they did get to have another date—nobody tells me 121

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much unless I ask. And I did ask, but I don’t think Gregory gave me a straight answer.” She wrinkled her brow again, looking confused and disoriented, perhaps surprised that her memories weren’t crisp and sharp.

“Does Gregory live in the neighborhood?”

She shook her head. “In Cherry Hill, with his sister, in this house that is much too big for them.” She shook her head again.

“Do you happen to have a phone number for him?”

She looked surprised by the request, then took a moment to think it through, and nodded, standing rather unsteadily and saying, “I’ll get it.”

“If you tell me where . . .” I began, but she shook her head again, and wove her way into the dining room.

Gregory’s second date could have been that final night. He wouldn’t have been ready to tell Sally he’d been there. But then, Phoebe’s visitor could have been her furious business partner, whose red hair had been long enough to put up into an elaborate French braid the day of the memorial service. Or one of her inappropriately young dates. Who were they—if indeed there were plural young men—and where did she find them?

And why the devil did she want to find men online if she was already overloaded with them?

“Still and all, fate stepped in, didn’t it?” Sally said, returning with a cracked and battered address book, which she handed to me.

I didn’t know what she was talking about.

“One way or another, they were simply not meant to be.”

She sat back down, although it wasn’t quite a matter of seating herself as much as it was allowing herself to descend onto the sofa pillow.

“I only meant to make everybody happy,” she said with her whiny and sentimental undertone growing stronger by the second.

I flipped through the book to the “Mc”s and copied Gregory’s address and phone number.

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“The woman killed herself ! I didn’t exactly make her happy, did I?” Once again, the slightly puzzled, worried expression. “I really liked her, too.”

“You can’t blame yourself if she was depressed, or if the man you fixed her up with didn’t turn out to be Prince Charming.”

She sighed and seemed to have run out of words and steam. I checked my watch. “I’m so sorry! I’ve been keeping you, and I only meant to stay a minute. You’re too good of a hostess. Thanks so much for the wine, and for the address.” I put the book on the coffee table. “I nearly forgot I have another appointment in two minutes.”

“Only tried to make her happy,” she repeated.

I showed myself out and crossed the street to Phoebe’s house.

The cold air was a shock at first, but it cleared my head, and I thought how silly it was to be circling around the idea of this pathetically-rigid-sounding blind date suddenly murdering Phoebe. Drugging her wine—to what purpose? Or looking for whatever Sally considered a “kid” visitor. Or trying to believe that Merilee would screech up to a house in which she was about to commit a very low-key kind of murder.

Nobody had murdered Phoebe.

I felt a little better, as if I’d finally been allowed to put down an unwieldy and heavy piece of luggage.

Sasha’s car pulled up as I reached the house.

“Perfect timing,” I said, my breath a frosty fog. Sasha shivered while she unlocked the front door.

“No Dumpsters yet, at least,” she said. “But I thought she’d be here. I thought we agreed. . . .”

“I love you, dear friend, but you do have a tendency to over-state things. Nobody’s talking Dumpsters. She isn’t rebuilding the house, just removing excess items and sprucing the place up. So probably, there will be a truck or two taking things to Goodwill.

You have to admit, there is too much stuff in this house. I for one am glad that somebody else is going to do the scut work of making the place presentable. That way I don’t have to volunteer to 123

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be a good friend and help you with it. Don’t make the situation out to be so dire.”

“She’s supposed to be here. We have an appointment.”

I looked at my watch. “You’re five minutes early. Cut her some slack. She’s probably stuck in traffic.”

Sasha grumbled as she opened the door and entered. Then her voice became an angry shout. “It looks worse than ever!”

I was ready to suggest that maybe Toy had been playing with ideas, tentatively rearranging a few things, but then I glimpsed the room, and the words died in my throat.

It
was
worse than ever. Much worse. We hadn’t left tables turned over, lampshades hanging crazily from broken stands. We hadn’t pulled out cabinet doors and buffet-table drawers and left them open.

Neither would Toy have done that.

I felt a chill much more extreme than I’d felt outside.

“Sasha,” I whispered, “Sasha, I think—”

“Don’t think,” she said from the dining room. “Come here.”

I did.

Toy lay the way her namesake might, when it was broken, head twisted in an unnatural direction, arms splayed, booted feet pointing outwards.

Except, of course, real toys don’t bleed.

Or die.

Ten

Get out of the house,” I whispered.

Sasha stood there, paralyzed, staring at Toy’s small body, which lay like a marionette’s might, arms and head at the wrong angle. Then Sasha bent over and touched her at the neck, where the pulse should be, and she had the same results I’d had one minute earlier. Nothing. No pulse. No life.

“Sasha! Out!” I said, pulling at her sleeve. “Whoever—there might still—out!”

She stood up but remained speechless. I felt like a tugboat, leading a steamship into safe harbor.

Outside, shivering, I pulled out my cell and dialed nine-one-one.

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“She’s dead,” Sasha whispered.

“I think so,” I said.

“She’s still warm,” she said in a hushed voice. “Still warm.

That means—”

“Yes. That’s one more reason to be out of the house.”

“I’m freezing.”

“Yes, but this just happened and—”

“She looked so . . .”

I nodded, unable to find the right words any more than Sasha was. And I knew we were both thinking the irrational but irresistible thought: But I just saw her last night and she was fine.

Such a sudden, unexpected, irrevocable cancellation of what we so take for granted needed those denials. Surely if I saw her last night and she was animate, this couldn’t have happened to her in the interim.

Surely if Sasha arrived ready to do battle with Toy about possessions and priorities, then Toy could not be dead, violently, abruptly, dead on the very floor of the house under dispute.

“In Phoebe’s house!” Sasha looked at me and bit at her upper lip. I again knew what she was thinking before she said it.

“Because . . . this—it’s too much, the same house. This must have some connection to Phoebe.”

I didn’t want to allow that idea back into my head. I’d resolved the issue of Phoebe’s death fifteen minutes earlier.

“Two dead women in this one house. This is a quiet neighborhood. This doesn’t happen. This doesn’t happen in neighborhoods that
aren’t
this quiet.”

I agreed, but I didn’t want to think past that, to what that meant, so I waited as patiently as I could for the police to arrive, and luckily, it was a blessedly brief time.

They were all business, moving into the house at the ready, searching it thoroughly, finding nobody on the premises except poor, broken Toy. After checking the carpet for whatever they check it for, they allowed us back in and kept us standing close to GILLIAN ROBERTS

126

the front window, an area that looked relatively untouched, while a square-headed, burly man who identified himself as “Collins”

asked us questions as his fellow officers dusted and photographed the area, moving in and out the front door.

We explained who Toy was, and luckily Sasha still had her business card, as I’d forgotten her last name and the name of her company. We explained what staging was, and who had hired Toy, and why we didn’t know much about her, and how we’d already removed sentimental objects.

I say “we” said all that, and we did, but I did most of the talking because Sasha was in some other place. Not quite in a state of shock, but unable to truly be present. Her mind had shut down on the scene, and words came only with great difficulty.

And so I also said, with Sasha nodding and adding the occasional word, that no, we didn’t have any idea who might have done this, or why.

Sasha tried again to plead the case for Phoebe’s having been murdered. “Don’t you see?” she asked. “Too much for coincidence, don’t you see?”

I took over, filling in the many blanks she’d left, but it didn’t matter.

“All in good time,” Officer Collins said in the most patroniz-ing tone possible. He wanted to talk about Toy Rasmussen. She had definitely been murdered. He did not want to cater to a freaked-out witness’s half-baked theories about a death that had already been determined to be a suicide. “I assure you, we’ll look at everything that’s germane to this investigation.”

He didn’t have to say that Phoebe was not germane.

I could see how mistakes geometrically expand and build upon themselves. Nobody—including me, including Mackenzie—

would listen to Sasha’s convictions the first time. We humored her rather than believed her. So Phoebe’s death had been officially

“solved.” Now she was a closed and tidily disposed of non-case that would not therefore be relevant to this new occurrence.

“Why were you here if you hired her to clean out the house?”

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Collins asked. I was pretty sure it was the second or third time for that same question.

“We hadn’t officially signed anything. I didn’t know the price or her plans. She was going to stop in during the day and decide whether anything major—like painting or whatever—was necessary, and how much of the furniture would stay. That kind of thing. We were going to talk it over this evening. Right about now, in fact.”

“What was your precise relationship to the deceased owner of this house?” he asked—definitely again.

Sasha had to repeat her unorthodox family history and what part Phoebe had played in it. “She was my stepmother for a few years. I lived with her and my father. My mother was married to a Norwegian at the time. I didn’t want to move to Oslo.”

“How is it, do you think, that you came to be the person who stumbled upon both of these women’s deaths?”

Sasha was agape, shaking her head in disbelief. “You can’t think—please!”

“Officer,” I said, “we didn’t harm this woman. We came here and found her and phoned you. Would we do this if we’d had anything to do with the crime?”

His look and his silence made it clear that my question was not worth answering.

I could see intricately worked criminal machinations on our part playing through his mind. We’d murdered her, then gone away, then returned and phoned the police, hoping it would make us appear innocent. And what the devil—maybe he would find out that the first woman was murdered as well, and pin both on Sasha, the demon of 570 Hutchinson Court. A serial killer for anyone unwise enough to come into or own this house.

Collins wasn’t going to let us pull this fast one on him.

Because of Toy’s fate, I now believed Sasha’s theory about Phoebe’s death, but that gave us two inexplicable deaths. The living and dining rooms had been trashed. What was somebody looking for? What could somebody want?

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And which of those visitors, those semi-known outsiders, would know about Phoebe’s possessions—the one or ones worth this horrifying outcome? I certainly didn’t. Sasha didn’t.

I spoke out of turn again, but it was so clear what must have happened that I couldn’t understand why Collins wasn’t operat-ing under this theory. “It seems to me that somebody came here thinking the house was vacant, and wanted to rob it. And they interrupted Toy, whose presence couldn’t have been anticipated.”

“Where were you the past two hours?” he asked. “You first,”

he said to Sasha, showing how much he cared about how anything seemed to me.

Sasha explained her job, the corporate client she’d been with earlier. She named the company, its CEO, and much more than Collins seemed to welcome. “They’ll tell you I didn’t leave till four-thirty-five,” she said.