Beyond Reason (9 page)

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Authors: Ken Englade

BOOK: Beyond Reason
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“For a long time,” she said, “I really disliked the idea of marriage. I’m still not completely happy with it. That doesn’t mean to say I like the idea of living with somebody. That doesn’t really appeal to me either. I value my independence tremendously. At the moment, if I were to think about getting married, I don’t think it would be for a long time.”
“Who did you feel closest to?” Kirkland asked. “Your Mom or Dad? As far as being able to talk to? Explain things to?”
“It really depended,” Elizabeth replied nervously. “Some things definitely were Daddy’s subjects. I could talk to Daddy about sex, drugs, any of that stuff. I could talk to him about all those things, but when it came to school, I guess I talked to Mom more about that. For some reason, and this is completely unfounded, I had this tremendous feeling of pressure from my parents. I felt that I had to completely excel. Excellence was the only thing that was acceptable.”
“How did you feel about this?”
“It made me want to excel.”
“Did it bother you or depress you any?”
“No, it just made me a little frantic. It didn’t really bother me. I enjoy pressure of some sort. I never felt depressed about it, and I never found the work sufficiently difficult to cause me any stress that way.”
“Did it ever bother you that what you did in school was more important to your parents than how you felt about things?”
“No,” Elizabeth emphasized. “In fact, the whole thing of pressure was completely unfounded. I mean that was something I sort of invented. It was paranoia. Something in my own head. If anything, my parents were quite carefree. All the time they used to try to get me out of school at UVA. You know, ‘Just skip that,’ they’d say. Then, ‘Why don’t you say the hell with that?’ Or ‘Let’s have lunch.’ Or ‘Let’s go shopping.’”
“Let’s take a break,” Gardner suggested, rising and stretching.
While Elizabeth went to the ladies room, Gardner turned to Kirkland.
“What do you think?”
“I think she’s hiding something,” Kirkland replied.
“What do you think it could be?”
“I don’t know, but look how nervous she got when we started talking about marriage and pressing her about her parents.”
“That seems pretty strange all right.”
“I think it’s pretty obvious that there’s something shed doesn’t want us to know. I guess we just have to find out what.”
SOMETHING ELIZABETH SAID WAS NAGGING AT GARDner. It was the way she had answered his and Kirkland’s questions about her boyfriends and marriage—not so much what she had said but how she had said it and the words she had used. He cautioned himself to tread carefully because he didn’t want to risk making her hostile. “Now, when you say you have some question about being married,” he began, “I don’t know if that’s because of your independence or if you are possibly gay?”
As soon as he said it, he was glad that he had not confronted her more directly. Elizabeth jumped up as though she had sat on a tack. “No!” she said loudly.
She overreacted, Gardner felt. He was sure now there was something there.
“You’ve strayed?” he persisted.
Elizabeth, pacing around the room, answered elliptically, conceding that after she had been attacked in the Nova Scotian schoolyard because of her father’s union stance, she began to regard males with animosity, a situation all the attentions of her half-brothers could not correct.
Her statements were mostly show for Gardner and Kirkland. Elizabeth was still anxious to impress the detectives with the idea that her family was extremely close knit. To make sure they got the point, she stressed how helpful her parents had been and how grateful she was for their support.
“Nobody’s like them,” she said with apparent sincerity. “I mean, my mother used to come up to my room sometimes late at night just to make sure I was okay and give me a hug. My parents were always there no matter what. No matter how dreadful I was, they were always there.”
Still pacing, she glanced quickly at the two detectives, as
if to see, thought Gardner and Kirkland, how they were taking her performance.
They weren’t buying it at all. Not completely. But both had enough experience with people not to let their thoughts show. While they both intuited that she was not telling the truth, they weren’t sure what she was lying about or why.
Elizabeth went on to explain that her parents’ marriage was a model for her and that until she felt she could find someone she was as compatible with as her mother had been with Derek, she preferred not to get married.
Gardner blinked. She’s been talking for five minutes, he told himself, but she still hasn’t answered my question. He tried again. “The reason you don’t want to get married is definitely not because you’re gay?”
“Oh, no,” Elizabeth said emphatically. “No, I’m
not
gay.”
Gardner nodded. May as well leave it there for right now, he figured, although he was convinced he had not yet heard the truth. He started to ask another question, but Elizabeth cut him off.
“I went through a stage of that,” she told him hurriedly. “I’ll be honest with you. I did. Yeah.”
“Yeah?” Gardner said, not really surprised. He was getting the feel of her personality now, realizing that delicacy was the key in her interrogation, not confrontation. Let her ramble long enough, and sooner or later she would tell him what he was asking. “I guess that’s what happens when you go to an all-girls school,” he said in mock understanding.
“Well,
that
really wasn’t a thing at the school,” Elizabeth explained, adding that the incident she was referring to had not occurred at school but during vacation. “It was just a holiday thing,” she said.
She’s getting there, Gardner told himself. That’s not the whole story, but she figures that will be enough to convince me to move on to something else. But it wasn’t. “What about the time you and your friend took off?” he asked. “Was she just a friend?”
That was a sore spot for Elizabeth. Her eyes flashed, and
Gardner feared for a moment that he had pushed her too far too quickly, that he should have approached that subject differently.
“Melinda was gay,” Elizabeth snapped, then quickly added that didn’t mean she also was gay. Even though Melinda had made advances toward her, she had maintained her distance, protected her heterosexuality. “I love men, you know.” Besides, she explained, it was quite fashionable in Europe at that time to be bisexual, and it would not have been unusual for a heterosexual woman to have a homosexual affair just to see what it was like.
Gardner asked if that is what had happened. Had Melinda made advances toward her believing that she might go along just to see what it was like?
“Oh, yeah,” Elizabeth said, realizing she had a possible way out. “We had problems that way. But she got the idea that I didn’t care if she was gay just as long as she kept her hands to herself.”
Were Derek and Nancy as open-minded? Gardner asked. Did
they
worry about their daughter’s sexual orientation?
As usual, Elizabeth didn’t answer directly. Instead, she said that a lot of people assumed that she was gay because she had run off with a gay girl. Some other people assumed, however, that because she had no visible means of support while she and Melinda were traveling through Europe, she had been working as a prostitute. Some people even thought that she had deliberately gotten pregnant or tried to.
Most liars are convinced that the more outrageous the story, the more credible it becomes. Elizabeth tested that theory then. “Actually,” she told Gardner and Kirkland with a straight face, “I had been completely celibate.”
“Didn’t you say earlier,” Gardner pointed out, “that you thought yourself that you were pregnant?”
Elizabeth paused. How could she have forgotten that? Never at a loss for words, however, she scrambled quickly to recover.
“I just got this thing into my head that I was pregnant,
you know. I mean, traveling can do strange things to your head.”
Gardner rolled his eyes. But her pregnancy wasn’t what interested him right then. He wanted to know more about her possible homosexual relationships. “Elizabeth—” he started, but was interrupted by the quick buzz of the recorder signaling the end of a tape. While he changed the cassette, he told Elizabeth he wanted to pick up on the homosexuality issue again when the session continued.
Forewarned, Elizabeth was ready. “I thought that the fashion of bisexuality was a scream,” she began. “It amused me to dress in drag, that kind of stuff. I liked to go to gay bars and have a laugh.” It was very juvenile, she confessed, but on the other hand homosexuality was not something she took very seriously.
When he had asked earlier about her parents’ reaction, Elizabeth had answered evasively. So Gardner decided to try again. The homosexual issue may not have been a big deal to her, Gardner said, but it may have been one to Derek and Nancy. They must have thought she was gay. Did it bother them?
Elizabeth laughed. They had been very understanding, she said. She had just sat down with them and explained that even though Melinda was gay, that did not mean that she and Melinda had had a sexual relationship.
“Did they believe you?” Gardner asked.
“Oh, yes,” Elizabeth said lightly. “They were much more concerned that I might have been pregnant.”
 
GARDNER GLANCED OVER HIS NOTES. HE AND KIRKLAND had been talking to Elizabeth for a long time, and, while the conversation was interesting, he really wasn’t getting the answers he had been searching for. One of the things he had hoped Elizabeth would tell them was
why
someone may have wanted to murder her parents. So far, he hadn’t even gotten close to an answer. He decided to pursue that angle more aggressively.
“Did your parents have a happy marriage?” he asked Elizabeth.
“Oh, yes,” Elizabeth sighed, obviously relieved to be talking about something else.
“Very, very happy?”
“Yes.”
“From day one?”
“That was the funny thing. They told me that when they got married, they made an agreement: My father said to my mother that no matter how old they got and no matter how many bits of them had been chopped off, they would always sleep together.”
Gardner winced at the phrase about bits of them being chopped off. A very poor choice of words considering what happened to them, he told himself.
Elizabeth apparently did not notice. She kept right on talking, anxious to impress upon the detectives how happy her parents had been. That, too, was apparently a lie, at least according to what she would later claim. But at that stage neither Gardner nor Kirkland had sufficient background to begin weeding truth from falsehood.
“They still referred to each other by their lovers’ names,” Elizabeth continued. “Ruden and Druden. Those were names they had picked up in Europe somewhere.” Mainly, she said, they acted like young lovers.
Gardner wanted at least to eliminate the possibility that they had been killed by a spurned lover. “Did either one of them appear jealous?”
“Oh, no,” Elizabeth answered quickly.
How about the age difference? Gardner asked. Was that a problem? Nineteen years was a big gap.
“They were just like a honeymoon couple,” Elizabeth insisted. Her father was very attentive. Often he came home with a bottle of champagne, or he would bring Nancy coffee in bed.
“So it would be safe to say they had a very happy marriage?” Gardner asked.
“They had a
fantastic
marriage,” Elizabeth amended.
 
 
GARDNER SIGHED. ANOTHER DEAD END. TIME TO TRY another tack. Groping, he asked Elizabeth about her parents’ financial situation.
They were very comfortable, financially speaking, she asserted. They had, in fact, paid $165,000
in cash
for the house they were living in when they were killed. Plus, they were contemplating buying another house in North Carolina. It was priced at $225,000 and she thought they were going to pay most of that in cash.
“Were your parents very, very wealthy?” Gardner asked.
“I wouldn’t say they were very, very wealthy. I would say thaw they had been very careful. My father was a cash man. He didn’t believe in credit. He didn’t buy something unless he had the money for it.”
Gardner raised an eyebrow. He hadn’t known about the Haysoms’ penchant for cash. Did they keep a lot of money around the house? he wanted to know. Could they have been murdered by a robber? Did they have a safe?
The detective was giving Elizabeth one opportunity after another to confuse the investigation. A little slowly, because she was making it up as she went along, she told him that her mother often kept valuables, including cash, in a secret spot behind the hot water heater.
What kind of valuables? Gardner asked.
In addition to the cash, she said, her mother hid some antiques, some silver, and possibly some other things as well. She had never actually seen the hiding place, she added, because her mother was very secretive about it. But she knew it existed. Her mother told her if she ever needed money in an emergency, she could get it from there.
Who else knew about it? Gardner wanted to know.
Thinking quickly, Elizabeth spewed out the first name she could think of. Annie Massie, she said.
Gardner said nothing, but he was shocked. Why in hell did she say that? he asked himself. We’ve just about torn that house apart, and we didn’t find any indication of a safe or a hiding place of any kind. Why is Elizabeth now trying
to make us believe there was? And why did she bring Annie Massie into it? He would have to think about that, he decided. Right now he was tired. Kirkland was tired. Elizabeth was tired. It had been a long, exhausting interview. But there was one thing more he wanted to cover before he wrapped it up.
“Let’s talk about Margaret Louise,” Gardner said. “Are you and Margaret Louise pretty good friends?”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said enthusiastically.
“I heard it through the grapevine. I may be completely off base, but I understand she had a little—”
“Oh, yes,” Elizabeth interrupted. “She was put under psychiatric treatment because she needed some support. They stuck her in a home, and they gave her intense shock treatment plus a lot of drugs.”
Did that affect her? Gardner asked. Permanently?
“That’s bound to have an effect on anybody,” Elizabeth said. Then she added quickly, “But she’s completely normal when you talk to her. It’s just that she’s a little bit distant. She’s very quiet and she thinks in a slightly different way than most people. But she’s safe.”
Is she unbalanced still? Gardner asked. Is she slow?
Definitely not, Elizabeth responded. “She’s got a first-class mind with a degree in mathematics and computers. She has a good sense of humor. She’s completely with it. She knows what’s going on. She acts. She dances.”
Gardner asked about Margaret Louise’s relationship with Elizabeth’s half-brother Julian.
They were engaged, Elizabeth said, but Julian broke it off when he met another woman in Canada. The unfortunate thing about it, she added, was that the breakup came very unexpectedly. Margaret Louise had no idea that Julian was thinking of ending the relationship until he told her that he had married someone else.

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