Cold Case (34 page)

All I knew was that my questions would go unanswered. Where was she when her sister died? Did she see her die, perhaps help her along in her journey out to sea?

“Were you jealous of Thea?” I asked sharply.

No reaction. Nothing. I didn't look at Jannie.

Instead I stared at the furnishings. From home. If Beryl could tell me nothing of her earlier life, maybe her possessions would. Surely she'd collected things, written things. A sample of her handwriting might prove interesting.

I expected Jannie to jump down my throat when I opened a drawer. She didn't, just stared listlessly out the window. If she'd cracked it an inch, Beryl could have heard the noise from the volleyball game.

Beryl watched, devoid of curiosity, as if her personal privacy had been violated so often she no longer had the right to any secrets.

Maybe she had no secrets. Just neatly folded cotton underwear and uniformly pink nightgowns, smelling faintly of camellias, as though Tessa had folded them, or selected the sachet bags. A collection of stuffed bears peeked from one drawer; dolls, some with broken arms, twisted legs, filled another. I kept looking, methodically searching for a diary, a notebook, until I came upon unexpected treasure: a scented wooden box. Large, made of sandalwood, filled with family photos, neatly inscribed on the back. If Beryl had printed the captions, the ink light and feathery, bearing no resemblance to the heavy definite strokes with which Thea had penned her prose and verse, I'd have the answer to one question.

I lifted the heavy box out of the drawer, arranged it at Beryl's side.

“What are you doing?” Jannie asked.

“Refreshing her memory.”

“Good luck.”

“This could take time. No reason for you to stay. Want a cigarette break?” I was sure I'd smelled tobacco in her hair.

She gazed longingly toward the window.

“I won't tell,” I said. “I mean, what's the big deal?”

“Five minutes,” whispered Jannie, her hands already patting her pocket. Addiction, what're you gonna do about it?

As soon as she left the room, the desire, the compulsion to rid myself of all Manley's stuff, to dump it in Beryl's bureau, was almost overwhelming. No. It would be too easy to prove I'd been here, too easy to backtrack his wallet to me. I had to find out if Manley'd kept an office here, better yet a room, a place to stay when he and Tessa were on the outs or playing it cool.

I took the two sketches of “Thea,” and the written document I'd stolen from Pix, blended them into the photos.

“Let's look at these, Beryl,” I said. “Is this your mom?”

It was labeled Tourmaline Cameron. I'd almost forgotten Tessa's given name.

Beryl didn't seem unhappy or distressed. She hardly seemed there at all.

“Did you write this?” I pointed at the caption.

Her whispered “yes” caught me off guard.

We went through the photo box together, item by item. Garnet and Thea and Beryl as children. “Father, 1962” showed Franklin Cameron as a huge hulking man. Garnet had always looked like his mother. Once, when the kids had been very young, they'd had a spaniel named Beanie.

I tried out the thin version of “Thea” first.

“Have you seen this lady, Beryl?”

She put her hand to her throat, pointed at herself. I wondered if she'd looked like her sister once, before the medication had altered her shape.

The heavy-set “Thea” got no reaction.

“Can you read this?”

I gave her the page I'd taken from Pix, the page “for b.” She read it once, read it again, folded it, and pressed it against her breast. “Mine,” she whispered. “My white ribbons.”

Jannie entered and with the uncanny skill of prisoners everywhere, Beryl secreted the paper beneath her nightgown, more quickly than I could have done.

“Getting anywhere?” Jannie asked derisively.

“There sure are a lot of photos,” I said with a sigh, wanting her to know she was in for an extraordinarily boring time if she stayed.

“Yeah,” she said. “Guess so.” She watched the volleyball game, staring out the window. I got the feeling that the window was as far as she planned to go now that her nicotine demon slept.

I went back to the photos.

They seemed curiously impersonal. I could find no family member missing from the shots. Were they works done on commission? Had a servant taken them, perhaps the chauffeur? Had they been used as campaign fodder, stylishly shot by some public relations maven? “The perfect family picnics in style.” “The perfect family poses at the beach.” “The perfect children play leapfrog on the lawn.”

Beryl patted her breast. One tear rolled slowly down her cheek.

“Are you a therapist?” I asked Jannie.

“No.”

“A nurse?”

“No.”

“Who'll be her—”

She cut me off. “That decision hasn't been made yet. You'd better leave. You seem to be upsetting her.”

Beryl caught me by the hand, hung on tight.

Jannie shrugged. “Stay,” she said.

I righted a photo facedown in the box. A handsome man with laughing foreign eyes, dark complexion. It was a snapshot, but it wasn't like the others. It lacked their curious formality, looked like it had been held, handled. Its edges had been bent and straightened.

There was no caption.

“Who's this?”

No answer. What did I expect?

“Have you seen this man?” I asked Jannie, walking to the window, lowering my voice.

Beryl followed me with her eyes. Her hands plucked at the sheet.

“No,” Jannie said. There was some secret satisfaction behind her complacency. She was telling the technical truth, but she knew something.

“How long have you worked here?” I asked.

“Eleven years next March the first,” she said as if she'd been counting every day.

“Who's worked here the longest?” I asked. “I need to see that person.”

“You can only visit with Miss Beryl,” Jannie said stubbornly.

“Don't give me any crap,” I said.

“How dare you?”

“Just get me the right person.”

“I take it you want to know who's in the picture.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I could tell you, if you weren't so rude.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “It's been a long week. I would really appreciate it if you'd tell me.”

Her tongue peeked out of the corner of her mouth. She was making up her mind.

“I won't tell anyone that you told me,” I said encouragingly. “If anyone asks, I'll say Beryl let it slip. She does speak occasionally.”

Jannie drew closer, ready to gossip. “He was a gardener here.” Her eyes were amused, above it all. “The clients often, well, they don't see men of their own, um, social class, and they get crushes, especially the younger ones.”

“It's an old photo,” I remarked.

“She's always had it. Since I came. Some days it's faceup, some days facedown. Sometimes it's on top of the box. Once I found it in the trash, but I didn't throw it away. Means something to her,” Jannie said with an elaborate shrug. “I guess.”

She's always had it
.

Always dating back eleven years next March first.

“Does the man still work here?”

“No.”

“Did he work here when you started.”

“No.”

“How long ago did he leave?”

She shrugged again. “He was just day labor, I think.”

“Are there records?”

“There are rumors.”

“Yes?”

“You can see how he's so good-looking …”

“I see.”

“One day he was gone. And the rumor was his past had caught up with him. Can't have men working around the place with that kind of reputation.”

“What kind? Was he a thief?”

“Nothing like that.” She smiled; she was enjoying this, drawing it out. “In his previous position he'd fooled around with one of the lady clients.”

“Do you think he fooled with Beryl?”

“Can't say.”

“Won't or can't?”

“Unconfirmed rumor,” Jannie said. “What's that worth in a place where half the people talk crazy—excuse me, I'm not supposed to use that word.”

She stroked the picture. “Looking like he did,” she went on with a giggle, “kind of like that movie star, you know, Omar Sharif, I always thought he coulda messed with at least half the clients. Don't I wish he was still here when I came. Coulda maybe messed with me, too.”

Beryl said, “Come here,” not clear as a bell, but a definite summons.

Jannie was all over her in an instant. Did she want her pillows plumped? Did she want a glass of water? A doctor to talk to?

With a curt nod, Beryl indicated me.

“Give me,” she mouthed, “Alonso's picture.”

“Alonso,” I repeated.

Another tear fell, beading for an instant on her cheek, rolling toward the pillow.

Jannie, rebuffed, stalked back to the window.

I whispered, “Trade with me, Beryl, for a little while. Let me keep Alonso's photo. It's very important. And you can keep what you have.”

“Always,” she said.

“Yes. You can keep the paper always. And I'll bring Alonso's picture back to you.”

“Promise.”

I promised.

“Cross your heart and hope to die.” Her voice was like a memory, a ghost of a voice. As I promised, I thought about all the things she'd lost in her life, lost to illness, lost to fate.

“I'll bring it back,” I said, making a child's-promise cross above my heart, sliding the snapshot into my back pocket with my other hand.

We kept sifting through the photo box; several times I asked Jannie to identify Garnet or Franklin as a young man, so that she wouldn't fix on the photo of Alonso as the sole item that had caught my interest.

It was the only photo of a nonfamily member. A gardener who'd been fired from a previous gardening job. Alonso.

At last I thought the time was right to replace the sandalwood box in the drawer. Beryl had long since released her hold on me. She seemed to be sleeping, but her eyes were wide and staring.

“Good-bye, Beryl,” I said. “I'll visit you again soon.”

She didn't react, but Jannie did, with a deep sigh of relief, as though I'd been keeping her from her favorite TV show of the decade.

Quickly I made a decision. The complex was too vast to search. If it came to court, it would be Jannie's word against mine. She wasn't a therapist; she wasn't a nurse; she'd already taken an illegal cigarette break. I'd take my word over hers any day.

Bet I lie better than she does.

“I'd like to see Dr. Manley's office,” I said, once we were in the hallway, ears buffeted by piano concertos.

“Wouldn't you? Well, I could have bounced you half an hour ago. The minute a tear fell down her cheek—”

“But you didn't bounce me, Jannie. You like Beryl. You'd like her to get better, wouldn't you?”

“Course I would. Who'd like to be shut up for life, even here?”

“What's the harm in letting me into the doctor's office, for two minutes, while you have another cigarette?”

“You'd take something.”

“I wouldn't. On my honor.”

“Not good enough.”

“Is fifty dollars good enough?”

“Let's see it.”

I had two twenties and a ten ready in my pocket.

She could have turned me over to security. I wouldn't have tried it if she hadn't taken her ciggie break, if she hadn't been so gossipy about Alonso's photo.

She wasn't going to risk going over to another building. She could get caught, fired. But she'd give me directions, a key. I should leave the key in the lock, and she'd get it back in ten minutes. Ten minutes. No more than that. Did I understand?

I did. After placing the good doctor's wallet and appointment book at the back of his desk drawer, where they could have easily been overlooked, I wiped my prints off every surface I'd touched, and then some.

Outside I started shaking. That place scared me more than any prison I've ever entered.

41

I spent too much time trying to locate Mooney, to see if he'd traced the number erased from Thea's file. No luck at one o'clock, at two, at three. Yes, I was snatching at straws, but why those careful erasures in a file covered with wite-out and scrawling black marker? Had someone wanted to be able to find that number again? Why?

I left a message asking Mooney to call me; I don't usually do that.

I bought both the
Globe
and the
Herald
, sat on the stoop, and studied each account of Manley's death. Dr. Andrew Edgar Manley had been found bludgeoned to death near a burning shack close to the ocean's edge. Flames had attracted the neighbors' notice. Mr. Hector Davies of 46 Ocean Avenue had promptly phoned the fire department.

I swallowed. My throat felt tight and raspy. The murderer had returned. Had he tried to obliterate his crime through arson, or call attention to it with flame? Call attention to it. Otherwise he'd have moved the body into the shed. Or had the police department merely responded to my anonymous tip? You can't believe everything you read.

The murderer could have been there, watching Pix and me fighting in the sand, blotting his footprints with ours
.

Manley had last been seen at an eight-thirty dinner party. Guests and location were not named. The Marblehead police promised an early arrest. A tramp, a young man in his early twenties, seen loitering near the shed, was urged to contact the police immediately. The burned hulk of a motorbike would be inspected by forensic specialists at the police garage.

Manley's obituary consisted of a string of honors and degrees, publications heralded for their clarity and brilliance. One of the primary founders of the Weston Psychiatric Institute, he'd given up private practice to concentrate on a passion for travel and rare manuscripts. At the time of his death, he remained an active member of Weston Psych's Board of Directors. He was survived by a sister, two nieces, one nephew.