On the Street Where you Live (8 page)

“If there is an answer to that, I intend to try to find it,” she told him. “Will, I'd like to meet the Lawrences. Do you know them?”

“Yes, I do. They used to entertain pretty frequently before Martha disappeared. I was often at their house, and, of course, I see them around town.”

“Would you call and ask if they would allow you to bring me over for a short visit whenever they're up to it?”

He did not question her reason for asking. “I'll get back to you,” he promised.

Twenty minutes later the voice of the receptionist, Pat Glynn, came over the intercom. “Mr. Stafford, Natalie Frieze is here. She wants to see you for a few minutes.”

Just what I need, Will thought. Natalie was the second wife of Bob Frieze, a longtime Spring Lake resident. Nearly five years ago, Bob had retired from his brokerage firm and fulfilled a lifelong dream by opening a decidedly upscale restaurant in Rumson, a town twenty minutes away. He'd called it The Seasoner.

Natalie was thirty-four. Bob was sixty-one, but clearly each had gotten what was wanted from the marriage. Bob had a trophy wife, and Natalie a luxurious lifestyle.

She also had a roving eye that sometimes settled on Will.

But today, when she came in, Natalie was not her normal flirtatious self. She skipped her usual effusive greeting to him, which always included a warm kiss, and flopped into a chair. “Will, it's so terribly sad about Martha Lawrence,” she said, “but is this going to stir up a hornet's nest? I'm worried
sick.”

“With all due respect, Natalie, you don't look worried sick. In fact, you look as though you just came back from a shoot for
Vogue.”

She was wearing a three-quarter-length chocolate-brown leather coat with a sable collar and cuffs, and matching leather slacks. Her long blond hair hung straight past her shoulders. The even tan, which Will knew had been recently acquired in Palm Beach, accentuated her turquoise-blue eyes. She slouched back in the chair as though too burdened to sit up straight and crossed one long leg over the other, revealing a slender, high-arched foot in an open-backed sandal.

She ignored the compliment. “Will, I came straight over to talk to you after I saw that news conference. What do you think about that finger bone in Martha's hand. Isn't that a little
weird?”

“It's certainly very strange.”

“Bob almost had a heart attack. He stayed to watch the prosecutor finish his statement before he left for the restaurant. He was so upset I didn't even want him to drive the car.”

“What would make him so upset?”

“Well,
you
know how that Detective Duggan keeps coming around to talk to all of us who were at that damn party at the Lawrence house the night before Martha disappeared.”

“What are you getting at, Natalie?”

“What I'm getting at is that if we thought we saw a lot of Duggan before, it won't begin to compare with how much we'll see of him now that the investigation has heated up. It's obvious that Martha was murdered, and if people around here get the idea that one of us was responsible for her death it's going to be pretty damn bad publicity.”

“Publicity!
For godssake, Natalie, who's worried about publicity?”

“I'll tell you who's worried about it. My
husband
is. Every nickel Bob owns is sunk into his fancy restaurant. Why he thought that he could make a success of one without knowing about the restaurant business is a question only a shrink could answer. Now his guts are all tied up in a knot because he has the idea that if there's a lot of attention aimed our way because we were at the party, it might hurt his
business. Such as it is, I might add—he's gone through three chefs so far.”

Will had gone to the restaurant a few times. The decor was heavy-handed and luxurious, jacket and tie were required in the evening, which didn't sit well with people on vacation. I suggested he drop the requirement for a tie, Will thought. The food had been only average, and the prices much too steep.

“Natalie,” he said, “I understand that Bob is under a lot of stress, but the idea that all of us being at the Lawrence party would keep anyone away from his restaurant is really reaching.”

And if it fails with a pile of money lost in it, your pre-nup won't be worth much, he thought.

Natalie sighed and untangled herself from the chair. “I hope you're right, Will. Bob is one big quivering sea of nervous tension. Barks at me if I make even the smallest suggestion.”

“What
kind
of suggestion?” I can only imagine what kind, Will thought.

“That maybe before he fires another chef he'd better take a cooking class so he can step in and take over the kitchen himself.” Natalie shrugged and grinned. “I feel better talking to you. You can't have had lunch yet. Let's go get something to eat.”

“I was going to send out for a sandwich.”

“No you're not. We're going to eat at The Old Mill. Come on. I need company.”

When they went out to the street, she tucked her hand under his arm.

“People may talk,” he suggested, smiling.

“Oh, so what? They all resent me anyhow. I told
Bob we should have moved. This town is too small for me and his first wife.”

As he held the car door open for Natalie and she ducked her head to get in, sunbeams made her long blond hair glisten and sparkle.

For a reason unknown to him the prosecutor's statement raced through Will's mind. “Strands of long blond hair were found on the remains.”

Bob Frieze, like his trophy wife, was known to have a roving eye.

Especially for beautiful women with long blond hair.

D
R.
L
ILLIAN
M
ADDEN,
a prominent psychologist who used hypnosis regularly in her practice, firmly believed in reincarnation and would regress appropriate patients to previous lifetimes. She believed that emotional trauma suffered in other lives might be the source of emotional pain in present-day experience.

Very much in demand on the speakers' circuit, she expounded a favorite premise, that the people we know in this life were most likely people we knew in other lives. “I do not mean that your husband was your husband three hundred years ago,” she would tell her enthralled listeners, “but I do believe he may
have been your best friend. In the same way, a person with whom you have had a problem may also have been an adversary in another life.”

A childless widow with her home and office in Belmar, a town bordering Spring Lake, she had heard about the discovery of Martha Lawrence's body the night before and experienced the communal sorrow that afflicted the residents of all the nearby towns.

The idea that a grandchild was not safe while jogging on a summer morning seemed incomprehensible to all of them. To find that the slain body of Martha Lawrence had been buried so near her grandparents' home convinced everyone that someone who had seemed trustworthy must be guilty of the crime. Someone who conceivably would be welcome in any one of their homes.

After she heard the report, Lillian Madden, a lifelong insomniac, had spent sleepless hours meditating on the finality of the tragic discovery. She knew that Martha's family had undoubtedly still been hoping against hope that one day, miraculously, she would return unharmed.

Instead they now lived with the cruel knowledge that any number of times they had passed by the property where her body was buried.

Four and a half years had passed. Had Martha returned in a new incarnation? Did the baby just born to Martha's older sister house the soul that had at one time dwelt in Martha's body?

Lillian Madden believed it was possible. Her prayer for the Lawrence family was that they might
sense that in welcoming and loving the baby they might also be welcoming Martha home.

Her morning schedule of patients began at 8:00
A.M.
, an hour before her secretary, Joan Hodges, came in. It was noon before Dr. Madden talked to Joan at her desk in the reception room.

Joan, dressed in a tailored black pantsuit that showed off her recently achieved size 12, did not hear her come in. She was pushing back a strand of frosted blond hair from her forehead with one hand and scribbling a message with the other.

“Anything important?” Dr. Madden asked.

Startled, Joan looked up. “Oh, good morning, Doctor. I don't know how important they are, but you're not going to like these messages,” she said bluntly. A forty-four-year-old grandmother, Joan was, in Lillian Madden's opinion, the perfect person to work in a psychologist's office. Breezy, matter-of-fact, unflappable, and naturally sympathetic, she had the gift of putting people at ease.

“What about them am I not going to like?” Lillian Madden asked mildly as she reached for the notes on Joan's somewhat cluttered desk.

“The prosecutor held a news conference, and in this past hour you've gotten calls about it from three of the most sensational tabloids in the country. Let me tell you why.”

Lillian listened in startled silence as her secretary described the discovery of the ringed finger of another woman in Martha Lawrence's skeletal hand, and the fact that Madeline Shapley, like Martha, had disappeared on September 7th.

“Surely they don't think that Martha was Madeline reincarnated and destined for the same terrible death?” Lillian demanded. “That would be absurd.”

“They didn't ask that,” Joan Hodges said grimly. “They want to know if you think Madeline's killer is the one who's been reincarnated.” She looked up at Madden. “Come to think of it, Doctor, you can't blame them for wondering that, can you?”

A
T TWO O'CLOCK,
Tommy Duggan got back to his office, trailed by Pete Walsh. After the press conference ended, a team from the prosecutor's office had begun poring over the Martha Lawrence file. Every detail, from the first phone call four and a half years ago reporting Martha missing, to the finding of her body, was being scrutinized and analyzed to see if anything had been overlooked.

Osborne had put Tommy in charge of the investigation and made Pete Walsh his assistant. Walsh had been a police officer in Spring Lake for eight years before joining the prosecutor's office two months ago.

He also had been a member of the research team that had spent the night at the Hall of Records in the courthouse going through the dusty bins, searching
for material relating to the disappearance of Madeline Shapley in 1891.

It was Walsh who had suggested looking to see if there were any other reports of women missing around that time, and he had come up with the names of Letitia Gregg and Ellen Swain.

Now Tom Duggan looked at Walsh with sympathy. “If I haven't mentioned it before, you look like a chimney sweep,” he told him.

Despite his efforts to clean up, dust and grime from the nightlong search were ground into Pete's skin and clothes. His eyes were bloodshot and though he had the build of a linebacker, his shoulders were drooping with fatigue. At thirty, even with a hairline that was already receding, he looked to Tom like a tired kid.

“Why don't you just go home, Pete?” he asked. “You're asleep on your feet.”

“I'm fine. You talked about phone calls you wanted to make. I'll split them with you.”

Tom shrugged. “Have it your way. The morgue will release Martha's remains to the family later today. They've arranged for a funeral director to pick them up and take them to the crematorium. The immediate family will be there and will escort the urn with her ashes to the family mausoleum in St. Catherine's cemetery. Just so you know, that information is not to be leaked to the public. The family wants it to be absolutely private.”

Pete nodded.

“By now a spokesman for the family will have announced to the press that a memorial Mass will
be held for Martha on Saturday at St. Catherine's.”

Tommy was sure that most if not all of the people who had been at the party the night before Martha vanished would be in attendance at the Mass. He had already told Pete that he wanted to get them under the same roof somewhere and then question them individually. Inconsistencies in their recollections could be straightened out much faster if they were together—or perhaps
not
straightened out, he thought grimly.

There had been twenty-four guests and five catering staff in the Lawrence home the night before Martha vanished.

“Pete, after we assemble them, we'll do the usual. Have a little talk with them, one by one, and try to find out if any of them lost anything at the party. Our top priority is to learn if anyone had been wearing or carrying a gray silk scarf with metallic beading.”

Tommy pulled out the list of the guests who had been at the party and laid it on the desk. “I'm going to call Will Stafford and ask if I can have everyone meet at his house after the memorial Mass,” he said. “If I clear that with him, we'll start making phone calls.”

He reached for the phone.

Stafford had just returned from lunch. “Sure you can meet at my house,” he agreed, “but you'd better schedule it a little later. There's a message on my desk that says the Lawrences are inviting some close friends back to the house for a buffet luncheon after the Mass. I'm sure most of the people who were at the party will be included in that.”

“Then I'll ask them to be at your place at three o'clock. Thanks, Mr. Stafford.”

I'd give a lot to be at that luncheon, Tommy thought. He nodded at Pete. “Now that we have the place and the time, let's start making these calls. We're supposed to be at Emily Graham's house in an hour. We're going to try to sweet-talk her into letting that backhoe dig up the rest of her yard.”

They began making the phone calls and reached everyone except Bob Frieze. “He'll call you back presently,” an employee at the restaurant promised.