Winter House (17 page)

„You’re a shrink,“ said Riker. „Can’t you give us more than that?“

„Based on a telephone conversation?“ Charles sighed. He hated the word
shrink,
and it would not apply to him. Although he had the proper credentials and a special interest in abnormal bents of mind, he had never had a private practice and never treated a single patient.

Mallory leaned forward. „McReedy lied to Pinwitty, didn’t she?“ It was a mistake to encourage her idea that he was a human lie detector. Her belief was founded on the fact that he could always tell when
she
was lying. However, this time she was correct. Ten years ago, Miss McReedy had lied in her interview with the author. The proof was all here in the folder that lay open on his desk. Pinwitty had been a word-for-word recorder of conversations.

„Well, if we begin by assuming this woman wanted to mislead Pinwitty –“

„She did,“ said Mallory.

„Fine. Then the redhead who killed Humboldt was young, not middle-aged. I’d say the mystery woman’s hair was naturally red, not dyed. Otherwise Susan McReedy wouldn’t have made a point of mentioning that small detail – while pretending to forget the woman’s name or what had become of her. Rather difficult to misplace a local murderess in a small town described as a truck stop. And her defensive posturing on the phone might suggest a protective relationship with the missing redhead.“ He shrugged to say that was all he had. „So you’ll be going up to Maine to interview her?“

„No,“ said Mallory. „She ‘11 call you back. And when she does, you’ll get more out of her than we would.“

„And you know this
how?“

„She didn’t brush you off,“ said Riker. „She asked a lot of questions. That means you’ve got something she wants.“

„And she’s wanted it for a long time,“ said Mallory.

„Good logic.“ Charles turned to the window, looking up to a blue October sky and wondering where his own logic had flown. How could he have been so far off the mark in his initial assessment of Nedda Winter? „I nearly forgot. I gave Miss McReedy a date for the stabbing. I was off by two days, and she corrected me. I think that was a slip on her part. What’s her profession? A teacher, something like that?“

„A librarian,“ said Mallory. „Retired.“

„Close enough. So Nedda Winter was a fourteen-year-old child when Humboldt was stabbed to death. You really believe that she – “

„Yeah,“ said Riker. „Everything fits. Ice picks seem to be her lifelong weapon of choice.“

Mallory leaned far back in her chair, and Charles was immediately on guard. If she were a cat, her tail would be switching like mad.

„You
like
Nedda Winter, don’t you.“ This was not a question. She was making an accusation, for Miss Winter was now solidly in the enemy camp. Mallory also turned a cold eye on Riker, no doubt suspecting him of the same treason.

„I do like her,“ said Charles. „Can’t say I thought much of the rest of Nedda’s relatives.“ Though Bitty certainly deserved his pity.

„You know it’s a dysfunctional family,“ said Riker, „when the one you like the best is a mass murderer.“

nedda’s body remained at rest, there was no anxious wringing of hands, nor was there any furtive sign of panic – though she was alone.

The new housekeeper, the latest in a parade of transient hires, was out grocery shopping, and Bitty was off on some errand. Nedda had no idea where her brother and sister had gone. Lionel and Cleo had simply walked out the door without a word to her. And why not? She was dead to them. One did not consult with the dead about the day’s plans. The sadness of this slight never showed in her eyes. She continued to behave as if she were constantly being observed from all quarters of every room and would not betray any emotion that might be noted or charted.

Poor Bitty.

Her niece must have had great hopes for the first family reunion. Nedda recalled the startled faces of Cleo and Lionel on the day they had visited the hospice. What a grand surprise that had been. Bitty had dramatically thrown open the door to the private room and exposed their long-lost sister, whom they had always believed to be –
hoped to
be – dead. True horror had set in after their barrage of questions which only a true sister could have answered. Finally, Cleo and Lionel had been convinced that Nedda was no grifter, no fraudulent heiress, and they had asked, almost in unison, „Why did you come back?“

Nedda’s joyful face had frozen into a fool’s grin, and she had been trapped in that expression until her brother and sister had quit the room. How mad she must have seemed to Bitty in that next moment. Anguished crying – foolish smiling.

M
allory turned her small tan sedan eastward into the center lane of Houston at the optimum time for the greatest flow of commuter traffic. Riker sat beside her unaware that anything was amiss in their relationship.

She braked to a full stop and killed the engine. Vehicles in flanking lanes whizzed by, the drivers craning their necks at the odd sight of her stationary car in the middle of rush hour when all New York motorists went insane en masse. The yellow cab behind her screeched to a halt, and a long line of cars behind that one were also unable to change lanes. Mallory only stared at the windshield, as if checking it for spots and bugs, unruffled by the song of the city – drivers honking, putting great feeling into their horns, leaning on them for maximum noise, and the rising lyrics of shouted obscenities. In peripheral vision, she watched Riker’s head swivel in her direction, silently asking,
What are you doing?

„You’re holding out on me.“ She never raised her voice to be heard over the hell choir of honking and screaming, and this forced Riker to lean toward her, straining to hear every word.

Good.

She had his attention now. „When Pinwitty mentioned Humboldt’s name, I know you recognized it, but you didn’t get it from a book or a – “

„Oh, sure,“ said Riker. „I know all of Stick Man’s names.“

Bastard!

While she waited for him to elaborate on this little throwaway bombshell of his, the trapped cars were stacked up all the way back to a grid-locked intersection. The horns had doubled their number and volume, and now a new note was added to the mix. She could hear the angry, tinny slams of compact cars and the heavy-metal sound of trucks as drivers left their vehicles, intent on laying some blame and taking some satisfaction out of her hide.

Yeah, right.

But one glance at Riker told her that he was a believer in road rage. A traffic jam like this one could make killers out of the best-tempered nuns.

„So tell me something.“ Mallory’s words were slow and dead calm, as if she had all damn day for this conversation. „When were you planning to share all these names?“

An old man stood on the cement strip that divided the traffic bound east and west. The elderly pedestrian had no stake in this event, yet he was as outraged as any of the drivers gathering around her car. He shook his fist and mouthed toothless angry words that were lost in the fray. Other men were massing near the windows on all sides. Riker held up his badge, as if that would fix everything.

Mallory slowly turned her head to glare at him, to warn him. He had better start talking and fast. The people surrounding this car were murderously angry, and this was definitely not the time for one of his long-winded stories.

And so Riker told her a story.

C
harles Butler sat at his desk, reviewing paperwork on the latest client of Butler and Company. This one was the most brilliant to date – and the most troubled. The teenager had dropped out of college, descended into profound depression, and continued his fall by dropping off the planet. Mallory had found a lead with an illegal perusal-for-profit of police reports on missing persons. She had then tracked the boy down to a hole in the swamp at the edge of the world (her euphemism for a motel in New Jersey).

During the employment evaluation, all the right answers had been provided for every question on the personality profile, and that had been a clue to a problem; no one was so well balanced. However, the first warning had been the boy’s rolled down sleeves on an unseasonably warm day. Mallory had suspected drugs. Charles had believed the sleeves would hide the scars of an attempted suicide.

He looked up from his reading and noticed his copy of
The Winter House Massacre
lying on the end table by the couch. So Mallory had decided not to read it after all. Wise. What a deadly bore was history in the hands of a bad writer. He turned back to the matter at hand, reading his business partner’s most recent research on their young job candidate.

She had turned up a history of no less than six therapists, thus explaining how the youngster had sailed through all the psychological examinations – practice. Charles read the headings for each of Mallory’s documents; all of them had been raided from hospital computers in the tristate area. She could not have gotten them by any other means. Even at one remove from theft, it would be unethical to read this material. And what would Mallory’s foster father have said of this – theft of confidential patient files?

That’s my kid.

And Louis would have said that with great pride.

Thoughts of this dead man linked up with the image of Nedda Winter skirting her ghosts on the staircase the night of the dinner party. He had never mentioned that to Mallory as an indication of a mind gone awry. If that held true, then he must count himself as a loon and a half.

The brown armchair beside the couch was the most comfortable seat in this office, and yet he never sat there. It was Louis’s chair even now. That good old man had sat in this room on many a night when sleep was impossible because his wife was dead. In a way, all of Louis’s stories of life with the incomparable Helen Markowitz had been ghost stories. Had she not come alive in this room? After a time, Charles had also come to grieve for Helen, though he had never met her. And he still grieved sorely for Louis. He missed that great soul every day.

And Charles could see his old friend, clear as day, seated beside him now, gathering up hound-dog jowls in a dazzling smile. And was there just a touch of pity in the old man’s crinkled brown eyes? Oh, yes. Only Louis could fully appreciate Charles’s predicament with Mallory’s purloined documents.

As the former commander of Special Crimes Unit, Inspector Markowitz had made such good use of his foster child’s skill with computer lock picks.

Charles looked down at the raided information, poisonous fruit from Mallory’s hand. Well, it was definitely in a good cause – life and death – if his suspicions about their client proved true. He read every line of the stolen data and discovered that each of the boy’s psychiatric examinations had followed police custody for a suicide attempt on Halloween. And what were the odds that he might forgo his yearly wrist-slashing?

Well, job placement was out of the question, but now he could make the proper referral for long-term therapy. Mallory may have saved the boy’s life with this information, stolen or not. Charles looked up at the armchair – Louis’s chair. His old friend, the dead man, shrugged, then splayed one hand to say,
This is how it begins
–
the seduction.

Charles found himself nodding in agreement with a man who was not there. Yes, he had actually rationalized a breach of ethics, an unnecessary violation. In truth, Mallory’s theft had only supported his own suspicions. He was actually quite good at his craft, though he applied his skill to analyzing a potential client’s gifts and suitability for employment.

Retiring to the couch, he stretched out to finish his reading in comfort. He was surprised to turn a page and find Mallory’s job proposal for placing the boy in a remote scientific community. There, he would not be a solitary freak, but one of many such freaks, and he would cease his ritual attempts to kill himself every Halloween; this had been Mallory’s argument for selling an unbalanced job candidate.

Oh,
of course.
Never mind the fee. And here he countered with her own trademark line, „Yeah, right.“

Mallory, the
humanitarian,
had also secured the client on the profit side of this transaction. The New Mexico think tank was funded with a truly obscene amount of grant money. Best of all – and this was her final salvo – the personnel director had not balked at the disclosure of the boy’s suicidal ideation, and the project would provide long-term therapy.

Thus far, this was the only argument for job placement.

All that remained was the detail of signing off on Mallory’s paperwork.

He slowed his reading to a normal person’s pace, for his partner sometimes deviated from the standard boilerplate contract, and he had learned to go slowly and scrutinize every line before signing anything. True to form, she had named a staggering fee that he would never have had the gall to charge, and her conditions straddled a borderland between ethics and all that the traffic would bear. She had added a penalty clause, doubling their fee if the New Mexico project failed to keep the boy alive through Halloween.

Charles stared at the ceiling, averting his eyes from the laughing dead man.

Reading that final contract clause in the best possible light, Mallory was not actually planning to profit on a death. No, she only wanted to ensure the boy’s ongoing survival. He turned to face his memory of the late Louis Markowitz, who knew her best.

The old man lifted one eyebrow to say,
But you ‘re not really sure, are you, Charles?

On a normal day, he would be madly rewriting the terms of Mallory’s contract, but now he simply bowed to the absurd and signed his name on the dotted line.

Done with the business of the day, he turned his attention to the telephone on the other side of the room, willing it to ring. He was looking forward to another conversation with Susan McReedy, the lady from Maine. Mallory had insisted that the woman would call again. The detective’s contracts were a bit dicey, but her instincts were superb. Yes, Ms. McReedy would definitely call back. He could see the woman clearly now, sitting by her own telephone, her hair gone to gray and her life as well, facing the tedium of her retirement years. This very moment, all of Ms. McReedy’s thoughts would be consumed by old acquaintance with a memorable icepick-wielding redhead.

He reached out to the near table and picked up his history book. As he turned the pages, he marveled anew that Riker could have ingested this dry text without the skill of speed reading and the mercy of a quick end. While scanning the pages, Charles revisited Mallory’s theory on a twelve-year-old girl’s involvement in the Winter House Massacre.

In a bibliophile’s act of heresy, he threw the book across the room. Next, he abandoned logic, replacing it with faith and feeling. He liked Nedda Winter. Between dinner at eight and the last bottle of wine in the early hours of a morning, he had come to think of her as a friend.

H
ead bowed over her plate, Nedda Winter finished supper in the kitchen, then disregarded the automatic dishwasher to clean her plate in the sink. She planned to retire early and spare her siblings one more encounter, though she craved their company, any company at all, rather than to be alone, that state where memory consumed her.

One benign recollection was of Mrs. Tully, wide as she was tall, the cook and housekeeper who had died in the massacre. This kitchen had been that old woman’s domain, and October had been Tully’s favorite time of the year. For weeks in advance of Halloween, she had always been allowed free rein to terrify her employer’s offspring. That last time, when five of the Winter children had only a few more days to live, they had all gathered in the kitchen, all except Baby Sally. The youngsters, rocking on the balls of their feet, had wafted back and forth between terror and delight. And then the long-awaited moment came when the housekeeper threw open the cellar door to absolute darkness and led them all down the stairs.

Five-year-old Cleo had alternately laughed and squealed in anticipation before Tully had even begun her scary work. Erica, who had turned nine that year, was much more ladylike, practicing to be blase and determined that the old woman would not make her scream. And the rest of them could hardly wait to be scared witless.

„I never use mousetraps,“ the old woman said, as she led the parade of children into the dank basement by the light of a single candle. She held the flame below her face to make it seem evil when she grinned at them. „No, traps won’t do. Might catch a child or two by mistake and break your little fingers and toes. But no fear. The house likes you – all of you. But the house hates vermin. Kills ‘em dead, it does.“ Tully had bent low to hold her candle over the small moldering body of a field mouse underneath a fallen box. Another mouse was found crushed by a wrench that had dropped from a shelf of tools. „Looks accidental, don’t it? But look around you, my little dears. Did you ever see so many accidents in one place?“ And then she had laughed, high-throated, wicked, shining candlelight into corners, illuminating other tiny corpses caught and crushed in the circumstances of apparent mishaps.