All Around the Town (20 page)

Abruptly she stopped, dropped her hands and shouted, "Debbie, get back inside! Listen, Doctor, I may be sick of that little kid, but I take care other. You burn that picture, do you hear me? Just don't make her look at it again."

Kate had taken charge.

AT THE END of the session, an attendant came for Laurie. "Can you come back later?" Laurie begged Sarah as she was leaving.

"Yes. Whatever time Dr. Donnelly says is okay."

When Laurie was gone, Justin handed the picture to Sarah. "Can you see anything about this that might frighten her?"

Sarah studied it. "You can't see much with all those cracks and that glue drying over it. You can tell she looks cold, the way she's hugging herself. She's wearing that same bathing suit in the picture with me that we have in the library. It was taken a few days before she was kidnapped. In fact that's the bathing suit she was wearing when she disappeared. do you think that might have triggered the fear?"

"Very possibly." Dr. Donnelly put the picture in the file. "We'll keep her busy today. She'll be in art therapy this morning and a journal-writing session this afternoon. She still refuses to take any of the standardized tests. I'll be available to see her between and around other patients. I hope the time will come when she's willing to talk to me without you. I think that may happen."

Sarah stood up. "What time shall I come back?"

"Right after she has dinner. Six o'clock work our for you?"

"Of course." As she left, Sarah was calculating the time. It was now nearly noon. With luck she'd be home by one. She'd have to be on her way back by four-thirty to avoid the worst of the commuter traffic. That still gave her three-and-a-half hours at her desk.

Justin walked her to the door of the reception area, then watched her go. Her slim back was straight, her tote bag over her shoulder, her head high. Chin up, he thought, good girl. Then as he watched her walked down the corridor he saw her shove both hands in her pockets as though seeking warmth from a chill only she could feel.

Chapter
68

THE GRAND JURY convened on February 17 and did not take long to indict Laurie for the purposeful and knowing murder of Allan Grant. A trial date was set for October fifth.

The next day Sarah met Brendon Moody in Solari's, the popular restaurant around the corner from the Bergen County courthouse. As lawyers and judges came in, they all stopped to speak to Sarah. She should be eating with them, joking with them, Brendon thought, not meeting them this way.

Sarah had spent the morning in the courthouse library researching insanity and diminished mental capacity defenses. Brendon could see the worry in her eyes, the way the smile faded as soon as anyone who greeted her turned away. She looked pale, and there were hollows in her cheeks. He was glad that she had ordered a decent lunch and commented on that.

"Everything tastes like sawdust, but there's no way I can let myself get sick at this stage of the game," Sarah said wryly. "How about you, Brendon? How's the food around the campus?"

"Predictable." Brendon took an appreciative bite of his cheeseburger. "I'm not getting very far, Sarah." He pulled out his notes. "The best and maybe the most dangerous witness is Susan Grimes, who lives across the hall from Laurie. She's the one you called a couple of times. Since October she's noticed Laurie going out regularly between eight and nine o'clock at night and not coming back till eleven or later. She said Laurie looked different on those occasions, pretty sexy, lots of makeup, hair kind of wild, jeans tucked into high-heeled boots---not her usual style at all. She was sure Laurie was meeting some guy."

"Is there any indication that she was ever actually with Allan Grant?"

"You can pinpoint specific dates from some of the letters she wrote to him, and they don't hold up," Moody said bluntly. He pulled out his notepad. "On November sixteenth, Laurie wrote that she loved being in Allan's arms the night before. The night before was Friday, November fifteenth, and Allan and Karen Grant were at a faculty party together. Same kind of fantasizing for December second, twelfth, fourteenth, January sixth and eleventh. I could go on right up to January twenty-eighth. The point is, I hoped to prove that Allan Grant had been leading her on. We know she was hanging around his house, but we haven't a shred of evidence that he was aware of it. In fact everything points the other way."

"Then you're saying that all this was in Laurie's mind, that we can't even suggest that Grant might have been taking advantage of her despondency?"

"There's someone else I want to talk to, a teacher who's been away on sick leave. Her name's Vera West. I'm picking up some rumors about her and Grant."

The pleasant background hum of voices and laughter and dishes being placed on tables, all the familiar sounds that had been part of her workday world seemed suddenly intrusive and foreign to Sarah. She knew what Brendon Moody was saying. If Laurie had fantasized all the encounters with Allan Grant, if in his wife's absence Allan had begun a romance with another woman and Laurie had learned about it, it gave more credence to the prosecutor's contention that she had killed him in a jealous rage. "When will you question Vera West?" she asked.

"Soon, I hope."

Sarah swallowed the rest of her coffee and signaled for the check. "I'd better get back. I'm going to meet the people who are buying our house. Guess what? This Mrs. Hawkins who's been coming out is none other than the wife of the Reverend Bobby Hawkins."

"Who's that?" Brendon asked.

"The hot new preacher on the 'Church of the Airways' program. That's the one Miss Perkins was on when she came up with the name 'Jim' as the man Laurie was with in the diner years ago."

"Oh, that guy. What a faker. How come he's buying your house? That's quite a coincidence with him being involved with the Perkins woman."

"Not really. His wife had been looking at the house before all this happened. The Perkins woman wrote to him, not the other way round. Have we gotten any feedback yet from the Harrisburg police on 'Jim'?"

Brendon Moody was hoping Sarah would not ask him about that. Choosing his words carefully, he said, "Sarah, as a matter of fact we just did. There's a Jim Brown from Harrisburg who's a known child molester. He has a record a mile long. He was in the area when Laurie was spotted in the diner. Miss Perkins was shown his picture at that time but couldn't identify him. They wanted to bring him in for questioning. After Laurie was found, he disappeared without a trace."

"He never showed up again?"

"He died in prison six years ago in Seattle."

"What was the offense?"

"Kidnapping and assault of a five-year-old girl. She testified at his trial about the two months she was with him. I've read the testimony. Bright little kid. Came out with some pretty harrowing stuff. It was all over the papers at the time."

"Which means that even if he was Laurie's abductor it won't do us any good. If Laurie has a breakthrough and remembers him and is able to describe what he did to her, the prosecutor would bring the Seattle newspapers into court and claim that she'd just parroted that case."

"We don't know that this guy had anything to do with Laurie at all," Moody said briskly. "But, yes, if he did, no matter what Laurie remembers about him, it will sound as if she's lying."

Neither one of them spoke the thought that was in their minds. The way it was going, they might have to ask the prosecutor to consider plea-bargaining for Laurie. If that proved necessary, it would mean that by the end of the summer Laurie would be in prison.

Chapter
69

BIC AND OPAL drove with Betsy Lyons to the Kenyon home. For this meeting they had both dressed conservatively. Bic was wearing a gray pin-striped suit with a white shirt and bluish gray tie. His topcoat was dark gray, and he carried gray kidskin gloves.

Opal's hair had just been lightened and shaped at Elizabeth Arden's. Her gray wool dress had a velvet collar and cuffs. Over it she wore a black fitted coat with a narrow sable collar. Her shoes and bag, purchased at Gucci, were black lizard.

Bic was sitting next to Lyons in the front seat of her car. As she chatted, indicating various points of interest in the town, Lyons kept glancing sideways at Bic. She'd been startled when another agent had asked, "Betsy, do you know who that guy is?"

She knew he was in television. She certainly hadn't realized he had his own program. She decided that the Reverend Hawkins was a terribly attractive and charismatic man. He was talking about moving to the New York area.

"When I was called to the Church of the Airways ministry, I knew that we'd want to have a home nearby. I'm just not a city person. Carla has had the undesirable job of scouting for us. And she has kept coming back to this town and this house."

Praise the Lord, Betsy Lyons thought.

"My one hesitation," the preacher was saying in his courteous, gentle voice, "is that I was so afraid that Carla was letting herself in for a disappointment. I honestly thought that the house might be taken off the market permanently."

So did I, Betsy Lyons thought, shivering at the prospect. "The girls will be happier in a smaller place," she confided. "Look, this is the street. You drive down Lincoln Avenue and pass all these lovely homes, then the road bends here and it's Twin Oaks Road."

As they turned onto Twin Oaks Road, she rattled off the names of the neighbors. "He owns the Williams Bank. The Kimballs live in the Tudor. She's Courtney Meier, the actress."

In the backseat. Opal clutched her gloves nervously. It seemed to her that every time they came to Ridgewood it was as though they were skating on thin ice and insistently, consistently testing it, pushing nearer and nearer the breaking point.

SARAH WAS waiting for them. Attractive, Opal decided, as for the first time she got a close look at her. The kind who gets better looking as she gets older. Bic would have passed her by when she was a little kid. Opal wished Lee hadn't had golden hair down to her waist. She wished Lee hadn't been standing by the road that day.

Mutton dressed as lamb, Sarah thought as she extended her hand to Opal. Then she wondered why in the name of God that old Irish expression, a favorite other grandmother's, had jumped into her mind at this moment. Mrs. Hawkins was a well- dressed, fashionably coiffed woman in her mid-forties. It was the small lips and tiny chin that gave her a weak, almost furtive expression. Or maybe it was that the Reverend Bobby Hawkins had such a magnetic presence. He seemed to fill the room, to absorb all the energy in it. He spoke immediately about Laurie.

"I don't know if you're aware that we prayed on our holy hour that memory of the name of your sister's abductor would be returned to a Miss Thomasina Perkins."

"I saw the program," Sarah told him.

"Have you looked into the name, Jim, to see if there is any possible connection? The Lord works in strange ways, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly."

"There is nothing we're not checking in my sister's defense," Sarah said with closure in her voice.

He took the hint. "This is a beautiful room," he said, looking around the library. "My wife kept saying how happy I'd be working here with the bookcases and those big windows. I like to be always in the light. Now I don't want to take any more of your time. If we can just go through the house with Mrs. Lyons one last time, then my lawyer can contact your lawyer about passing papers..."

Betsy Lyons took the couple upstairs, and Sarah returned to work, filing the notes she had made in the law library. Suddenly she realized she'd better get started for New York.

The Hawkinses and Betsy Lyons looked in to say they were leaving. Reverend Hawkins explained that he would like to bring his architect in as soon as possible but certainly didn't want to have him going over the library while Sarah was working. What would be a good time?

"Tomorrow or the next day between nine and twelve, or late afternoon," Sarah told him.

"Tomorrow morning, then."

WHEN SARAH returned from the clinic and went into the library the next afternoon, she had no way of knowing that from now on every word spoken in that room would be turning on sophisticated voice activated equipment and that all her conversations would be transmitted to a tape recorder hidden in the wall of the guest-room closet.

Chapter
70

IN MID-MARCH, Karen Grant drove to Clinton for what she hoped would be the last time. In the weeks since Allan's death, she had spent Saturdays going through the house, weeding out the accumulation of six years of marriage, selecting the pieces of furniture she wanted in the New York apartment, arranging for a used-furniture dealer to pick up the rest. She had sold Allan's car and put the house in the hands of a real estate agent. Today there was going to be a memorial service for Allan in the chapel on campus.

Tomorrow she was leaving for four days in St. Thomas. It would be good to get away, she thought as she drove swiftly down the New Jersey Turnpike. The travel business perks were wonderful. She'd been invited to Frenchman's Reef, one of her favorite places.

Edwin would be going too. Her pulse quickened and unconsciously she smiled. By fall they wouldn't have to sneak around anymore.

THE MEMORIAL SERVICE was like the funeral. It was overwhelming to hear Allan eulogized. Karen heard herself sobbing. Louise Larkin, seated next to her, put an arm around her. "If only he'd listened to me," Karen whispered to Louise. "I warned him that girl was dangerous."