Read An Illustrated Death Online
Authors: Judi Culbertson
An Illustrated Death (14 page)
I
WASN’T SURE
when Marselli would interview Regan, but my phone rang Sunday afternoon. The caller ID came up as “Harada, Dai.”
“Secondhand Prose!”
“Delhi?”
“Hi Regan.”
“Why did you tell that policeman where I live?”
“I didn’t. I don’t even know where you live. Your family must have told him.”
“But to come all the way up to Kinderhook—and on a Sunday morning! He even started asking me about Nate and wouldn’t tell me when Gretchen’s service is going to be. What an idiot.”
“He probably doesn’t know when. They can’t plan anything until the autopsy is finished.
I’ll
let you know when the service is.”
“
You
will? That’s another thing: For someone who’s only my sister’s collaborator, you’re way too chummy with the whole bunch. It’s weird that you’re the one who called me about my aunt. I work with lots of authors and we hardly ever see each other. You seem to be out there all the time.”
“People work differently.”
“I want you to tell me why! What’s really going on with you?”
“What do you think is going on?”
“Don’t answer my questions with questions. You know what I think? You’re a con artist trying to get their money.”
Lots of luck with that
. “Did you want something, Regan? Or did you just call to insult me.”
“No.” Her voice was suddenly small. “I get carried away when I’m upset.”
“I didn’t sic the police on you.”
Well, actually I did. I didn’t say you’d
done
anything though.
“I knew they’d be a nuisance! That’s why I said involving them was a mistake. They can railroad people into anything.”
Was it my place to tell her that Gretchen had been suffocated? No, she had already accused me of being too involved. “They’d have to have evidence first. They don’t just decide someone is guilty and go after them.”
“Oh, no? You can interpret ‘evidence’ any way you like. Look at all those people who’ve been cleared by DNA years later. That detective asked Dai a lot of questions and he wouldn’t even let me stay in the room.”
“Maybe he wanted to get an outsider’s perspective. Someone who knew the family but wasn’t related.”
“Dai’s much too trusting. You know what he said? He told that detective that he and Gretchen didn’t get along! That’s all he needed to hear. It wasn’t like that, Gretchen was the one who resented Dai. She did everything she could to keep us from getting married. Just because he was the gardener. Now that detective thinks Dai had a reason for hurting her.”
“Regan, they know people don’t always get along. If people went around killing everyone they disliked, there’d be about three of us left in the world. And why would Dai have any reason to hurt her after all these years?”
A long silence. “He wouldn’t—of course he wouldn’t. But innocent people go to jail with no evidence all the time.” She sounded close to tears. “And he was down on Long Island when she went missing. Anyway, I’ve got to go, we promised the kids we’d get pumpkins. You’ll keep me posted?”
I promised I would.
L
ATE THAT AFTE
RNOON
I called Susie Pevney back.
“I guess you’re calling about the Old Frigate?” I was dreading telling her I had offered her a job that wasn’t available.
“It sounds like an answer to my prayers. Paul has some doubts, but I’m sure he’ll come around.”
“There are still a few details to work out,” I warned.
Like holding a gun to Marty’s head.
“Delhi, I’m so sick of eBay and PayPal I could take a whip to them. By the time everyone takes their cut, I don’t know why I bother. I’ll work whenever he needs me to.”
“I’ll let you know more soon,” I promised, and hoped it was a promise I could keep.
I
SPENT THE
rest of the afternoon in the barn, but didn’t accomplish much. Some days are like that. Some days I’ll pick up a book to describe and an hour later I’ll still be reading it. I wished I could time travel back to the first giddy days of bookselling, back to when the economy had not yet tanked, and I could have dismissed Colin and Marty’s plans for me with a laugh. Back before September, when Nate Erikson was one of my idols. I still loved his sensibility, but I was seeing him through a cloudy window. I didn’t understand the destroyed painting of the young woman in the studio. I thought it was mean to give Regan money and then deny his other children what
they
needed to pursue their dreams. It was not that he owed them anything . . . except to treat them fairly. It might have been better to continue happily collecting his work without knowing anything about him.
T
HE POLICE WERE
back at Adam’s Revenge on Monday, concentrating on the area between the house and the pool, moving snaillike as they studied the ground. I wondered if they were looking for traces of someone carrying Gretchen’s body down from the house. But who was strong enough? Puck and Claude could probably manage it, but not the women. Of course, two people working together could do it, Claude and Lynn or Regan and Dai. Or Bianca and Puck, though they didn’t seem to like each other that much.
Then I remembered the wheelbarrow that Regan said was tipped on its side. She assumed Gretchen had tripped backward over it and fallen down into the pool. But what if Gretchen had not died in her room but in one of the cottages that was on the same level as the pool? It would have been easy for anyone to wheel her body over. The wheelbarrow had been on the terrace when Marselli first came, but there had been no reason for it to seem important.
Another thing: If Gretchen had died in her own bed, why bother moving her at all? But if she had been suffocated in Rosa’s or Claude’s or Bianca’s cottage, there was a good reason to have her found somewhere else.
It seemed important to let the police know. I continued into the studio to leave my laptop and bag, then locked the door again and headed for the pool. I had nearly reached the opening in the cedars when a young patrolman intercepted me. He was blond with a pleasant face and lean build, the kind of face you would notice at a mall but never be able to identify afterward.
“Ma’am, this is a crime scene.”
“I know—is Detective Marselli here?”
“Not yet.”
“I only wanted to tell him—I guess I can tell you—that if you haven’t dusted that wheelbarrow for fingerprints, you should.”
“Ma’am?”
I pointed in the direction of the terrace. “It’s Gretchen Erikson’s wheelbarrow, the woman who died. Someone may have used it to transport her body from one of the cottages. So it should be checked out.”
“Who are you?” He didn’t seem to know if he should kneel down in admiration or arrest me.
“Delhi Laine. I’m the one who called the police. It’s up there on the side of the hill. Or was.” From where we stood I couldn’t see the garden or the pool.
“Wait a minute. You’re saying that the wheelbarrow’s part of the crime scene? How do you know that?”
“I don’t. It’s just an idea. It probably doesn’t mean anything. Just mention the wheelbarrow to Frank Marselli, okay?”
I knew it wouldn’t make the patrolman happy, but I turned and walked away before he could ask me anything else.
B
IANCA WAYLAID ME
on my way back from delivering the message about the wheelbarrow. I suspected that the yellow mums she was planting in front of her chalet were an excuse to make sure she didn’t miss me.
“How about some tea?” she offered.
“Okay, fine.”
I went inside and sat down on the quilted floral sofa, averting my eyes from the lonely teddy bear. Bianca came back from the kitchen a minute later, carrying a tray with two beautiful Spode cups, and a matching floral sugar and creamer. Setting the tray on the coffee table in front of me, she asked, “Take anything in it?”
“No. Thanks.”
“You were going to tell me why you don’t take photographs anymore.” She sat back in her chair, waiting, her pale eyes watching me.
“I meant to tell you before this,” I said. “It’s hard to talk about.”
“What happened?”
“You know the photograph of the two little girls trading flowers?”
“The twins? You and your sister? No, not if you took it.”
“My daughters, Hannah and Caitlin. They were twins too.”
“How do you stop being—oh.” Bianca didn’t miss much.
I took a breath that felt ragged to me. “They were two years old when that photo was taken. We were in England for the summer at a kind of archeological institute. My daughter Jane was four, and I was pregnant with my son, Jason. I know.” I smiled faintly at her look of disbelief. “It’s a lot of children in a short time.”
“It’s what my parents were trying to do. Anyway, go on.”
“Colin was off visiting a site that day and I was down by the Avon River with the girls. We went to the park every day. The story in the papers said that I was dozing on a bench, holding Hannah, when Jane came running up and told me that Caitlin had fallen in the river.”
Bianca put her hand over her eyes.
“You don’t have to listen to this.”
“No. Go on.”
“I raced down to the edge to try and find her. People heard me screaming her name and saw me thrashing around in the water and came running. The trouble was, the water was only waist-deep there but we didn’t know where to look. Jane couldn’t tell us where she had fallen in.
“Then that night, Jane changed her story. She was hysterical, afraid to fall asleep because she said ‘the bad lady’ would come and steal
her
too. We tried to get her to tell us more about this lady, but she couldn’t. All she said was that she had on ‘funny shoes’ and promised her a bunny, then wouldn’t give it to her.”
I was suddenly back in that large family bedroom, holding my sweaty child, part of my mind trying to make what had happened not true, the other part fighting to understand her. That second part wanted to shake her until the truth came tumbling out of her mouth like marbles.
“Delhi, are you okay?”
I nodded and took a long sip of the peppermint-flavored tea. The English were right. Tea was bracing.
“What did the police say when you told them what she’d said?”
“We tried all night to find out more. Finally we had to let her sleep. Colin went to the station at six the next morning.”
I had trouble remembering what happened after that. “They promised they would follow up. They tried to interview people who had been in the park that afternoon. People had seen us all together but no one had noticed a woman leaving with a little girl.”
Another sip of tea. “I don’t think they took Jane seriously. The police psychologist thought she felt guilty about not protecting Caitlin, and had invented a ‘bad lady’ to help her cope.”
“But the details were so specific. They never found her in the water?”
“No. I think they brought in divers. But—no.”
“Isn’t that unusual?”
“They said it could happen, if she got caught on something. She hardly weighed anything. We borrowed money from Colin’s parents to hire a private detective and I stayed on as long as I could, right up until Jason was ready to be born. We posted pictures of Caitlin everywhere. The trouble was, everyone assumed that she had drowned since that’s what the police said. It’s not like that other little girl who was stolen from her hotel room in Portugal, Madeleine McCann.” I may have buried Caitlin and my feelings over the years, but I obsessively followed stories about missing children.
“What did your detective find?”
My throat felt too raw to talk. “Nothing,” I croaked.
Bianca sighed. “What a terrible thing for your other children. Especially her twin. Something like that can scar your whole life. You never get over what might have been.”
“That’s what Colin thought.” I took my final dose of tea. “He said that what happened to Caitlin couldn’t be the thing that defined our family, to have what you called the might-have-been always looming over us. We decided the other children were young enough to let them have a normal life. Jane seemed to forget about it after it happened and Hannah and Jason never really knew.”
“And your therapist agreed with that?”
“No therapist.”
“You didn’t
see
anyone?” She put her other hand under her teacup as if to keep from dropping it.
“We were young and only trying to survive. I guess we thought we didn’t need that kind of help. We wanted to do what was best for the other kids. But now . . . I don’t know.” I thought about Jane in Manhattan, a financial success but changing boyfriends like Prada handbags, Hannah, my animal lover and drama queen and Jason wandering around New Mexico trying to find a way to live. Were they responding to something under the surface, a melancholy they had no idea how to define?
I remembered my conversation with Jane. “When I was talking to Jane the other night, I asked her if she could recall anything that had happened in Stratford-upon-Avon. And she said she couldn’t.”
“Well—” Bianca sounded skeptical.
“I know. After I asked her she started sounding weird. She got off the phone right away. I don’t think she remembers anything consciously, but there’s something there.”
“More tea?”
“Sure. Thanks.”
She set my cup on the tray and disappeared, leaving me time to gather myself for the next and harder part. I leaned back on the sofa. I wasn’t sure why telling Bianca felt so good, but it was like fighting nausea for hours, pressing your lips closed and trying to think about something else, then finally giving in. You felt so much better—at least for the moment—that you wondered why you hadn’t given in earlier.
When she came back with two fresh cups, she said, “What does it have to do with your not taking pictures?”
Even Colin didn’t know this part. “The newspapers said I had been dozing on a park bench. Exhausted mum, too many little children, end of story. I got as much sympathy as blame.” I paused, but Bianca just watched me.
“I wasn’t asleep. I was busy taking photos of people in boats on the river and the girls were playing around me. I got absorbed in what I was doing and moved to the edge of the bank. I even remember what I was focusing on, two elderly women in large white hats being rowed by a young boy. Then Jane was pulling at my leg, and the rest you know.”
Bianca tilted her head at me, frowning. “I don’t understand. If you were that close to the river, why didn’t you see her fall in? Out of the corner of your eye. Or at least heard a splash.”
I stared at her. I had changed my story so quickly that no one had known to ask me that. With all the terror and confusion, some part of me had come to believe the sleeping story was true. I
was
always exhausted in those days, always nodding off in airports and poetry readings. “My God!” It came out as a wail.
“My God,” she echoed.
“Of course I would have noticed. I noticed everything.”
“Why did you change your story?”
“I don’t know. As soon as I called him, Colin said, ‘You fell asleep, didn’t you? You weren’t watching her because you fell asleep.’ At first I told him no, but ignoring your kids to take photos seemed even worse. I knew he would never forgive that.” The truth was, it was hard to remember what I had been thinking half a lifetime ago.
“So you punished yourself by giving up photography.”
“I didn’t think of it like that, I just wasn’t interested in it anymore. I was too busy.”
Bianca put her cup down as suddenly as if the steam had scalded her hand. “If you didn’t see her fall in the water and nobody else did either, there’s a good chance she didn’t. Your daughter’s story about the ‘bad lady’ is probably true.”
I leaned forward. “You think she’s
alive
somewhere?”
“Why not?”
