In a Dark Season (27 page)

Chapter 34

Something Like Fate

Tuesday, December 26

I
t was arson, all right—see how they set the mattress on fire—slashed it and the pillows open so they’d burn better—but at the moment I’m fresh out of motives.” Mackenzie Blaine rubbed his hands together and stamped his feet in an effort to warm them. The interior of the Gudger house seemed, somehow, at least ten degrees colder than the out-of-doors. “What d’ya think, Hawk? I suspect you and your lady friend mighta been discussing the subject.”

Phillip looked around the wreck of the bedroom. The half-burned recliner lay on its side and the ratty little television’s tube was shattered. The old trunk’s lid was open and its interior was a mass of charred clothing. Every drawer had been wrenched from the chest of drawers and dumped into the center of the room to make another pile of tinder for the arsonist’s kerosene.

Burn marks stretched across the floorboards of the bedroom and into the little hallway, marking the fire’s path. The stench of the wet, charred wood and plastic and cloth was strong, and he knew that it would linger in his nostrils and cling to his clothes for hours.

“Lizabeth did suggest that both Miss Barrett’s niece and those RPI development folks would be happy not to have a historic building on their hands. You know how it is—once the historic preservationists get a bee in their bonnet about maintaining a place’s authenticity, all of a sudden there’re miles of red tape to untangle and everything has to wait till every single interested party has had their say and made their appeals. What if someone figured the place would be more useful as a development
without
the historic building? You said something like that yourself, back before Christmas when you were showing me around this place.”

The sheriff kicked disconsolately at a jumbled heap of debris. “I know I did. And I’ve been quietly checking into the whereabouts of all those parties on the night in question. The niece and her boyfriend say they were back in Raleigh, but I haven’t been able to confirm that yet. And the RPI bunch all have alibis—hell, they were every one of them at a big do up at the Holcombe place, along with most of the politicos and movers and shakers of the county. Of course—”

“Of course that doesn’t mean shit,” Phillip reminded him. “Folks like RPI don’t personally commit arson—they hire it done. But this was such a godawful
amateur
job—no, it doesn’t make any sense.”

“Nope, none of it does.” With a last look around what remained of the bedroom, they traced the blackened trail of the fire through the little hallway and into the onetime barroom.

Mackenzie Blaine led the way to the back door. “The RPI folks say it’s radical environmentalists. Kind of a convenient catch-all phrase, like ‘outside agitators’ was back in the civil rights era. But there was a letter in the paper from some group called Black Bear Watches saying they’d torched the Hummer in protest of RPI’s plans. Only thing is, no one’s ever heard of this group.

“Way too many unanswered questions, Hawk. Why’d Miss Barrett jump? Why’d Payne Morton kill himself? Whose bones are those in the silo? Who’s the damn mole in my department?”

“About those bones,” Phillip trailed Blaine out the door onto the back porch. “Does the name Bambi Fleischaker ring any bells for you? She was a young woman who evidently went missing around that same October as the alleged gang rape occurred. Elizabeth is thinking that’s who it was in the silo.”

As they began to follow the overgrown path around the house, looking once more for anything that might be a link to the incompetent arsonist, Phillip briefly outlined the story told by Thelma and Maxie, with the addition of the new information about the Bambi website. Mackenzie Blaine listened without comment till Phillip had finished, then began to shake his head slowly.

“First of all, I’ve been going through the records—all the missing-persons reports and inquiries starting in mid ’95—and these records are what you might call badly incomplete. Of course, the department wasn’t fully computerized—hell, until Miss Orinda either retires or explodes because someone inadvertently lights a match around her, it’s not going to
be
fully computerized. Anyway, the paper records were damaged in some flooding a few years ago and there’re whole sections stuck together or washed clean of ink—it’s a god-awful mess.”

Blaine prodded with his boot at a mound covered with leafless vines and dead vegetation. The square outline of a rusted metal roof lay half-buried in the pile of dirt and charred rough-sawn timber. “This must be what’s left of the outhouse that burned a little before Revis was murdered.”

Feeling somewhat aggrieved, Phillip exclaimed, “What’s the matter with you, Mac? I’ve just given you—no,
Lizabeth
’s just given you a nice little late Christmas gift to pass on to the medical examiner. When they get around to looking for names to go with those bones, you hand ’em Bambi Fleischaker. Once that’s confirmed, we can start looking for the murderer.”

“’Fraid not, Hawk. I talked to the ME’s office this morning. They won’t be doing a full workup for several weeks yet, but the young lady I spoke to let drop one interesting bit of information. She said that the ME took one look at the pelvis and said the bones were definitely male. So our skeleton’s not your Bambi.”

“The letter that had been opened was postmarked San Francisco and written in December of ’93, almost six months after Spinner supposedly died. He wrote that he wanted me to know that he was alive and that eventually there’d be a way for him to see me. There was something about breaking a promise to Papa and that he should never have made that promise.”

Amanda was shivering as she told the story—how she had snatched up the letters and run to her room to read them, only to be interrupted by her father’s voice calling to her to come downstairs.

“I pulled on a silk top and a long velvet skirt—I never
had
gotten those pantyhose—and shoved the most recent letter into the skirt pocket. Once I made my appearance downstairs, I thought I could slip away and read it.

“As I went down the stairs into the crowd of people milling about the entrance hall, I knew that I was no longer the same person who’d climbed those stairs an hour before. Mama and Papa were in the hall welcoming guests, and when Papa beckoned to me, I can remember looking down at him—at
them—
and wondering if I’d ever really known them at all. They seemed changed too. Mama’s face was more like a mask than ever, and the sound of talk and laughter and the smells of dozens of heavy perfumes and the odor of the food that was being laid out in the dining room all rushed up at me. I remember thinking that if I could just get through the party, then I’d do whatever it took to find Spinner.”

Amanda tilted her head as if to gauge the reaction to her tale. Elizabeth nodded. “You didn’t run screaming down the stairs, waving the letters to confront your parents in front of the assembled company like someone in a soap opera. I completely understand. That Southern Lady thing of never washing family linen in public dies hard, thank god. So you waited.”

Amanda nodded. “I did. And I was rewarded for it. If I’d made a big scene that night, the party would have broken up and I might not have met Ben.”

She had played her part, meeting and greeting at her parents’ side. Finally, when the stream of incoming guests had abated and the crowd had scattered to various rooms throughout the house, Amanda had slipped outside, past the swimming pool to the garden house, where clusters of candles in hurricane lamps flickered invitingly. None of the guests had yet found their way to this secluded spot and she took advantage of her solitude to pull out the letter, rip it open, and read the last message her brother had sent her.

“He said that Mama and Papa still hadn’t come round and he doubted now that they ever would. But he wanted me to know that he was buying some property in the mountains and hoped to settle down there. I had read just that far when Ben walked into the garden house.”

“Had you met him before that? I know Gloria was doing her best to get him interested in, as she put it, ‘the right sort of girl.’”

“No, I’d been away for some time, doing photo shoots here and there. Mama had mentioned Gloria’s handsome son and how I would just love him, so naturally I was ready to dislike him. The minute I saw him I knew who he was. But, like you say, the Southern Lady stuff dies hard. So I introduced myself and asked all the right questions and before I knew it, we were having a great conversation even though I was dying to finish reading that letter.”

Amanda’s perfect face blossomed into a disarming lopsided grin. “Fate or karma or something led me to Spinner’s letters. But fate or karma wasn’t done with me, because when I asked Ben what he did, he said he was getting ready to go back to his aunt’s farm where he lived, a farm in the mountains of North Carolina. ‘Near a little town called Ransom,’ he said. ‘You’ve never heard of it.’

“Oh, but I had. The letter in my pocket was postmarked Ransom, NC.”

Chapter 35

“I Have No Heart”

Tuesday, December 26

S
o you came to Ransom to look for your brother.”

Amanda nodded. “It was all so perfect—I was tired of modeling and ready to find out what I really wanted to do with my life; I was attracted to Ben—after the men I’d known, he seemed so real—and I thought if I came to Ransom, maybe I could find someone who’d known Spinner—or maybe even find Spinner himself. In that last letter, he said that he’d bought property here and wanted to build a little cabin.

“Ben and I spent a lot of time together in the last few weeks he was staying in Tampa and it just kind of worked itself out. And here I am.” Amanda’s guileless eyes said that this was the simplest thing in the world.

“Did you ask your mother why she hid the letters from you?”

“I did. When I’d read all the letters, it was clear that something Spinner had done had turned Mama and Papa against him. I didn’t know what it was, but they had made the choice to never see him again and to pretend to everyone—even me—that he was dead.

“The day after the party, Papa was away and I went to Mama’s room. I knocked on the door and she opened it but just stood there, blocking my way. I told her how I’d found the letters. And she just looked at me and said, ‘Have you? I should have destroyed them long ago, but I couldn’t.’ It was awful. That brittle mask she’d worn all these years just crumbled away and she looked so terribly old and defeated. And then she told me.

“Do you know what it was, Elizabeth, what terrible thing Spinner had done that made them pretend he was dead? He told them he was gay—and so they killed him.”

Amanda was weeping now, but the story continued to spill out. “Mama said Papa had promised Spinner a lot of money if he would stay away from me—Papa didn’t want me ‘contaminated.’ And Mama went along with the whole phony story.

“I yelled at her that she was heartless, to do that to her own son and to let me grieve for him when she knew he was alive. She just said, ‘Yes, I think I have no heart.’ And then she closed and locked her door, leaving me standing in the hall.”

“Amanda”—Elizabeth felt near tears herself—“I think I can show you that your mother tried to get in touch with Spinner—she wasn’t entirely heartless. And I can take you to someone who knew him.”

“And so we went right away to Thomas Blake’s place and pounded on the door but no answer. I guess even a troll must have to go get groceries sometime.”

“Yeah, when I got done with Mac, I went down to Blake’s place but couldn’t rouse him. One of those junkers out front was missing, so I figured, same as you, that he’d gone somewhere.”

Phillip watched as Elizabeth pulled open first one drawer and then another in the old secretary. He had returned around six to find her deep in a storage closet, from which she emerged, a spiderweb caught in her hair, eager to tell him all about her encounter with Amanda.

“Anyway, I told Amanda we’d go see Thomas Blake tomorrow when she got back. She and Ben and the girls were going in to a movie tonight, and they were all going to stay at Laurel’s place.
And
I told her I could find one of those earlier ads seeking Spencer Greer. I’m pretty sure it’s in a newspaper I saved.”

As Elizabeth resumed her search through the bottom drawer of her secretary, Phillip looked toward the kitchen. No pots on the stove, no tantalizing smells. He took a seat on the sofa and immediately James hopped up to try to lick his face.

“Sounds like you’ve had a full day, Lizabeth. No, James, no tongue!”

He nudged the small dog gently to one side. “Have they been fed? I can take care of that if—”

She was on her knees now, searching through the neat piles of manila envelopes, old tax returns, bundled correspondence, and other odds and ends. Her long braid dangled over her shoulder and she flipped it impatiently out of the way.

“Thanks—but I fed them the minute I got home. If James is telling you otherwise, he’s lying.”

She pulled out a neatly folded newspaper with a startling five-inch headline: “Y2K: THE END?” and got to her feet. Passing by him, she ran one hand gently over his head. “And I’m going to feed us too. There’s a salad already made in the refrigerator and in about fifteen minutes we’re going to have some very elegant sandwiches with the leftover duck, okay?”

“Better than okay. Sounds great. You want a glass of wine now? I stopped to get some champagne for New Year’s and they had good deals on some other stuff. There’s a nice red from the Biltmore Winery—what was that Ben said the other night—‘a naïve little domestic…’?”

“‘…but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption?’ Yeah, I think that’s from an old
New Yorker
cartoon—it’s part of the family language now.”

Elizabeth turned on the light in the dining room and pulled out her chair. “What did Mackenzie want you for? You’re not officially working for him yet, are you?”

“No, the job doesn’t start till January twenty-second—I forget why that particular date. Anyway, Mac wanted to go through the fire scene again.”

He was uncorking the naïve little domestic and describing the desolation of the ruined house when she interrupted his somewhat leisurely narrative.

“You say the mattress was ripped open and all the drawers and things dumped out?” She looked up from the yellowing newspaper on the table before her as Phillip handed her a glass filled with the deep red wine.

“Yeah, it was one helluva mess. The arsonist must have thought that stuff’d burn better than it actually did—all those old clothes and things were likely damp and moldy. You remember how that whole place was—hadn’t been heated in years.”

He took his own glass to the other end of the table. “Mac says he’s stymied. Nothing’s adding up. And by the way, Sherlock, it looks like the Bambi thing is a dead end. The bones in the silo were a male.”

He could see the struggle of conflicting emotions crossing her face.
She’s glad it wasn’t her friend’s friend; she’s disappointed her lead wasn’t the right one. But she’s going to stay cool.

“Really? Well, so much for Sherlock. I’ll just hope Bambi got where she was going. But they’re looking at the bones already? I thought it was going to be weeks or months before they got to them.” With delicate care, Elizabeth turned a brittle page of the 2000 Millennium Edition of the
Marshall County Guardian.

“No, they haven’t really started; evidently that was just an off-the-cuff comment the ME made—nothing official.”

He watched as she turned another page and ran her finger down what looked to be the classified ads.

“I’m glad this got saved—all the fuss there was about the Millennium. If I ever have any grandchildren, maybe their kids would get a kick out of reading about how panicked a lot of people were and what dire prophecies were floating about what would happen when the second hand hit twelve on that crucial moment when the twentieth century became the twenty-first.”

Her finger continued its search, up and down the columns of newsprint. “To tell the truth, when the New Year and the new century rolled around, Sam had only been dead for a couple of weeks and I wasn’t opening the mail except to pay bills. The magazines and newspapers piled up for a few months till Rosemary came home one weekend and sorted them—and me—out. It was her idea to save this so-called historic edition.”

Her finger stopped and stabbed at an ad. “Here it is—I thought I remembered right. ‘Spencer Greer, or anyone with knowledge of his whereabouts, please contact Box holder, P.O. Box 4973, Tampa, FL 33629. Generous reward offered.’”

She refolded the newspaper carefully. “I’ll check at the library to see how soon after ’95 the ads started; I’m almost positive this wasn’t the first one. I remember they came around like clockwork, three or four times a year.”

“And Amanda didn’t know her brother was alive till a year ago; is that what you said? So…?”

“So it almost has to have been her mother. Which means she may not have been quite as heartless as Amanda thinks.”