Night Corridor (11 page)

But she liked looking at herself in her new coat, and the hat and gloves. The storekeeper had said the outfit was made for her. Though she didn't mention Mary Tyler Moore.

She stood a moment longer, then impulsively snatched the hat from her head and threw it into the air. She tried to catch it but it fell on the floor because she'd been trying to watch herself in the mirror when she did it. Though she was alone, she felt her cheeks grow warm with embarrassment. Then she giggled.

Bending to pick up her hat, her eye was drawn to the old trunk, sitting on the floor against the wall, mostly ignored, like the proverbial elephant in the room. More vividly seen in some far corner of her memory, in a far different setting.

It had been in her parents' bedroom, next to the bed for as long as she could remember. The trunk was in her mother's family for a very long time, passed down through generations, brought over from England by her great grandparents in the early 1800s. Strange that she recalled that story when she had forgotten so much else.

Her mother kept a salmon pink runner draped over the trunk, a vase of silk daisies on top. No dust collected on them for her mother was a very good housekeeper. Whether she liked it or not, the trunk was now hers. She might as well see what was in it.

She hung her coat in the closet, sat down on the sofa and gazed at the relic for a few minutes. Then, sighing heavily, she reached into her bag for the key. Don't think. Just do it.

She fit the key into the old rusting lock and turned it. There was a click and the lock fell open, and her heart gave an odd skip. She removed the lock. Almost in the same instant, upstairs, he began playing the piano. She looked up, both startled and pleased. She had not heard him up there for days now. His mother must be better, she thought.

The policemen were back again yesterday, knocking on doors, talking to tenants. She heard them pass by her door, go upstairs. She had nothing more to tell them. Did he? Had he known the actress when she lived across the hall? He would, wouldn't he? Mr. Mason had.

It was a classical piece he was playing, like a lullaby. Soft. Beautiful. Fingers up and down the keys, a gentle waterfall. Building. Almost as if he knew about the trunk and was providing music for the occasion.

What foolish thoughts she had. Fanciful. Her life was of no importance to anyone but herself.

But she was glad he was back. She liked listening to him play the piano.

She took a breath and lifted the trunk lid and had a sense of raising the lid of a coffin. In a way, she supposed she was. The perfume of ancient rose petals and musk rose up to her, filling her senses, bringing a flood of memories with it. She was like Pandora, opening the box and letting loose all that was chaos and misery into the world.

Except only she would be affected by what was in this trunk. Only her world would be touched.

Eighteen

Detective O'Neal was at home in his den, drinking coffee and going through the murder file for the first victim, Rosalind Gibbs, making comparisons with the Lorraine Winters' case, trying to find something besides their physical likenesses, that would connect them. There was nothing. One an aspiring actress, the other a nurse. A caregiver and a performer. Couldn't be more different, at least in career choices.

Rosalind Gibbs was only two blocks from her home when she was grabbed. She had a live-in boyfriend, who'd been questioned a number of times and released. Name of Brian Redding, clean-cut kid, worked at Neilson's brewery. Tom thought another visit might be in order. After scanning the notes, he saw nothing that would constitute an ironclad alibi for the night of his girlfriend's murder. Redding said he was at a hockey game on the night in question, but they hadn't double-checked his story. If he recalled, the guy had a ticket stub, but you could get that off the sidewalk. Sometimes the smallest thing can be the key to unraveling a case.

Like with the David Berkowitz case, so-called Son of Sam, the psycho who stalked kids in parked cars and blew them away with his .44 Bulldog; it was a traffic ticket that did him in, and unquestionably saved more innocent kids from being slaughtered. Christ, it could have been his own two. The thought sent an icy bath through him. Life was a crapshoot.

He glanced up as Jake, his black lab let out a whine, his body jerking. He was curled up in front of the fireplace, dreaming again. After their run on the beach, he wiped out. They both did. Jake was shot in a domestic case a couple of years ago, a drunk fool with a gun, and he brought Jake straight here from the vet's. They were best friends. A friend he could talk to or not talk to, depending on how he felt. As for Jake, he was generally content if they were in the same room together. As good as new physically, Jake had a round scar on his left thigh where the bullet had penetrated. A bare spot where fur would never grow, like scar tissue over a wounded heart.

A sudden gust of wind rattled the big window that overlooked the ocean. He could hear the Atlantic crashing against the rocks below. He bought this place after the divorce, a five room bungalow he'd spent two summers winterizing, and was as content here as he was likely to get. But he did like the privacy, walking on the beach with his dog. Still, he missed being part of his kids' lives, both teenagers now. Missed being part of a family.

He closed the files, slipped them into his briefcase. He grabbed his coat, rattled the car keys, bringing Jake immediately to his feet.

"A drive?"

Jake answered with a single, joyful bark, tail thumping the floor.

As they drove in the direction of town, Tom ran other possible 'persons of interest' through his mind. There were a couple that warranted keeping an eye on. The piano player, for example, in the Peel Street building. Jeffrey Denton. When Tom questioned him about being at the funeral, he said, 'She was my downstairs neighbor for two years. I was paying my respects.' He also insisted he was visiting his mother on the night she was killed. Maybe. Another 'not exactly solid' alibi.

There was another note of interest: Several days after the murder, a cab driver came forward, reported seeing a runner in the park in the early morning, just a short time before Lorraine Winters' body was discovered. Just a guy in a hooded jacket. Average height, weight. Hadn't thought anything of it at the time.

The department put out a call for the man to come forward on the off chance that he saw something while on his run. Something he might have considered insignificant at the time, or that hadn't even registered with him.

But no one answered the call. True, he might just have been an ordinary jogger the cabby drove past that morning, who simply chose not to get involved. But Tom O'Neal had a feeling it just might have been her killer.

As he drove, he went back to thinking about his old life while his furry passenger enjoyed the sights they passed on the way to Brian Redding's place.

He was still thinking about his kids, and how he missed them. Oh, they talked on the phone from time to time, but they were usually on their way to somewhere, and when they weren't, it wasn't the same.

Not that he blamed his ex. It wasn't Mary's fault. She'd always complained he was married to the job, and she had a point. He knew she was unhappy but he kept promising himself, and her, that it was just a few years till he retired, and he'd have more time for vacations and so on after that. But she couldn't wait. Or didn't believe me, and maybe she was right not to.

The divorce papers shouldn't have come as a shock to him, yet they did. Like a fist to the gut. He held out hope for a long time that they'd get back together, until one night he showed up on the doorstep and she told him she was seeing someone else, and he'd seen sorrow on her lovely face. Maybe even pity. She had loved him once. He would always love her. If not quite in the same way. At any rate, she married the guy. A dentist. Someone who could give her the nice normal life Tom hadn't been able to.

The radio sputtered and crackled and Detective Glen Aiken's voice was loud and clear into the confines of the cruiser, ending his pity party.

"Got another one, Tom," his partner said. "Body found by a hiker at the edge of the woods, out near Crater Lake."

The road was clear both ways, and Tom made a squealing U-turn. Redding would have to wait.

Nineteen

All their worldly goods are in this trunk, Caroline thought. The total accumulation of two lives lived. All of it, plus two thousand dollars, had come to her, their child. Compensation. She had hated them both.

Why don't you just close the lid? Everything in here will only be painful reminders of what happened. But Doctor Rosen said she had to find a way to forgive them if she ever hoped to be truly free. "Even though there may not be bars on the windows where you're going, Caroline, they'll still be across your heart." She knew he was right, but she didn't know if she could forgive them.

They had tried to reach out to her on those Sundays that they came to visit, but she had withdrawn herself from them, gone far away in her mind. They were strangers to her.

Though not entirely, she thought with a twinge of guilt. She could recall the woman sitting in hard-backed chair wearing her little black hat, weeping behind the veil, wiping tears away. They had meant nothing to her. Once, she had lashed out at her mother, telling her she was sick of her tears, and could still see the shock on her face, as if she had struck her. She'd taken a perverse pleasure in that. Felt good about it.

As for her father, he might have been any man who'd walked in off the street, she was so remote from him. Apparently, then, she had had her revenge even if her actions had not been deliberate, and she wasn't sure that at some level, they hadn't been. Had she meant to be so cruel? As they had been to her?

But that was the thing, wasn't it? They hadn't thought of it as cruelty; it was all for her own good.

The salmon-colored runner, edged at either end with silky fringes, lay folded atop the other items in the trunk. She picked it up and it slid both weightless and weighty through her fingers, the fringes tickling her wrist, as if tiny insects walked across it. She let it fall beside her on the bed.

Next, was her father's Bible with its black cover and well-turned pages. She held the weight of it in her hands. Every night, they would sit in the parlour and he would read aloud from a passage he'd chosen earlier in the day, his handsome face animated and commanding, like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, while she and her mother sat quiet as mice. His captive audience. His congregation.

She used to imagine that God looked like her father. To the child she was, God and her father were interchangeable. She'd been taught that God was love. As a teenager, she would come to know his wrath.

'You won't be seeing that boy again,' he had bellowed, standing over her in the kitchen that day. 'If you try, I will lock you in your room and nail the windows shut. I'll tie you to a chair if you force me to.'

She saw his flushed face in her mind, the spittle forming at the corners of his mouth, his face dark with rage.

She had disgraced them. Demeaned them and herself in the eyes of God and society. 'We will not accept a bastard child into his family.' Scripture rolled off his tongue: 'A bastard child shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord…' She would go away to bear this spawn of Satan, and give it to a Christian family to raise. 'Perhaps if you throw yourself on his mercy, God will forgive you your whoring ways.'

All through his rant, her mother had sat silent and weepy at the table, her hands twisting a tissue into contortions in her lap, of no help. Caroline had felt only contempt for her.

'I am not a whore,' she had cried. 'Please…William and I love each other. We want to get married.'

I hated her far more than I hated him, Caroline thought now. I hated her for her weakness. But she had loved them both too.

Over the next days, as promised, she was locked in her small, windowless room, allowed out only to go to the bathroom. Downstairs, the phone rang and rang, and she knew it was William calling. She rattled her doorknob and begged them to let her talk to him, but her pleas went unheard. She was wild with her need of him, to feel his love, his arms around her, comforting, telling her that everything would be okay. But it was not to be. Once, she heard voices downstairs, one an angry rumble that belonged to her father. The other softer. William's. He was trying to reason with her father. She held a thread of hope, until she heard the door close.

Then, on one impossibly golden summer's day, they drove her to another province where they committed her to a home for unwed mothers. She never heard from William again.

Now, standing over the trunk, tears pricked her eyelids. She batted them away, returned the Bible to the trunk and closed the lid. She would do no more of this tonight.

Twenty

The murdered woman was identified as forty-eight year old Pearl Grannan. Like the other two victims, she'd been beaten and strangled. The smell of pine was strong here, cut with an underlying odor of death.