No Place Like Home (17 page)

Paul Walsh knew he was as much as telling his boss that he had missed the salient facts of a crime scene, but he forged ahead doggedly. “I went back last night and clocked the trip between Holland and Old Mill Road. Getting to Holland, and leaving it, can be confusing. I made a wrong turn on my way to Old Mill, went back, and started again. Normal driving, by which I mean about ten over the speed limit, it took me nineteen minutes from
Holland Road to Old Mill Lane. So let's do the arithmetic.”

Paul Walsh glanced at Shelley and Ortiz, as if to confirm that they were following his reasoning. “If Celia Nolan was correct about getting to the house on Holland Road at quarter of ten, and if she had to leave that house by nine minutes of ten to drive back home without flooring the gas pedal, it means that she was in the house only four to six minutes.”

“Which is possible,” Jeff said quietly. “Fast, but possible.”

“That would also assume she drove straight as an arrow, and knew exactly when to turn on unfamiliar and confusing roads while she was in a state of severe shock.”

“I would suggest you make your point,” Jeff said grimly.

“My point is that she either got there much earlier and was waiting for Georgette, or that she has been at that house before and was sure of the roads she would take back and forth.”

“Again, your point?”

“I believe Nolan when she said she didn't know about the real estate law that could have gotten her out of the sale. Her generous husband bought the house for her, and she wanted no part of it, but didn't dare tell him. She somehow learned about the vandalism the kids pulled last Halloween and decided to go it one better. She got someone to mess up the house for her, arrives, and pulls the fainting act, and now she has her way out. She's
leaving the house she never wanted, and her nice new husband understands. Then somehow Georgette caught onto her act. She was carrying a picture of Celia Nolan doing her swan dive in her purse. I say she was going to show it to Nolan and tell her she wasn't going to get away with it.”

“Then why weren't there any fingerprints on the picture, including Georgette's?” Ortiz asked.

“Nolan may have handled it but been afraid to take it with her in case other people had seen Georgette with it. Instead, she wiped it clean of any fingerprints and put it in Georgette's bag.”

“You've missed your calling, Paul,” Jeff snapped. “You should have been a trial attorney. You sound persuasive on the surface, but it's full of holes. Celia Nolan is a wealthy woman. She could have bought another house with a snap of her fingers,
and
sweet-talked her husband into going along with it. It's obvious he's crazy about her. Go ahead and check her prints in the database and then let's move on. What's happening, Mort?”

Mort Shelley pulled a notebook from his pocket. “We're putting together a list of the people who might have had access to that house and then we're interviewing them. People like other real estate agents who have keys to the lockbox, and people who do any kind of service, like housecleaning or landscaping. We're investigating to see if Georgette Grove had any enemies, if she owed any money, if there's a boyfriend in the picture. We still haven't been able to trace the doll that was left
on the porch of the Nolan house. It was expensive in its day, but my guess is it was picked up at a garage sale at some point and has probably been in someone's attic for years.”

“How about the gun the doll was holding? It looked real enough to scare me if I was facing it,” Jeff said.

“We checked out the company that makes them. It's not in business anymore. It got a lot of bad publicity because the gun is too realistic. The guy who owned the company destroyed all the records after seven years. That's a dead end.”

“All right. Keep me posted.” Jeff stood up, signifying the meeting was over. As they were leaving he called out to Anna, his secretary, to hold any calls for an hour.

Ten minutes later, she buzzed him on the intercom. “Jeff, there's a woman on the phone who claims she was in the Black Horse Tavern last night and heard Ted Cartwright threatening Georgette Grove. I knew you'd want to talk to her.”

“Put her on,” Jeff said.

A
fter she left Marcella Williams, Dru Perry went directly to the
Star-Ledger
offices to write her story about the homicide on Holland Road. She then cleared it with her editor, Ken Sharkey, that she would work at home in the morning to put together a feature story on Georgette Grove for the weekend edition of the newspaper.

That was why, with a mug of coffee in her hand, and still dressed in her pajamas and robe, she was at her desk at home on Friday morning, watching local Channel 12, on which the news anchor was interviewing Grove's cousin, Thomas Madison, who had come from Pennsylvania when he received the news of Georgette's death. Madison, a soft-spoken man in his early fifties, expressed his family's grief at their loss and his outrage at her coldblooded murder. He announced the funeral arrangements he had made—Georgette would be cremated when her body was released by the coroner, and her ashes placed in the family plot in Morris County Cemetery. A
memorial service would be held at 10
A.M
. on Monday at Hilltop Presbyterian, the church she had attended all her life.

A memorial service so soon, Dru thought. That says to me cousin Thomas just wants to get things over with and go back home. As she pressed the remote button and snapped off the television, she decided to attend the service.

She turned on her computer and began to search the Internet for references to Georgette Grove. What she loved about the Internet was that when she combed it for research, she often stumbled across valuable information that she had not expected to find.

“Pay dirt,” she said aloud an hour later, as she came across a school picture of Georgette Grove and Henry Paley when they were seniors in Mend-ham High. The photo caption said that they each had won a long distance race in the annual county competition. They were holding their trophies. Henry's skinny arm was around Georgette, and while she smiled directly into the camera, his fatuous smile was only for her.

Boy, he looks lovesick, Dru thought—he must have been sweet on Georgette even then.

She decided to try to find more information on Henry Paley. The pertinent facts that turned up were that he had worked as a real estate agent after college, married Constance Liller at age twenty-five, and joined the newly formed Grove Real Estate Agency when he was forty. An obituary notice
showed that Constance Liller Paley had been dead for six years.

Then, if one could believe Marcella Williams, he tried to romance Georgette again, Dru mused. But she had wanted no part of it, and lately they had been quarreling because he wanted to cash out his interest in the business and the Route 24 property. I don't see Henry as a murderer, she thought, but love and money are the two main reasons people kill or get killed. Interesting.

She leaned back in her creaking desk chair and looked up at the ceiling. When they had talked yesterday, did Henry Paley talk about his whereabouts when Georgette was killed? I don't think so, she decided. Her shoulder bag was on the floor beside her desk. Dru fished in it, pulled out her notebook, and jotted down the questions and facts that were jumping into her mind.

Where was Henry Paley the morning of the murder? Did he go to the office at the usual time or did he have any appointments with clients? Lock-boxes have a computerized record. It should show how often Henry visited Holland Road. Was he aware of the paint cans in that storage closet? He wanted the agency to close. Would he deliberately sabotage the Old Mill property to embarrass Georgette, or to kill the sale to the Nolans?

Dru closed her notebook, dropped it in her bag, and switched back to researching Georgette Grove on the Internet. In the next two hours she was able to form a clear picture of an independent woman
who, judging from her many awards, was not only community minded but a dynamic force in preserving the quality of life, as she saw it, in Mendham.

Lots of people who applied for variances to the zoning board must have wanted to strangle her, Dru thought, as she came upon reference after reference to Georgette Grove eloquently and successfully arguing against loosening or bending the existing zoning guidelines.

Or maybe one of them wanted to shoot her, she amended. The record showed that Georgette had stepped on a lot of toes, especially during the last few years, but maybe her pro-community actions had affected nobody more directly than Henry Paley. She picked up the phone and dialed the agency, half-expecting it to be closed.

Henry Paley answered her call.

“Henry, I'm so glad to reach you. I didn't know if you'd open the agency today. I'm working on the article I'm writing about Georgette, and I was thinking how nice it would be to include some of those wonderful pictures in your scrapbook. I'd like to drive over and borrow your scrapbook, or at least make a copy of some of the pictures.”

After some encouragement, Paley reluctantly agreed to allow her to photograph the pages. “I don't want the book to leave the office,” he said, “and I don't want anything taken out of it.”

“Henry, I want you to stand beside me when I'm doing it. Thanks very much. I'll see you around noon. I won't take too much of your time.”

When she replaced the receiver, Dru stood up and pushed back her bangs. Got to get them cut, she thought. I'm starting to look like a sheepdog. She went down the hallway to her bedroom and began to dress. As she did, a question came to mind, an intuitive question that was partly hunch, the kind that made her a good investigative reporter. Does Henry still run or jog, and, if so, how would that fact fit into this whole scenario?

It was something else to check out.

M
artin and Kathleen Kellogg of Santa Barbara, California, were the distant cousins who adopted me. At the time of Mother's death, they had been living in Saudi Arabia where he was with an engineering firm. They did not learn anything about what had happened until the company relocated them back to Santa Barbara. By then the trial was over and I was living in the juvenile shelter here in New Jersey while the Division of Youth and Family Services, DYFS for short, decided where to place me.

In a way, it was good that they hadn't had any contact with me until that time. Childless themselves, they learned of what had happened, then, quietly and without a hint of publicity, came to Morris County and petitioned to adopt me. They were interviewed and checked out. The court readily approved them as being suitable to become the guardians and adoptive parents of a minor who had not spoken more than a few words in over a year.

At that time, the Kelloggs were in their early fifties, not too old to parent an eleven-year-old. However distant the connection, Martin was a blood relative. More important, though, they were genuinely compassionate. The first time I met Kathleen, she said that she hoped I would like her and, in time, come to love her. She said, “I always wanted to have a little girl. Now I want to give you back the rest of your childhood, Liza.”

I went with them willingly. Of course, no one can give you back something that has been destroyed. I was no longer a child—I was an acquitted killer. They desperately wanted me to get beyond the “Little Lizzie” horror, and so coached me in the story we told to anyone who had known them before they returned to Santa Barbara.

I was the daughter of a widowed friend who, when she learned she was terminally ill with cancer, asked them to adopt me. They chose my new name, Celia, because my grandmother had been Cecelia. They were wise enough to understand that I needed some link to the past, even though it would be secret.

I lived with them for only seven years. During all that time, I saw Dr. Moran once a week. I trusted him from the beginning. I think he, rather than Martin, became a real father figure for me. When I could not speak, he had me draw pictures for him. Over and over, I drew the same ones. Mother's sitting room, a ferocious apelike figure, his back to me, his arms holding a woman against
the wall. I drew the picture of a gun poised in midair with bullets flying from it, but the gun was not held by any hand. I drew a picture that was the reverse of the Pietà. Mine depicted the child holding the dead figure of the mother.