Skeleton Key (26 page)

“Anyway,” Faye said. “Zara Anne liked to think she was a witch. She liked to believe she had powers. And so, you know, on the night the Jeep was stolen—Friday night, the night before last. It's so odd. On the night the Jeep was
stolen she decided she could feel the thoughts of the person she saw driving it. That's what she told the police. Or at least that's what I think she told them. That she saw the Jeep following Kayla Anson's BMW and that she could just tell, I guess, that there was malevolence, that something awful was going to happen.”

“Do you think she got a look at whoever was driving the car?”

“I don't know. If she did, it must not have been somebody she knew, because she would have said, I think. I think she would have liked being able to give definite information, to point a finger. To get on the news, I guess. And how could she have seen? It was a dark night. We have streetlights out there. The glare would have kept her from seeing anybody through the windows of a car.”

“Probably true,” Gregor Demarkian said.

“I think she wanted to set herself up as a psychic,” Faye said. “Except that she wouldn't have called herself that. And I told her at the time that it was dangerous, to say the things she was saying, when there was somebody out there who had already murdered one person. But she said them anyway. And not just to me.”

“Do you mean to the police?” Gregor Demarkian asked.

“I mean to all sorts of people. To a reporter who came here, for one thing. It was on the news on Saturday, I remember, and some woman reporter asked Margaret Anson what she thought of it, the things that Zara Anne was saying. Margaret Anson didn't give an answer, of course. They were trying to catch her as she left the house. They were just sort of following her in her driveway. And she ignored them. But it was right there on the news. Zara Anne liked that. She liked it very much.”

“And today?” Gregor Demarkian asked. “Did she do anything special today?”

“I don't know,” Faye said. “I've been out at the stand most of the day. It's a busy day once the churches let out. People stop by and get vegetables for Sunday dinner. And then, later, I had to go out myself. I had to pick some things
up at the Portuguese food store in Waterbury.”

“What time was this?” It was one of the policemen again.

“I left here around one-thirty. I was gone until just after four. I would have stayed out longer, there were still things I needed to do, but I got into my car and there it was on the radio. About Zara Anne. It was just right there on the radio.”

“Yes,” Gregor Demarkian said gently.

“Somebody should have warned me,” Faye said. “I know that with the press in the kind of insane snit it's in now, it's hard to do the right thing, but somebody should have warned me. I shouldn't have had to hear it on the news like that, out of the blue.”

“Her parents are going to be saying the same thing,” one of the policemen said.

Gregor Demarkian moved closer to where Faye was sitting and bent toward her. “Listen,” he said, “this is important. Did you give Zara Anne a ride out to Margaret Anson's house?”

“No, of course not.”

“Did you know she was intending to go to Margaret Anson's house?
Was
she intending to go to Margaret Anson's house?'

“I don't think so. She didn't mention it to me. And I think she would have. She wasn't good at keeping secrets, especially of information she thought might make her seem important.”

“Would she have hitchhiked out to Margaret Anson's house?”

Faye sat up a little straighter. “I don't think so. She wasn't an energetic person, if you know what I mean. She tended toward lethargy. Hitchhiking is a lot of work, especially on back roads on Sunday afternoon. And there's one other thing.”

“What?”

“I'm not sure she actually knew where the Anson house is. I know she'd seen pictures of it, but I don't think she'd
ever been out there. And it wasn't in a direction she would be likely to go. To Waterbury to the mall, you know, or even here in Watertown to Kmart or one of those places, but not farther up into the hills. Unless there was a meeting or a conference or something of the sort, and then we would have gone together.”

“And you didn't.”

“No.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “One more thing. What about friends. What kind of friends did she have, who did she see, other than yourself?”

Faye blushed. “No one,” she said. “The whole time she was here, she never saw anyone at all except me.”

“Really? But that's—she was local, wasn't she? Woodbury is somewhere close to here?”

“Oh, yes, it's very close. But I was just as surprised as you seem to be. I thought she must have been from out of state, or at least way off on the eastern corner, because she never saw anybody. Or called anybody. Or wrote to anybody. Not anybody at all. And now it turns out she had parents in Woodbury. I can't believe it.”

“Did you know if she'd had problems with her parents? If there was some reason for an estrangement?”

“Well, there must have been, mustn't there?” Faye said. “You don't just stop talking to your parents completely unless something has come up. But she never mentioned anything to me. She never even mentioned her parents. She never mentioned school, or friends—and yet she was always talking about herself. How she felt about things. What she meant to do. I don't know what to make of it.”

“I think it's nuts,” one of the policemen said. Faye noticed that it was the state policemen this time, the one with the very blond hair.

“I think it's nuts, too,” she said. “But it's the truth. I don't know what else to tell you.”

Gregor Demarkian nodded a little and stepped away. “Well, we'll just have to talk to her parents, then. And any acquaintances from high school we can find. But you must
realize how important it is, determining just how she got out to Margaret Anson's house.”

“Oh, yes.”

“And why,” Gregor Demarkian said.

“I think I'd stopped thinking about why when it came to Zara Anne,” Faye said. “I think I'd just come to accept that Zara Anne did what she did.”

Gregor Demarkian nodded a little—and then, suddenly, the whole lot of them were in motion. Faye stood up herself, realizing with something like franticness that they were all headed out her front door. They were going to leave her alone. And what was she going to do when she was alone?

She trailed behind them through the front hall and stood in the doorway as they filed out. She watched them get into their cars one after the other. Gregor Demarkian got into the state police car. He was not driving. Faye pulled at her hair and felt a raft of pins come lose.

It was worse than swimming through Jell-O. It was like being drugged. She had no idea what she was going to do now that she was on her own. She only knew that she did not want to be on her own, here in this house, by herself. She wished she had thought to ask them how Zara Anne had died. She envisioned Zara Anne's face, mottled and bug-eyed from strangulation, which was what was supposed to have happened to Kayla Anson. Then she bent double and wrapped her arms around her body. She thought she was going to be sick.

She had never wanted Zara Anne to die. That was the truth. She had only wanted to be on her own again for a while, to have some quiet, to be able to think. Now she had all those things, and she hated them.

Back at the Mayflower Inn, Bennis Hannaford was stretched out on the bed, feeling awful. The television was on. She had heard much of the press conference, and she
had gone on watching after everybody had taken off for Margaret Anson's house. Breaking news, they called it—an excuse for hyperactivity. She knew nothing at all about this young woman, Zara Anne Moss. She wondered just what it was Gregor was doing. She wished she could stop coughing. That was the thing. She couldn't stop coughing.

Actually, she
did
stop coughing, on and off. She stopped and felt the muscles in her arms and chest relax—and then, as soon as they did, the coughing would start again. It had gotten to the point where she was afraid to sit up. Any movement at all seemed to trigger another set of spasms. She didn't even move to answer the phone when it rang. She was afraid to turn over, or that, if she did answer it, she would start coughing and not be able to stop. She willed herself to lay still until the ringing stopped. Then she closed her eyes and tried very hard not to yawn, even though she needed to. Yawning was the most treacherous thing of all.

She was just beginning to drift off to sleep when the phone started ringing again. She sat up to answer it without even thinking about it. She got the receiver off the hook and said, “Bennis Hannaford speaking” before the cough started in again.

“Bennis?” Donna Moradanyan asked.

“Donna,” Bennis tried to say, but it didn't work. The coughing hit her like a wave, and in no time at all it was much worse than just coughing. It was something like convulsions.

She stood up and bent over at the waist.

“Bennis?” Donna said again.

Bennis felt something come up her throat, something thin and raw. She convulsed one more time and spat it out, and then the coughing stopped.

Then she looked at the floor, and saw what she had left there.

It was a thick clot of blood.

Bennis Hannaford was asleep in bed when Gregor got back to the inn that night, carrying an armful of notes that made him feel as if he were back in college and had lost his briefcase. She was awake when he got up the next morning, running the water in the shower and muttering behind the bathroom door. Gregor got up, discovered that the bathrobe he'd brought was gone—this was nice, it meant that Bennis was behaving according to type—and took up his notes of the day before. It felt to him as if he had seen a million people in just a few hours. It might even have been true. Kayla Anson. Zara Anne Moss. The two deaths were almost undoubtedly connected. Gregor just didn't understand why investigating them required riding around in cars for the better part of the day.

Bennis was done in the bathroom. Gregor waited politely for her to come out and then went in himself. She did not look well. Her eyes were pouchy. Her skin was much too white. Gregor took a shower and brushed his teeth and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. His eyes were pouchy. His skin was much too white. Maybe there was nothing wrong with Bennis except that she was a forty-year-old woman and he was seeing her the first thing in the morning. Maybe the other mornings when he had seen her first thing, and she had not been like this, had been the real exceptions.

He went back out into the main room and found Bennis sitting at a small round table, eating breakfast. The table was set for two, and the wheeled cart beside it had urns for both coffee and tea. She must have called room service.

“Good morning,” Gregor said.

Bennis waved at him with her cigarette. “Donna Moradanyan called. Last night. She said it was important, but
you can't call her back today. She's out until just around dinnertime.”

“Did she say what it was about?”

“Something about Peter. She didn't go into a lot of detail.”

“She didn't go into detail with you?”

“I was throwing up at the time. I think I've got a touch of . . . food poisoning. Or something.”

“I thought you looked ill,” Gregor said. “Do you want to see a doctor?”

“I don't see what for. I'm not throwing up anymore. I don't feel as if I'm about to die. I'll be all right.”

“Maybe you should just stay in and take it easy.”

“Mmmm,” Bennis said.

Gregor sat down at the chair that was waiting for him and got himself coffee. It was decent coffee, properly perked, as he would have expected it to be. There were Danish pastries and doughnuts on the tray, too, and he took one of those. Bennis, he saw, was having her usual fruit and cheese, but she had barely touched it.

“I'm going to have to do quite a lot of running around today,” he said. “I've got Stacey Spratz picking me up about quarter to nine. I think we're going to interview the boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend?”

“Kayla Anson had a boyfriend.”

“Oh.” Bennis stirred out of her lethargy. “I've heard about him. From Abigail, my friend who sent me down here. Margaret was supposed to be livid.”

“Why?”

“Because he's self-made, or something. Abigail said he was really quite respectable. You couldn't tell he hadn't been to Taft and Yale. But apparently he has no real background, the way Margaret would define the term, and he's in business for himself, by which I suppose she'd mean that he doesn't have enough money. I mean, her own husband was in business for himself.”

“I'm not too sure if you describe the founder of a global conglomerate as ‘in business for himself.' ”

“Well, maybe not. But you see what I mean. And I don't really see why it would have mattered anyway, unless he was a beach bum or a ski instructor, and Abigail says he definitely isn't that. He owns Goldenrod. The catalogue company.”

“Am I supposed to know what that is?”

“You've seen enough of their catalogues,” Bennis said. “They sell natural fiber clothes for the country. Sort of like an East Coast Sundance. I buy a lot of my flannel shirts from them.”

“And they're successful?”

Bennis shrugged. “I suppose you can never tell without a financial report, but I'd guess that unless the man's an absolute ass of a businessman they must be. Their stuff is everywhere. They're the most status-ridden label on any college campus. I don't think they're outsold by anybody except J. Crew and L. L. Bean.”

“Sounds good.”

“One would hope. But that's just like Margaret Anson, you see. I suppose you've met her by now. You must have seen what she's like.”