Skeleton Key (28 page)

“Well,” Thomas Mortimer said. “This is Mrs. Grand-mere.” He nodded toward the dark-haired woman. “And this is Mrs. Martindale.” He nodded toward the blonde.

“Ms.,” the blonde woman said, but it was automatic. Gregor didn't think she even realized that she had spoken.

“Well,” Thomas Mortimer said. “To explain. Mrs. Grandmere—”

“Yes,” Mrs. Grandmere said. “Well. I would never have noticed it myself. It's not the kind of thing you do notice. But the lawyers saw it right away. Could you tell me what time Kayla Anson died?”

“I don't think we could tell you that,” Stacey Spratz said. “I don't think we know exactly yet. We don't have the full medical examiner's report.”

“But it was earlier on in the evening. Before, say, eleven o'clock?”

“She was found just around twelve,” Gregor said, “and she'd been dead then for some time. I don't know if it's impossible that she was alive at eleven o'clock.”

“How about at eleven twenty-two?” Mrs. Grandmere said. “Could she have been alive and here at eleven twenty-two?”

“She wasn't here at eleven twenty-two,” Ms. Martindale said suddenly. “I would have seen her. I brought Mallory in for a drink at about eleven.”

“I keep telling Sally that Kayla may have been here but out of sight,” Mrs. Grandmere said. “This is a large place. And very—convoluted, so to speak.”

“Well,” Gregor said, “for what it's worth, I don't think
she could have been here, alive and well, at eleven twentytwo. Not unless I've got my geography all mixed up again—and even then, it would be pushing it. How far are you from Margaret Anson's house?”

“About six miles by the roads,” Thomas Mortimer said. “Less than a ten-minute drive.”

“I still don't think it would have been possible,” Gregor said.

Mrs. Grandmere shifted in the wing chair. “I don't think it's possible, either, and neither did the lawyers. That's why they asked me about it. Because it really is right there, plain as day, as soon as you know to look for it.”

“What is?”

It was Sally Martindale who spoke up. “A withdrawal from her account From Kayla Anson's account. She kept a cash account here at the club.”

“A large withdrawal?” Gregor asked.

“Two hundred dollars,” Sally said.

“Was that a large amount of money for her to take out?
Did
she usually take out less?” Gregor asked.

Sally Martindale shrugged. “I could look it up for you. It sounds like a normal amount. People take that sort of money all the time, and more, really, when they play golf or they've got a bet in a football pool.”

“I don't think the problem is the amount of money,” Mrs. Grandmere said. “It's who took the money. It couldn't have been Kayla Anson. She wasn't here at the time. She might not even have been alive.”

“It might have been her killer,” Thomas Mortimer said. “That's what I was thinking. Somebody might have murdered her to get access to her accounts, and then—”

“If they did, they'd have to be a member of the club,” Sally Martindale said. “We don't have cash machines here. Anybody can't get in the front door. You have to find a club officer to get to your account for you.”

“And that club officer would be—?” Gregor asked.

“It could be any of us in a pinch,” Mrs. Grandmere said. “That's not a problem. It's just that none of us seems to
have been the club officer involved in this case. I have talked to the night manager, and you can, too, but the fact is that he says he gave nobody at all any money on Friday evening, never mind somebody as prominent and easy to remember as Kayla Anson.”

“Nobody asked me for any money, either,” Sally Martindale said. “And I was right there in the open. In the bar. It's not like I was hiding out.”

Gregor considered the possibilities. “Are you sure of the time when the money was taken out?” he asked. “Could there be a mistake in the records?”

“It's done by the computer,” Sally Martindale said. “I suppose if you knew how to override the program, you could change the time. I wouldn't want to do it.”

“Could anybody at all have had access to the computers?”

“In the middle of the night like that, it might have been possible,” Mrs. Grandmere said, “but it would have been risky. We don't keep the rooms locked. This is a private club. But people are in and out of these offices all the time. And even on a weekend night, if the night manager had seen a light he wasn't expecting coming from under Sally Martindale's door—well. He would have looked.”

“I think we ought to keep the doors locked,” Sally Martindale said. “It isn't the way it was when I was growing up. People aren't the same. Kids aren't the same.”

“I'm not going to turn my club into an armed camp,” Thomas Mortimer said. “The members would never stand for it.”

“The members won't stand for having their accounts stolen from,” Mrs. Grandmere said sharply. “I mean, Thomas, really. That's what we're talking about here. Somebody stole two hundred dollars from Kayla Anson's club account on the night she was murdered.”

Sally Martindale put her face in her hands.

Gregor stood looking at the three of them. He was half-sure that they must have thought of what he was thinking of now, but he could never tell. Some people were almost
criminally naive. He looked from one to the other of them and then at Stacey Spratz, who for all his loud-voiced bumbling had picked up on the thread immediately.

“Do you have access to the rest of Kayla Anson's records?” he asked them.

“We've got copies,” Mrs. Grandmere said.

“And you have records on all the other accounts for all the other members of the club?”

“Yes, of course we do,” Mrs. Grandmere said. “What
are
you getting at, Mr. Demarkian?”

It was Sally Martindale who said it. It burst out of her like an explosive cough. “He's saying we should check it all,” she said, seeming near tears. “Every last account. Because two hundred dollars from Kayla Anson's account last Friday probably wasn't the first time, and Kayla Anson probably isn't the only one whoever it was took money from.”

For Margaret Anson, the only real blessing was that it was Monday. On Monday, people had to be where you expected them to be. The long weekend had been an agony beyond anything she could have imagined. It had been a little like being in jail, with the press people in the road day and night and nowhere to go that she could have gotten to. This morning it had occurred to her that she could have gone away completely. She could have gotten on the train and gone to the city and put up at a hotel, or even left the country. She had her passport in a leather passport holder in the bottom of her bag. She supposed, if she'd done it, that she would have been followed. Maybe she would be followed everywhere now. Maybe it would only last as long as it took to put someone in jail for these two murders, assuming they ever put anyone in jail for them at all. She was still angry beyond belief that Zara Anne Moss had been in her garage. Surely there was somewhere else the girl could have gone, somebody else she had wanted to see. Surely there was some place the girl might have fit. All that batik cotton and jangly cheap gold jewelry, like an actress playing a Gypsy in a cut-rate movie. All that simpering innocence.

Derek Chase would have come out to the house for this conversation, but Margaret had been unable to stand the idea of spending the entire day in the house. The Swamp Tree Country Club wasn't really much better, but at least it had a decent menu and private rooms for members who needed to conduct confidential business. Besides, there was a factotum at the door and various guards around the place. It was for members only. The press would not be allowed to bother her here.

She had called ahead and reserved conference room
four. It was the small one, the one almost nobody ever wanted, and she had known before she asked for it that she was most likely to get it. She brushed by the doorman and Thomas Mortimer in the hall. They were murmuring solicitations in her direction, but she didn't want to hear them. She didn't feel that she needed condolences of any kind. Kayla was dead and that was the end of it. She saw Ruth Grandmere and Sally Martindale working busily over papers in one of the offices. She had heard terrible, satisfying things about Sally Martindale—that her husband had left her, that she had so little money that she was sometimes unable to heat the house. Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. That was what people had said when she was growing up, pointing to the new money that was pouring in in the aftermath of the war. Things were faster now, and less forgiving. People were going from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in a single lifetime.

She got to conference room four and opened the door. Derek was already there, seated at the table with his attaché case open and a small set of papers lying spread out in front of him. He was not a young man, although he was younger than she was—in his late forties, she would have guessed. He was thinning at the top, the way so many men do. His grandfather had been with her father at the Hill School.'

Margaret went into the room and closed the door behind her. Derek looked up and stood when he saw her. She shook hands with him and then sat down herself.

“Margaret,” he said. “Please believe me. I was so sorry to hear about Kayla, to hear about this young woman—”

“We could get past this part,” Margaret said. “I don't need your sympathies about Kayla. And the young woman has nothing to do with me.”

Derek had the good sense not to look surprised. By now he knew her very well. He sat down and moved his papers around on the desk.

“I should think that at the very least you would be worried about the young woman,” he said. “Having two dead
bodies in your garage in three days is not likely to look entirely innocent to the police.”

“I'm sure it won't. It doesn't matter.”

“Doesn't it?”

“Well, Derek, I didn't kill her. I had nothing to do with whoever it was did kill her. That should be enough to keep me out of trouble, don't you think?”

“Maybe and maybe not.”

“I think it's going to turn out to be one of those serial killer people. Somebody roaming all around killing young women of a certain type. Although I will say that I don't know what type Kayla and this one might have had in common. Really, she was—I don't even know how to describe it. Ridiculous, I supposed.”

“Zara Anne Moss was ridiculous.”

“Oh, yes. That was her name. That was ridiculous by itself. Zara instead of Sarah. My mother always stressed the importance of giving children solid, traditional names. They don't date. But of course I couldn't do anything with Robert. Robert wanted a daughter named Kayla, and Robert got a daughter named Kayla. Robert tended to get whatever he wanted.”

“And you didn't mind,” Derek said, “finding the body in the garage? Finding a dead person?”

“Of course I minded. I'm just not being overemotional about it. Why should I be?”

“No reason at all.” Derek looked down at this papers again. “So, you want me to go over your position vis-á-vis the estate?”

“I want you to tell me something about it, yes. They've already been out here, you know. Kayla's trust lawyers. The ones Robert picked. They came to the house and searched her room. I nearly threw them out.”

“Why didn't you?”

“Because I didn't really know what my position was. I think that now that Kayla's dead I own the house. I know that I have a life interest in it, but I don't know if there are conditions under which that interest could be terminated.
And they'd love to get me out of there, the whole lot of them. They didn't even like Kayla living with me.”

“You didn't like Kayla living with you,” Derek said. “I was always rather surprised that she agreed to it Now that she was eighteen, I mean. She had control of a good deal of money. Why didn't she just leave?”

“Leave and get her own house and sign up for an ordinary public school and finish her senior year that way?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“She thought of it,” Margaret said. “We talked about it. Or rather, she talked about it to me, and to Annabel Crawford and Peter Greer.”

“And?”

“I take it they didn't think well of it or they talked her out of it. Annabel isn't really interested in graduating from some public high school. She likes being the world's ultimate debutante. And Peter—” Margaret made a gesture in the air.

“I thought Peter was out of the picture.”

“I thought so, too. I know Kayla was sour on him. He called and she didn't return his calls, or mostly she didn't. But she saw him last week. They had dinner together out in Southbury. She got home very late.”

“Maybe they were gearing it back up again.”

“He wanted to marry her,” Margaret said. “I know all about that. He'sreally the worst kind of social climber. But Kayla wouldn't have married him. She—was—enormously annoying about all kinds of things, but she wasn't quite that stupid. I've often wondered what happened at that dinner out in Southbury. I've wondered if she dropped him flat”

“Yes,” Derek said. “Well. If you want to look at the structure of the estate—”

The structure of the estate, Margaret Anson thought and then she sighed a little.

They were all so self-protective, these people. None of them could look life in the eye and accept it for what it was. None of them could accept
themselves
for what they
were. But she could. In that way, she was much better than Kayla had ever been, or Robert, either. She was much better than Mr. Gregor Armenian Demarkian, who had come into her house and thought he was tricking her into talking to him. Margaret never talked to anyone she didn't want to talk to, and she never said a single thing she didn't want to say. She wondered what Derek would think if she told him what had really gone on in her mind when she first saw Zara Anne Moss lying dead on the floor of her garage, with her eyes bugged out like the eyes of a carnival doll.