A Photographic Death (18 page)

Chapter Thirty-Seven

T
HE NEXT MORNI
NG
it snowed. Not the blizzard the newscasters were hoping for, not a record for Long Island, but twenty-three inches in Port Lewis. It was enough to cover my van to the tops of its tires and keep me housebound, since I hadn’t remembered to park at the end of the driveway. There was enough snow to make me sit at my kitchen window looking out at where my yard had been and think of graves under winter’s blanket and the dying of hope. I had once seen a photograph of Arlington Cemetery in winter, rows of markers in the snow, each punctuated by a wreath.
Gone, forever gone.

If Colin came now, he would have to eat comfort food, all that I had in the house: saltines crushed into tomato soup, crackers and peanut butter, Kraft macaroni and cheese, and canned corn beef. At least I had bags of dried food for the cats and wine left over from Christmas. But when Colin called he announced that the university was closed, the roads impassable. The condo where he was staying had been plowed out, but he didn’t trust the rest of the island.

I did what I always did when I was snowed in: made a fire in the living room, wrapped myself in a blanket with a cup of peppermint tea nearby, and read from the stacks of books I had set aside. I would run out of food long before books. Lately I had been fascinated by art theft and the novels of Jane Gardam, and was soon lost in those worlds. Just for once, just for a few hours, I let myself escape from mine.

After a lunch of tomato soup and crackers, I turned on my laptop and found that colleges in Kentucky, California, and North Carolina were planning to run Hannah’s photo and description. I wrote back and thanked them and asked them to let me know if anyone responded to them directly. I wasn’t good at math, but three out of 2,774 seemed the tiniest fraction of one percent. There were also two book orders and e-mails from Hannah and Jane. Hannah in Ithaca was blasé about the snow, but Jane worried that I had lost power and urged me to keep warm. I responded to everything though I didn’t plan to battle my way out to the Book Barn to fill the orders until tomorrow morning.

Yet this contact with the world outside made it hard to become reabsorbed by books. It didn’t matter now if more colleges ran our appeal. If the e-mail about Betsy Cavanaugh was a ruse to make us abandon our search, then we had already reached the right people. Or the wrong ones.

Something about being trapped inside the house, not knowing what to do next to find Caitlin, made me cranky. I sat on the green-and-gold couch and created a mental done-me-wrong list. At the top was Jason, who had never called again to find out about his missing sister. My sister, Patience, who had called Christmas Day in a conciliatory mood, wanting to hear all about England, but skirting the issue of Caitlin.

DCI Sampson had promised to keep me updated on anything new he learned, but I had never heard from him. Okay, I had said I would call him, but still . . . Even Jane and Hannah had gone back to their lives. They cared about their mythical sister, but not in the way I did.

Colin was the only one I could not accuse of indifference.

I added wood to the fire and picked up
The Gardner Heist
again.

L
OST IN THE
book finally, I was back at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston when there was a soft thud against the front door. If I had not been in the living room I would not have heard it. I waited for someone to knock—probably Colin, though he usually barged right in—but there was no other sound. It could have been snow sliding off the roof, except that it would have fallen beyond the front porch, and this noise was much closer. Besides, it was still too cold and sunless for melting to have started.

I waited for another thud, but heard nothing.

Getting up meant disturbing Raj who had settled in next to me on the blanket and purred whenever I reached down to stroke his head, but now I was curious. Lifting him to one side I stood up and went to the front door. When I looked out I saw nothing but swirling white for a moment. Then I screamed.

There was a trail of blood, red as holly berries against the white snow, leading to the front door. On the worn sisal mat lay a ragged bundle.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

I
DIDN’T WANT
to touch it. I kept staring down at the squeezed-together rags until I was sure it was nothing alive—nothing that had ever
been
alive—though it was bloodstained too. Something about the white-and-yellow striped knit fabric haunted me. I kept looking until I knew what it was.

I still didn’t want to touch it, but I knelt down and picked the bundle up. Quickly I closed the front door, locked it, and set whatever it was on the coffee table, next to the cup of tea I had recently drained and the pile of waiting books. I couldn’t feel my fingers as I reached down, untangled the bunched-up cloth, and saw a familiar smiling goldfish.
Oh my God oh my God oh my God.

Safety-pinned to the shirt Caitlin had been wearing the last time I saw her in Stratford was a white folded piece of paper. It took me much too long to unfasten the tiny gold pin and open the paper. Printed in block letters:

YOU’RE WASTING YOUR TIME.

If I’d lived in Jane Austen’s day I might have crumpled to the floor. But I was part of the twenty-first century, so I pushed up from the couch and staggered into the kitchen to call Colin.

“Hey-lo!” His cheerful voice carried into the room.

“You have to come over. Something’s happened.”

“To one of the kids?”

“No. Yes. It’s horrible!”

“Tell me.”

“You’ll see.”

“Okay, Delhi, calm down. Is the driveway plowed?”

“No, but—”

“How are the roads?”

“I don’t
know
. But—”

“I know, I know. I have to come. Just tell me what happened.”

“I can’t!”

“Okay. I’ll be right there.”

I went back to the couch and stared at the tiny blood-soaked shirt, at the note, until I heard Colin’s boots on the front porch steps. Then I jumped up and unlocked the door.

He came in breathing hard, stomping the snow off his feet and looking at me.

We didn’t even embrace.

“Where did the blood outside come from?”

“I don’t know! I looked out and it was there.”

“There are no footprints around it. Not even animal tracks.”

“Really? You looked at it closely?”

“I could see it from the path.” Then he added, “Someone probably reached out from the path and dripped it. But why?”

“Do you—do you remember the shirt Caitlin had that she loved so much? With the goldfish?”

He winced as if a strong light had been shone in his face.

Mutely I pointed to the coffee table.

Colin had no qualms about picking up the little striped top and shaking it out. “This is what she was wearing? But this isn’t
her
blood. It’s still fresh.”

“Thank God.”

Then he saw the note and his face changed. The color in his cheeks deepened, not into red but into something darker. A dusky rage. When he looked at me his blue eyes were colder than I had ever seen them.

If I had been sickened and terrified, he was possessed by a fury that made him capable of anything. “Wrong. We
will
find her. And when we do there’ll be more bloodshed.”

I
HAD WANTED
Colin on our side but he was frightening me. Neither of us knew what the police could do, but we called them anyway. “For the future,” Colin said grimly.

The young patrolman who came didn’t have many ideas. “There’s a lot of footprints on the path,” he pointed out. “Even mine. But it could have been a dying bird who dripped as he flew away.”

“What about the shirt and the note?”

“I don’t know. Why does it say you’re wasting your time?”

There was no use telling him the whole story. “We don’t know,” I said.

C
O
LIN DID NOT
want macaroni and cheese for dinner—it had been our fallback meal, served with cut-up hot dogs when the children were younger—so we drove downtown, back to Slices. He was calmer now, but still grim. “From now on, I’ll handle this. It’s too dangerous for you.”

“What are you talking about?” We were both drinking beer, and I set my glass down.

“These are dangerous people, Delhi. They’ll do anything they can to keep us from finding her.”

I nodded. “And we have no idea who they are.”

“But they know who we are. They can’t be that far away, to do something like that in a snowstorm.”

“That means Caitlin’s close too!”

“Not necessarily.” His fingers played with his napkin. “She’s probably away at college.”

“What I don’t understand is—why would you even keep a shirt you kidnapped a child in?”

He shrugged. “People hold on to things. Things have power.”

That was true. But if it had been me, I would have destroyed the evidence right away. “What do we do now?”

“We wait. And think.”

Thinking, I could do that. But I had never been one to wait.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

W
HEN
I
GOT
back from the restaurant there was a frantic message from Susie. She was sobbing.

Before I even took my jacket off, I called her back.

“Delhi?”

“Susie, what happened?”

“Marty stopped by the shop just now. Three more books are gone!”

“You opened up today?”

“No, not with the snow. The shop was all locked up, with the new locks. He went to pick up two books people had ordered privately. Then he checked the shelves.”

“What books are gone?”

“
The Emerald City of Oz
, a Steinbeck, and this pamphlet on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It was in a special holder.”

I knew the one she meant. One of the most valuable things in the shop. I wasn’t sure why Marty even left it there.

“He’s going to fire me! After I earn out what the books were worth.” Her voice trembled.

“He’s just upset. He can’t blame you for what happens when the shop’s locked and you’re not there. That’s crazy.”

“He’s threatening to shut it down completely. To go back to just selling to collectors.”

Maybe that’s what he really wanted to do. Could Marty himself be hiding the books so he would have a valid reason for not keeping the shop open?

It made as much sense as anything else.

I
KNEW
I had to stay alert to any danger, but I couldn’t stop my life. Two days later I got up early and drove into Whitestone, over the Nassau County border into Queens, to attend a book sale. As usual the selection at this temple sale was good, particularly in the area of art catalogs and vintage children’s picture books, though the prices were higher than I liked to pay. But in winter you took what you could get and were grateful for it. I was pleased with a first edition
Stuart Little
in a beautiful dust jacket that would pay for my trip there.

I saw a number of dealers I knew, but was most surprised to encounter Paul Pevney, Susie’s husband. Instead of his usual modus operandi of coming late to carry off the dregs, he was standing in front of me in line to pay. For once he did not seem excited to see me.

“You’re far from home,” I said. “Not working today?”

His lanky frame straightened up from arranging the books in his cartons. “I took the day off.” He gave me an accusing look through his rimless glasses. “Susie should be here with me. If she wasn’t working at that bookstore, she would be.” His look conveyed his feeling that it was my fault.

I started to point out that the money had to be coming in handy, then remembered Susie telling me she was squirreling it away. That would be for nothing, of course, if Marty insisted she reimburse him.

“You find anything good?” I asked.

“I like her with me at sales, then going home and listing the books. That’s what she’s good at.”

We were almost to the cashier, and I pushed my vinyl boat bag along with my foot.

Belatedly he answered my question. “I found some good books. No Ernest Hemingways, but I did okay.”

And then his books were on the table, the amounts being totaled. By the time I had finished with my own books, Paul was gone.

I
GOT
HOME
in the early afternoon and carried my bag to the Book Barn, stopping every few minutes to flex my arm and look behind me. Would I be able to schlep books this way when I was sixty? Seventy? Would I reach old age without mishap? Before I stepped into the barn I checked around it carefully to make sure the snow had not been trampled near the windows or door. It did not look as if anyone had been here though, so I unlocked the door and went inside, switching on the heat immediately. It would take nearly an hour for the cavern to warm up enough to take my jacket off, and I sat down at my worktable still rubbing my hands.

Perhaps it was the snow outside, or the ski slope updates they’d given when I turned on the news in the van, but the hoax e-mail suddenly stirred a memory. The writer claimed Betsy Cavanaugh had died in a skiing accident. Years earlier my friend Diane was sure she had seen Hannah on the slopes in Colorado. Was skiing a common denominator?

A tenuous thread, but it was all I had.

If Caitlin was a good skier, she might have belonged to a ski club or junior association. Sending the photo I had received to organizations within driving distance of Long Island would be the longest shot yet. But what else was there? I could even get a list of young women who were ranked as accomplished skiers and see if their names matched up with—what? I had read somewhere that when people chose false names they tended to pick names with the same initials as their own. If the hoax e-mail had been an attempt to make us abandon the search for Caitlin, that could be significant. What if I concentrated on last names that began with C, first names starting with B or E? I decided it couldn’t hurt.

On the computer I found a few organizations that were devoted to national champions, and many more regional youth ski clubs, from New England to Minnesota. I hadn’t thought about amateur clubs, but those might be a better way to go. Even if Caitlin wasn’t a national champion, a local group might recognize her as one of their own.

This time there was no flash drive of e-mail addresses to plug in. I scrolled through lists of organizations, laboriously cutting and pasting individual information. The longer I worked, the more apprehensive I grew. Suppose the club contacted her parents first to make sure it was all right to release the information? What if that pushed them deeper into hiding and made them lash out at us again? And the blackest possibility of all: What if an organization confirmed that it was Betsy Cavanaugh in the photograph and that she had indeed died?

Doomed.

It took several hours but I sent individual e-mails hinting at an award, explaining that her photo had been submitted by someone who had seen her skiing and admired her expertise, but did not know who she was. I attached the new photo. It was not a message you could overthink. There were holes large enough for a Nordic village to schuss through. But it was all I had.

At first I sent the e-mail only to New York and New England, then expanded the search as far as Chicago and down to Virginia.

And then, as Colin had suggested, I waited.

Our opponents evidently knew how to wait too. Colin stopped by for dinner and took me to a seafood restaurant in town. He was skeptical of the skiing connection but saw no harm in trying it. Slumped across from me, a weary Santa, he admitted he had no better ideas himself.

“But look how much we’ve narrowed it down,” I said. “We know she’s in this country, probably in the Northeast. We’ve eliminated the rest of the world. That’s
huge
.” I thought of something else. “DCI Sampson can concentrate on car rental records for Americans now. I’ll call him tomorrow morning and tell him.”

“How much longer are we going to grasp at threads?”

His words made me cold. But I said, “Threads? I thought it was straws. I guess as long as it takes. But we are getting closer.”

Exactly how much closer I could not guess.