And Leave Her Lay Dying (13 page)

“So go back and see your lawyer friend,” Marlene shouted as he headed for the door. “Those guys really know how to use a shovel!”

The DC-10 dropped out of the clouds directly overhead as McGuire stepped from his car. Its engines, on low throttle, idled with a shrill whistle that pierced his ears, and he glared up at the craft's steel belly to watch it descend into Logan Airport.

He stepped carefully through the fresh snow in the gutter and stamped his feet on the shovelled walkway leading to the house. At the door he rang the bell and heard the Labrador bellow inside. A woman's voice spoke soothingly to the animal before the inner door swung open.

Frances O'Neil stood behind the outer storm door, an expectant smile frozen on her face. The smile began to dissolve, then reappeared, weaker and without conviction.

“May I come in for a few moments?” McGuire asked pleasantly.

She nodded, unfastened the inner lock and opened the door for him.

He stepped into a warm corridor which ended at a closed door. Behind the door the dog cried and snuffled.

To McGuire's right, at the far end of a large living room, logs burned silently in a plain brick fireplace. The room was filled with undistinguished furniture, much of it covered in vinyl, arranged haphazardly on thick broadloom carpeting. Below one of the two picture windows facing the street sat a large antique steamer trunk overflowing with colourful plush and plastic toys.

“Would you like to sit down here?” Frances O'Neil asked, leading the way into the room. The next sentences emerged in a torrent of words, falling over each other as she walked ahead of him. “I can make a pot of tea. I'm not a coffee drinker. Marlene was always trying to get me to drink coffee, but . . . Mona, that's my sister, she and Kelly have gone to see Robert, that's her husband, for lunch in the city. So I made a fire, because I love fires on days like this, just sitting here with a book and with Jabs for company. Jabs, that's the dog . . .”

She turned to see McGuire watching her carefully, standing beside the sofa.

Her hands flew across her face and fluttered frantically like birds tethered on a string. Squeezing her eyes shut, she stammered, “What am I doing? I didn't even take your coat. I'm sorry. I don't know what's gotten into me.”

McGuire shrugged out of his topcoat and handed it to her as she brushed by, returning to the corridor. “Hush!” she called to the dog behind the door.

He entered the room and sat on the sofa, facing the fire. The mantel was crowded with photographs of Kelly. In most of them, the little girl and Frances smiled back at the camera together. McGuire counted only three in which the girl was pictured with her stern-faced parents, the mother with her hair always freshly set, the father, balding, with his eyes challenging the camera from behind steel-rimmed glasses.

“Are you sure you don't want tea?” Frances asked when she returned. McGuire assured her he didn't.

She crossed the room and sat on a low bench near the fire, her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped tightly around her calves. Her blouse complimented her long, loosely-fitted skirt; she had applied just enough mascara to flatter her eyes and just enough lipstick to define her thin mouth. A gold chain lay around her neck and gold hoop earrings swung with each move of her head.

Not beautiful, McGuire thought as he studied her, but not unattractive, either. The kind of woman who could sit alone in a bar and not get a second look from men until after midnight.

She stared into the fire and said, in a small sad voice, “Why did you return?”

“To ask a few questions. About Jennifer Cornell. And about Andy, her brother.”

“Andrew? Andrew's gone, isn't he? Can't you people believe that he's never coming back?”

“Miss O'Neil,” McGuire began.

“Frances,” she said, turning to look at him abruptly. “Please call me Frances.”

“Frances,” McGuire smiled. “It appears you were the last person to see Andy Cornell. Did he walk you home the evening his sister was murdered?”

“Actually, I walked Andrew home. He invited me back to his . . . back to Jennifer's apartment. He said he wanted company. Just company to walk home. It was such a lovely night, I remember. Warm and soft. You only get nights like that in June, don't you? Later on, in August, the nights can get, I don't know, heavy. But in June they're soft and romantic.”

“What did you talk about?”

She looked back at the fire and smiled. “So many things. Andrew was interested in so many things. Books and music. And movies and plays. I told him I thought the most beautiful movie ever made was
A Place in the Sun
because it had the two most beautiful people in it, Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. I had a mad, passionate crush on Montgomery Clift when I was a kid. I thought he was the most gorgeous man in the world. I told Andrew he reminded me of Montgomery Clift. Not in looks so much. Andrew wasn't as dark and swarthy as Montgomery Clift. But in his sensitivity. His eyes, his voice, the way he carried himself.”

Briefly, she bowed her head, and then raised it again, her eyes flooded with tears.

“And he stopped and took my head in his hands and looked at me and said, ‘I love you for saying that.' I thought he was going to kiss me. I was sure he would, but we just kept walking, up Westland Street and across the bridge, the stone bridge over the Fens.”

She bent to rest her forehead on her knees.

“What happened then?” McGuire asked gently.

“When?”

“After you crossed the bridge.”

She looked up and studied McGuire before replying in a stronger voice. “He saw the light on in his . . . in Jennifer's apartment. He said he would love to invite me up for coffee and talk about movies and books and things. But he said Jennifer was home, and Jennifer wouldn't like it. He said she was a very jealous, possessive woman. And she was. I knew that. So I asked him . . .” She swallowed, looked away, regained her strength and began again. “I asked him to come home with me. I had never done that before. Asked a man home, I mean. I just had this small apartment in Cambridge, it was nothing much. But he said no, he couldn't do that, he had to go to Jennifer.”

“And that's the last time you saw him?”

She nodded silently.

“He went into Jennifer's apartment house?”

Another nod.

“Did you actually see him enter?”

“Mr. McGuire, I stood on Park Drive and I watched him go in the door and I stayed there for the longest time waiting for him to come out. But he never came.”

“So you went home.”

“I walked. Across the Harvard Bridge all the way to Prospect Street.”

“What did Andy do for a living? Did he tell you?”

She rubbed the fingertips of her hands together as she spoke. “He never said. He just told me he had travelled a lot, here and there, and that he was ready to settle down. He said he liked Boston, he had never been here before.”

“Did he tell you about his limp? Did he explain it?”

“He joked about it. Said it was from a car accident. I didn't ask for details.”

“There's no record of Jennifer ever having a brother. Nothing at all.”

“Yes she did. It was Andrew.”

“But there's no proof.”

“You never saw them together like I did.” She looked away and wiped her eyes. “She was so proud. So proud.”

He waited until she turned to face him again, an embarrassed smile on her lips.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “What else would you like to know?”

“I understand he had an accent.”

“He had several.” Her smile grew broader. “He liked to practise them. When we walked home that night he talked in a Georgia accent and a Texas accent, just joking, making fun of them. And he did a Boston accent, a broad one, like the Kennedys.”

McGuire frowned. The picture of Andrew Cornell was becoming more clouded with every revelation about him. “Where were you the morning Jennifer was found dead?” he asked, trying another tack.

She shrugged. “In bed. Exhausted.”

“What did you think about when you heard the news?”

Frances brought her hands to her face and her shoulders heaved. Standing up, she walked to the window and gazed out at the snowy landscape. “I knew Andrew was gone. I knew I would never see him again.”

“Do you think he was responsible for Jennifer's death?”

She replied without hesitating. “Oh, yes. Andrew was responsible. That I'm sure of.”

“Why would he kill his sister?”

Turning from the window, her face was calm again. “I don't know,” she replied. “You'll have to ask somebody else. I can't answer that.”

“Where is Andrew now?”

Sparks flew as a log shifted and dropped into the embers. Frances looked towards the fire. “Probably dead.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I don't know. A feeling.” She smoothed her skirt. “That's the logical explanation, isn't it?”

“It's one,” McGuire replied. “He could be anywhere. In fact, when I was here last time you just said he had gone away. Now you suggest he's dead. Why?”

“Because I want to believe it.” She lifted her head—a teacher's pose of strength and authority. “Maybe it's wrong to hope that someone is dead. I'm sorry if it is, but that's the way I feel.” She walked quickly towards the kitchen door. “I'm making some tea, Mr. McGuire. Are you sure you won't have some before heading out in the snow?”

Her legs crossed, she dangled one shoe from her toes, swinging it back and forth as she spoke.

“There was just Mona and me,” she said in a voice that was relaxed and reedy. “Mona is two years older. When you come from a family like ours, you either get hard and aggressive or you get . . . like me, I guess. I withdrew into my own little dream world where everything was sweet and romantic and everybody was nice to everybody else. Nobody was cruel. Mona, she became tough. No one ever dominated
her.
No one ever will.”

She drained the tea from her cup and set it aside. McGuire had long since finished his and he sat back on the sofa, listening to her tale of two young girls being terrorized by a tyrant father as they grew up in South Boston.

He liked the delicacy of her, the slenderness of her arms and body. McGuire had known women with an inner beauty whose appeal defied physical measure alone, and women whose outer beauty was so obvious it made cosmetics superfluous. Frances O'Neil's beauty was neither inner nor obvious. It was frail, like a green bud in early spring, ready to burst into full flower or wither in the next killing frost.

“So Mona became an executive secretary. And I became a teacher. Then I worked as a librarian for a few years.” She smiled at the memory. “I loved being surrounded by books. Loved having all those characters and ideas lingering between the covers. I could visit them whenever I wanted. It was a wonderful time for me.”

“And then?”

She smiled and stood up, kicking off both shoes before walking to set her empty cup on a side table. He realized for the first time she wore no brassiere. Her feet were tiny and bare; nail polish flashed like costume jewellery from her toes.

In McGuire's eyes she suddenly seemed attractive, sexy, enticing, as she stretched languidly, her arms above her head, in the soft light of the picture window, in a warm room with a dying fire on a cold day.

She walked back to the fireplace and knelt to add a log.

“I only had one boyfriend in high school. And there was a nice man I dated when I was teaching,” she said after seating herself once again on the low bench by the fire. “They were both quiet, gentlemen. Perhaps I should have married one of them. But I didn't.”

Her hands fluttered in front of her face. “I've always been a nervous, withdrawn person. But I'm getting better. I was always so afraid of becoming too involved. Too deeply involved. Being a librarian helped. I was distanced from people. I could take refuge in books.”

She stood and walked back to the window. Again, McGuire was struck by her grace and delicacy.

“One day a businessman came in and asked me to help him find some reference books he needed,” she said, without turning from the window. “He was in advertising. He was going to make a speech and I helped him find what he needed. We spent an hour together. He came back a week later to say his speech had been a big success and he wanted to take me to lunch, just to thank me for all the work I had done.”

She turned to face McGuire, raising one hand to brush away a lock of hair from her forehead.

“Do you want to guess the rest?” she asked.

“I don't have to,” McGuire replied. “How long did it last?”

“Almost three years. During the last year, his daughter started coming into the branch every Saturday. She was perhaps nine, ten years old. I recognized her from the photographs he had shown me. And I saw her name and address on her library card. He would talk about her all the time. He worshipped her. One day, when he hadn't called me for over a week, I did a terrible thing. I went to this sweet little girl and said I knew her name and to please tell her daddy to call me at the library.” She returned from the window and sat on the bench again, staring at the fire.

“When he called, he was furious. He said terrible things about me. Things I couldn't believe a man would say to a woman who did nothing wrong except love him too much. He told me his family was the most precious thing in the world to him and I had almost destroyed it for him. I cried for days. Finally the chief librarian said I would have to leave. Due to my emotional state. And because someone had complained about me.”

“The man's wife,” McGuire added.

She nodded. “So,” she said, smiling and opening her arms, “that ended one career and began another. At Pour Richards. That was my sister's idea. She told me I had to get out among people. She said one bad affair shouldn't make me a hermit. And working there was fun for a while.”