Better Homes and Corpses (17 page)

Voices filtered from under a door in the middle of the hallway. I crept toward it and pressed my ear against the door, forgetting that any time my ears were covered, the batteries in my hearing aids whistled. The feedback almost shattered my eardrums. I had to bite my tongue to keep from calling out. Not about to give up, I bent down and peeped through the keyhole.

Mrs. Arnold sat at the end of a bed facing my direction, in perfect lip-reading distance. “Don’t you ever serve that wench another drop of anything. She thinks she’s better than us. Always has. Mrs. Caroline must be rolling around in her grave knowing that tangerine-haired
she-devil
sat at the Spenser table. I don’t know what Adam had to promise to get Jillian to invite his mother, Frances. And what about that Salvatore, the great artiste, always lurking about? He gets the guesthouse and what do we get? I’ll tell you what.
Nothin’. We get nothin’. I raised her child single-handedly and what does she leave us? Just a lot of heartache.”

I couldn’t make out Mr. Arnold’s response, but Mrs. Arnold replied, “She won’t, but who knows about Mr. Cole?” Then Mrs. Arnold took the prone position and the room went black.

I continued up the fourth flight of stairs to the attic. In the dark, furniture came alive. Chests of drawers morphed into grizzly bears and lightning reflected off the leaves of a huge oak outside the window and caused shadows to dance on the lanceless knight. I aimed my flashlight toward the end of the attic and spotlighted the Creature. Everything in the attic had a reason and a tag, with the exception of the ugly, hairy stuffed pig. I shone my light inside the beast’s mouth. Pieces of his tongue were disintegrating, but his fangs looked like they’d survive another ice age. A branch clawed at the window. I stepped back and bumped something solid behind me. Covered in a sheet was the Dominy tall clock I’d seen in Champagne and Caviar Antiques. Next to it, also covered, was the missing bookcase.

I made my way down to the second floor. All seemed copacetic, except for the storm that raged outside. I took off my jeans and T-shirt, went to my overnight bag, and removed a black satin camisole and matching panties.

Darn.
I must have forgotten the matching robe. I was rooting through my bag when the screaming commenced.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Everyone converged in the hallway at once: Cole, Adam, and Dr. Greene from the east and Mr. and Mrs. Arnold from the west. Officer Bach was the last to arrive. We bottlenecked in front of Jillian’s closed bedroom door. Adam did the honors. He threw open the door and we all pushed in.

Jillian lay in the center of her round bed. Officer Krane tried unsuccessfully to steady her flailing arms. “I see him. I see him!” Jillian screamed.

Officer Bach, Dr. Greene, and Adam tore to the bed, while everyone else stood and watched. Even Mrs. Arnold seemed suspended in the moment.

Dr. Greene lifted Jillian’s fragile body to a sitting position, while Adam tried to shake her into consciousness. It was as if her circuit breaker had been reset. Her eyes snapped open and she croaked loud enough for everyone to hear, “It can’t be right. It can’t be him.”

“Who, Jillian? Who killed your mother?” Adam asked.

Jillian moved her jaw slowly, like a ventriloquist’s doll. “I remember now, it was . . .”

“Who was it?” Officer Bach coaxed.

“No. I must be wrong. I must.”

“Please, Ms. Spenser, you mustn’t be frightened,” Officer Bach said.

“Col . . . It was Cole . . . Oh no . . .” She gulped. “It was Cole. My brother. Noooo. Oh, Momma, Momma!”

A communal “Ohhh” filled the room and all eyes went to Cole.

My mind went back to the day I found Caroline and Jillian. Was that what Jillian was trying to say? Was she saying “Cole,” not “cold”?

“What? What are you talking about, Jillian?” Cole’s voice cracked in midsentence as he edged toward the bed.

“Noooooooo . . . Stay away . . . You killed her. You killed her . . . our mother . . . How could you?” Jillian clutched her knees and started to rock.

“I didn’t kill anyone, especially not our mother.” Cole searched the room for an ally.

He didn’t find one.

“You maniac! Stay away,” Adam spat.

Officer Bach jumped into action. “Officer Krane, put a call in to Detective Shoner. Now!”

Jillian moaned. Dr. Greene left the room and returned with his bag and injected a large hypodermic into Jillian’s arm. Within seconds, her head lolled onto her right shoulder. Dr. Greene positioned her against the pillows. All she needed was a lily to complete the corpse-like pose.

“It can’t be true,” I said from the back of the crowd.

An overwhelming feeling of awkwardness permeated the room. Everyone, except Mr. Arnold, focused their eyes on the ceiling. Mr. Arnold looked straight at me, the pink
of his tongue touching his upper lip. Then I followed his gaze and remembered I was wearing only black satin lingerie.
Talk about timing.

*   *   *

Detective Shoner, Chief Pell, and officers from both the Suffolk County and East Hampton Town police departments showed up within the half hour. I tried but was unable to get Detective Shoner alone.

I changed into something more appropriate then hurried down the hall to Cole’s room so I could watch the police go through his things. His black leather jacket hung on a chair. A book lay open on the bed; its cover pictured a sailboat.
Racing Through Paradise: A Pacific Passage
, by William F. Buckley, Jr. I imagined Cole reading it, biding his time until he could make it down to the guest room for our assignation. I didn’t believe he was Caroline’s killer, or maybe I should rephrase that: I didn’t
want
to believe he’d killed his mother.

Detective Shoner sent word through Officer Bach that I should leave. Mrs. Arnold pushed me out the door with a smug look, like she knew I had a thing for Cole.

The rain had stopped. The storm was over. Or was it?

It was past midnight by the time I arrived home. I needed to clear my head. The rain had stopped, so I slunk down to the beach. The words in the sand were written larger than usual:

All that is necessary for Evil to triumph

Is that good men do nothing.

I never made it up to bed; instead, I crashed on the sofa and fell into a fitful sleep.

When I opened my eyes, the red light blinked on my phone, telling me of an incoming call. I fumbled for my hearing aids, put them in, and answered.

“Meg, it’s Cole.”

I glanced at the clock. Eight
A.M.
Two hours before the St. Patrick’s Day parade. “Where are you?”

“A holding cell. Can I see you?”

I grabbed my jacket and purse and left the cottage, dressed in the same clothes I’d slept in. I had to get out of Montauk before they closed the streets for the St. Patrick’s Day parade.

“I want to see Detective Shoner,” I announced to a young man behind the desk.

“And you would be?”

“Meg Barrett.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No, but I’m sure he’ll see me.” I surveyed the lobby, wondering which direction I would find the holding cells.

Detective Shoner came to greet me. He glowed like a stallion after impregnating a filly. “Just the little lady I wanted to see.” He grinned.

“This ‘little lady’ wants to see Cole Spenser.”

“And why is that?”

“He called me.”

“I see. Come back to my office and we’ll set it up for you.”

I sat across from him and waited while he talked on the phone. He wrote on a yellow legal pad. I tried to read the upside-down print but couldn’t decipher his physician-like scribble.

“That might do it.”

“Do what?” I asked.

“You were right about the lance being the murder weapon. It had traces of Caroline Spenser’s blood. Now that Jillian’s memory is back . . .”

“What if someone was dressed up like Cole? Jillian and her mother were both hit on the back of the head. Maybe it was only a peripheral glance and Jillian saw someone in a wig and a black leather jacket. Who knows?”

“Why are you so gung ho to defend him? You’ll be the prosecution’s best witness.”

“What?”

He pulled some papers from a manila folder. “When you came to the scene of the murder, you said Jillian mumbled the word ‘Cole.’”

Damn, the police had thought of that one too. “She said ‘cold.’ She was shivering.”

“You have a hearing loss, so you have to agree, Jillian might have been saying ‘Cole.’ Plus, don’t forget about the sweatshirt you found on the beach. Cole probably wore it when he chased Jillian, not to mention his Swiss Army knife we found in the woods.”

“That wasn’t the murder weapon, remember.”

“Yes, but it was the knife he used when he was chasing his sister. We’re searching his house and his boat in North Carolina, and we’ve frozen his personal checking account in a local bank, which just happens to have a balance of one hundred grand. Guess what else we found? A money transfer to Cole’s account from Caroline Spenser the day before she was murdered in the amount of one hundred grand.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because we want you on our team. Maybe you can get a confession out of him. We have the means, opportunity, and motive, but a confession would make it ironclad.”

“What’s his motive?”

“Bad blood between him and his mother and maybe blackmail. Hence, the one-hundred-grand wire transfer.”

“It sounds circumstantial. How about concrete evidence?
Why would Cole chase Jillian? He had ample time to get her alone. He wouldn’t have to chase her, and he wouldn’t have to ram her with a truck.”

“My theory is he tried to scare her into not talking, or he tried to keep her memory from coming back by terrorizing her. Do you want to see him or not?”

I cooled down. I needed Shoner on my side. “Yes, I do, and if he confesses, I’ll tell you.”
Lie.

I entered a small room. It was bare, with the exception of a small Formica table and two folding chairs. I pulled out a chair and waited. The white speckled floor tiles were lined with thick black scuff marks, telling the tale of all the downtrodden prisoners who’d been escorted in and out.

I opened my purse and removed a tube of lipstick and a mirror. I was still in yesterday’s mascara. I licked my pinky finger and wiped the smudges from under my eyes and then performed the old lipstick-as-blush routine. I put the lipstick and mirror back in my purse and saw the mini–tape recorder Doc had given me. I removed it and turned it on, resting it at the top of my open purse.

Cole didn’t scuffle in as I anticipated. In fact, he walked quite confidently and looked damned good, better than I would in similar circumstances. The guard who brought him in waited until Cole sat down, then he walked out and peered at us through a small wire-entwined window.

Cole smiled. “Thanks for coming.”

“Of course. Are you okay? How are they treating you?”

“I have the cell to myself. Not much action this time of year, or any time of year.” He shrugged his shoulders and embarrassment flashed across his ice-blue eyes. “Do you believe her?”

“I think Jillian thought it was you, but it must’ve been
someone dressed to look like you. Or her brain is still addled from the wallop on the back of the head.”

“Meg, I want you to know, there is no way I killed my mother. They’re not going to be able to prove it.”

“I hope you’re right. They found the murder weapon. It was a steel lance that went with a knight in armor stored in the attic.”

“We used to play with that thing as kids.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“What happened seventeen years ago that made you leave New York?”

He rubbed his finger back and forth on his lower lip. “It has nothing to do with this.”

“It might not, but the police will use whatever they can as a motive.”

“It’s simple. My mother was having an affair with my father’s best friend, Stephen Prescott, aka Adam’s father. I heard them arguing. Stephen was advising my mother to tell my father the truth about their affair, but mother told him she felt too guilty and weak to tell my father. She blamed my father because he neglected her by staying in the city.”

“Did they know you were listening?”

“No.”

“Did you tell your father about the affair?”

“No, I was worried about his heart. He’d already had a minor stroke. He died that fall, right after I left home.”

“And you never forgave your mother?”

“We talked on the phone, birthdays and holidays. She had her life. I had mine.”

“What about Jillian? Didn’t you want to see her?”

“I tried to get her to come to North Carolina. She wouldn’t
leave. My mother, with the help of Stephen Prescott, convinced Jillian I’d almost killed her that day on the boat.”

“What really happened?”

“It was my fault. I’m not refuting that. The accident was on the same day I overheard them talking of their grand affair. I was angry and wanted the boat to go as fast as it could. I remember watching my mother and ‘Uncle’ Stephen on the shore. They were pretending to be buddies, playing gin rummy and sharing bites of sandwiches and sips of iced tea . . .”

“You did dive in to rescue Jillian, right?”

“Yes, but I didn’t jump in as fast as I should have. I was too busy watching them. I was so angry. I wanted to swim over and beat Stephen Prescott senseless. I didn’t hear Jillian fall in. They accused me of negligence, and they were right, but I accused them of negligence too. My mother told me I was wrong, that she wasn’t having an affair. She sent out a decree I shouldn’t visit Jillian at the hospital because I would upset her. The next night my mother and I argued at one of her big dinner parties. I left angry and took a curve too fast. Tara and I ended up in the ditch. My mother didn’t even bother to leave her precious guests to come to the hospital to see if I was dead or alive.

“I left a few days after the motorcycle accident. I don’t regret leaving. I regret not having Jillian in my life and not being with my father before he died. I always wondered if somehow he found out his old Oxford buddy was servicing his wife and that’s why he had a stroke.”

I said, “Your mother did come to see you that night at the hospital.”

He looked puzzled. “How do you know?”

“I talked to a nurse that was on duty. She said Caroline came to see you, but you’d already been released.”

“It’s a little late, but thanks, it makes it hurt a little less. Wonder why she never mentioned it?” He turned my hand over and sensually traced his index finger across my palm.

I felt scorched. “Did your mother give you one hundred thousand dollars the same day you flew into New York?”

“What are you talking about? One hundred thousand dollars? No way. I never took a penny from her, or anyone else!”

“Why did you come to East Hampton after all these years?”

“I got a call from my mother. She said she had something important to discuss with me and it had to be in person.”

“Okay, time’s up.” The guard was behind me. I hadn’t heard him come in.

“Just one more minute.” I turned to Cole. “Is there anyone you want me to contact in North Carolina?”

“Yes. Bill Millburn.”

I was relieved the name was male. I got out a scrap of paper and a pen from my purse while I shielded the tape recorder from the guard.

“Nine-one-two, five-five-five, three-two-four-three. Don’t tell him where I am. Say I’ll be in New York for a while and he should run things in my absence.” Then he looked at me with such passion I had to stifle a moan. “I didn’t do it. No matter how much I despised my mother. You’ve got to believe me.”