Cast a Blue Shadow (11 page)

22

Saturday, November 2 10:50 A.M.

SHERIFF Robertson met Sally and Jenny as they rounded the back corner of the big house. Waiting next to the cars and cruisers were Daniel Bliss, Henry DiSalvo, Mike Branden, and Sonny Favor. Several deputies worked with shovels in the snowbanks beyond.

“Ready to go, girls?” Robertson asked. “It’s still an hour or two before lunch. Maybe we can finish up at a decent hour.”

DiSalvo stepped forward and said, “First, I’ll have a word with Sally and Sonny.” He waved them over to the far edge of the parking lot and began to speak softly to them next to the family limousine.

Jenny Radcliffe found herself alone with the sheriff. She leaned back against his black-and-white cruiser and lit another cigarette.

Robertson pointed at the Favors, talking secretively with DiSalvo, and said, “They’re cutting you out of the play. Bluebloods stick together.”

Radcliffe laughed outright and wagged her finger at the sheriff. “Nice try, Mr. Policeman,” she said.

“Sally is in more trouble than you realize, young lady.”

“Don’t you ‘young lady’ me, old man,” Jenny barked, heated. “I don’t tolerate fossils like you.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” Robertson said, feigning astonishment. “I only meant that you are over here, and they are over there.”

“Sally will call me when she wants me.”

“Is that how it works, then? You’re her little pet?”

Radcliffe threw her cigarette down and crushed it hard under her boot. “I know what you’re trying to do.”

“I’m trying to tell you what kind of trouble you three kids are in.”

“I already know that.”

“We know about Sally’s fight with her mother.”

“That’s not news.”

“We also know that Sally was going to be cut off. A busted trust. No inheritance.”

“That’s not the way it is. Sally will be fine. She talked to Mr. DiSalvo in the kitchen.”

Robertson unzipped his coat and reached into the breast pocket. He pulled out a small notebook and read some figures there. He angled the page so Jenny could see the numbers, and said, “Cut from a trust fund worth $10,250,000 now, to $4,000 a month until she’s thirty. That’s a motive for murder.”

“Sally hasn’t been cut out of the will. She gets almost half of everything.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Like I said, she talked to Henry DiSalvo.”

“What did you two overhear last night to cause Sally to take on her mother that way?”

“You already know.”

“Busting Sally’s trust?”

“Yes.”

“There has to be more.”

“Well, there isn’t.”

“You’re lying. You were drunk.”

“I was with Sally. We stayed by ourselves all night. Partied in her room.”

“You must have slept some.”

“Not really.”

“Yes, really. Then, sometime later in the night, closer on toward morning, Juliet Favor went downstairs, and Sally knocked her down on the marble floor. Then you two carried her upstairs, and left a blood trail in the staircase carpet.”

“I don’t have to take this,” Jenny said.

Robertson decided that he had her about as worked up as he wanted and said, “Then Sonny is the only one who could have killed her.”

Jenny looked over to Sally and Sonny, who were still talking to DiSalvo beside the black limousine. She glowered up at Robertson and said, “Neither one of them killed her.”

“They benefit from her death, equally. That means they had equal motive to have wanted her dead. You say you were with Sally all night.”

“It’s the truth.”

Robertson put his notebook away and zipped up his coat. “We will continue this in town.”

Jenny Radcliffe squared up to the big man, stared at him long and steady, and started off in the direction of the limousine.

Robertson caught her coat sleeve and said, “You’re not riding with them.”

She jerked loose and stood her ground, saying, “Oh, yes I am.”

Ricky Niell came around the corner of the house and sized up the standoff. He said, “She can ride with me,” and Robertson saw Radcliffe relax a bit.

“OK,” Robertson said dismissively. “You ride with Sergeant Niell.”

Radcliffe moved two steps in Niell’s direction, and Niell said, “This way, Jenny,” pointing to the cruiser nearest the back door.

DiSalvo noticed the skirmish and had made it to Robertson as Niell was leading Radcliffe to his car. To Robertson, DiSalvo said, “Jenny Radcliffe is represented by Baker, Lumbaird, and Drumond, out of Wooster. The Favor children have just retained them on her behalf.” To Jenny, DiSalvo added, “You should not say anything until your lawyers are present, Jenny.”

Robertson said, sarcastically, “Now see, Jenny. They’ve gone and made this all adversarial.”

Radcliffe pulled an imaginary zipper across her lips and smiled at DiSalvo before getting in the front of Niell’s black-and-white.

DiSalvo told Robertson, “She’s not to be questioned,” and walked back to the limousine. Robertson watched the three climb in the back. Bliss closed up and got in behind the wheel. When Niell pulled out, Bliss followed.

Alone on the packed snow stood Robertson and Branden. The sun was up at its midmorning position, but clouds were swarming in from the west on a cutting wind. Robertson put on gloves and smiled.

Branden shook his head. “You were working her pretty hard, Bruce.”

“I’m just warming up.”

“We’re going to have to keep them separated down at the jail.”

“I’ve already called Ellie. She’s setting up Interview A and B, and we can use my office, too. You gonna help?”

“I’d like to, but what’s with you? You don’t seem like yourself.”

“It’s nothing, Mike. Now, what have we got so far?”

“We know who was here, and when,” Branden said.

“For the most part. But, there’s still that little matter of the Lexus that seems to move itself from place to place.”

Branden ignored the thrust. “We also know when everyone left.”

“Except that Bliss didn’t sweep through the house before he turned in.”

“We do know that Sally, Jenny, and Sonny stayed the night,” Branden said.

“And we know someone cracked Juliet Favor’s skull.”

Branden shook his head. “Trouble is, there are a good fifteen people with motive to have done that.”

“I put it at more like twenty.”

“So, motive won’t solve this one,” Branden said.

“Not at first. Someone has to make a mistake,” Robertson said.

“Do you know when Missy and her people will be done in the house?”

Robertson checked his watch. “In about an hour. By noon, anyway.”

“Her station wagon is out front. Who else is still here?”

“My photographer just left,” Robertson said. “There are still two tecs with Missy.”

“She knows about the pitcher?”

“Right. There’s something else.”

Branden waited.

Robertson took off his hat and rubbed the top of his head with a gloved hand. “I’m having them test a little bottle labeled DMSO.”

“Pomeroy’s medicine?”

“She was dabbing that stuff on her temples all night long.”

Branden said, “Then I’ll see you in town,” and started walking toward his car beside the garage.

Robertson looked suspiciously at the professor’s vehicle and said, “That a new one?”

“No.”

“How many cars do you have, Mike?”

“This is just our little around-town sedan.”

“How many? Give!”

“I still have the truck.”

“OK.”

“We also have our custom van.”

“Tough life.”

“There’s Caroline’s Miata, too.”

“Four. You’ve got four cars.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“What, Doc. Have you been taking money from Old Lady Favor, too?”

23

Saturday, November 2 11:00 A.M.

CAROLINE and Evelyn moved Martha to an upstairs bedroom, and she was asleep by the time they had pulled the covers up over her shoulders. Evelyn went downstairs to make another pot of coffee, and Caroline lingered in the bedroom doorway, watching Martha sleep.

It had been nine years since Martha’s son had been born, and Caroline now bitterly remembered the day Ben Schlabaugh had brought her in a flatbed wagon to the emergency room of Joel Pomerene Hospital. Caroline had been a volunteer in pediatrics, and Martha had been fourteen.

The mad scramble in the emergency room was lodged vividly in Caroline’s mind. The filthy clothes they had cut away. The Cesarean section to save the child. The transfusions as Martha had bled out on the table. All these played again in her memory, like an old movie, scratched film on a tattered screen, as Caroline fingered the veins in her arm where they had taken blood for Martha. When she realized she was crying, Caroline went to the bathroom, dried her eyes and blew her nose, and went down the steps angry again at the backward Amish peasant doctrines that had nearly cost child and mother their lives.

In the kitchen, Caroline rinsed out her Lincoln mug and poured herself a cup before the coffee had finished brewing. Evelyn, watching, read the expression on Caroline’s face and anticipated the need to talk about matters that had been left unsaid over the years.

“You may have been too hard on Ben Schlabaugh, Caroline.”

Caroline bristled instantly. “He nearly killed her!”

Evelyn refrained from comment, and Caroline sat down at the table, heat dissipating quickly from her cheeks. “I’m sorry, Evelyn. I was there when he brought her in, lying in the back of that wooden cart like something out of fifteenth-century Europe. My land, Evelyn, she was nearly dead.”

“Another way to look at it is that he actually saved her life.”

“How can you say that? He had her hidden for three months, and you yourself swore out a complaint as her psychiatrist.”

“Her parents always maintained that they knew where she was, and that Ben Schlabaugh was engaged to her and was caring for her as they wished.”

“He used a midwife, Evelyn. They almost killed her.”

“I haven’t told you everything, because after she got to know you, she asked me not to.”

“Do you know that the only support that she got from her so-called Amish Brothers and Sisters,” Caroline said, “was the bishop showing up once at the emergency room? We didn’t know if she would live or die, and there stood that sanctimonious creep with two pillowcases full of money. ‘We pay cash’ is all he said. Turned and walked away like he had done nothing more than talk to a bank teller.”

“What you don’t know is that Ben Schlabaugh helped pay her psychiatric fees when her family was shunned for buying a car.”

“You mean turning Mennonite,” Caroline said.

“It’s all the same to Amish. Once you’re out, they’re off of you like a dirty shirt.”

“It’s too harsh, Evelyn. How many poor souls get cut loose like that every year? They never seem to make it, out in the world.”

“When they find a new church home,” Evelyn said, “they seem to be OK.”

“Then thank God for Cal Troyer.”

Evelyn let a silence pass and then gently said, “Did you know that, when Martha first started talking again, it was to Ben Schlabaugh?”

Caroline started crying, and Evelyn reached across the table to take her hand. “Caroline,” she said. “I’m going to tell you everything I can about Martha Lehman without breaking her confidence. You know most of this, but you need to remember before we talk to Ben tomorrow.

“I first saw Martha when she was nine years old. It was spring. Her father brought her in and said, ‘You are a head doctor. Make her talk.’

“For five years, I saw her every week, and she never said a word. So I devised other ways to draw her out. I brought her brothers and sisters into her sessions, and without exception, she was cold toward her older siblings and protective of the younger ones.

“I’d start poems for her, and she would write out the finish to them. We worked jigsaw puzzles, and as soon as she got the border finished, she would lose interest.

“By the time she was fourteen, I had concluded that she had been sexually abused as a very young child, perhaps as early as five years old, and that she was in jeopardy again as a teenager. That’s when I told the parents they should move. That’s when Cal Troyer got involved. He helped them understand how they could make a change and not forsake their faith. The bishop had them convinced that to leave an Amish sect meant a total loss of faith. At that point, she had her child.”

“It’s Ben Schlabaugh’s,” Caroline said.

“I’m not so sure anymore.”

“It’d be easy enough to tell,” Caroline said.

“Schlabaugh is Amish. He’d never agree to a blood test.”

Caroline drew her hand away from Evelyn’s and dried her eyes with a napkin from a wooden holder on the table.

Evelyn continued. “After her son was born, I saw Martha for another year and a half. Like I said, she first started talking to Ben Schlabaugh. He’d bring me bits and pieces of what she said. I won’t go into everything, but by the time she finished with me, she was talking freely, and went home to her newly-turned-Mennonite family. You picked up with her after that.”

“She got her G.E.D.,” Caroline said. “She’s on one of our scholarships.”

“I know.”

“I hear a ‘but’ in there somewhere.”

Evelyn locked her fingers together on top of the table. “There was always more work to do, Caroline, even before this episode.”

“You said she talked freely.”

“We never addressed her real problem.”

“What does that mean?”

“She’s still vulnerable to the deep psychological consequences of some early childhood episode. Her silence now may have been triggered by something else, but she still faces the need to confront old issues. Her memory will eventually bring it back. This new pregnancy may be the thing that has put her into relapse. Or the Favor murder could have done it. But, until her mind and heart are strong enough to handle the pain, she won’t be able to remember her childhood. And until those memories are cleansed, she can’t be truly healed.”

“How long could that take?”

“Some people don’t recover memories of severe abuse until they are forty or fifty. Then their world caves in, and they don’t know why. In therapy, sometimes, survivors can work through the trauma that they, as children, could never face.”

“And you think Martha is like that?”

“Very possibly. All we really know is that she’s not talking again.”

“You said she’s protecting someone.”

“That someone may be the very small and helpless Amish girl of five she used to be.”