Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) (25 page)

Of course, the outcome of the police search was not good. My heart sank as I read the microfilm.

Along with a grainy picture of a derelict building, the May 3 issue of the
Denver Dispatch
had, as its front page lead, this:

Margaret Prestwick, the 15-year-old daughter of Tommy Prestwick, the stable manager at Governor Bright Academy, was found dead yesterday evening at the site of Rookery House, a former hotel, a mile from the Bright campus. Police are not releasing details of the incident and a spokesman for the Denver Police Department, Officer Anthony Sutcliffe, said that it was “too early to determine the cause of death or whether Margaret Prestwick had been sexually assaulted.” However, a spokesman for the Denver Coroner’s Office said late last night that Margaret Prestwick had been the victim of foul play….

In the next few days, the
Denver Dispatch
discovered further details of the incident. Margaret Prestwick had not been raped, but she had been sexually assaulted and then strangled. There were no scenes of struggle outside the property and the speculation was that Margaret had known her assailant and had arranged a liaison with him at Rookery House, a hotel that had suffered extensive fire damage years before and had lain empty since. In the weeks that followed, the
Dispatch
’s sense of frustration grew as little progress seemed to be made with the crime. The police interviewed many people, but no one was charged and there were no arrests. It must have been an important story within the community, for even two months later, the
Dispatch
’s crime reporter, Danny Lapaglia, was still writing about the unsolved murder.

This Fourth of July, the campus of Governor Bright Academy is quiet. School has been out for two weeks and the new term does not begin until after the long summer vacation. When school does begin, the new students at Bright will doubtless have heard of the ghastly events of the first week of May, when the daughter of the school’s former stable manager was brutally strangled a mere mile from where this reporter sits. As the weeks have gone by and the Denver police have seemingly run into a wall, it is no wonder that Tommy Prestwick, the murder victim’s distraught father, has resigned, leaving Bright Academy to be close to his only surviving daughter in New Orleans….

The story disappeared until November of that year, when Danny Lapaglia came out with a scoop. By this time, though, his article was only the lead on page five.

This reporter has learned that the Denver Police Department interviewed all the members of the Governor Bright lacrosse team in connection with the murder of Margaret Prestwick in May of this year….

The article went on to explain that a tiny piece of a lacrosse team tie had been found in Maggie’s teeth. Great significance had been attached to this. Every boy at Bright wore the same school uniform, black blazer, black trousers, white shirt. However, any boy who was a member of a team was permitted to wear his team tie rather than the school tie. If, indeed, the murderer was a member of the lacrosse team, that could leave only thirteen suspects. In Bright there were three soccer teams and two basketball teams, but only one lacrosse team, with ten players and three reserves. Only thirteen pupils in the whole school were permitted to wear the lacrosse team tie. All thirteen had been thoroughly interviewed but none had admitted to any knowledge of the murder. The police had not ruled out the possibility that a pupil who was not on the lacrosse team had used a team tie as the murder weapon.

But the police didn’t have the information that I had. That twenty years later Alan Houghton from that lacrosse team had been blackmailing Charles Mulholland from the same team. Maybe the blackmail was about something else, but maybe it was not. It certainly was worth looking into further.

I didn’t know how I felt. Ecstatic that I might have a lead, but it was a lead that would mean Charles, Amber’s husband, had killed more than once. Was Amber in any danger? In any case, I had to find out more.

I tried to speak to Danny Lapaglia, but his widow explained that he had died of cancer in 1983. Probably be a waste of time after twenty-two years but, anyway, I called in sick at CAW and took a trip out to the school.

It didn’t board anymore and half the pupils now were girls. Quite far out, too, the taxi ride cost twenty dollars. A beautiful campus: ivy-clad buildings, a swimming pool, a sculpture park. Only a short drive along Hampden Avenue to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

I told the headmaster’s assistant I was thinking of sending my adopted son there and he showed me around, but he’d been there for only two years and couldn’t be pumped for information. He let me walk the grounds. They didn’t own horses anymore and the stable block was now a garage for school buses. I walked in the hundred-degree heat across a dried stream and a brown field to where the old Rookery House hotel had been. Signs everywhere pointing out the danger of wildfires.

The old hotel was gone and a housing development had obliterated any hope of finding clues or insights into Maggie’s murder.

It was only during the walk back across the dusty field under the unforgiving Colorado sun that I saw why the boys had met Maggie at the Rookery House. The Bright campus was on a hill that commanded the surrounding area. Two boys in Bright uniforms could be spotted from miles away coming over these fields. Except for this one field that led to the Rookery. For this field lay behind a small mesa that sloped down and away from the Bright campus. On the downslope side the little dry stream to the Rookery and the Rookery itself were completely cut off from Bright. Once you got over the brow of the mesa, you disappeared from view. Nice spot for a rendezvous.

Was it possible she had agreed to meet both of them? It seemed unlikely.

In the photograph, Charles was handsome, tall, poised, Alan stubby, askew, asymmetrical, and unattractive. If I had to take a stab at it, I’d say that Alan had tagged along unannounced. What had happened next was anyone’s guess. Impossible to say then, impossible to say now….

I went to the school office and asked if I could browse through the alumni magazines to see how Bright pupils did in life. They were happy to let me have the last twenty years or so of the annual. It was even indexed. Alan Houghton appeared three times. In 1984 he was living on the rue Saint-Vincent, trying to be—guess what?—a painter. In 1989 he was in his hometown of New York “working in the theater.” In 1992 he had moved to Denver, where he had bought a studio to “continue his experiments in the arts.” A grainy photograph from the 1980s showed a haggard young man, with a fixed grin and something that might be a brown toupee on his head.

He had moved to Denver, perhaps to be near his good friend Charles. Perhaps to start hitting him up for money. Who knew? But that might be it.

The bell went for the end of school.

“What time is that?” I asked one of the secretaries.

“Three-fifteen,” she said.

Three-fifteen. If I hurried, I could still get into the office.

I would. I wanted to see Amber, too. I wanted to untangle those thoughts of her that were crowding my mind.

I called for a taxi and made it there by just after four.

Abe was about to give me a lecture about lateness, but Amber intercepted me. Black jodhpurs, black cashmere sweater, boots. Hair tied back. Maybe not the most comfortable of sartorial choices, but it looked bloody great. She looked like a high-class dominatrix. As cute as a box of knives.

“Alexander, I’d like to speak with you,” she said.

“Ok,” I said, and I found myself wondering why my perception of her personality was so influenced by her taste in clothes.

She walked me over to the sofa that had just been set up in the reception area of the CAW offices.

“I’d like to ask you a favor,” she said.

“Oh, yeah?” I said, as those lovely turquoise eyes blinked in fast succession.

“Charles is being asked to speak at a Republican Leadership Conference in Aspen,” she said.

“I know,” I replied.

“Charles doesn’t want me to go, thinks I’ll put him off,” she said, smiling.

“I can understand that,” I said.

“Anyway, it’s the same night a touring company of
Dancing at Lughnasa
is coming to Denver and I hardly ever get to go to the theater. Robert can’t go. It’s a big hit and it’s about Ireland. I thought, I mean, I wondered if you wouldn’t mind escorting me. I don’t want to go alone. I have two tickets. And I thought, because it was about Ireland, you’d be interested.”

“Of course,” I said, stunned.

“Thanks,” she said, and left the room without another word.

I shuddered. Hot and cold. She had me jumping through hoops. Intentionally or not.

To compound it, she didn’t come into the office at all for the next few days. In fact, I didn’t see her again until I met her outside the theater in a rented tuxedo. I was there twenty minutes early. She was late. A limo dropped her off.

She looked incredible in a slightly risqué, low-cut black dress and heels. She had had her hair done, too, pulled back and pleated and curled over on itself. Perfumed, bedecked with pearls over an impressive cleavage, she could have been going to the bloody Oscars or just a dinner party next door. My dinner jacket was old and too long in the sleeves and judging from the other patrons I was woefully overdressed.

“Thank you so much for coming,” she said.

“Not at all,” I replied.

“I’m glad to get out, I’d be worried about Charles all evening,” she said.

“Sure.”

“You’re not nervous, are you?”

“I’m not nervous. Why would I be nervous?”

“Don’t you get nervous for the performers? Hoping they’ll hit their lines and their marks?”

I shook my head. We went into the show.

The audience said “Ssshhh” as the lights went down.

The actors. The play. Amber’s bare arm next to mine. I hardly paid the story any attention at all. The only thing I noticed were the worst Irish accents I’d heard outside of an Irish Spring commercial. It went on for a long time.

The audience liked it, though, and there were four curtain calls. Amber clapped with the best of them.

We filed outside.

Amber wanted to walk home. She was very happy and it was a gorgeous night.

We walked south along Sixteenth and despite the play, despite the lovely evening, despite the champagne cocktails at intermission, Amber was talking about Charles.

“You can imagine how excited he was, he won’t be on television or anything like that, but it’s a real honor to be asked to speak, bigwigs are going to be there, Robert Dornan, Alexander Haig, he’s on the bill right after Newt Gingrich.”

“Great.”

“Charles, naturally, is diametrically the opposite. He represents the moderate wing, you know. He called me this afternoon, very excited. Of course, he’s been to Aspen a million times, but he’s not a natural public speaker.”

“Maybe you
should
have gone with him,” I said.

“He thinks it will be worse if I’m in the audience, better in front of a bunch of strangers, he says.”

“I don’t see Charles as the nervous type,” I said.

“Oh, you see, that’s where you’re wrong, Alexander, he’s extremely shy, he’s very much like Robert in that respect. He’s quite introverted. In many ways, it’s all a front, his whole persona. He does it to get the best out of people. Really, he’s very sensitive, shy. ’Course, you must keep that to yourself.”

“Of course I will,” I said indignantly.

We talked a little about the play and the neighborhood. On Pennsylvania Street, she pointed out the fancy nursing home where her mother stayed. A big, white, modern, soulless building.

“Charles pays for everything,” she whispered reverentially.

“That’s nice,” I said.

“He flew her in from Knoxville. It’s one of the finest homes in the state, she gets the best of care, it’s so sad,” she said, her voice breaking a little.

“It is,” I agreed. “Alzheimer’s is the cruelest way to go.”

“I can barely bring myself to visit, once a week is about all I can manage,” she said, overcome by sadness.

That topic had killed the conversation, and we walked in silence the rest of the way to her front door.

I wished her a good night.

“Oh, come up for a quick drink,” she said, slurring her words slightly and frowning a little at herself. Tipsy from the walk and the aftereffects of champagne, I assumed. She tapped in her security code, the cast-iron gate swung open; I followed her inside.

“What a night,” she said.

“Aye.”

“I wish Charles could have been there, it’s always the way, isn’t it, everything always happens at the same time,” she said.

“Yeah, life is like that,” I agreed.

“Do you want a drink?” she asked.

I didn’t, but I said, “Anything.”

“Charles has a collection of single malts, I don’t know a thing about whisky, would you like one?” she asked.

“I suppose in Tennessee you were all drinking bourbon?” I asked.

“What?”

“You know, because you’re next to Kentucky, Jack Daniel’s, that kind of thing,” I said.

“Yeah, well, we weren’t big drinkers in my family. My father, well, he was a recovering alcoholic, you know, we didn’t really allow it in the house…. Anyway, it doesn’t bother me, do you want a whisky?”

“Ok.”

If she wasn’t accustomed to alcohol, that explained how she could be tipsy. But why mention this out of the blue? Christ, maybe she was in a confessional mood. What else did she want to talk about? Maybe more about shy, introverted Charles? I would have to go softly-softly.

“Do you want anything in it? Ice or water?” she asked.

“No, nothing, thank you.”

She brought me a glass, smiled innocently, happily.

I chastened myself. No, she hardly seemed to be breaking under the strain of angst about a double murder. Maybe I was overanalyzing everything. You’re not supposed to do that, you’re supposed to get the information first, then collate it, and then think about it. Not leap to conclusions on inadequate facts. I relaxed, sniffed the whisky glass. Peaty. I took a sip: peaty with a seaweed tinge and a sugary harshness. From Islay or Jura.