Lie in Wait (2 page)

 

Chapter 3

“
D
AMN,
”
J
ONATHAN
M
ERRYFIELD
groaned.

He removed his eyeglasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, set his glasses back on and shifted in the passenger's seat of the Land Rover as its headlights raked across the brick-­and-­ivy façade of the creamery.

“What is it?” Bethany said.

Jon shook his head, as if to rid a bad memory. “That kid.” He sighed. “That
boyfriend
. Whoever he is. We're going to have to let her go.” He moaned and hugged his stomach. Bethany killed the Rover's engine and headlights. The creamery windows fell black. She rested a palm on her husband's shoulder. “Feeling any better?”

“If by better you mean I don't feel like I am about to vomit all of my insides. No.”

“Sorry I insisted we go,” Bethany said and pulled her hand from the shoulder of her husband, who'd spent the end of their evening in the restaurant restroom. Suffering. She felt poorly for insisting they go out to dinner just because that's what they always did on Wednesday nights. Insisting was her nature: insisting on things that seemed imperative at their inception, vital and necessary—­an urgency created out of the anxiety of wanting perfection, and afterward seemed so trivial. Often her demands involved events that even she did not want to attend, but felt she
should
attend. Jon always obliged, predictably. It infuriated her, his predictability. Why, for once, couldn't he stand up for himself and say,
No. We're not going out. I'm still sick
. They both could have stayed home and rested. Instead, he'd caved. How was a man who was so aggressive, commanding, manipulative, and steadfast in his thorny and taxing professional life so dithering in his personal life? It was as though he were two completely different men. And, by the way: When had she come to disdain the consistency and stability, the predictability, she'd worked most her adult life to obtain and had once claimed she'd wanted and even admired in a spouse?

“I'll talk to the girl,” Bethany said. She had spotted the boy herself once, sliding off in the darkness a few weeks earlier. She'd spoken with Jessica about him. “You can have girlfriends over. But no more boys.” Oh, how the poor girl's cheeks had reddened, as flush as if she'd been slapped across the face. “It won't happen again,” Jessica had blurted, then crossed, actually crossed, her heart and hoped to die.

Bethany understood Jessica better than Jessica knew. Jessica would be shocked out of her panties to learn just how many boys Bethany had
entertained
in high school when she'd babysat, or while her parents had been out at yet another of their lousy, obligatory soirees, from which they inevitably returned pickled and bickering. One such Sunday, when Bethany's parents were off to get soused in Seer Sucker, her father's business partner, one for whom Bethany babysat, Mr. Alcott, had dropped by to find Bethany home alone basking bikini-­clad beside the pool, her brain fuzzed from the beating sun and a half pitcher of her mother's gin and tonics already slipping around inside her. She'd turned seventeen, just the day before. “Why, Little Beth,” Mr. Alcott had said and sat beside her on the edge of her chaise longue. “I see the cat's away.” Bethany had adjusted her top, which was unstrung, and cupped her hand to her brow, eyeing him and glancing at his Carmen Ghia, parked in the driveway. She had felt the sweat bead on her upper lip. “Apparently,” she'd said, rolling her tongue inside her mouth to taste the tart bite of lemon, the juniper of gin. Mr. Alcott had set his smooth, manicured hand on her tanned calf. “Care to go for a ride?”

The
ride
had lasted all summer.

She'd never told a soul. Not even Jon. If ever she prided herself on anything, it was her ability to keep secrets. It had served her well.

Bethany stepped out of the Land Rover and hurried around to assist Jon. His tie was slack around his neck. His shirt rumpled and untucked. His face shiny with perspiration.

Bethany escorted him up the front walk. Their motion activated the walkway lights. Bethany opened the front door and ushered her husband inside.

The baby was crying.

Bethany's heart registered the sound before her ears heard it.

No. Not crying.

Wailing.

The house was a riot of wailing. It reverberated throughout the creamery,
from
it. The terrible plaint of a baby abandoned.

Bethany envisioned Jessica servicing some pimply, groping boy while baby Jon shrieked. The little bitch. “Jessica!” Bethany hollered from the bottom of the staircase. She kicked off her Ferragamos and slung herself up the stairs two at a time, leaving Jon slumped on the edge of the deacon's bench, head in his hands. “Jessica!” Bethany cried again.

Baby Jon yowled so it seemed his tonsils would rupture in a mist of blood. The sound leeched the marrow from Bethany's bones.

Atop the stairs, Bethany ran down the hallway, bawling: “Jessica!''

Bethany burst into the baby's room. She threw on the light and raced to the crib. Little Jon. His scrunched and purple face was swollen and sopped. Bethany scooped him up, a feverish churn of legs and arms. She pressed him to her breast, stroked his head. “Shhhhh. It's all right. Mama's here. Shhh.”

His screams diminished. Bethany took him downstairs, her pulse throbbing in her wrists. She hurried over to her husband. “Jon. Something's wrong.”

Jon lifted his head from his hands, looking as though he might vomit; but he stood at the word
wrong
.

“Wrong?” he said. He touched the baby's shoulder, rubbed it with his fingertips.

“Jessica,” Bethany said. “She isn't
here.”

“She has to be here,” Jon said.

“I've been
shouting
for her. I checked the baby's room. She's not allowed to be in any of the other rooms upstairs, except the bathroom.”

“She's not allowed to fuck boys on our couch either.”

“You need to pull yourself together and do something.”

Jon stepped past Bethany and began to climb the stairs, using the rail for support.

With baby Jon clutched to her breast, Bethany searched the kitchen, the study, the library, the dining room, the parlor, and the guest bedroom, where Jon slept of late; his deluge of work and his stomach bug keeping him sleepless. The bedroom was off-­limits to Jessica, though who knew what anyone got up to in private? Bethany had certainly snooped around as a babysitter. As she strode across the living room, she stopped. The cellar door was open, just a hair. But it was normally shut tight unless someone was downstairs.

Baby Jon stirred in Bethany's arms. She balanced him and opened the cellar door. The sad yellow light of the cellar's single bulb died at the bottom of the stairs. Bethany felt an icy blade of guilt slice between her ribs. The radio was playing. Jessica was doing laundry. Since being caught with the boy—­and despite Bethany insisting she need not bother—­Jessica had taken to doing chores after Little Jon was in bed and Jessica's homework was finished. Jessica was downstairs now and had not heard Bethany and Jon come home over the sounds of the radio. The old stone foundation, the beams and trusses, the thick floors, they cut you off from the world. Bethany's one stipulation was Jessica take the baby monitor down there. But Bethany had forgotten it herself on plenty of occasions. Once, she'd come from the cellar to find baby Jon crying as if he were being held to a hot stove. How quickly she'd leapt to crucify the girl.

“Jessica,” Bethany said, her voice bare of anger. “Jessica.”

She descended the stairs.

With each step she called the girl's name.

With each step her voice pitched louder. “
Jessica.
”

J
ON
M
ERRYFIELD WAS
upstairs in the master bedroom, noting that the bedsheets were amiss, when he heard his wife howl.

 

Chapter 4

D
ETE
CTIVE
S
ONJA
T
EST
yanked her rattling Peugeot into the Merryfields' driveway and brought it to a lurching stop behind two cruisers.

Damn it.

The Vermont State Police were already on the scene, the cruisers parked at odd angles, doors left flung open as the police radios squawked, blue lights strobing in the black November night, turning the facade of the old creamery into a madman's funhouse.

Damn it.

She'd hoped she'd be first on the scene. She was last, apparently. Which meant she'd have to rely on others to fill her in on the details instead of seeing them firsthand and arriving at her own conclusions and theories. She did not like relying on others. Especially regarding crime scenes. Not that she'd been to a murder scene in her young career. And if her superior in the Canaan Police Department, Senior Detective Harland Grout, had not been in the hospital for an appendectomy, she'd not have been to this one either.

Test had still been in her old Dartmouth sweats when the call had come in. She'd just finished her daily 10k on her treadmill, the country roads of Canaan too dark and treacherous with blind curves to run at night. She didn't need to get struck by a car and left in a ditch like Stephen King. Besides, George and Elizabeth had been in bed, and Claude had not yet come home. What had been keeping him, she'd had no clue. It wasn't like him to be late and not to call. She'd phoned him several times and finally got him, to find the roads over the mountains from St. Johnsbury, where he'd been preparing for his exhibit, were perilous with black ice. There'd been no time to get her babysitter, who wasn't the most reliable anyway.

Test cranked the heater—­if a fan that stirred cool air could be called a heater—­then leaned back over her seat to hand her iPad to George. “You and Elizabeth can watch
Peppa Pig
or
Caillou
. Or play games your little sister likes. But no scary games to upset her. Got it?”

“Don't leave, Mama,” Elizabeth whimpered from her car seat, her emotions ragged from being hauled out of a deep sleep and tossed into the car in flurry of activity to get to the scene.

Test reached back to pinch Elizabeth's tiny chin between her thumb and finger. “Georgie will take care of you till Daddy comes. I'll be right up there.” She pointed to the old creamery.

“When's Daddy coming?” Elizabeth whined. “I don't wanna be alone.”

“Soon,” Test said, not knowing if that was true or not. “And you're not alone. You have Georgie,” she said, thinking,
What kind of mother leaves her kids in front of a murder scene on a cold Vermont night in a car with a crap heater
? But the only way she could be more irresponsible and heap more guilt upon herself would be to leave her kids sleeping alone in the house to possibly awaken without her there, or bring them inside the creamery to witness whatever gruesome scene awaited. “Georgie, take care of your little sister. And
no
scary games.
Peppa
,
Caillou
, or games your sister likes. That's it.”

“They're boring,” George said.

“You heard me.”

Test hastily dusted her cheeks and nose with foundation that hid her freckles. She was partial to her freckles, but in a professional setting they projected a girlish image she believed undermined her authority in a mostly male world. She'd not bothered to change out of her sweats, or to shower, wanting to get here straightaway. She'd thrown on her coat and strapped on her sidearm, bundled up the kids and buckled them into the car. She wished now she'd taken the two minutes to change out of her sweats. If she was going to be late anyway, it would have been good to be dressed accordingly. Now, she'd have to keep on her long parka while in the house. She probably smelled ripe with sweat, too. It was less than professional, but arriving at a murder scene posthaste had trumped decorum. All that, and she was still last to the party. As much as she had felt she'd been breaking a land speed record while leaving, getting the kids out of the house always took exponentially longer than she imagined.

“Keep the doors locked,” she said to George as she shut the door behind her and strode toward the house.

C
RIME-­SCENE T
APE, STRUNG
across the boundaries of the yard, snapped in the November gust.

From the few houses down the dark street a ways from the old creamery, residents came out to stand on their porches and dead lawns. They gawked at the blue lights that splashed across the darkness, and stared at each other's shadowed faces as if to seek permission from one another to proceed.

Then, they advanced, in bathrobes and unzipped parkas tossed on over pajamas, slippers and barn boots—­the attire of a weekday evening that stripped them of any hint of the varied standings or tastes that divided them by daylight.

Those who lagged began to hurry. They swung their arms with the exaggerated restraint of speed walkers, not wanting to appear as eager as they really were to discover whatever horror waited at the old creamery. They formed a line behind the yellow police tape as if waiting behind the velvet rope of a swank nightclub.

Test noticed a sign staked in the lawn: T
AKE
B
A
CK
V
ERMONT
.

The sign made Test cringe. It was an insult to human rights, as she saw it. Others saw it as gospel. The original signs had been the ugly brainchild of opponents to the 2001 civil union passage, the historic and incendiary law that had ignited bigotry and a seething, divisive hatred in ­people across the state and across the country. Test had been at Dartmouth at the time, and some students whom she'd counted among her friends had reacted in ways that had frightened and disillusioned her. The law had also brought out a compassionate nature in folks from whom Test had least expected it. With the actual gay marriage bill now being hammered out, the Take Back Vermont signs had cropped up again, like poisonous weeds never fully eradicated.

For some ­people, the ashes of that time were being stoked into flames again by Jon Merryfield and his work on The Case.

As Test approached officer Larkin at the door, she wondered how he had managed to get here so soon and be so put together in his patrol uniform on a night she knew he had off from duty. It made her look bad. Then again, Larkin, with his boyish face and lank body, lived in the village, and not a half hour away in the hills as Test did. And he was single, with no sleepy kids or absentee husband.

As Bethany nodded at Larkin, the Canaan County ambulance pulled into the drive. Its lights were off, which meant one thing: The victim, Jessica Cumber, whose name Test knew from the updates on the police radio in her Peugeot, was dead.

Seeing the ambulance, those neighbors who had not yet reached the creamery raced toward it. They elbowed to join the crowd. A father perched his young daughter atop his shoulders as if they were watching a circus act. Behind them, two TV crew vans had set up, their harsh lights invading the darkness.

“Do me a favor?” Test said to Larkin, wishing she could retract what she'd just said. She was not used to being in command; however, with Grout MIA she needed to be assertive. She was not asking for an optional favor, she was giving a mandatory directive.

“Name it,” Larkin said, shaking his head with disdain at the crowd.

“Bag and tag that sign in the yard,” Test said.

“On it.”

“And. Keep an eye on my car, the Peugeot,” she said, trying not so appear as embarrassed as she felt.

“Of course, Detective.”

“My two kids are in there. Make sure it stays that way?”

If he was taken aback by this revelation he concealed it expertly. “Yes ma'am, Detective Test.”

T
EST STEP
PED INSIDE
the home, even the soft soles of her Asics echoing in the vast marble entry. In the fireplace room off the foyer, Richard North, senior detective for the Vermont State Police, stood between John and Bethany Merryfield, both of whom looked like they'd just been washed ashore after a shipwreck.

North spotted Test and grimaced, then looked back to Jon Merryfield.

In her brief interaction with North, Test knew the state police detective as affable. But that interaction had been at a softball tournament fund-­raiser, not a murder scene. She couldn't expect the same congenial man tonight. Especially since state police detectives defended their turf ardently. Even if Test had not been late, the investigation would still belong to the state police, with her in a subordinate and supportive role. Being late only made it more difficult for Test to gain entry into the inner fold of the investigation.

Test made room for two forensics technicians, both wearing surgical gloves, white paper booties, and hairnets, to pass by her with lighting equipment. One of them, a woman, barked at her: “If you plan to go any farther into the house, put the garb on.” The woman nodded at a plastic tub containing booties, masks, and hairnets and strode away.

Test peered into the plastic tub. She glanced at North. He wore no hairnet, though he likely didn't require one. His hair was shorn severely tight. A mask hung backward behind his neck from its elastic band. She could not see from her vantage if he wore booties; but his hands, big hands, were gloved.

Test took a moment to put on the garb, letting the mask hang around the front of her neck, so she could speak to North.

Done, she waited for North to come over and brief her. When after several minutes he didn't extend the professional consideration, Test went to him.

As Test approached, North averted his eyes to the cellar stairs. Test could tell from the creases carved in his face by his scowl that whatever was down in that cellar was nasty. She'd not worked a murder scene. They were few and far between in Canaan.

She prepared herself by taking a slow deep breath through her nose; a technique she employed when running half marathons.

Her first homicide and she would work it—­or support it, rather—­alone.

“It's not pretty,” North said to Test without saying hello or shaking her hand. Had he thought she'd think it would be pretty? Was he patronizing her? She was uncertain.

She disliked being uncertain even more than she disliked relying on others.

Under the circumstances, she was willing to give North the benefit of the doubt. For now.

“I don't expect it to be pretty,” Test couldn't help saying, realizing too late that it may have come off as defensive. “I'd like to see.”

“We've already seen it,” North said. “I have. And the ME. Cause of death was a blow to the cranium. A hammer or pipe, likely. No weapon found.” He tapped his forehead, between his eyes, with two fingers. “Right here.”

“Ironic,” Test said.

“What?” North dug a thumb between his belt and chinos, and Test noticed he'd hand-­tooled a rough, extra hole in the black leather belt to accommodate his narrow waist. The time she'd seen him before, last summer, he hadn't had the build of the typical state police detective: that compact, bulldog's build that imposed a physical dominance on a subject and came in handy when approaching a car pulled over on a dark, lonely stretch of Vermont highway. No. North was tall but lean. In the several months since, he'd lost tremendous weight, and not in a good way. Test wondered if he was ill.

“What's ironic?” North repeated.

“The frontal lobe,” Test said, touching her forehead. “It's the part of the brain that helps us decide between bad and good behavior.”

“Hmm.” North said, unimpressed or perhaps just confused.

“It allows us to imagine the future repercussions that might come from our present actions, so we can overcome our base urges,” Test continued. “Something the doer obviously lacked.”

“Hmm,” North said. Unimpressed.

Test wished she hadn't said anything. Her own sticky, flypaper brain had a knack for snatching bits of factual flotsam out of the air as much as her tongue had a habit of then spouting those facts. At Dartmouth, she'd spewed inane and arcane facts with all the certitude and desire to astound that was shared by insecure undergrads everywhere. She still harbored a nostalgic embarrassment at the earnest girl she'd been, so desperate to be taken seriously that she'd mistaken reciting numbing facts as intelligence and subverted her own native intellect in the process.

These days she brought forth such facts only when useful to her police work, or when she was nervous or excited.

“I'd like to see the victim,” Test pressed.

“As I said—­”

“I recognize this is your case, Detective,” Test said. “The state police's case. I respect and appreciate that. Still, this
is
my jurisdiction. My town. I live with these ­people. They're my neighbors. It's my duty to them to be involved and to help in whatever capacity I am able.”

“In whatever capacity you are allowed,” North corrected. “It is not your duty to be involved. It is at my discretion. Not that I don't welcome your assistance. I do. Ready?”

Test nodded, her fingers shaking.

North noticed. “Nervous? We all get that way our first few murders. Especially ones like this. It's normal.”

Test wondered how normal North would think she was if she told him the truth: She wasn't nervous. She was excited. Senior Detective Grout's misfortune of being in the hospital was her good fortune.

“Be careful,” North said, “follow closely.”

As Test followed North toward the cellar stairs, she attempted to peer out a window to her car. But the glare on the windows from the lights inside returned a warped reflection of herself. She hoped Claude would be here soon to take the kids home. She had her cell phone on vibrate in her coat's pocket for when he called or texted, which she had expected him to do by now.