Murder in the Hearse Degree (8 page)

“We just want to ask you a few questions,” Pete said.

The woman replied, “I said to you on the phone, I haven’t heard from Sophie since the beginning of the summer.”

“We understand that,” Munger said. “We won’t take long.”

The woman considered the two of us a few seconds longer. She must have determined that we weren’t in fact vacuum-cleaner salesmen employing an elaborate ruse in order to get ourselves inside and toss black dirt down on her carpet. She opened the door and let us in. We were led to a sun porch. It was so choked with a flower motif I half expected to see bees buzzing around the cushions.

Kathy Pierce was a skinny woman with a pinched nose and a nervous tic. She wore—naturally enough—a floral-print skirt along with a navy blue blouse.

“This is so tragic,” she said. “That poor girl.”

“How long did Miss Potts work for you?” Pete asked.

“Just under a year.”

“And how many children do you have?”

“Two. Patrick and Patricia. They’re twins.”

“How was Miss Potts?” I asked. “I mean, as a nanny? Was she responsible? Were you happy with her?”

The woman bobbed her head vigorously. “Oh yes. Sophie was wonderful with the children. Paul used to say Sophie wasn’t much more than a kid herself.”

“Paul’s your husband?”

“Yes.”

“What exactly did your husband mean by that?” Pete asked. “Did he mean she was immature? Naïve?”

“Playful. That’s really what he meant. Sophie just had a natural way with children. She was more comfortable with children than she was with adults. She could be very shy.”

Pete asked, “Any boyfriends?”

“Certainly not while she was living with us.”

“She was from New York, is that right?”

“Hungary originally. But grew up on Long Island.”

“Did she talk about that?” Pete asked. “I mean, about her friends back home? Maybe a boyfriend up there?”

The woman shook her head. “When she talked at all about her life Sophie spoke more about growing up in Hungary. She said she was there until she was eleven.”

I asked, “That’s when she came to America?”

“Yes. Do you know the story? She lost her father when she was only six. Then her mother remarried and they came over here. I could hear from the way she told it how horrible it all was for her.”

“Did Sophie ever talk to you about her father?”

“She did talk about him a few times. Briefly. It was clear she still missed him. She told me once how sad she was that she only had a handful of memories of him. She had lots of stories from her mother, but her actual memories of her father, she said, were just of a few events. She said to me once that sometimes she pretended that he was still alive, that he was still living in Hungary and that this was the only reason she didn’t see him. Because he’s there and she’s here.”

“Do you know if she blamed her mother for bringing her over?”

Kathy Pierce frowned. “Why no, she certainly never implied anything like that.”

“Just a thought.”

Pete leaned forward in his chair. “Aren’t you a little off subject here?”

I shrugged. “Just trying to put a picture together.”

“The fact is, probably the most animated I’d see Sophie was right after she’d gotten off the phone with her mother. They’d speak in a mix of English and Hungarian. Sophie would be almost chatty after talking on the phone.”

“How was her English?” Pete asked.

“Oh, it was fine. Perfect, really. There was a bit of an accent, very light.”

“Do you know what she did for fun, Mrs. Pierce?” I asked. “I assume she had time off.”

“She had a bicycle that she loved to ride around. She loved the water, even though she told me that she couldn’t swim. But she was always riding to the river and down to the harbor. We had some friends over once who have a sailboat, and the subject came up. They offered to take Sophie out on the boat one Saturday. Sophie was so shy, she kept saying no, no, no, even though it was clear that she was dying to do it. I cajoled her and finally she said yes.”

Pete shifted in his chair. “So she went?”

“Yes. She was practically bursting when she got back in the evening. You’ve never seen someone so happy. She began pulling pictures of sailboats out of my magazines before I recycled them. She put them up on her wall. Along with her movie posters. Sophie loved old American movies. She was always getting them from the video store.”

Pete and I tossed a few more questions, but there didn’t seem to be much more to ask. Pete stood up and thanked her for her time. She followed us to the front door, where Pete paused.

“One more thing,” Pete said. “Can you tell us about the circumstances of your letting Sophie go?”

The woman’s head flicked like a bird’s, taking in both of us. “There were no ‘circumstances.’ The twins started first grade this year. Sophie knew that we wouldn’t be needing her once they started school. It was understood.”

“So you didn’t fire her. She didn’t quit. Nothing like that.”

“No. Not at all.”

A thought came to me. “Mrs. Pierce, do you have a picture of Sophie?”

“I certainly do. I have one on my refrigerator. Hold on.”

While she was off fetching the snapshot, I asked Pete what he thought. He shrugged.

“Naïve girl. No friends. Likes kids. Loved the water. Read books. Rode a bike. Enjoyed old movies. Hadn’t ever gotten over leaving Hungary. Missed her daddy.”

“Damn. You’re good at this.”

Pete took hold of my earlobe and tugged on it. “Use it.”

Kathy Pierce came back and handed Pete a photograph. He looked it over then handed it to me.

“It was taken at Christmas,” Kathy Pierce said.

Chances are that the Douglas fir in the photograph festooned with decorations and colored lights would have tipped me off, but I knew the woman was only trying to be helpful. The photograph showed a young woman standing in front of the Christmas tree. The twins were on either side of her. Little Patricia was wincing an overlarge smile and on the other side of the nanny, darling Patrick was sticking out his tongue at the camera and bugging his eyes. The twins were dressed in matching red and green outfits. Like elves from hell.

For her part, Sophie seemed oblivious to the overposing going on around her. She stood erect, her hands down at her sides, wearing a dark blue dress that fell just below the knees. Her brown hair was an explosion of unkempt waves falling well past her shoulders. Sophie had a slender hooked nose, like her mother, and a small pointed chin. Her eyebrows were thick and quite dark, as were her eyes. Unlike her mother, however, the girl looked to be short. Maybe five four. She was slightly built, though not exactly waiflike. The look on her face was extremely earnest. Her smile was tiny, almost imperceptible.

“She’s cute,” I said. “She looks like a real nice kid.”

Kathy Pierce took the picture back. “Yes, she . . . well, she was.”

Pete handed her his card, along with his rap about giving him a call if she thought of anything that we might want to hear. We thanked her for her time and returned to Pete’s car.

“Where next, Sherlock?” Pete asked me.

I opened up the Annapolis map on my lap. I ran my fingers along the paper.

“Go up here and take a right,” I said. “Then a left. Then check back with me.”

In about ten minutes we pulled up in front of a three-story brown clapboard house that sat back from the sidewalk on a nick of land that needed some watering and maybe just the slightest bit of thought. The windows had pale blue shutters with the design of a simple sailboat jig sawed into them. A pair of last-gasp bushes sat on either side of the front door, looking like lost tumbleweeds a long long way from home. Planted in the middle of the yard was a wooden duck, painted yellow and red. Its wings windmilled backward in the breeze, like it was trying to get the hell away from this place. The door knocker was a crab.

The woman who answered the crab had a head of hair not dissimilar to the dying bushes, only smaller, of course, and in her case sprayed orange. The parts that had missed the spray were a dull pewter. She was wearing a blouse of such electric fuchsia that it hurt my eyes to look at it, and a pair of lime-green slacks, the hips of which filled half the doorway. The woman was close to sixty. She looked like George Washington. I was awestruck.

She sang out, “Can I help you?”

“You’re Mrs. Gibbons?” I asked.

“Stella Gibbons.”

“I’m Hitchcock Sewell. I phoned this morning?”

“You most certainly did.”

“Mrs. Gibbons, we’d like to talk to you about a boarder you had here a while back,” Pete said.

“Yes, I know. Sophie Potts.” The woman pursed her lips and took a hard look at Pete. “Are you her daddy?” She let out the sort of cackling laugh that would split ice. “I’m teasing with you, hon.” She gave Pete a conspiratorial look. “Unless you
are
?”

“Unless I’m what?” Pete asked.

“Her daddy.”

“We’d like to ask you a few questions about Sophie,” I said. “You see, she—”

“Come in, come in, come in.”

She swung the door wide open and ushered us in. She made a big fuss about inviting us into the parlor. That’s what Stella Gibbons called it. She popped her
p
when she said it. “The
p
arlor.” I might have called it a walk-in closet. It turned out to be a stuffy wood-paneled room that absolutely slaughtered what little natural light came in through the small windows. On one wall was a pair of carved wooden ducks frozen in flight. The wall opposite held wooden cutouts of a crab, a lighthouse and a ship’s anchor. The couch that Pete and I took looked like it had a body stuffed into it. It was all about springs. Pete sat first and when I followed, Pete gently elevated.

Stella Gibbons turned out to be all about springs, too. At the slightest provocation she was up on her feet and fetching something for Pete and me to take a look at. A Chesapeake Bay retriever had nothing on this woman. There was a photograph we simply had to see, of her late husband, Randall, and herself, posing together with a twenty-pound bluefish that the two had hauled in during a fishing excursion in the bay. The photo must have been at least thirty years old as best I could tell. Stella Gibbons claimed to have fetched it so that we could see her late husband (“May he rest in his peas,” she cackled), but it was my guess she was showing it to us more for the leggy charm that her younger self had been able to pull off. Randall Gibbons was wearing a large floppy hat that totally obscured his face. The woman fetched us cookies and lemonade. She fetched a book of photographs by A. Aubrey Bodine, turning to a dog-eared page that included a black-and-white picture of three naked boys diving into a river from a wooden bridge. Stella placed her finger directly on the skinny butt of one of the boys. “Jeremy Lynch. First boy I ever kissed. And not the last!” We got another sample of her laughter with that one.

“You caught me on pinochle day,” Stella announced, flouncing down on the couch between Pete and me. We rose and fell like a calliope. “On Friday the witches all get together for pinochle and mint juleps.” She winked at Pete. “You ought to catch me
after
pinochle.”

We finally crowbarred the conversation around to the subject of Sophie.

“You rented a room to Miss Potts for several months this summer, isn’t that right?” Pete asked.

“That’s right. Bath down the hall. Kitchen privileges. Why? What’s wrong? That little girl rob a bank?”

“That little girl is dead,” I said.

Stella’s face froze. “What do you mean, dead?”

“Miss Potts was pulled from the Severn day before yesterday,” Pete said. He shot me a look before continuing. “It appears that she jumped off the Naval Academy Bridge. The police aren’t sure when. It might have been as long as a week ago.”

“That little scamp? I just can’t believe it. Why in heaven’s name would she want to do something like that?”

“That’s exactly what we’re trying to figure out,” I said.

Stella shook her head slowly. “Isn’t that the silliest thing in the world?”

“So the police haven’t been by to ask you anything about Sophie?” I asked.

“The police? Not at all.”

Pete asked, “What can you tell us about her?”

“About Sophie? Well, sweet little girl. Wouldn’t know how to have fun if you wrote it on her forehead.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Just that. Cute little thing once you fixed her up, but as homely as a rug when she first got here. I’d tell her, get out there and have some fun while you’re young. Get yourself a boyfriend. Not that it was any of my business, of course. But the girl would much rather hole up in her room and read her damn romance books. I’d tease her. I’d say, ‘Sophie, while you were out Mr. Fabio himself was here to see you. He was right here in the parlor, honey, wearing that tattered shirt of his.’ ”

She cackled again, and slapped her hand down on Munger’s knee.

“I fixed her up, though,” Stella went on. “If I do say so myself.”

Pete asked, “Fixed her up?”

“Did you ever meet her?” Stella asked us. “Do you know what she used to look like?”

“We just came from the home where she worked before she came here,” I said. “We saw a picture of her.”

“Was it one with all that hair of hers?”

“She had a good head of hair, yes,” I said.

“Lopped it off,” Stella said proudly. “I took her into town myself and sat her down in Elsbeth Finkle’s chair and I told Elsbeth exactly what we wanted.”

“Excuse me,” Pete said, “what do you mean by that? What
we
wanted?”

Stella gave Pete a fierce look. “Girl looked like a little ragamuffin when she got here. I told her if I didn’t know better she could have passed for a twelve-year-old. No sense of style in that child. None at all. I’m sorry, you might say it was none of my business, but I say a person only lives once. And I told her. I told her we were going to get her fixed up and I got Elsbeth to lop off that hopeless hair of hers and we got her nice and cute in a little bob cut. Now that, I told her, that’s sophisticated. Give the boys something to look at. You could see her face, for goodness sake. With all that crazy hair she was like someone peeking out of a cave. Still had to pinch the silly little thing to get her to smile, but at least now you could see it. And for a little thing the girl had herself a nice little figure.” She grinned at Pete. The way a shark grins at a foot wagging off a raft. “And don’t men like a good figure. Of course the problem was you wouldn’t know Sophie was even a woman in those god-awful sacks she wore. So I got her to pick up a few nice-looking outfits.”