On the Street Where you Live (19 page)

“No. This one is a drawing of two tombstones. The name on one is Carla Harper. The name on the other is Letitia Gregg. If this card is on the level, they're buried together in the backyard of 15 Ludlam Avenue in Spring Lake.”

E
RIC
B
AILEY BEGAN
M
ONDAY MORNING EARLY
, as a guest on the news hour of the local Albany television channel.

Slight of frame and barely medium height, with rumpled hair and frameless glasses that dominated his narrow face, he was unprepossessing in appearance and manner. When he spoke, his voice had a nervous, high-pitched quality.

The anchorman of the program had not been happy to see Bailey's name on the list of guests. “Whenever that guy is on, the loud clicking sound you hear is all the remote controls in Albany switching to another channel,” he complained.

“A lot of people around this area invested money in his company. The stock's been on the skids for the last year and a half. Now Bailey claims he has new software that will revolutionize the computer industry,” the financial editor snapped back. “He may sound like a chipmunk, but what he has to say is worth hearing.”

“Thank you for the compliment. Thank you both.”

Eric Bailey had come on to the set quietly, without either man hearing him approach. Now, with a slight smile, as if enjoying their discomfort, he said, “Perhaps I should wait in the green room until you're ready for me?”

*   *   *

T
HE STATE-OF-THE-ART
security cameras he was going to install around Emily's home were already packed in his van, so immediately after the television interview, Eric Bailey began the drive to Spring Lake.

He knew he had to be careful not to drive too fast. Anger combined with humiliation made him want to press the gas pedal to the floor of the car, to weave in and out of traffic, terrifying the occupants of the vehicles he would cut off.

Fear was his answer to all the rejections in his life, to all the rebuffs, to all the ridicule.

He had learned to use fear as a weapon when he was sixteen. He had invited three girls, one after another, to go to the junior prom with him. They all refused. Then the snickering started, the jokes.

How far would Eric Bailey have to go before he could get a date?

Karen Fowler was the one whose imitation of him fumbling to articulate his invitation to her was considered most hilarious. He had overheard her mimicking him.

“Karen, I'd really like . . . I mean, would you . . . it would be nice if . . .”

“And then he started sneezing,” Karen Fowler would tell her audience, laughing so hard she was almost gasping. “The poor dope started sneezing, can you believe it?”

The best student in the school, and she called him “the poor dope.”

The night of the prom he had waited with his camera at the local hangout where everyone went after
the band quit. When the drinking and pot smoking started, he secretly snapped pictures of a glassy-eyed Karen, hanging all over her date, her lipstick smeared, the strap of her dress falling over her arm.

He showed the pictures to her in school a couple of days later. He could still remember the way she paled. Then she cried and pleaded with him to give them to her. “My father will kill me,” she said. “Please, Eric.”

He put them back in his pocket. “Want to do your imitation of me now?” he asked coldly.

“I'm sorry. Please, Eric, I'm sorry.”

She had been so frightened, never knowing whether or not he would ring the bell some evening and hand those pictures to her father, or if one day they'd be delivered to him in the mail . . .

Thereafter, whenever she passed him in the hall in school, she'd given him a frightened, beseeching glance. And for the first time in his life Eric Bailey had felt
powerful.

The memory calmed him now. He would find a way to punish the two who had dissed him this morning. It just took a little quiet thinking, that's all.

Depending on traffic, he would be in Spring Lake between one and two.

He knew the route fairly well by now. This would be his third round trip since Wednesday.

R
EBA
A
SHBY,
investigative reporter for
The National Daily,
had taken a room at The Breakers Hotel in Spring Lake for the week. A small, sharp-featured woman in her late thirties, she planned to milk the story of the reincarnated serial killer for all it was worth.

On Monday morning she was having a leisurely breakfast in the hotel dining room, on the alert for someone with whom she could strike up a conversation. At first she saw only business types at the nearby tables, and she knew it would be useless to interrupt them. She needed to find someone who would talk about the murders.

Her editor shared her chagrin that she had not managed to get an interview with Dr. Lillian Madden before she was murdered. She'd tried to contact Dr. Madden all day Friday, but the secretary wouldn't put her through. Finally she'd managed to get one of the single-session tickets to Dr. Madden's lecture Friday night, but still had no luck in talking to her privately.

Reba no more believed in reincarnation than she believed elephants could fly, but Dr. Madden's lecture had been compelling and thought-provoking, and what was going on in Spring Lake certainly was bizarre enough to make one wonder if there was such a thing as a reincarnated serial killer.

She also had noticed how Chip Lucas from the
New York Daily News
had startled Dr. Madden when he asked her if anyone had ever asked to be regressed to the 1890s. It also had brought an end to the evening's open forum.

Even though she couldn't have gotten home before 10:30
P.M.
or so, Madden had been in her office when she died. Had she been looking up the record of a patient, Reba wondered, maybe a patient who had asked to be regressed to the 1890s? If nothing else, it provided a good angle for another story on the Spring Lake serial killer.

Hardened as she was by the nature of her job, Reba nonetheless had been shocked to the core by Dr. Madden's cold-blooded murder. She had heard about it shortly after attending the memorial Mass for Martha Lawrence and she had written extensively on both events for the next issue of
The National Daily.

What she wanted now was to get an exclusive interview with Emily Graham. She rang the bell of Graham's house on Sunday afternoon, but there was no answer. When she swung by her house again an hour later, she saw a woman on the porch, bending down as if she were slipping something under the door.

Reba looked up hopefully when she saw that the table next to her had been cleared, and the hostess was leading a woman who appeared to be in her late seventies over to it.

“The waitress will be right with you, Mrs. Joyce,” the hostess promised.

Five minutes later, Reba and Bernice Joyce were deep in conversation. The fact that Joyce was a friend
of the Lawrence family was a bit of serendipity, but the fact that all the people who had been guests at a party at the Lawrence home the night before Martha's disappearance had been questioned in a group that had included Mrs. Joyce was the kind of break tabloid writers pray for.

Under Reba's skillful questioning, Mrs. Joyce explained how each of them was called in, one by one, to talk to the two detectives. The questions were general, except that they were asked if they knew if something had been lost that night.

“Was
anything lost?” Reba inquired.

“I didn't know of anything being lost. But after we spoke to the detectives individually, we were all questioned together. The detectives asked if anyone had noticed Mrs. Wilcox's scarf. Apparently that's what was lost. I felt sorry for poor Dr. Wilcox. In front of the entire group, Rachel was quite brusque, blaming him for not putting the scarf in his pocket as she'd asked him to.”

“Can you describe the scarf?”

“I remember it quite well because I was standing next to Rachel when Martha, poor darling, made a point of admiring it. It was a silvery shade of chiffon, with some beading at the edges. Rather gaudy for Rachel Wilcox, actually. She tends to dress more conservatively. Perhaps that's why she took it off a short time later.”

Reba was salivating at the thought of writing her next story. The police had said the cause of Martha's death was strangulation. They wouldn't have asked about the scarf if it hadn't been important.

She was so busy composing her headline, in fact, that she did not notice how quiet her elderly companion at the next table had become.

I am certain that I saw Rachel's pocketbook on the table in the foyer, Bernice thought. From where I was sitting in the living room, I could see it. I wasn't paying enough attention to notice if it was lying on something. But then did I see someone move the purse and pick up whatever was under it?

She was putting a face to the figure.

Or am I getting fanciful because of all the talk about it?

There is no fool like an old fool, Bernice decided. I'm not going to discuss this with anyone because I'm not sure.

“I
DIDN'T EXPECT TO SEE YOU
again quite so soon,” Emily told Tommy Duggan and Pete Walsh when she opened the door for them.

“We didn't expect to be back this soon, Ms. Graham,” Duggan replied as he observed her closely. “How did you sleep last night?”

Emily shrugged. “Meaning that you can tell I didn't sleep much last night. I'm afraid that photograph yesterday got to me. Isn't it true that, in medieval times, if somebody who was being pursued
managed to get into a church, he could shout ‘Sanctuary!' and he'd be safe so long as he stayed there?”

“Something like that,” Duggan said.

“I guess that won't work for me. Even in church I can't feel safe. I am terribly frightened, I have to admit it,” she said.

“Since you live alone, it would be much safer—”

She interrupted. “I'm not moving out of the house.”

“I have the postcard in the study,” she said. She had taken it there from the kitchen where she had sorted the mail, having found it between a flyer for a landscaping service and a request for a charitable donation.

After the shock of the card's message sank in, she had walked to the window and looked out at the backyard. On this overcast day, it looked bleak and dreary, like a graveyard. Like the graveyard it had
been
for over a century.

Still holding the postcard, she had rushed into the study and called the prosecutor's office.

“The only mail that's been delivered since I've been here was either addressed to the Kiernans or to ‘Occupant,'” she told the detectives. Then she pointed to the postcard, which she'd placed on the writing desk: “But this is addressed specifically to me.”

It was as she had described it to them. A crude drawing of a house and the property surrounding it, the address 15 Ludlam Avenue scrawled between the lines of what was meant to be a sidewalk. Two tombstones were depicted side by side at the extreme left-hand corner
of the area behind the house. Each bore a name. One was Letitia Gregg. The other, Carla Harper.

Tommy took a plastic bag from his pocket, picked up the postcard by the edges, and slipped it into the evidence bag. “This time I came prepared,” he said. “Ms. Graham, this may be someone's idea of a sick joke, but it also may be on the level. We've checked out 15 Ludlam Avenue. It's owned by an elderly widow who lives there alone. We're hoping that she'll be cooperative when we tell her about this, and will let us dig up her yard, or at least the section indicated in this sketch.”

“Do
you
think it's on the level?” Emily asked.

Tommy Duggan looked at her for a long moment before answering. “After what we found out there”—he nodded in the direction of Emily's backyard—“I think that there's a very good chance that it is, yes. But until we know for a certainty, I'd appreciate if you don't say anything to anyone about it.”

“There's no one I want to talk to about it,” Emily said. I'm certainly not going to call Mother or Dad or Gran and worry them sick, she thought. But if my big brothers lived down the street, you bet I'd yell for them. Unfortunately they're over a thousand miles away.

She thought about Nick Todd. He had phoned just after the mail came, but she hadn't told him about it either. When they found the photograph on the foyer floor after they returned from brunch yesterday, he'd urged her to drive to Manhattan and stay in her apartment there.

But she'd insisted that the cameras Eric was going to
install were the best hope of finding out who was doing this to her, explaining how it was the hidden camera Eric put in the townhouse that caught Ned Koehler when he was trying to break in. Once the cameras are in place here, we'll have a shot at identifying whoever is pulling this stuff now, she'd assured him.

Brave words, she thought, as she walked Tommy Duggan and Pete Walsh to the door and closed and locked it behind them, but the fact is I'm scared to death.

The little sleep she'd gotten had been filled with nightmares. In one of them, she was being chased. In another, she was at the window, trying to open it, but someone was holding it down on the other side.

Stop it! Emily ordered herself. Get busy! Call Dr. Wilcox and ask if you can drop off his books. Then go to the museum and do some research. See if you can figure out where those people lived in the 1890s in relation to one another.

She wanted to identify the residences of the friends of Phyllis Gates and Madeline Shapley, the friends Gates had repeatedly mentioned in her book.

Phyllis Gates made reference to her own family renting a cottage for the summer season, but seemed to infer that the other families owned their own houses. There had to be records showing where they lived, she thought.