SHADOW OVER CEDAR KEY (18 page)

Cara gasped. Of course. Why hadn’t she thought of it? Marcia was strong, but when she came back to the house and saw that open beach bag...When she realized Cara knew, that she was gone...Cara suddenly felt faint. Memories of Marcia flooded back, walking her hand in hand to first grade, getting up early to fix Cara’s favorite breakfasts, giving her a kitten for her birthday. “How is she?”

The man’s speech slowed, repeating a message. “Detective Strong called in. Said we would find you at the drug store. Someone found your mother about eleven.” Of course, Cara thought, the Goodwill pick up. “Medics got there right away. They’ve rushed her to Crystal River, Seven Rivers Hospital.”

In spite of everything, Cara knew what she must do. “I have to go immediately.” She fingered the fat envelope. The two shots would be near the bottom. She strode toward the door, while he lumbered along beside her.

“I’m authorized to take you to her,” he said. “I’ve got a cell phone in the car. We’ll call and get a progress report. We can use the siren if we need it.”

Thoughtful of the Sheriff s Office, Cara thought. If he drove, she would save time. She could look at the photographs and call Detective Strong from the car. She paused long enough to lock her station wagon. Then he took her arm and helped her into the passenger seat of a new Ford. “Got an unmarked car, but it’s equipped.”

As soon as she slipped into the passenger seat, he gunned the engine, tapped two digits on the keyboard with thick fingers, and picked up the hand-held set. “Stokes here. I’m on my cell.” In a few seconds he added, “Patch me in to Seven Rivers Hospital.” He drove with one hand, holding the phone, waiting. “Seven Rivers? Tell Marcia Waters’

doctor I found her daughter. We’re on our way. Any change?” For a few more seconds he listened, then set down the phone.

Everything about the man was oversized, wide nose and mouth, massive head, coarse black hair. “Conditions the same,” he said. “She’s asking for you.”

She’ll lay a real guilt trip on me this time, Cara thought, but she was misty eyed. She loosened the glued flap of the yellow and black envelope. “I just picked up some photos Detective Strong may want to see.”

Detective Stokes surprised her a little. He was well enough dressed, but sitting so close to him, she didn’t find him as clean as she would expect. His hair was unruly, and his belt squeezed over an inflated stomach. The Sheriff should put him on a diet, Cara thought, and Strong could give him a few pointers on grooming. Maybe he’d been undercover.

She pulled the package open and began flipping past the first shots of a stilt house on the Gulf, aware of pines and palmettos rushing past on Route 19. Now the car suddenly slowed, spun up a dirt road on the right, and ground to a stop. With a quick motion her driver cut off the engine and lifted something out of his pocket. She continued shuffling through more pictures. Perhaps the driver had seen some illegal activity in the woods.

Then she sensed he had turned in his seat. The sour odor of sweat washed over her. She looked down. He was holding a gun level with his bulging belly, and it was aimed at her. His voice coarsened. “Outta the car. Now.”

Stricken, Cara pressed her back against the car door. “I don’t understand. Am I in trouble with the law? What about my mother?”

“Ain’t nothing wrong with your old lady, girlie. Drop the pictures and get outta the car.” The fleshy lips tilted up. “I been in the back of enough cop cars to know the lingo.”

Cara stumbled out beside the road while he snatched the envelope and crammed it into his pocket, then scrambled after her, puffing, the gun still cocked at her head. When she twisted around to look for the gun, he thrust his head forward. For the first time she noticed his tobacco stained teeth. She thought of a quail, mesmerized by a snake.

“Face the other way. Hold still and you won’t get hurt.”

She thought of his big, blubbery body and froze to the bone. He was no Sheriff’s Office detective. How could she ever have thought he was? Metal pressed against the side of her head. A car sped past, only yards away. Somewhere a mockingbird trilled. He was moving his other arm. Something metal rattled.

“One little scream and you’re dead meat. Arms behind your back.”

When she hesitated, he jammed the gun against her temple. She obeyed and heard the metallic click. Metal tightened around one wrist, snap, a ring gripped the other. Handcuffs, of course. Her legs went weak. She could feel her body sag. She did not control it now.

“Gonna climb into the back seat.” The barrel end of the gun tapped her skull again. Somehow she crawled in. She felt a shove, and her slender shoulders fell against the other door. Then he yanked her feet up on the seat, snatched a rope from the car floor, and began knotting it around her ankles. He must’ve laid aside the gun, but she was helpless, drained, deafened by the pounding of her own heart.

He pulled the rope tight. “Strictly business, girlie.” Wildly she thought, how methodical! A hit man, a hired thug. He reached under the front seat, pulled out a can and a rag. “You gotta keep nice and quiet.”

Her eyes widened. The last thing she saw was the dirty, sodden cloth coming toward her, its sharp stench overpowering.

CHAPTER 14
 

By the time Brandy had dressed Tuesday morning, Thea had already gone. Brandy edged past Sonata, sleeping under a pile of wrinkled clothes beside the open window. As she reached for the doorknob, Allegro swiveled his decorative head, his black eyes glinting at her. Apparently when the musical parrot act returned near dawn, Sonata didn’t cover his cage.

But he only emitted a murmurous “Awk,” and went back to people-watching beyond the iron grill of the front window. Stretching his dove-gray neck, he peered down into the basement entrance, where a tenant was depositing a sack in a garbage can, and called, “Go away, bad boy!”

The man, who must’ve been accustomed to Allegro’s demands, looked up, grinned, and disappeared into his basement apartment. Brandy slipped past the cage and, taking Thea’s advice, trotted down the stone steps beside the recessed basement and waited for a taxi at the curb. For the first time she noticed the coils of razor ribbon, designed to ward off burglars, between Thea’s building and its neighbor.

Irving Grosmiller lived in a buff-colored brick building above a travel agency, a bagel shop, and a camera store. In the small tiled lobby Brandy stopped at a counter, where a plump young clerk interrupted his bagel and coffee to call Mr. Grosmiller on an intercom, then nodded toward the elevator.

“He’s expecting you. You gotta punch the bell.” The clerk smeared cream cheese on a doughy bagel half. “Number’s 623.” On the sixth floor Brandy was admitted to the apartment in the standard New York way. First she heard two locks turn, the slide of a chain, and finally the deadbolt release. Brandy faced a bald, elderly gentleman with thin, bent shoulders and a soup-strainer mustache.

“I’m packing,” he said. From the narrow kitchen off the foyer came a shrill whistle. “Fixing some coffee. Instant.” He raised bristling gray eyebrows. Irving Grosmiller suffered from one of nature’s ironies, a shiny pate above and excessive hair below. “Want a cup?”

Brandy followed him while he groped in a half-empty cupboard and took down two mis-matched cups, one cracked. “Should’ve hired a packing crew.” His faded blue eyes looked soulful. “My wife always did the packing. We hadn’t moved in twenty-five years. Now on this block we suddenly got gentrification. Everything upscale.” He scraped a teaspoon of dried out coffee into each cup and gave them a vicious stir. “Could’ve stayed, of course, because of my age. Could even buy into the co-op. It would’ve cost an arm and a leg.”

Brandy picked up her coffee and trailed after him into what had been the living room. The sun burned through the curtainless window on several cartons and boxes and a threadbare oriental rug. “Might as well move near my daughter in Jersey. Nothing’s going to be left of the old Chelsea.”

With a sigh he dropped into one of two upholstered chairs beside a half-filled bookcase, set his cup on a shelf, and began stacking volumes into a narrow oblong crate. Brandy recognized a few titles,
The Ordeal of Richard Feveral, Martin Chuzzlewit, The Vicar of Wakefield.
A Victorian enthusiast, she thought. My story might appeal to his sense of drama. On the opposite wall stood a glass-paneled cabinet, crammed with sentimental ceramic figures—tiny boys and girls, puppies, and kittens, bright blue and pink birds. His wife’s collection, probably. Brandy had more respect for the husband’s taste.

“Mr. Grosmiller, I told you on the phone I’m a reporter from the Gainesville newspaper. Your wife commissioned a private investigator to locate her niece. I need to know the niece’s identity.”

“We paid the man for his time,” Grosmiller said in an irritated tone. “I’m sorry he’s dead, but I don’t want to get involved. I’m too busy just now.”

If the story of the murder even made the New York papers, it would’ve been a small item. He didn’t understand the urgency. Brandy leaned toward him. “The investigator was murdered two days ago in Florida,” she said.

His bony hand halted in mid-air, still holding a slender volume of Aubrey Beardsley. “I haven’t read the newspaper in days.” Finally he inserted the book into the box.

Brandy reached into her bag for a note pad, forcing her voice to sound gentle. “Tell me about your wife’s niece.”

He slumped back in his chair. “Her mother was my wife’s sister. The family lived over on the east side, Tudor City. To start with, when the daughter was a teen-ager she give her parents problems. An only child. Sometimes ran in a crowd they didn’t approve of. Then there was the tragedy.”

“Tragedy?”

When he pursed his lips and glanced at her note pad, Brandy returned it to her bag. Better to trust her memory than stifle an interview. Note-taking made some people nervous.

“Both parents were killed in a car accident up in New England one summer, my wife’s sister and her husband. Her niece was nineteen, at New York University.” He shook his head. “Allison’s her name. She dropped out of college, went through a bad time, I guess. We saw something of her for a while. My wife felt an obligation, you know.” He resumed his slow packing. “The girl turned to her father’s attorney for advice. Natural, I suppose. He had to close the estate, take it through probate. She got to depend on him for every decision. Turned out her father was a poor businessman, left a lot of debts and not much else. She came out with a lump sum. Not much, my wife said.”

Brandy wondered where the story was leading, but at least she had a first name now, Allison.

“She didn’t want to go back to school, anyway. Well, one thing led to another, and by the end of the year, she up and married the attorney. My wife was upset. He was probably twenty years older, but then he was a wealthy man. She figured that was some compensation. He was on the rebound, like they say. Divorced his first wife the year before. An ugly business. That wife told all sorts of outrageous stories about him, but he held firm. He said the woman was running around with another man. He finally got custody of their son.”

Grosmiller took a long sip of coffee that dampened his drooping mustache. For a doleful moment he reflected. “So Allison and the attorney married, but I guess it didn’t work out. They started having trouble early on. When she got over grieving for her parents, I guess she started thinking about having a good time again. But as you young folks say, he wasn’t into her scene.

“The little girl was born about a year after the wedding. About two more years went by and we didn’t hear from her. Then she called my wife a couple of times, and I think they met somewhere. Next thing I knew, Allison left her husband and took the little girl. My wife figured Allison had seen Frank Bullen as a substitute for her father, and she tired of being married to a father figure.”

Allison’s other name had dropped. “Why would Mr. Bullen let her leave with their child?”

“My wife said he might not want to hold Allison against her will, but Allison was afraid he’d fight for custody of the little girl. Mr. Bullen said she was running around wild. Remember, he got custody of his son after his first marriage.”

Brandy reached down, opened the Beardsley volume to one of the artist’s typical illustrations—a Victorian beauty with delicate features, fluid neck, up-tilted head of dark, flowing hair. “That little girl has grown up to look very much like this picture, Mr. Grosmiller. It’s for her that I’m bothering you this morning.”

Silently the old man stared at the page. Then he passed his hand over his eyes. “I wouldn’t want to cause trouble for Mr. Bullen,” he said at last. “Seems like a decent fellow. I see their pictures in the papers, at charity functions sometimes. He finally got a divorce for desertion, my wife said. A couple of years ago he married again.”

“Did your wife ever hear from her niece?”

“Once, I think. A card, right after she left. My wife told Allison where to go that her husband couldn’t find her, and she gave her a letter of introduction to an old friend who would help her. When she didn’t hear from Allison again, she thought she’d settled in all right. I never knew where. When my wife got so ill—” he paused to get control of his voice—”she wanted to find her niece. She tried to get in touch with her old friend, but the woman had moved away. No one knew how to reach her anymore.”

“Do you know what happened to the card her niece mailed?”

He thought a moment. “Might be in my wife’s safety deposit box. She didn’t keep much stuff. A tidy sort. I forgot about the box, and it was sealed. Now I’ve got to wait until later this week to get into it, look for some bonds.”

Brandy steered the conversation back to Cara. “Were you aware that a woman was murdered in Cedar Key, Florida, about the time Allison disappeared? A woman who had a two-year old girl with her?”

He glanced up, startled. “My wife never knew that.” He’d stopped packing now. “Name of the town rings a bell. As a kid my wife spent some time in Cedar Key. Had relatives used to live there. Talked about what a quiet, out-of-the-way place it was, miles off the main highway.”