Skeleton Key (14 page)

The door next to her closed. On the other side of the car, the driver's side door opened, and the young woman climbed in behind the wheel. Then that door closed, too—
God, but the noise was loud; it was explosive—and the engine started up.

“I'm Grace Feinmann, by the way,” the young woman said.

That was when a voice from the radio started talking about how Kayla Anson had been murdered, only the night before, and something in Eve's head began to struggle mightily to put the information in context. BMW. Jeep. The Litchfield Road.

The cold gave way to heat. Eve was suddenly burning up, so hot that there was no way she could move, no way she could shudder, no way she could do much of anything except sweat and sweat until big rivers of water ran down the front of her chest.

But the car was out on the road now, moving, and that made her feel a little better.

Annabel Crawford knew that the death of Kayla Anson had done her at least some good—although she didn't like to think about it like that. She didn't like to think about Kayla dying at all. It had been so odd to get up this morning and see it all over the news like that. It had been odd, in fact, just to see the television on at ten o'clock. Annabel's mother always said she hated television, the way women like her were supposed to hate it. The set was kept in a cramped little “sitting room” at the back of the house, off the kitchen, and only turned on in the early evenings, when Jennifer Crawford had nothing else to do. Annabel's father wasn't home enough for decisions like that to matter. Annabel thought she should have known, as soon as she came downstairs looking for coffee, that something was terribly wrong. Her mother only kept the television on like that for major league airplane disasters.

“I've been trying to get through to Margaret all day,” Jennifer said, when Annabel came down and began moving
around the kitchen. “The phone's on the answering machine—I don't suppose I blame her. There must be reporters crawling all over that place by now. And it's only going to get worse.”

Annabel found grapefruit in the refrigerator. She got one out and cut it in half. She hated the taste of grapefruit, but that was the point. If you hated the taste of something, you didn't eat too much of it. She put the half a grapefruit in a little bowl, and found a spoon, and sat down at the table. The red Corvette was parked right outside the kitchen window, in that part of the drive that came up to the back porch. Annabel was surprised that she hadn't thought to put it away in the garage.

“There's something I've got to talk to you about,” Annabel started.

Jennifer was still on a roll. She was a fine-boned woman with too much hair and clothes that had come straight out of the Talbot's store in Southbury. She looked like any one of a hundred Litchfield County ladies.

“Strangled,” she was saying, pacing back and forth from the kitchen to the little sitting room and back again. “That's what they said on the news. Strangled. And hit on the head, too, or something. I don't know. The news is very confusing. But I don't think there's a safe place left anywhere in the world.”

“She was strangled in her house?” Annabel asked.

“She was strangled in her car. Or strangled and then put in her car. Really, Annabel, it's impossible to sort it all out. There are all these news reports, but I don't think anybody really knows anything. And there were pictures… of them bringing the body out. You know. The bag. And all I could think of was that Kayla Anson was in that bag.”

Annabel felt suddenly very ill. Kayla in a body bag. Body bags in general. She pushed her grapefruit away from her.

“Mother, listen to me,” she said. “I sort of stole this car.”

“What?” Jennifer said.

“Well, I didn't really steal it. I just—I was out with this
guy. Tommy Haggerty. You know. He goes to Princeton. His parents belong to the club.”

“It's going to be really awful if it turns out it wasn't some thug from the neighborhood. So to speak. If it turns out it was one of Kayla's boyfriends.”

“Kayla only had one boyfriend. He wouldn't strangle her. The thing is, Tommy and I went out to the Lucky Eight last night, and he was drinking, and—”

“You can just imagine what Margaret is going through. Especially given the fact that Margaret is Margaret, if you know what I mean. A more tightly wound, unforgiving woman I've never met. Margaret hates publicity.”

“He got too drunk to drive,” Annabel said, plowing on gamely. “So I took his keys and left him in the bar and drove his car back here. And now it's in our driveway. That one. The Corvette.”

“Well, dear. I think that's only sensible. You wouldn't have wanted the boy to drive you home if he was drunk.”

“Right,” Annabel said.

On any other day, Jennifer would have caught onto it immediately—if the boy was drunk, the chances were that Annabel had been drinking. Her father would catch onto it, if her father heard about it. He didn't seem to be around.

“Did Daddy go into the city?” Annabel asked.

“What? Oh, yes. He had some kind of conference or something. They say they're going to get that famous detective out here to help. You know the one. The Hungarian.”

“Hungarian?”

“Gregory something.”

“Oh,” Annabel said. “Gregor Demarkian. He's not Hungarian. He's from Philadelphia.”

“When I was growing up, you never heard about people with names like that. If they got famous, they changed them. Now, I don't know what to think, half the time. I wish they'd be more clear about what happened. They keep saying she was found in her own car in her own garage, as if she'd committed suicide with carbon monoxide. Or
somebody had killed her that way. Do you think that could be it?”

“I think I've got to get the car back to Tommy,” Annabel said.

Jennifer blinked. She wandered back into the little sitting room again. Annabel heard her sigh. “Now they've got Diane Smith at the scene,” she called out, “except it isn't exactly at the scene because the driveway's blocked off. It's just out in front of Margaret's house. Oh, Margaret must be having a
fit.”

“Right,” Annabel said.

Her pocketbook was just where she had left it the night before, on the kitchen counter next to the refrigerator. She picked it up and made sure she still had Tommy's keys tucked into the open pocket on the side. She would drive the car over to Tommy's house and ask him to drive her home—if he was in any shape to do any such thing. If he wasn't, she would explain the whole thing to Tommy's mother and have Tommy's mother drive her home. Annabel didn't think she had to worry about Tommy's father. None of the fathers she knew was ever home, not even on the weekends. If they didn't work themselves to death, they wouldn't have enough money to buy their children Corvettes.

“I'm leaving,” Annabel called out.

“Drive carefully,” Jennifer called back.

Annabel went out and got into the Corvette and started it up. The radio was on. A woman announcer was giving a littie capsule report on “the murder in Washington Depot.” She said something about “tragedy” and something about “the only child of entrepreneurial pioneer Robert Anson.” Annabel turned her off.

Now that she was out here, on her own, without her mother nattering to her, Annabel suddenly realized that this was all for real. Kayla was really dead. It had happened and it would not un-happen. The whole thing seemed worse than impossible. People didn't just die. They didn't get murdered in the Northwest Hills, either, where nothing
much ever happened in the way of violence except wild turkeys chasing small cats. In all the years and years Annabel and her family had been coming to Litchfield County, there had only been one murder, not counting this one. A few years ago, a boy had gone into the convenience store in Four Corners and shot his ex-girlfriend and then himself. They were both in high school and she had wanted to be free to date other people.

If it had happened in Waterbury, that would be a different thing, Annabel thought—but that wasn't really true, of course. It wouldn't have mattered where it happened. It wasn't where it happened that was bothering her.

If it was really real, she thought to herself—and then it struck her. This was it. This was what was bothering her.

She didn't know what was really real. She had no idea what she was talking about when she said something was really real. She had no idea what “real” meant.

It seemed to her that she had lived her whole life in a fog.

It was well after noon before Peter Greer decided that he had to go to sleep—to bed, to sleep, to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom off the loft, where he kept a small bottle of contraband prescription sleeping pills. The first news of the murder had come across in a bulletin on WTNH. The next thing he knew, it seemed to be all over everywhere, on CNN, on the major networks. It made sense, of course, because she had been who she'd been, because she'd had so much money. It was the money that really made all the difference.

Years ago, when he had been growing up in Litchfield County, Peter Greer had made decisions for himself, decisions he had known, even then, that he would never change. Unlike Kayla Anson and her friends, Peter had not been part of the country-club and private-school segment of
Litchfield County. His parents had had a small Cape Cod house in Morris, and he had gone to Morris Elementary School and to the regional high school, just like everybody else. He couldn't even remember when he had first realized that there was a difference, or that the difference would matter in the long run in ways nobody ever admitted to themselves out loud. He did remember walking down South Street in Litchfield and looking at the big houses there, the white ones set back from the road with their tall columns and curving front drives. He did remember sitting on the Litchfield Green and listening to them talk, the ones they called the pink-and-greens, who went to Rumsey Hall and then got sent away to prep school. Their voices were so different from the ones he was used to, it was almost as if they were speaking anther language.

There were people who said that Peter Greer was an opportunist, and a social climber, but it wasn't exactly true. It was true that he had always intended to live in
that
Litchfield County instead of in the one that he was used to. He thought anybody on earth would want to make that change, once they understood what it was about. It was even true that he intended to make as much money as possible, without having to be tethered to a desk like the Wall Street bankers who kept houses out here for the summer. In his better moments, he imagined himself becoming his generation's version of Steve Fossett, a multimillionaire adventurer, taking up mountain climbing or around-the-world sailing as a hobby in his old age.

What he really wanted, when he thought about it, was a kind of rest—the end to his own dissatisfaction, the end to this feeling he had had all his life that he wasn't getting enough, wasn't doing enough, wasn't respected enough to be able to relax and let it all go. It was as if he were strapped to the front of an express train and being pushed ever onward, ever faster. He had worked for years to be valedictorian of his high school class, and when he had achieved it he felt only that it would have been better if his grade point average had been five points higher than it was,
if it had been perfect. He had worked those same years to make sure he got a scholarship big enough so that he could go to Amherst without piling up debts he would never be able to pay. Then, when he got to Amherst, he thought only that he should have tried for Harvard. It went on and on, on and on, and there didn't seem to be any way he could stop it.

For a while there, he had thought Kayla Anson was going to stop it for him. He had thought she was going to be his resting place. He honestly couldn't imagine how much higher he could go, than being married to her and having for himself what being married to her would mean. Even if it didn't last forever. Even if she couldn't love him always. None of those women could ever love for always. They weren't built for it.

Right now, he could hear Deirdre in his shower. She had slept through the night and the morning. She didn't give a damn about the news or even about the way Kayla Anson had died. She seemed to think it had nothing to do with her.

Peter wondered if he would feel differently if he and Kayla had been closer than they were, if what they had had together hadn't already begun to wind down, if she hadn't been on her way out his door. On her way, but not completely gone yet. On her way, but waiting for the right time to make a scene. All women felt they had to make scenes, to justify the end of a relationship. Even Deirdre was going to feel the need to make a scene, and she was going to be good at it.

Once, when he and Kayla were first going out together, she had taken him to a hunt breakfast up in Salisbury. They hadn't actually gone on the hunt—Kayla didn't approve of hunting, but she didn't disapprove of the people who approve of it—and they had walked together along the wide halls of one of those mock-Tudor houses everybody had been building in the twenties. In that one moment, Peter Greer had been perfectly and unquestionably at peace. He had suddenly been able to see himself in just the place
where he belonged. It was so far in the past, he could never reach it, but it was there. It wasn't just a figment of his imagination.

Now he would never reach even an approximation of that place. He was sure of it. She would not be coming back to him.

And although it was true enough that she would not have come back to him even if she had lived—that she was more than on her way out the door the last time he talked to her, she was all the way out and just running back to clear up a few loose ends—it somehow made an enormous difference that she was dead.

That did not, however, mean that he was sorry she was dead.