Skeleton Key (27 page)

“She's an unattractive woman.”

“Unattractive nothing,” Bennis said. “She's a rattlesnake. I don't think I've been so upset by anybody in my entire life. Do you think she's some kind of serial killer, luring young women into her garage and then—”

“I doubt it,” Gregor said. “In fact, one of the few things I'm sure of is that Margaret Anson did not physically strangle either one of those two women.”

“Is there a way to strangle somebody that's not physical?”

“I meant strangle with her own hands. Rather than induce somebody else to strangle. Pay somebody else to strangle. That kind of thing.”

“Oh,” Bennis said. “Well, that's a possibility. Do you
think there's something about mothers that makes them hate their own daughters?”

“What?”

“I don't mean all mothers,” Bennis said. “I mean, obviously, I got along wonderfully with mine. I mean some mothers. And the hate is so deep that it's like acid. Deeper than hate could ever be otherwise.”

“I think in a case like that, the hate is usually mutual.”

“Well, Margaret Anson hated her daughter. I can tell you that absolutely. I don't know if Kayla Anson hated her mother. I only met her superficially once or twice.”

“You only met Margaret Anson once.”

“It was enough.”

Gregor stood up. “I'd better get dressed and ready to go. Stacey Spratz seems to think that we're going to tour most of the state today. And maybe we are. I think I need to get him to make me a map. I never know where I am.”

“I'm going to stay in and drink tea and read P. D. James.”

Bennis was already almost reading P. D. James. She had picked the book up from the floor and laid it in her lap. Now she was rubbing the tips of her fingers against the cover. Gregor hesitated. The way she was this morning made him uneasy. She was so—worn out.

“Well,” he said, “if you're sure you'll be all right here alone.”

“Of course I'll be all right here alone. And you couldn't take me with you. You know that. I'll be fine.”

“Of course you will.”

“Of course I will.” Bennis looked up. “Go get dressed, Gregor. You're hovering over me like a storm cloud.”

It was Bennis's hair that looked like storm clouds. Gregor had always thought so.

He left her sitting at the little table and went back into the bathroom to get dressed.

Gregor was already sitting in the lobby when Stacey Spratz showed up. It took no time at all for Gregor to realize that Stacey was full of news, since Stacey tended to announce it, out loud, to everybody assembled near the inn's front desk.

“I got you all those things you asked for,” he called out, in a voice that could have carried across a football field. “The police report sheets from Watertown, Morris, and Washington for Friday night. What a zoo that was, Friday night.”

The people in the lobby all looked excessively well-heeled. The women wore good wool slacks with creases in them instead of jeans. The men wore sport coats. They turned first to look at Stacey Spratz, and then to look at Gregor. Gregor sighed.

“I take it you left them out in the car,” he said, in as quiet a voice as he could manage.

“They're right on your seat,” Stacey said. “But I'm impressed, you know. You were right. All kinds of stuff went on that night, and all in the right areas as far as we know. Well, not out near Margaret Anson's place, but where the Jeep and the BMW were seen together. You wouldn't believe what I found—”

“Let's go out to the car,” Gregor said.

The woman behind the reception desk was glaring at them. They were mucking up her atmosphere.

Stacey trailed Gregor happily across the lobby and out the front door, talking all the way. Gregor stopped on the inn's front steps and looked around. Fall was here for real. The air was cold. The trees were nearly bare, and the leaves that lay on the ground were yellow and red. Stacey's state police cruiser was one of only six cars in the small lot.

“You want to hear this list of things we've got?”

“Absolutely,” Gregor said.

He had reached the cruiser. The doors weren't locked. Gregor was beginning to wonder if he was one of the last people on earth who locked his doors. He opened up and climbed into the passenger seat, waiting for Stacey to come around and get behind the wheel.

“So,” he said, when Stacey was settled in. “Tell me.”

“I've got copies in the back,” Stacey said, “but I'll give you a rundown. First, Watertown. The Jeep was stolen. And Zara Anne Moss saw it pass.”

“We knew that”

“Right. But then it gets more interesting. Then we get to Morris.”

“And?”

Stacey started the engine. “And Martin and Henry Chandling. Two old guys who do caretaking work at this historic cemetery. The Fairchild Family Cemetery. It's protected, or something, as a landmark. Established up here in sixteen eighty-six. Closed pretty much before the Civil War—lack of space, and lack of Fairchilds. It sits up there on its hill, you know, and the gravestones are all a hundred years old at least, and people come to take stone rubbings. You know about that, people bring tracing paper and pencils or char-coal and they rub against the stones and get the words and stuff on the paper?”

“I've heard of it, yes.”

“Well, I don't get it, but it's really big with a certain kind of woman from New York. Anyway, that's what they do. That's where the Jeep was found.”

“In the cemetery.”

“Right. Tipped over on its side and a real mess. We can look at that, too. But that isn't all. This is the part I thought you'd be interested to hear. Thing is, they heard this noise and they went out to investigate it and it was the Jeep. But then when they got back to their little house, they had another surprise. They had a skeleton. Not one of their own skeletons. A strange skeleton.”

Gregor considered this. “Strange in what way? Do you mean fake?”

“If you mean fake plastic, or that kind of thing, no. I talked to the Morris PD. This was a real enough skeleton, only it came from an exhibit up at the Litchfield County Museum. That's this little place some foundation has set up that does educational exhibits for schoolkids to take field trips to. You know the kind of thing.”

“And they were doing anatomy?”

“They were doing bones. They've got all kinds of skeletons—a beaver, I think I heard, and an ostrich. I don't know where they got that one. And I don't know what the exhibit was supposed to be in aid of, either, so don't ask me. But somebody took their human skeleton and put it on Martin and Henry Chandling's front porch.”

Gregor drummed his fingers against the top of his knees. He hated details like this. They almost always meant trouble, even if—like this one—there was a good chance that they had nothing to do with the case in hand. It was Halloween, after all. The skeleton could have been put on that porch by anybody at all, just as a trick or treat prank.

“Did they have to move this skeleton a long way to get it to this porch?” he asked.

“Just down the hill to the back,” Stacey told him. “Guy I talked to out in Morris was fit to bust. Seems like the guy who runs this museum, Jake something, anyway, he's some kind of obsessive. He spent yesterday afternoon going back and forth from the museum to the house where Martin and Henry live, over and over and over again, and measuring everything—”

“Why?”

“Nobody knows. But he did it, and he wrote the measurements down in a notebook, and then he showed up at the Morris Police Department and tried to get them to listen to his theories about how the skeleton was carried and what the thief must have been wearing and whatever all else. And then Martin and Henry called in, and they were fit to bust, too, because this guy had been bugging them. It really was a mess.”

“It probably doesn't mean anything.”

“I'm with you. Kids out to have a good time and the museum was handy to the porch. There are always kids going out to that cemetery and trying to drive Martin and Henry nuts. They're a little eccentric.”

“I wish I had a map of the area, though,” Gregor said. “Something with the roads on it but not much else, and the relative distances, and the incidents marked out Maybe we could make something like that if we wanted to take the time.”

Stacey was surprised. “Sure we could. But I never expected you to want such a thing. It sounds like something out of Agatha Christie.”

Sometimes far too much of Gregor's life sounded like something out of Agatha Christie. He looked out the windshield at the country they were passing through. It was odd the way you could tell the affluence of a town by the shade of green on its lawns. Rich towns had deep, jewel-like greens, even in the winter. This was definitely a rich town.

They passed a few small houses, built very close to the edge of the road. They passed a few more that were much larger and set well back. There didn't seem to be a single person anywhere.

“Does he live out here, Peter Greer?” Gregor asked. “Is that where we're going?”

“Oh, no,” Stacey said. “I forgot to tell you. We're going out to the Swamp Tree Country Club. There's a manager there, a Mr. Mortimer. Thomas Mortimer. Anyway, he said it was urgent, about where Kayla Anson was on Friday night. He was all worked up. So I told him we'd be right out.”

“But we know where Kayla Anson was on Friday night,” Gregor pointed out.

“He seems to think we don't,” Stacey said. “And I thought it wouldn't hurt us to check it out Don't you agree with that, Mr. Demarkian? Should I have asked you first?”

The last thing Gregor could do was insist that Stacey Spratz check in with him before he made a single move. Going out to this country club would not hurt either one of
them, if it gave them information about the life of Kayla Anson.

Gregor didn't think he had ever investigated a murder before where he had so little sense of the deceased. He knew more about what Zara Anne Moss was like than what Kayla Anson was like—and really, considering the time he had spent thinking about Kayla Anson, it should have been the other way around.

The Swamp Tree Country Club was at the end of a long and winding drive, and totally hidden from the road. Approaching it made Gregor think of the opening scene in Daphne du Maurier's
Rebecca,
and especially of the Alfred Hitchcock version. The vegetation at the side of the drive was something worse than overgrown. A lot of it seemed to be made up of bushes with brambles on them.

They made a turn and then another turn, and the vegetation ceased abruptly, replaced by a broad lawn in perfect order. The clubhouse was long and low and substantial-looking. Behind it, a golf course meandered up a gentle hill. At least one foursome was playing, making their way from the fifth to the sixth hole.

Stacey parked the car as close to the front door as possible and got out. Gregor got out, too.

“We're supposed to go right in and tell the man at the door that we need to see Thomas Mortimer,” Stacey said. “I guess he's some kind of bouncer. To keep the nonmembers out.”

Gregor didn't think that a lot of nonmembers showed up here, demanding to be let in. He didn't think a lot of non-members even knew that this was here. He followed Stacey toward the front door. Halloween might as well not have been happening at all, as far as the Swamp Tree Country Club was concerned. There wasn't so much as a jack-o'-lantern on the front porch.

The man just inside the front door was not a bouncer. He was far too old, and far too dignified, and dressed in a white tie and tails. Stacey explained what they had come for and the man retreated for a moment into a little wooden booth at the side of the wall. Then he came out again and asked them to take a seat while they waited.

They might as well not have bothered. It took no time at all for Thomas Mortimer to come out to get them, bustling with officiousness like a minor bureaucrat at the head of an even more minor department. Gregor knew the type all too well, and hated it. This was a man who would interrupt his subordinates at every opportunity. If you wanted to question those subordinates, you would have to get them out of the room.

“Mr. Demarkian,” he said, holding out his hand to Gregor and ignoring Stacey Spratz completely. “It's such an honor and relief to have you here. Truly. I've read about every one of your cases. And this must be Officer—”

“Spratz,” Stacey said.

“How good of you to come.” Thomas Mortimer was staring over the top of Stacey's head. Then he turned back to Gregor.

“Come this way now, come this way,” he said, leading them off down a hall to the side. “You'll see what the problem is immediately. We would have seen it ourselves except that the lawyers had the records all day Saturday and most of Sunday. They only got them back to us at nine o'clock last night.”

“Lawyers?”

“Kayla Anson's lawyers. They came on Saturday morning and took the records of Kayla Anson's account here. If I'd been on duty I never would have allowed it. The account is really our responsibility. But Mrs. Grandmere was here instead, and she was quite at a loss for what to do, so she let them into the system. The computer system. We've been fully modernized here for at least the last three years.”

“Ah,” Gregor said.

Thomas Mortimer stopped before a heavy wooden door.
It had a brass plate on it that said
OFFICE OF THE MANAGER
. He opened it and shooed them inside, to a big room with its own fireplace and what was almost a wall of windows looking out on the golf course. Gregor stepped inside and saw that there were two women there, a dark one sitting calmly in a big wing chair and a blonde who was pacing back and forth in front of the bookcases at the far end of the room. Gregor didn't think he had ever seen anybody so tense in all his life.