Skeleton Key (37 page)

“I'll get that in a minute,” she said. “Tell me what you're talking about. What was an official report?”

“It would have been written down,” Eve said again. “They would have seen it. They've probably thought about it already, and decided it doesn't mean anything. I'm probably just being stupid.”

“I've got to go get the kettle. But I don't think you should just decide that you're stupid. If you think you know something, you should tell somebody. You should tell the police.”

“It's just that it's so close. To the cemetery. And something must have knocked it over. They don't fall over by themselves. And it would do a lot of damage, too. Usually it would just knock the whole thing over.”

“Oh, for God's sake,” Grace said.

The kettle was whistling and whistling. It hurt Eve's ears to listen to it. She still couldn't make up her mind. She hated to look stupid in front of people, and this was just the kind of thing that would make her look stupid for years. Everyone in town would know. She would hear about it every time she went to Adams for the groceries or to Brooks for her hydrogen peroxide and witch hazel.

The kettle stopped whistling. Grace had gone to get it. Now she came back to the living room, holding it in her hand.

“I don't think you should just decide you're stupid,” she said. “I think if you think you know something, you should go tell someone. If you don't want to tell the police, go tell that detective they brought in. That Gregor Demarkian. But tell somebody. There are three people dead in less than a week. There's some sort of homicidal maniac on the loose. Anybody at all could be next. Even you.”

Even me, Eve said to herself inside her head, but the thought did not compute, it did not make an impression. What did was the idea of this man, this Gregor Demarkian, who was not from town and did not know her, and who
might be persuaded to listen to what she had to say but not tell anybody else she had said it. Unless she was right, of course, and then he could tell anybody he wanted. Then she wouldn't look stupid, but smart.

Grace disappeared into the kitchen again and came back holding a big mug of tea. She put it down on the coffee table in front of Eve and then went away to get sugar and milk. When she came back again, Eve had made up her mind.

“This Gregor Demarkian is staying some place in Washington, isn't he? At the Mayflower Inn or somewhere? Could we go there?”

Zara Anne Moss's mother was a Litchfield County lady, the kind that Faye Dallmer could recognize on sight and twenty yards away. She had on a long flowered skirt and a black cotton crewneck sweater and espadrilles, and the espadrilles were the kind that came directly from Spain and frayed at the end of every summer. These were fraying now. Their fraying was a sign of status. Faye had once spent an entire year figuring out the various indicators of status in the Northwest Hills. That was in the days when she had still been married, and when she had thought that she might put the knowledge to the conventional use of social climbing. It seemed odd to her now that she had ever cared at all for social climbing.

Dorothy Moss did not look as if she had ever spent a day in her life worrying about social climbing, mostly because she probably didn't have to. She had the thin, highcheekboned face of the kind of woman who had gone to a Seven Sisters college and majored in the History of Art. She did not look anything at all like her daughter.

“I have heard of you, of course,” she said, “long before Zara Anne came out here to stay. And after I knew she was
here, I went out and bought a couple of your books, just to see. You write very well.”

“Thank you,” Faye said.

“And I was relieved, if you want to know the truth. That she was out here, I mean. Not that you write well. She had been—around—quite a bit. There had been—incidents.”

“Ah,” Faye said.

“Drugs, mostly, I suppose,” Dorothy Moss said. “There were always drugs, in high school, in college. Marijuana, most of the time. But sometimes mescaline. Which seems to be something like LSD.”

“It's a plant,” Faye said. “It causes hallucinations. Some people take it instead of the chemical drugs because they think it's more natural.”

“Well, Zara Anne was always very committed to doing the natural. Natural food. Natural fibers. I didn't realize there were natural drugs. And of course she was always committed to the supernatural, too. Are you a practitioner of Wicca?”

“No,” Faye said.

“You've written about it.”

“It goes with the territory. A lot of people who are interested in what I do are interested in Wicca. Sometimes I write about it.”

“I think Zara Anne was a practicing witch.”

“She tried to be.”

Dorothy Moss's mouth twisted into something that was not a smile. She was sitting in the middle of Faye's couch, with a mug of Faye's herbal tea on the coffee table in front of her. She looked out of place, and Faye had no idea why she was here.

“That's the thing, isn't it?” Dorothy said. “She tried to be. Nobody can really be a witch. There are no witches. But Zara Anne tried to be. And I thought it was safer for her here, with you, than it would be if she'd stayed drifting around the way she had been. You seemed—stable, somehow. As if you knew what you were doing. And reading what you wrote, I didn't think you did drugs.”

“I don't.”

“I would never have guessed that Zara Anne would know Margaret Anson. Or that she'd even consent to going to her house and talking to her. I wish I understood why it was she went out there. I wish I understood anything about her, really. We were very close when she was small. Then she became an adolescent, and everything changed. I talked to a psychologist about it. He told me to just relax and wait, that when she got older she'd change her mind. But she never did. In the end, we couldn't get together at all without fighting.”

“I never got along with my mother, either,” Faye said.

Dorothy Moss shook her head. “I suppose you're wondering what I'm doing here. I'm wondering a little myself. I think I just wanted to see where she'd been living, what her life had been like, in the last few months before she died. We found her once, maybe three or four months after she left college, living on the street in Boston. Just sitting there on the pavement with a cup to collect charity in.”

“I don't understand,” Faye said. “Had there been an argument? Was there a reason why she couldn't go home?”

“No reason at all. We would have been glad to have her. She'd gone to Boston to set up as a—as a fortune teller, I suppose you'd say. She wanted to read Tarot cards and do horoscopes. And she had some money with her when she left, money enough to get started, I would have thought. She cleaned out her entire savings account. Then she gave it all away to somebody, to some man. ‘Loaned' it to him, is how she put it. But he disappeared, of course. Most people would have expected him to. She didn't have much of a sense of self-preservation.”

“Maybe that explains how she got out to Margaret Anson's house. Maybe she got a call, or somebody stopped in, and she just—trusted the person.”

“Yes, maybe so. I suppose that's as good an explanation as any. But really, I just wanted to see, you know. I wanted to see what this place was like. I wanted to see how she was living. You've made it very lovely here.”

“Thank you.”

“It's good to know she wasn't cold, or living in filth, or hungry. You start out with so many more elaborate hopes for a child. That she'll grow up to have a brilliant career. That she'll marry well and produce half a dozen happy children. With Zara Anne I had to give all that up early. She was very bright—she would never have been admitted to Trinity if she had not been very bright—but she was never really stable.”

“Yes,” Faye said. This, at least, she could verify as true. Zara Anne had not been stable. Not at any time while she had been living in this house.

Dorothy Moss stood up. Like most Litchfield County ladies, she was a little too thin. The bones in her neck stood out like cords.

“Well,” she said. “I'll leave you now. I've seen what I came to see. I want to thank you so much for letting me come. And for talking to me. I find that I haven't assimilated it yet. That she's gone. She was in and out of our lives so much, it still seems to me that she must be coming back.”

“Yes,” Faye said again.

“Of course, some of that is due to my own weaknesses. I've let her father do all the arrangements, you see. I haven't taken any part in them. I haven't been able to. Do you have any children?”

“No,” Faye said.

“Then I don't suppose you'd understand. I wouldn't worry about it if I were you. Some things it's a blessing not to understand.”

Dorothy's black leather Coach bag was on the floor. She bent over, picked it up, and put it on her shoulder.

“Well,” she said. “Thank you again. And thank you for the tea. Now I must be going.”

“Oh,” Faye said—but she didn't really have time to say anything.

Dorothy Moss was fast. She was out of the living room and at the front door in no time at all. Faye trailed after
her, not sure if she wanted to catch up and make all the customary condoling noises or not. By the time she reached the door, Dorothy was out in the drive and at her car. Faye stopped in the doorway and waved back when Dorothy waved to her.

She wasn't going to make condoling noises after all. She wasn't going to say a thing that made sense, any more than she had said a thing that made sense in all the hour that Dorothy Moss had been in her house. She wasn't even going to be able to think anything that made sense.

She saw Dorothy's car pull out onto the Litchfield Road and head in the direction of Watertown. She retreated into her foyer and shut the door firmly on her sight of the day.

Eventually, she was going to have to open the roadside stand again. She was going to have to go on with her life. She was going to have to go through the motions. Already there had been one or two incidents, when people who had driven all the way out from New York City found that they couldn't do the shopping they'd come to do after all.

Really, Faye thought, it wasn't that she was bereft at the lost of Zara Anne Moss. She hadn't even liked Zara Anne much in the end. It was the circumstances that were making her crazy, and that she couldn't shake off.

It hadn't even occurred to her that violent death was different than other kinds of death, and now she was drowning in a sea of confusion.

She didn't think she'd get straightened out again until she found herself in need of money. The practical, as she had told her husband once, would always trump the metaphysical.

Bennis Hannaford hadn't brought a lot of clothes with her to the Northwest Hills. She never brought a lot of clothes with her when she traveled. A veteran of book tours, she knew that clothes were more a problem than an asset. They
made it difficult for you to get away quickly. This time, she had only to pack two skirts, two silk blouses, and a dress. Her laundry was already in a plastic bag at the bottom of her suitcase. She could wear her jeans and her turtleneck and her sweater for the drive home.

Assuming, of course, that she was able to drive home. She didn't see how she could avoid trying. The car was here, and there wasn't anything in the way of public transportation. Her cough, though, had become a steady hacking convulsion. At least once or twice every half hour it bent her over double. She was finding it impossible to breathe.

She was also bringing up more blood. That was what had decided for her. She. had brought up two big wads of it, on two separate occasions, since this morning. Something had also happened to her smoking. She had been a two-pack-a-day chain smoker for decades, but she had always felt in control of her addiction. She had always been able to put the cigarettes aside for a few hours if she needed to, to ride in an airplane or sit through a movie. Now she couldn't put the cigarettes aside at all. She wanted to smoke all the time. If she didn't have a cigarette lit and to hand, she was positively frantic. It didn't make any sense. It was also scaring her to death.

“Listen,” she'd told Tibor on the phone, when she'd called to tell him she was coming home. “Call Dr. Gerald Harrison and tell him it's me and it's an emergency. I'd do it myself but I'm in a hurry and I don't have my book with me. Tell him it's a big emergency. I'm not even going to come to Cavanaugh Street. I'm going to drive right to his office. I'm going to get there at about seven o'clock.”

“Seven o'clock at night? But, Bennis, the doctor will not be in his office at seven o'clock at night.”

“He will be if you call him and tell him I need him to be there. Tell him it's an emergency, Tibor. Tell him it's a big one. Do it now.”

“Bennis—”

“I've got to get on the road,” Bennis said.

Usually, Bennis was infinitely patient with Tibor. Tibor
had been jailed in the old Soviet Union. Tibor was the best priest Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church had ever had. Tibor was her friend.

But right now, there was nothing and nobody more important than her moving, driving, going, getting where she had to be. Where a doctor could check this out. Where she could find that she was afraid for nothing, and that she wasn't going to die. There it was, right there, at the back of her mind. She was afraid she was going to die.

At the last minute, because she had to tell him some-thing, she wrote Gregor a note and taped it to the mirror in the bathroom, where he would be sure to see it as soon as he washed his hands.

Had to go back to Philadelphia. Love you, Bennis.

She didn't think she wanted to write down any more. She didn't think she wanted to explain.

If she wrote it down—if she put it into words—it would turn out to be true.