The Twisted Thread (22 page)

Fred was shaking as he put the papers back into a semblance of order. He could barely tie the fraying black thread that held together the accordion file. A secretary. A woman who had worked in Llewellan's office. She had seen what was happening and had had the courage to gather the evidence and in her own, private way preserve it.

And all of it accounted for Malcolm Smith's rage. His desire to hang that rage like a heavy, spiked wreath around Fred's neck and make him feel the shame of his grandfather's neglect. For that is what it had been, Fred felt sure. Most likely, at least one of the men that Mr. Smith named had molested Edward or worse. For all Fred knew, all three could have been involved and their abuse had driven the boy to suicide. He stood and looked at the file. The flashlight, on its side on the table, cast a fragile cone of brightness over all of Armitage's dusty, complicated history. He knew he could simply stash the file again and let someone else discover it years or decades from now. He knew, too, he could destroy it. But that wasn't really an option. Naomi Beardsley, with her careful insistence on documenting what she felt to be an unbearable wrong, had changed that. She had been as brave as she could be in the circumstances, and she had done what she could to right an injustice. Who knew what she had been risking? She hadn't been brave enough to go to the newspapers or the board. Nor had the family apparently taken any legal action to avenge their son. But maybe those were different times, and women and boys seen as weak would be told, as Llewellan had told the parents of Edward Smith, to buck up and get on with it. They wouldn't be seen, heard, responded to. They would instead be told that what they were and what they'd been through simply wasn't true.

Standing, his legs shaky, Fred picked up the file and tucked it to his side. Malcolm Smith couldn't have known about it. He probably had no idea who Naomi Beardsley was. But he had known enough of the original story to want Fred, Llewellan's scion, to bear its burden. Why had he waited until this spring? Did he have a terminal illness and feel it was his last chance to speak out? More likely, it was something deeply personal that Fred would never be able to understand. But now Edward's brother could see what had happened laid out before him. Fred would send the folder to him tomorrow, from the academy's post office. He turned off the flashlight then, grateful for a moment for the room's encompassing blackness.

He almost didn't care about making noise anymore but was still sensible enough to be happy that he met no one once he'd risen from the tunnels. The file seemed light pressed against his ribs, though he had to set it down as he crossed the bridge over the stream leading to the Bluestone. He unhooked the skeleton key from his ring and tossed it into the flowing water, glad to be rid of it. The queer stillness in the air had continued. Not even Forrest and Milton were out now.

Back in his apartment, Fred saw that it was only ten o'clock. How astonishing that news that could change your life could unfold so quickly. He laid the file on his desk, and now, in a room filled with regular light, he saw how faded it actually was. More than fifty years had gone by since Naomi Beardsley had done her careful, secret work. And now Malcolm Smith was going to have his vengeance. Fred snapped on his computer and opened a new document form. “Dear Mr. Smith,” he wrote. “I do not know why you chose me or chose the moment you did to come and find me, but your visit worried me enough to look into what had happened to your brother. What I found was this, gathered and saved by a woman who worked, I believe, as my grandfather's secretary. I do not know if any of this information will make a difference to you or in any way console you. But these files rightfully belong to you and your family. Again, I know it can't come as consolation for your loss, but for what my grandfather did, I am truly sorry.”

He was utterly drained. But he had one more letter to write: his resignation from Armitage. Not merely the request for the leave he had thought would serve as the compromise position between the year in Williamsburg and the safety of his job at the academy. Knowing what he did, he couldn't stay and couldn't return. When he was done, he went into the hall and found some cardboard boxes left in the recycling bin. He assembled them until he was too tired to move anymore and looked at their brown emptiness, waiting to be filled with what he would take from this part of his life.

CHAPTER 18

M
att woke before the sun was up and forced himself to go for
a run. Cases like this were wretched on the body; no one let themselves rest, and everyone but Vernon drank far too much coffee. No wonder cops tended to look fifteen years older than they were, haggard and worn. It came from being hunched over emergencies all the time. His joints felt stiff and cramped, but it was a good idea to limber up before meeting Angell at nine at the station. Matt thought about how much had shifted in less than a week. He had slipped his cell phone in a pocket of his shorts and even stopped to answer it when it rang, despite the fact he was in the beech grove, the most beautiful part of the loop, and just at the moment when his muscles had finally released. He had not, he realized, as he leaned in to talk to Vernon, seen Madeline, though the woods were no longer off-limits. Nothing had turned up there, despite the dogs, the men, and all that tense and thorough searching.

“Nowhere to be found,” said Vernon by way of saying hello. He was referring to Tamsin, who had not returned to her bungalow the night before. Lucinda, when they'd returned to question her last night about the bag, had said that Tamsin brought it with her. Lucinda had no idea what had been in it. She'd been at the house working on something Porter had asked her to take care of. That late at night? “She's always on duty, Tamsin Lovell,” Lucinda had answered spitefully.

And when asked if she and Miss Lovell had had a disagreement, Lucinda had responded, “Of course we did. I didn't like her. I was always disagreeing with her.” And then her phone had rung, and she had slammed the door in their faces and gone off to pick it up. Fortunately, at the station, they'd found a young officer eager to be a part of something as real as a murder investigation who had asked if there were anything he could do. Which was how he found himself watching Tamsin's house until Vernon went to relieve him at dawn.

Matt walked through the filtered light that came down through the canopy of rough-edged leaves, listening to Vernon. “She's got lilac bushes that she trims, window boxes full of hyacinth. She's like something out of Beatrix Potter, except I get the strong impression she's an unpleasant character.”

“Vernon,” Matt asked, “did you go into her house?”

There was a pause. “No,” he finally admitted. “But it was close.” Matt was pouring with sweat and for the first time in a week felt like he had actually breathed. “And now,” said Vernon, “I'm going home to have some breakfast with the kids. I'll see you down at the station.” The young cop had tried to offer him a jelly donut. “I nearly yielded,” Vernon confessed.

“But you didn't,” said Matt. “Go home and have some bulgur. You'll feel better.”

“Fuck off,” Vernon said, quite cheerfully.

Matt snapped the phone closed and walked the rest of the way out of the woods. It was only seven, but he was planning to go to see his father. His sister, Barbara, was in town; she had no Friday classes, and he hadn't done more than exchange a hurried hello on the phone with her in days. Once a month, she drove over from the Connecticut college where she taught art history to keep an eye on them both, she said. Come for breakfast, she'd urged. I know you can't stay long. Just a few minutes.

Besides, his father was good preparation for Angell. He started in the moment Matt walked through the door. “Barbara,” Joseph shouted, “the man of the law has arrived,” and continued to sit in his large armchair and fiddle with the plastic tubing that led from his oxygen tank to his nose. Barbara sailed out of the kitchen and gave her brother a hug. His sister, lean as a deer, dark-haired, dressed in something black and architectural that probably cost a fortune in Tokyo, had her hands wrapped around a dish towel that did not match the sharp lines of her dress. “Hi, baby,” she said. “How are you?”

“Good to see you. You cooking?” he asked a little cautiously.

She snorted. Barbara's idea of a good meal was Diet Coke with a side of lemon. She was, however, an ace at cleaning up, and she'd been setting the table and putting away dishes from the night before. “I'll leave the food to you. I've got coffee on. Go say hi to Pop.”

Joseph was still tinkering with the knob on the tank and didn't look up at his son until he was finished. “So what's going on up there? No arrests? No baby found?” Above everything, Joseph hated incompetence, inaccuracy, vagueness. Matt remembered last year's Thanksgiving, the first without Ella, his mother, and how they'd limped through it with help from a very expensive Barolo and Matt's cooking. The rich smell of dark meat had hung in the air, and Joseph had been unable to stop talking about the bad books kept by the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles until Matt had said to Barbara in the safety of the kitchen, “Can you hospitalize someone for obsession with irrelevant details?” And she had said, “We can try,” and they had cackled for a minute until they went into the dining room and saw Joseph staring out the window, his hand twisting a napkin to knots.

“Good to see you, Pop,” Matt said. “It'll break today or tomorrow,” he added, surprising himself. Both he and Vernon had sensed that this was so; that something critical would happen, but he hadn't realized just how confident he felt about it since he had no real idea of why Claire's death had happened as it had.

“What about the baby?” Barbara asked, bringing coffee.

This at least was decent, and they all sat down near Joseph, who continued to fuss with the knobs on his tank. “Barb, this is the part that's strange. Mostly in these cases, there's a clear suspect. A boyfriend, an uncle, a babysitter. But no one and everyone is involved here. No overwhelming physical clues, no confessions, no leads that pan out.”

“And who thought it would happen in this backwater,” Joseph said, “and that you, Mr. Big City Cop, would be dealing with it?” It was a favorite theme. When Matt had told his father that he had taken a desk job in the Armitage-Greenville force, Joseph had said, “Sentimentality. Lack of ambition. What is this? Some
Little House on the Prairie
moment?
Roots
meets Massachusetts?” He'd waved his hand dismissively. “Matthew, I am old and worn-out, but I do not need you here. I have Fabiola”—his tyrannical visiting nurse—“my practice, a lot of old geezers just like me, and your meddling sister one state away.” Barbara, who'd been visiting, had said, “I heard that,” over the clamor of the vacuum that she'd been running in the next room. Everyone in their family had impossibly keen hearing. Matt sometimes thought that it was his most curious advantage as a cop.

“Oh yeah?” Joseph had called. “Then you'll hear this, too. It would please me to see the two of you get on with your lives.” The vacuum stopped and Barbara came in the room. “Pop. We have lives. And we are using them to stay awake.”

Matt had smiled. He and Barbara had always been close. She had supported him when he'd left Armitage under a cloud; he had been her biggest ally when she'd gotten her Ph.D. in art history. When he had stayed in Philadelphia “to chase hooligans,” she'd been his staunchest advocate. And when she had finally admitted to her parents that the beautiful blond from Sweden with whom she shared a house was her girlfriend, he had been in this living room, holding her hand.

“Bah!” said Joseph. He loved them both helplessly, they knew it, even if their choices mystified him. As he often said, “One kid a gunslinger, the other a professor teaching children to look at pictures of naked people.” Barbara's most popular course, unsurprisingly, was The Nude Through the Ages. “If you come back here, don't pretend it's for me. It's your own business what you're here for.”

Joseph had been right, of course. His mind was admirably lucid, floating easily from his accounting practice (small but still percolating) to his garden, backgammon game, and book club. That his body was slowly refusing to accommodate his still flexible intelligence was a fact he tried to treat as a trifle, an inconvenience. The wicked gap that Ella's death had left was something they steered around as if it might swallow them all. Thinking of his mother now made Matt bite back the sharp retort he felt ready to make.

Instead, he kissed his father's head and went to make omelets. He didn't stay more than half an hour, though he had been happy in the bright dining room, surrounded by what was left of his family. But Angell had called the meeting for nine and would probably start early. Barbara saw him out and gave her head a tilt in the familiar direction, up the hill, toward the school. “Bringing it all back?”

He stood in the threshold. “It's like a physical slap, walking around that campus. It just jolts me, the memories. The smells. And it's hard to believe I was part of it and that the old guys still hang on to everything that's happened.” He paused. “I keep wanting to think I'm different. That I'm not like them. That I might have gone there but I'm not of it. But that's not entirely true. And now they're vulnerable and I feel like protecting them.”

She got it, she said. Her thesis had been called “The Ambivalence of Patronage in Renaissance Italy.”

“You glad you took the job?” she asked, holding open the door. Since he'd returned, she'd asked him that almost every time she saw him, as if taking his spiritual temperature.

He paused. “No. But that doesn't mean it's not what I should have done.” He looked at her more closely. “What's up?” he asked, then, “Inge?”

Barbara looked down, suddenly unwilling to meet his eye. “She's not certain about having a baby. I think it's time.” She frowned and said, “We'll talk. Hit the road.”

He promised to come to Connecticut to see her when the case was finished. She said, “Go get the evildoers, honey,” and shoved him out the door, trying to smile.

On the way to the station, he couldn't stop imagining her lovely face. She was the one he told everything. That same Thanksgiving, Matt had mentioned to Barbara his doubts about continuing in Philadelphia. He'd confided in her about Ann. He had heard the entire paltry story come out as they shared a glass of wine on the cold screened porch, their breath arriving in rounded puffs of fog, their voices low so as not to wake their light-sleeping father. She had listened and then said, “Don't walk entirely. There's a reason you do what you do. Could you get a job here?”

“Greenville?” he'd objected. “Why here?”

“For Dad. For me. For you. It's peaceful. It could give you a place to think. It's an idea,” she said and swallowed the last of the wine. “I miss Mama,” she said, and he had held her until they were so cold their hands and feet began to go numb. He kissed her good night and said, “No one has a better sister.” She laughed and answered, “You've got one thing right at least.”

He was still thinking about her when he pulled into the parking lot and saw Vernon pacing there. “How are the kids?” he asked when he saw his partner's face. Vernon shrugged. “Screaming, crying, Daddy, don't leave, blah blah blah.” He turned toward the back entrance of the station. “And that is why I do white-collar crime, because white-collar criminals are nine-to-fivers, just like me.” Matt could imagine the scene. The tearful girls, Vernon's guilty crankiness spilling over everything. “We finish this this week,” Vernon said, “and then you stop drinking coffee and I take my personal days.”

“We'll finish,” said Matt. How, he wasn't sure, but it was nearly over. But he wasn't the one to start the meeting, which was chaired by a black-browed Captain Angell and attended by three tall men from the FBI who looked like bricks, and the rest of the ragged team as they sat around the laminated table in the conference room, tubes of lights buzzing their nasal song overhead.

One of the bricks discussed how not a single one of the more than four hundred serious leads about the baby's whereabouts had led to a single concrete outcome. The sheet they had found in the tunnels had been used by some handyman to staunch a cut someone had gotten repairing a pipe. Norm Parker's forensic evidence was muddy, slow in coming, going to be very hard to use. Autopsy results ditto. A case could easily be made that Claire had slipped and gotten those bruises in labor. Another of the bricks discussed Scotty Johnston ad nauseam. They had grilled his supposed friends, but he had no one he'd really confided in. They were all scared of him. No roommates. No one wanted to live with him. Still, in spite of his parents' urging that he come home and rest from his ordeal, he had stubbornly insisted that he needed to stay to finish out the year. “He's in the midst of it, and his lawyer won't let him say a thing. His attorney's hourly is a thousand dollars. It's hopeless.” Rosalie Quiñones refused to talk. Stymied all around. And the DA practically brokering settlements already. A mood of gray and total gloom descended over the table.

Matt looked at the men gathered there shuffling their papers and picking at the foam rims of their cups; the surface of the table was flecked with the stray white crescents. He felt impatience surge through him. “No, it's not,” he said. He described what Betsy Lowery had seen and how Porter had reacted to their questions. He talked about Harvey Fuller and Tamsin Lovell. He told them about Claire's French diary again and passed out Marie-France's translation. He told them in even greater detail what Madeline had learned from Sally Jansen, Maggie, and Rosalie, and the group that called itself the Reign of Terror. And he shared his own view on what might have happened.

They were listening, he could tell they were listening. Even the bricks couldn't pretend that they didn't hear him. As he spoke, he saw Vernon watching him with a combination of admiration and suspicion, but Matt continued to talk with articulate clarity, outlining what he felt needed to happen and how the case should proceed from here in a concise and orderly way. He didn't speak long. He didn't need to. He saw Angell lean back and saw as well the relief on his face. Matt was living up to his end of their agreement. Over the next few minutes, they allotted tasks, and then, earlier than expected, he and Vernon found themselves in the warming light of the parking lot, the sun making the puddles steam as if they were miniature hot springs.