Twenty-One

OZZIE’S OFFICE—OUR OFFICE—WAS only a few blocks away, across the Parkway, and for the short walk, I mentally sorted and filed, and tried to organize everything I had ever heard from any source that might pertain to the Severin family, and more precisely, to the skeleton in their closet, the sister who didn’t bark in the night. Shippy Severin.

She was nowhere and everywhere and too central to ignore, but I needed the advanced geometry that led to her and away from Zachary, and I needed some reason to believe it existed.

I walked in the rain, considering what this could mean. The one thing I knew about her habits was that she made phone calls and Tomas Severin had been upset about phone calls from someone whose voice he almost recognized.

And? And then?

I needed a whole lot more before I’d dare try to sell the idea of Shippy Severin to the police, or even to my one ex-cop himself. At the moment, everything about her was invisible, unknown—and omnipresent.

I walked upstairs to the office, glad to be out of the rain and looking forward to a respite of methodical clerical work that required minimal thought, routine actions.

And I would have done that. I’d settled in at the desk with a cup of hot water, and one of the tea bags I now kept in my desk, and I’d gotten as far as booting up the computer, when somebody knocked on the door.

Ozzie happened to be nearby, refilling his coffee cup with the house sludge. “What is this with you lately?” he growled. “This used to be a nice, quiet place.”

Right, I thought. Two knocks in two weeks. A regular madhouse.

Ozzie returned to his pebble-glassed-in cubicle, not bothering to consider the possibility the person wanting entrée might also want him. After all, it wasn’t pizza-delivery time yet.

I opened the door and beheld none other than Sasha Berg dressed in shaggy sheepskin against the elements—the Himalayan elements. Someone small and encased in a black hooded raincoat stood behind her. I must have stood there a beat too long, because Sasha, her Sherpa guide hood dripping onto her nose, raised her eyebrows. “Aren’t you going to let us in?”

I opened the door wider. “Sure, but—what are you doing here?”

“The secretary at your school said this is where you’d be, and we spent all afternoon right around the corner, practically, at the Four Seasons, no less, m’dear, so I thought—”

By this point, she was inside, shaking her ankle-length sheepskin out. Turned right-side out, the way the sheep had worn it, would have kept more water off her. “This is Nina Severin,” she said. The little woman pulled off her hood.

I recognized her from Ingrid Severin’s house. That did not, however, explain why Tomas Severin’s final wife—the woman Sasha had told me screamed at her over the telephone—and the woman he’d been dating when he died would be socializing, let alone come a-calling on me together.

“Please t’meet you.” Nina Severin’s words seemed to swim more slowly than her lips moved. I had obviously been less memorable than she’d been that day at Ingrid’s.

“I’m sorry there isn’t a comfortable place to sit. Most people don’t actually come here.”

“I’ve seen detective movies,” Sasha said. “Damsels in distress come in, state their problems, hire the shamus, and get him in trouble.”

Nina nodded agreement. Her head seemed loose on the neck, and I wondered how much the two women had had to drink before deciding to drop in on me.

“When we’re in reruns,” I said, “and we return to the nineteen-forties, I’m sure foot traffic will increase. These days, most communication is done via phone or e-mail.”

Sasha poked me. “Don’t be such a stick. I wanted to see the place, and if I waited for a formal invitation…” She wandered, as much as one could, through the room, detouring around the empty, standard-issue desks and running a finger along the front of the steel file cabinets. She even paused to inspect the potted plant that in its shock at being in Philadelphia, and worse, in our negligent hands, had grown into a tough, straggly specimen, a sort of street-smart palm.

“Although,” Sasha drawled, “now that I have seen this place, I can say with assurance that it ain’t much. Goodwill discards plus computers. The new noir?”

The widow Severin giggled, then clapped her hand to her mouth.

“Is there some way I can help the two of you?” I asked.

“Didn’t you get my phone message?” Sasha smoothed her blouse, a candy-striped semi-transparent number that looked as if it had last seen the light of day when Eisenhower was president.

The petite woman wandered off to the corner, to put her raincoat on the clothes tree. “I got word that you had phoned,” I said.

“Aha!” she said, as if that sufficed.

“I wish you’d actually leave a message when you leave a message. I was in a terrible rush, and I had no idea what—”

“It was about her,” she said, jerking her head in the direction of Nina Severin. “It wasn’t like I wanted to blurt it out to some stranger. And that particular stranger, your secretary, didn’t sound that bright a bulb in the first place.”

“She isn’t. What about her?”

“The secretary?”

“No—her.” Sasha’s “her” was now approaching my desk, smiling. She raised her eyebrows and pointed to a chair, Mackenzie’s chair, actually, and I nodded and invited her to sit down. Sasha carried over a small bench that had been near the clothes tree.

“How can I help you?” I asked again.

“We’re here to help you,” Sasha said.

Nina Severin’s smile was wide and joyous. Talk about a merry widow. But she had every reason to be jolly, given her estranged husband’s abrupt demise. Instead of her plummeting into reduced circumstances, he’d plummeted into death and left her with all the money and no philandering husband. What could be better? No love lost—but he was.

If only Nina had been anywhere near the school last Monday. You didn’t need to be large to push somebody down the stairs. Of course, there was the question of Severin’s cracked cheek… The widow Severin sighed expansively, then looked at Sasha, and giggled. A merry widow and a happy drunk.

“Nina was kind enough—or brave enough—to phone me,” Sasha said. “She felt…”

“Bad,” Nina said with an explosion of sound, as if “bad” were a rare, precise, and dangerous word. “I felt real bad.”

I waited, nodding encouragement.

“She’d been understandably upset, as”—Sasha leaned over and touched the smaller woman’s shoulder—“anybody would have been!”

They’d obviously bonded, but that didn’t clear much up for me.

“I was rude,” Nina Severin said. “Ruuu-ude!”

“To whom?”

“To Sasha! Just because she was dating my husband!” The sound waves she produced boomeranged back through the alcohol fumes and Nina exploded with laughter. “Hah!” she shouted. “That didn’t sound right, did it, but he was always dating somebody else. The man was engaged to somebody else while he was still married to me, for God’s sake. But when he was dating Sasha, he was cheating on the person he was cheating on me with and dumping me, too—that really made me mad.”

“I can only imagine.” If I wanted stories like this, there was always daytime TV. I could feel my smile hardening and becoming painful.

Sasha must have noticed. “That’s why Nina called and suggested we have a drink at the Four Seasons.”

“To apologize,” Nina said. “I’d been rude on the phone.” Then she smiled at me, and I could picture her in school, a good fifth-grader, handing in neatly written assignments, and beaming the same self-satisfied happiness upon her teacher. “I called her a bitch.”

“An English bitch,” Sasha said with great glee.

I did the teacher thing. “Thanks so much. I love hearing about people doing the right thing. Thanks for going out of your way to tell me about that. But now, I’ve really got a lot of—”

Nina frowned. “It wasn’t out of our way. We were just over—”

“When Nina was apologizing,” Sasha said, “she explained how she tended to make phone calls when she was upset, and she feels—”

“Bad,” Nina said. “Real bad.”

“—about several of the calls.”

“He made me really angry,” Nina said. “Grrrrrr! You understand that, don’t you? He was not a good man, or a nice man. Sometimes I think about the twins, and I realize their father’s dead, and that’s scary and sad for them, kind of, but you know what? They barely ever saw him. It’s going to take a long, long time before they notice that he hasn’t been around.”

“The phone calls, Nina?” Sasha prompted.

“Oh, yes. I called Ingrid and told her what a bad mother I thought she’d been, and how spoiled her son was. But she doesn’t understand half of what’s going on, so that might be why she listened so calmly. And one time, that pill Penelope—that’s what I call her, Penelope the Pill—she picked up the extension and told me I was a disgrace.” Nina giggled again. “I think she listened in a lot of times.”

“You called a lot?”

“I did it…a few…I made—I don’t know how many times I called.”

“And?” Sasha prompted.

She could have filled in the gaps herself and moved this process along, but then, she was the person who left messages that said nothing. She probably loved the suspense. “Remember?” she now said. “We decided to come tell Amanda because she’s trying to help figure out what happened to Tom.”

“Oh. Tom. Right. Well, there was this bad week,” Nina said. “I was upset. Tom had moved out, so I invited my brother to come over and he told me really bad things Tom and Ingrid had done. Things I hadn’t known. And I guess we had too much wine with dinner.”

We waited. “And?” Sasha and I finally said in unison.

“We got a little crazy and we both called him and said bad things and I’m ashamed of myself because now he’s dead. And we…well, we did it more than one time.”

“Tom? You phoned your husband—” She was the phoner? The one thing I was sure of—I’d thought—was that the mysterious Shippy had phoned her brother.

“My brother, really. He did the talking to my estranged husband who was cheating on the person he was cheating on me with, you remember. And in other ways, he had cheated other people, too.”

“I remember. Did you—did he—say something you’re sorry about?” I asked.

She nodded solemnly. “We phoned a couple of times. With Tom gone, Jay came over a lot.” She shrugged, as if making crank calls followed coming over as the night did the day. “Mostly, Jay talked, but sometimes I’d do this—” She lowered her voice. “Do you hear me?” she asked in a deep tone that was obviously fake, but could confuse a listener. “It was—it was a prank,” she said in her normal voice. “Just to scare him. Shake him up a little. He made everybody else miserable. Turnabout seemed fair.”

The threatening calls were made by his brother-in-law and his wife? Wouldn’t he recognize their voices? Or hadn’t he spent much time with Jay at all and perhaps hadn’t heard his wife’s strange ability to sound like a bullfrog.

I felt too tired to revise my thinking, and instead had to squelch a rush of annoyance that this inebriated woman’s confession messed up my only working theory. “What did you say to him, Nina?”

“Jay did the talking mostly,” she reminded me.

“Fine. What did your brother say?”

“We lost our manners, I’m ashamed to say. That’s part of why I feel so bad. That, and how I was with Sasha.” Her turn to lean over and pat her new best friend’s arm. “Anyway, it was prank stuff, nothing like a real threat.”

Tom’s final date, the other-other woman, sat near her, nodding support. Who had changed the rules of sisterhood? “You, Jay, whoever was talking, told him he didn’t deserve to live,” Sasha said quietly. “Right?”

Nina looked down at her hands, which were folded in her lap, and she sighed and nodded. “That was a terrible thing to say because then, he died. But Jay told me such things about him. At first, we thought…but we didn’t. We didn’t…we didn’t do what we could have.”

“Which was what?”

“We didn’t ask for anything. We could have. We could have promised not to tell people how he ripped off his own sister. How she deserved to inherit money but was homeless instead. Homeless!”

She was talking about blackmail. She and Jay hadn’t blackmailed her husband, and that was her mark of pride.

“All we did was tease Tom about it. Make it clear we knew something about him, and that it was rotten.”

“About what, Nina?”

“About the skeletons in his closet. About the ghosts of his past. About how we knew stuff, and he, well…he didn’t deserve to live. And I think once we said that maybe we’d tell people what we knew. We didn’t say anything specific. Just…once, I think, Jay said something like that the skeletons had come out of the closet before Halloween.”

I remembered his saying that at the nursery. He was obviously quite fond of that turn of phrase.

Sasha looked at her. “What’s it mean?” Then she looked at me. “He didn’t say anything about that part to me.”

Maybe the specifics of some of the calls—the ghost and skeleton ideas—had been too frightening, too private, too specific and potentially dangerous for Severin to share with Sasha. Maybe he would have told me about it, had he lived. Maybe, in fact, that’s what he needed to talk about with someone.

“You mustn’t berate yourself because of what happened afterward,” I said. “The important thing is to move on.” I meant it literally—I had things to do—and I meant it emphatically, but once again, someone knocked on the office door.

“People obviously come here all the time!” Sasha said. “You weren’t telling the truth.”

“You were leaving, weren’t you?”

“Are you kidding? This is as good as a late-night movie. I want to see who comes in next, and why.”

I didn’t bother to protest. It still wasn’t pizza-delivery time, so I didn’t even look in the direction of Ozzie’s frosted door, but went to open the door.

“Good!” Carole Wallenberg said. “You’re here. I was hoping—”

“What is this,” Nina asked, “a Tom’s old wives convention?” Then she looked at Sasha and said, “Sorry! I don’t mean to leave you out or anything…”

With great relief, I saw Zachary behind Carole. He wasn’t locked up. They hadn’t believed him, at least not enough to charge him with the crime. Not yet. “Come in, please. Both of you.”

“I’ll phone you later,” Carole said. “This is obviously a bad time. You’re busy. Besides, it isn’t urgent. Everything’s okay for now. I only wanted to explain. I was a little over the top earlier.”

“I told you that you don’t have to explain anything.” Zachary looked and sounded sullen. “You shouldn’t.”

“Don’t go,” I said.

“It isn’t me, is it?” Nina asked from her chair. “Don’t tell me you’re leaving because of me? Be angry with Brooke, if you need to be angry with anybody, but not—”

“Who is Brooke?” I felt as if I was “it” in an obscure game, the object of which nobody had told me.

“Tom’s wife after me,” Carole said.

“Before me,” Nina said. “So I never knew you or did you any harm, Carole, and you know it.”

It was fascinating watching Nina wind herself up into a fury based on nothing, a petite tornado packing massive destructive power.

Carole’s nostrils flared. “I never said—”

“Really,” Nina said, “if you think about it, we’re family. One big family. My twins are Zachary’s half brother and sister. Think about it! Not that you’ve ever acknowledged that.” Nina’s whirlwind imploded, and she was almost visibly sliding down an alcohol slicked route into profound self-pity. “You never brought Zach over to meet them, you—”

“Who ever invited us, who ever remembered, I wasn’t—”

“Mom!”

“Jeez.” That from Sasha, who probably didn’t have a clue as to what was going on, but who’d lost her buzz and glow. “Maybe we ought to—”

“As if I were a floozy, just because he’d been married before—”

“And married still when he met you, don’t forget!” Carole shouted. “And why are you here, anyway? The police didn’t haul you off!”

“Mom! They didn’t haul me—I called them.”

She wheeled to face her son. “As if I could forget that stupid fact!”

“I’m here because my new friend Sasha thought I should tell Amanda—”

“And I’m here to talk to her, too. This isn’t all about you, Nina.”

“Okay, everybody. Stop it! One person at a time and no—” I wasn’t shouting, and I was proud of being able to control the urge to shout, but I needn’t have been, because shouting might have been effective—I surely wasn’t.

“What were you going to tell her?” Carole demanded.

Nina sat farther back in her chair. “I already told her, and I don’t have to tell you anything. Certainly not if you use that tone of—”

Sasha stood up to her full six-foot-plus-heels glory, her arms in their see-through candy-stripes spread wide. “People,” she said. “People. This isn’t a war zone. Nina came here to clear something up.”

“What?” Carole demanded. Each of her sentences was followed by a mournful, “Mom.” Zachary sounded as if he was in hell. He’d been rejected by the police, which I was sure he saw as humiliating, and now his mother was committing the mega-sin of the parent of an adolescent: making a scene in public. He looked touchingly pitiable, a big, good-looking teen with a plaster cast on one arm, an expression of exquisite agony on his face, and body posture suggesting a desire for invisibility.

“I’ll explain,” Sasha said. “I got Amanda involved in all this—in Tom’s death—because he told me he’d been getting threatening phone calls.”

“Calls?” Carole said.

“Mom!” Zachary’s “Moms” were a metronome failing to regulate her flood of words.

The note had said “Calls. Amanda Pepper.” Maybe it was grammatical, after all. He was seeing me about the calls. But why the Philly Prep part?

“What’s this with the calls?” Carole said, once again ignoring her son. “My son does nothing—nothing!—and the police question him and—and you made calls?”

“If you’d listen for once…” Even with her arms now lowered, Sasha was sufficiently commanding to cut short Carole’s tirade.

I told myself to be considerate, to understand how distraught Carole Wallenberg was, but understanding why something is happening doesn’t necessarily make the event bearable.

“Everybody’s upset,” Sasha continued, “but nobody’s blaming anybody else for anything.” She turned to me. “Are there more chairs? It’ll feel better if we’re all sitting down.”

She had a future in mediation. “I’ll get them,” I said. Every Tuesday evening, Ozzie had a poker game at the office and the table, chairs, and chips were kept always at the ready. My visitors fell oddly silent while I retrieved two chairs from the utility closet. Sasha had somehow convinced them that nothing would or could proceed until everyone was properly in place.

I unfolded the chairs, with Sasha directing, saying, “There. Put that one right there, so nobody trips over anybody else.” Zachary and his mother sat down while I returned to my desk chair and realized that we’d formed a rough circle. I thought this was clever of Sasha except that I didn’t feel so much part of a round table discussion group as part of a kindergarten class, and I had nothing to show-and-tell.

Carole cleared her throat. “I came here to explain, and now’s as good a time as ever because I want to get this over with. Finished. Chapter closed.”

“Mom!” Zachary said. “Not now. Not with other people—”

“I already told the police, so what difference does it make who else hears? I’m not ashamed about anything I did.” She folded her hands across her chest and looked like somebody who was profoundly ashamed and badly braving it out.

“What?” I finally had to ask. “What is it you want to say? Feel free.”

“Zachary wasn’t telling the truth,” she said. “About what he did to his father. But you knew that.”

“I thought so and hoped so,” I said. “And I certainly hope you have a way of proving that.”

“I did. I do. I told the police, which is why they kicked Zach out.” She paused, looking defensive and satisfied. And Zachary definitely looked as if the police had humiliated him by not believing he was a killer.

“And, ah, you told them…about…?”

She might have responded, but at that moment, the door opened, this time without benefit of a warning knock. All heads swiveled to see Mackenzie. “I interrupt something?” he asked. “Group therapy? A séance?”

“This is C.K. Mackenzie,” I said to the group. “I work for him, after school. He’s the actual licensed PI.”

“He’s also her fiancé,” Sasha murmured, though I wish she hadn’t. The women, even warring Nina and Carole, called time out to consider Mackenzie for a moment, then toss me an appreciative look. I’d done well in the mate-hunting sweeps.

“This is Nina Severin, the late Tomas’s widow,” Sasha said, “and this is Carole Wallenburg, the late Tomas’s first wife, and their son, Zachary. You know me, so that about does it.”

Mackenzie’s got a fine poker face, even when there’s no game on. Not as much as a blink when Zachary was named, though here was the very problem he’d promised to “work on.”

“Carole was explaining why Zachary’s confession wasn’t—”

“Confession! He didn’t do it!” Carole Wallenburg was back to full-speed and full-volume. “You have to have something to confess—it was a fabrication. A well-intentioned dumb lie; he was protecting me, he thought, but a dumb lie all the same.”

Mackenzie glanced my way. “Join us,” I said. “I’ll get you a chair.”

He knew perfectly well where the chairs were, but I was sure he’d follow me over to the closet, where I could do a quick fill-in about Shippy Severin.

He did follow, but before I could whisper a word, he spoke softly and quickly. “They’re here, Manda.”

“Obviously.” I tilted my head toward the group. “But they won’t be long. As soon as—”

“Not them. The Mafiosas.”

“No. Not for three more—”

“Nonetheless, they’re here, waiting for us. At our home. It appears there is panic in the land, fear that you and I are not giving sufficient attention and gravitas to the issue of our future, to our life together, to—”

“The shower isn’t till the end of this week. They said they weren’t getting here till Thursday.”

“They consider this an emergency. They consider their little convention an intervention. For your own good.”

“Before they have me committed?”

“Think of it this way. It’s a sign we won’t have in-law problems. Our mothers are getting along famously. They colluded. They plotted. They planned this. All of that without a single sour note. Not many families can make that claim.”

“Did you know? Were you in on—”

“Absolutely not. My mother phoned me when her plane landed an hour ago, and she’d already hooked up with Bea, and Beth was en route to the airport herself.”

“Beth knew.” Ambushed by my sister. “But not now—I can’t possibly—”

He nodded again. The room wasn’t all that large, and we’d been moving, slowly, back toward the circle as we spoke.

“And what do you have here?” Mackenzie whispered. “It’s very Nero Wolfe-ish, isn’t it? You’ve gathered the suspects—”

“They gathered themselves.”

“Are you ready to point the finger yet?” Mackenzie beamed a guileless smile at me and set up his folding chair, joining our circle. Actually, he had no choice. Our desks were out here, so the chances of his getting any work done while the show-and-tell circle carried on an arm’s length away were nil.

“Should we bring you up to speed?” I asked.

“If you weren’t doing that, then what were you whispering about back there?” Sasha demanded.

I smiled at her and didn’t answer and hoped she interpreted that to mean something wild and sexy. I hoped even more that she didn’t know the Marriage Mafiosas had descended because I hoped she hadn’t been part of their conniving. “First,” I said, “Nina came here with Sasha because she thought we should know she and her brother made the phone calls Tom found worrisome.”

“You made them?” Mackenzie asked. “You could have saved a lot of legwork and time if you’d—”

Nina looked down at her hands again, a chastised little girl. Then she looked up and shrugged. “What does it matter? That’s all we did. Stupid crank calls, like in junior high. Big deal, big deal…” Her eyelids were at half-mast, and she had the only semi-comfortable chair.

“We weren’t talking about that anymore,” Sasha said. “Carole was saying how Zachary—oh, you explain, Carole.”

Her eyebrows rose in the center, and she looked under enormous strain, but Carole seemed determined. “You have to understand: I have never been as furious with Tom as I was a week ago,” she said, “and I’ve been angry with him more times than I want to remember. But this time—his own son, his firstborn’s college tuition, and he’d promised. He’d laid it down like a challenge, and it was so easy for him, petty cash for him, too. This was pure spite. Meanness. And right after he’d said all this, I saw a little notice in the paper about an award he was going to be given. For good works, and the article said something about his distinguished career, his patrician roots. It was like a slap in the face.”

She looked as if she might orate on Tom’s offense forever, she was so filled with its outrage, but to my relief, she stopped abruptly, and looked around as if seeing us for the first time, and when she spoke again, it was softly, with little inflection. “It made me want to do something—anything—to wipe the smug expression off his face. Not to kill him, for God’s sake, but to make him feel the way he made Zachary feel—like dirt, like trash, like less than nothing. And right around then, Zach’s piece about drugs had been published, and of course I’d seen it and read it as he wrote and rewrote it.

“I daydreamed about Tomas drugged, staggering down the street, vomiting, being incoherent and picked up or ignored as a drunk. I obsessed about it. It was the only revenge I could think of. And it seemed so easy to arrange. It’s easy to make GHB in your own kitchen, and it was easy enough getting the makings, so I did it. I know it was wrong, and—”

“Really stupid to tell the police,” Zachary said. “Now—”

“It’s better than what you told them! At least mine was the truth. I’ve hired a lawyer. We’ll see. I made it. I had it. I tried to meet him for lunch, because I knew he’d have a couple drinks and that would make the drug more powerful. But he had a date, couldn’t. Didn’t want to meet me anyway, to tell the truth, so I told him something. News that I didn’t think he wanted to hear about…someone’s whereabouts. Someone he was afraid of. He met me because he thought I knew more, but I didn’t. Still, there he was. And that’s all there was—I bought our teas and dropped the stuff in his, we talked awhile, and I went my way and he went his and I never saw him again. I knew he never drove into the city. Took the train, so he wasn’t going to get behind the wheel and hurt someone else. Other than that, I had no idea where he’d go, but I hoped it would be embarrassingly public, that was all.”

So much for the mystery of the drugged tea, and the whole cause and effect chain that was linked in my mind. There were no links, only an enraged mother out for a humiliating revenge.

And her son. “You knew?” I asked quietly of Zachary.

He swallowed and looked at his mother.

“I didn’t think he possibly could,” Carole said. “I never wanted him to. But he’d been looking for something—”

“The laptop,” Zachary muttered. “I needed to use it.”

“I’d taken it with me that day, and when he pulled it out of the backpack, he saw the chemicals. Never said anything.”

“Until I heard—until afterward—I thought they were for some experiment in chemistry.”

Which, in a way, they were.

“And then, when you put two and two together,” Mackenzie said, “you—”

“Thought I’d killed his father!” Carole seemed astounded by this, although she’d quite blissfully admitted to drugging the man. “I would never—no matter what.” Then she deflated somewhat. “I was careful with the dose, enough to humiliate, to disorient. I assumed he’d have had alcohol with lunch. I even figured that in. But I understand.”

“And that’s why the sudden confession,” I said to Zach.

“I thought—once they knew about the drug, I thought—I’m a kid, I used to get in a lot of trouble, they’d go easier, they’d believe me. And if it didn’t really make sense what I said, then they’d let me go and not look our way anymore. I mean, who was going to think of my mother?”

Deceitful, but clever, actually. He was a smart kid.

“Zachary, what actually happened?” I asked. “The absolutely true story this time.”

“Like I said. I saw him go by, followed him in, found him in your room, thought—well, you know.”

I wouldn’t make him confess his hopes again, make him feel again the pain of his father telling him that his presence at Philly Prep had nothing to do with Zachary. Really, that nothing about his father had much to do with Zach.

But my mind did register the third part of Severin’s message. Calls. Amanda Pepper. Philly Prep. And that Carole had told him somebody’s whereabouts. The note started to make sense.

“He went out of the room,” Zach said, “and I followed him, and I kept trying to get him to talk to me, just talk to me, but he was acting strange—now I know why, but I didn’t then. I thought he was drunk, and I guess that made me angrier. I said things, angry things, and he grabbed my arm and held it down while he lifted his other hand, like he was going to hit me, so I swung out—to protect myself, to push back his hand, but I used my free arm—and the cast, it smashed into his face, and he shouted and backed away and sat down, hard. I didn’t know what to do—call an ambulance or what? But he shouted that I should get away from him, stay away from him, so I did. I left.”

“Zach, I understand you said you heard shouting at the time. Did you mean your dad?”

Mackenzie astounded me. I was sure he’d dismissed and trashed that idea when I told him about it. I would love to be able to check out the filing cabinets in his brain.

Zachary shook his head. “Somebody else. Somebody downstairs shouting like ‘What’s going on? Who’s up there?’ You know, the regular stuff. That’s why I took the back stairs, so they wouldn’t see me.” He was supporting the arm in the cast with his good hand, and he looked down at it, as if it had a life of its own.

“So Nina and Jay made calls,” I said, trying to get a timeline.

“Do I have to tell the police?” Nina said.

“I will,” I said. “And they’ll probably get in touch with you, to verify it.”

“That’s all we did, though.” She looked smaller and smaller with each word. “It was stupid saying things about skeletons, but we were angry. It was a bad time. He’d…”

“Dumped you. Everybody knows, Nina. And frankly, there’s no shame in being dumped by Tomas Severin. But what do you mean by ‘skeletons’?” Carole looked on alert. “What does that mean:

“I don’t know. It’s only that I heard…my brother said…” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Maybe it does,” Carole said. “Because on the phone, before we met, I told him I’d seen a ghost. A ghost he knew.”

I thought about Carole’s life, where she might have been. On campus, in the lab where she worked as part of her tuition grant. Carpooling. I thought about Tom Severin’s note again.

“Ghosts and skeletons, oh my! Halloween’s really in the air!” At least Sasha was having a good time.

I’d had it. “How about trying something new?” I asked. “How about if just this once, everybody told the truth? So far, not one person in this whole mess—not one!—has considered doing that.”

“I never lied!” Carole said.

“I never even spoke to you before today!” Nina said, sitting back and hugging herself.

“Please! There are lies of omission, as everyone knows.”

“That wasn’t my fault,” Sasha said. “Tom only talked about what I told you. No ghosts and skeletons, that’s for sure.”

“That figures. He was lying, too. He left out the part that really scared him. I thought you were telling the whole truth this time, Carole, but you left out the small detail of who—and where—your ghost was, didn’t you?”

“I recognized her,” she said. “Back when I was married to Tom, she tried to make contact. She recognized me, too.”

“Who?” Nina sounded whiny, a cranky, sleepy child annoyed by the static around her. She yawned, and sighed, and closed her eyes.

“The skeleton in the closet, the ghost in the attic of Tom’s mind,” I said.