13

In my dreams an engine revved, sputtering to a loud and angry whine, close and threatening. The Windbreaker Man rode a red motorbike, perfectly balanced, arms outspread like some gigantic bird of prey. Soundlessly he swooped up girls in his path—teens in pleated navy skirts, crisp white blouses—dropped them at my feet, broken and bleeding, their heads lolling like rag dolls.

I woke up sweating. Heat and light seared my eyelids. Half-waking, half woozy, I panicked, unable to open my eyes, afraid to peer into the fiery abyss. I blinked. Just the sun burning through gauzy curtains, eating the morning haze.

The toothpaste oozed from the tube like a melted candy cane. I washed my hair, not because it was dirty, but because the cold water felt so good.

I hate the heat.

I hated the fact that Adam Mayhew had chickened out. I hated the glorified guiltlessness of Avon Hill, the easy innocence of its headmaster.

I unlocked my desk drawer and reread Thea’s thirty-six pages. A perfect family sits down to a beautifully laid table. Fine china, crystal, and silver gleam in the candlelight. An elaborate multicourse dinner is served, and although insects crawl over their bare feet and snakes twine about their ankles, no one is so gauche as to mention the invasion.

It reminded me of something written by one of the South American magical realists—a Colombian whose books I’d studied in an effort to understand the land of Paolina’s heritage.

In Thea’s work, the character dubbed “d” was a poet, shunned by the gracious family. “b” spoke in an unheard monotone, telling herself endless repeated stories that made no sense. “b” alone admitted the existence of the reptiles, but seemed unaware of the bugs.

Roz tripped downstairs in a short excuse for a dress, possibly a tunic. Her sandal laces crisscrossed to her knees. She appeared unfazed by the weather. Before I could stop her, she plunked a bulging file folder on my desk, planted her feet in an approximation of ballet’s third position, and began her recitation.

“First thing,” she said, “I don’t have quite as much crap as they wrote about Chuck and Di, but that’s probably because most of this stuff is older. I mean, it dates back to when the press was still sharpening its canines.”

Maybe if I hadn’t just reread “Thea’s” chapter, if I hadn’t been buoyed by the magic of her words, I’d have stopped Roz cold. Mesmerized, I let her speak.

“Old man Cameron, that’s the Honorable Franklin Cameron, the late U.S. representative from the Fourth Congressional District, was some big deal. Old money, fleets of ships, China trade—You want to know about his mom and dad?”

“Not particularly.”

She ignored me, a not unusual state of affairs.

“His dad married money, twice. Had a knack for it. So we got China trade money comingling with Robber Baron money. Nice combo. Enough to get their kid—that’s Franklin, father of Garnet—a major league law school education. We’re talking Yale here, maybe buy the family a little something, like the presidency. But it seems our Franklin balked at a life of public service. Did a stint in the DA’s office, served on the Governor’s Council, but couldn’t win the big ones. Lost the governorship once, the Senate three times, finally made it to the House of Representatives in 1962. A one-term guy.”

“Scandal?” I inquired automatically. Once elected to the House from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, it’s a rare bird who returns north.

“Not a breath,” Roz answered. “Not a hint. Not a murmur. The man said he didn’t like living in D.C.”

I wondered what the real story was. In the early sixties, some matters weren’t fit to print in a family newspaper.

“And he never ran for district rep?”

“Nope. Governor or nothing far as local stuff went.”

“Kids,” I said. “It’s the kids I’m mainly interested in.”

“No kids from his first marriage. Had it annulled. Three from his marriage to—get this—the Contessa de la Montefiore, aka Tourmaline Montefiore. Tourmaline, right. Family calls her Tessa and I, for one, forgive them. Even if she did give her own kids weirdo names. Beryl’s the oldest, born 1950. Then Garnet. Then just plain Dorothy.”

Odd. I’d imagined Dorothy—Thea—as the oldest child.

“Which one are you interested in?”

“Dorothy.”

“The dead one. Too bad.”

“Yeah,” I agreed wholeheartedly. “Too bad.”

“It was a four-week wonder. A total circus. I don’t think I copied all the news articles, but I got most of them.”

“Summary?”

“Headlines: ‘MISSING!’; ‘RUNAWAY WRITER!’; ‘SUICIDE?’; ‘HEIRESS KIDNAPPED!’; then ‘HEIRESS MURDERED!!!’ They didn’t run with the suicide more than a day, just long enough to mention that there was family precedent. It was big-time stuff. I mean, when they nailed the killer, a couple papers ran her photo with a black border around it, like she was the President or something.”

“Go back to the suicide.”

She shuffled paper. “Veiled suggestions that someone else named Cameron had given it a try. Then the kidnapping stories swamped it.”

Beryl? I wondered. “b” for Beryl, who sat at the perfect table and mumbled under her breath? The one who saw the snakes. Or Tessa. Had she found an effective way to keep her husband front returning to Washington?

I guess I shouldn’t have dismissed Garnet or Franklin Cameron from the suicide sweepstakes, but statistics bear me out. Men succeed at suicide more often, but a greater number of women try it on. The classic “cry for help.”

“Family reaction to Dorothy’s death?”

Roz frowned, searching for a word. “Muted. I got the feeling the family was holed up, saying ‘no comment’ for all they were worth, and the journalists were writing whatever the hell they felt like writing. You ought to read the bilge.”

She tapped the folder. Maybe I would.

“I got some great stuff on the funeral. It was like a fashion show, swear to God, an all-white funeral. If the family’d wanted to feed the press frenzy they couldn’t have done a better job. Here’s this kid who’s written a scandalous book, and she’s getting the ‘virgin special’ funeral. Not one, but two cardinals presiding.”

I glanced at the page of flowing script in my hand, gently closed the calligrapher’s notebook. “Adam Mayhew” couldn’t have missed such an ostentatious funeral.

“Well, don’t get all excited and tell me what a great job I did,” Roz said, finally sensing that she wasn’t getting the desired reaction. “Just pay me and tell me what else I can do. I bought a videocam. On credit.”

“I didn’t know you had a credit card.”

“I do now. I listed you as a reference. If they call, can you tell them you pay me, like, three hundred a week?”

“In your dreams, Roz.”

“Come on. Let me dig more on this totally pseudo Mayhew chump. He’s lying like a rug. Thea’s mom—La Contessa—she’s still alive, and she never had any brothers, step, half, or otherwise. There’s no Mayhew comma Adam in any local phone book.”

“There’s an Adam Mayhew in Mount Auburn Cemetery.”

Roz’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know?”

“I took a field trip.” I bit my lower lip, glanced through Roz’s scrawled notes and news clippings. “What can you tell me about Beryl Cameron?”

“Beryl? For the past twenty years, she might as well be dead.”

“The brilliant Thea’s only sister? She must have done something newsworthy. Her marriage would rate a Sunday Magazine special feature.”

“Yeah, you’d think. She’s in all the press photos, all the late great Franklin Cameron’s campaign stuff, throughout the sixties. She’s in there stumping with the family, the girls wearing those god-awful matching puffy white dresses and little heels with anklets. I mean the socks are so retro I might give ’em a try. With stiletto heels—”

“Roz.”

“Sorry. Then, after Thea’s death, there’s nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“Exactly one ‘Women’s Section’ article announcing that Beryl Cameron plans to visit her mother’s relatives in Italy. The writer barely mentions the girl’s name, uses it as a lead for a piece on what the fashionable young debutante should pack for a trip abroad. Then it turns into a tirade against blue jeans.”

“What’s the date on it?”

“I think August ’71.”

After Thea’s death. If Thea had been kidnapped, then murdered when something went wrong with negotiations for her release, the family might have sent their other daughter away for her safety …

No way. Four weeks from disappearance to death. Hardly long enough for ransom negotiations to go so badly awry.

I doubted a kidnapping. The FBI would have tried to slap a lid on it, but after the murder every detail would have spilled across the front page. And Mooney’d said the man in Walpole had been convicted of killing two other girls besides Thea.

Maybe the family had screamed “kidnapping” to stop the suicide stories.

“So Beryl might live in Italy?” I said to Roz.

“Far as the press is concerned, she never came back. But brother Garnet, he’s been busy enough for all three kids. Classic overachiever. Probably can’t fit his resume on a floppy disk, much less a single sheet of paper.”

“What’s he done?”

“What hasn’t he done? Harvard. Yale Law. Law Review. Worked as a public prosecutor, played in a jazz band, married young, divorced young. Ran for state Attorney General, remarried, currently running for governor, as you may have noticed—”

“And his only living sister hasn’t been part of his campaign?”

“Hasn’t been part of his life, far as I can tell.”

“Okay,” I said, figuring the eleven hundred bucks could stretch a little farther. “New task: See this photo?”

“Yep. Good work.”

“Could you age the subject twenty years?”

“Thea Janis? She’s dead. What’s the point?”

“The point is I’m willing to pay for it!” I snapped.

“Temper, temper,” Roz said. “You want to waste money, I’m your girl.”

Until I’d seen Thea’s death certificate, held it in my hand, studied the goddamned notary’s mark, I intended to believe the phony “Mayhew.” I’d believe in his sincerity, if not his name. He’d been on to something. I was presuming a hell of a lot. I knew that. I work in a business where you’ve got to trust your hunches.

“Can you age her?” I asked Roz.

“She was a looker, huh?”

“If she were alive, would she still be a looker?”

“Bones are bones,” Roz said, “but you can do a hell of a lot of damage. I mean, she could weigh four hundred pounds, she could have AIDS.”

“Do two or three versions,” I said. “No extremes. A little chunky, a little skinny, on target.”

“How old is she in the picture?”

“Fourteen.”

“So she’d be, what, thirty-four?”

“Thirty-nine.”

Roz’s eyes lit. “It’s gonna cost.”

“I know. And you can do one more thing.”

“Big bucks in this case.”

“Roz, it’s practically over. But for the hell of it, find me a 1954 Harvard yearbook.”

She opened her mouth, closed it, tried again. “How?”

“I don’t care, Roz. Impersonate someone. Walk up and down Brattle Street, bang doors, say you’re on a scavenger hunt.”

“A 1954 yearbook.”

“I want a picture of any graduating senior with the initials A.M.”

“Girl or boy?”

“Roz, listen up. You think they let girls into Harvard in 1954?”

It was too hot to contemplate volleyball. I tried to write Paolina a cheery letter, tossed three attempts.

I craved iced coffee, but found myself too lazy to make it. I settled for a breakfast Pepsi accompanied by the world’s sourest plum. Roz does the groceries. She has a knack for produce.

I did routine stuff, typing and filing, sending out bills along with one mildly threatening third reminder to pay up or deal with a nonexistent collection agency. Wrote out an account of the Janis/Cameron non-case based on my two encounters with “Adam Mayhew,” and my interview with Mr. Anthony Emerson of Avon Hill.

I found myself dawdling over the report. I couldn’t help it; I didn’t want the case to end. I didn’t want Thea dead. My mind kept inventing other scenarios. With Beryl so unsung by the press, I wondered if she could have died, while Thea lived on in obscurity. Writing, but not publishing, perhaps fearful, like other prodigies I’d heard of, that she’d lost her gift along with her youth, afraid she could never live up to such early promise.

Mooney would have laughed at me. When I was a cop he always used to say my imagination would get me in deep trouble. Murderers don’t confess for the hell of it, he’d say. And if they do, they don’t wind up at Walpole State Prison. A judge and a jury see to that. Still …

I found myself in profound sympathy with the man who’d called himself Adam Mayhew. If I, never knowing Thea, wanted so badly to believe her alive, imagine how someone who’d been close to her, who’d cherished her, might feel.

When I started dripping sweat on the pages, I quit and took another shower.

The phone rang while I was in the rinse cycle. I hopped out, grabbed a towel, and stumbled into my room in time to lift the receiver.

“My house has central air conditioning. The sheets are cool. The wine’s on ice.”

“And me totally naked. I’ll be right over.”

“Throw a robe on,” Keith Donovan said, ever conservative.

I suppose I’ve slept with a considerable number of guys, but Keith Donovan’s my first psychiatrist, far as I know. Before you label me an indiscriminate tramp, allow me to defend my honor, such as it is, by telling you that I went through a rough time after my first and only husband deserted me for cocaine and the blues circuit. A shrink might say my self-esteem was badly bruised. He might say I needed to prove I was still desirable. I proved it, for a few weeks, with a vengeance. Thank God Cal left me before AIDS became epidemic or I wouldn’t be here.

That brief adventure in one-night-stands is why I’m not quite sure whether Donovan’s my first psychiatrist. It’s not like I cut notches in my belt.

Sex always lands me in trouble. Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t start out as early as Thea, and I’m not ready or cut out for a life of celibacy. I merely have this unfortunate tendency to get involved with one Mr. Wrong after another. Some last for years, out of inertia, chemistry, whatever.

With Donovan, the sex part’s fine. I have the feeling that his profession will turn out to be the fatal flaw. I have no desire to be part of an article in the American Journal of Psychiatry entitled “Women and Guns in Bed.”

He had a brief affair with Roz before I became interested and available. That alone makes me suspicious of the man’s motivation.

Other than that, he’s young, handsome, blond, and conveniently located. So much for my motivation.

Keith’s house puts mine to shame. The mahogany handrail gleams along the staircase. The polished oak floorboards shine. He makes his bed with matching sheets.

His profession occasionally comes in handy. I can always get a question answered. The man will talk.

“Something to drink?” he said, holding open the door, just in case I hadn’t taken time to dress. I had. The neighbors gossip enough.

He ducked into the kitchen to grab a bottle of wine nested in ice cubes, all in a silver bucket. Crystal glasses were poised on his desk, as if they were waiting to have their picture taken for a glossy magazine. Keith uses his entire living room as an office, leaving precious little space for social intercourse. I settled on a square of hunter green carpet.

The Chardonnay was rich and buttery.

“Acacia,” he said as he poured, as if it should mean something other to me than expensive, which it obviously was.

I seem to have acquired a penchant for rich lovers. My mother, she should rest in peace, would have found that far more deplorable than promiscuity. Mom was a free spirit. Lovers, yes. Rich, no. Neither she nor my Scots-Irish Catholic father had much use for the Bible, except for the parts castigating the wealthy. I grew up hearing about a steady stream of rich men, camels, and eyes of needles. The message gradually made sense as I grew older.

I took another drink of amber bliss. Keith sank down beside me. I decided the carpet would be hot, so I stayed upright.

I said, “Talk to me about sexually precocious girls.”

“Is this kinky? Do you want to peel your jeans off first?”

“This is business: A fourteen-year-old who seduces prep school boys, possibly teachers as well.”

“The five-cent version is: ‘Lookin’ for love in all the wrong places.’”

“Would she be happy?”

“Miserable. Low self-esteem.”

Didn’t sound like Thea, polished author, feted poet.

“Would you be surprised if the girl left school, killed herself?” I asked.

“No.”

“Why would a young man she seduced say that she was totally into ‘free love,’ that she initiated everything, controlled everything?”

“Because it lets him off the hook.”

“Okay.”

“That’s all? Okay? Has the girl attempted suicide? Can she get into analysis?”

“Relax. It happened over twenty years ago. You were a baby.”

“Was not.”

“Were, too.”

“I wondered about the ‘free love.’ You don’t hear that much about ‘free love’ anymore.”

“’Cause there’s a price,” I said.

We took the wine upstairs and bypassed the day’s heat under smooth percale. A restless sleeper at best, I decided to give him a break and venture home around eleven. The night air felt warm and sticky as I scampered across two front yards to my door, holding my sandals, giving the neighbors something to talk about.

The red light on my message machine was going nuts when I came in. Six messages.

Sometimes a week goes by and I don’t get six calls.

The phone rang before I had a chance to touch the replay button. Goddamn crazy night. Hot nights are the worst for cops. People go nuts with the heat, attack their best friends, their lovers, with hammers, scissors, anything close to hand.

“You’re home. I thought perhaps it is that you unplug your phone.” The voice was heavily accented, female. I like most accented voices, enjoy the lilt, the music.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Oh, pardon me. I expect a recording device, not a real person … I am, perhaps, unprepared.”

“Who are you?” I said. It seemed like a good place to start.

“I am Tessa Cameron, Mrs. Franklin Cameron. I believe you know of me.”

Tessa. Thea’s mother. Who had no brother named Adam Mayhew, no brother with the initials A.M.

“Yes,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

“It is extremely urgent that I see you as soon as possible. Concerning a personal matter.” The voice had the superior tone of one accustomed to name-recognition. She spoke as though she were making a restaurant reservation at a dive that had no business expecting anyone of her status to darken their door.

“Not tonight,” I said.

She hesitated as if consulting an overcrowded appointment calendar. “At eleven tomorrow morning then.”

She seemed certain that my life could be reordered to suit hers. She’d almost hung up before I could assure her that eleven would not be convenient for me. I made it noon, just to let her simmer.

Strictly confidential, she insisted, as though my next logical move would be a phone call to a gossip columnist.

I started revising my positive thoughts concerning accents.

“Please,” she said softly, “you will bring my … property with you.”

“I don’t believe I have anything that belongs to you, Mrs. Cameron,” I said. Lying is even easier over the phone.

I was ready to say good-bye when she started rattling off directions. The thought that prospective clients might come to me had never occurred to her. I mean, probably her dressmaker, her hairstylist, her personal trainer all attended her at home. Why should I be different?

Why indeed? I took careful notes thinking I’d enjoy seeing the house where Thea Janis grew up. I was glad I’d held out for noon. Maybe I could snag an invitation to lunch, check under the dining table for serpents and scorpions.

I pressed my answering machine’s glowing numeral six with trepidation. By the time I’d finished listening to six messages, each from Tessa Cameron, each more demanding than the last, I figured I’d do my damnedest to place a call to Miami Vandenburg from her house.

Let the DEA deal with la Contessa Cameron.