48

She sat like a woman carved from rock. A hundred questions burned my throat, but I kept silent, ceding her the opening, letting her begin, so I’d get some idea where her thoughts were headed. Part of me was afraid she might fade into mist. I fought off the impulse to touch her, to feel solid flesh.

Slowly, she removed her hat. Her hair was gray, steel to Beryl’s yellowed white. No one would have confused the two sisters now, one bloated with medication, the other … merely average. Unremarkable.

All that was unique and beautiful in Thea, she’d made deliberately plain. Either that, or she’d changed so completely that her reckless beauty had evaporated. Her hair, vaguely curly, was an unstyled clump too heavy for her thin neck and sharp features. Tortoiseshell glasses hid the angle of her brow. She held her head low. Her chin seemed less pointed, less remarkably small. If she’d had plastic surgery she couldn’t have looked more different, and yet her features were the same. Under a short-sleeved khaki jacket, her breasts swelled, camouflaged but large for her small-boned body. All fire and color drained from her, Dorothy Cameron seemed plain as salt.

“Hello,” she said, glancing around as if she’d expected a larger audience. “You must be the detective. Carlyle.”

Her calm words floated on the mist and I shivered. It was the dampness of my clothes, I told myself, not the flicker of dread, not the sensation of hearing the voice of someone returned from a watery grave.

“You know who I am … who I was.” There was no lift at the end of the sentence. No question.

“Yes,” I said, when it seemed nothing else would follow unless I replied.

“I understand the police are holding my son.”

Mooney must have gotten the word out quickly.

“Alonso,” I said.

“Yes. I’m willing to deal: My freedom for his.”

I said, “The police want him for murder. I doubt they’ll find your offer attractive. Running away isn’t in the same league.”

“Oh, they’ll want me,” she said.

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because I killed Andrew Manley.” She nodded at the police tape. “Here. Friday night.”

“How long after he phoned me?” I asked.

“Don’t try to trip me up. I can answer all your niggling questions,” she said scornfully.

“Give it a try. Before we go to the police. Listen, Thea—”

She closed her eyes. “Call me Susan. Susan Gordon. I’ve been Susan Gordon most of my life.”

“Why did you kill Andrew Manley, Susan Gordon?”

“Because he never listened to me. He never believed in me. He didn’t trust my talent, because of Beryl. He assumed I was unstable, because of her. He should have seen through all that, though all the—” She came to an abrupt halt.

“Why kill him now?”

She sucked in a deep breath, regained control. “Because revenge is a dish best eaten cold,” she said.

“You’ve come back for revenge,” I echoed.

“And to make sure nothing happens to my son.”

“You ran away from Avon Hill because you were pregnant?”

“Oh no.” She shook her head, smiled crookedly. “What a foolish girl you must think I was.”

“I don’t think you were foolish.”

“Then grant me good reason for what I’ve done,” she said with the first hint of anger I’d heard in her voice. “I disappeared. I did it well. Because I had no other choice.”

I swallowed. I found her simple presence astonishing. Carved from rock. Edges worn away by the sea.

“You named your son for a gardener who disappeared,” I said, “disappeared the same day you did.”

“It’s not unusual to name a boy for his father.” I thought she smiled but it might have been a trick of the light. “Since I’d killed the man, it seemed the least I could do.”

If she’d killed the gardener, that would have been worth the payoffs, worth turning MacAvoy, worth using Heather Foley’s timely disaster.

Waves broke on the rocky shore, retreated into mist. She murmured, “‘Silenced for what they did to you, worse, far worse than caged for acts of rage.’” She shook her head, alarmed, as though she’d just realized she’d spoken out loud. “Excuse me. Susan has no poetry. Susan speaks plainly.”

Does Susan speak the truth?

“Do you have a key to the house?” I asked.

“No.”

“Do you know a way in?”

“Why?”

I didn’t want her sitting on a rock by the sea. I’d already lost one life to the Atlantic.

“I didn’t mean to kill him,” she said. “I paid for his death with my gift. I paid.”

I wasn’t sure if she was talking about Manley or about Alonso Nueves, gardener. Alonso, the Cuban day-jobber at Avon Hill, the romantic dreamboy of the Weston Psychiatric Institute. The man in Beryl’s cherished photo. Her lover, too, perhaps.

What would a man of Franklin Cameron’s stature have thought? Have done? His precious daughters and the gardener?

“Let’s talk about it in the big house,” I said gently. “Aren’t you cold?”

“Cold? No.” She folded her arms, rubbing them with her hands, her motion negating her denial. “I won’t go into that house.”

“Why?”

“Why should I? Don’t you trust me?” The shadowy smile again.

“With what?”

“With my life, with my life, with my life.”

I was starting to get angry with her verbal tricks. I said, “You’re playing for Alonso’s life, aren’t you? Your son’s life.”

“Can you arrest me?”

“I can make a citizen’s arrest, take you to the nearest station house. I can advise you to see a lawyer. I hope you have your details straight about Manley’s death. I hope you have an eyewitness.”

“Why?”

“Because your boy was seen on this stretch of beach. His motorbike was in the shed.”

“Circumstantial,” she said dismissively.

“But convincing,” I said. “And I hope you have proof about Alonso Nueves, too. Because I know the cop who’s handling this, and he’s going to want more than your sacred word of honor that friend Alonso didn’t take a hike that day.”

She was staring at the big house, her mouth moving. No words came out.

“What?” I asked.

“Have they kept it shut? Have they installed an alarm?”

“It’s been closed since you left. I don’t know about alarms, but I could give the place a once-over.”

“If we can get in, I can show you proof,” she said.

“But you don’t have a key.”

“There used to be a way, through a window with a loose jamb. As kids we crawled through, into a sink, so we never got hurt.”

“Show me,” I said. “Pix?”

No answer.

I’d told her to stay put.

But she was gone. She couldn’t help by fetching tools, getting a crowbar from my trunk.

First I checked the house for signs of a system. Almost everybody’s got one these days, those little glowing keypads by the side of the door, the red and green lights. The Camerons, bless them, had the kind I know best.

“Unless we’re unlucky and this is the particular window they’ve wired, we ought to be able to do it.” I kept my voice optimistic. If I’d deserted a beautiful home on the seaside, I’d have driven heavy nails through the ground-floor window jambs.

The rich are different. Once Thea had pointed out the window, one of fourteen identical slits, it went like clockwork. She helped me remove the screen. Her nails were clipped short, unvarnished. No nonsense, like her clothes. She moved like a woman in a dream. I rarely took my eyes off her.

“The, lock’s broken. The top half of the window should slide right down,” she said. “We may have to tap it or something.”

Oil would have been nice. A hammer, a screwdriver.

Even as I thought about the items we lacked, the sill groaned and gave, sinking twelve inches.

“You first,” I ordered Thea. “Clear space for me, but don’t move around. If you see a glowing red light on the wall, don’t, I repeat, don’t walk in front of it.”

Her face grew even paler. “Don’t leave me in there alone,” she said.

“The sooner you go, the sooner I follow.”

She slipped off her sandals like a veteran housebreaker. She went in backward, feet first.

Don’t think I had no qualms about following. For the first time, I envied cell phone owners. I could have called Mooney, gotten his scalding advice. I didn’t want to crawl into an unlit basement with a confessed murderess.

But, dammit, I did want to find out what Thea’d hidden there so long ago.

Head first? Feet first? I followed Thea’s example.

Sometimes the riskiest moves turn, in a tick of the clock, into the most ridiculous. Inside, I flicked on my flashlight to discover Thea and me cowering in a huge old double sink, one woman to each compartment. We exchanged glances, mine wry. This didn’t look like the boogeyman’s hideout to me. But Thea’s eyes hid no smile. They stared blankly across the room. I held up my flash. When she saw the huge white freezer chest, she gasped.

“You’ll see,” she said, starting to unfold herself.

“Wait,” I said.

“Why? You got me in here. I want to get out as fast as I can.”

“Unless you know the four-digit code, we have to crawl under the motion detector. See the red light on the left wall? It’s between here and the freezer. If that’s where you want to go, crawl.”

“What if we—”

“Set off the alarm? You get your choice—identifying yourself as a member of the family, or running like hell.”

“Great,” she muttered.

“I don’t think we’ll have to,” I said soothingly, lifting myself out of the—thank God—empty sink. “I’ve seen this system before. To set it ringing, you pretty much have to walk straight through a beam, and the beams aren’t wide. You ought to tell the family to upgrade.”

The floorboards were wooden. Heavy planks, six-by-tens, worn smooth, dusty as hell.

“Keep your tail down,” I hissed as we slipped under the beam, Thea doing the baby crawl, me going army-style, hands and elbows, dragging my legs.

“Okay,” I said. “Up.”

Thea said, “Is it locked? The freezer?”

“If it is, I hope you have the key.”

“Try the door,” she said impatiently, looking away.

“What’s inside?”

“Whatever remains of a man after twenty-four years in a freezer,” she said firmly. Then she swallowed.

I assumed the door would be locked, so I gave it a halfhearted tug. It opened. Nothing tumbled out. I shone my flashlight on wrapped packages tagged “spareribs.” Ice cream cartons. Frozen lemonade in yellow cans.

“Well?” she said.

“You can look,” I said. “I don’t think you’ll find it too upsetting.”

I was wrong.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “Where could he be? They could have buried him anywhere on the estate, towed him out to sea.”

“I don’t think so, Thea.”

“Susan,” she said automatically, still stricken by the contents of the freezer.

“Susan.”

“They’ll never believe me now.”

“Who’s they?”

“The police.”

“The other ‘they.’ The ones who moved the body.”

“None of your business,” she said.