Six
The next morning Jane stopped at Whipped Cream, as she did every morning before work, for coffee and an apple-raisin muffin. She took her usual table near the fireplace, which was now filled with a brass pot of dried flowers.
Ginny came over with the coffeepot.
“You okay?” Jane asked her.
“Yeah. I was mostly upset for the kids, that they had to see that. Me, I’ve seen that sort of thing before.”
“You have?”
Ginny shot a glance over the tall counter to make sure George, the owner, wasn’t around. When she was sure he wasn’t, she dropped into the chair opposite Jane’s.
“When I was twelve I found my Uncle Dave hanging in our attic.”
“Ginny, how horrible! You never told me.”
“It’s one of those things you block out. But it sure came back yesterday.”
Jane decided not to tell Ginny Nick’s murder theory. What would telling her accomplish other than upsetting her further? “I’m so sorry. Why did he kill himself?”
“Because he was gay and he didn’t want to be.”
“How sad.”
Ginny’s gaze was downcast. “I loved him like I can’t tell you.”
“It might have been different for him now.”
“I often think that—which just makes me sadder.” Ginny looked up sharply at a sound behind the counter. George’s beady black eyes stared at her from just over the top.
“Oops,” she whispered, “back to work.”
“Hello, George!” Jane called cheerily.
George made a grunting sound and disappeared.
Ginny crossed the shop and poured coffee for a man who was reading the Star Ledger. He held the paper high as he read something inside, and Jane could read the front page headline from where she sat: CLOWN GIRL FOUND HANGING BEHIND AFFLUENT VILLAGE’S INN.
“What do you think of that?” Ginny asked on her way past Jane’s table.
“Not much,” Jane said. “ ‘Clown girl’ . . . That’s awful.”
“Heard anything more about it?” Ginny asked, on the lookout for George.
“No.”
“Louise is very upset.”
“Of course she is,” Jane said. “You would be, too, if it had happened behind your inn.”
“It’s not just that,” Ginny said. “I talked to Louise last night—called her to make sure she was okay. She sounded funny, like she knew more than she was telling.”
“You mean, as if maybe she did know who that young woman was?”
“I don’t know. . . .” Ginny looked bewildered. “All I can say for sure is that she wasn’t upset only because it happened behind her inn. Better get Mr. Raymond’s croissant.” She hurried behind the counter.
Jane didn’t feel like lingering that morning. She finished her coffee and left half her muffin. Leaving a nice tip for Ginny, she took her bill to the register.
“You were quick today,” Ginny murmured as she rung up the amount and handed Jane her change.
“Mm, lots to do.” Jane noticed a stack of placards lying faceup on the counter near the register. They were upside down but she could tell they were for the upcoming church bazaar, a major spring event in Shady Hills. George was always willing to post placards on the front of the counter under the register.
“You going?” Jane asked, indicating the placards.
“Of course! Who doesn’t? Besides, I have to. Rob sells his jewelry there every year, remember?”
How could Jane forget? Every year, out of loyalty to Ginny, she bought a piece of Rob’s jewelry, even though she disliked Rob’s designs almost as much as she disliked Rob. “Nick loves the bazaar, and I enjoy it, too. But this”—she tilted her head toward the man’s upraised newspaper—“should put a bit of a damper on the festivities.”
“Can’t be helped,” Ginny said on a deep sigh, and slammed the register drawer shut. “See you around.”
Jane gave Ginny a smile and left the shop. She crossed Center Street and started down one of the brick paths that crossed the village green. The massive ancient oaks, towering above the grass and the white Victorian bandstand, were in full leaf now, and a gentle breeze passed through them with a shooshing sound. It was another glorious day—brilliant blue sky with only a few puffy clouds, sun shining brightly, probably a perfect seventy degrees. But very bad things could happen on glorious days, Jane reminded herself, and a chill passed through her as she crossed Center Street again and entered her office.
Daniel had the Star Ledger open on his desk. He was reading the story under the clown headline. He shook his head. “This is reprehensible! They make us sound like some tawdry little cauldron of sin.”
“Hey, I like that! Write it down for Bertha.”
“I’m serious, Jane. You should read this. This reporter is absolutely salivating. But what is there to salivate about? A pathetic young woman decides to kill herself, and for whatever warped reason, she decides to do it behind the inn. Why is that so . . . salacious?”
Jane sat down in his visitor’s chair. “Is that what they call it? A suicide?”
“Yes.”
She considered. “Then I guess the angle is that she’s a mystery woman. I really should read that, I suppose,” she added.
“Laura’s been crying off and on since it happened. This kind of story doesn’t help. I still don’t see why it’s such big news.”
“Neither does the newspaper, obviously.”
He frowned. “What do you mean?”
Jane leaned forward. “Nick gets the credit for this one.” And she told Daniel Nick’s two theories.
“Nick said that?”
“Yup. Smart kid, huh? What do you think?”
Daniel thought for a moment. “I vote for theory number one. I still believe she killed herself. And I’m sorry, Jane, but just because Nick says he studied the way the tree was shaped doesn’t mean he’s right. She may in fact have found a way to put the noose around her neck and then jump from a branch, or she may have stood on something and then kicked it far enough away that Nick wouldn’t have seen it. The police will determine exactly what happened, I’m sure.”
The police . . . Jane thought about Detective Greenberg as she entered her office and tossed her bag onto her desk. He had been quite pleasant to her, under the circumstances, and it was kind of him to have remembered her. She realized now that he was quite a good-looking man, something she hadn’t noticed the first time she’d met him.
She spent the first half of the morning reading book proposals by her clients. Bill Haddad had written a synopsis and the first hundred pages of a new thriller for St. Martin’s. It was really a very clever idea—that a woman would stage her own murder to shed her unhappy life, only to find out someone had taken her place—with her husband’s complicity. The story’s heroine—and her replacement—were avid tennis players, and Bill had called the book Doubles. Very clever.
Barbara Ianelli had sent Jane a proposal for a romance she hoped Silhouette would want for its Desire line, but the proposal had a lot of problems. For one thing, all of Barbara’s previous novels had been for the Christian inspirational market, and though she was an excellent writer, she had carried that tone into this proposal intended for sexy, secular Desire. “Too inspirational,” Jane jotted on the title page.
In need of a break from proposals, Jane picked up an advance reading copy of Relevant Gods, a novel by Carol Freund that she had sold for a high advance last fall to Holly Griffin, executive editor at Corsair Publishing. The book’s official publication date was in two weeks, and Corsair would be throwing Carol a lavish publication party on Thursday. Jane remembered that she was scheduled to have lunch with Holly, whom Jane could barely tolerate, tomorrow, and that at this lunch Holly would give Jane details of the party.
Jane studied the front of the reading copy, which bore a less expensively printed version of the book’s jacket. In the background was a detail from Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam panel on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—the hand of God not quite reaching Adam’s. The novel’s title ran across the top in lettering meant to look old like the painting, and Carol’s name was at the bottom in the same type. Jane felt that this jacket was just all right, not especially imaginative—that hand image, in Jane’s opinion, had become a visual cliché—but she didn’t hate it, and Holly and her colleagues at Corsair adored it, so Jane hadn’t made a fuss, especially since Carol herself liked it.
Shaking her head, Jane swiveled in her chair and tossed the reading copy onto the cluttered credenza behind her. As she turned back to her desk, there was a soft knock on her door and Daniel popped his head in. When he had ascertained that she was not on the phone, he slipped into the room and quietly closed the door.
“Jane,” he said, a perplexed expression on his face, “Doris is here.”
She frowned. “My knitting Doris? Doris Conway?”
He made a shushing gesture with one finger. “Yes.”
Doris had never come to Jane’s office before. “Why is she here?” Jane whispered.
“No idea. She wants to talk to you.”
Jane shrugged. “Okay.” She got up and went to the door, following Daniel into the reception area. Doris stood near Daniel’s desk. It seemed to Jane that she looked more stooped than usual, more frail.
“Hello, Doris,” Jane said brightly. “This is a pleasant surprise.”
Doris didn’t return Jane’s smile—not that Doris smiled much anyway. She looked quite serious; Jane even wondered if she was upset about something. Perhaps what had happened at the inn.
“Jane, can I talk to you?”
“Of course. Come on in. Coffee?”
“No.”
Jane showed the older woman into her office and shot Daniel a baffled look before closing the door. “Have a seat,” she said, indicating her visitor’s chair, and sat behind the desk. What could Doris possibly need to talk to her about that couldn’t wait until their next knitting club meeting? Jane noticed that Doris was pale and that her hands were shaking ever so slightly. Jane had never seen her like this. “Doris, what’s wrong? Is it about what happened at Louise’s yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“We’re all upset about that, of course.”
“It’s more than that.” Doris met Jane’s gaze. She seemed to be trying to decide where to begin. “Jane,” she said at last, “you know I volunteer at the Senior Center on Mondays and Wednesdays.”
Jane nodded. The Shady Hills Senior Center was an upscale nursing home on Cranmore Avenue, on the west side of town. What could this possibly have to do with the girl found hanging behind Hydrangea House? “Yes . . .”
“Did you know that my nephew Arthur works there, too?”
Jane shook her head, frowning slightly. “I didn’t even know you had a nephew, Doris.”
“Well, I do. He’s my younger sister Marge’s boy. I’ve told you about Marge, I’m sure I have. She passed away six years ago. Pancreatic cancer.”
Jane nodded sympathetically.
“Arthur—Arthur Sullivan is his name—he works at the Center full-time. He’s been there about two and a half years. I helped him get the job there.”
“Is he . . . a doctor?” Jane asked.
“No,” Doris scoffed. “Arthur . . . he’s mildly retarded. He’s thirty-eight. He can pretty much take care of himself, lives in a group home here in the village, but there are only certain jobs he’s qualified to do. He works as an orderly at the Center.”
“I see. But I don’t see how this relates to what happened at the inn.”
“Lemme finish. This morning when I got to the Center, Arthur came to talk to me. He was very upset. I’d never seen him so upset. He asked to talk to me privately. He said he had ‘a secret.’ ”
“A secret?”
“That’s right. I took him into an empty TV room and he told me what was on his mind.” Doris paused, clearly reluctant to reveal Arthur’s secret. At last she continued. “A week ago Friday—that would be ten days ago now—Arthur was walking along Cranmore Avenue. It was lunchtime, and he was on his way into the village to buy a sandwich at the Village Shop. He does that every day.
“As he was walking, he heard a sound behind him. He turned and saw a young woman come out of the woods. When she saw him, she started to run back into the trees, but he called after her, and she came back. She walked with him.”
Jane stared at Doris intently. “Who was she?”
Doris shook her head. “She wouldn’t tell him. Wouldn’t tell him where she’d come from, either. Arthur grew up in Shady Hills. He knows everybody. He knew she wasn’t from here in town. He said she was pretty, with brown hair. She was wearing a pale blue dress with little white flowers.”
“Like the hanging woman,” Jane said quietly.
“Yes, like the hanging woman.”
“Why was she here?”
“She wouldn’t tell him that, either. But the strangest thing was that when he asked her where she was going, she told him she was on her way to Shady Hills! He told her she was in Shady Hills, and when she heard this she was—overjoyed! Arthur tried again to get her to tell him what she was doing here, but she refused. All she would tell him was that she had a ‘wonderful surprise’—that was how she put it. Then, after they’d walked a little more, she told him she had come to meet someone here in town. She couldn’t say who because she didn’t want to ruin the surprise for that person—and she wasn’t ready to approach that person yet. She told Arthur that in the meantime, she needed a map of the village and was looking for a place to stay where no one would find her.”
Doris’s hands shook nervously as she fingered the collar of her fluffy white cardigan—a sweater Jane remembered seeing Doris knitting at the club.
“As I told you, Arthur grew up here,” Doris went on. “He knew a place to show her. He walked with her into town, then took her down Plunkett Lane all the way to Hadley Pond. From there he led her into the woods beside the pond to a cave where he used to play when he was a little boy. He said she was delighted. He told her to wait there while he went into town for the map she wanted and some food. He walked back into town and bought a map and some sandwiches and soda, and brought it all back to her. She thanked him, and he asked her if she needed anything else. She said no, so Arthur left her there and returned to work.”
“Didn’t he think all this was strange?” Jane asked. “Why didn’t he say anything to anyone?”
“Because she had told him it was her ‘secret,’ ” Doris reminded Jane. “He wanted to honor that. Arthur’s a good boy. He just doesn’t . . . question things like that.”
Jane waited, watching the older woman.
“That was the last he saw of her,” Doris said. “He knows she was the same woman we found behind the inn yesterday. He recognized the newspapers’ description of her dress and also of the girl herself. Who else could it be?
“Arthur’s in a panic. He’s terrified. Jane,” Doris said, leaning forward on the desk, her wrinkled face pleading, “Arthur didn’t kill that woman. Arthur couldn’t hurt another person; it’s simply not in his nature. But he’s afraid the police will think he did it. And he was in the cave with her for a moment, while he showed it to her, and the police—well, these days they seem to have all kinds of ways of knowing who’s been where.” She frowned, as if she disapproved of such methods. “Also, Arthur isn’t certain he wasn’t seen walking with her on Cranmore. A lot of cars do pass by.”
“Doris,” Jane said, remembering Nick’s theories, “what makes you think the woman was killed by another person?”
Doris sat up, shocked at this question. “What are you talking about? We found her hanging there. Jane, what the devil are you talking about?”
“To me it looked like simple suicide,” Jane said innocently. “She hanged herself.”
Doris gave her a look of amused disdain. “For someone People magazine called North Jersey’s Miss Marple, you’re not very observant. There was nothing under that poor girl’s feet—no rock, no nothing. Jane, that girl was strung up! And the sicko who did it smeared that makeup all over her face.”
Jane, taken aback, sat up straight in her chair. “All right. Makeup aside, how do we know she didn’t put the noose around her neck and jump from a branch of the tree?”
Doris shook her head firmly. “Something else you didn’t look at very closely. There were no branches she could have jumped from—all the other branches were much too high on the tree.”
“Doris,” Jane asked searchingly, “why . . . how could you have studied all of this closely, and in so little time? We couldn’t have been there more than half a minute before we got the children out of there.”
Doris was unruffled by this question. “You forget I was a schoolteacher for forty-five years, Jane. When you’re a teacher you have to notice everything or you’re lost.” She gave a little chuckle. “I think you’re the one who has to work on her observation skills.”
Jane forced a smile. “North Jersey’s Miss Marple was People magazine’s name for me, not mine. I have no interest in detective work.”
Doris shrugged indifferently. “Be that as it may, anyone with eyes and half a brain could see that girl was murdered.”
Jane knew Doris too well to be insulted. “Well, here’s a question from my half brain: Couldn’t the girl have used something to stand on, which someone else later took away?”
Doris stared at her. “If she had, why would anyone have taken it away? You mean someone who found her before we did?”
“Possibly.”
“But why?” Doris repeated. “To make a suicide look like murder—what reason could anyone have to do such a thing?”
“I don’t know. I’m just putting forward all theories.”
Doris waved this all away with a flip of her hand. “I think you do have an interest in detective work, Jane. But you’re lousy at it. The important point is that it’s clear someone killed that girl, and it wasn’t my Arthur.”
“So he says.”
“I told you,” Doris blurted out, “he could never do such a thing. Besides, why would he have told me about it in the first place if he’d hurt her?”
“To cover himself! That’s pretty obvious.” A thought occurred to Jane. “Doris, why have you told me all this?”
Doris looked down at her hands. “Because, believe it or not, Jane, you’re the most sensible friend I have.”
Jane bit her tongue at this backhanded compliment.
Doris went on, “I need advice about what to do now—if I should do anything. And I have to admit you did a pretty good job of putting two and two together when your Marlene disappeared.”
Jane had to smile. “Despite my being lousy at detective work, eh? But that involved a murder case, Doris, and you’ve just insisted that Arthur is incapable of hurting anyone.”
Again Doris looked down. She mumbled something.
“Excuse me? I didn’t hear you.”
Doris met Jane’s gaze. “Maybe . . . maybe I’m not so sure.”
Jane gaped at Doris. “Then you think Arthur could have done it?”
“I don’t really think that, Jane, not really. I think he’s an innocent man who may be blamed for this. But if there’s any chance that he might have done it, then he would have to be . . . dealt with, wouldn’t he? He would have to be stopped from hurting other people.”
“Yes, he would,” Jane said. Doris had tears in her eyes now, and Jane’s heart went out to her. “Doris, whatever really happened, you have to go to the police. They’ll want to question Arthur. Especially if someone driving on Cranmore did see him with that girl, wouldn’t it be better for Arthur to come forward than for them to find out and go after him? I’m sure that, as you say, he’s not capable of hurting anyone, but he can no doubt provide some clues to her identity.”
“You’re right, Jane. I’m going to tell Arthur we have to go to the police. I suppose I knew all along that that was what we had to do. I just needed to hear it from someone whose judgment I respect. Jane,” Doris said, her eyes beseeching, “will you go to the police with us? You know that Detective Greenberg. I saw him speaking to you at the inn.”
“Of course I’ll go with you. But you must be aware that the police will want to question Arthur alone.”
“I know, but until that moment, he—and I—could use your . . . moral support.”
“Maybe I can give you more than that,” Jane said. “If you like, I’ll speak to Detective Greenberg first about Arthur and his story.”
“Oh, yes, I’d like you to do that,” Doris said eagerly.
Jane rose and Doris followed suit, Jane leading the older woman toward the office door. Before opening it, Jane said, “I’ll call him this afternoon. And I’ll meet you at the police station whenever you and Arthur go.”
“Thank you, Jane. If Detective Greenberg gives you a time, you just let me know and we’ll be there.”
“All right. I’ll call you right after I speak to him.” She opened the door and Doris preceded her into the reception room. Daniel looked up, his face composed, but Jane saw the consternation in his dark eyes.
“Good-bye, Daniel,” Doris murmured to him, then looked back at Jane. “Good-bye, Jane. Thank you.” And looking older and more frail than Jane had ever seen her look, she walked slowly to the door and let herself out.