LATER HE WENT TO FEY AND ASKED IF HE COULD GET INTO Mary’s rooms—that she wanted something from them.
“What does she want,” Fey asked, looking up at him curiously from his desk.
“She wants her childhood comforter,” John said. Perhaps he shouldn’t have told—but he was only a tourist and this was a murder investigation.
Fey shrugged as if he did not comprehend. But John knew he had. Fey spoke to a police officer, and John was led out and down the street toward the resort again.
John was let into her rooms at 3:34 in the afternoon; a two-bedroom townhouse villa shaded by coconut palms, and an old broken lawn chair on the balcony overlooking the empty back pool and the water in the distance. A lizard scurried along the brick tile and hid; another moved and craned its neck toward him.
A disordered apartment. But it was disordered by a search. Both beds had been slept in. There was a bottle of gin on the cupboard—and the bottle was three-quarters gone—and there was police tape around the dresser. There were two books on this dresser. One was Introduction to Conversational French. The second, open and half-read, was The Royal Twenty-Second Regiment in Action—a history of the Quebec regiment, the Van Doos, that fought heroically in both world wars.
The comforter was in fact rolled up near the headboard of Mary’s bed, and she was right—it looked as if it was part of the pillow. Whoever looked at the bed did not look at it as being particular. Besides, this room was not searched like the other bedroom, where the young boy’s body had been found. He took Plu and put it into a plastic bag he had in his pocket. And there was something inside the blanket’s pouch. Her diary.
He put it into the plastic bag as well.
Then he went into the other bedroom.
John looked everywhere in that room, in the closet and behind the balcony door curtains. He went to the balcony door. There was a stain on the door pull. What did that mean? Well, it could very likely mean that the boy was bleeding outside, before he ever got to the townhouse.
John realized something else. The youngster was also spitting—perhaps he was trying to get his breath.
Certainly they should know this by now. So if they knew it, they wanted to deny it. He shrugged, went into Mary’s bedroom and sat on the side of the bed, trying to catch his breath. He felt a lump in his chest, as if he wouldn’t be able to breathe, and then stood and walked unsteadily to the counter and took a drink of bottled water.
He suddenly felt the first cold inkling of the intractableness of the past and how it would play into the charges against her.
“Victor is dead, and little Florin is missing—”
And even though he knew nothing about them, he felt a sudden well of sympathy and despair.
Later that day John went back to the police station and inquired about the toxicology report. That report, no matter in what manner collected or no matter how tepid, did not have to be released until the trial—and the trial might be twelve months away. But the German and his Dutch wife already knew the police were going to say it was arsenic. Now that it was considered arsenic, it would take weeks to say it was not and have anyone believe it.
“Everyone knows it’s preposterous,” the Dutch doctor said. “But now that she is in jail on that charge they will not or cannot change it.” She said she had spent years in Mexico and understood them.
“Zodra dit een nationale verhaal wordt zal ze niet veranderen,” she said, quickly.
“It’s a national story and they won’t change up their minds,” the German translated.
Besides, the worst of it was—John had to get back to the cases he was working on in Canada. A case concerning a woman named Velma Cheval.
And the secret was Constable Fey knew this. Perhaps was waiting him out.
John was allowed to see Mary once again. It was now four o’clock.
The sun still burned in the sky over the water as it settled. There was a smell of early supper. He asked her.
“NO. I wasn’t his girlfriend—do they think that?”
“Yes.”
This seemed to catch her unprepared, and in this a kind of revelation overcame her—her features looked amazed at the “thing” now developing against her.
“But he was just a little boy—he was going to help me. He was young enough to be my son—almost grandson.”
“Help you do what?”
“Help people. I came here to help people. What else in my life can go wrong?”
John looked at her frightened, almost hilarious, gaze and said:
“Hopefully nothing else!”
He remembered her as a child. Many times he had to protect her because of the fear the family had that someone would abduct her. Initially that is why he was hired. Although John was never made privy to why this worry had resulted, he was almost sure there must have been a threat. Perhaps it was the idea of her mother coming to claim her? Now he was almost certain of it.
So they made a game of looking out for strangers—though John had thought after meeting Garnet that she had been surrounded by them most of her life. He gave her his number when she was a young girl and told her to phone him whenever she felt uncomfortable about anything.
“Oh—” she now said. “Dear me.”