17

“SEE YOU IN THE DINING ROOM,” Charlie said on Saturday morning. Constance was not quite finished dressing as he left. He started down the stairs, but midway he halted, listening.

“I won’t leave her here! She can’t stay here with all this going on.”

He couldn’t see the woman speaking, but the panic in her voice was loud and clear. He took another step or two down, enough to see several clusters of people standing outside the breakfast room, some of them holding newspapers, all of them looking agitated, frightened. With a sigh he went on to the foyer that served as a lobby, picked up a newspaper on the registration desk, then headed back to the stairs and up to their room.

“It’s started,” he said as he entered. The front page of the local newspaper, The Herald, had a banner headline: Is There A Bainbridge Curse? Under it a second line read: Second Woman Murdered.

Together he and Constance scanned the brief article. “I say we get the hell out of here and find breakfast somewhere down the road,” Charlie said. “Do you have the map?”

“In my bag,” she said, picking it up.

They went down and were almost to the door when Charlie spotted Millie Olaf hurrying toward them, he suspected with a message from the sheriff or Chief Engleman. He quickened their pace out the door and to the car.

“Onward,” he said, leaving the parking lot. “I imagine the Lakeview Resort has breakfast for its guests. Let’s eat there and then hit the road. A nice leisurely drive in the country to calm your nerves.”

#

They pulled in at the curb at Teresa Briacchi March’s house a few minutes before eleven. This was a working-class neighborhood, the houses small and for the most part well maintained, but the signs of financial trouble were all around with a foreclosure sign on one house, one boarded up, and two For Sale signs within a block. The recession had hit hard here apparently.

The woman who opened the door for them was tired-looking and anxious. “Mrs. March?” Constance asked, and at the woman’s nod she introduced herself and Charlie.

“Come in,” Teresa March said. “What did you mean, it’s something about Andrea?”

She had big dark eyes and black hair showing a gray strand or two, drawn back in a loose ponytail. Although a little too thin, she looked fit and had a nice suntan. She took them to a living room comfortably furnished with old easy chairs, a coffee table at a sofa, and several shelves of books. Library books were on the coffee table. Several framed photographs were on shelves and tables.

“Please, make yourselves comfortable,” she said, gesturing toward the chairs. She perched on the edge of the sofa.

“Mrs. March,” Charlie said, “we’re private investigators and a matter we’ve been looking into seemed to involve your daughter and Earl Marshall, and possibly his sister Dorothy Dumond. What we’re really interested in was the period when your daughter was attending Stillwater College, when she stopped, and if possible to learn why she dropped out when she had a scholarship for another full year.”

Teresa’s expression was of bewilderment and disappointment. “I thought… I hoped you had something to tell me about her death,” she said.

“I hope you can tell us something about that,” Constance said. “Did you believe it was an accident?”

She shook her head. “Why? How could she have done that accidentally? Dorothy suggested that she did it on purpose, but she didn’t. I know that much. She would not have killed herself. She didn’t. And neither was she seeing someone secretly.”

“Please tell us what you can of that period,” Constance said, her voice gentle and low.

Teresa looked from her to Charlie, moistened her lips, and in a near whisper asked, “Do you think it was an accident? First, you tell me that much.”

“No, Mrs. March, we’re inclined to believe that it was not an accident. But we know so little about that last year of her life, we have very little to base a conclusion on.”

“Thank God,” Teresa said and closed her eyes for a moment as if her words had been a true expression of gratitude. Words that needed a silent Amen.

“At last someone might look into it,” she said in a low voice. “I wanted an investigation, a real investigation at the time. They told me there was nothing to indicate that additional inquiries were necessary. Earl was talking to Mr. Wasserman, Dorothy was in bed, people saw the lights go down the hillside. They said it was all reported, checked and verified, nothing more could be done. They called it an accident and closed the case.”

“Mrs. March, do you know why she dropped out of college when she did?” Charlie asked.

She shook her head. “She called me just before she dropped out. She was upset. She wanted to know if it was true that Howard Bainbridge had provided the scholarship, but I couldn’t tell her anything. I didn’t know, and I hadn’t thought of him in years. I asked her what difference it made and she said it made a big difference, but she wouldn’t say more than that. She stopped going that same week. I tried to get her to reconsider, but she said her mind was made up.” She drew in a breath. “She should not have married Earl. They were both too young. She had been happy, doing well in school, planning a future. She had an apartment, small, but her own apartment. She was so pleased by that, so happy. The scholarship gave her enough to live on by herself, but after she married him, it wasn’t enough for two. There were always money worries, and it got worse after she gave up that scholarship. She hardly ever called during that last year, and when she did, she had little to say. They were planning to move, be by themselves after he graduated and got a job. That’s what she wanted to do, live by themselves, not in that house with Dorothy. She said Earl wanted it too, to live by themselves somewhere else.”

“Didn’t Earl have money of his own?” Charlie asked.

“A little, not enough. Andrea said that when his mother died, he was a minor and Dorothy was his guardian, and continued to control whatever money there was even after they were married. He wanted Dorothy to sell the house, split the money, but she refused. It was left to them both equally and neither could do anything without the other’s consent, and she wouldn’t sell. I think for the year Andrea was still collecting living expenses, she was pretty much supporting all three of them. I never did know how much money Dorothy had, or if she simply wouldn’t touch it, or what was going on, but I do know that Andrea and Earl had practically nothing.”

Answering one of Charlie’s questions she said that Mr. and Mrs. Wasserman were good people. She had worked for him from time to time, and they both had been terribly sorry for her loss. Mr. Wasserman wouldn’t have lied about seeing taillights.

“Mrs. March,” Constance said, “you said Andrea had been happy before she married Earl. Did she love him? Did he love her?”

“I know she loved him,” Teresa said after a moment. “And I think he loved her as much as he could love any woman. It wasn’t their relationship that was failing them. It was the living arrangement. He had always been taken care of by his sister and his mother, and then he was being taken care of by Dorothy and Andrea. Nothing had changed for him, and I think he was happy. She wouldn’t hear a word against him and really believed that once they were by themselves, responsible only for themselves, he would change. She said once, just a few months before… They were counting the days until he would graduate, get a job, and they would move.” She looked at her hands tightly clasped in her lap. “Maybe he would have changed if it had happened. He was so immature. Maybe taking responsibility would have helped him grow up. Newlyweds should not live with relatives. It would have been better if they had moved out, no matter how little money they had. They could have found part-time jobs or something.”

Charlie brought up the day that Howard Bainbridge had given Andrea the bicycle when she was a child. “Will you tell us about that?”

Startled, Teresa looked from him to Constance, back. “Why? What does that have to do with her death?” Color flamed on her cheeks suddenly and she jumped up. “You can’t believe he was seeing her later, that she met him. That’s what Dorothy hinted at, but it’s a lie!”

“We don’t think that,” Constance said. “We don’t know if that incident with the bicycle means anything, but we have to fill in blanks however and whenever we come across them, and that’s a blank.”

Slowly Teresa sank back down to the sofa and cleared her throat. “One day he came to our apartment and asked to speak to me for a minute. I had never met him before and I was suspicious, I guess. He said he wanted to express his gratitude to the little girl who had saved his life, and he thought a bicycle might be appropriate, if I had no objection. He was quiet spoken and, I don’t know, very sad maybe. He looked like a young man who had suffered, and was still suffering.” She paused, then added, “He was kind and gentle, and he was like that when he saw Andrea and told her what he had for her. Kind and gentle. I told him she never had ridden a bicycle, that she didn’t know how. He asked if I minded if he made sure she could handle it, that he didn’t want her to get hurt, to try riding it before she was ready. I went with them and watched him teach her how to ride a bicycle. She was overjoyed, and pretty soon he was laughing with her, running to keep up with her, and he seemed to be enjoying it almost as much as she was. He was a young man, in his twenties, I think, but he was like a boy that day, running and laughing at her side as she pedaled. He bought her ice cream and he wheeled the bike so she could eat it as they came back to where I was waiting. At first she had been shy with him, but she was talking easily by then, as they walked down the block toward me. I could tell that he was different, more serious or something, and really listening to her talk. Most adults don’t really listen to kids. They just pretend, indulge them, but they don’t listen, treat them seriously, but he did. I could see them, see how she must have been prattling, licking ice cream, and how he changed, with his head turned toward her, smiling at first, then more and more serious or something. It made me suspicious again. You know, a stranger giving your little girl presents, paying such attention to her. I was afraid that maybe he really did have something else on his mind. He didn’t stay more than a minute after that. He shook her hand as if she were an adult and said thank you to her. He thanked me, and he got in his car and left.

“I thought about it a lot over the next months, of course, and even kept an eye out for him, in case he came back, and she did too. She wanted him to come back She’d hear a car stop out front and run to the window, but gradually it faded. She stopped talking about him and I stopped worrying. It became just another one of those memories of the past. That’s why, when she asked if he had given her the scholarship, I was surprised and couldn’t say. I simply hadn’t thought about him in years. But I guess he must have done it. I didn’t know anyone else who could have afforded such a gift.”

They stayed for a while longer and learned that after high school Andrea had taken a job clerking in a department store. “She never had a chance to meet Mr. Bainbridge,” her mother said in answer to Charlie’s question. “We moved here to Newton when she was thirteen, she babysat, there was high school, a job. There simply wasn’t time. Then a letter came asking her to verify her identity, and telling her about the scholarship.” She looked down at her hands as she said bitterly, “At first I thought maybe it was from her father. He abandoned us when she was an infant. I thought, maybe hoped, that he’d had a change of heart, wanted to bear some of his responsibility. Wrong. I had his number and called him, but he was drinking, kids crying in the background. I hung up. I never learned who provided the scholarship, or why. Now you say it was Howard Bainbridge because she saved his life. But why would that have caused her to drop out of school the way she did? There must have been something else.”

“That’s one of the things we’re trying to find out,” Constance said. “Thank you, Mrs. March. You’ve been very helpful in filling in some of the details. We appreciate it.”

“If you learn anything more, will you tell me?”

“Absolutely we will,” Constance said.

Teresa pointed to one of the photographs on an end table. “Her high school graduation picture with me,” she said.

In the photograph Andrea was lovely, shorter and more delicate-looking than her mother, with the same big dark eyes and black hair. She was smiling broadly, holding her cap as if ready to fling it into the air.

When they reached the car, Charlie got behind the wheel. “Two stops,” he said. “A store and then down the road and find a place to eat.”

He bought a deck of cards at the store he drove straight to, told the clerk he didn’t need a bag, and slipped the cards into his pocket. They had lunch and then he started the drive back to Stillwater.

“It’s going to be a long afternoon,” he said. “Hang out at the house as long as necessary. Give Paley a pat on the head and tell him to sit tight or I’ll grind him into meatballs. Sooner or later I’ll meet you back at the gingerbread house.” He sounded morose, contemplating his reception by the sheriff when they finally connected.

Constance laughed. “If I had to pity anyone right now, it would be Sheriff DeLaura.”

He turned a scowling gaze on her and she laughed again.

“You have never been grilled by an arm of the law,” he said.

“I know, dear. Be brave.”

His scowl deepened.

They were both surprised that no media were parked outside the Bainbridge house, and less surprised that neither was Alice’s old Ford.

“I suppose that since the press couldn’t get inside and no one would come out, they decided there was no point in camping out here,” Constance said. “Probably Alice is holding court in town, filling in ghastly details about the Bainbridge curse.”

He grunted. There was a sheriff’s car parked at the house.

It turned out to be a deputy, not the sheriff himself, who stood in their way inside the door.

“Meiklejohn?” he said. He didn’t wait for an answer. “Sheriff wants you downtown. Let’s go.”

Charlie shrugged. “See you later, honey,” he said and left with the deputy.

As soon as the door closed behind them, Tricia and the others came from various rooms to surround Constance. They all looked to be in a state of shock.

“Where have you been?” Lawrence demanded. “Do you know what’s going on?”

“They think Stuart killed Pamela,” Tricia cried. “They have a search warrant for his camper and they’re questioning others camping in the park. Media people were here taking pictures of all of us, yelling questions at us.”

Stuart said not a word, but he looked haunted and, if anything, in worse shape than Tricia, who looked ready to collapse. Ted was hovering near her, as if afraid she might need support any minute.

“They ordered us all to stay here where they could find us later,” Ted said.

“They didn’t order us. They asked us,” Lawrence said.

“You don’t know an order when you hear it.”

“Please, everyone, is there any coffee? I’ll tell you what little I know over a cup of coffee,” Constance said and started to move toward the kitchen.

“No Alice today,” Lawrence said. “She’s too scared of us to ever come back. Don’t much blame her.”

“I made coffee a few minutes ago,” Tricia said. “That’s what we do, isn’t it? When the sky’s falling, you find yourself making coffee or scrubbing a floor or something.”

In the kitchen, Constance helped herself to coffee, and then, seated at the big worktable cradling her cup with the others sitting or standing nearby, she told them what had happened the night before. “She was dead, and Charlie said she had been dead at least an hour. That makes it around nine thirty or a little earlier, probably. That’s all I know about it.”

“She asked you to meet her?” Ted demanded suspiciously. “Why?”

“We didn’t get to find out why.”

“She hinted more than once that she knew something about the checks,” Lawrence said. “And she said she was done with the house, with all of us. Did she have those checks?”

Constance spread her hands. “If she did, then the police have them now. But I don’t believe she did.”

“Alice will tell them I hated her, that I yelled at her a lot, and probably a hell of a lot more than that,” Stuart said. “That’s why they’ve come after me.”

“When she starts blathering about a curse, they’ll see how reliable she is,” Lawrence said.

“Have you all accounted for your whereabouts for last night?” Constance asked.

“Sure,” Ted snapped. “And for all the good it did, we might as well have said we were on the moon. We were all alone in our rooms, apartments, at the camp. In no mood for more soothing music or crowds on the commons. Crap! If we’d known we’d need an alibi, we would have arranged one in advance.”

“Well, there’s little any of you can do now. Since Alice isn’t coming around, have you thought about what you want to do about dinner? You wouldn’t want to go out to face the media even if the sheriff hadn’t asked you to sit tight.”

Tricia’s face was so blank she might not have heard and Lawrence barked a bitter laugh.

“What I suggest is that I can shop for you,” Constance said. “Fast food, real food, pizzas, whatever, and you can do with it what you like. Is Mr. Paley around?”

“In his bat cave,” Ted said. “Twitching, moaning, wringing his hands, ready to fall apart.”

“I’ll have a word with him,” Constance said. “Be thinking about food for later. Make me a list. At least, it will give you something to do,” she added, rising.

“What about you and Charlie? Where were you all morning? What the hell have you been doing?” Ted said.

“Our job,” she said and walked out of the kitchen.

Ted’s description of Paley had been accurate, she thought when she entered the breakfast-room office. He seemed to have aged ten years overnight and his pallor was alarming. She closed the door and went to his desk.

“Mr. Paley, our conditions are still operative,” she said. “You have to pull yourself together and get through this for another few days. Nothing has changed as far as you’re concerned.”

“Everything’s changed,” he said, sounding close to tears. “Another murder, more investigators. That stupid woman didn’t deserve this. Who killed her, Dr. Leidl? Who? One of the family? Who will be next?” His voice rose to a near falsetto. He apparently made a great effort to control himself, but a pencil he was holding suddenly snapped. He stared at it hypnotically, then dropped it as if it had burned his hand.

“Put an end to it,” he begged. “Have your little show, let me go back to the city, let them all go home.”

“Mr. Paley, you know as well as I do that the police won’t let that happen. They won’t allow anyone to leave, including you. Have they even taken formal statements yet? They will, you know. From you, from everyone. We have to let this run its course, and you have to play your part exactly as we talked about. Do you have any tranquilizers? You may need one.”

He slumped in his chair. “I’ll be all right,” he said. “Just leave me alone.”

She studied him for a moment, then went to the door. “I know you’ll be fine,” she said, “and in a few weeks you’ll be in Paris or Rome, or somewhere like that and this will be like a bad dream you had.”

Outside the door, Constance checked her cell phone for messages. Out of range for much of the day while driving in mountains, she saw that several calls had been sent to her voice mail. Jenna’s was the first. Desperate-sounding, begging for a call back. She skipped two from Debra Rasmussen and headed for the nearest bathroom where she could lock herself in and call Jenna without interruption. Jenna answered almost instantly.

“Please, Constance, I have to talk to you. I can’t leave the apartment. Someone’s parked outside waiting to ask questions and there was a cameraman out there earlier who might still be there. Someone keeps knocking on the door.”

“I’ll come right over,” Constance said. “Hang in there. Keep your door locked. Give me fifteen minutes or so.”

She hesitated before going back to the kitchen, where the family was still at the table in what appeared to be a heated conversation.

“Have you decided what to do about dinner?” she asked at the door.

“Pizza,” Lawrence said. “A lot of pizzas, for tonight, tomorrow, on into next week. And I’m not going out there at eight. Those buzzards know we’re supposed to leave at eight and they’ll be back in force wanting to know all about the Bainbridge curse. I’ll sleep on the floor first.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Tricia said. “Eggs. At least we can have an omelet or something.”

“Beer,” Ted added.

“I get the picture,” Constance said. “I have to go, but I’ll be back later, as soon as I can.”

She waved and left, hoping that she would not have to throw anyone down the stairs of the apartment in the Hammond house.