4

WHEN CONSTANCE AND CHARLIE TURNED from the door Tricia said, “I have that information you asked for when we talked about the death of William’s first wife, the drive-by shooting, and Lori’s disappearance from Ted’s farm. And a lot of clippings about Mary Beth’s drowning. Dan, my husband, drove down on Saturday and brought my folder where I had it all.”

She noticeably stiffened as a woman appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. “Oh, Alice, hello,” she said. “This is Dr. Leidl and Mr. Meiklejohn. Alice Knudsen. They’ll be joining us for a few days.”

Alice was carrying two grocery bags. She was tall and broad, with a bony, wide face, and pale hair that was short and straight, pulled back behind her ears. She nodded. Looking at Charlie she said, “A doctor?”

“She is,” Charlie said, motioning toward Constance. “Not a medical doctor, a psychologist.”

The woman looked either disgusted or disappointed.

“I’m happy to meet you, Ms. Knudsen,” Constance said. “I hope it’s not too much trouble, having two more people.”

Alice looked her over, shrugged slightly, and walked on into the room. “Two more don’t make no difference,” she said. “On the table about five.”

“We’ll see you later,” Tricia said. “I’m giving them a tour of the house. Want to start upstairs?” she asked Charlie.

“Yes indeed, upstairs first,” he said. He waved to Alice and followed Constance and Tricia out into the hall again.

No one spoke until midway up the stairs when Tricia said in a low voice, “That material I mentioned is in my car, along with my purse. Locked car.” She glanced at Constance. “Dr. Leidl, another unasked-for warning—Alice snoops. She gets here between two and three most days. After that the only place you can be sure you can speak in confidence is out on the terrace, well away from the house. The only thing I bring in with me are my keys.”

Constance nodded. No corners to lurk around, no doors to press an ear to, and no purse to examine. “Noted,” she said. “Thanks. We can retrieve your folder when we leave. And please, it’s Constance and Charlie. Maybe a little less formality will let everyone relax a bit.”

Tricia gave her a fleeting smile. “I guess I do seem overwound, don’t I? Tricia,” she added. “Even Stuart calls me Tricia. I’m not the aunt type, I guess.”

In the upper hall she motioned right and left. “Four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a dressing room, another little room that might have been a sewing room or even a nursery at one time. And most of them are completely empty. Let’s start with Howard’s bedroom. This way.”

The room was furnished with a king-sized bed, two bureaus, an easy chair and lamp, bedside tables. It all appeared to be out of a Sears catalog. “All new?” Charlie asked.

“It seems so. Old bedroom furniture is in the other furnished room up here. Mr. Paley is using it. I assume it all came from Howard’s apartment. The detectives did a thorough job of examining it, of course.”

The room was dim with heavy, dark-blue closed drapes at the windows. Tricia clicked on a lamp. There was an adjoining dressing room, a closet with three suits, two pairs of khaki pants, one pair of ankle-high boots that looked well worn, and two pairs of shoes. Charlie didn’t spend any time poking into drawers. He did little more than cast a swift look at the tiled bathroom with a separate shower. They moved on to the other furnished bedroom, the room Paley was using. The furnishings were old and looked as if everything had been picked up at a yard sale or an estate sale. No two pieces matched. After a quick walk through to an adjoining bathroom, where Charlie disconnected an electric razor almost reflexively, they returned to the hall. There was no point in searching, Charlie knew. It had been searched.

They glanced into the other bedrooms, bare, uncarpeted, with tan window shades down all the way. The rooms were large, bleak and uninviting. Another door in the hall opened to a walk-in linen closet with enough shelving to store bedding and towels for a family of a dozen, and now holding a few towels and sheets, with most of the shelves stripped down to bare wood.

“Why buy such a house and not furnish it, use it?” Charlie muttered.

“Who knows?” Tricia said. “It’s a beautiful house, a wonderful family house, great for entertaining, overnight guests, teenage sleepovers… He seemed to have lived in it exactly as he lived for years in an apartment.” She was hugging her arms about herself as if chilled. “It’s unsettling,” she said in a low voice. “It gives me the creeps.” She looked at Charlie. “There’s an attic, but it’s more of the same, just empty space. Do you want to see it?”

He shook his head.

Back on the ground floor they started with a large living room that was sparsely furnished with a dark-blue sofa and two brown easy chairs, a coffee table, two chairs with a game table, and several lamps. No pictures were on the walls, nothing on the coffee table, no ornamentation or decorative touch anywhere. It was a dismal, unwelcoming space, like a waiting room without the magazines.

“It sure wouldn’t have taken appraisers long to do their job,” Charlie commented. “Onward.”

Across the hall Tricia opened another door and they all stopped. This was a library, and there were many books on shelves, magazines and more books on an end table by a good chair and lamp. But what held Charlie’s gaze was a man sitting in lotus in the center of the room. He glanced their way without rising.

“Lawrence,” Tricia said in a strained voice. “Constance Leidl and Charlie Meiklejohn. My brother Lawrence.”

“I’m putting myself in his head,” Lawrence said. “Zen.”

He resembled Tricia and Stuart. His hair was down to his shoulders, auburn, with a slight wave, and he appeared to be much lighter in weight than Ted. With him in his lotus position, it was hard to guess his height, but Charlie assumed he was tall and well built. Handsome, single, not yet fifty, with his kind of good looks there must have been many opportunities to partner with someone. Charlie scowled as what Constance had said about curses came to mind. They could be effective for those cursed if they believed in them. He tilted his head toward the hall.

“We’ll catch you later,” he said to Lawrence.

“Not much more,” Tricia said in the hall. “We think Howard spent most of his time in the library or in the den or television room, whatever you want to call it.” She opened the other door to show them into the den.

This room held a big flat-screen television and a rack of CDs, two easy chairs and lamps, and a reclining chair with Stuart in it. He jumped up when they entered.

“Hi,” he said. “I thought you’d get to this room eventually. I was in the basement when you got here. I took the filter on the furnace apart, and considered taking the exhaust hose off the clothes dryer, but gave it up. You wouldn’t put anything in a space where it would get blown outside.”

Charlie’s nod was sympathetic. “Good thinking about the filter,” he said and didn’t add that the detectives had thought of that.

“He liked movies?” Constance asked, walking to the rack that might have held a hundred CDs.

“Seems he did,” Stuart said. “John Wayne, Sherlock Holmes, a complete run of some old television shows. The Avengers, The Prisoner, some Hitchcock movies. I spent a week going through them, started each one to make sure it was what the jacket said it was.”

“Is that your bike out front?” Charlie asked.

“Yes. After the reading of the will I flew home, then drove back in my van. Outfitted for camping, which I’m doing up in the state park. I brought the bike back with me. The van’s great, home away from home, but it’s a gas guzzler and a little big for driving in town.”

Charlie understood exactly what he meant. He was keeping his expenses to a minimum, living on the cheap. He suspected that Stuart made the most of whatever meals Alice prepared.

“What else should we see in the house?” Constance asked Tricia.

“The dining room, I guess. You saw Mr. Paley’s office, previously a breakfast room. There’s a pantry, and the basement.”

Past Tricia, near the kitchen door, Constance glimpsed Pamela. She stepped back into the kitchen. “Let’s have a look at the dining room and call the tour quits,” Constance said. “Afterward, any chance of getting a cup of coffee, maybe sitting out on the terrace for a few minutes?”

“I’d love a cup of coffee along about now,” Tricia said. “Alice keeps coffee ready all afternoon.”

“Charlie, after we look at the dining room, do you want to check out the garage? Maybe Stuart would be willing to be your guide.”

His marching orders, Charlie understood. “Sounds good,” he said. “Remind me to bring some beer along tomorrow.”

“I have beer in the fridge,” Stuart said. “We all bring anything extra we want, snacks, drinks, whatever.”

A quick look at the dining room was enough. There was a table with six mismatched chairs, nothing else. “We brought chairs in from all over the house,” Tricia said in a tight voice. “I don’t think Howard ever used this room. Probably the breakfast room was his preferred choice. Alice sets her dishes on the table, buffet style, and we help ourselves.”

Charlie opened a door on the side wall; it was to the terrace. He was arranging rooms in his head as they toured the house, and now he had a clear picture of the whole building. The breakfast room across the hall from the kitchen overlooked the terrace. Drapes had been drawn when they met Paley there. The den, library and breakfast room, master bedroom, rooms where Howard had spent time, had drapes. The bedroom Paley was using had ugly shades on the windows.

“Garage,” he said to Stuart. “Then beer.”

Constance and Tricia went back to the kitchen, where Alice was dicing vegetables on the counter. She looked up but didn’t speak. A coffee carafe and cups were on the worktable.

“Cream? Sugar?” Tricia asked Constance as she poured coffee.

“Black is fine.”

Tricia hesitated a moment, then said, “Let’s take the carafe out with us. There’s another one if Alice makes another pot.”

She carried the carafe and her coffee and Constance held the screen door open and managed to reach the table first and position herself facing the house.

“Tricia, I don’t want to come on as an interrogator. Why don’t you just talk about growing up with your four brothers, what you remember about Howard as a child, an adolescent. Ramble all you want. If I’d like clarification on anything, I’ll interrupt, not otherwise.”

At first haltingly, then with more and more fluency but in a disjointed manner, Tricia described a noisy, boisterous family of four lively boys and a girl who had seemed almost an afterthought. Lawrence, the youngest boy, had been five when she came along, and Howard, the oldest, had been fourteen. Their father was a dentist in Buffalo and there were no financial problems although neither had they been rich. They had all gone to the university in Buffalo and lived at home until graduation. William had gone on to the Rochester Institute of Technology for a master’s degree in electrical engineering, and Howard had earned an MBA.

“Every summer,” she said, “Dad rented a fishing camp here at Stillwater Lake and we spent late August through Labor Day there. It was a rough camp, not like the fancy resorts around here now. Howard had a job in Trenton working for a car-parts dealer, the company he eventually bought out and expanded. He was a good businessman. I think we all knew that summer that it would probably be the last summer we’d all be together. Howard was engaged. William was really working hard at R.I.T. with little time for vacations. I was fourteen that summer.”

While Tricia was talking, Constance saw the drape pulled aside a little in Paley’s office, and she had seen Pamela standing at the kitchen door for several minutes. She poured coffee when the cups were empty and listened to the rambling discourse without interrupting.

When Tricia stopped speaking and looked down at her cup, Constance said, “Keep talking, Tricia. Tell me about that last day.”

“It was Friday,” Tricia said. “Howard had said he and Mary Beth couldn’t make it much before three or four in the afternoon. They both had jobs in Trenton.” She drank some coffee, put it down and looked past Constance at the green barrier surrounding the terrace. “It’s peaceful out here, isn’t it? So quiet.” Then, shaking herself, she went on. “We’d met Mary Beth in June, when Howard brought her home to meet the family, to announce that they were planning to marry. She was very pretty, with long blond hair. Shy. I remember how shy she was, almost as if she was intimidated by my brothers. I guess she was. Her family was well off, private schools, Bennington. She was an only child and had never been around four guys like that. They were full of tricks and jokes all the time, loud… Anyway, that day we had all been swimming, playing water games. Dad had been out fishing early that morning. I remember that he brought home some perch or blue gill or something and Mother fried them for lunch. We were always hungry, especially out at the camp. After lunch the boys were playing football or something by the water’s edge and I went inside to shower and change.”

“Howard and Mary Beth arrived and Lawrence was flirting with her, and all three were following her and Howard, joking, teasing, making nuisances of themselves. I felt sorry for her. She and Howard were both in city clothes. Heels and a pretty blue dress for her, suit and tie for him, and we were all in shorts or scruffy jeans, old sneakers or flip-flops, camp clothes. The teasing was really too much, it was getting ugly. I think she was embarrassed. Someone said the only place to be alone was in the middle of the lake. Howard grabbed her hand and said that’s where they’d be. They ran out together. They were laughing.”

She was twisting her cup around and around in the saucer, gazing at it as if fascinated, but Constance suspected she was looking back through time to that terrible afternoon. She waited.

“I was helping Mother get a barbecue dinner ready,” Tricia said after a lengthy pause. “The boys had settled down in the rec room, playing Ping Pong, the stereo on. Mother heard a motorboat and looked out the window. She dropped a pan of beans and ran out. I ran after her, down to the shore. Two boats were out there, the rowboat was upside down, and a couple of men were diving. They pulled Howard out and put him in one of the motorboats. There was an ambulance on the shore at the other side of the lake. I don’t know when Dad and my brothers began racing around to cars, but we were all there in two cars, speeding back into Stillwater, following the ambulance to the clinic.” She stopped again, even longer. “They didn’t get Mary Beth out for almost another hour. Howard didn’t wake up until late in the day on Labor Day.”

Constance saw movement at the screen door again, and this time it opened and Charlie walked out carrying a tray with glasses on it. He had a dish towel draped over his arm. “Your drinks, madam. Gin and tonic, I believe it was.” He put the drinks and napkins down.

“You believe right,” Constance said. “Thank you.”

Charlie picked up the carafe and cups, put them on the tray, bowed and returned to the house.

“He’s not all bad,” Constance said.

“A godsend,” Tricia said and she took a long drink.

“Just a little more if you’re up to it,” Constance said. “Did you notice the change in Howard immediately after he recovered?”

Tricia drank again before answering. “No. They wanted to keep him in the clinic for another day, but he insisted that he had to go to the funeral, and in the end we all did. Afterward, Mother and Dad went to his apartment with him, supposedly to get some clothes, but when they got there, he said he really wanted to be alone and they had to leave. Mother talked to him every day for a couple of weeks, and he seemed to be okay, grieving, heart broken, but coping. He was due home for Christmas, but we had a snowstorm and he couldn’t make it. He came in February, and again he seemed okay. Quiet, somewhat remote, but not, oh, I guess the word is hostile. He seemed terribly sad, withdrawn, reflective. But later in the spring, when Lawrence called him, he hung up on him. He never came home again and I doubt he ever talked to my brothers again. He would take Mother’s call and mine, and never say anything much. And that’s how it was until his death.”

“You said you kept him informed of the family’s doings. Did he respond?”

“Never. He didn’t seem to care what was going on with anyone. I told him he had to come home for Dad’s funeral, that Mother needed him, and he showed up. He stayed in a hotel, but he was at her side through the funeral service and at the cemetery, then left the next day. He didn’t attend her funeral.”

“Thank you,” Constance said after a minute. “I know this has been difficult. It really is peaceful out here. A good place to unwind now and then.”

Tricia drained her glass. “Did you ever blow the dandelion puff of seeds? You know how they scatter out in all directions? That’s what happened to our family after that summer. Scattered in all directions. You can never put them back.”