THE WASHING MACHINE had been used.
“What was so important it couldn’t wait until I got back, Mrs. Westerfield?” Rosita asked, her tone a touch defensive, as though fearful she had left a task undone. She had gone out of town to visit her ailing aunt on Thursday. It was now Saturday morning, and she had just arrived back. “You shouldn’t bother yourself with wash when you have your hands full decorating all those houses.”
Linda Westerfield did not know why a sudden alarm bell went off in her head. For some reason she did not respond directly to Rosita’s remarks.
“Oh, every once in a while, if I’m checking on the decorative painting and touch it up myself, it’s just as easy to run the paint cloths through the machine as to leave them around,” she said.
“Well, judging from the amount of detergent you used, you must have had a whole heap of them. And Mrs. Westerfield, I heard about the Cavanaugh girl on the news yesterday. I can’t stop thinking about her. Who would believe that kind of thing could happen in this little town? It breaks your heart.”
“Yes, it does.” It had to be Rob who used the machine, Linda thought. Vince, her husband, would certainly not have used a washing machine at any time. Probably didn’t even know how.
Rosita’s dark eyes glistened, and she dabbed her hand over them. “That poor mother.”
Rob? What would be so important for him to wash?
It was an old trick of his. When he was eleven, he’d tried to wash the smell of cigarette smoke from his play clothes.
“Andrea Cavanaugh was the prettiest thing. And her father a lieutenant in the state troopers! Somehow you’d think a man like that would be able to protect his child.”
“Yes, you would.” Linda was sitting at the counter in the kitchen, going over the sketches she had made for window treatments for a client’s new home.
“To think that anybody would smash that girl’s head in. Had to be a monster. I hope they string him up when they find him.”
Rosita was talking to herself now and didn’t seem to expect a response. Linda slipped the sketches into the portfolio. “Mr. Westerfield and I are meeting some friends at the inn for dinner, Rosita,” she said as she slid off the stool.
“Will Rob be home?”
A good question, Linda thought. “He went out for a run and should be back any minute. Check with him then.” She thought she detected a quiver in her voice. Rob had been agitated and moody all day yesterday. When the news about Andrea Cavanaugh’s death flashed through the town, she had expected him to be upset. Instead, he’d been dismissive. “I hardly knew her, Mom,” he said.
Was it simply that Rob, like many nineteen-year-olds, could not confront the death of a young person? Was it that somehow he felt as though his own mortality was threatened?
Linda went up the stairs slowly, suddenly weighted down with a sense of impending disaster. They had moved from the townhouse on Manhattan’s East Seventieth Street to this pre-Revolutionary house six years ago, when Rob went away to boarding school. By then they both knew that the town where they’d traditionally summered at Vince’s mother’s home was where they wanted to live permanently. Vince had said that there were great opportunities to make money here, and he had begun investing in real estate.
The house, with its sense of timelessness, was a continuing source of quiet pleasure to her, but today Linda did not pause to feel the polished wood of the banister under her hand or stop to enjoy the view of the valley from the window at the top of the stairs.
She walked directly to Rob’s room. The door was closed. He had been gone an hour and would be back from jogging any minute. Nervously she opened the door and stepped inside. The bed was unmade, but the rest of the room was oddly tidy. Rob was meticulous about his clothing, sometimes even pressing slacks fresh from the cleaners to sharpen the crease, but he was downright careless about discarded garments. She would have expected to see the clothes he had worn Thursday and yesterday thrown on the floor, waiting for Rosita’s return.
She walked quickly across the room and looked into the hamper in his bathroom. That, too, was empty.
Sometime between Thursday morning, when Rosita left, and early this morning, Rob had washed and dried the clothes he’d been wearing Thursday and yesterday. Why?
Linda would have liked to go through his closet but knew she risked having him find her there. She wasn’t prepared for a confrontation. She left his room, remembering to close the door, and went down the hall and around the corner to the master suite she and Vince had added when they expanded the house.
Suddenly aware that she might be feeling the onslaught of a migraine, she dropped the portfolio onto the sofa in the sitting room, went into the bathroom, and reached in the medicine chest. As she swallowed two prescription pills, she looked into the mirror and was shocked to see how pale and anxious she looked.
She was wearing her jogging suit because she had planned to go for a run after she’d worked on the sketches. Her short chestnut hair was held back by a band, and she hadn’t bothered with makeup. To her own hypercritical gaze, she looked older than her forty-four years, with tiny wrinkles forming around her eyes and the corners of her mouth.
The bathroom window looked out over the front yard and the driveway. As she glanced out, she saw an unfamiliar car driving up. A moment later the doorbell rang. She expected Rosita to use the intercom to let her know who it was, but instead Rosita came upstairs and handed her a card.
“He wants to talk to Rob, Mrs. Westerfield. I told him Rob was out jogging, and he said he’d wait.”
Linda was nearly eight inches taller than Rosita, who was only a shade over five feet, but she almost had to grab the small woman to support herself after she read the name on the card: Detective Marcus Longo.