I KEEP MY CELL PHONE on the other pillow. Tuesday morning it began to ring and woke me up. As I gave a sleepy “Hello,” I glanced at my watch and was shocked to see that it was nine o’clock.
“Must have had a night on the town.”
It was Pete.
“Let’s see,” I said. “Driving from Maine to Massachusetts and across New York State. It was the most exciting night of my life.”
“Maybe you’re too tired to come down to Manhattan.”
“Maybe you’re trying to wiggle out of the invitation to come to Manhattan,” I suggested. By now I was awake and on the verge of being disappointed and angry.
“My suggestion was going to be that I drive to Oldham, pick you up, and we’ll find a place for us to have dinner.”
“That’s different,” I said cheerfully. “I have a great spot in mind, and it’s only fifteen minutes from the inn.”
“Now you’re thinking. Give me directions.”
I did, and he congratulated me. “Ellie, you’re one of the few women I know who can give lucid directions. Is it something I taught you? Never mind answering. I can be there around seven.”
Click.
I sent for room service, showered, washed my hair, and phoned a nearby nail salon to make an appointment for four o’clock. I had broken several nails when I fell in the parking lot and wanted to do something about them.
I even took time to study my limited wardrobe and decide on the leaf brown pantsuit with the caracul collar and cuffs. The suit had been an impulse buy at the end of the season last year, expensive even at half price, and I had yet to wear it.
Parading it out for Pete seemed like a good idea.
Actually, it was comforting to have something to anticipate at the end of the day. I knew it was not going to be easy to spend the afternoon writing Alfie’s story about the break-in and tying the incriminating diagram to Rob Westerfield’s use of the name Jim in school.
By not easy, I meant emotionally not easy, because of the unbearable certainty that if Rob Westerfield had been convicted of that crime, Andrea would not have met him.
He’d have been in prison. She would have grown up and gone to college, and, like Joan, probably gotten married and had a couple of children. Mother and Daddy would still be in that wonderful farmhouse. Daddy would have come to love it as much as she did and by now realized what a great buy it had been.
I would have grown up in a happy home and gone to college. Choosing to study journalism had nothing to do with Andrea’s death, so I probably would be in the same kind of job. It’s the career that held a natural attraction for me. I still wouldn’t be married. I think I always wanted a career before a commitment.
If Rob had been convicted, I would not have spent my life grieving for my sister and yearning for what I had lost.
Now, even if I manage to convince Rob’s grandmother and the rest of the world of his guilt, he still will get away with it. The statute of limitations has run out on that crime.
And even if his grandmother changes her will, his father has plenty of money, at least plenty by normal standards, so Rob will live well.
Disgusting liar that he is, in a second trial Will Nebels’s story might throw enough doubt in jurors’ minds to give Westerfield an acquittal.
Then his record will be expunged.
I beat Phil to death, and it felt good.
There is only one way I can get Rob Westerfield back behind bars and that is to track down Phil, that other person whose life he extinguished. Fortunately, there is no statute of limitations for murder.
* * *
BY THREE-THIRTY I was ready to transfer everything to the Website: Christopher Cassidy’s story of being beaten by Rob Westerfield in prep school; Rob’s insistence on being called “Jim” because of the character he had played on stage; Rob’s role in planning the attempt on his grandmother’s life.
I wrote that William Hamilton, Esq., was the court-appointed lawyer who had destroyed the original diagram implicating Westerfield in the crime. I ended the piece with the diagram and playbill displayed side by side. On screen the “Jim” signatures were startling in their similarity.
I kissed my fingers in a salute to the story, pressed the appropriate keys on the computer, and an instant later it was out there on my Website.