Dreams in the Key of Blue (24 page)

“You’re convinced that we’re dealing with a woman,” Jaworski said, skepticism evident in his tone.

“That’s the angle I want to pursue.”

He pushed himself from the chair. “How do we do it?”

“Each of us grabs a thread and follows it. You talk to Amanda Squires here in Ragged Harbor, pursue the Beckerman angle. I’ll head for Portland.”

“Katrina Martin?”

“That’s where I’ll start.”

“Norma Jacobs will give you a hand with anything you need down that way,” Jaworski said as he prepared to leave. “Call me after you see the Martin woman.”

“Herb, you’re walking proof that Yankee independence is alive and well.”

He stopped at the door. “Jasper’s meeting with Hubble Saymes,” he said. “I ain’t ready to retire. We’re both climbing out on a limb, Lucas. If it snaps off, we’ll welcome a visit from a rattler.”

I watched Jaworski amble across the grass and climb into his car. As he backed out and drove down the hill, I remembered watching Amanda Squires play the piano in the Silo’s music room.

“A friend of mine describes this piece as music written in the key of blue,” she said. “There is so much muted rage.”

“Maybe not so muted,” I said.

AS I DROVE UP THE HILL TO THE COLLEGE, A RADIO
newscaster droned about the murder epidemic without mentioning my name. I wondered how much longer my luck would hold.

Amanda Squires sat alone in the classroom. “I hoped you’d come in,” she said.

“We have a class scheduled. Where is everyone?”

“The academic dean canceled the seminar.”

“I didn’t stop at my mailbox,” I said, thinking that the dean’s action made sense.

“They may close the college until this is over. The hill is nearly empty. Dawn Kramer left this morning. I think Amy Clay is still here.”

“Have the police talked with you?”

“Wendell was a friend. I knew they’d want to ask me questions, so I went to see Detective Jasper this morning.”

“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“I wanted to talk to you. That’s why I waited.”

“Your friend Wendell lived in the same building where another man was murdered.”

“Mr. Dorman. The detective asked me about him. I
saw him a few times when I visited Wendell, but I didn’t know him.”

“Does the name Lily Dorman mean anything to you?”

She shrugged. “Ms. Jasper asked me where I was last night, how well I knew Wendell and Mr. Dorman. She didn’t ask me about other people.”

Squires sat comfortably in her chair, her legs crossed, her hands folded in front of her. She stared at her hands as she spoke, and I could not see her eyes. There were no overt indications that she was lying or withholding information, but I could not assess the patterns of her involuntary eye muscle movements. I consider these subtle shifts more accurate than a polygraph at detecting deception.

After a moment I said, “Did you have something you wanted to ask me?”

“I figured if you were going to be here anyway…”

I waited.

“When I get angry,” she said, “and I yell, or throw something, I feel like I’ve lost control. I feel guilty about it. I think most women do.”

“You were here for the discussion about Aileen Wuornos,” I said. “She didn’t feel any guilt. She felt justified in what she did.”

“Don’t you think that women want to avoid situations that might end in violence? I mean,
their
violence. Or, do they just explode and feel bad afterward?”

Amanda Squires seemed to be looking for reassurance that women remained the gentler and more reasonable gender. “A woman can be just as predatory as any man,” I said. “Have you heard of Carolyn Warmus?”

She furrowed her brow and shook her head.

“She was a predator,” I said. “Warmus was having an affair with a colleague. She pushed for a more permanent arrangement, and he didn’t want it. Warmus obtained a gun equipped with a silencer, went to the man’s home on a
night when she knew he wasn’t there, hit his wife over the head with a blunt instrument, and shot her nine times. That’s predatory. She passed a polygraph and managed to deflect suspicion from herself to the victim’s husband. That’s calculating. It took two trials to convict her. The newspapers called it the
‘Fatal Attraction
murder.’ The violence was planned, and it had a purpose. She didn’t lose control, and she certainly didn’t express anything remotely close to remorse.”

“She was obsessed,” Squires said.

“Obsessed with having her own way,” I qualified. “So was Pamela Smart.”

“That was the New Hampshire murder,” she said. “I know about that one. She seduced a fifteen-year-old high school student, manipulated him, and convinced him to kill her husband. It was just one step removed from the woman you described.”

“The question is whether these two would have killed or arranged murder again if they had not been caught. Warmus had earlier relationships where she quickly became obsessed with the men, possessive. When they backed off, or dated other women, she went ballistic. Pardon the pun.”

She smiled.

“She wrote letters to these boyfriends, called them repeatedly, threatened them. She focused most of her attention on any other women in the picture. One guy had to get an injunction to keep her away from his wedding. Past behavior is the best single predictor of future behavior.”

“For her to do it again,” Squires interjected, “I think she’d have to be involved in a nearly identical situation, an impossible relationship.”

“We don’t have any reason to believe that she would suddenly, spontaneously change.”

“What about feelings?” she asked. “Warmus and Smart must have felt something.”

“Smart’s nickname was the Ice Princess. She had appetites, wants. I doubt that she felt much of anything unless someone ignored her demands or got in the way of what she wanted. An affront or snub that you or I might disregard elicits rage because it is seen as an attack, a threat to the entire structure of the personality.”

“That sounds like what the experts speculated about during the O.J. Simpson murder trial,” she said. “Nicole was pulling away from him. Her family snubbed him at the dance recital. The model he was dating, Paula Barbieri, broke up with him. I remember commentators saying that he’d always controlled his world and suddenly it was coming apart.”

As Squires prepared to leave she said, “I wonder if I sat and talked with Pam Smart before, or even after, she’d arranged her husband’s death, would there be any way to know?”

“You have a keen interest in the subject,” I observed, “and you’ve obviously read extensively.”

Again, Squires shrugged. “I’m trying to understand,” she said. “There doesn’t seem to be any place for conscience.”

I watched as she walked away, unsettled by the feeling that Squires was not examining a hypothetical situation. She struggled with something far more personal.

I DROVE NORTH TO THE FLATS, THINKING ABOUT A
fourteen-year-old child strong enough or panicked enough to wage war with a roomful of adults hell-bent on wrapping her in canvas restraints. Harper Dorman—her father, someone she trusted to protect her and comfort her—had dragged his daughter into horror. I empathized with Lily’s
suffering, understood her rage. Now I was beginning to have a sense of what she had become.

When I saw the small, shingled building with its weathered sign, I slowed the car and pulled off the road. Loudermilk’s.

I pushed open the door and a bell jingled.

Ben Loudermilk was a short, wiry man in his late forties. He wore a trimmed goatee, and his steel-gray hair appeared to have been shocked into a Beethoven mop. He sat behind a drawing table, where a gooseneck lamp illuminated an ink sketch that held his attention. Loudermilk gazed down through rimless eyeglasses.

“This is the time of year when I do most of my design work,” he said. “Business is slow. After we get the first snow, I don’t bother opening the shop during the week. Tourists don’t want any part of Maine winters unless they’re over in ski country or running snowmobiles. You don’t look like a tourist.”

“No,” I agreed.

Loudermilk sketched a necklace of interlocking fish. His attention to detail was impressive.

“Local kids come in,” the garrulous silversmith continued. “They want single earrings. Loops for their pierced navels, studs for their tongues, chains for their nipples. One kid whipped off her shirt and attached three different pieces while I was making change.”

He shrugged. “Used to be that everyone wanted tattoos. It’s a fad. It’ll pass. Although I guess their parents get pretty upset. Is there something I can help you with?”

“I hope so,” I said, and handed him the scrimshaw letter opener.

“I sold this piece,” Loudermilk said.

He riffled through the contents of a shoe box and produced a Polaroid photo. “That’s it right there.”

In the snapshot, the scrimshaw rested on a bed of blue velvet.

“The date’s on the photo. What was it, two years ago?”

I nodded, studying the photo. “Who was the customer?”

He held his hands in the air. “Why?”

I showed him my identification. “I’m working as a consultant to the Ragged Harbor police. I’ll be happy to wait while you verify that with Chief Jaworski.”

“Hang on,” he said, opening a wooden box of five-by-eight cards.

I sensed a fellow neo-Luddite.

“This may not be real quick,” Loudermilk said. “When I go through these cards, I see names, sketches of pieces I’ve made. I like to remember. I do remember her, but not the name.”

He continued sorting through the file, occasionally examining one of his sketches. “Here it is.” He handed me the card.

“When the tourists leave, a sale like that is completely unexpected. She paid in cash.”

I looked at the name: Melanie Martin. There was an innocent, even innocuous, explanation. MI funded nearly everything related to the college. Expensive gifts for visiting instructors could be a routine line item. Jaycie was an MI intern, so her informal welcoming committee made the delivery.

I didn’t buy it. Martin had personally attended to the purchase two years earlier. When I opened the package, Jaycie expressed pleasure and surprise. Only Amanda Squires knew the box’s contents.

“You said you remembered her,” I prompted.

Loudermilk’s eyes shifted down as he considered. “She was tall. Dressed… fashionably, I’d call it, in a blue
suit. Blond hair. She wore eyeglasses, tinted, the kind that adjust to the light. Late twenties, early thirties.”

“She was in only one time, two years ago,” I said. “What made her so memorable?”

“She was in twice,” he corrected. “She wanted the sketch embellished.”

I looked again at the card. “Is that what these notations are?”

Loudermilk emerged from his work area and pointed at the card. “That was enjoyable work. I studied photographs and drawings of snakes, then did my own sketches. I consider myself an artist, not a merchant. I could never forget a customer like that. She arrived in a limo.”

“No address? No phone number?”

He shrugged. “She was quiet, private. It was a cash transaction.”

Again, I looked at Loudermilk’s notes: timber rattler. “This was your choice?”

“I narrowed it to five. Ms. Martin chose that one.”

Loudermilk crossed the room and pointed to a display case that contained dozens of delicate whalebone and walrus-tusk etchings. “This is a popular depiction of a folk tale from the 1840s. She didn’t want one of the old renditions. She wanted her serpent to be real.”

Again, he shrugged. “People have their quirks. The oceans have their monsters.”

“What about her driver?”

“He waited outside. Big, African-American, bald.”

I thanked Loudermilk, pocketed the whalebone, and turned to leave.

“There’s a song about that one,” he continued. “‘The Wreck of the
Lily D.
’ ”

I froze. “The what?”

“She was a Maine whaler. No one knows what happened to her. She sailed on what was supposed to be a
three-year voyage. That was common in those days. The
Lily D.
never returned to port, which wasn’t uncommon, either.”

I stood, riveted.

“When a ship went down in a storm, wreckage washed up, or word of the tragedy drifted back to the crew’s home port. Sometimes it was years before families learned what happened to their sons and fathers and brothers. The
Lily D.
vanished without a trace. The ship had a remarkable record. The captain knew the best whaling waters in the North Atlantic and always sailed his ship into port laden with whale oil. Every sailor heard and retold stories of monsters… giant squid, whale sharks, sea serpents. The folk tale about the
Lily D.
grew around the notion that a serpent took the ship, its crew, and its cargo, in payment for their years of pillaging the sea’s treasures.”

“Vengeance,” I said.

Loudermilk nodded. “We don’t always know our sins, but we pay for them.”