Carolyn G. Hart_Henrie O_02 (10 page)

The girl’s thin face was almost colorless, her wispy blondish hair mousy, her lips often tightly pressed together. Brigit seemed caught in a perpetual pout. Except in a number of photos in costume. Class plays, more than likely. The only photos in which she was smiling were a half dozen taken with Craig. These revealed a delicate, fawnlike beauty that her sullen demeanor had obscured in the other likenesses.

There were many photos of Patty Kay and a laughing, tanned, relaxed Craig. Playing tennis, as I’d expected. White-water rafting. Hiking, in European train stations. Skiing. Horseback riding.

I walked on down the hall and looked through an open door.

Into chaos.

Captain Walsh blocked the doorway to Patty Kay’s office. He surveyed the dumped-out desk drawers, the shards of glass in the smashed bookcase fronts, the gouged surface of the once-elegant mahogany desk, the emptied file cabinets, and the cardboard files in untidy heaps.

I looked past him and shivered. There was a viciousness at work here that frightened me: Ink splattered against the cheerful daisy wallpaper, photos ripped from a bulletin board and scattered in pieces, papers ground beneath a heel, a lamp used like a baseball bat on the desktop, an upended aquarium and the limp bodies of the fish on the sodden rug.

Captain Walsh turned toward me and crossed his arms over his midriff. His expressionless eyes slowly moved to my face. “Interesting thing is, Mrs. Collins, this office was undisturbed when my men searched the house Saturday.” “So somebody broke in between Saturday night and this afternoon.”

“Broke in?” Chief Walsh inquired. “Shall we check, Mrs. Collins?”

We made a survey of the ground floor together.

No broken windows. No smashed-in doors.

But the back door was unlocked.

Once again Captain Walsh stood, feet braced, arms crossed. “The house was secure when we left Saturday night.” He pointed at the door. “That was definitely locked.”

“Craig could have unlocked it on Sunday and, with a good many other things to think about, not locked it when he left.”

“He could have.” Chief Walsh’s voice was flat. He turned and pointed at the madras patchwork purse on the butler’s table. “There’s Mrs. Matthews’s handbag. And there are a great many valuable articles in this house. Silver, right out on the dining room table. VCR. Can you describe any missing items?”

He knew I couldn’t. “We’ll have to wait until Craig gets home to answer that.”

“Yes.”

“Patty Kay’s office is a mess,” I said sharply.

“Yes. I’ll agree to that.”

We glared at each other.

I got the picture.

Captain Walsh believed I’d planned a diversion.

Now I crossed my arms. “I didn’t touch that office, Captain.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Are you going to investigate this?”

“Of course, ma’am. I’ll make a full report.”

As the captain’s black unmarked pulled away—and I have to hand it to the Fair Haven police, it arrived four minutes after I phoned—I marched down the drive and
crossed the street. As I waited by the white rail fence for the riding mower to come toward me, I admired the two-story colonial overlooking the sloping lawn. A cream Mercedes turned into the next driveway. A cocker spaniel bounded into a tangle of underbrush, his high, excited bark announcing pursuit of a squirrel or cat. Toward the end of the curving street, Cheryl Kraft strode briskly up another manicured drive.

This was the kind of neighborhood where people noticed strangers. Most assuredly every eye on King’s Row Road would have been turned toward the Matthews house since the murder story broke in the Sunday papers. The young man on the riding mower certainly noticed my arrival this afternoon.

The mower turned, heading back to me.

When it was no more than a dozen feet away, I lifted my hand.

The driver of the mower was a handsome youth. He had thick, lustrous black hair, strong, even features, intelligent, dark blue eyes. At my summons, he looked surprised. But he promptly switched off the motor and jumped down. He hurried toward the fence.

“Yes, ma’am?” He was slim and athletic in a blue polo and white tennis shorts.

“I’m Henrietta Collins. I’m staying at the Matthews house. I’m Craig Matthews’s aunt.”

I held out my hand.

He yanked off brown gardening gloves, swiped his right hand against his shorts before holding it out to shake mine. “Yes, ma’am. I’m Dan Forrest.” His grasp was firm.

I looked at the boy more closely. He was truly extraordinarily handsome—and the masculine image of Patty Kay’s beautiful tennis partner, Brooke. Brooke, the tennis player. Brooke Forrest, the trustee.

“Did your mother and Patty Kay play tennis together?”

“Yes, ma’am. Mom loves to play. Mrs. Matthews was one of her best friends.” Dan waited politely, tucking the gloves in a back pocket.

I did some quick figuring. Craig must have returned to the house at some time on Sunday to change clothes before he was questioned by the police. I didn’t know what time he was arrested. The newspaper article had indicated the arrest was made Sunday evening. So—

“Dan, between late yesterday and about four this afternoon, Mrs. Matthews’s study was burglarized. Have you seen anyone near the house?”

“My gosh.” His eyes widened. “I guess I should’ve called somebody. Gosh, I’m sorry.” He sounded uncomfortable and embarrassed. “But I thought it could be the wind.”

I scarcely dared to breathe. “What happened?”

“Well, it was just a little while before you came.” His eyes slid away from me. “I mean, I couldn’t help but notice when you turned in. Your car’s neat.”

I abruptly understood. The teenager was embarrassed that he had indeed been curious and couldn’t keep his eyes off the Matthews house. He didn’t want to admit to poor manners. Interest in sports cars was acceptable, however.

I hastened to give him an out. “I imagine a riding mower gets pretty boring. You can probably tell me how many squirrels have crossed the road this afternoon. And certainly I’m glad you were here and happened to be looking around.”

“Yeah. That’s funny too. Usually I’d still be at school. But they canceled sports today. I guess they thought it wouldn’t seem right. Not until the funeral.”

I tried to sort that out. I thought Patty Kay’s funeral was Wednesday. Why no sports on Monday? But that didn’t matter. What mattered was what this boy saw.

“So you were home this afternoon?”

“I got home about three-fifteen. I started mowing about three-thirty. Anyway, I happened”—his tone was painfully casual—“to look across the street and I saw the Jessops’ little white poodle dashing up your driveway. And Mitzi’s not supposed to be out. She gets lost. So I ran over, but by the time I got there, she’d run around back. I went back there and I heard Mrs. Jessop calling and then I realized Mitzi’d gone home. So I was turning around and that’s when I saw the back door was open.”

His face wrinkled in remembered indecision. “I looked around the drive and Mr. Matthews’s car wasn’t there, just hers. And so nobody was home. I mean, there weren’t any cars but hers. But the door was open. I just stood there and looked at it and then I thought that was odd, so I went up to the screen and opened it and poked my head in. I called out for Brigit, but I didn’t think she’d be there. I mean, not” —Dan Forrest paused, then said awkwardly, “with what had happened. So I stepped into the hall.” He stopped and jammed his hands in the pockets of his shorts. “And I thought I heard something—like a bump, maybe?—upstairs. So I called out real loud this time for Brigit. It was quiet. Real quiet.” He looked sheepish, a different kind of embarrassment this time. “It was—I don’t know. I just felt funny. So I decided to leave. I closed the door and came back home and started mowing again.”

I didn’t say anything. I looked at his handsome, uncomfortable face and wondered if maybe Dan Forrest had been luckier than he would ever know. If Patty Kay’s murderer had waited upstairs, listening—

Dan mistook my silence.

“I’m sorry,” the boy said miserably. “I guess I should have called somebody.”

“No, you did fine, You couldn’t have known. And everything downstairs looked all right?”

He nodded eagerly. “Yeah. Everything looked okay.”

“You didn’t see anyone leave?”

“No, ma’am.”

But I hadn’t expected that. Obviously, the searcher would have heard Dan call, heard the door close. It would be easy to go down the alley or to slip through the thick woods behind the Matthews house and gain the street—or a nearby yard?—without being seen.

“Thank you, Dan.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I heard the mower start up again as I walked swiftly back to the house. I went by my car and retrieved my 35mm camera.

All the way upstairs, I thought about Dan Forrest—and luck. But maybe it was also my lucky day—and by extension Craig Matthews’s. Because the trashed study had to mean something.

Captain Walsh thought it meant I’d do anything necessary to help my “nephew.”

I knew better.

I took careful photos that would overlap and show the precise condition of the room.

The more I looked at the destruction, the more somber I felt.

The rampage that had turned this room into a shambles reflected enormous anger. And frustration?

Surely the search was made to find something the murderer feared anyone else seeing.

It had to be something so shocking, so revealing that the search was made despite Craig’s arrest.

The desk was littered with papers. It would take hours
to sort through them. And, more than likely, they would mean nothing to me.

The same was true of the emptied files.

It looked very much as though the searcher had taken whatever came to hand and dumped it out, then mixed the papers into untidy heaps.

Searching for something specific?

Or angrily destroying order.

Behind the desk, a ring-binder notebook lay spread-eagled on the floor. Gold letters on the navy vinyl cover read:
Walden School, Special Projects
. In a corner of the room was a cracked Rolodex. Jammed against the wall was an appointment book.

I used a pencil to edge the appointment book over. I opened it to Friday, April 2.

Patty Kay’s handwriting was as distinctive as her laugh. Oversize looping letters were scrawled in vivid scarlet ink.

She evidently used the daybook simply to jot down appointments and reminders. That didn’t surprise me. It takes a more reclusive, inwardly turned personality for journal keeping. So I didn’t expect to find a diary entry relating the latest upheavals in what had surely been a life filled with controversy and confrontation.

Nor did I.

I found, instead, these un revealing notes:

I flipped back a page.

I described the notes as unrevealing. Yes. But they did raise some questions.

The Friday tennis game with Craig was marked out. On Saturday Patty Kay had marked through the theater date and written
“trustees.”
She had double-underlined two Friday entries, Chuck and Call Stuart—Brigit. A slash was marked through the Saturday morning tennis notation.

Why these changes in her plans?

Why were two entries double underlined?

I quickly made a copy of the three pages in my notebook. Though I had to wonder if anything in the appointment book mattered. Because surely the pages could have been torn out or the book removed if there had been anything remotely incriminating in them. Still, I had to start somewhere. At the very least, those notations were clues to Patty Kay’s thoughts and actions on the last days of her life.

The quartz clock—lying on the floor, its delicate face smashed—chimed the hour. Five o’clock. It was time.