Deceitful, but clever, actually. He was a smart kid.
“Zachary, what actually happened?” I asked. “The absolutely true story this time.”
“Like I said. I saw him go by, followed him in, found him in your room, thought—well, you know.”
I wouldn’t make him confess his hopes again, make him feel again the pain of his father telling him that his presence at Philly Prep had nothing to do with Zachary. Really, that nothing about his father had much to do with Zach.
But my mind did register the third part of Severin’s message. Calls. Amanda Pepper. Philly Prep. And that Carole had told him somebody’s whereabouts. The note started to make sense.
“He went out of the room,” Zach said, “and I followed him, and I kept trying to get him to talk to me, just talk to me, but he was acting strange—now I know why, but I didn’t then. I thought he was drunk, and I guess that made me angrier. I said things, angry things, and he grabbed my arm and held it down while he lifted his other hand, like he was going to hit me, so I swung out—to protect myself, to push back his hand, but I used my free arm—and the cast, it smashed into his face, and he shouted and backed away and sat down, hard. I didn’t know what to do—call an ambulance or what? But he shouted that I should get away from him, stay away from him, so I did. I left.”
“Zach, I understand you said you heard shouting at the time. Did you mean your dad?”
Mackenzie astounded me. I was sure he’d dismissed and trashed that idea when I told him about it. I would love to be able to check out the filing cabinets in his brain.
Zachary shook his head. “Somebody else. Somebody downstairs shouting like ‘What’s going on? Who’s up there?’ You know, the regular stuff. That’s why I took the back stairs, so they wouldn’t see me.” He was supporting the arm in the cast with his good hand, and he looked down at it, as if it had a life of its own.
“So Nina and Jay made calls,” I said, trying to get a timeline.
“Do I have to tell the police?” Nina said.
“I will,” I said. “And they’ll probably get in touch with you, to verify it.”
“That’s
all
we did, though.” She looked smaller and smaller with each word. “It was stupid saying things about skeletons, but we were angry. It was a bad time. He’d . . .”
“Dumped you. Everybody knows, Nina. And frankly, there’s no shame in being dumped by Tomas Severin. But what do you mean by ‘skeletons’?” Carole looked on alert. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. It’s only that I heard . . . my brother said . . .” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Maybe it does,” Carole said. “Because on the phone, before we met, I told him I’d seen a ghost. A ghost he knew.”
I thought about Carole’s life, where she might have been. On campus, in the lab where she worked as part of her tuition grant. Carpooling. I thought about Tom Severin’s note again.
“Ghosts and skeletons, oh my! Halloween’s really in the air!” At least Sasha was having a good time.
I’d had it. “How about trying something new?” I asked. “How about if just this once, everybody told the truth? So far, not one person in this whole mess—not one!—has considered doing that.”
“I never lied!” Carole said.
“I never even spoke to you before today!” Nina said, sitting back and hugging herself.
“Please! There are lies of omission, as everyone knows.”
“That wasn’t my fault,” Sasha said. “Tom only talked about what I told you. No ghosts and skeletons, that’s for sure.”
“That figures. He was lying, too. He left out the part that really scared him. I thought you were telling the whole truth this time, Carole, but you left out the small detail of who—and where—your ghost was, didn’t you?”
“I recognized her,” she said. “Back when I was married to Tom, she tried to make contact. She recognized me, too.”
“Who?” Nina sounded whiny, a cranky, sleepy child annoyed by the static around her. She yawned, and sighed, and closed her eyes.
“The skeleton in the closet, the ghost in the attic of Tom’s mind,” I said.
Twenty-two
W
HAT
are you doing?” Mackenzie asked when I stood up.
“It’s finally finger-pointing time.” I nodded to him to come with me. “Call a taxi for Nina,” I told Sasha. “She can’t drive home in that condition.”
“But you didn’t—I—but who is—”
“What about us?” Carole demanded. “What’s going on?”
“Beats me,” Mackenzie said.
“If you’ll give me ten minutes, you’ll know. Everybody will. Even me.”
We made our exit, ducking out while Carole said “Hey!” a few times, and Zachary did his “Mom” protest, but halfheartedly, as if he’d forgotten its purpose.
“What’s going on?” Mackenzie asked as we descended the staircase.
“Mrs. Wiggins. She said she lived next door. That gives us two options—you take the left, I’ll take the right.”
“Who the hell is Mrs. Wiggins? What am I looking for? What do I do when I find her?” He stopped, and I nearly tripped over him. He put an arm on mine. “Tell me who she is and why I should care.”
“She’s the new secretary at school.”
“What the—”
“No, wait. She’s the reason Tom Severin came there, thought we’d be a good idea—not because of us, but because Sasha said where I worked. That’s why the note said
Calls. Amanda Pepper. Philly Prep.
He thought I could verify what Carole had told him. I could do it for him, find out bad things about her, without his being directly involved. Who knows? He didn’t want to face her.”
“It’s raining,” Mackenzie said. “I’m standing out here in the rain because?”
“Mrs. Wiggins is—was—Sigrid—Shippy—Severin. His sister. Resurfaced. Ready, or so he thought, to make her claims again. Ready to tell the world about her rotten brother. That note they found on him—I thought the drawing was a doodle, a smile and a seven, but it wasn’t. It was a little boat. A Shippy memo. Remember? Remember how everybody said he was afraid of her? Rightly so—he’d treated her so badly.”
“She’s here?”
“Next door. Whoever finds her, give a holler.”
“And she’s the killer,” he said softly. “She was there, in the school. Lying about hearing nothing, seeing and knowing nothing—including not knowing the victim.”
“I hope not.” We both took off.
The building on the right was a sad yellow brick affair. The real estate agency on the first floor’s windows were filled with cards listing homes, their edges curled, their photos faded and uninviting.
The entrance to the upstairs apartment was via an uncomfortably dark staircase, and I thought of Mrs. Wiggins trudging up these steps every afternoon. And yet it was better than the shelter had been. She’d found a job—the job nobody else wanted, perhaps, but still a meager living—and established a life of her own.
“It’s got to be this one,” Mackenzie said, taking the stairs double-time. “A cranky old man and woman live in the other one. In their eighties, I think, and they look as if they’ve been quarreling the last seventy-five of them.”
I pushed the bell, but heard nothing.
“Broken?”
I knocked. We both took deep breaths. I smiled at the peephole, and the door opened. “Miss Pepper!” she said, her mouth agape. “What on earth? What are you doing here?” Then she saw Mackenzie and stepped back a pace.
“We’re so sorry to bother you,” I said. “But we have a few questions. They’re important, or we wouldn’t bother you. Do you think we could come in?”
“Oh.” The blood drained from her face. “I don’t think—it’s such a—there really isn’t—I don’t even know this—no. No, I don’t think so.”
“You’re right,” Mackenzie said. “We’re rude to barge in on you this way. We can talk out here, or right where we’re standing.”
Nice of him, particularly given the weather and the fact that her front door was not protected from the elements.
“Am I in trouble?” she asked in her rabbit-in-distress voice.
“Do you think you are?” he asked.
“I think maybe.”
“Why would that be?”
She looked at me before answering. “Because Tomas died.”
“Your brother,” I said softly.
She nodded, then kept her gaze on her feet while she hugged herself.
“And you were there,” I said even more softly.
This time, the nod was barely perceptible. Then she looked up. “I am in trouble, aren’t I?”
“Not with me,” Mackenzie said. “Not with anybody I know. Because you didn’t do anything wrong, did you?”
“I tried not to.”
“But you’re afraid nobody will believe that it happened the way it did.”
“I was in the—that was the truth, the way I said. I didn’t see him come in. But when I came back to the office, I heard shouting. I was scared, but I called up and nobody answered and—I was still scared, but I went upstairs. He was there, all alone, but hurt. His face . . . he’d been hurt.”
“He recognized you,” I said.
She nodded, her expression bleak. “He got all crazy, no matter what I did. He was standing and kind of waving—I mean his body was waving, and he sounded different, but I hadn’t heard Tommy in a long, long time. I thought he was drunk, to tell the truth. He said things about money, about how I shouldn’t have come back because I wasn’t getting any no matter what I said or who I told. I didn’t know what he meant. I still don’t.”
I did. Ingrid’s sanity and will were both still up in the air, up for grabs by Cornelius, so why not by Shippy. And Tomas was so guilt-ridden about his sister that he believed she was out to get him, as he’d “gotten” her. All that had been compounded by what he understood to be blackmail-like phone calls. Why not believe she was behind them?
“I wanted Tommy and my mother to talk to me again,” she said. “I wanted them to see that I got myself straightened out. I had a good job again, and a place of my own, and I thought . . . even if I’m not . . .” She looked down at herself and said nothing for a moment. “We’re all a lot older. People change, so I thought by now . . . I thought he’d be happy to see me. I’m his sister. But when I went toward him—he was crazy, talking crazy—I couldn’t understand what he was saying, and he waved his arms like he could make me disappear and backed away. And then—and then—” She shook her head and inhaled.
“Try,” I said. “It’s important.”
“He was too close to the stairs. They were right behind him, and he was going to fall and I shouted, and when I tried to grab him, to help him, he shouted ‘Go away!’ and took another step back and . . .” She shook her head. “I ran down after him, but then, I could tell. He wasn’t moving. I got scared about what I’d done. I always have things come out wrong, and now—he wasn’t moving. I went into the office and sat at my desk and put my head down. I didn’t know what to do. And then I heard the scream. That was you.”
“You didn’t do anything,” Mackenzie said softly. “You tried to help him.”
I thought it through and it made sense. I remembered Liddy Moffat upset about scuff marks at the top of the stairs, wondering how they’d gotten there. Now I knew. If a man fell directly backward, his heels would leave those marks. But if pushed, he’d have been propelled away from that spot, wouldn’t have left marks that close to the top.
“How about you put on a raincoat and come next door,” I said. “You’ll see our office and be warm.”
“I guess I’m in big trouble.”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “No, you’re not.” Apparently nobody was.
Nobody had killed Tomas Severin.
Nonetheless, everyone had played a part in his death.
Jay Kress did a bit by sharing the stories the “old” lady at the shelter, Shippy Severin Wiggins, had told him. He probably thought the stories were going to give Nina and him leverage against Tom during the divorce, insuring that it would be more generous than was Tom’s wont. Nina did her bit by pouring the wine and deciding it would be fun to harass Tom with phone calls about skeletons from his past.
Carole played a double role by telling him outright that his sister was in town, at Philly Prep, and of course, by putting the drug in his system. She had no way of knowing how those two actions would interact and throw suspicion on her son.
Zachary himself did nothing except attempt détente, but in the course of it, he’d walloped Tom’s cheek in clumsy self-defense, further disorienting the man.
And finally, Sigrid Severin Wiggins, someone Tom had erased from his life—and bank account, and from what was legally and justifiably hers—tried to help him, tried to make contact.
Tomas got so twisted in his greed and guilt and anger—he hoisted himself on his own petard.
Tomas Severin had murdered himself.
And, worse, he had lived so that there were, if not outright pleasure, few regrets at his death.
Twenty-three
N
ERO
Wolfe didn’t have to face his perturbed mother after he’d solved a crime. Why then did I, did we?
We’d accomplished big things today—unraveled a tangled mess, sent Carole and Zachary home on a more even keel, and even talked to Shippy Wiggins about her future, which, apparently, might well contain some of the money that was rightly hers. And, I secretly hoped, a comfortable and speedy retirement from the secretarial desk at Philly Prep.
We deserved to bask. Instead, we had to face the music.
There are times I wish you really couldn’t go home again, and this was one. But I had moved beyond whining and even beyond playing possum, and there was no turning back.
“We need a plan,” I said. “A unified front. The definition of insanity is trying the same thing again and expecting different results. Let’s try something completely new.”
W
E ENTERED HOLDING HANDS
and smiling, and they smiled back. These were good women. Overenthusiastic, and overinvolved, but compared to mothers like Ingrid who saw her daughter as a fashion accessory, these mothers were perfection itself. They simply wanted us to be happy—wanted it a little too much.
And so we gave them a blueprint of how they could get their wish, to see us happily, blissfully married in the way that would delight us and presumably, therefore, fill them with joy as well.
“Friday?” they squawked, almost in unison. “This Friday?”
We nodded. “Friday. City Hall. There’s time for the dads to fly in, too,” I said. “Instead of a shower, we’ll call it a wedding celebration party at Sasha’s. She has the space, the food and wine, and the party spirit.” I’d called her from the car. She thoroughly approved. So like that, my wedding color scheme was resolved: moss green, to go with the English gentleman’s china.
“But—but—”
“It’s what I’ve always dreamed of.” I admit I was exaggerating. I’d dreamed of this—or dreamed it up—for twenty minutes at most, but in today’s fast world, that’s close enough to always. “We have three days to go crazy with whatever’s left to plan. We can shop for my dress after work tomorrow. How’s that?” I was ready to wear whatever their overdecorated hearts desired.
“And . . . your bouquet?” my mother asked softly.
“That, too. I’d love to know what you think would be best.”
No lists, no haggling, no wedding consultant, no rented hall, no gown, no bridesmaids, no color scheme, no florist, no registry, no invitations. Just my beloved and our beloved—once they stopped organizing our wedding—family and friends. The people who mattered. The ceremony that mattered. The beginning of the rest of our lives.
Bliss.
“After all,” I said, “we’re only getting married once.”
I took the words right out of their mouths. What else could they say except a variation of what we said that Friday: I do.
We did.