49
At six-thirty Jean was in her hotel room when she finally received the call she’d been hoping would come. It was from Peggy Kimball, the nurse who had been in Dr. Connors’ office when she was his patient. “That’s a pretty urgent message you left, Ms. Sheridan,” Kimball said briskly. “What’s going on?”
“Peggy, we met twenty years ago. I was a patient of Dr. Connors, and he arranged a private adoption for my baby. I need to talk to you about it.”
For a long moment Peggy Kimball did not say anything. Jean could hear the voices of children in the background. “I’m sorry, Ms. Sheridan,” Kimball said, a note of finality in her voice. “I simply cannot discuss the adoptions Dr. Connors handled. If you want to begin to trace your child, there are legal ways of going about it.”
Jean could sense that Kimball was about to break the connection. “I’ve already been in touch with Sam Deegan, an investigator from the district attorney’s office,” she said hurriedly. “I have received three communications that can only be construed as threats to my daughter. Her adoptive parents have got to be warned to watch out for her. Please, Peggy. You were so kind to me then. Help me now, I beg you.”
She was interrupted by Peggy Kimball’s alarmed shout: “Tommy, I warn you. Don’t throw that dish!”
Jean heard the sound of glass breaking.
“Oh, my God,” Peggy Kimball said with a sigh. “Look, Ms. Sheridan, I’m baby-sitting my grandkids. I can’t talk now.”
“Peggy, can I meet you tomorrow? I’ll show you the faxes I’ve received threatening my daughter. You can check on me. I’m a dean and professor of history at Georgetown. I’ll give you the number of the president of the college. I’ll give you Sam Deegan’s number.”
“Tommy, Betsy, don’t go near that glass! Wait a minute . . ..by any chance are you the Jean Sheridan who wrote the book about Abigail Adams?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake! I loved it. I know all about you. I saw you on the Today show with Katie Couric. You two could be sisters. Will you still be at the Glen-Ridge tomorrow morning?”
“Yes, I will.”
“I work in neonatal at the hospital. The Glen-Ridge is on the way there. I don’t think I’ll be any help to you, but do you want to have a cup of coffee around ten?”
“I would love to,” Jean said. “Peggy, thank you, thank you.”
“I’ll call you from the lobby,” Peggy Kimball said hurriedly, then her voice became alarmed. “Betsy, I warn you. Don’t pull Tommy’s hair! Oh, my God! Sorry, Jean, it’s becoming a free-for-all here. See you tomorrow.”
Jean replaced the receiver slowly. That sounds like mayhem, she thought, but in a crazy way, I envy Peggy Kimball. I envy her the normal problems of normal people. People who mind their grandkids and have to clean up messy babies and spilled food and broken dishes. People who can see and touch their daughters and tell them to drive carefully and be home by midnight.
She had been sitting at the desk of her room in the hotel when Kimball phoned. Scattered in front of her were the lists she had been trying to compile, mostly the names of people in the nursing home who had befriended her and also the professors at the University of Chicago where she had spent all her spare time taking extracurricular courses.
Now she massaged her temples, hoping to rub away the beginnings of a headache. In an hour, at seven-thirty, at Sam’s request, they would be having dinner together in a private dining room on the hotel’s mezzanine floor. The guests included the honorees, Gordon and Carter and Robby and Mark and me, Jean thought, and, of course, Jack, the chairman of the godforsaken reunion. What is Sam hoping to accomplish by getting all of us together again?
She realized that unburdening herself to Mark had been a mixed blessing. There was astonishment in his eyes when he said, “You mean that on graduation day at age eighteen, when you were tripping up to the stage to accept the History medal and a scholarship to Bryn Mawr, you were aware that you were expecting a baby and that the guy you loved was lying in a casket?”
“I don’t expect either praise or blame for that,” she had told him.
“For God’s sake, Jean. I’m neither praising nor blaming you,” he’d said. “But what an ordeal. I used to go to West Point to jog and had seen you once or twice with Reed Thornton, but I had no idea it was more than a casual friendship. What did you do after the graduation ceremony?”
“My mother and father and I had lunch. It was a really festive lunch. They had done their Christian duty by me and could now separate with a clear conscience. After we left the restaurant, I drove to West Point. Reed’s funeral Mass had been that morning. I put the flowers my parents gave me at the graduation ceremony on Reed’s grave.”
“And shortly after that you saw Dr. Connors for the first time?”
“The next week.”
“Jeannie,” Mark had said, “I always felt that, like me, you were a survivor, but I can’t imagine what you must have been going through, being alone at a time like that.”
“Not alone. I gather somebody must have known about it or found out about it even then.”
He had nodded and then said, “I’ve read up on your professional life, but what about your personal life? Is there someone special, or has there been someone special you might have confided in?”
Jean thought of the answer she had given him. “Mark, remember the words of the Robert Frost poem. ‘But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep . . ..’ In a way I feel like that. Until now, when I’ve had to talk about her, there’s never been a single soul I’ve ever wanted to tell about Lily. My life is very full. I love my job and love writing. I have plenty of friends, both men and women. But I’ll be honest. I’ve always had a feeling that there is something unresolved in my life that has to be settled, a sense that in a way my life itself has been held in abeyance. Something needs to be finished before I can put this behind me. I think I’m beginning to understand the reason for that. I still wonder if I shouldn’t have kept my baby, and now that she may need me I’m so helpless, I want to turn back the clock and have the chance to keep her this time.”
Then she had seen the look on Mark’s face. Or are you setting up a manufactured scenario because of your need to find her? He might as well have shouted the question. Instead he had said, “Jean, of course you must pursue this, and I’m glad Sam Deegan is helping you since you’re obviously dealing with an unbalanced individual. However, as a psychiatrist, I warn you that you must be very careful. If because of these implied threats you are able to access confidential records, you may intrude into the life of a young woman who isn’t ready or willing to meet you.”
“You think that I have been sending those faxes to myself, don’t you?” Jean winced, remembering how angry she had been when she realized that some people jumped to that conclusion.
“Of course I don’t,” Mark had said promptly. “But answer me this: If you received a call right now asking you to meet Lily, would you go?”
“Yes, I would.”
“Jean, listen to what I’m saying. Someone who somehow found out about Lily may be deliberately getting you into a fever pitch so that you’ll be vulnerable to rushing off to meet her. Jean, you’ve got to be careful. Laura is missing. The other girls at your table are dead.”
He had left it at that.
Now Jean stood up. She was due downstairs for dinner in forty minutes. Maybe an aspirin would prevent the oncoming headache she sensed, and a hot bath would revive her, she thought.
The phone rang at seven-ten as she was stepping out of the tub. For a moment she debated about letting it ring, then grabbed a towel and rushed into the bedroom. “Hello.”
“Hi, Jeannie,” a smiling voice said.
Laura! It was Laura.
“Laura, where are you?”
“Where I’m having a lot of fun. Jeannie, tell those cops to pick up their jacks and go home. I’m having the time of my life. I’ll call you soon. Bye, dear.”
50
Late Monday afternoon Sam went to interview Joel Nieman at his office in Rye, New York.
After keeping him waiting in the reception area for nearly half an hour, Nieman invited him into his decidedly upscale private suite. His entire manner suggested ill-concealed annoyance at the interruption.
Doesn’t look much like Romeo to me, Sam thought as he studied Nieman’s pudgy features and dyed reddish brown hair.
Nieman airily dismissed the suggestion that he had made a date with Laura during the reunion. “I heard that nonsense about the lunch table killer on the radio,” he volunteered. “That school reporter, Perkins, started it, I gather. They ought to put a net over his head and cart him away until he grows up. Listen, I was in class with those girls. I knew them all. The idea that their deaths are related is nonsense. Just start with Catherine Kane. Her car skidded into the Potomac when we were college freshmen. Cath was always a fast driver. Look up the number of speeding tickets she got in Cornwall during her senior year, and you’ll see what I mean.”
“That may be,” Sam said, “but don’t you think it’s a remarkable case of lightning striking in the same place, not twice but five times?”
“Sure, it’s pretty creepy that five girls from the same table died, but I could introduce you to the guy who services our computers. His mother and his grandmother dropped dead of heart attacks on the same day thirty years apart. Day after Christmas. Maybe they realized how much they spent for presents, and it got to them. Could be, don’t you think?”
Sam looked at Joel Nieman with acute distaste but also with the sense that underneath his show of disdain there was a sense of unease. “I understand your wife left the reunion on Saturday morning to go on a business trip.”
“That’s right.”
“Were you alone at your home on Saturday night after the reunion dinner, Mr. Nieman?”
“As a matter of fact, I was. Those long-winded affairs make me sleepy.”
This guy isn’t the kind who goes home alone when his wife is away, Sam thought. He took a shot in the dark. “Mr. Nieman, you were observed leaving the parking lot with a woman in the car.”
Joel Nieman raised his eyebrows. “Well, perhaps I did leave with a woman, but she wasn’t pushing forty years old. Mr. Deegan, if you’re on a fishing expedition with me because Laura took off with some guy and hasn’t resurfaced, I suggest you call my lawyer. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a number of phone calls to make.”
Sam got to his feet and ambled toward the door, obviously in no haste. As he passed the bookcase, he paused and looked at the middle shelf. “You have quite a collection of Shakespeare, Mr. Nieman.”
“I have always enjoyed the Bard.”
“I understand you were Romeo in your senior play at Stonecroft.”
“That’s right.”
Sam chose his words carefully. “Wasn’t Alison Kendall critical of your performance?”
“She said I forgot my lines. I didn’t forget them. I had a moment or two of stage fright. Period.”
“Alison had an accident in school a few days after the play, didn’t she?”
“I remember that. The door of her locker fell on her. All the guys were questioned about it. I always thought that they should have been talking to the girls. A lot of them couldn’t stand her. Look, this is going to get you nowhere. As I told you, I would bet my bottom dollar the other four lunch table deaths were accidents. There’s absolutely no pattern to them. On the other hand, Alison was a mean kid. She trampled on people. From what I read about her, she never changed. I could see where someone might decide she’d been swimming long enough the day she drowned.”
He walked to the door and pointedly opened it. “Speed the parting guest,” he said. “That’s Shakespeare, too.”
Sam hoped he was professional enough not to allow his face to show exactly what he thought of Nieman and his cavalier dismissal of Alison Kendall’s death. “There’s also a Danish proverb that says fish and guests smell after three days,” he observed. Especially dead guests, he thought.
“That was more famously paraphrased by Benjamin Franklin,” Joel Nieman said quickly.
“Are you familiar with the Shakespeare quote about dead lilies?” Sam asked. “It’s somewhat in the same vein.”
Nieman’s laugh was an unpleasant, mirthless bark. “ ‘Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.’ That’s a line from one of his sonnets. Sure, I know it. In fact, it’s one I think about a lot. My mother-in-law’s name is Lily.”
Sam drove from Rye to the Glen-Ridge House faster than he approved, allowing the speedometer to climb. He had asked the honorees and Jack Emerson to meet him for dinner at seven-thirty. His gut instinct had been that one of the five men—Carter Stewart, Robby Brent, Mark Fleischman, Gordon Amory, or Emerson—held the key to Laura’s disappearance. Now, after interviewing Joel Nieman, he wasn’t as sure.
In effect, Nieman had admitted that he did not go home alone the night of the dinner. At Stonecroft he had been the prime suspect in the locker incident. He’d almost gone to jail for assaulting another man in a bar fight. He made no attempt to conceal his satisfaction that Alison Kendall was dead.
At the very least, Joel Nieman could use a great deal more scrutiny, Sam reasoned.
It was exactly seven-thirty when Sam entered the Glen-Ridge House. On the way into the private room, he passed the omnipresent Jake Perkins, sprawled on a chair in the lobby. Perkins jumped to his feet. “Any new developments, sir?” he asked cheerfully.
If there were, you’d be the last to know, Sam thought, but he managed not to let his annoyance show in his voice. “Nothing to report, Jake. Why don’t you go home?”
“Pretty soon I’ll be on my way. Oh, here’s Dr. Sheridan. I’d like to catch her for a minute.”
Jean was coming out of the elevator. Even from a distance Sam could see that there was something about her that suggested distress. It was the way she walked so quickly across the lobby toward the dining room. That sense of urgency made his own step quicken to catch up with her.
They met at the door of the dining room. Jean started to say, “Sam, I heard from—” Then, noticing Jake Perkins, she closed her lips.
Perkins had overheard. “Who did you hear from, Dr. Sheridan? Was it Laura Wilcox?”
“Go away,” Sam said firmly. He took Jean’s arm, propelled her through the dining room door, and closed it firmly.
Carter Stewart, Gordon Amory, Mark Fleischman, Jack Emerson, and Robby Brent were already there. A small bar had been set up, and all the men stood around with glasses in hand. At the click of the door they all turned, but when they saw the expression on Jean’s face, any greetings they were about to offer were forgotten.
“I just heard from Laura,” she told them. “I just heard from Laura.”
Over dinner the initial relief they all felt began to be replaced by uncertainty. “I was shocked to hear Laura’s voice,” Jean said. “But then she hung up before I could ask her anything.”
“She didn’t sound nervous or upset?” Jack Emerson asked.
“No. If anything, she sounded upbeat. But she didn’t give me a chance to ask her a single question.”
“Are you sure you were speaking to Laura?” Gordon Amory asked the question that Sam knew was on everyone’s mind.
“I think I was,” Jean said slowly. “But if you asked me to swear under oath that it was Laura, I couldn’t do it. It sounded like her, but . . .” She hesitated. “I have friends in Virginia, a couple, who sound exactly alike on the phone. They’ve been married fifty years, and the timbre of their voices is the same. I say, ‘Hello, Jane,’ and David laughs and says, ‘Guess again.’ Then when we’ve been chatting a few moments, of course I can pick up their different nuances. It was something like that with Laura’s call. The voice is the same, but maybe not exactly the same. We didn’t talk long enough to be certain one way or the other.”
“The point is, though, that if the phone call was from Laura a
nd she’s aware that she’s considered missing, why wouldn’t she be somewhat more specific about her plans?” Gordon Amory asked. “I wouldn’t put it past someone like that Perkins kid to try to keep his hot story going by pulling a stunt like this. Laura was on that TV series for a couple of years. She has a distinctive voice. Maybe some drama student Perkins knows is imitating her for him.”
“What do you think, Sam?” Mark Fleischman asked.
“If you want a cop’s response, it’s that whether or not Laura Wilcox made that call, I’m not satisfied by it.”
Fleischman nodded. “That’s the way I feel.”
Carter Stewart was cutting his steak with decisive strokes. “There is another factor that should be considered. Laura is an actress on the skids. I happen to know she’s just this side of being homeless.”
He glanced around the table and looked smugly at the startled expressions on the faces of the others. “My agent phoned. There was a juicy little item in the business section of the L.A. Times today. The IRS is foreclosing on Laura’s house to satisfy a tax lien.”
He paused to lift the fork to his lips, then continued: “Which means that Laura may well be desperate. Publicity is the name of the game for an actress. Good publicity, bad publicity, it doesn’t really matter. Anything to keep your name in the headlines. Maybe this is her way of doing it. Mysterious disappearance. Mysterious phone call. Frankly, I think we’re all wasting our time worrying about her.”
“It never crossed my mind that you were worried about her, Carter,” Robby Brent commented. “I think that other than Jean, the only person who really might be concerned is our chairman, Jack Emerson. Right, Jack?”
“What’s this?” Sam wondered aloud.
Robby smiled innocently. “Jack and I had a date this morning to look at some real estate that I might invest in, or at least might have considered investing in were it not so wildly overpriced. Jack was on the phone when I got to his place, and while I waited for him to talk to yet another few potential suckers, I looked over the collection of pictures in his den. There was a pretty sentimental inscription on one of Laura, dated exactly two weeks ago. ‘Love and kisses and hugs to my favorite classmate.’ It makes me wonder, Jack. How many hugs and kisses did she give you over the weekend, and is she still giving them to you?”