On the Street Where You Live

  I am certain that I saw Rachel’s pocketbook on the table in the foyer, Bernice thought. From where I was sitting in the living room, I could see it. I wasn’t paying enough attention to notice if it was lying on something. But then did I see someone move the purse and pick up whatever was under it?

  She was putting a face to the figure.

  Or am I getting fanciful because of all the talk about it?

  There is no fool like an old fool, Bernice decided. I’m not going to discuss this with anyone because I’m not sure.

  forty ________________

  “I DIDN’T EXPECT TO SEE YOU again quite so soon,” Emily told Tommy Duggan and Pete Walsh when she opened the door for them.

  “We didn’t expect to be back this soon, Ms. Graham,” Duggan replied as he observed her closely. “How did you sleep last night?”

  Emily shrugged. “Meaning that you can tell I didn’t sleep much last night. I’m afraid that photograph yesterday got to me. Isn’t it true that, in medieval times, if somebody who was being pursued managed to get into a church, he could shout ‘Sanctuary!’ and he’d be safe so long as he stayed there?”

  “Something like that,” Duggan said.

  “I guess that won’t work for me. Even in church I can’t feel safe. I am terribly frightened, I have to admit it,” she said.

  “Since you live alone, it would be much safer—”

  She interrupted. “I’m not moving out of the house.”

  “I have the postcard in the study,” she said. She had taken it there from the kitchen where she had sorted the mail, having found it between a flyer for a landscaping service and a request for a charitable donation.

  After the shock of the card’s message sank in, she had walked to the window and looked out at the backyard. On this overcast day, it looked bleak and dreary, like a graveyard. Like the graveyard it had been for over a century.

  Still holding the postcard, she had rushed into the study and called the prosecutor’s office.

  “The only mail that’s been delivered since I’ve been here was either addressed to the Kiernans or to ‘Occupant,’” she told the detectives. Then she pointed to the postcard, which she’d placed on the writing desk: “But this is addressed specifically to me.”

  It was as she had described it to them. A crude drawing of a house and the property surrounding it, the address 15 Ludlam Avenue scrawled between the lines of what was meant to be a sidewalk. Two tombstones were depicted side by side at the extreme left-hand corner of the area behind the house. Each bore a name. One was Letitia Gregg. The other, Carla Harper.

  Tommy took a plastic bag from his pocket, picked up the postcard by the edges, and slipped it into the evidence bag. “This time I came prepared,” he said. “Ms. Graham, this may be someone’s idea of a sick joke, but it also may be on the level. We’ve checked out 15 Ludlam Avenue. It’s owned by an elderly widow who lives there alone. We’re hoping that she’ll be cooperative when we tell her about this, and will let us dig up her yard, or at least the section indicated in this sketch.”

  “Do you think it’s on the level?” Emily asked.

  Tommy Duggan looked at her for a long moment before answering. “After what we found out there”—he nodded in the direction of Emily’s backyard—“I think that there’s a very good chance that it is, yes. But until we know for a certainty, I’d appreciate if you don’t say anything to anyone about it.”

  “There’s no one I want to talk to about it,” Emily said. I’m certainly not going to call Mother or Dad or Gran and worry them sick, she thought. But if my big brothers lived down the street, you bet I’d yell for them. Unfortunately they’re over a thousand miles away.

  She thought about Nick Todd. He had phoned just after the mail came, but she hadn’t told him about it either. When they found the photograph on the foyer floor after they returned from brunch yesterday, he’d urged her to drive to Manhattan and stay in her apartment there.

  But she’d insisted that the cameras Eric was going to install were the best hope of finding out who was doing this to her, explaining how it was the hidden camera Eric put in the townhouse that caught Ned Koehler when he was trying to break in. Once the cameras are in place here, we’ll have a shot at identifying whoever is pulling this stuff now, she’d assured him.

  Brave words, she thought, as she walked Tommy Duggan and Pete Walsh to the door and closed and locked it behind them, but the fact is I’m scared to death.

  The little sleep she’d gotten had been filled with nightmares. In one of them, she was being chased. In another, she was at the window, trying to open it, but someone was holding it down on the other side.

  Stop it! Emily ordered herself. Get busy! Call Dr. Wilcox and ask if you can drop off his books. Then go to the museum and do some research. See if you can figure out where those people lived in the 1890s in relation to one another.

  She wanted to identify the residences of the friends of Phyllis Gates and Madeline Shapley, the friends Gates had repeatedly mentioned in her book.

  Phyllis Gates made reference to her own family renting a cottage for the summer season, but seemed to infer that the other families owned their own houses. There had to be records showing where they lived, she thought.

  There has to be a map of the town as it was then, too. I need some art supplies. And I should be able to buy a Monopoly game somewhere. The small houses that are part of that game would be perfect for my needs.

  On a three-foot-by-three-foot sheet of cardboard, the kind that art students use, she would draw a plan of the town as it had looked in the 1890s, put in the street names, then place the tiny houses on the properties where Madeline Shapley’s friends had lived.

  Then I’ll get the history of the ownership of those properties since that time at the town clerk’s office, Emily decided.

  It’s probably an exercise in futility, she told herself as she went to the closet to get her Burberry, but the closer she was to entering Madeline’s world, the better chance she had of learning what happened to her—and to Letitia Gregg and Ellen Swain.

  forty-one ________________

  THE PIERCING RING of the doorbell was an intrusion. Rachel had driven to Rumson to have lunch with friends, and Clayton Wilcox had booted up his computer, looking forward to several hours of uninterrupted work on his novel.

  Since the meeting at Will Stafford’s house on Saturday afternoon, Rachel had been alternately resentful of the questions they’d been asked and increasingly suspicious of Detective Duggan’s motive for inquiring about her lost scarf.

  “You don’t think it has anything to do with Martha’s death, do you, Clayton?” she had asked several times. Then answering her own question, she had brusquely dismissed that possibility as ridiculous.

  Clayton had not contradicted her. It had been on the tip of his tongue to say, “Your lost scarf obviously has everything to do with Martha’s death, and you implicated me by making sure that everyone knew you had asked me to put it in my pocket,” but he had restrained himself.

  When he opened the door, he realized that he had half expected to see Detective Duggan standing on the porch. Instead, it was a stranger, a small woman with pursed lips and inquisitive gray eyes.

  Even before she spoke he was certain that she was from the media. Still her question stunned him: “Dr. Wilcox, your wife’s scarf has been missing since the party at the Lawrence home the night before Martha Lawrence vanished. Why are the police asking so many questions about it?”

  Clayton Wilcox gripped the doorknob with convulsive force and began to close the door.

  The woman spoke hastily. “Dr. Wilcox, my name is Reba Ashby. I’m with The National Daily, and before I write my article on the missing scarf, it might well be to your advantage to answer a few questions.”

  Wilcox considered for a moment, then opened the door a little wider, but still did not invite her into the house. “I have no idea why the police inquired about my wife’s scarf,” he said deliberately. “To be mo
re accurate, they inquired to see if anything was missing the night of the party. My wife had taken off her scarf and asked me to put it with her purse, which was on a side table in the foyer.”

  “I understand your wife told the police that she asked you to put it in your pocket,” Ashby said.

  “My wife asked me to put it with her pocketbook, and that is what I did.” Wilcox could feel the beads of perspiration forming on his forehead. “It was there in plain sight, and anyone could have picked it up during the course of the evening.”

  It was the opening Reba wanted. “But why would anyone pick it up? Are you suggesting that it was stolen?”

  “I am suggesting nothing. Perhaps someone moved it from under my wife’s purse.”

  “Why would anyone do that unless they planned to take it?”

  “I have no idea. Now if you’ll excuse me . . .” This time Clayton Wilcox closed the door, ignoring Reba Ashby’s raised voice.

  “Dr. Wilcox, did you know Dr. Lillian Madden?” she shouted through the door.

  SETTLED AGAIN AT HIS DESK, Wilcox stared at the screen. None of the words he had just written any longer made sense to him. He had no doubt that Reba Ashby would write a sensational article about the scarf. Inevitably, he would be the subject of glaring publicity. How far would that rag she wrote for dig into his background? How deeply were the police investigating his past right now?

  According to the newspapers, the records in Dr. Madden’s office had been destroyed.

  All of them?

  Should he have admitted to consulting her?

  The telephone rang. Be calm, Wilcox told himself, you must be perceived as being calm.

  It was Emily Graham, asking if she might drop by and return his books.

  “Of course,” he said smoothly. “It will be a pleasure to see you again. Come right over.”

  When he replaced the receiver, he leaned back in his chair. An image of Emily Graham swam through his mind.

  A cloud of midnight-brown hair caught up by a clip at the back of her head, the tendrils escaping on her forehead and neck . . .

  Sculpted aquiline nose . . .

  Full, sooty eyelashes, framing wide, questioning eyes . . .

  Clayton Wilcox sighed and put his hands on the keyboard and began to type. “His need was so great that even the unspeakable consequences of what he was about to do could not deter him.”

  forty-two ________________

  ON MONDAY MORNING, Robert Frieze started the week by quarreling with Natalie. The fact that he had a meeting scheduled with Dominic Bonetti, the potential buyer of The Seasoner, precipitated the bitter exchange.

  Sleepless as usual, he had gone jogging at 6:30, wanting to work out the tension building up in him. He knew he needed to be at his most confident best when he met Bonetti.

  On the way back from the North Pavilion, he spotted Susan, his ex-wife, jogging toward him, and left the boardwalk to avoid her. Her semi-annual alimony payment was due at the end of the month, and this wasn’t the day to worry about how to squeeze out the cash for it, he decided.

  He returned home, the tension if anything increased, and to his dismay he found Natalie at the table in the kitchen. He’d hoped to have a quiet cup of coffee and go over the figures he’d compiled during the night.

  “Is this the new regimen?” he asked snappishly. “For the last three days you’ve been up with the birds. What happened to the beauty sleep you claim you need?”

  He was annoyed to see that the financial statements he had been working on in the predawn hours were spread out on the table.

  “It’s pretty hard to sleep when there’s no reason to be tired,” she snapped back. The remark was Natalie’s way of reminding him that since he had started opening the restaurant for dinner on Sundays, she spent Sunday evenings alone.

  Then she started in on him. “Bob,” she said, “will you please tell me what these figures mean? Particularly the ones on the last page? You wouldn’t sell the restaurant for that little, would you? You might as well give it away.”

  “It might be better to give it away than to go bankrupt,” Bob said coldly. “Please, Natalie, I’m trying to prepare myself for a meeting today in which, with any luck, I’ll close a deal and get this albatross off my back. Dom Bonetti has me between a rock and a hard place, and he has to know it. I’ve got to have a bottom-line position that he can’t refuse.”

  “Well, unless I can’t either add or subtract, it looks to me like your bottom-line position leaves us damn near strapped. I told you when you got involved in living out your innkeeper fantasy that you should have sold those stocks, instead of borrowing against them. Now, unless you get a high price for the restaurant, which from a quick look at these calculations you don’t expect to, you’ll have to sell the stocks to pay back the loans.”

  Natalie paused, then continued, her voice even more angry and scornful: “I hope I don’t have to point out that those stocks are now worth half as much as they were when you started borrowing against them.”

  Bob felt his stomach cramp and his chest begin to burn. He held out his hand. “Give me those papers.”

  “Get them yourself.” Natalie swept the papers off the table and onto the floor, then deliberately stepped on them as she stalked out of the room.

  FIVE HOURS LATER, Bob shook his head and looked down at the papers he was holding. There was a narrow oval-shaped hole in one of them. Then he remembered—the stiletto heel of Natalie’s bedroom slipper had torn through that paper as she walked on it.

  It was the last thing he remembered—their quarreling as he stood in the kitchen in his jogging suit, and hearing her slam the door of the bedroom overhead. He closed his eyes for a moment.

  Opening them, he looked around slowly. He was in his second-floor office in the restaurant now, wearing his dark-blue jacket and gray slacks.

  He looked at his watch. It was almost one o’clock. One o’clock! The potential buyer, Dominic Bonetti, was due any minute. They were going to discuss the sale over lunch.

  Frantically, Bob tried to focus on the figures he had compiled. His phone rang. It was the maître d’. “Mr. Bonetti is here. Shall I seat him at your table?”

  “Yes. I’m on the way down.”

  He went into his private bathroom and splashed cold water over his face. At Natalie’s insistence, he’d had some work done on his eyes last year, by a plastic surgeon her friends were raving about. Now his lids were tighter and the pouches that had started to form under his eyes were gone, but he knew the results didn’t flatter him. As he looked in the mirror, it seemed to him that the upper half of his face was out of sync with the bottom half, something he found disconcerting, even alarming. He had always prided himself on his good looks. Not anymore.

  A hell of a thing to be worried about now, he thought as he ran a comb through his hair. Then he hurried downstairs.

  He knew they didn’t have many Monday lunch reservations, but he had counted on the drop-in crowd to make the place look at least reasonably busy. He felt his palms begin to sweat when he walked into the dining room to see that only six tables were occupied. Dominic Bonetti was waiting for him, a notebook open at the table.

  Was that a good sign?

  He’d met Bonetti once before, at a golf outing. The man was powerfully built, not very tall, with a thick head of dark hair and shrewd dark eyes. He had a hearty, outgoing manner, and when he was not speaking, he exuded an air of quiet confidence.

  They did not begin discussing business until after they finished the broiled salmon, which had been dry and unappetizing. Bob had managed to keep up his half of the conversation, but it had been a real effort.

  As espresso was served, Bonetti came to the point. “You want out of this place. I want in. Don’t ask why. I don’t need it. I’m fifty-nine years old, and I have as much money as I’ll ever want to spend. But I miss having a restaurant. It’s in the blood, I guess. And you’ve got a great location here.”

  But then, in the next half hou
r, Bob learned what The Seasoner did not have, which turned out to be almost everything.

  The decor: “I know you spent a fortune on it, but it doesn’t invite you in. It’s cold and uncomfortable because . . . The kitchen is inefficient . . .”

  Natalie had picked the pricey interior designer. The first chef he hired, that hotshot from Madison Avenue, dictated the way the kitchen would be laid out.

  The price Dominic Bonetti offered was a half million dollars less than the absolute bottom price Bob Frieze thought he could accept.

  “That’s your initial offer,” he said with a dismissive smile. “I’ll be happy to counter it.”

  Bonetti’s easygoing manner vanished. “If I buy this place, I’m going to spend big bucks to make it look the way I want it and to staff it with top-quality people,” he said quietly. “I’ve given you my price. I won’t consider a counteroffer.”

  He stood up, a warm smile on his face again. “Think it over, Bob. It’s actually a very fair price, considering what needs to be done and undone. If you decide not to accept it, no hard feelings. My wife will be thrilled.”

  He extended his hand. “Let me know.”

  Bob waited until Bonetti left the dining room, then caught the waiter’s eye and held up his empty wineglass.

  A moment later the waiter returned with the wine and a cell phone. “Urgent call from Mrs. Frieze, sir.”

  To Bob’s surprise, Natalie did not ask him about the meeting with Bonetti. Instead she said, “I just heard that there’s a backhoe digging up the yard at 15 Ludlam Avenue. The rumor is that they’re looking for the body of Carla Harper, that girl who disappeared two years ago. My God, Bob, 15 Ludlam Avenue! Isn’t that the house your family lived in when you were growing up?”

  forty-three ________________

  “YOUR FATHER IS HERE TO SEE YOU, Mr. Stafford.” The receptionist’s voice sounded puzzled. It was almost as if she were saying, “I didn’t know your father was alive.”