“My father!” Will Stafford threw down the pen he was holding. Angered and dismayed, he waited until he was sure his voice was calm. “Send him in.”
He watched as the door handle turned slowly. Afraid to face me, he thought. Afraid I’ll throw him out. He did not get up, but remained seated rigidly at his desk, willing every inch of his body to convey his displeasure at the intrusion.
The door opened slowly. The man who came in was a shadow of the one he had seen a year ago. Since then his father had lost at least fifty pounds. His complexion was now waxy yellow, the cheekbones prominent under tightly drawn skin. The full head of graying sandy hair that Will remembered, and had himself inherited, was now reduced to loose strands of dingy gray.
Sixty-four and he looks eighty-four, Will thought. Am I supposed to feel sorry for him, to throw my arms around him? “Close that door,” he ordered.
Willard Stafford, Sr., nodded and obeyed. Neither man noticed that the door had not completely shut and then had drifted open several inches.
Will stood up slowly. His voice rising, spitting out the words, he demanded, “Why won’t you leave me alone? Can’t you understand that I want no part of you? You want me to forgive you? Fine. I forgive you. Now get out.”
“Will, I made mistakes. I admit it. I haven’t got long. I want to make it up to you.”
“You can’t. Now go and don’t come back.”
“I should have understood. You were an adolescent . . .” The older man’s voice began to rise.
“Shut up!” In two strides, Will Stafford was around his desk and in front of his father. His strong hands gripped the other man’s thin, shaking shoulders.
“I paid for what someone else did. You didn’t believe me. You could have afforded a team of lawyers to defend me properly. Instead you washed your hands of me, your only son. You publicly disowned me. But now the juvenile record is sealed. I don’t need you coming in here and destroying everything I’ve built up for the past twenty-three years. Just get out of here. Get back in your car. Drive back to Princeton and stay there.”
Willard Stafford, Sr., nodded. His eyes moist, he turned around and groped for the handle of the door. Then he stopped. “I promise I won’t be back. I wanted to see you face to face for the last time and ask your forgiveness. I know I failed you. I just thought that maybe you could see . . .” His words trailed off into silence.
Will did not respond.
His father sighed and opened the door. “It’s just”—he mumbled more to himself than to Will—“it’s just that reading about what’s been going on in this town. I mean that girl whose body was found. I got worried. You understand . . .”
“You have the nerve to come here and say that to me? Get out! Do you hear me! Get out!”
It did not matter to Will Stafford that he was shouting, that Pat, the receptionist, was surely overhearing him. It only mattered that he get control over his blinding rage before he put his hands around the scrawny throat of the man who had sired him, and squeezed it until the neck snapped.
forty-four ________________
NED KOEHLER’S LAWYER, Hal Davis, was not pleased to meet Marty Browski at Gray Manor again at three o’clock on Monday afternoon.
“The state doesn’t pay me enough to help you with a witch hunt,” he complained as they waited together for Koehler to be brought into the conference room.
“The state pays me to make sure that people pay for their crimes,” Browski shot back. “As I told you this morning, we’ve reopened the Ruth Koehler investigation, and your client is under suspicion of murder.”
Davis looked incredulous. “You’ve got to be kidding. You couldn’t prove your case against Ruth Koehler’s killer, Joel Lake, he went free, and now you’re trying to make yourselves look good by making that poor dope Koehler the fall guy? I rushed here and spoke to Ned after you called me and advised him not to speak to you. But he is adamant that he is innocent and is insisting that he be permitted to talk to you.”
“Maybe he’s smarter than you think,” Browski said. “We all thought Koehler compromised the crime scene because of his shock and grief. Another way to look at it though, is that he was cunning enough to make sure that there was a reason his fingerprints were all over that knife and there was blood on his clothes.”
“He picked her up. He didn’t know she was dead. He ran for help.”
“Maybe.”
The door opened. Ned Koehler was escorted to a seat by the guard. “Ned’s a little agitated today,” the guard said. “I’m right outside if you need me.”
“Why are you doing this to me?” Koehler demanded of Marty. “I loved my mother. I miss her.”
“I just have a few questions,” Browski said soothingly. “But I must specifically inform you that you are a suspect in the death of your mother, so anything you say can be used against you.” He rattled off the rest of the Miranda warnings by rote.
“Ned, you understand that you don’t have to answer any questions.” Hal Davis leaned forward as though by getting closer to Koehler he could get through to him better.
“Ned, I talked to your aunt,” Marty said quietly.
“She wasn’t mistaken. She did talk to your mother after Joel Lake was seen leaving the building.”
“My aunt is crazy. If my mother talked to her after that guy left, she would have told her that she’d been robbed.”
“Maybe she didn’t know it yet. Ned, did your mother ever get angry at you?”
“My mother loved me. Very much.”
“I’m sure she did but she used to get angry at you sometimes, didn’t she?”
“No. Never.”
“She was especially angry because you were so careless about pulling the door closed tight when you went out so that the lock would engage. Isn’t that right?”
“I always locked that door when I went out.”
“Always? Joel Lake says the door wasn’t even fully closed. That’s why he went into your apartment.”
Ned Koehler’s eyes had narrowed to slits. His mouth was working convulsively.
“Isn’t it a fact, Ned, that the week before your mother died, the same thing happened? Didn’t she shout at you and say that someone could come in and put a knife through her? Your neighbors told me that was what she always said to you when you didn’t make sure the lock had caught.”
“Ned, I don’t want you to talk anymore,” Davis urged.
Ned shook his head at his lawyer. “Leave me alone, Hal. I want to talk.”
“Ned, how do you know how frightened your mother was when she saw the knife and knew she was going to die?” Marty hammered the question across the table at Ned Koehler.
He did not wait for an answer. “Did she beg you not to hurt her? Did she say she was sorry for picking on you? She was sitting at the kitchen table. She had just realized the apartment had been burglarized. She must have been very angry. The knife was right there on that rack on the wall. Did she point to it and tell you that whoever came in could have used it on her, and that it would have been your fault?”
Something between a wail and a scream burst out of Ned Koehler’s throat, startling the two men. The door opened, and the guard rushed in.
Ned Koehler buried his face in his hands. “She said, ‘Don’t, Ned, I’m sorry, Ned, don’t Ned, please.’ But it was too late. I didn’t know I was holding the knife, and then it was in her chest.”
Great racking sobs shook his body as he shouted, “I’m sorry, Mommy! I’m sorry, Mommy!”
forty-five ________________
ERIC BAILEY WAS WAITING on Emily’s porch when she arrived home, back from delivering the books to Dr. Wilcox, visiting the museum, and buying the supplies she needed for the project she planned to begin.
He waved away her apologies. “Don’t worry. I made good time, but I am hungry. What have you got to eat?”
She brought in sandwich makings—ham and Swiss cheese, lettuce and tomatoes, and fresh Italian bread—and while she prepared lunch,
he began to unpack the camera equipment.
They ate in the kitchen. “I added some leftover chicken soup to the menu,” she told him. “I made it the other night and froze what was left over. It’s good, I promise.”
“This reminds me of when we were in those dumpy offices in Albany,” Eric said as he scraped the last drop of soup from the bowl. “I’d go down and get sandwiches from the deli, and you’d heat up your homemade soup.”
“It was fun,” Emily said.
“It was fun, and I wouldn’t have had a company if you hadn’t defended me against that lawsuit.”
“And you made me rich. Fair’s fair.”
They smiled at each other across the table. Eric’s three days older than I am, Emily thought, but I always feel as if he’s my little brother.
“I was concerned when I saw that the company stock had gone down,” she told him.
He shrugged. “It will come back. You made your money, but you’ll still be sorry you sold when you did.”
“I was raised on hearing how my grandfather lost all his money in 1929, when the market went kaput. I guess I just wasn’t comfortable holding on to the stock. I’d have been worried that something would go wrong. This way, I can live the rest of my life without a financial care, thanks to you.”
“Anytime you need taking care of . . .” Eric left the sentence unfinished, as Emily smilingly shook her head.
“Why spoil a beautiful friendship?” she asked.
He helped to load the dishwasher. “That’s my job,” she protested.
“I like helping you.”
“Since you say that you absolutely have to make the drive back to Albany tonight, I’d rather you got started on installing the cameras.”
A few minutes later she closed the dishwasher with a decisive snap. “Okay. All set. If you work at one end of the dining room table, I’ll set up at the other end.” She explained what she was planning to do with the copies of the maps and town records.
“I want to enter these people’s lives,” she said. “I want to see where Madeline’s circle of friends lived. I’m convinced it was someone she knew who killed her, then buried her here. But how did he get away with it? There must have been police activity around the house, at least for the first few days, when she was reported missing. Where was she being held? Or where was her body being kept? Or did the killer bury her here that same day after dark? The holly tree blocked off that section of the yard.”
“You’re sure you’re not becoming obsessed with this crime, Emily?”
She looked at him sharply. “I’m obsessed with finding the link between the crimes of the 1890s and the recent ones in this town. Right now the police are digging up someone else’s backyard a few blocks from here, and they think they may find the remains of a young woman who has been missing two years.”
“Emily, don’t stay here alone. You tell me you’ve had two incidents of stalking in the five days you’ve been here. You wanted a break, a vacation. From the looks of you, you certainly aren’t getting it.”
The sudden ringing of the phone caused Emily to gasp and grab Eric’s arm. She managed a shaky laugh as she ran to the study to answer the call.
It was Detective Browski. He did not waste time greeting her. “Emily, your client in the Koehler case is a louse and a bum, but you may be glad to hear he’s not a murderer. I just left Ned Koehler. Wait till you hear . . .”
Fifteen minutes later she returned to the dining room.
“That was quite a conversation,” Eric commented, his tone light. “New boyfriend?”
“Detective Browski. You’ve met him. He’s been saying nice things about you.”
“Let’s hear. Don’t leave out a detail.”
“According to him, you probably saved my life, Eric. If the camera you installed hadn’t caught Ned Koehler, we wouldn’t have known who was stalking me.”
“Your neighbor heard something and called the cops.”
“Yes, but Koehler figured out how to disable the alarm system. And he got away before the cops came. If we didn’t have him on-camera, thanks to you, we wouldn’t have known who had tried to get in. The next time might have been very different for me.”
Emily heard the quiver in her voice. “He admitted today that he was planning to kill me. Marty Browski said that in Koehler’s twisted mind, Joel Lake, the guy I defended, caused his mother’s death. He told Browski that if Joel hadn’t burglarized the apartment, his mother would be alive today, that Joel was the real killer.”
“Pretty crazy logic, I would say.” Eric Bailey’s hands worked effortlessly as he assembled the equipment needed to install the cameras that he had brought to Spring Lake.
“Crazy, but in another way understandable. I’m sure he didn’t mean to kill his mother, and I know he can’t bear to think that he’s the cause of her death. If Joel Lake had been found guilty, he would have been able to transfer his own guilt to him. Then I got Joel off, so I became the villain.”
“You’re not a villain,” Eric Bailey said emphatically. “What worries me is that from what you say Browski is worried about this renewed stalker business. Who does he think is doing it?”
“He’s checked out my ex. Whatever Gary is, he’s not a stalker. He has airtight alibis for Tuesday night and Saturday morning, when these last pictures were taken. Browski hasn’t been able to locate Joel Lake yet.”
“Are you worried about Lake?”
“You’ll be surprised to hear that on one level I’m relieved about him. Remember how Ned Koehler flew at me after the jury acquitted Lake?”
“You bet I do. I was there.”
“When the guards pulled Koehler off me, Joel Lake helped me up. He was right next to me, because we had stood up to hear the verdict. Eric, do you know what he whispered to me?”
The tone of Emily’s voice made Eric Bailey stop what he was doing and look intently at her.
“He said to me, ‘Maybe Koehler’s right, Emily. Maybe I did kill the old lady. How does that make you feel?’
“I haven’t told that to anyone, but it’s been haunting me ever since. And yet I didn’t believe he had killed her. Can you understand that reasoning? He’s just a despicable human being, who, instead of being grateful that he wasn’t going to prison for life, needed to taunt me.”
“You know what I think, Emily? I think he was attracted to you and knew it wouldn’t do him any good. Rejection can do terrible things to some people.”
“Well, if he is the stalker, I hope to God that one of your cameras catches him for me.”
When Eric left shortly before 7:00 P.M., the cameras were in place on all sides of the house. What he did not tell Emily was that he had installed others inside the house, and attached a line-of-sight antenna on an attic window. Now, within a half-mile radius, with the television set in his van, he would be able to follow her movements and hear her conversations in her living room, kitchen, and study.
As he left her with a friendly kiss on the cheek and began the return trip to Albany, he was already planning his next visit to Spring Lake.
He smiled, thinking of how she had jumped when the phone rang. She was far more unnerved than she wanted to admit, even to herself.
Fear was the ultimate weapon of revenge. She had sold her stock at peak value. Shortly after that other sell-offs had started, leading to a chain of them. Now his whole company was on the verge of bankruptcy.
He could even forgive her for that if she had not rejected him as a man. “If you will not love me, Emily,” he said aloud, “you will live your life in fear, waiting for that moment when someone steps out of the dark and you can’t get away.”
Tuesday, March 27
forty-six ________________
ON MONDAY AFTERNOON the backhoe that had been delivered to 15 Ludlam Avenue had turned over only one shovelful of dirt before malfunctioning. To their chagrin, the forensics experts were told that a replacement would not be available until Tuesday morning.
Bowing to the i
nevitable, they taped off the backyard and left a police officer to guard the premises.
At eight o’clock on Tuesday morning, even before the new backhoe arrived, the media were present. Vans displaying the logos of television channels lined the quiet streets. Helicopters hovered above the area as cameramen began to shoot aerial views of the search site. Reporters with mikes waited to see the forensic team sift through every shovelful of dirt.
Emily, in a jogging suit and sunglasses, mingled with the people standing on the sidewalk in quiet, somber groups and listened to their comments.
Everyone knew the searchers had to be looking for another body. But whose? It almost had to be Carla Harper, that young girl who vanished two years ago, they whispered among themselves. People had heard that the police now seriously doubted that Carla had ever left Spring Lake.
Two questions were on everyone’s lips: “Why did they decide to search here?” and “Was it because someone has confessed to the crime?”
Emily listened, as a young-looking grandmother pushing a stroller said grimly, “We’d better all pray that they have the killer in custody. It is too frightening to think that a murderer is on the loose in this town. My daughter, this baby’s mother, is only a few years older than Martha Lawrence and Carla Harper were.”
Emily remembered what she had read in Phyllis Gates’s book: “Mother has become a fierce guardian, unwilling to have me even stroll down the street unless I am accompanied.”
Mother was right, Phyllis, she thought. She had spent Monday evening until well past midnight preparing her model of the town and marking in the streets as they had been at the time of the earlier murder. On her cardboard plan she had Monopoly houses in place, indicating where the Shapleys, the Carters, the Greggs, and the Swains had lived.
She recognized the columnist from The National Daily, standing not far from her, and turned away quickly, deciding to go home. I don’t want her to collar me, Emily thought. And after last week, I certainly don’t want to be here if they do uncover bodies. I already have what I need to know about 15 Ludlam Avenue.