“Why Spring Lake?”
We used to stay at the Essex and Sussex Hotel for a couple of weeks every summer when I was a kid. It was a happy time.” He shrugged.
The waitress put the check on the table. Will glanced at it and got out his wallet. “Then twelve years ago I realized I liked living here and didn’t like working in New York, so I opened this office. A lot of real estate work, both residential and commercial.
“And speaking of that, let’s get going to the Kiernans.” They got up together.
BUT THE KIERNANS had already left Spring Lake. Their lawyer explained he had power of attorney to execute the closing. Emily walked with him through every room, taking fresh delight in architectural details she had not fully appreciated before.
“Yes, I’m absolutely satisfied that everything I bought is here and the house is in perfect condition,” she told him. She tried to push back her increasing impatience to get the deed transferred, to be in the house alone, to wander through the rooms, to rearrange the living room furniture so that the couches faced each other at right angles to the fireplace.
She needed to put her own stamp on the house, to make it hers. She’d always thought of the townhouse in Albany as a stopgap place, although she had been in it three years—ever since she’d returned from a visit to her parents in Chicago a day early and found her husband in an intimate embrace with her closest friend, Barbara Lyons. She picked up her suitcases, got back in the car, and checked into a hotel. A week later she rented the townhouse.
The house she had lived in with Gary was owned by his wealthy family. It had never felt like hers. But walking through this house seemed to evoke sensory memory. “I almost feel as though it’s welcoming me,” she told Will Stafford.
“I think it might be. You should see the expression on your face. Ready to go to my office and sign the papers?”
THREE HOURS LATER Emily returned to the house and once more pulled into the driveway. “Home sweet home,” she said joyously as she got out of the car and opened the trunk to collect the groceries she’d purchased after the closing.
An area near the new cabana was being excavated for the pool. Three men were working on the site. After the walk-through she’d been introduced to Manny Dexter, the foreman. Now he caught her eye and waved.
The rumble of the backhoe drowned out her footsteps as she hurried along the blue flagstone walk to the back door. This I could do without, she thought, then reminded herself again that the pool would be nice to have when her brothers and their families came to visit.
She was wearing one of her favorite outfits, a dark green winter-weight pantsuit and white turtleneck sweater. Warm as they were, Emily shivered as she shifted the grocery bag from one arm to the other and put the key in the door. A gust of wind blew her hair in her face, and as she shook it away, she jostled the bag and a box of cereal dropped onto the flooring of the porch.
The extra moment it took to pick up the box meant that Emily was still outside when Manny Dexter shouted frantically to the operator of the backhoe. “Turn that thing off! Stop digging! There’s a skeleton down there!”
four ________________
DETECTIVE TOMMY DUGGAN did not always agree with his boss, Elliot Osborne, the Monmouth County prosecutor. Tommy knew Osborne considered his unceasing investigation into the disappearance of Martha Lawrence an obsession that might only succeed in keeping her killer in a state of high alert.
“That is unless the killer is a drive-through nut who grabbed her and dumped her body hundreds of miles from here,” Osborne would point out.
Tommy Duggan had been a detective for the last fifteen of his forty-two years. In that time he’d married, fathered two sons, and watched his hairline go south while his waistline traveled east and west. With his round, good-humored face and ready smile, he gave the impression of being an easygoing fellow who had never encountered a problem more serious than a flat tire.
In fact, he was a crackerjack investigator. In the department, he was admired and envied for his ability to pick up a seemingly useless piece of information and follow it until it proved to be the break in his case. Over the years, Tommy had turned down several generous offers to join private security firms. He loved the job.
All his life he had lived in Avon by the Sea, an oceanside town a few miles from Spring Lake. As a college student he had been a busboy and then a waiter at the Warren Hotel in Spring Lake. That was how he had come to know Martha Lawrence’s grandparents, who regularly dined there.
Again today, as he sat in his private cubbyhole, he spent the short lunch break he allotted himself glancing once more through the Lawrence file. He knew that Elliot Osborne wanted to nail Martha Lawrence’s killer as much as he did. The only thing that differed was their ideas of how to go about solving the crime.
Tommy stared at a picture of Martha that had been taken on the boardwalk in Spring Lake. She’d been wearing a tee shirt and shorts. Her long blond hair caressed her shoulders, her smile was sunny and confident. She had been a beautiful twenty-one-year-old who, when that picture was taken, should have had another fifty or sixty years of life. Instead she had had less than forty-eight hours.
Tommy shook his head and closed the file. He was convinced that by continuing to make the rounds of people in Spring Lake he eventually would stumble upon some crucial fact, some bit of information previously overlooked, that would lead him to the truth. As a result he was a familiar figure to the neighbors of the Lawrences and to all the people who had been in contact with Martha in those last hours of her life.
The staff of the caterer who had serviced the party at the Lawrence home the night before Martha disappeared were longtime employees. He had talked repeatedly to them, so far without garnering any helpful information.
Most of the guests who had attended the party were locals, or summer residents who kept their homes open year-round and would come down regularly for weekends. Tommy always kept a copy of the guest list folded in his wallet. It wasn’t a big effort for him to drive to Spring Lake and look up a couple of them just to chat.
Martha had disappeared while jogging. A few of the regular early morning joggers reported they had seen her near the North Pavilion. Each of them had been checked out thoroughly and cleared.
Tommy Duggan sighed as he closed the file and put it back in his top drawer. He didn’t believe that some drive-by had randomly stopped in Spring Lake and waylaid Martha. He was sure that whoever had abducted her was someone she trusted.
And I’m working on my own time, he thought sourly as he observed the contents of the lunch bag his wife had packed for him.
The doctor had told him to take off twenty pounds. As he unwrapped a tuna on whole wheat, he decided that Suzie was hell-bent on making the weight loss happen by starving him to death.
Then he smiled reluctantly and admitted that it was this lousy diet that was getting to him. What he really needed was a nice thick ham and cheese on rye, with potato salad on the side. And a pickle, he added.
As he bit into the tuna sandwich, he reminded himself that even if Osborne had just made another remark about him overdoing his efforts on the Lawrence case, Martha’s family didn’t see it that way.
In fact Martha’s grandmother, a handsome and naturally elegant eighty-year-old, had looked happier than he’d have thought possible when he stopped in on her last week. Then she told him the good news: Martha’s sister, Christine, just had a baby.
“George and Amanda are so thrilled,” she told him. “It’s the first time I’ve seen either one of them really smile in the last four and a half years. I know that having a grandchild will help them get over losing Martha.”
George and Amanda were Martha’s parents.
Then Mrs. Lawrence had added, “Tommy, on one level we all accept that Martha is gone. She never would have voluntarily disappeared. What haunts us is the terrible possibility that some psychotic person kidnapped her and is keeping her prisoner. It would be easier if we only knew for certa
in that she’s gone.”
“Gone,” meaning dead, of course.
She had been seen last on the boardwalk at 6:30 A.M. on September 7, four-and-a-half years ago.
As Tommy unenthusiastically finished his sandwich, he made a decision. As of 6:00 A.M. tomorrow, he was going to become one of the joggers on the Spring Lake boardwalk.
It would help him to shed the twenty pounds, but there was something else. Like an itch he couldn’t scratch, he was getting a feeling that sometimes came when he was working intensely on a homicide, and try as he might to escape it, it wouldn’t go away.
He was closing in on the killer.
His phone rang. He picked it up as he bit into the apple that was supposed to pass for dessert. It was Osborne’s secretary. “Tommy, meet the boss down at his car right away.”
Elliot Osborne was just getting in the backseat when Tommy, puffing slightly, arrived at the reserved parking section. Osborne did not speak until the car pulled out and the driver turned on the siren.
“A skeleton has just been uncovered on Hayes Avenue in Spring Lake. Owner was excavating for a pool.”
Before Osborne could continue, the phone in the squad car rang. The driver answered and handed it back to the prosecutor. “It’s Newton, sir.”
Osborne held up the phone so that Tommy could hear what the forensics chief was saying. “You’ve got yourself a hell of a case, Elliot. There are remains of two people buried here, and from the look of it, one has been in the ground a lot longer than the other.”
five ________________
AFTER MAKING THE 911 CALL, Emily ran outside and stood at the edge of the gaping hole and looked down at what appeared to be a human skeleton.
As a criminal defense attorney she had seen dozens of graphic pictures of bodies. The expressions on the faces of many of them had been frozen in fear. In others she’d been sure she could detect lingering traces of pleading in their staring eyes. But nothing had ever affected her the way the sight of this victim did now.
The body had been bound in heavy, clear plastic. The plastic was shredding but, although the flesh had crumbled, it had done a good job of keeping the bones intact. For a moment it crossed her mind that the remains of her great-great-grandaunt had been accidentally discovered.
Then she rejected that possibility. In 1891, when Madeline Shapely disappeared, plastic had not yet been invented, so this could not be her.
When the first police car raced up the driveway, its siren screeching, Emily returned to the house. She knew it was inevitable that the police would want to speak to her, and she felt the need to collect her wits.
“Collect her wits”—her grandmother’s expression.
The bags of food were on the kitchen counter where she had dropped them in her rush to phone. With robotlike precision she filled the kettle, placed it on the stove, turned on the flame, then sorted through the bags and put the perishables in the refrigerator. She hesitated for a moment, then began opening and closing cabinets.
“I don’t remember where the groceries belong,” she said aloud, fretfully, then recognized that the stab of childish irritation was the result of shock.
The kettle began whistling. A cup of tea, she thought. That will clear my head.
A large window in the kitchen overlooked the grounds behind the house. Teacup in hand, Emily stood at it, observing the quiet efficiency with which the area around the excavation was being cordoned off.
Police photographers arrived and began snapping picture after picture of the site. She knew it had to be a forensic expert who scrambled into the excavation, near the place where the skeleton was lying.
She knew that the remains would be taken to the morgue and examined. And then a physical description would be issued, giving the sex of the victim, along with the approximate size and weight and age. Dental records and DNA would help to match the description with that of a missing person. And for some unfortunate family the agony of uncertainty would be ended, along with the forlorn hope that maybe the loved one would return.
The bell rang.
A GRIM-FACED TOMMY DUGGAN stood next to Elliot Osborne on the porch and waited for the door to be opened. From their whispered consultation with the forensics chief, both men were sure that the search for Martha Lawrence was over. Newton had told them that the condition of the skeletal frame wrapped in plastic indicated it was that of a young adult who, as far as he could tell, had perfect teeth. He refused to speculate on the loose human bones that he had found near the skeleton until the medical examiner could examine them in the morgue.
Tommy glanced over his shoulder. “There are people starting to gather out there. The Lawrences are sure to hear about this.”
“Dr. O’Brien is going to rush the autopsy,” Osborne said crisply. “He understands that everyone in Spring Lake is going to jump to the conclusion that it’s Martha Lawrence.”
When the door opened, both men had their identification badges in hand. “I’m Emily Graham. Please come in,” she said.
She had expected the visit to be little more than a formality. “I understand that you only closed on the house this morning, Ms. Graham,” Osborne began.
She was familiar with government officials like Elliot Osborne. Impeccably dressed, courteous, smart, they were also good public relations people who left the nitty-gritty to their underlings. She knew that he and Detective Duggan would be comparing notes and impressions later on.
She also knew that behind his appropriately serious demeanor, Detective Duggan was studying her with appraising eyes.
They were standing in the foyer, where the only piece of furniture was a quaint Victorian love seat. When she had seen the house that first day and said she wanted to buy it, adding that she would be interested in purchasing some of the furnishings as well, Theresa Kiernan, the former owner, had pointed to the love seat with a faint smile. “I love this piece, but trust me, it’s purely for atmosphere. It’s so low that it defies the force of gravity to get up from it.”
Emily invited Osborne and Detective Duggan into the living room. I was planning to move the couches this afternoon, she thought as they followed her through the archway. I wanted to have them face each other at the fireplace. She tried to fight back a growing sense of unreality.
Duggan had quietly taken out a notebook.
“We’d just like to ask you a few simple questions, Ms. Graham,” Osborne said sympathetically. “How long have you been coming to Spring Lake?”
To her own ears, her story of driving down for the first time three months ago and immediately buying the house sounded almost ludicrous.
“You’d never been here before and bought a house like this on impulse?” There was a distinct tone of incredulity in Osborne’s voice.
Emily could see that the expression in Duggan’s eyes was speculative. She chose her words carefully. “I came to Spring Lake on an impulse because all my life I’ve been curious about it. My family built this house in 1875. They owned it until 1892, selling it after the older daughter, Madeline, disappeared in 1891. In looking up the town records to see where the house was, I found it was for sale. I saw it, loved it, and bought it. More than that I can’t tell you.”
She did not understand the startled expression on both their faces. “I didn’t even realize this was the Shapley house,” Osborne said. “We’re expecting that the remains will be those of a young woman who disappeared over four years ago while visiting her grandparents in Spring Lake.” With a brief shake of his hand, he signaled to Duggan that now was not the right time to mention the second set of remains.
Emily felt the color drain from her face. “A young woman disappeared over four years ago and is buried here?” she whispered. “Dear God, how can that be?”
“It’s a very sad day for this community.” Osborne got up. “I’m afraid we’ll have to keep the scene under protection until they have finished processing it. As soon as it is, you’ll be able to have your contractor resume digging for your pool.”
>
There isn’t going to be a pool, Emily thought.
“There’s bound to be a lot of media people around. We’ll keep them from bothering you as best we can,” Osborne said. “We may want to talk to you further.”
As they walked to the door, the bell pealed insistently.
The moving van from Albany had arrived.
six ________________
FOR THE RESIDENTS of Spring Lake, the day had begun in its usual, orderly fashion. Most of the commuters had gathered at the train station for the hour-and-a-half ride to their jobs in New York City. Others had parked their cars in neighboring Atlantic Highlands and caught the jet water launch which whisked them to a pier at the foot of the World Financial Center.
There, under the watchful gaze of the Statue of Liberty, they had hurried to their various offices. Many of them worked in the financial community as traders on the stock exchange or executives in brokerage houses. Others were lawyers and bankers.
In Spring Lake the morning passed in reassuring regularity. Children filled the classes at the public school and St. Catherine’s. The tasteful shops on quaint Third Avenue opened for business. At noon a favorite spot for lunch was the Sisters Café. Realtors brought prospective buyers to see available properties and explained that, even with the escalating prices, a home here was an excellent investment.
The disappearance of Martha Lawrence four and a half years earlier had hung like a pall over the consciousness of the residents, but other than that terrible event, serious crime was virtually nonexistent in this town.
Now, on this wind-driven first day of spring, that local sense of security was shaken to the core.
Word of the police activity on Hayes Avenue spread through the town. Rumors of the discovery of human remains followed quickly. The operator of the backhoe quietly used his cell phone to call his wife.