Robin held up a finger to let me know Cathy had picked up. “Detective Trumble? This is Robin Crusoe. I got back an hour ago. No, I didn’t answer my room phone, but I finally heard your message. You got mine? I called from the airport. I was focused on getting home.” Robin’s expression showed he was definitely discomfited. “I’ll explain that later. Listen, I called to tell you something I’m sure you’ll want to know. There’s a nanny cam in Sophie’s room. Maybe there’s something important on it.” He listened, looking even more unhappy. “Okay, if you really think so. Bring it by.” He hung up.
“What?” I was playing with Sophie’s fingers and toes. She looked at me seriously. It was still intoxicating to realize I was Mama. When I had been a child, my mother had been everything to me, since my dad had not been home much even in the years before they divorced. Mother had been interested in my life. She’d been my manners coach, my yardstick of correctness, my moral compass. She had always loved me. She’d praised me when I’d earned it, and she’d expected better of me when I fell short.
Now I was this almighty figure to my own baby. It was awesome, and it was terrifying.
I glanced up at Robin, to see that he too was lost in rapt contemplation of the miracle we’d created.
He sighed heavily, and returned to planet Real Life. “Cathy wonders why I wasn’t in my hotel room when she called last night. She’s bringing by a photo of the dead woman for us to look at. Let’s watch the recording right now. Once the police take it, we’ll never see what’s on it.”
“Should we?” I couldn’t deny I really, really wanted to see the recording. More importantly, I was relieved Robin and I were again in sync. We hadn’t been married long, and I’d realized there would be rough patches. We’d just hit one of them.
“If you’ll hold on to Sophie, I’ll get dressed,” I said. “I’ll feel better when Cathy comes if I’m dressed.” I pulled my nightgown over my head. Robin watched with some interest.
Maybe I’m shallow, but that made me feel better. I hesitated. I was reluctant to get dressed when I felt I wasn’t really clean. “I’m going to take the quickest shower on record. Do you really think it’s okay if we watch the recording before Cathy gets here?”
“It’s ours,” Robin said, and shrugged expansively.
When I emerged from the two-minute shower and pulled on some jeans and a T-shirt, Robin and Sophie were in her room. His nose was wrinkled. “I needed to change her again. You want to get the cam?”
I noticed the “air freshener” immediately. It really did look just like a plug-in. If I’d been in the habit of using them, I would never have questioned its purpose. I unplugged it while Robin laid a sleepy Sophie in her crib.
In the living room, I sat expectantly in front of the television. I hoped so strongly that the nanny cam would reveal everything, and there would be no more mystery. We’d learn what had happened to Virginia.
Chapter Eight
Robin had an instruction book in his hand, and he referred to it to start the recording.
Among the multiplicity of small machines surrounding our television—DVR, sound system, cable transmitter—the new black box was hardly noticeable.
I was surprised at how excited I was. This was almost like being at the movies, but with an elevated element of suspense.
After a minute of fiddling, Robin sat beside me. “It’s motion-activated,” he explained. “And it’s in color.”
Of course it was. I didn’t even want to know how much it had cost.
I was disappointed, at first. All the actions caught by the camera were innocuous, not to say boring. I walked in and out once or twice, visibly dragging, holding my arm over my mouth and nose when I coughed or sneezed. You could see me deteriorate into a staggering wraith in a nightgown with a mask over her face. But interspersed with these glimpses, there were moments of Virginia. The first afternoon, she looked around the room, opening and shutting drawers and closets, reacquainting herself with the arrangements for changing Sophie and the location of her clothes and so on.
We saw Virginia carry Sophie to the changing table. She never turned away from Sophie. I nodded silently. Virginia put on the fresh diaper quickly and efficiently before she picked the baby up and turned Sophie to her shoulder while she patted Sophie’s back. Wisely, Virginia had thrown a burp cloth over her shoulder. Sophie spit up copiously on it.
“Aw, girl!” Virginia said. I could read her lips. I could tell when Sophie produced one of her prodigious burps, because Virginia laughed. She lowered Sophie into the crib while she disposed of the used diaper and tossed the wet cloth into the clothes hamper. Virginia checked her shoulder, evidently found it was dry, and looked relieved. She checked on Sophie, saw Sophie had fallen asleep, and left the room.
Then light was coming through the shades on Sophie’s window when we next saw movement. Phillip came in and took care of Sophie, talking to her and blowing on her stomach, before carrying her out of the picture. I appeared once, looking like death. Then we watched Emily and Angel come in and out, and I reminded myself to write them thank-you notes.
We had seen nothing out of the ordinary. Up to this point.
We reached last night’s footage. Virginia entered the room alone, her cell phone held to her ear. It was like watching a pantomime. It was clear Virginia was agitated. Her whole posture was tense, and her movements were emphatic, exaggerated. She might as well have had I AM UPSET in a balloon over her head. She paced back and forth as she spoke. After a short and angry conversation (going by the expression on Virginia’s face), she stabbed a finger on the “end call” icon on her phone. (Though we couldn’t see the face of the phone, her actions were clear to read.)
After disconnecting, Virginia stood rooted to the spot. Though her face was turned away from the camera, the hunch of her shoulders read as “despairing.” Or maybe “resigned.”
Robin and I glanced at each other. “Wish I could have heard that conversation,” he said. I nodded, and we turned back to the screen. What happened next was another surprise, though a slight one.
Phillip came into the room, clearly to ask Virginia a question. She waved a hand, as if to sweep away his words. Phillip looked at her narrowly, but after a moment, when she said nothing else, he left the room with a shake of his head. If you don’t want to talk, I’m outta here.
When she was alone, Virginia’s shoulders slumped. She turned to face the camera, and we saw she was crying. After a minute or two, she seemed to pull herself together. She left the room.
Since the camera was motion-activated, the sequences jumped forward in a disconcerting way. Virginia, her face shuttered but calm, popped in and out carrying Sophie. If she put Sophie in the crib to sleep, in the next segment we saw Virginia hurry in when Sophie’s arms were waving.
In what was one of the last bits of the recording, Phillip and Sarah tiptoed in. Sarah bent over the crib, smiling, to admire Sophie. She glanced up at Phillip, and he beamed back at her. Then they tiptoed out.
There was one of the jerks that indicated a time lapse.
Then a strange woman appeared. She glanced around the room.
“Oh my God,” I whispered. I glanced sideways at Robin. He was as appalled as I was.
“That’s the dead woman,” I said. “She was in Sophie’s room. In our house.”
“You know her,” he said, sounding tired and sad.
Now that I could watch the woman alive and moving, a sense of familiarity tickled at me. I shook my head, trying to fix a name to the woman. As we watched, the dead woman crossed the room to the crib. She looked down at Sophie for a long moment. Though I knew perfectly well Sophie was okay, I was terrified.
There was a loud knock on the front door, and I gave a little shriek.
“Sorry, honey,” I told Robin, my heart thudding. “I’ll let her in?”
He nodded wordlessly. He looked very grim, an expression that did not sit on Robin’s face with any ease.
Cathy Trumble looked every day
of her age, and maybe a few more. She’d clearly been up for hours, maybe hadn’t ever gone to bed. “Seriously, a nanny cam?” Cathy said. “You didn’t know about this last night, Roe?”
“I would have told you.”
“Robin, you’re home very quickly,” Cathy said, with no inflection. “Hard to get in touch with you last night.”
“I had my phone on vibrate for the banquet duration. I didn’t even think about checking my messages,” Robin said. “I called Roe to tell her I’d won, and then I called my mother. I went around the bar to have my pats on the back.” He smiled. “Jeff and I started talking again about collaborating. We wanted to get into the nuts and bolts of how it would work, so we went to Jeff’s room where we could hear each other. So I missed your call to my room. And finally, I saw Phillip’s text.”
“You sure have it all worked out.” Cathy looked sour.
“I had the plane ride to think about it,” Robin said.
“You went straight to the airport? Your friend Jeff give you a lift?”
“I took a cab to the airport. A Yellow Cab. I checked flights from the hotel, and I found an empty seat on a Delta flight, leaving in around an hour.”
“Use a credit card?”
“Sure.”
It was clear to me that Cathy distrusted Robin, which was startling as saying you distrusted ice cream. I opened my mouth to say a few things (sharp and pointed things) to Cathy, but Robin held up his hand.
“Roe, she’ll find out I’m telling the truth. Let’s skip the argument. It’s more important for her to see this.” Robin took a deep breath. “Cathy, we just watched the footage.”
She didn’t seem surprised. “And?”
“The woman on it … if she’s the woman who was killed, I know her.”
Cathy opened a folder she’d had in her hand and took out a picture of the dead woman. It had been taken from the uninjured side of her face. Her hair was shoulder-length and unrealistically blond. She had a big jaw, which made her miss being pretty.
“Oh, no,” I said, recognizing her for certain. I was unable to think of anything more eloquent. This is incredibly bad, I thought, dismally sure our lives were about to get worse.
“That’s Tracy Beal.” Robin’s voice was full of distaste, unhappiness. He looked the detective right in the eyes. “Cathy, it’s the woman who attacked Roe in her kitchen. While the movie crew was here. You didn’t recognize her?”
Cathy looked at the picture again, a little line between her eyes as she concentrated. “This woman’s hair is longer and a different color,” she said slowly. “And she’s gained a lot of weight. But I see it’s Tracy Beal, now.” Cathy was clearly unhappy she hadn’t caught this earlier, but she shook off the self-reproach. “It’s good to know her identity. We would have found out from her fingerprints later today, but the sooner the better. What’s your complete history with her, Mr. Crusoe?”
When had we gotten so formal?
“Please, sit down,” I said, not because I wanted to be polite, but because I was still weak and needed to sit, myself. I collapsed gratefully in my favorite corner of my favorite couch, next to Robin. “We went over all this when she tried to kill me,” I said. “And over it and over it. You know our history with this woman. How come she’s out, now? How could it be possible she was in our house?”
“I’ll look into that. But first I need to hear about your relationship with Ms. Beal,” Cathy said. She wasn’t going to budge.
I could tell from her face and the way she was sitting that Cathy was being such a jerk because she was ashamed. The police had screwed up, somehow. She would tell what bothered her so much … when she had to. I glanced sideways at Robin, knowing that he would rather talk about hemorrhoids than Tracy Beal.
“Tracy had already been sentenced to court-ordered therapy before she came on my radar. She’d stalked Dan Lonsdale and threatened his fiancée.”
Cathy looked blank. “Who?”
“Another mystery writer,” I explained.
“I just saw him at Bouchercon,” Robin said. “But we didn’t talk about Tracy. Nothing to say.”
“Then what did you talk about?” Apparently, Cathy couldn’t imagine a conversation that didn’t touch on the stalker they had in common.
“Dan’s publicist just got promoted, so he was worried she wouldn’t be handling his books anymore. Dan’s editor just moved to another house … another publishing house. I was commiserating.”
Cathy looked blank. Well, she’d asked. “Let’s return to how you first encountered Ms. Beal,” she suggested.
“While Tracy was in therapy for stalking Dan, she was in the mental ward of a hospital. It had a library. She picked up one of my books. She liked it. She was released from therapy two months later because she showed such amazing progress. Of course she seemed better, because she didn’t care about Dan anymore. She’d transferred her obsession to me.” Poor Robin looked tired to death of talking about Tracy Beal, and no wonder. “It wasn’t a secret I was in Los Angeles working on the script for Whimsical Death. When she was released, she made her way to LA somehow.”
Robin would never get over his mortification at being the object of Tracy’s obsession. That was one of the things I liked about him; he was really surprised when women found him attractive.
“She was your Number One Fan,” Cathy said, predictably. She had watched Misery, along with everyone else in the free world, apparently.
“If only I had a dollar for every time someone has said that.” Robin was trying to stay cool, but he hated rehashing a painful memory, and he hated it even more when people made fun of what had been a fraught situation.
“How did you meet her initially?”
“I didn’t meet her at all. She started leaving messages on my Web site under the name LastFanStanding. At first, they weren’t really loony. Comments about my books, some of them really perceptive.” Robin sounded faintly surprised. “Talking about how excited she was to see the movie. Discussing the actors cast in the production. I’ve had readers who got invested before, so I wasn’t too concerned, though my Web-management person got antsy.” Robin slung his arm around my shoulders. I leaned against him. “Then Tracy started writing letters. To me. To my Los Angeles agency. My New York agency. They weren’t signed, but the phraseology was the same as the postings on my Web site, and each message was more or less the same. She wanted to meet me in person.”
“How did you respond?”
“I didn’t. In fact, we called the police and reported it.” He shrugged. “But my signing schedule was available to anyone. I was a little worried, but I figured if she really had to meet me, it would be better in public. She didn’t show up at any of the events, or if she did she didn’t introduce herself. She kept posting, though, wanting to talk to me one-on-one. And she would not let it rest. The situation got major, both in public and in private.”
“So what happened?”
“Dawn—my Web person—banned her from the site.”
“How did Tracy react?”
“She found my mother’s address.”
I’d never heard this part of the story. Robin gave me an apologetic look; and I understood he’d simply found it too distasteful to discuss.
“Tracy wrote my mother a horrible letter, and upset Mom … very much.”
I couldn’t imagine Corinne, whose favorite topics of conversation were her two little dogs and her grandchildren, reading such a document. “Oh, Robin,” I said, taking his hand. I wished he had told me before, but I understood why he hadn’t.
“Mom took the letter to her local police—she lives in Florida—and they faxed it to LA. The police got really interested then, because there was some threatening language. And there were elements of that letter that matched one sent to Celia Shaw, the actress. The one who was murdered on the set of Whimsical Death.”
“So the police got serious about Tracy,” Cathy said.
“Right. They tracked her through the Web site, where she k
ept posting under different names. But Tracy kept moving, always a step ahead. She’s not stupid. But she did finally make a mistake. She blamed Dawn for the Web site ban, not me. She researched Dawn’s address, just like she’d tracked my mother. One night, she broke all the windows in Dawn’s car and slashed her tires. It was on Dawn’s security camera.”
Cathy was learning forward. “They arrested her.”
Robin managed a wry smile. “She had left her hotel room just before they got there. But they got fingerprints, and identified her from her previous stalking sentence. About that time, Variety ran a story about me coming here for the filming. Tracy got here ahead of the film crew and got a job with the craft service company hired for the shoot. The LAPD had shown me a picture, but it was like a driver’s license headshot. I didn’t have a clear idea who I was watching for.”
“You know what happened after that,” I said, cutting short this unpleasant trip down memory lane. When Tracy had tried to kill me, Sophie had been a tiny cluster of cells in my womb. I hadn’t even known I was pregnant. The thought of Sophie never existing …
Tracy had been arrested and taken to jail. At her arraignment, the judge had agreed with her court-appointed lawyer that Tracy’s mental condition should be evaluated. Again.
The last we’d heard, she was in a secure facility being “evaluated.” I hadn’t even wanted to know where she was. I’d dismissed Tracy Beal from my thoughts.
“You haven’t heard from her?” Cathy asked.
“I’ve gotten a couple of e-mails that sounded reminiscent of her. But she was locked up. I was sure it couldn’t be her.” Robin did not look at me as he said this.
And he felt that concealing the flu was outrageous?
“Do you have these?” Cathy said. “You didn’t delete them?”
“I saved them,” Robin said.
“I’ll need to see them, of course. Now I need to get in touch with Tracy’s mother and sister,” Cathy said, making a note on a little pad she kept in her purse. “Their contact information should be in our records.”