Bridget’s disappointment was palpably evident in her voice. “I don’t know how long they’ll keep that apartment for me in the assisted-living home, and it’s exactly what I want. Oh dear! Regina, maybe I built up my hopes too much. It’s not your fault.”
But it is my fault, Regina thought, trying to keep raw anger out of her voice as she swore to Bridget that she was going to find her a buyer and fast, and then, knowing how difficult that would be in this market, said good-bye.
Her office, a one-room former garage, had once been part of a private residence on the main street in St. Augustine, Florida. The bleak housing market had improved, but not sufficiently for Regina to do more than eke out a living. Now she put her elbows on her desk and pressed her fingers to the sides of her forehead. Wisps of curly hair reminded her that her midnight-black hair was growing with its usual annoying rapidity. She knew she would have to make an appointment for a trim. The fact that the hairdresser always insisted on talking a blue streak was what had kept her from making the appointment—that, and the cost.
That silly fact made Regina annoyed at herself and her own always present impatience. So what, she told herself, if for twenty minutes Lena yak-yak-yakked away? She’s the only one who knows how to make this unruly mop look decent.
Regina’s dark brown eyes traveled to the picture on her desk. Zach, her nineteen-year-old son, smiled back at her from it. He was just completing his sophomore year at the University of Pennsylvania, an education fully paid for by his father, her ex-husband. Zach had phoned last night. Hesitantly, he had asked if she would mind if he went backpacking through Europe and the Middle East this summer. He had planned to come home and get a job in St. Augustine, but jobs were hard to find there. It wouldn’t cost all that much, and his father would finance him.
“I’ll be back in time to spend ten days with you before the term starts, Mom,” he had assured her, his tone pleading.
Regina had told him that it was a wonderful opportunity and that he should jump at it. She hadn’t let the keen disappointment she felt sound in her voice. She missed Zach. She missed the sweet little boy who used to come bounding into the office from the school bus, eager to share every single moment of his day with her. She missed the tall, shy adolescent who would have dinner waiting if she was out late with a client.
Since the divorce, Earl had been skillfully carving out ways to separate her from Zach. It had begun when, at age ten, Zach went to sailing camp in Cape Cod for the summer. The camp was followed by the shared holidays when Earl and his new wife took Zach skiing in Switzerland or to the South of France.
She knew Zach loved her, but a small house and a tight budget could hardly compete with life with his wildly rich father. Now he’d be gone for most of the summer.
Slowly, Regina reached for the letter from Moran and reread it. “She’ll pay fifty thousand, and the mighty Robert Nicholas Powell will pay each of us two hundred fifty thousand,” she murmured aloud. “Mr. Benevolence himself.”
She thought of her friends and former co-hosts of the Graduation Gala. Claire Bonner. She was beautiful, but always so quiet, like a faded shadow next to her mother. Alison Schaefer, so smart she put the rest of us to shame. I thought she’d end up the next Madame Curie. She got married the October after Betsy died, and then Rod, her husband, was in an accident. From what I understand, he’s been on crutches all these years. Nina Craig. We called her “the flaming redhead.” I remember even as a freshman if she got mad at you, watch out. She would even tell a teacher off if she thought she didn’t get a good enough mark on an essay.
And then there was me, Regina thought. When I was fifteen I opened the door of the garage to put my bike away and found my father swinging from a rope. His eyes were bulging and his tongue was lapping over his chin. If he had to hang himself, why didn’t he do it in his office? He knew that I’d be the one to find him in the garage. I loved him so much! How could he have done that to me? The nightmares have never stopped. They always started with her getting off her bike.
Before she called the police, and the neighbor’s house where her mother was playing bridge, she had taken the suicide note her father had pinned to his shirt and hidden it. When the police came they said that most suicide victims leave a note for the family. Sobbing, her mother had searched the house for it, while Regina pretended to help.
The girls were my lifeline after that, Regina thought. We were such close friends. After the Gala and Betsy’s death, Claire and Nina and I were Alison’s bridesmaids. That had been such a stupid move. It was so soon after Betsy died; the tabloids had made a spectacle of the wedding. The headlines were all a rehashing of the Graduation Gala murder. That was when we realized that all four of us would continue to be under suspicion; maybe for the rest of our lives.
We never got together again, Regina lamented. After the wedding we all went out of our way to avoid any contact with each other. We all moved to different cities.
What would it be like to see them again, to be under the same roof? We were all so young then, so shocked and frightened when Betsy’s body was discovered. And the way the police questioned us, together, then separately. It’s a miracle one of us didn’t break down and confess to smothering her, the way they hammered at us. “We know it was somebody inside that house. Which one of you did it? If it wasn’t you, maybe it was one of your friends. Protect yourself. Tell us what you know.”
Regina thought of how the police had wondered if Betsy’s emeralds might have been the motive. She left them on the glass tray on her dressing table when she went to bed. They suggested that she woke up while she was being robbed and whoever was there panicked. One of her earrings was on the floor. Had Betsy dropped it when she took it off, or had someone, wearing gloves, panicked and dropped it when she woke up?
Regina got up slowly and looked around. She tried to visualize having three hundred thousand dollars in the bank. Almost half of that would go to income tax, she warned herself. But even so, it would be an unimaginable windfall. Or maybe it would bring back the days when her father had been so successful, and they, as well as Robert and Betsy Powell, had the big house in Salem Ridge with all the trimmings, housekeeper, a cook, a landscaper, a chauffeur, a top New York caterer for their frequent parties . . .
Regina looked around her one-room real estate office. Even with the Sheetrock walls painted light blue to coordinate with her white desk and the white armchairs with blue cushions for potential clients, the room looked like what it was: a brave effort to hide a thin budget. A garage is a garage is a garage, she thought, except for the one luxury I installed when I bought this property after the divorce.
The luxury was down the hall past the unisex restroom. Unmarked and always locked, it was a private bathroom with a Jacuzzi, steam shower, vanity sink, and wardrobe closet. It was here that sometimes, at the end of the day, she would shower, change, and then meet her friends or go out to a solitary dinner followed by a movie.
Earl had left her ten years ago, when Zach was going on nine. He hadn’t been able to put up with her bouts of depression. “Get help, Regina. I’m sick of the moods. I’m sick of the nightmares. It’s not good for our son, just in case you haven’t noticed.”
After the divorce, Earl, a computer salesman at the time, whose hobby had been writing songs, had finally sold a collection of his music to a major recording artist. His next step had been to marry budding rock singer Sonya Miles. When Sonya hit the charts with the album he wrote for her, Earl became a celebrity in the world he coveted. He took to that life as a duck takes to water, Regina thought as she walked over to the row of files on the far side of the room.
She took an unmarked package from the bottom of the locked file. Buried under miscellaneous real estate advertisements, it was a cardboard box that contained all the newspaper coverage of the Graduation Gala murder.
I haven’t looked at it in years, Regina thought as she carried the box
back to her desk, laid it down, and opened it. Some of the newspapers had begun to crumble at the edges, but she found what she was looking for. It was the picture of Betsy and Robert Powell toasting the four graduates—Claire, Alison, Nina, and herself.
We were all so pretty, Regina thought. I remember how we went shopping for dresses together. We all had done well in college. We had our plans and hopes for the future. And they were all destroyed that night.
She put the newspapers back in the box, carried it over to the file, and dropped it in the bottom drawer, carefully concealing it below the ads. I’m going to take his damn money, she thought. And that producer’s as well. Maybe if I do, I can take hold of my life. I do know I can use some of the money to take Zach on a fun vacation, before he goes back to school.
She slammed the drawer, put the CLOSED sign in the window of the office, turned out the lights, locked the door, and went back to her private bath. In it, as the water ran in the Jacuzzi, she stripped and looked at herself in the full-length mirror on the door. I’ve got two months before the show and I need to lose twenty pounds, she thought. I want to look good when I get there and tell what I remember. I want Zach to be proud of me.
An unwanted thought crept into her mind. I know Earl always wondered if I was the one who killed Betsy. Did he ever plant that suspicion in Zach’s mind?
Regina knew she didn’t love Earl anymore, didn’t want him anymore, but even more than that, she didn’t want to have any more nightmares.
The Jacuzzi was filled with water. She stepped into it, leaned back, and closed her eyes.
As her curly black hair became straight and sleek around her face, she thought, This is my chance to convince everyone that I wasn’t the one who killed that rotten slut.
6
Rod Kimball signed for the certified letter and opened it while his wife, Alison, was busy filling a prescription. When the customer left she hurried over to take it from him.
“Who’s sending a registered letter?” she asked, her tone worried, as without breaking stride she took it from him, turned, and went back to the pharmacy area of their drugstore, giving him no chance to warn her of the contents. Dismayed, he watched as her face flushed, then paled as she read the two-page missive. Then she dropped it on the counter. “I can’t go through that again,” she cried, her voice trembling. “My God, do they think I’m crazy?”
“Take it easy, love,” Rod cautioned. Trying not to grimace with pain, he slid off the stool behind the checkout counter and reached for his crutches. Twenty years after the hit-and-run accident that had crippled him, pain was always a fact of life for him. Yet some days, like this one, cold and wet in late March in Cleveland, Ohio, it was more severe than others. Pain was etched into the lines around his eyes and the resolute set of his jaw. His dark brown hair had turned almost completely gray. He knew he looked older than his forty-two years. He hobbled over to Alison. Across the counter from her, his six-foot body towering over her petite frame, he felt an overwhelming need to protect her. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” he said firmly. “Tear up that letter.”
“No.” Shaking her head, Alison opened the drawer beneath the counter and shoved the letter into it. “I can’t talk about it now, Rod,” she said.
At that point the jingling sound that signaled the opening of the door told them that a customer was coming into the store, and Rod made his way back to the checkout counter.
He had been a rookie quarterback for the New York Giants when he and Alison were married. He was raised by a single mother who worked as a caretaker for an invalid to support him. His father, a hopeless alcoholic, died when he was two. The sportswriters were unanimous that a brilliant career was ahead of him when he had signed his first big contract. He and Alison were both twenty-two then, and he had been crazy about her since kindergarten. In fact, when they were in kindergarten together he had announced to the class that he was going to marry her someday.
Alison’s family had never had any money. Her father was the produce manager in a grocery store. Alison went to college on a mix of student loans and working part time. She had lived in a modest section of Salem Ridge, not far from where Rod Kimball had lived. She had missed out on a scholarship to graduate school.
He officially proposed the day he was offered the big contract with the New York Giants. That was two months after Betsy Powell’s murder. An important part of the proposal was that he knew Alison wanted to go to medical school and then into research. He promised to pay for her education, to tiptoe around the house when she was studying, and to delay having children until she obtained the degree she wanted so badly.
Instead, three weeks after the wedding, he had been in the accident, and Alison had spent the better part of the next four years at his bedside helping him to heal. The money he had saved from his one season with the Giants was soon exhausted.
At that point Alison had taken out more loans and gone back to school to become a pharmacist. Her first job came about because her elderly childless cousin had hired her to work with him in his drugstore in Cleveland. “Rod, there’s a job for you as well,” he had said. “My assistant is leaving. She does the ordering of everything except for the drugs, and she handles the cash register.”
They had both been glad to get out of the New York area, where they always seemed to encounter speculation over Betsy Powell’s death. A few years after they moved to Cleveland, the cousin retired and they took over the store. Now they had a wide circle of friends, and no one ever asked them about the Graduation Gala murder.
The nickname “Rod” had come about because in his college years on the football field, a sportswriter had commented that he moved as fast as a lightning rod. After the accident, Thomas “Rod” Kimball had managed not to let that nickname become a source of bitter irony.
The morning was fairly quiet, but in the afternoon business was brisk. They had two part-time assistants, a semiretired pharmacist and a clerk who stocked the shelves and helped at the cash register. Even with their help it was an exceptionally busy day, and by the time they closed at 8 P.M., he and Alison were both bone tired.
By then it was raining hard, a cold driving rain. Alison insisted that he use the wheelchair to get out to the car. “We’ll both be drowned if you try to use the crutches,” she said, an edge in her voice.
Many times over the years he had sought the courage to insist that she leave him, that she meet someone else and have a normal life. But he had never been able to bring himself to utter those words. He could not visualize a life without her now, any more than he could have visualized it all through his growing years.
He sometimes thought of an observation his grandmother had made long ago. “In most marriages, one of the couple is more in love than the other, and it’s best if it’s the man. The marriage will have a better chance of going the whole way.”
Rod did not need to be told that with Alison, he was the one who loved the most. He was almost sure that she would not have accepted his proposal if he had not offered to send her to medical school. And then, after the accident, she was too decent to walk out on him.
Rod didn’t let himself drown in that kind of speculation often, but the letter today brought back so much—the Graduation Gala, the pictures of the four girls plastered all over the newspapers, the circus the media had made of their wedding.
When they reached the car, Alison said, “Rod, let me drive. I know you’re hurting.”
She was shielding him with the umbrella as she opened the door, and without arguing he slid into the passenger seat. It was impossible for her to hold the umbrella and fold the wheelchair at the same time. He watched regretfully as the rain pelted her face and hair until she was finally settled behind the wheel. Then she turned to him. “I’m going to do it,” she said. Her tone was defiant, as if she expected him to argue with her.
When he said nothing, she waited for a lon
g minute, then started the engine. “No comment?” Now he detected a slight tremor in her voice.
He was not going to tell her what he was thinking—that with her long brown hair wet on her shoulders, she looked so young and so vulnerable. He knew she was frightened. No, he thought. Make that terrified.
“If the others agree to take part in the program and you don’t, it wouldn’t be good,” he said quietly. “I think you have to go. I think we have to go,” he corrected himself quickly.
“I was lucky last time. This time I may not be so lucky.”
They were both silent for the rest of the trip. Their ranch-style home, designed to accommodate his disabilities, was a twenty-minute drive from the pharmacy. They were spared any further exposure to the downpour because a door from the garage opened into the kitchen. Once inside, shaking off her wet raincoat, Alison sank into a chair and buried her face in her hands. “Rod, I’m so scared. “I never told you but that night when we all went up to bed all I could think of was how much I hated Betsy and Rob Powell.” She hesitated and continued haltingly, “I think I was sleepwalking that night and I might have gone into Betsy’s room.”
“You thought you were in Betsy’s room that night!” Rod dropped his crutches as he pulled a chair closer to Alison and eased himself into it. “Do you think there is any possibility that anyone saw you?”
“I don’t know.”
Alison pulled away from his embrace and turned to face him. Her large, expressive light brown eyes were her dominant feature. Now with tears streaming from them, they looked haunted and defenseless. Then Rod heard a question he never expected to hear from his wife’s lips.
“Rod,” she asked, “isn’t it a fact that you have always believed that I killed Betsy Powell?”
“Are you crazy?” he asked. “Are you absolutely crazy?”
But even to his own ears, he knew that his protest sounded hollow and unconvincing.