Pawns

  If Dora had made up the whole story she’d told, she was about as bold and brazen as anyone Teddi could imagine.

  And therefore, if challenged, she would surely fight back. So before Teddi faced that, she would need as much information as possible.

  • • •

  In the morning, as she came downstairs, the doorbell rang. Since she was the closest, Teddi answered it.

  It was a delivery man with a very large cardboard carton, its contents named on the package: a color TV.

  “Package for Thrane,” he said, consulting the slip he had gripped in one hand, then taking the paper between his teeth so he could maneuver the carton.

  “Oh, it’s here already!” Dora said, opening her door and sounding pleased. “Can you carry it into my room, please?” She grinned at Teddi. “Wasn’t it nice of Mamie to let me get it now, without waiting for the insurance money?”

  Teddi felt her jaw sagging and snapped her mouth shut. When had Dora talked Mamie into that?

  But that wasn’t the biggest shock of the morning.

  When Teddi was putting away her breakfast dishes after they’d been washed, her eyes were drawn at once to the mayonnaise jar where Mamie kept her change.

  Teddi’s heart seemed to stop beating. For there was a twenty-dollar bill, right on top of the smaller bills and the change on the bottom of the jar.

  Chapter 12

  “You weren’t thinking about tennis,” Jason told her as they left the court. It wasn’t an accusation, simply a statement of fact.

  “No,” Teddi admitted. “I wasn’t.” For a few seconds she hesitated, reluctant to put her inner turmoil into words. Since her mother’s death, Callie and Mamie were the only ones with whom she had shared her worries and fears.

  But this situation was too much for her. She was scared, and she was angry, and though she was still determined to get to the bottom of the circumstances surrounding Dora’s arrival here, she was not a detective. She didn’t know what to do, or how to do it. She made the plunge.

  “Would you mind listening for a few minutes, and then giving me your opinion?”

  Jason grinned. “Sure. Nobody in my family ever solicits my opinion on anything beyond which video we should watch, and then they usually overrule me. There’s an empty bench over there, and nobody’s close by. Let’s sit down.”

  So she told him. The whole thing, including all the wild things she had thought last night as she sat alone in the dark, waiting for Dora to return to the house.

  “Am I crazy?” she asked at the end of the recital, to which Jason had listened without asking more than an occasional question. “Could it be possible that Dora’s an imposter, not Ricky’s wife at all? Could anybody come here this way, lying about such a thing?”

  Jason’s face was thoughtful and concerned. “Well, I don’t think you’re crazy. When you lay it all out that way, it’s pretty overwhelming evidence. The why is probably money. She hopes to gain from taking advantage of Mamie.”

  “But Mamie has so little. Just a small pension, and now the insurance. And nobody knew about the insurance before Dora came.”

  “Maybe Dora did, somehow.”

  It made her feel a little better already, knowing that he didn’t think she was irrational.

  “How could she? Until the notice showed up in the mail, Mamie and I didn’t even know about it.”

  “Maybe she was there when Ricky bought it. At one of those booths in the airport, right? Where you can walk up on the spur of the moment and make out a simple form that says if you don’t make it through your flight, the insurance company will pay your family?”

  Teddi nodded, eager for some logic, for a possible explanation that hadn’t occurred to her. “How would she know, though?”

  “Maybe she was working in the booth and had carbon copies of the insurance policy, something like that, that gave her his name, and Mamie’s, and their addresses. Or maybe she was just sitting next to him in the airport waiting room and overheard him mention the policy.” He gained enthusiasm as he let his imagination run free. “Maybe he talked to her about it, the way people do sometimes with strangers in a place like that. Nobody expected that plane to crash into the ocean, but it did, only a matter of minutes after takeoff. If she had talked to him, she’d remember him, it happened such a short time later. And she decided to take advantage of it.”

  “And made up all this elaborate hoax right on the spur of the moment?” Teddi asked, incredulous.

  “Maybe. Maybe right at first all she did was keep track of who he was and where he was from. And then when they started recovering bodies, and they couldn’t find them all, and his name was on the list of the ones still missing . . . well, by that time she’d had a few days to think about it. And she obviously needed help, didn’t she? She was pregnant and broke. Desperate, probably. And there was this guy she knew about, who wasn’t ever coming home to call her a liar. Maybe she was desperate enough to try to rip Mamie off, even if she didn’t know about the insurance money. Mamie could have been no more than a person to take her in and pay the bills until she could handle a baby and take care of them both herself. But I’m betting she knew about the insurance. Which probably means she was there at the airport just before he took off.”

  Teddi felt light-headed, she was so grateful that he was taking her seriously, not ridiculing her convictions regarding Dora.

  She had told him about the twenty-dollar bill that had been in the mayonnaise jar, then missing, only to show up in Dora’s purse, and then suddenly reappearing in the jar.

  “Does that make any sense to you?” she demanded.

  Jason chewed on his lower lip. It was gratifying that he was giving her his full attention. “Maybe. Maybe she wanted you to be accused of taking it. To screw up your relationship with Mamie. She apparently didn’t know you were part of the picture, living with her supposed mother-in-law. You may have been an unpleasant surprise, one that complicated what she was trying to do.”

  “That could have happened, all right. Only why put it back?”

  “Maybe it had nothing to do with you. Maybe she just needed the money—you said her purse was practically empty—and she took it for . . . something, whatever she had to do, or get . . . and then because she didn’t want any suspicion to fall on her, she put it back.”

  “But if she still had it, how could she have used the money?”

  Jason shrugged, watching a young mother approaching them with two small children. “I haven’t figured that out yet. To make one of those mysterious phone calls, the way she did before? What could she have been doing so late at night, except making phone calls or meeting someone? She was on foot, so she couldn’t have gone far out of the neighborhood.”

  “She says she has no family, no friends to turn to,” Teddi remembered.

  “But she’s in contact with somebody. Have you thought that if Ricky’s not that baby’s father, someone else must be?”

  She hadn’t gotten that far. “You think she has an . . . an accomplice? A man, Danny’s father, maybe?”

  Jason drew in a deep breath. “This is going to take some analysis, and we’d have a better handle on it if we wrote it all down. All the things, even the little ones, that don’t fit into the story Dora tells about being Ricky’s wife. Let’s go to my house and put it all on paper. Of course there’s a possibility that she was married to Ricky, and it’s just that she’s the type to sponge off Mamie if she can get away with it. And there’s another thing. Have you thought about the baby? Mamie’s crazy about him, right? If Dora wasn’t married to Ricky, Danny’s not Mamie’s grandson.”

  Teddi’s voice was small. “I know. It makes me cry to think about it. But I can’t let it slide, can I? Let Dora take advantage of Mamie if she is a fake?”

  “No,” Jason agreed soberly, though there was an excited sparkle in his eyes at the thought of the adventure that might lie ahead. “You can’t. We can’t.” He got up off the bench and reached for her hand to pull her up. “Let?
??s go work on it.”

  It was the first time she’d been in the house since her father’s death except for the time she’d spent clearing out her personal belongings to take to Mamie’s. The furniture had all been sold to pay some of the debts.

  There were changes that made the house seem alien, yet there were also plenty of reminders of the time when it had been her home. The furniture was different, of course, and the draperies were new.

  There was a runner in the front hallway, a patterned rug with a floral pattern. There were unfamiliar pictures on the walls, and through an open doorway she saw that they’d repainted the kitchen so that it was now a sunny yellow instead of the pale green Teddi had grown up with.

  She had not formally met Jason’s mother before, and she liked her, or she would have if she’d been able to spend any time thinking about it.

  “We’ve got to run some stuff off on the computer,” Jason told his mom before they climbed the stairs.

  Doors were open off the upper hall, and she saw that in her old bedroom, now home to a ten-year-old and a seven-year-old, her pale blue walls had been papered in a pink rosebud pattern.

  It was Jason’s room that was most disturbing, however, the room where her mother had spent her last months.

  Here, too, the furniture was different. It was a relief to find a single bed, a desk, a couple of chairs, and posters for rock groups and a Save the Eagles campaign.

  But the carpet was the familiar blue she remembered, and there was a slightly faded spot on the wall where Gloria Stuart had kept a painting of Jesus.

  Nobody had put anything else over that area, and Teddi wondered what had happened to the picture. She wished she had it. She probably could have taken it if she’d thought of it when she gathered things out of her own room. Now it was probably gone forever, disposed of along with all the other household furnishings.

  Yet it was a tremendous comfort to have confided in Jason, and to know he’d be helping her work it out.

  “Okay,” Jason said, sitting down before the computer and switching it on. “Let’s first list what Dora’s said about being married to Ricky. And then all the things that make you think she might be lying about that.”

  Teddi stood at his shoulder, staring at the screen where the damning evidence grew as Jason typed. She tried to divorce herself from her surroundings, to forget that her mother had died here in this room, to think only about Dora and Danny and Mamie, and her own future.

  The thing that had struck her almost immediately, Teddi told Jason, was that Dora related nothing personal about Ricky.

  “After my mom died, and then my dad, I kept remembering things, you know, like how they’d laughed—way back when they still did laugh—and what they’d liked to eat, and how they looked. The way they did things, the things they liked. But Dora hardly mentions Ricky. Mamie thinks it’s because it’s too painful to remember, but I keep wondering more and more if it is because . . .” She hesitated, then blurted out what seemed such a terrible suspicion. “Because she never even knew Ricky.”

  “And she picked your brains for details about him,” Jason said, fingers moving on the keyboard.

  He finished up with three full pages of questionable points, then punched the keys to make them print out.

  He made three copies, one for her, one for himself, and one to save for future reference.

  Teddi held the pages as if they might burn her fingers. When she raised her eyes from the print, her voice was tremulous. “It . . . it certainly seems like more than a bunch of stupid wild ideas when it’s all printed out like this, doesn’t it? So what can we do about it? How can we find out the truth?”

  Jason switched off the monitor and then the printer and swiveled around in his chair to face her.

  “We’re going to become spies, or detectives, if that sounds better. We’re going to snoop into everything we can find about our friend Dora. If she’s an imposter, we’re going to expose her.”

  Teddi swallowed. How, she wondered despairingly, could their investigations spare Mamie any further grief?

  Yet her voice was very nearly steady when she replied. “All right,” she said. “How do we start?”

  “We watch her every movement, and the next time she goes out on one of those midnight excursions,” Jason said with satisfaction, “I’m going to follow her and see where she goes, or who she meets.”

  For long seconds they stared into each other’s faces, and Teddi’s heart was pounding as if she’d just climbed a long, steep hill.

  “Okay,” she agreed softly. “Let’s do it.”

  Chapter 13

  Teddi felt as if she were walking a tightrope.

  What would Dora do if she knew she was under suspicion? How determined was she to succeed in bilking Mamie of everything she had?

  How would Mamie feel about the plan Teddi and Jason were putting into effect? Would she be outraged at the idea that they wanted to discredit the daughter-in-law and grandson she had only just found? At the very least, whether they were right or wrong about Dora, Mamie would be terribly hurt.

  Teddi watched Mamie as she went about her routine tasks, in the house and out in the garden, seeing a contentment that had not been there since the news had come about Ricky’s death.

  Every time Mamie looked at Danny, or held him, there was a smile that only too clearly bespoke how important this child was to her.

  Dora, engrossed in her new TV, luckily, didn’t seem to notice the way Teddi watched her. At dinner, though, sitting across the table, her expression seemed to sharpen at something she saw in Teddi’s face.

  Teddi tried—unsuccessfully, she feared—to smile offhandedly. Inwardly, she was in a turmoil, praying that no one could really read her countenance. Fortunately, that was the moment Jason chose to tap on the back door. Teddi quickly pushed back her chair and excused herself, joining Jason on the back porch rather than inviting him in.

  “It may not prove anything,” he said in a low voice, “because we don’t know for sure that Dora and Ricky were supposed to have been married in San Diego, but they weren’t.”

  Teddi stared at him. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I called my uncle Jim, who lives in Escondido—you know, not far from San Diego—who’s a lawyer, and my cousin Jenny, who works as his secretary. She investigated it and just called me back. Nobody named Richard Thrane married anybody named Dora anything in San Diego County over the past two years. I didn’t figure she needed to look back any further than that, because Ricky hadn’t been down there that long.”

  “So either they got married somewhere else,” Teddi said slowly, “or they weren’t married at all.”

  “Right. Of course the fact that she says they lived in San Diego wouldn’t have to mean they were married there, but if they were really short of money, wouldn’t it be most likely they’d get married close to home, where it would be cheaper? And”—Jason paused for effect, though she was paying close attention, anyway—“there is no telephone listing anywhere in the county for Richard Thrane. Was his home address on that form he filled out for the insurance?”

  “I don’t remember. I wonder what Mamie did with the form after she wrote to the insurance company?”

  “See if you can find it. He must have had to put an address on it. If we had that, we might be able to find out more about him. About whether he was married or not.”

  Finding the notification Mamie had received about the insurance Ricky bought proved to be quite easy. Teddi had been afraid Mamie had put it into her safe-deposit box at the bank, but she had not.

  It lay in the corner of the top drawer in the desk, along with a few unpaid bills.

  Teddi glanced around guiltily, but Mamie was out in the laundry room, and Dora was with her blaring television.

  The form held both an address and a telephone number.

  Teddi copied them and ran next door with the information.

  Mrs. Temple let her in with a smile. “Jason’s up in his room, fooling
around with the computer, I think.”

  He turned to face her when she tapped on his door frame, and took the paper she handed him.

  “Yes!” Jason said triumphantly. “Let’s call this number and see what we can find out.”

  That plan, however, proved disappointing. Though the phone rang and rang on the other end, nobody answered.

  “Well,” Jason said, hanging up, “whoever’s phone it is, it hasn’t been disconnected. I’ll try it again later. Has Dora been sneaking out of the house every night?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve only caught her a couple of times. And they were just by accident. Am I going to have to sit up all night and watch for her to leave?” It was a dismaying prospect, going without sleep, but there must be a way to trap Dora if she was the imposter they believed she was.

  “Can you cover until, say, two A.M.? Then I’ll take over until dawn,” Jason offered.

  “What’ll I do if I see her leaving?” Teddi asked nervously. “Will I have to follow her?” It was a scary prospect. “What if she meets an accomplice?”

  “I’ll get my Boy Scout whistle for you, and we’ll both leave our bedroom windows open. Give me a toot on the whistle, and I’ll come running. I’ll keep my clothes on, even my shoes, so it’ll only take a few minutes to get on her trail.”

  It was the best plan they could come up with. Teddi figured Dora wouldn’t leave, if she were going to, until Mamie had gone to bed and was asleep. That had been the pattern so far. So it ought to be safe to take a nap earlier in the evening, to be sure to be awake during the critical period.

  A little later, back at Mamie’s, she took a book and made a remark about reading in bed for a while. When she headed up the stairs, it was a little after nine o’clock. But once in her room, either napping or reading proved impossible. She was too tense.

  She had Jason’s Boy Scout whistle on a cord around her neck, which should have been reassuring. But what if he didn’t hear it? What if he’d gone to the bathroom, or downstairs for something to eat? What would she do then?