Joan, who heard him as he spoke to her lawyer, tried to protest. “Why are you calling him? I already told you — I can’t remember what happened. I just want to see my son. Can’t he meet us at the clinic?”
Pullman had said nothing. Hanging up, he sat down at the kitchen table, resisting the impulse to go through the house looking for something that might explain what had happened. What he’d found in the basement provided far more than the legal definition of “probable cause,” but he knew that without a warrant, Trip Wainwright could tie up for months whatever evidence he might find.
Better to wait a few minutes for Wainwright now than churn through paperwork for months later.
Better to do it by the book.
The attorney arrived on the heels of the ambulance that came to pick up Kelly Conroe. As the medics, followed by two state troopers, disappeared down the basement stairs, Joan Hapgood’s eyes widened in surprise.
Surprise that looked to Dan Pullman to be absolutely genuine.
“What are they doing?” she asked. “What did you find down there?”
Before Pullman replied, Trip Wainwright broke in. “Would you mind telling me exactly what’s going on here, Dan? I thought we agreed that you wouldn’t talk to either Matt or Joan without me being present.”
As briefly as he could, the police chief explained what had happened to Matt Moore. “I haven’t talked to Joan,” he said. “I just asked her to show me where the entrance to the basement was, and I didn’t need a warrant for that, given what Matt said.”
Wainwright’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “And did you find anything?”
His eyes fixed on Joan Hapgood, Pullman said, “I found Emily Moore, Becky Adams, and Kelly Conroe.”
Joan Hapgood gasped, and her hand flew reflexively up to cover her mouth. “M-Mother?” she stammered, standing up and taking a step toward the basement door. “My mother is down there?” Pullman nodded, and she uttered an unintelligible cry.
“Sit down, Joan,” Pullman said.
The gentleness in his voice caught Joan’s attention, and she froze. Then, the horror in her eyes dissolving into fear, she sank back onto her chair. Wainwright took a seat next to her, at the table.
“She’s dead, Joan,” Pullman went on, his eyes remaining on her. “So is Becky Adams. And Kelly Conroe has been beaten so badly she can barely speak.”
As the horror returned to Joan’s eyes, Wainwright slipped a protective arm around his client. “Is there any proof that Matt did it?” he asked. “I mean any real proof?”
Again Pullman’s eyes stayed on Joan as he spoke. “When we found him, there was a shovel lying next to him, smeared with bloody fingerprints that I suspect will match Matt’s. And there was a piece of the shirt Becky Adams is wearing, with her father’s monogram.”
Wainwright’s lips compressed as he digested this. “There has to be an explanation — ”
“Kelly Conroe says it wasn’t Matt.” Pullman went on, still watching Joan. “She says it was you.”
Again the look of shock on Joan’s face seemed genuine. “No!” she cried. “How could she — ”
“She did,” Pullman interrupted. “She said, ‘Not Matt. His mother. It was his mother . . .’ ” As he repeated the words Kelly Conroe had spoken, he saw a change come into Joan’s eyes. The horror — and the confusion — seemed to clear. She shifted position, and the dress she wore somehow seemed to fit her better. And when she spoke, her voice was calm and clear.
“The Conroe girl said I did it?” she demanded. “That’s ridiculous.”
Trip Wainwright put a restraining hand on her arm. “You don’t have to say anything at all,” he cautioned, but she brushed his hand aside and gave him a withering look.
“I hardly think I need your help,” she said, then turned back to Pullman. “It was Joan,” she said. “It was always Joan.”
Wainwright was about to say something, and Pullman silenced him with a gesture. “And who are you?” he asked softly, though he was certain he already knew the answer.
“I’m Matt’s mother,” the woman sitting at the kitchen table said. “I’m Cynthia Moore.”
The color drained from Trip Wainwright’s face, and his eyes flicked between Dan Pullman and the woman he knew as Joan Hapgood. Pullman broke the silence that had fallen over the room. “Do you know why she did it?” he asked.
“He was going to take Matt away,” Cynthia said.
Pullman frowned. “Who? Who was going to take Matt away?”
“His father,” Cynthia replied. “Bill Hapgood.”
“I thought Bill Hapgood wasn’t his father — ” Pullman began, but Cynthia Moore, her nostrils flaring angrily, cut him short.
“Don’t you think I know who the father of my own son is?” she asked, her voice turning bitter. “Let me show you something.”
She stood up, and Wainwright was suddenly on his feet too. “Joan, I don’t think this is a good idea. Before you show him anything, or say anything else, we have to talk.”
Cynthia ignored him. Slipping her arm through Dan Pull-man’s, she drew him with her as she moved toward the dining room. Turning on the chandelier that hung over the table, she glanced around the room, her eyes lingering on the glass-fronted cabinet that held the half-dozen sets of fine china the Hapgood family had amassed over the generations, along with dozens of crystal goblets in different sizes and patterns. “All this should have been mine, you know,” she said to Pullman. “He never loved Joan — not like he loved me.”
They moved on, passing through the entry hall and into the living room. It was Trip Wainwright who first noticed the photographs on the piano. There were three, of Bill and Joan Hapgood.
Except that Joan’s image was gone, replaced by Cynthia’s.
“I’m going to call Dr. Henderson,” Wainwright said softly as Cynthia led them into the den and his eyes moved from one picture to another, each one altered in the same manner as the ones on the piano in the living room.
Pullman nodded in silent agreement as Cynthia went to the desk, picked up a file folder, and handed it to him. He opened it and saw a letter from a laboratory in New York City. It confirmed that DNA tests on samples of both Matthew Moore’s tissue and William Hapgood’s established the relationship of the man and the boy.
“He was going to take him away,” Cynthia said as Pullman read through the file. “I couldn’t let that happen. Don’t you see? That’s why I had to make Joan kill him. Otherwise he was going to take Matt away from me.”
Pullman looked at her uncertainly. “You ‘made’ Joan kill Bill? But it was Matt who — ”
“He was there,” Cynthia told him. “But it was Joan who made him pull the trigger.” Her eyes took on a faraway look. “She stood behind him, with her arms around him. She loved to hold him, you know. She loved to go into his room at night, to watch him sleep.” Her voice grew husky. “And touch him. She loved to feel his skin against hers, his body . . .” Her voice trailed off, then she looked anxiously into Pullman’s eyes. “They both loved me,” she whispered. “Bill and Matt both loved me. But she took them away.”
Tony Petrocelli appeared at the door. “Dan?” he said. “We’re ready to bring them up.”
Pullman signaled curtly, but before Petrocelli left the room, Cynthia said, “Mama? Is he talking about Mama?” Before anyone could answer, she turned back to Dan Pullman and spoke to him with a pleading tone. “I want to see her. Please? Can’t I see my mama?”
Wainwright had returned to the room, and Pullman’s eyes met his, an unspoken message passing between them. The lawyer nodded. “I don’t have any objection.”
They got back to the kitchen as two state troopers emerged from the basement, carrying a stretcher. Pullman asked if they were carrying Emily Moore, and, after the trooper nodded, the police chief eased the sheet off the old woman’s face so her daughter could look down at it.
“It was Joan,” Cynthia Moore said, as she always had when she’d done something wrong. “It was
n’t my fault, Mama. It was Joan . . . it was always Joan. . . .”
EPILOGUE
KARL RHINEMANN’S VARIOUS degrees hung in gilt-framed splendor against his office’s rich, oiled-walnut paneling. His diploma from Harvard, denoting a Bachelor of Arts degree in biochemistry, hung in the center. Surrounding it were the rest. The medical diploma from Harvard Medical School. The Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia. The L.L.D. and J.D., also from Columbia. But neither the years of schooling nor his equal number of years in practice had prepared him for the woman who sat across the desk from him, perched nervously on the edge of the deep red leather wingback chair that usually made his subjects feel more relaxed than they had any right to be. Rhinemann’s practice was in forensic psychiatry, and on this day it had fallen upon him to do an initial evaluation of Joan Moore Hapgood.
As his subject watched him warily, he quickly reread the file in front of him. According to the report made out by Daniel Pullman, who had been the chief investigator of the crimes Joan Hapgood was accused of committing, she had killed her husband, her mother, and an unrelated teenage girl, attempted the murder of her son, and battered a second, unrelated teenage girl.
His eyes shifted from the file to the woman who sat before him. She did not look like the monster the file depicted. Indeed, she did not look like any sort of monster, but like a very frightened, very worried woman, whose face was etched by a grief that was engulfing her prettiness. “Would you like to tell me what happened?” Rhinemann asked, leaning forward and resting his chin on his folded hands, his attentiveness letting her know he would see through any lies she might tell.
“I don’t know what happened,” Joan Hapgood said softly. Her eyes, wide and frightened, met his with no hesitation. “I know what they say I did, but I don’t believe I did any of it. I loved my husband and my mother. I still love my son.”
“And the girls?” Rhinemann asked. “How did you feel about them?”
“Kelly Conroe is my best friend’s daughter. I loved her. I — ” She faltered. “ — I hardly knew Becky Adams. But I know she was a sweet girl. Shy, but very sweet. When we lived across the street from her, I always liked her very much.”
Rhinemann leaned back in his chair, unfolding his hands and idly picking up a pencil he had no intention of using. Whatever notes he took would be committed to paper after the subject was gone. “Would you like to tell me what happened the day your son had to go to the hospital?” Joan Hapgood tensed, and he could see her debating something in her mind. He nodded — an almost imperceptible gesture that he knew would probably not even register in the subject’s consciousness. It would, however, suggest to her subconscious that she could trust him. Sure enough, she shifted in her chair, making herself more comfortable.
“You’ll think I’m crazy,” she said.
Rhinemann shrugged noncommittally. “Try me.”
“I — I was clearing my sister’s things out of my house. . . .”
“Cynthia’s things?” Rhinemann had studied Dan Pullman’s account of his conversation with Joan Hapgood on the night she was arrested so many times that he could have repeated it verbatim, had no need to ask Joan to identify her sister. It was his way of prodding her. When she nodded but still said nothing, he added, “And she didn’t want you to do that?”
Joan bit down on her lip as if to prevent herself from speaking, then shook her head. “She said it should have been her house. Then — ” She took a deep breath and continued. “Then she started laughing at me.”
“Laughing at you?” Rhinemann repeated, deliberately lending his voice a touch of mockery. As he had intended, the subject exhibited the first signs of anger. “Did she laugh at you often?”
For the first time, Joan Hapgood’s eyes moved away from him, and she began picking at the seam of her dress. “She always laughed at me. As long as I can remember, she always laughed.”
“Why would she do that? Why would she laugh at you?”
Joan’s eyes met his again and when she spoke, Rhinemann could hear her anger in her voice. “She always thought she was better than I was. And she always said that even though I wanted to be her, I never could. She said I could never be as pretty as her, or as smart as her. She said Mother would never love me the way she loved her.”
“And that was true, wasn’t it?” Rhinemann asked, his voice bland though his pulse was quickening as he saw the subject’s rage growing.
“No!” Joan shouted. “It wasn’t Cynthia that Bill Hapgood loved — it was me! And even if I didn’t give birth to Matt, I was his mother. Not Cynthia! Me!”
“But it was always Cynthia your mother loved best, wasn’t it? And no matter what you did, you couldn’t be as pretty or as smart as your sister.”
Joan’s voice hardened. “I could! I could be everything she was. I could have been just as beautiful as she was. And just as smart and popular too!”
“But you couldn’t make your mother love you, could you?”
Joan flinched as if she’d been struck.
“Is that what it was about? That you could never make your mother love you?”
Again Joan flinched, and then, abruptly, she straightened, seeming to grow taller in the chair. Her expression shifted too, but more than that, her features now appeared more refined, her cheekbones higher, her eyes more widely spaced. And her lips curled into a smile so cold it made Karl Rhinemann’s skin crawl.
“Of course Mother never loved her,” the woman who sat across from him said. “I saw to that. I saw to everything.”
Rhinemann regarded her without speaking for several seconds, wondering how to proceed. Finally, he asked, “Does Joan know about you? Does she know what you’ve done?”
Cynthia smiled enigmatically. “That all depends, doesn’t it?”
“Depends on what?” Rhinemann countered.
Cynthia Moore shrugged. “Oh, come now, Doctor. I’m not a fool, and neither are you. We both know that what happens to Joan depends entirely on what you say in the report you’re going to write as soon as Joan is taken back to her room. So what is it going to be?” The forefinger of her right hand touched its counterpart on her left hand. “It’s quite possible that Joan is totally insane, isn’t it? After all, the way Mama beat her and locked her in the cedar chest in the basement when she was little could account for a lot, couldn’t it? Certainly it would account for her fear of the basement at Hapgood Farm. And it would account for the way she beat Mama and Becky Adams to death. And it would certainly account for me — Joan wouldn’t be the first person to develop a second personality, would she?” She cocked her head knowingly. “Someone had to take the abuse that she couldn’t stand. And who better to come up with than me?” Her smile turned brittle. “After all, Doctor, you and I both know that no matter how much she professes to love me, deep down she must hate me. Why wouldn’t she? I’m everything she never was. I’m everything she ever wanted to be. And she was my whipping boy from the day she learned to crawl. Without me, she never would have gotten those beatings.” Cynthia laughed, a cold, harsh sound. “But there’s another possibility, too, isn’t there?”
Rhinemann raised his brows in a silent invitation for her to go on.
The woman’s right forefinger moved on to the middle finger of her left hand. “Perhaps Cynthia doesn’t really exist at all — maybe I’m Joan, simply pretending to be Cynthia. After all, is it really reasonable to believe that Cynthia simply ‘appeared’ whenever I needed to be rid of someone? Don’t forget — Bill had left me, and told me he was going to take Matt away from me — he showed me the proof that he’d fathered him. He even told me that the only reason he married me was because he began to suspect that Matt really was his son. His, and Cynthia’s! So why wouldn’t I kill him? He was going to take my son away from me. And why wouldn’t I kill Mother, after everything she’d done to me?”
“And the girls?” Rhinemann asked.
The woman shrugged as if what she’d done to the two teenagers was barely worth explaining. “They w
anted Matt. They wanted him, just like Bill wanted him.”
“So you killed one of them and beat the other,” Rhinemann continued. “Just like your mother beat you.”
The woman’s head tipped forward as if she were a teacher acknowledging the correctness of a pupil’s answer. “So what are you going to do, Doctor?” she asked. “What is Joan’s fate to be?”
“What do you think I should do?” he countered.
The woman leaned back in the chair and crossed her legs, and when she spoke again, her voice was soft, her smile easy. “For all I care, you can find her totally sane and do whatever you want to her. But the trial will be difficult, since Joan won’t be able to answer anybody’s questions about much of anything. And I won’t be around to help.”
Rhinemann allowed himself a small smile. “Oh, I suspect if the questioning were handled properly, you’d find it impossible to resist coming out.”
The woman refused to rise to the bait. “If I were you, I wouldn’t put my reputation at stake by trying.” Her eyes and smile hardened. “I told her I’d never let her have my baby. She didn’t believe me. And then I took Matt away from her, just like she took him away from me. And she’ll never get him back. Never.” As the psychologist was about to ask one more question, she said, “Good-bye, Dr. Rhinemann. And say good-bye to Joan for me too. I don’t ever expect to see her again. Not her, and not you either.”
As the psychologist watched, the woman opposite him changed again. She seemed to deflate, her body sagging in the chair, her features losing definition.
“Mother would have loved me,” Joan whispered, her eyes tearing. “If it hadn’t been for Cynthia, Mother would have loved me.” Her eyes fixed on the doctor’s. “Whatever happened,” she said, “I’m sure it’s all Cynthia’s fault.”
* * *
TWO WEEKS LATER, Joan Moore Hapgood was once again sitting in the chair across from Karl Rhinemann. As he went through the file in front of him — a file three inches thicker than when he first got it — he glanced occasionally at her. She looked exactly as she had at the end of their first interview: grief-stricken and confused.