Death in A Mood Indigo, page 14
“Four or five years,” she repeated, forcing his attention back to the Markhams. “And how well would you say you knew them?”
“We were very good friends,” he said quietly. “Which made Betsy’s behavior all the more appalling.”
“Betsy’s?”
“Yes. Betsy’s. She bent Ian to her will, Detective, with single-minded precision. My wife was an only child, you know. And a psychiatrist. Something of a deadly combination. Betsy knew exactly why she was selfish, and exactly how to manipulate the people around her. That summer she wanted Ian.”
“And, in your opinion, she succeeded?”
“Absolutely. Markham was head over heels in love with her, and his poor wife pregnant. A hideous spectacle we all tried to ignore.”
“All of you being—who?”
“Me. Julia Markham. I hope her toddler remained in ignorance. Our friends knew, of course. A few others, who were mere social acquaintances, probably suspected.”
“And everyone simply took the affair in stride? Continued dining and dancing together as though nothing were the matter?”
A faint expression of irritation crossed Osborne’s face. “We’ve established that my wife was not on Mood Indigo when it went down, Detective. What possible interest can her involvement with Ian Markham now hold?”
“Two people died that night under suspicious circumstances.”
“I beg to differ. Markham, at least, died from his own stupidity.”
The first suggestion of spite. Never mind that Ian Markham’s boat might have been deliberately sabotaged—by the man who helped him buy and sail it. “Perhaps you were angrier than you’re willing to say,” Merry suggested impassively. “Perhaps Markham’s wife was less understanding than you believe. Perhaps someone else in your circle decided to exercise some outrage on your behalf. The connection is there. The double tragedy. You choose not to make a link, Professor, but I have to give it some consideration.”
“It was so long ago,” Osborne said wearily, “and Julia can’t have had anything to do with it, because she was off-island at the time. You must know that. Markham had sent her back to Boston to be close to her doctor. And conveniently out of the way of his amorous affairs.”
Merry hadn’t known. “That would have been after the Opera Cup?” she asked, remembering Julia’s smiling face in the victory picture. Hardly the expression of a long-suffering housewife.
“Yes. The Cup was usually held around the third week in August, and Julia left about Labor Day, I think. No pun intended, of course. Markham drowned a week later.”
But Julia might have returned to Nantucket long enough to murder your wife, Merry Ian’s boat. She made a note to verify Julia’s alibi. “Have you kept in touch with Mrs. Markham since the tragedy?”
“No.”
A one-word answer. Suggesting sensitivity to the question, perhaps? “Not even a Christmas card?”
“Not even.”
Merry changed tack. “Any idea why the boat went down?”
Osborne shrugged again. “Bad weather, shoals, an overly confident skipper. Might have been anything.”
“But wasn’t, in fact, specifically anything?”
“As I’ve mentioned, the boat was never recovered. Any theory as to the sinking must remain conjecture.”
Convenient. “And your wife, Professor Osborne—how long would you say she ‘bent Ian to her will’?”
Osborne shifted in his chair. “I have no idea how long the affair had been simmering. I was gone the entire winter, if you will recall. But I don’t think it had begun before I left. A brief interlude, at best. Wasn’t destined to prosper, I suppose.”
“How fatalistic. You wouldn’t have lent Fate a hand?”
He snorted. “Since you’ve asked—no, I would not.”
Merry snapped her notebook shut. “Then you would be a very unusual husband, Professor Osborne.”
Osborne’s head shot up, and he looked narrowly at Merry. “What are you implying?”
“That you’re not being perfectly honest.”
He laughed bitterly. “I’ve been nothing but. It’s you, Detective, who’s holding your cards close to your chest. There’s a lot you’re not telling me.”
“Isn’t there always, in a conversation between the police and a suspect?”
“So now I’m a suspect.”
“Of course you are, Professor.” Merry removed her half glasses and searched in her purse for the case, deliberately casual. “I can’t imagine that a tenured member of the Harvard law faculty wouldn’t have assumed as much. You’re suspect number one, in my book. I hope you’re lining up a lawyer.”
There was a moment of silence, and when Merry glanced at Osborne’s face again, she read disbelief and shock in it. But nothing like consuming rage. She felt a mild pang of disappointment.
“We now know that your wife was strangled,” she persisted. “And you admit to a troubled marriage. She was sleeping with your friend. All your acquaintances knew it and were laughing up their sleeves at the idiotic figure you made. ‘Poor Jack, he’s so tied to Betsy’s strings he can’t even stand up for himself when she’s cheating on him.’ I bet they were even snide enough to wonder if you needed your wife’s money. Something, after all, must have made you stay and turn such a blind eye.”
The man seemed to digest this in silence. The expression on his face did not alter. Merry waited. Finally she prodded, “Did you ever confront your wife about her affair with Markham?”
Osborne folded his arms across his chest, as though to contain his antagonism. “No.”
“I’m surprised you weren’t beside yourself with jealousy and anger.”
“Would it make you less suspicious, Detective, if I admitted to a murderous rage?”
“It might, at that,” Merry retorted. “At least then I could consider your reaction normal. Because, frankly, Professor, nothing that you did in the wake of your wife’s disappearance eight years ago looks that way. You find out Ian Markham’s dead, leap to the conclusion that Elizabeth was with him, and make no effort to prove the fact. You leave Nantucket and apparently”—here Merry glanced with calculation around the comfortable study in the expensive Marlborough Street row house—“live off her money until someone unfortunately trips over her bones.”
“I couldn’t touch Betsy’s money, Detective, because she was never declared dead—which you’d have known if your understanding of law was somewhat better than the minor idiocies you learned by heart at the police academy,” Osborne said. The words were sharp, but to Merry’s frustration and intense interest, he was completely in control of his anger.
“Funny,” she mused. “At the police academy they taught us you can declare a missing person legally dead after seven years. By my reckoning, your wife has been gone nearly eight.”
Osborne smiled thinly. “I probably would have got around to all that paperwork this summer. But your Sconset discovery saves me the trouble. Why is it, Detective, that I have the impression you’re deliberately trying to make me angry? To see if you can? If I manage to govern my emotions better than the average man—I can only plead superiority to the average man.”
“Of course you would.” Merry’s voice was heavy with irony. “I doubt you’ve ever known much about the guy in the street, except when you were swinging at your wife.” A comment she expected would make Osborne apoplectic.
But the professor merely looked bewildered. “Swinging at my wife?” he said.
“Well—at her arm, her cheekbone, her rib cage, her femur, her tibia, and her eye socket, to be specific. The FBI’s forensic anthropologist found healed fractures all over Elizabeth’s body. The report suggests a sustained pattern of abuse. From a domestic partner, perhaps.”
“Who might then have gone on to strangle her, is that it?” Osborne said acidly.
“Exactly.”
“The O. J. Simpson influence.”
“Oh, I’d guess it predates him by several thousand years.”
“I can tell you categorically, Detective, that I never struck my wife.” Stiffly, Osborne rose, as if to steer her immediately from the room.
“Then you can offer a reasonable explanation for her injuries? You must have witnessed their effects. I notice”—and here Merry flipped backward through her notes—“that pain was something your wife ‘found difficult to bear.’ Strangely enough, your wife removed any record of treatment for these particular pains from her medical files. Was she shielding you, Professor, or someone else?”
Osborne hesitated, his mouth hanging open, and then abruptly snapped it shut. “Whatever Betsy’s injuries, Detective, they must have occurred while I was absent in Paris. I’m afraid I can’t tell you a thing.”
“A lot seems to have happened while you were conveniently elsewhere.”
“Are you done with Betsy’s bones?” Osborne asked, with an effort at casualness that utterly failed. “Could I arrange a decent burial, I mean?”
“Of course.” Merry scribbled a number on a piece of paper and passed it to him. “They should be released by the state police at your request. It’s best to have an undertaker of some kind accompany you, for the actual transferral.”
Osborne glanced at the paper, his face blank. “Thank you.
“Where were you, Professor, the night of January seventh?” The night Mabel Johnson saw someone burying what might have been Elizabeth Osborne’s bones.
His brow furrowed. “This past January seventh?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I have no idea. What does that have to do with anything?”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d check your calendar. It has a bearing on your wife’s case.”
“But I thought you only just found—”
“Your calendar, Professor.”
He wheeled around and pulled open the top drawer of an antique desk, rifling among some papers. A black leather daytimer appeared, and he flipped through the pages.
“January seventh. That was a Sunday night, wasn’t it?” He looked up and met Merry’s eyes. “I think I must have been sitting here at home. There’s no record of an engagement.”
“Alone?”
He smiled faintly. “I take it that would be a mistake.”
“Just curious. Whether anyone else could verify you were at home.”
“There isn’t much of anyone else in my life at present, Detective,” he replied, and dropped the calendar back into the drawer.
Merry followed Jack Osborne to his door, grudgingly impressed by his poise and self-control. The professor was too intelligent not to discern the case she was building against him, and yet he betrayed neither anxiety nor fear.
“Just one more thing,” she said as he pulled open the door and gestured, as if to usher her through it. “That money of Elizabeth’s. If you can’t touch it, who does?”
“Morgan Guaranty Trust. A fellow named Bromwell. Martin Bromwell.” He spelled the name for her helpfully and ushered her to the street. “And, Detective—”
She looked back over her shoulder, quick enough to witness Osborne’s odd smile.
“Now that Betsy has been declared good and dead, I should be coming into some of that fortune, shouldn’t I?”
“If you don’t land in prison first, Professor,” Merry said, and walked away.
Chapter Eleven
Merry walked briskly down Marlborough Street to Exeter, resisting the impulse to glance around and check whether Jack Osborne was staring after her, then turned out of sight toward Newbury Street, feeling something akin to relief. Her pulse was singing, her cheeks were flushed, and she experienced all the adrenal surge of a challenging interrogation. It was like chess, she supposed—although chess seemed too passive a game in comparison to her conversation with Osborne; perhaps fencing was better. Something swift and sharp and punctuated by abrupt reversals of fortune.
It was a glorious Boston afternoon. A brisk breeze stirred the first leaves of the maple trees lining Back Bay’s streets. Tulips nodded behind black wrought-iron grills, and the first geraniums were already springing up in row-house window boxes, vivid against the aged brick. Merry drew a sudden breath of exultation; her steps quickened. Dr. Elizabeth Osborne was dead, of course, and had been for years; but the world that had been so much a part of the dead woman’s days—this genteel neighborhood, this hurried passage of street fair and student life—was Merry’s to enjoy. She felt extraordinarily alive: her work was done for the afternoon, however incomplete it might still be, and Peter waited somewhere in the chic huddle of shops and restaurants and skateboarders and businesspeople that made up the charm of Newbury Street.
She had agreed to meet him at the entrance to the Boston Public Gardens, where the ornamental ponds, drained all winter, were slowly filling; but between Exeter and the Ritz were dozens of dazzling shop windows. Left side of the street, or right? On the corner she hesitated. Armani was on the right, but Merry thought she remembered a particularly enticing home-furnishings shop on the left—and now that she was in possession of her own home, of three entire rooms, housewares won out over fashion every time. She turned decisively to the left and embarked on the oldest entertainment known to man—the fathoming of the bazaar.
“You seem predisposed to believe Jack Osborne murdered his wife,” Peter observed as he reached for his wineglass an hour and a half later. They were sitting in the dining room of the Ritz Hotel—without, as it happened, a view of the gardens. Merry no longer cared, having strolled the gardens’ length arm-in-arm with Peter, attempting and failing to name every type of bulb springing skyward from the beautifully tended beds. She was tired and happy, in possession of an excellent pear-and-endive salad, and looking forward to the prospect of a duck browning nicely somewhere in her name.
“Don’t you consider his behavior rather suspicious?” she asked.
“Most behavior can seem that way, if you work hard enough.”
“All right.” Merry set down her fork. “If you persist in thinking you can do my job for me, I might as well take you to the cleaner’s while I’m at it. Bet me whatever you please. I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that the man tampered with Mood Indigo, causing it to sink, and then strangled and buried his wife. Somewhere. And for some reason he was forced to rebury her a few months ago on Sconset beach, which led to his downfall.”
“You’re on.” Peter held out his hand.
Merry studied him. “You don’t agree with me. You refuse to see the plausibility of the act.”
“I admit he could have killed his wife and Markham,” Peter said calmly, “and that he may have had prodigious motivation, being cuckolded and embarrassed and possibly abusive to boot. But I think you’re very far from proving it.”
“He did nothing to search for her after the boat went down! Because he knew she was already dead. He trusted the public nature of her affair would place her, in most people’s minds, in Mood Indigo with Markham. He probably left her shoes and passport on the beach for himself to find. And Peter”—she raised a forkful of endive and shook it for emphasis—“he can’t come up with one single excuse for those healed fractures. The man was married to Elizabeth for fifteen years. He should remember a broken arm, or the facial injuries, or the taping she must have had around her ribs.”
“Fine,” Peter rejoined, “I’m not arguing that things don’t look black for the distinguished professor. He may have killed them both, as you say. But consider the contingencies! How could Osborne possibly know that Ian Markham would take his boat out in a storm?”
“Maybe he lured him out.”
“Prove it. Then tell me how he got his friend to sink the thing just beyond the continental shelf. If Osborne tampered with the boat, and it was retrieved—or if Markham somehow survived to explain the disaster”—Peter snapped his fingers—“there goes Osborne’s happily widowered life.”
Merry looked crestfallen. Peter pressed his advantage. “I won’t even go into the unlikely series of events that are required to bring Osborne back to the island this January, reburying his wife’s bones in a snowstorm.”
Merry brightened, inspired. “What if Julia was in on the murders with him? And she reburied the bones in January for reasons we haven’t discovered?”
“Possible,” Peter conceded. “But if she plotted to murder her husband, why has she remained in Sconset with the kids all these years, slowly going mad? Why not make a new life with his insurance money—return to England, for instance?”
“Guilt. Guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt.”
Peter shook his head in protest. “Seems to me that if you’re going to knock off your errant spouses together, you should at least get to enjoy the fruits of your crime. Instead, as far as you can tell, Julia Markham and Jack Osborne haven’t been in touch.”
“So Osborne would like us to believe.”
“Seems odd, doesn’t it?”
“Maybe they hoped to divert suspicion from one another. That would explain Osborne’s avoidance of the island.”
Peter drank the last of his wine and reached for the bottle. “For eight years? You’ve got to do better than that.”
“Okay,” Merry said thoughtfully through a bite of pear, “I agree there’re a few holes.”
“And how do you propose to fill them?”
“With talk, for one thing.”
“Talk.”
“Yep. Everyone who knew the Markhams and the Osbornes was talking about that affair, by Osborne’s own admission. Some of them must remember it well enough to share their impressions with me. Ever hear of a woman named Sylvia Whitehead?”
“No. Sounds like she should write the Inky Mirrors bird-watching column.”
“She’s an art dealer. Or was. I thought you’d know all those sorts of people.”
“I don’t deal art. I inherit it.”
“Snob.”
Peter’s sharp-boned face softened with amusement. “Talk to everyone you like, Meredith. Talk until you’re blue in the face. But talk won’t amount to diddly in a court of law.”
