Death in A Mood Indigo, page 27
“There’s the electroplating vat!” Osborne exclaimed, with something like excitement. “And Markham’s tools. His firing oven. I can’t believe it—like Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Julia’s left everything exactly as it was.”
“That’s what Peter said,” Merry replied, half to herself, and joined the law professor by the studio window.
He was leaning forward, hands cupped around his eyes, the better to view the ravaged cottage’s interior. “I bet you could still fire up the equipment and gild yourself a lily,” he mused. “How bizarre.”
“Don’t you need an electrical current?” Howie asked. “The fire department will have cut the line by this time, if the Markhams even thought to keep it up.”
“Of course,” Osborne said. “It’s just the appearance that’s so deceiving. I bet there’s still a pretty toxic soup in that vat, by the way. It’s fairly large—it had to be, given the size of Markham’s figures—and if it’s going to sail out to sea, you might want to get someone to inspect it first.”
Merry stood as if turned to stone by his words, her eyes on the studio’s battered window frame. “Detective?” Howie reached for her elbow and shook it slightly. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” she snapped. “You’re completely right, Professor. We need to get our environmental police over here, and sooner rather than later. But right now we’d better get up to the house. I don’t feel completely comfortable about the building’s stability.”
Jack stepped gingerly away from the studios broken foundation and glanced past her, toward the Markham house. He whistled. “Looks as neglected as our place. Only it’s been lived in.”
“Yep,” Merry said. “Times have not been good for Julia and the kids.”
“I should have talked to her. I should have offered some help,” Osborne said, almost inaudibly.
Merry looked at him searchingly as they walked up the path to the front door. “Why didn’t you?”
He smiled briefly, bitterly. “It was my wife who ruined her life, remember? We both thought she was on that boat with Ian. Neither of us could really face the other.”
But you must have known Julia stood to benefit from Elizabeth’s will, Merry argued to herself, and yet you did nothing to prove your wife was dead. Curious, if indeed you felt some guilt over Julia’s state. A case of out of sight, out of mind? Or is the concern for Julia a sham, like everything else you’ve told me?
“And yet,” Merry said aloud as she knocked lightly on Julia’s door, “Elizabeth wasn’t on Mood Indigo when the boat went down. She may already have been dead. So, tell me, Professor. Who do you think killed your wife?”
Julia opened the door on the heels of that question, her eyes wide and staring as she looked from Merry to Osborne. She swayed slightly in the doorway, her mouth open as if to speak; and then, without a word, she crumpled at their feet.
“Lie still,” Merry urged, her hand on Julia’s forehead. “Don’t try to speak.”
But the half-conscious woman struggled upright, elbows braced against the floor, her head twisting and mouth working. “You!” she said, pointing a shaking finger at Jack Osborne. “How could you?” She turned imploringly to Merry. “Keep him away from my Nan—please!”
Merry’s brows came down over her green eyes, and she studied Julia intently. The woman had curled into a fetal ball, her black hair hanging snakelike over her cheeks, and was crying helplessly. “Stay with them, Howie,” she said over her shoulder. “I’ll go find the kids.” She rose swiftly and headed out the entryway toward the kitchen when an inhuman screech of terror stopped her in her tracks. She looked back at the two men and saw her own astonishment mirrored in their faces.
“No!” Julia screamed, crawling toward Merry, “Hell kill me too! Please! Don’t leave me!”
A finger of fear crawled its way along Merry’s back. Julia Markham sprang to her feet, a wiry animal, and lunged for Osborne’s throat.
“You can’t have her! Not my baby! I’ll kill you first!”
Howie grasped the woman’s frail shoulders, attempting in vain to pull her hands away from Osborne’s face. He was bellowing with pain, and as Merry went to help, the professor laid a glancing blow to Julia’s head. With a sharp cry she stumbled and fell to the floor. Her skull struck the edge of a metal toy truck one of the children had left lying in the entryway, and as suddenly as a deflating balloon, all struggle went out of her. Howie stared, wordless and appalled.
Jack Osborne, his balance regained, half fell in a crouch by her side, one hand outstretched. “Julie,” he murmured, but drew back before he could touch the inert shoulder.
What to do with the man? Merry thought frantically. Julia Markham desperately believed he was a murderer. Should she pull a gun on him? Expect attack at any instant? Merry tensed, her fingers reaching for her service revolver, and waited to see what Osborne would do.
His head came up, and he looked at her beseechingly. “We’ve got to get help,” he said.
Merry nodded. “Howie,” she said, “the phone’s in the living room. Probably under some clothes or magazines. You’ll have to hunt.” Her eyes never left Jack Osborne’s face as Howie went.
“Mum,” a faint voice said from the doorway. Nan Markham, one finger in her mouth and a doll trailing from her other hand. “What have you done to my mum?”
“So what happens next?” Jack Osborne asked her later, in the emergency room’s waiting area.
Merry looked at Nan and Cecil, who were sitting quietly on either side of Peter Mason, their legs swinging a few inches off the floor as he turned the pages of James and the Giant Peach. “I’ll probably ask my friend to take them home tonight. He lives on a farm—has a dog, some sheep, the whole nine yards. Julia should be up and around tomorrow. Or so the doctor tells me.”
Julia Markham had regained consciousness at the arrival of the white-clad ambulance crew, had started screaming again at the sight of Jack Osborne, and was swiftly sedated. She lay now in the splendid isolation created by temporary hospital screens, half-dreaming, half-agonized, amid a ward of new mothers.
“I don’t mean the kids,” Osborne said quietly. “I mean about me. Julia’s act was pretty convincing. And she’s accused me of murder.”
The law professor’s face was marked by exhaustion. Between his meeting with Emily Teasdale and his arrival at Nantucket Cottage Hospital, he’d had a long day. “I could charge you with the murders of Ian Markham and Elizabeth Osborne, based on Julia Markham’s accusation,” she said, “but someone with your legal background would argue that Julia was deranged. I’d like to talk to her when she’s more coherent. So I’ve asked Howie to take you back to the Harbor House, and to stand guard outside your door. The guard will be changed periodically over the next few days. It would be easier to put you in a cell, of course, but I could keep you there for only twenty-four hours. A small matter of shower rights for the accused under Massachusetts law. But, then, you’d know all about that.”
“I see,” Jack Osborne said faintly. “I guess I’d better call a lawyer.”
“Good idea.”
“Sir,” Howie said, with a hand on his elbow.
And with only the mildest appearance of chagrin, the professor went. There were worse things, Merry reflected, than being forced to stay at the Harbor House.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“It’s too late for you to leave,” Peter argued as Merry slipped quietly away from the doorway of his guest bedroom. Nan and Cecil Markham were sound asleep beneath the covers of their twin beds, cheeks flushed in the faint glow of the lamp Peter had carefully left burning. If nightmares came, at least they need not be endured in total darkness.
“I’ve got to go,” Merry said gently, and made for the stairs.
Unwillingly, Peter followed her. “I might point out that it’s Friday night.”
“You might. And then I’d have to tell you that I promised Bill Carmichael I’d look through the serial victims’ files today. Or that I told the entire world via television that I had the guy in my sights, and nobody else was going to be hurt. Then Jack Osborne shows up, and presto! I’m back on the Osborne case. It’s like a drug. I can’t let Elizabeth go.”
“Any closer to the answers?”
Merry shook her head and turned to look at him as he descended the last of his steps. The staircase of the two-hundred-year-old house was just high enough, and the ceiling just low enough, that Peter was forced to tilt his head at an angle in order to negotiate his way between the floors. “All I’m finding is more and more questions.”
“Maybe you need a break.”
“I’ll take one when all this stuff is put to bed,” she promised.
“Will you? And what if there’s another mess that only Meredith Folger can resolve?” Peters face was un-wontedly sober; and Merry knew that he needed something she was too tired to give. Reassurance, undivided attention—sheer normalcy.
“You’re a godsend, Peter, you know that?” she said, deliberately changing the subject. “I wouldn’t want these kids to be left with anyone else.”
“Except Ralph.”
“Right. But Ralph’s got me to contend with tonight.”
“Would you do me a favor? Let me call your dad to pick you up? Or Howie? I don’t like the thought of your traveling alone.”
“I’ll be fine. I’ll go straight to the station and sit up with my files for company. Really.”
“Then at least call Ralph and explain why you’re not coming home. We don’t want him to lose sleep.”
“At least I know you won’t,” Merry teased, “since you’re unlikely to camp out in the Rover ten feet from my door tonight. I have Nan and Cecil to thank for that”
“How did you know?” he asked her, disappointed. “I thought I was the best of spies. Invisible to all but the eyes of evil.”
Merry reached up and touched his cheek briefly with her hand. “I always know when you’re near. Consider that a good thing.”
“I do,” Peter said, his expression lighter now than it had been, and kissed her.
Lights blazed in the Water Street station, and the ubiquitous crowd of newsfolk and cameramen still huddled, spirits unquenched by the descent of darkness or the siren call of Friday-night laughter from the eating establishments that lined the surrounding streets. Merry was more cautious this time, however, and slipped the Explorer into an illegal spot near the war memorial on Federal. Then she moved as quietly as a shade through the shrubbery along Chestnut, thankful for the dense island darkness and the waning moon, and ducked through the station door unnoticed.
She bumped into a harassed Dana Stevens near the stairs.
“Still here?”
“Yes,” the FBI agent said shortly. “Not that it’s made a damn bit of difference. We’re getting nowhere.”
“How’s Enright holding up?” Merry asked. “I was hoping to talk to him.”
“Gone AWOL.”
“Probably eating dinner. He’s a man who likes his food. You had any yet?”
“Nope. I’m heading out right now. Care to come?”
Merry shook her head and held up a brown paper bag Peter had pressed upon her as she’d left Mason Farms. “I’ve brought my milk and cookies, thank you very much.”
“You stopped at home?” Dana asked, her interest quickening.
“No. I’m staying at my dad’s, actually. Why?”
The agent waved a hand dismissively. “Never mind. Just wondered if you’d received another love letter. We’re all waiting for one. Your press-conference footage ran, by the way, an hour ago.”
“I know,” Merry replied. “I watched it at the hospital.”
“How’s your hysteric?”
“Sedated.”
Dana nodded. “That business about to wrap up?”
“I know you’d like it to.” Merry paused. Then, “Yes,” she said. “I think it’s basically over.”
“So did Jack the Ripper do it?”
“I’ll let you know. Listen, Dana, I’m trying to catch our environmental police. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”
But neither Jamie Ferreira, the officer in charge of responding to calls about hazardous waste, nor his assistant, Chris Mancuso, was sitting behind their companionable desks, poring over the materials and newsletters that other members of the force found so tedious. Both had quit at their usual hour and were probably well embarked on some weekend ritual of relaxation. Merry scanned the reference works arranged tidily in alphabetical order on the top shelf of Jamie’s cubicle and seized the most promising amid the technical jargon.
She already knew, really, what had happened the night that Elizabeth Osborne died; all she needed now was some sort of confirmation. She found it within seven minutes of sitting down with Industrial Chemicals: Their Hazards and Uses, and spent the next fifteen or so staring into space, imagining how it must have been.
Then she turned, somewhat reluctantly, to the mountain of manila folders Bill Carmichael had helpfully left on the corner of her desk.
It was the saddest of plunges into meaningless waste—a compendium of lives full of hope, and lives simply lived. A memory album, of sorts, for five young women, women ten years younger on average than Meredith herself, whose dreams of love or meaningful work or small children running through the sunlit reaches of high-ceilinged houses had been abruptly and brutally extinguished. Sandy was an accomplished athlete who hoped to ride for the Olympic equestrian team, one interviewer had noted. Everyone loved Janine, particularly her theater group of underprivileged kids in Charlestown, said another. Melanie’s younger brother Buck, a high school junior, is severely affected by her loss and is undergoing counseling recommended by this officer.
The silent victims, Merry thought. The ones the killer never thinks of—every single person these young women had touched. How did their families come to terms with it? All the years of effort—the struggles with school, the teenage tantrums, the survival of the first driving test and the last late-night prom—the successful navigation of the college years (although one victim, Jennifer Morgan, found on the Charles River bike path, had died in her sophomore year)—and then this. A life eradicated.
The sense of futility was overwhelming.
A smiling snapshot of each victim, taken in life, accompanied each file. Merry arranged the inside front covers in an overlapping pattern, so that the five women were arrayed in a mournful lineup. And realized suddenly what had been nagging at the edge of her consciousness—all of them were blonds. Surely everyone else had noted the fact; it was part of the pattern. And what color was the hair of the girl Manuel Esconvidos had carried off in his trunk?
She shuffled through the disordered reams of paper teetering precariously on every square inch of her desk’s surface and found the file marked Lisa McChesney, Attempted Abduction. Flipped it open and stared. Another blond.
And Roxanne Teasdale’s long, shining hair was a deep auburn.
Merry shoved the last file aside and pulled off her reading glasses, understanding something of Bill Carmichael’s anger. Manuel Esconvidos—maverick, misogynist, and former resident of five suspect locales—was free on bail tonight, and there was nothing Bill or Merry could do about it.
A light tap on her half-open door, and Tucker Enright’s face peered around the jamb.
“Doctor,” Merry said. “The very man I wanted to see. Enjoy your dinner?”
“Immensely,” he said. “I highly recommend that place on Federal. Elegant, satisfying, and just steps from the station, too.”
“I know it well,” Merry said, considering 21 Federal with a hungry pang. “Do you have a minute?”
“Of course.” Enright slid through the doorway and bent to shift some files from a chair. He wore jeans tonight, and a cherry-red cable-knit sweater. A lazy, good-natured ease was written into every line of his body; and studying him, Merry felt her own weariness deep in the bone.
“Did you receive another letter?” he asked her.
“No. But there are some things I’d love to talk about. You know Jack Osborne has checked into the Harbor House.”
The psychiatrist nodded. “I read over his statement again before dinner. It was a curious feeling, Meredith, to sit in that room with Dana and interrogate a man I’ve known for years. A man, I’ll freely confess, that I have reason to dislike and resent. I’ve never had to do that. I understood, for a minute, how you must feel every day. Pursuing and accusing your own neighbors.”
“And protecting them,” Merry countered gravely. “Don’t forget the good part. But what do you think, Tucker? Is he our man?”
Enright sat straighter in his chair and steepled his fingers. This is the way he must look at his Harvard seminars, Merry thought, watching the concentrated stillness creep over his face. Like a priest awaiting confession.
“There’s a problem here, Meredith,” he began. “You know how I feel about Osborne personally; there’s a jealousy because of Betsy that goes way back. Admittedly. That might influence how I view him.”
“I know. We’ll take that as a given. Just tell me what you think as a psychiatrist.”
Enright looked at her and smiled. “Is it that easy?”
“I’m the woman who decides to he happy, remember.”
“And you can just decide to be objective, too?”
“No,” Merry replied, “but I keep my training in the forefront of my mind. Look. You’re a professional. Take refuge in that. Forget about who Osborne is. Think about him as though he were a stranger. Imagine a glass wall, a one-way mirror, between the two of you. And tell me what you see.”
“All right,” he said. “Osborne’s an utterly contained person. He never reveals his emotion if he believes that emotion is dangerous—only when he thinks it will win him something. Trust, security, affection. He can turn it on at will. He uses his intellectual talents in the same way—throws a curtain of reason over the most implausible actions. He’s calculating. He’s purposeful. And he does not make mistakes. I think he could quite reasonably have committed these murders.”
