A Bookmarked Death (10 page)

Chapter Nineteen

B
ACK
IN
THE
van, I settled my phone on the seat beside me. If you needed spare bodies, where else would you look? Funeral homes, of course, where people were already dead. But surely someone would notice if a body went missing. The media loved stories like that. A few years ago there had been a scandal when a nearby pet cemetery collected money for individual burial plots, then stashed the animals in a mass grave.

Certainly a funeral home employee would check before trundling a casket to the crematorium or releasing it to a church. Yet employees could be bribed to keep quiet or even paid to help in the transport.

I watched an open truck loaded with a riding mower and other landscaping equipment go past, several dark-skinned workers balancing among the machines. Surely a medical examiner would be able to tell how long a person had been dead, especially if they were filled with embalming fluid. But in that case, why use them at all?

The alternative, that a man and woman had been burned alive, would make the Crosleys killers again. Would they go to those lengths to protect themselves from being tracked down and prosecuted, exposed for what they were? Not unless they could also make Colin appear guilty and send him to jail. That would ruin our lives a second time and permanently estrange Elisa from our family.

I liked that theory, though it had far too many problems. Yet what else did I have?

I started the van and drove farther up Main Street to Route 27. I had long passed the charming clothing shops, the galleries filled with beautiful art, the upscale real estate agencies whose properties were too expensive to list their prices in the window photographs. The houses out my window were becoming increasingly modest.

If I had not been told where to find the Section 8 housing, I doubt I would have stumbled on it on my own. The homes did not look any different from those in other parts of Long Island. Many of them were well-tended with just a few hints that too many people lived there. In one scruffy yard there was a clutch of rusting cars missing tires. In front of another house there was a dirty white couch, several chairs, and a coffee table, as if its residents didn’t understand the difference between indoor and outdoor furniture.

I knew that I needed to knock on doors and find out if anyone was missing, an activity that seemed time-consuming and probably futile. People would be suspicious of me. I would have to keep reminding them that I was not selling anything or collecting for a charity. At least I wasn’t dressed like anyone official, a social worker or immigration agent.

I remembered the word for “missing” in Spanish,
perdu
, but wasn’t sure I could piece together a coherent conversation. Once again it all seemed too much. Then I made myself remember Colin and the arraignment hearing Monday. I thought of all the things I had read about innocent people being railroaded for crimes they hadn’t committed. Even if Colin were acquitted, Elisa would never believe he had not been responsible. Our family would never be the same.

Sitting on Flanders Road, thinking about the best way to approach people, I thought about the police officers I knew. Frank Marselli had great integrity and was devoted to his work. He would scorn any attempts at bribery or someone trying to coerce him into an arrest he did not believe in. But if a suspect seemed to fit a crime, if there was any evidence at all, he would look no further. Was Ruth Carew even worse?

The question was enough to make me pick up my bag, climb out of the van, and lock the door. If I had to spend every minute until Monday morning knocking on doors in the Hamptons, then I would do it.

The Section 8 neighborhood consisted of two long parallel streets, Flanders and Madison, connected at the far end by a horseshoe curve. At the first two houses, there was no answer when I knocked. The next five brought me puzzled expressions and denials that anyone who lived there was missing. Nobody invited me in for coffee or told me to have a nice day. I pushed on, walking up every path, knocking on every door, knowing how I must look to anyone watching. I was tempted to skip the houses with mowed lawns and yard ornaments, houses with only one late-model car in the driveway, but I persisted. Just because they appeared to be single-family homes, not immigrant housing, did not make them exempt.

Finally at the end of Flanders Road where it curved into Madison, I saw a large white house even more in need of paint than mine. Several front porch floorboards were broken off at the ends and two small boys were building a tiny fortress in the dirt where there should have been grass. I glanced at the porch, expecting to find their caretaker, but I could see no one. So I smiled at them and approached the door.

The young woman who answered me in Spanish was wearing a yellow sweatshirt with a Corona logo, and expecting a baby very soon.

“
Hola. Como estas hoy?
” I ventured.

“Okay.” But she did not sound sure. “Are you the teacher?” she asked in Spanish, looking around me at the boys.

“No. I’m looking for someone who is lost. A missing person.”

“A missing person?”

“Someone who did not come home when they should have. Someone who has disappeared.”

“You mean—like Kathleen?”

Was it possible? I pressed down my tremor of excitement, reminding myself that this was a transient population. “When did she leave you?” My Spanish was not very good.

“Only on the weekend. She went with a man.”

“A man? Do you know him?”

She frowned as if trying to figure out what I had said. “The man—I did not see the man.”

“Did she meet him somewhere? Like a restaurant?”

She nodded. But I could tell she was already afraid she had said too much.

The boys, about five and seven, had decided they needed her attention. They clumped up the porch stairs, slipped around me, then pushed at her, demanding cupcakes, chips, Coca-Cola. I don’t dislike children, but I wished they’d go away.

“And she never came home?” I prodded.

A sudden torrent of Spanish. She seemed to be telling me that Kathleen’s roommate, Moira, had thought she was staying with the man and laughed about it. But then on Monday someone from the hotel where Kathleen worked called to find out where she was. “She did not come back for her clothes.”

“Can I see her room?”

“But—Moira is there.”

Even better.

“She is not a friendly person. Not like Kathleen.”

“That’s okay. I just want to talk to her. What’s your name?”

She cradled her bulge of stomach before deciding to trust me. “Valentina.”

I followed Valentina deeper into the house, through an institutional-style kitchen to a narrow wooden staircase that appeared to have once been the servants’ stairs. The kitchen counters seemed sectioned off with individual collections of canned goods in stacks. I imagined the refrigerator was similarly divided, the food carefully labeled.

We climbed the stairs and came out in a hall with a tattered brown carpet and closed doors, each with a different style padlock. There was an odor I couldn’t identify, the chaotic present at war with the stale past.

Halfway down the hall, Valentina knocked on a door.

An exasperated “Yes?” from inside the room.

“Yes, hello,” I called. “Are you Moira?”

Perhaps because I was speaking English, she opened the door quickly.

Moira was my height and seemed close to my age but very thin, her blackbird-wing hair chopped unevenly around a pretty face. She reminded me of WPA photographs of exhausted Okies in the 1930s. Not just exhausted, but with the resignation that nothing good would ever happen again.

“Hi, I’m Delhi Laine. I’m looking for Kathleen.”

“She’s not here.” She said it matter-of-factly, as if that closed any interrogation.

“Has she been home since last Saturday night?”

She peered at me more closely. She had light blue eyes framed by black lashes that most women could only dream of having. “Do you know where she is?”

“Can I come in?”

She pulled the door wider. I looked behind me as I stepped inside, but Valentina had vanished.

The room was not tiny, but small for two adults, with just one uncurtained window at the end. Two single beds, two dressers, an overstuffed boudoir chair of faded roses. Moira motioned me to the chair and sat on the edge of a bed opposite. Unlike the hall, this room had the fresh scent of coconuts. I breathed more deeply.

“You know where Kay is?” she said, searching my face for the answer.

“I’m not sure. Have you lived here long?”

“Too long. Can I smoke? Do you mind, I mean? They don’t like it here, but I’m careful.”

Her voice had a pleasant Irish lilt despite her dour expression. “We had jobs at home,
good
jobs. I was in tech, she was an estate agent. We were set for life. But the Internet moved on and nobody could buy a house anymore. Kay’s husband wanted a divorce—after twenty years! So we came here to find a better life.” She gave a laugh as if the joke had been on them. She seemed desperate to make me understand that she did not belong in this house, with these people.

“What kind of work do you do?” I asked.

“Kay is a hotel receptionist. I do the books for a nursery. A grower. It’s not bad, except for the money. In Dublin I had my own flat!”

“What’s your rent here?”

“Eight hundred dollars. Each.”

“Yikes.” Sixteen hundred dollars a month for
this
room, shared kitchen and bath, shared everything else.

“You don’t know of somewhere else do you?” She was pleading with me now. “This is no way for two middle-aged women to live!”

I wanted to save her. “I’ll ask around. There has to be something better.”

“The thing is, if Kay doesn’t come back before the first, they’ll stick somebody else in here. She was frantic to meet a good man, I hope to sweet Jesus she has, but it puts
me
in the crapper.”

“Do you think that’s what happened?”

“Nah. That’s not Kay. She has my mobile, she’d let me know if something good had happened.” Her intent, blue-eyed stare. “You know something about her. Don’t you?”

Where to begin? There was nowhere to begin. “Do you have a photo I could see?”

Moira pushed off the bed and went to a dresser, then came back and handed me a five-by-seven framed photograph. Two smiling younger women, probably taken when they were still in Ireland. Moira just as thin but happier. And a dark-haired, brown-eyed woman who could have been Sheila Crosley’s sister.

Chapter Twenty

I
HAD
TO
let the police know, both about the Crosleys moving valuables out of the house and about Kathleen. It was too much of a coincidence that she would disappear the same night as the fire and not be heard from since. But which police? I couldn’t keep using Frank Marselli as a conduit. Even if I’d wanted to, he wouldn’t let me. No, I had to call Ruth Carew. I asked Siri to get me the number for Homicide.

I hoped that I could just leave a long message at her extension—it was Saturday, after all—but she answered the phone.

“Carew.” She sounded impatient, as if I was interrupting something important.

“Hi, this is Delhi Laine. Colin Fitzhugh’s wife?”

“Oh. Good. I need to ask you some things. I was planning to stop by your house.”

“Okay.”

“Why did you vacuum your van?”

A jolt. How could they tell it had been done so recently? “I always vacuum my van
and
my work space. I’m a rare book dealer. I can’t have dust around.” It was a lie but I didn’t care.

“Did your husband use your van the night of the fire?”

“No.”

“Without your knowledge?”

“I have the only key.”

“No one has just one key.”

“My son, Jason, lost the other one.”

She sighed. “Did you research accelerants on your laptop?”

“This is ridiculous, you know?”

“Just answer the question please.”

As if I would admit it to you if I had.
“No. I didn’t. I called to give you some information you missed.”

“Wait, I’m not done. What can you tell me about a Micah Clancy?”

“Micah?” So DCI Sampson had followed through. “Well—Micah was the son of the woman who kidnapped my daughter from the park in Stratford. There’s another son, Nick.”

“Has Micah Clancy been in touch with you since he’s been in New York?”

“Micah’s in New York?” I couldn’t have been more surprised if she had said he was taking the first flight into space.

“He’s here to film a TV series set in Queens. You knew he was an actor?”

“No.” Yet why should I be surprised? His mother had been a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Micah had been tall and black-haired with eyes as deep blue as the Irish Sea, as crisply attractive as a young Paul Newman. Hearing he was an actor made me wonder now if he had been wearing tinted lenses.

“Mr. Clancy says he never heard of the Crosleys.”

A stab of surprise. “I called him in February to tell him who they were. What about his brother, Nick? Is he here?”

“Mr. Clancy negotiated a small part for him on the show.”

“Wonderful.” Nick Clancy was a thug. He drank too much, dressed up as William Shakespeare to extort money from tourists, and had a chip on his shoulder the size of a small child. He was also handicapped by a high-pitched voice, an unpleasant whine. “I doubt if they gave him a speaking part.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Nick’s the one you should be looking at.” I hesitated then. Did this invalidate my new information? I decided it did not. “I was talking to the woman who lives across the street from the Crosleys, in the Tudor house? She told me that two men in a moving van took a lot of stuff out of the house the night before the fire. She made it sound like they were removing valuables.” Okay, that was my interpretation. But why else would you sneak things out in the dark of night?

“What did she say?”

I repeated it.

“But why would she tell
you
this instead of the police?”

“She said you didn’t ask. She’s—”

“No, why was she talking to you at all? Were you out at the crime scene?” She sounded as if I had been shoplifting at Tiffany’s.

“What do you expect me to do when you’re threatening my family? I have a right to find out anything I can. Anyway, there’s something else. Now I’m wondering if it was actually the Crosleys who died in that fire. Too many things don’t add up.” She didn’t break in to object, so I listed them for her. “Ethan’s accusing my husband
before
the fact and then moving their valuables out. That’s what you would do if you were going to burn your own house down.”

“
Ms. Laine
—”

I didn’t let her stop me. “I went to the neighborhood where foreign workers live and asked around. I found a woman from Ireland who looked exactly like Sheila Crosley. She disappeared the night of the fire and hasn’t been heard from since.”

“And you think she was burned in the fire in the Crosley home.”

“I know it’s a long shot. But I think they found a man to substitute for Ethan too.”

An audible sigh. “Ms. Laine, there are so many things wrong with that theory that I don’t know where to begin. So I won’t. But you’ve got to stop this! You’re interfering with police business. You can’t conduct your own investigation. You
cannot
go around interrogating witnesses as if you’re the police.”

“I’m not saying I’m from the police. If I were a private investigator or a newspaper reporter you couldn’t stop me from asking questions. You’re going after my husband and it’s the wrong thing to do!” They hadn’t even gotten important information from the neighbors.

“If I hear about you questioning anyone else, I’ll have you cited. Stay out of Southampton!”

I knew she had no legal grounds. But I had to have her investigate what I was telling her. “Will you at least think about the Irish woman? I have all her information.”

An exaggerated sigh. “Frank Marselli told me that you like to play detective. But I’m in charge of this investigation and I don’t need any help.”

Play detective? Frank said that I liked to
play detective
? When I wasn’t baking cookies, I dabbled in crime? I broke the connection, ready to kill them both.