Blood in the Water(74)

Gregor looked up and saw that Horace Wingard and Larry Farmer were looking at him anxiously. He’d spent a lot of his life with people looking at him anxiously. He straightened his shoulders.

“Let’s go over to the Platte house,” he said. “And let’s walk. I want to see how this place plays out.”

“We can go by the road or by the green,” Horace Wingard said. “It is forbidden to walk across the green itself, of course, but there’s a path—”

“Do many people walk across the green anyway?” Gregor asked.

Horace Wingard went red again. “Of course they do. It becomes a matter of pride to let people know that you’re not following orders, or that you’re above the rules. Of course, they expect other people to follow the rules. They think the world is coming to an end if somebody cuts across their lawn.”

Gregor nodded. He was sure they did.

He stepped out onto the green anyway, looking up and down the circle of houses that surrounded it. All of those houses had huge walls of windows looking onto the course, and big decks where people could sit and watch the action. Gregor assumed they were set back far enough not to endanger residents and their windows from flying golf balls, but he might be wrong about that. Maybe people liked the idea of being close enough to the action to really feel it, at least every once in a while.

He looked from Arthur Heydreich’s house to Michael Platte’s house and back again. There was some kind of activity going on at Arthur Heydreich’s that he couldn’t quite make out.

“All right,” he said. “If we do a direct run across the green, we’d get to the Platte house fairly quickly, and that’s what I suppose he did when he went to work at the pool house. He should have shown up for work at what time that night?”

“Six,” Horace Wingard said. “But I told you. Michael didn’t keep schedules. Not really. He—”

Gregor waved this away. “He spent a lot of time screwing around, I know. Ten forty-five to twelve thirty. That’s the problem. From the way this shapes up, everything would have had to be done between ten forty-five and twelve thirty. There would have been people in the clubhouse then. There would have been people around. Your gate is always manned? There isn’t a time at night when the guards are off and residents use a key or a code or something like that?”

“Certainly not,” Horace Wingard said. “Our gates are manned all day every day. It’s one of our premier claims to distinction.”

“But that back gate you mentioned,” Gregor said. “For that, people have keys.”

“They’re not supposed to use the back gate,” Horace Wingard said. “It’s a service gate. It’s only a few families who have children. There’s a school bus stop on the road there. They use that gate. Nobody else ever goes in or out of it.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Gregor said. “That won’t work, either. If the second man had come in by the back gate, he’d have had to cross the green to get to the pool house, or use the road or the path. But in any case, if he did that between ten forty-five and twelve thirty, it would be nearly impossible for him not to be seen.”

“Well, it should have been impossible for Martha Heydreich not to have been seen,” Horace Wingard said, “and Michael Platte and whoever else was here, but nobody seems to have seen anything. It’s as if the security cameras went off and everybody went blind and deaf.”

“But Martha Heydreich and Michael Platte were seen. It’s in the notes I have. Several people saw them walking across the green together. And they saw other people walking across the green. But Martha Heydreich and Michael Platte lived here,” Gregor said absently. “People wouldn’t have been surprised to see them. They’d have been much more likely to notice a stranger, especially if he was a stranger on his own. Of course, he might not have been on his own. There’s that.”

They were coming up on the Platte house, and he wished he could say he could determine something from the way it looked. People’s houses came to reflect them after a while. There were lawn ornaments and decorations, choices in the color of paint, repairs that were done well or done badly or not done at all. All the houses at Waldorf Pines looked like they’d been cloned from the world’s least interesting architecture.

Gregor came up to the back of the Platte house. He went past the green and over the path and directly into the backyard. The yard was empty. There was no lawn furniture. There were no toys the way there would be if the children here had been small. There were no ornaments. Gregor looked at one side of the house and then went around the deck to look at the other. It was all completely blank, and the odd thing was that the lawns of the houses on either side looked completely blank, too.