“But you’re sure now?” Gregor asked. “You’re sure because you found the money in a shoe box?”
“In his closet upstairs,” Eileen said. She leaned far over the table and whispered, “Twenty-five thousand dollars. In tens and twenties. When I found it in the closet, I took it down and counted it. I counted it over and over again. Then I put it back. I didn’t know what to do with it. Then later I told Stephen about it. But that was the wrong thing to do.”
Eileen sat back. She looked oddly satisfied, but at the same time she still looked blank. It was as if something inside her had broken down for good.
“The ambulance is on the grounds,” Horace Wingard said, rushing in from wherever he had been for the last ten minutes. “They’ll be at the door in an instant. Let’s try to get her out of here without too much fuss.”
Gregor didn’t care about the fuss, but he thought getting Eileen Platte into a medical facility as quickly as possible was the best idea in the room. She was staring at the wall now as if she’d never seen one before. It wasn’t clear that she was seeing it now.
“Let me just ask you one more thing,” Gregor said, hearing the air brakes on the road. “Just to make sure I have this straight. You saw Martha Heydreich give your son a manila envelope with twenty-five thousand dollars in cash in it, when was this? Just before he died, months ago, last year?”
Eileen Platte was staring at him “It was just the week before he died,” she said. “But Martha Heydreich didn’t give him the money. She did. The one who thinks she’s so perfect. I knew there was something wrong there. She isn’t who she says she is. She really isn’t. And Michael knew all about it.”
“All about who?” Gregor asked.
“Caroline Stanford-Pyrie,” Eileen said. Then she made a face, the kind of face children make when they think something is “yucky.” Then she leaned very close to Gregor and said, “She thinks nobody suspects anything, but it isn’t true. We all suspect something, even if we don’t know what it is. Her and the other one. They’re always walking around, making like the rest of us don’t know anything. But we know enough to tell.”
“Tell what?” Gregor asked.
“Tell that they’re gay,” Eileen said. “What else would two old biddies like them have to hide that anybody would care about? They’re both gay and Michael knew it and then they killed him for it. I’ve been watching them ever since.”
Eileen sat back, looking suddenly very happy and amused. Just then, there were the sounds of a door opening and the ambulance team coming in, ushered about by Horace Wingard speaking in hushed but very insistent tones.
“I will not have a fuss,” he kept saying. “I will not have one.”
Gregor was willing to bet almost anything that if he stepped out of the house and onto the road right this minute, he’d catch half a dozen people staring out their windows, ready to observe and report on whatever was going on.
2
It was Horace Wingard’s job to “do something” about Eileen Platte’s attempted suicide—or maybe not quite attempted suicide—and what he did was to run around looking important and barking directions into his cell phone. Gregor had no way of knowing if all the bustling was necessary. He did know that he and Larry Farmer should not stay in the house. Eileen Platte’s husband was called. Various members of the ambulance team got to work checking blood pressure, heart rate, pupil dilation, mental responsiveness. Gregor listened to Eileen Platte cheerfully answer the question about who was president of the United States with “Dwight David Eisenhower!” and wondered again about drugs.
Out on the road, he caught up with Larry Farmer and took the man’s arm. “Let’s go do something on our own while Horace Wingard is distracted,” he said. “Do you have somebody in your notes named Caroline Stanford-Pyrie?”
“Of course I do,” Larry Farmer said. “We interviewed everybody, we really did. We interviewed every single resident of Waldorf Pines. We’ve got notes on all of them.”
“Then let’s go over there and find out if she’s home.”
“There are two of them,” Larry Farmer said. “Two ladies, both widows, I think. The other one is Susan Carstairs. They’re refined.”
“What?”
“They’re refined,” Larry Farmer repeated. “You know what I’m talking about. They have really good manners. Their manners are so good, they make people nervous.”
“All right,” Gregor said. He had a sudden flash of a woman he had seen through the window of Horace Wingard’s office, the woman he had recognized.