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Fountain of Death(93)

By:Jane Haddam


Dessa Carter and Greta Bellamy were sitting together trying to make themselves inconspicuous. Philip Brye and Tony Bandero moved in behind Gregor, facing the Fountain of Youth staff and students like the members of a chorus line review. Gregor put his coat over a table near one of the officers at the door and cleared his throat.

“So,” he said. “Here we are. I have to thank you all for coming here just because I asked you. You didn’t have to.”

“We all want to know who the murderer is,” Christie Mulligan’s friend Tara said. “That’s what we’re doing here. You are going to tell us, aren’t you?”

“I am going to tell you,” Gregor promised, “but before I do, I want to tell you a few other things.”

“About Tim Bradbury?” Frannie Jay asked. She was very pale.

“Yes,” Gregor said. “About Tim Bradbury, and also about his mother, because this is mostly a story about Tim Bradbury’s mother. Which is ironic in a way, because Alissa Bradbury—that was her name, Alissa Bradbury—was not the kind of woman who usually has stories told about her. She was, in fact, what is commonly referred to as white trash. By the time she died, she was a big, fat, slovenly, alcoholic mess. The only two things she’d ever had in her life were her son and her house. Her house was falling apart and her son was barely speaking to her—for good reason. Alissa Bradbury was not a woman who cared for other people, even for her own child. She did what she had to do to get what she needed to have. Then she locked herself up and refused to talk to anybody about anything until she needed something again. The few times she did try to get out of herself and do the normal things she was expected to do as a mother, she created disasters. When she came to see Tim perform in a choir, she was loud and abusive and embarrassing. When she showed up for teachers’ conferences, she was a disgrace. Tim got to the point where he pretended she didn’t exist. He told people that his ‘parents’ had moved away from the area—that’s ‘parents’ plural, in spite of the fact that his father was legally listed as ‘unknown’ on his birth certificate and nobody had ever seen him with a man who could have been his father. There are people who had seen Alissa with a man they presumed to be her husband, but these people aren’t exactly reliable. Most of them are neighbors. One is a woman who quite definitely has Down’s syndrome. She isn’t too clear or too convincing about much of anything.”

“Poor Tim,” Magda Hale murmured. “What a mess.”

“It was a mess,” Gregor agreed. “And on the surface, the most remarkable thing about it was that Tim turned out so well. He didn’t turn to drink or drugs or gangs or crime. He just went on his way, working as hard as he had to, and he ended up with a good job and a lot of people who liked him very much and were rooting for him even harder. Under the surface, though, there was a lot more that was strange about the circumstances of Tim Bradbury’s—and especially his mother’s—life. There was, for one thing, the money.”

“It doesn’t sound like Alissa Bradbury had any money,” Dessa Carter said. Her hands were clenched tightly in her lap.

“Well, she didn’t, in the way we usually mean that phrase,” Gregor said. “What she did have was more money than she ought to have had. There was, for instance, the house at forty-seven Stephenson Road.”

“Stephenson Road?” Frannie Jay asked sharply. “People who live on Stephenson Road don’t have money. That’s a slum.”

“It most certainly is a slum,” Gregor agreed. “But the fact remains that it costs money to own property even in a slum. And Alissa Bradbury did own the property she lived on at forty-seven Stephenson Road. She bought it free and clear, for eight thousand five hundred dollars, the year her son Tim was born. Tim, by the way, was born at the old St. Mary’s Hospital in Derby as the son of a charity patient. The medical fees were picked up by the Community Health Project of the Diocese of Bridgeport.”

“My, my,” Tony Bandero said. “You have been busy. This must have taken you days.”

“No, Tony, it didn’t take me days. It just took me most of last night and some help from some people at the Diocesan offices and the Derby police. And I knew what I was looking for, of course, because I had already run across one or two strange items in Alissa Bradbury’s financial affairs. There was the fact, for instance, that she was not on welfare. Not when Tim was a child. Not even later, in the late 1970s and early 1980s when, according to my contacts in the Derby police, the eligibility rules were relaxed in this state and it was easier to get on the rolls. No welfare. No food stamps. No Medicaid. Not ever.”