Hearts of Sand(25)

2

The room Gregor was shown to was spectacular. It had a curved wall of windows and glass doors. Through the glass doors was a curved balcony that looked right out over Beach Drive and, beyond it, the sea. It was Long Island Sound, not Maui, but impressive all the same. The suite was even more so. The broad, high-celinged bedroom let in more light than Gregor thought he could stand. The sitting room had a stained glass window that made everything look like it had been dipped in rose food coloring.

Darlee Corn waited for him. When he had stopped pacing back and forth and looking in closets, she moved in, her hands crossed over her chest like freckled tree trunks.

“It’s not for tourists,” she said, looking around as if she were doing housekeeping inspection. “You get tourists in the Hamptons, but you don’t get them out here. This place doesn’t like flashy.”

“I can understand that.”

“You’re flashy, though,” Darlee said. “You’re on television all the time.”

“And that makes me flashy?”

“It makes you something I wonder about. You’d think that after all this, the last thing the people in this town would want would be publicity. And now here you are.”

“Sometimes publicity is impossible to avoid,” Gregor said. “Sometimes you can’t get rid of it. Then the best you can do is to manage what publicity you’re forced to have.”

“Maybe,” Darlee Corn said. She did a tour of the bedroom, checking the way the quilt lay on the bed, checking the notepad and pen on the night table. She stopped when she got to that big curved wall of glass. “You know how they’re always saying things like, don’t bother with the rich twits, the real Green Acres is a lot different? Well, the real Alwych is the rich twits. This town was founded by rich twits. The real Alwych is a woman with a four-thousand-dollar handbag the size of a feed sack, drinking a seven-dollar latte, driving a BMW, and believing with her entire heart and soul that nobody really wants to eat at McDonald’s, they’re just duped into doing it by evil corporations who brainwash them.”

Gregor was intrigued. “And?” he said.

Darlee dragged herself away from the window. “As I said, we don’t get tourists here. It’s not usually very busy. But it’s busy now. The only reason you got this room was that Jason Battlesea asked me first and Virginia Westervan asked me later. And that makes me very nervous.”

“I think it’s probably fairly normal,” Gregor said. “You’ve just had an unusual crime. It’s gotten a lot of publicity. People come to see. To tell you the truth, I was a little surprised not to pass a clutch of tourists on my way here.”

“On your way here? Why?”

“Isn’t the Waring house on this road?” Gregor asked. “Beach Drive.”

“It’s just up the road, back the way you came.”

“Exactly,” Gregor said. “I did assume that there would be people there, people who’d come to get a look at a murder house, maybe even some reporters. I didn’t even see a place with crime tape.”

“They had to take the crime tape down from the end of the driveway,” Darlee said. “There were too many people—” She stopped. “Oh,” she said. “I see.”

Darlee paused, as if trying to figure out how to proceed. “I wasn’t of that generation, but I remember the crimes happening. I remember all the fuss on television. And every once in a while, they do those retrospective things on television, you know. So it’s not like I’m clueless. I do get what’s going on here.”

“And?” Gregor said.

Darlee shook her head. “The problem is that I wouldn’t, I couldn’t, recognize Chapin Waring right off the bat the way a lot of people here could. I wouldn’t just know, if I saw her. But on the day of the murder, I did see her. And I knew it was her.”

Gregor tried to be careful. “A lot of people saw her,” he said. “The notes I got of the initial investigation are full of reports—”

“Well, there are always reports,” Darlee said. “I was out on the terrace, and I saw her walk onto the beach. I saw her, and I thought that she looked a lot like Chapin Waring. And then I wasn’t sure, so I came in the house and looked through some of my History of Alwych scrapbooks. The guests like the scrapbooks, and I’ve got one that’s almost nothing but pictures of the Waring case. I looked at these pictures and then I went back out onto the terrace to see if I was right, but she was gone. And that’s when I got to thinking. I’m probably the only woman in this town of my age or older who wouldn’t recognize Chapin Waring when they saw her. And that explains why I didn’t recognize her.”