Hearts of Sand(39)

“We came out here to investigate,” Mike Held said. “We came, not just the patrol officer. So if you would just—”

“Just what?” Caroline Holder said. “Just trust you to know what you’re doing? Well, I don’t. I don’t trust you to have the brains to pick your own noses. And I don’t see why I should. You’ve got to keep this place under surveillance, or that alarm will go off every other day and by the time you get here, whoever it was will be gone and taken a little souvenir to say they’ve been here. I’m sick to death of losing half the kitsch from my childhood because you won’t face reality.”

“Mrs. Holder?” Gregor asked.

“What is it?”

“I just want to get a couple of things straight. Tourists come, you say, and break into the house. How do they do that?”

“How do they do what?”

“How do they get into the house?” Gregor asked.

“Oh,” Caroline Holder said. She put a hand in her wild hair. It didn’t help. “Well,” she said. “Mostly, they come up by the beach. The house on that side is right on the beach. There’s a terrace, and then past the terrace there’s sand. And Long Island Sound. They walk along the beach and then come up from there.”

“And how do they get in?”

“There are sliding glass doors to the terrace,” Caroline Holder said. “Except we’ve got rods in the slider slots now. It didn’t used to be very hard. Even if they were locked.”

“And you changed that so that there were rods in the slots?” Gregor said. “When did you do that?”

Caroline Holder blushed. “It was after the murder,” she admitted. “Before that, it hadn’t been absolutely impossible for a while. Even with the television shows, you know, the crimes were so far in the past, and nobody saw or heard from Chapin—”

“I thought lots of people saw her,” Gregor said. “I thought people in town saw her fairly often.”

“Well, they said they did,” Caroline Holder said. “But really, Mr. Demarkian, how could that possibly have worked? You had half the Federal government trying to find out where Chapin was. Do you really think she could have shown up here in town half a dozen times in the last thirty years, been identified and called in by dozens of people, and they would never have caught her?”

“No,” Gregor agreed. “What I want to know about is this house. Why keep it all these years, when nobody was living in it? And I take it nobody has been living in it.”

“Nobody’s lived here since—maybe since a couple of weeks after Martin Veer’s funeral,” Caroline Holder said. “We couldn’t, really. There was a nationwide manhunt for Chapin. There were reporters everywhere you looked. People came right up to the front door and knocked. My parents decided we’d be better off somewhere else, so they moved us all to this place we had in the Adirondacks for the summer. Then, when the summer was over—” Caroline shrugged. “When the summer was over, my parents didn’t want to come back. And I can’t say I blamed them.”

“Where did they go?” Gregor asked.

“Out to California for a while,” Caroline said. “They put us in school out there and kept their heads low. Then, when I left for college, they traveled. And then they died.”

“And they never tried to sell the house?” Gregor asked.

“I think they did try, once,” Caroline said. “I was still very young, but I seem to remember something about it, except all they got was people who wanted a look.”

“And when they died, the house came to—who, exactly?” Gregor asked.

“To me and my sisters,” Caroline said. “We all got equal shares of everything.”

“All?” Gregor asked.

“If you’re asking if Chapin also got an equal share, then the answer is yes, Mr. Demarkian. And that should answer your other question. Charlotte and Cordelia and I would have been happy to sell the house, but we couldn’t do it without Chapin’s agreement, and we couldn’t find Chapin. We couldn’t even have her declared legally dead. And we tried. The United States government intervened in the case and the judge refused to do it.”

“So you’ve kept up the house ever since?” Gregor asked.

“Charlotte and Cordelia pay for most of it,” Caroline said. “I’m the one who gets stuck here on the ground, dealing with the day-to-day stuff. The break-ins. The periodic vandalism.”

“It’s been years since there’s been any vandalism,” Mike Held said.