Hearts of Sand(47)

“The local public school can out-Eton Eton,” Gregor said. “And yes, she’s the youngest sister. The other two sisters don’t live in the area. I think one of them is in Chicago. Anyway, that’s been checked out, by both the local police and the Bureau, so that’s all right. But she felt like somebody from central casting, too.”

“Do I feel like something from central casting?”

“No,” Gregor said. “You’re sui generis. And I always thought so. But I just feel up against a wall here. I’ve talked to two Bureau people, one retired and one very much on the case. I’ve talked to all the police officers locally who’ve had anything to do with the murder. And in all of that, I’ve only got one significant piece of information.”

“What’s that?”

“The uniform that went to the Waring house on the night of the murder is a woman named Angela Harkin. She says that when she was checking the place out, before she actually knew there was something wrong, she went around to the back and looked through a gap in the curtains and saw a single foot, wearing an espadrille.”

“And espadrilles mean something important?”

“When she found the body of Chapin Waring, Chapin Waring was wearing tennis shoes.”

“But that is interesting,” Bennis said. “That must have been the murderer. And the murderer must have been a woman.”

“Maybe,” Gregor said.

“But if there was another person there while the officer was looking around, how did she get out? Wouldn’t she have been seen?”

“Not necessarily,” Gregor said. “The place isn’t as big as Engine House, but it’s big. There are lots of ways to get in and out. And the alarm wasn’t tripped that night, so whoever got in knew how to turn it on and off. There was just the one officer there at the time. What bothers me the most is that that wasn’t in the notes I got, and the officers on the case didn’t seem to make anything of it. Everybody here is so wrapped up in discussing what happened thirty years ago, they lose sight of the obvious.”

“They probably just think that if Chapin Waring was murdered in her own hometown, it probably had something to do with what happened thirty years ago. Don’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s interesting,” Bennis said.

“Everybody loses sight of the fact that Chapin Waring may have been missing for thirty years, but that doesn’t mean she’d ceased to exist for thirty years. She was doing something all that time. And there’s really no reason to suppose that she’d been murdered now for something that old. From what I hear about her—in the notes and out—she was something of a juvenile delinquent all her life, except that she never was called that and she didn’t end up in reform school, because her family had too much money. But the general feeling seems to be that she was never good for herself or for other people. She was the kind of person who got people wrapped up in things they couldn’t really handle.”

“Well, that seems true enough.”

“I know,” Gregor said. “I’m just saying there’s no reason to suppose she stopped doing that when she left here. That leads me back to the other brick wall, and that’s the question of what she was actually doing for those thirty years.”

“And then you’re the one who’s bringing the whole thing back to what happened thirty years ago.”

“I know,” Gregor said. “This is why I need somebody to talk to. If I don’t talk, I end up going around and around in circles in my head. Today, the alarm went off at the house. We all hauled ourselves out there, and I do mean all of us, and all we found was the front door, slightly open. The alarm had gone off, so either the person who opened the door didn’t know how to disengage it or didn’t want to. But there were no signs of forced entry anywhere in the place, which would seem to indicate that whoever opened the door had the key. And there was absolutely no reason for this that I could tell.”

“Maybe somebody came to steal something?”

“If they did, it was nothing immediately discernible. Caroline Holder didn’t look around and go, ‘Oh, my God! The family credenza is missing!’”

“Maybe whoever it was took something not immediately evident,” Bennis said. “Maybe they took something from upstairs, or in the kitchen.”

“I’ve got every intention of asking Caroline Holder to make a revised inventory,” Gregor said. “But if whoever broke in didn’t know how to disarm the alarm, then she didn’t have enough time to look much farther than the foyer. And if she did know how to disarm the alarm, then that means she had to have come into the house, disarmed the alarm, done whatever it was she had to do, reset the alarm, and then left and let it go off. Does that sequence of events sound plausible?”