Skeleton Key(104)

The kettle stopped whistling. Grace had gone to get it. Now she came back to the living room, holding it in her hand.

“I don’t think you should just decide you’re stupid,” she said. “I think if you think you know something, you should go tell someone. If you don’t want to tell the police, go tell that detective they brought in. That Gregor Demarkian. But tell somebody. There are three people dead in less than a week. There’s some sort of homicidal maniac on the loose. Anybody at all could be next. Even you.”

Even me, Eve said to herself inside her head, but the thought did not compute, it did not make an impression. What did was the idea of this man, this Gregor Demarkian, who was not from town and did not know her, and who might be persuaded to listen to what she had to say but not tell anybody else she had said it. Unless she was right, of course, and then he could tell anybody he wanted. Then she wouldn’t look stupid, but smart.

Grace disappeared into the kitchen again and came back holding a big mug of tea. She put it down on the coffee table in front of Eve and then went away to get sugar and milk. When she came back again, Eve had made up her mind.

“This Gregor Demarkian is staying some place in Washington, isn’t he? At the Mayflower Inn or somewhere? Could we go there?”





2


Zara Anne Moss’s mother was a Litchfield County lady, the kind that Faye Dallmer could recognize on sight and twenty yards away. She had on a long flowered skirt and a black cotton crewneck sweater and espadrilles, and the espadrilles were the kind that came directly from Spain and frayed at the end of every summer. These were fraying now. Their fraying was a sign of status. Faye had once spent an entire year figuring out the various indicators of status in the Northwest Hills. That was in the days when she had still been married, and when she had thought that she might put the knowledge to the conventional use of social climbing. It seemed odd to her now that she had ever cared at all for social climbing.

Dorothy Moss did not look as if she had ever spent a day in her life worrying about social climbing, mostly because she probably didn’t have to. She had the thin, highcheekboned face of the kind of woman who had gone to a Seven Sisters college and majored in the History of Art. She did not look anything at all like her daughter.

“I have heard of you, of course,” she said, “long before Zara Anne came out here to stay. And after I knew she was here, I went out and bought a couple of your books, just to see. You write very well.”

“Thank you,” Faye said.

“And I was relieved, if you want to know the truth. That she was out here, I mean. Not that you write well. She had been—around—quite a bit. There had been—incidents.”

“Ah,” Faye said.

“Drugs, mostly, I suppose,” Dorothy Moss said. “There were always drugs, in high school, in college. Marijuana, most of the time. But sometimes mescaline. Which seems to be something like LSD.”

“It’s a plant,” Faye said. “It causes hallucinations. Some people take it instead of the chemical drugs because they think it’s more natural.”

“Well, Zara Anne was always very committed to doing the natural. Natural food. Natural fibers. I didn’t realize there were natural drugs. And of course she was always committed to the supernatural, too. Are you a practitioner of Wicca?”

“No,” Faye said.

“You’ve written about it.”

“It goes with the territory. A lot of people who are interested in what I do are interested in Wicca. Sometimes I write about it.”

“I think Zara Anne was a practicing witch.”

“She tried to be.”

Dorothy Moss’s mouth twisted into something that was not a smile. She was sitting in the middle of Faye’s couch, with a mug of Faye’s herbal tea on the coffee table in front of her. She looked out of place, and Faye had no idea why she was here.

“That’s the thing, isn’t it?” Dorothy said. “She tried to be. Nobody can really be a witch. There are no witches. But Zara Anne tried to be. And I thought it was safer for her here, with you, than it would be if she’d stayed drifting around the way she had been. You seemed—stable, somehow. As if you knew what you were doing. And reading what you wrote, I didn’t think you did drugs.”

“I don’t.”

“I would never have guessed that Zara Anne would know Margaret Anson. Or that she’d even consent to going to her house and talking to her. I wish I understood why it was she went out there. I wish I understood anything about her, really. We were very close when she was small. Then she became an adolescent, and everything changed. I talked to a psychologist about it. He told me to just relax and wait, that when she got older she’d change her mind. But she never did. In the end, we couldn’t get together at all without fighting.”