Skeleton Key(117)

“What?” Mark Cashman asked.

“Send her in,” Stacey Spratz said.

“Maybe we should try not to intimidate her,” Gregor said.

He could have been talking to the air. The young woman had disappeared. A few seconds later, she appeared again, this time with two other women in tow. One of them was middle-aged and distinctly pudgy and tired-looking. The other was young, thin, and somewhat New York-ish, complete with the sort of wiry shock of hair people used to call a Jewish Afro. The pudgy one looked around the room and started to panic.

“Now,” Gregor said, getting out of his seat and going over to her. He knew without question that the pudgy one was the one who wanted to talk to him. The young one had been brought along for moral support, or for courage. Gregor took the pudgy one’s arm and guided her to a seat. “Now,” he said again, “if you’ll just sit down, Mrs—”

“It’s Eve Wachinsky,” Mark Cashman said. “She’s from Watertown. She was a couple of years ahead of me in high school.”

“Oh,” Eve Wachinsky said. “Maybe I shouldn’t do this—”

“She’s worried that you’re all going to laugh at her,” the young woman with the Afro said. “But I’ve listened to what she has to say, and I think she ought to tell you. She really should. So if it’s not important, just blame it on me.”

“Who are you?” Gregor asked.

“My name is Grace Feinmann. I’m her neighbor across the hall. We both live in the same building out by Depot Square in Watertown. And you’ve got to be careful, because she just got out of the hospital yesterday. She had meningitis.”

“If I hadn’t been sick, I would have said something sooner,” Eve said. “It’s just that I was—it’s just that I was—”

“On Friday night when Kayla Anson was murdered, she worked the night shift at Darla Barden’s answering service,” Grace said. “She got back home about six in the morning and just collapsed in the hall. Because she was sick. So you see, she didn’t even hear about the murder and then she was in the hospital—”

“I had a fever,” Eve said. “It was a big fever and I couldn’t think. And now I have medical bills, you know, thousands and thousands of dollars in medical bills and I don’t know how I’m going to pay them—”

“You’re going to apply for patient assistance,” Grace said. “I’m going to help you fill out the forms. You’ve got to tell him what happened at Darla’s.”

“Oh,” Eve said. “Yes. I know. Only, the thing is, they must have made a record of it. At the time, you know. And you must have seen the record. So you must know all about it So you must not think it’s important. But Grace said maybe you don’t know at all, maybe something slipped up.”

“What is it we might not know about?” Gregor asked patiently.

“The telephone pole,” Eve said.

“The telephone pole,” Gregor repeated.

Eve nodded. It wasn’t just that she was scared, Gregor realized. It was that she was still weak from sickness. She shouldn’t be out in the open like this. She ought to be home in bed.

“On Friday night, there was a telephone pole,” she said. “It went down on Capernaum Road. I’m not sure about the time, but I think it might have been between eleven and twelve. That I got the call, I mean, not that the pole went down.”

“Capernaum Road,” Gregor said. “Why is the name so famillar?”

“You’re probably thinking of the Bible.”

“No he’s not,” Stacey said. “Capernaum Road is the dirt road at the back end of the Fairfield Family Cemetery.”

It was going to be a while before the adrenaline drained completely. Gregor could feel it. This was something far more dramatic than a second wind.

“How far is it from the cemetery?” he asked.

“About as far as the Litchfield Museum is in the other direction,” Stacey Spratz said.

“Right.” Gregor turned back to Eve Wachinsky. “A telephone pole went down. How did you hear about it?”

“Darla does the emergency calls for thetown,” Eve said. “And Rita Venotti called me and told me to call Craig and get a crew out there to, you know, fix things up or get SNET to fix them, because there are all kinds of wires on those poles or else the poles are close to the electrical wires or something. I dotft know how it works. But anyway, there had to be someone to take care of it. But it should be written down somewhere. That the crew was sent out. And that something happened. Especially since it was so odd.”