Skeleton Key(37)

“I’ve been trying to get through to Margaret all day,” Jennifer said, when Annabel came down and began moving around the kitchen. “The phone’s on the answering machine—I don’t suppose I blame her. There must be reporters crawling all over that place by now. And it’s only going to get worse.”

Annabel found grapefruit in the refrigerator. She got one out and cut it in half. She hated the taste of grapefruit, but that was the point. If you hated the taste of something, you didn’t eat too much of it. She put the half a grapefruit in a little bowl, and found a spoon, and sat down at the table. The red Corvette was parked right outside the kitchen window, in that part of the drive that came up to the back porch. Annabel was surprised that she hadn’t thought to put it away in the garage.

“There’s something I’ve got to talk to you about,” Annabel started.

Jennifer was still on a roll. She was a fine-boned woman with too much hair and clothes that had come straight out of the Talbot’s store in Southbury. She looked like any one of a hundred Litchfield County ladies.

“Strangled,” she was saying, pacing back and forth from the kitchen to the little sitting room and back again. “That’s what they said on the news. Strangled. And hit on the head, too, or something. I don’t know. The news is very confusing. But I don’t think there’s a safe place left anywhere in the world.”

“She was strangled in her house?” Annabel asked.

“She was strangled in her car. Or strangled and then put in her car. Really, Annabel, it’s impossible to sort it all out. There are all these news reports, but I don’t think anybody really knows anything. And there were pictures… of them bringing the body out. You know. The bag. And all I could think of was that Kayla Anson was in that bag.”

Annabel felt suddenly very ill. Kayla in a body bag. Body bags in general. She pushed her grapefruit away from her.

“Mother, listen to me,” she said. “I sort of stole this car.”

“What?” Jennifer said.

“Well, I didn’t really steal it. I just—I was out with this guy. Tommy Haggerty. You know. He goes to Princeton. His parents belong to the club.”

“It’s going to be really awful if it turns out it wasn’t some thug from the neighborhood. So to speak. If it turns out it was one of Kayla’s boyfriends.”

“Kayla only had one boyfriend. He wouldn’t strangle her. The thing is, Tommy and I went out to the Lucky Eight last night, and he was drinking, and—”

“You can just imagine what Margaret is going through. Especially given the fact that Margaret is Margaret, if you know what I mean. A more tightly wound, unforgiving woman I’ve never met. Margaret hates publicity.”

“He got too drunk to drive,” Annabel said, plowing on gamely. “So I took his keys and left him in the bar and drove his car back here. And now it’s in our driveway. That one. The Corvette.”

“Well, dear. I think that’s only sensible. You wouldn’t have wanted the boy to drive you home if he was drunk.”

“Right,” Annabel said.

On any other day, Jennifer would have caught onto it immediately—if the boy was drunk, the chances were that Annabel had been drinking. Her father would catch onto it, if her father heard about it. He didn’t seem to be around.

“Did Daddy go into the city?” Annabel asked.

“What? Oh, yes. He had some kind of conference or something. They say they’re going to get that famous detective out here to help. You know the one. The Hungarian.”

“Hungarian?”

“Gregory something.”

“Oh,” Annabel said. “Gregor Demarkian. He’s not Hungarian. He’s from Philadelphia.”

“When I was growing up, you never heard about people with names like that. If they got famous, they changed them. Now, I don’t know what to think, half the time. I wish they’d be more clear about what happened. They keep saying she was found in her own car in her own garage, as if she’d committed suicide with carbon monoxide. Or somebody had killed her that way. Do you think that could be it?”

“I think I’ve got to get the car back to Tommy,” Annabel said.

Jennifer blinked. She wandered back into the little sitting room again. Annabel heard her sigh. “Now they’ve got Diane Smith at the scene,” she called out, “except it isn’t exactly at the scene because the driveway’s blocked off. It’s just out in front of Margaret’s house. Oh, Margaret must be having a fit.”

“Right,” Annabel said.

Her pocketbook was just where she had left it the night before, on the kitchen counter next to the refrigerator. She picked it up and made sure she still had Tommy’s keys tucked into the open pocket on the side. She would drive the car over to Tommy’s house and ask him to drive her home—if he was in any shape to do any such thing. If he wasn’t, she would explain the whole thing to Tommy’s mother and have Tommy’s mother drive her home. Annabel didn’t think she had to worry about Tommy’s father. None of the fathers she knew was ever home, not even on the weekends. If they didn’t work themselves to death, they wouldn’t have enough money to buy their children Corvettes.