Skeleton Key(52)

“That’s fine with me.”

This seemed to be not quite fine with Stacey Spratz. He was hesitating, as if he were expecting Gregor to do something else, want something else, make some objection. When that didn’t happen, Stacey got up and got himself a second cup of coffee. Gregor didn’t understand how he’d managed to drink the first.

“All right then,” he said, coming back to the table and sitting down facing Gregor on the other side. “This is what we have, then.”





3


This was the part about a case that Gregor liked best—the part where you could put the pieces on the table and make order out of chaos. Gregor was a very orderly man. That had as much to do with his success as a detective as any trained intellect he could be said to have, or any talent, either. Life was never completely orderly. There were always loose ends. Still, a crime had a narrative, if it was any kind of crime at all. The kind of crimes that were really something else—the violence of too much dope or too much liquor—didn’t interest him at all.

Stacey Spratz was not an orderly man. He couldn’t even be said to be reasonably neat. Before he could get started telling Gregor what had gone on the night Kayla Anson was murdered, he had to hunt through the papers on the kitchen table three times to find his notes.

Gregor abandoned his coffee, stood up, and began to put the papers on the table in neat stacks, sorted by type. He did it as much to give himself something to do as to be any great help to Stacey Spratz. He had no idea if this case would be furthered or hindered by having a stack he thought of as “Watertown police reports” separate from the one he thought of as “Washington police reports.”

“Okay,” Stacey said. “The thing is, earlier that evening, around four-thirty or five, Kayla Anson went into Water-bury. She went out to the Brass Mill Center, which is the new mall. It’s actually in the town of Waterbury, right in the middle of it, right off Main Street. Not out in the country the way malls usually are. You see what I mean?”

“Yes,” Gregor said. He just didn’t see why it was important.

“Anyway, she went out there and did some shopping. She stopped at Waldenbooks. We talked to the manager. The manager knew her. Actually, most people did. She got around town a lot the past few months. Did I tell you she’d been expelled from her boarding school?”

“No.”

“Well, she had. Christmas last year. Actually, I think what it was was that she was asked to stop out for a year. She was supposed to go back this January. She and her friend Annabel Crawford got thrown out together. From the Madeira School, out in Virginia.”

“What for?” The Madeira School was the one Jean Harris had been headmistress of, before she drove up to Westchester and murdered Dr. Herman Tarnower.

“This Annabel Crawford was going to elope. Or said she was. With some local kid. And they’d been friends forever, so Kayla Anson helped her out by getting her horse out of the stables and parking it where Annabel could ride off on it. Do you know that some of these girls bring their own horses to boarding school with them?”

“I’d heard of it.”

“Well, they got caught. Actually, if you ask me, I think Annabel was pulling some kind of stunt and got Kayla Anson involved in it. We all know Annabel out here. She’s got more fake IDs than an Iranian terrorist. And she’s something of a rip. I don’t think she’d marry some local boy with no money and no prospects. He couldn’t keep her in shoes.”

“But they both got expelled.”

“Annabel got expelled expelled—don’t ever darken our door again. Kayla got held out for a year. Annabel had it coming. It wasn’t the first time she’d pulled something. She was suspended for a term the year before, but I don’t remember what that was about. Anyway, they came out here, because their families have houses here. Annabel’s actually live in Washington Depot practically full-time. And Kayla’s mother has that big yellow thing out on Sunny Vale Road. So they’ve been around almost full-time for nearly a year now.”

“And they made friends?”

“Out at the country club their parents belong to, yeah, I think so. The Swamp Tree Country Club. Out on Swamp Tree Road. They’ve all got names like that up here.”

“Did they have jobs?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Were they doing anything in particular? Volunteer work? Writing memoirs?”

“This fall they were coming out. Being debutantes. There was a big write-up about it in the Litchfield County Times. I don’t understand much about that, but it seems to mean they had to go to a lot of parties. And give a lot of parties. I’m from out by Manchester. We don’t do a lot of that kind of thing out there.”