Skeleton Key(56)

She entered the mall at the far end, near Sears, because it seemed to her easier to get in that way. She parked in the half-empty little section of lot and got out and made sure that all her doors were locked. She was doing things by rote, moving because she had to move. She couldn’t just stand still. Past the mall she could see the middle of Waterbury, right there, with its storefront windows boarded up and the boards spray painted with uninspired graffiti. People came here on foot. She could see three of them walking down the hill in her direction, women dressed in spandex, with too much hair.

She was almost to the little-found entryway when it struck her—what it had been about the garage, what was wrong with the light.

It was coming from the wrong direction, that was What was wrong with it. Or some of it was. The light on the tops of the cars was coming from the little window on the wall, but the light that had struck Kayla Anson’s face, that had made it possible to see that Kayla Anson was dead, that had had to come from somewhere else.

Behind. And lower. Maybe. Somewhere.

Bennis shoved her hands into the pockets of her jacket and tried to think.





2


There had been a man out from the Litchfield County Museum all Saturday afternoon, but Martin Chandling had had hopes that Sunday would be better. Who worked on Sundays, after all, especially out here? People went to church, that’s what they did on Sundays, and then after church they went to the Farm Shop or Denny’s to get something to eat. Catholics ate a lot when they went out, because they’d had to fast all morning in order to take Communion  . Protestants ate less, but still enough to make them fat. People got fatter and fatter every day. Martin had seen them. It was pitiful, what went walking around in the middle of town these days, and dressed in stuff so tight you could see their nipples right through the fabric. In Martin’s opinion, no woman had a right to dress like that unless she looked like Gwyneth Paltrow. In Henry’s opinion, it was a good thing if he got a chance to see nipples.

They were sitting together at the breakfast table, eating toast and coffee and arguing about the paper, when the car drove up. The paper was full of stories about the elections. There was even a picture of Monica Lewinsky on page six, next to a story about the “moral backlash” the Waterbury Republican thought was going to happen to Democrats running for Congress. Martin thought the Waterbury Republican was very aptly named. They hadn’t endorsed a Democrat at that paper since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and maybe they hadn’t endorsed him. Or maybe they had. Martin didn’t really pay much attention to the paper. He was just tired of stories about Monica Lewinsky.

The car parked right on the grass at the side of the house, as if there weren’t a perfectly good dirt drive to put a car on. Henry looked up over the top of his section of the paper and said, “Christ on a crutch. It’s what’s-his-name. Back again.”

“Jake Sturmer,” Martin said. He was the one who had written the name down on their calendar yesterday afternoon, so that they would have a record of who had been here and why. “Different car, though.”

The car yesterday had been a little red Toyota, with the words Litchfield County Museum stenciled in white on the doors. This car today was a much larger Volvo, and it gave Martin a great deal of satisfaction to see it. He had thought from the first time he saw Jake Sturmer that the man was the kind who ought to own a Volvo.

Henry had put the paper down on the table and was standing up. “What can he possibly want? We went all over it with him yesterday.”

“Well,” Martin said reasonably, “we did have his skeleton. I mean, it was in our possession.”

“It still didn’t have anything to do with us.”

“Maybe he didn’t get all the parts of it and he wants to look for something that’s missing.”

Henry was out of the kitchen. Martin could hear his heavy boots, clunking down the hall. He finished his own coffee and stood up himself. The last thing he wanted to do today was to talk to Jake Sturmer about the skeleton, or about anything else. Halloween was only two days away, for God’s sake. If they didn’t get some work done and the place protected, all hell was going to break loose on the night. It didn’t matter that they didn’t usually have much trouble. They’d been in all the papers now, what with the skeleton, and with that girl dying at the same time, and not all that far from here—Martin could just see how it was going to be. There were going to be a couple of dozen teenagers out here on Tuesday, and half of them were going to want to get laid on the graves.

The other half were going to be girls.