Skeleton Key(76)
“Why?”
“Nobody knows. But he did it, and he wrote the measurements down in a notebook, and then he showed up at the Morris Police Department and tried to get them to listen to his theories about how the skeleton was carried and what the thief must have been wearing and whatever all else. And then Martin and Henry called in, and they were fit to bust, too, because this guy had been bugging them. It really was a mess.”
“It probably doesn’t mean anything.”
“I’m with you. Kids out to have a good time and the museum was handy to the porch. There are always kids going out to that cemetery and trying to drive Martin and Henry nuts. They’re a little eccentric.”
“I wish I had a map of the area, though,” Gregor said. “Something with the roads on it but not much else, and the relative distances, and the incidents marked out Maybe we could make something like that if we wanted to take the time.”
Stacey was surprised. “Sure we could. But I never expected you to want such a thing. It sounds like something out of Agatha Christie.”
Sometimes far too much of Gregor’s life sounded like something out of Agatha Christie. He looked out the windshield at the country they were passing through. It was odd the way you could tell the affluence of a town by the shade of green on its lawns. Rich towns had deep, jewel-like greens, even in the winter. This was definitely a rich town.
They passed a few small houses, built very close to the edge of the road. They passed a few more that were much larger and set well back. There didn’t seem to be a single person anywhere.
“Does he live out here, Peter Greer?” Gregor asked. “Is that where we’re going?”
“Oh, no,” Stacey said. “I forgot to tell you. We’re going out to the Swamp Tree Country Club. There’s a manager there, a Mr. Mortimer. Thomas Mortimer. Anyway, he said it was urgent, about where Kayla Anson was on Friday night. He was all worked up. So I told him we’d be right out.”
“But we know where Kayla Anson was on Friday night,” Gregor pointed out.
“He seems to think we don’t,” Stacey said. “And I thought it wouldn’t hurt us to check it out Don’t you agree with that, Mr. Demarkian? Should I have asked you first?”
The last thing Gregor could do was insist that Stacey Spratz check in with him before he made a single move. Going out to this country club would not hurt either one of them, if it gave them information about the life of Kayla Anson.
Gregor didn’t think he had ever investigated a murder before where he had so little sense of the deceased. He knew more about what Zara Anne Moss was like than what Kayla Anson was like—and really, considering the time he had spent thinking about Kayla Anson, it should have been the other way around.
3
The Swamp Tree Country Club was at the end of a long and winding drive, and totally hidden from the road. Approaching it made Gregor think of the opening scene in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and especially of the Alfred Hitchcock version. The vegetation at the side of the drive was something worse than overgrown. A lot of it seemed to be made up of bushes with brambles on them.
They made a turn and then another turn, and the vegetation ceased abruptly, replaced by a broad lawn in perfect order. The clubhouse was long and low and substantial-looking. Behind it, a golf course meandered up a gentle hill. At least one foursome was playing, making their way from the fifth to the sixth hole.
Stacey parked the car as close to the front door as possible and got out. Gregor got out, too.
“We’re supposed to go right in and tell the man at the door that we need to see Thomas Mortimer,” Stacey said. “I guess he’s some kind of bouncer. To keep the nonmembers out.”
Gregor didn’t think that a lot of nonmembers showed up here, demanding to be let in. He didn’t think a lot of non-members even knew that this was here. He followed Stacey toward the front door. Halloween might as well not have been happening at all, as far as the Swamp Tree Country Club was concerned. There wasn’t so much as a jack-o’-lantern on the front porch.
The man just inside the front door was not a bouncer. He was far too old, and far too dignified, and dressed in a white tie and tails. Stacey explained what they had come for and the man retreated for a moment into a little wooden booth at the side of the wall. Then he came out again and asked them to take a seat while they waited.
They might as well not have bothered. It took no time at all for Thomas Mortimer to come out to get them, bustling with officiousness like a minor bureaucrat at the head of an even more minor department. Gregor knew the type all too well, and hated it. This was a man who would interrupt his subordinates at every opportunity. If you wanted to question those subordinates, you would have to get them out of the room.