“It might have been her killer,” Thomas Mortimer said. “That’s what I was thinking. Somebody might have murdered her to get access to her accounts, and then—”
“If they did, they’d have to be a member of the club,” Sally Martindale said. “We don’t have cash machines here. Anybody can’t get in the front door. You have to find a club officer to get to your account for you.”
“And that club officer would be—?” Gregor asked.
“It could be any of us in a pinch,” Mrs. Grandmere said. “That’s not a problem. It’s just that none of us seems to have been the club officer involved in this case. I have talked to the night manager, and you can, too, but the fact is that he says he gave nobody at all any money on Friday evening, never mind somebody as prominent and easy to remember as Kayla Anson.”
“Nobody asked me for any money, either,” Sally Martindale said. “And I was right there in the open. In the bar. It’s not like I was hiding out.”
Gregor considered the possibilities. “Are you sure of the time when the money was taken out?” he asked. “Could there be a mistake in the records?”
“It’s done by the computer,” Sally Martindale said. “I suppose if you knew how to override the program, you could change the time. I wouldn’t want to do it.”
“Could anybody at all have had access to the computers?”
“In the middle of the night like that, it might have been possible,” Mrs. Grandmere said, “but it would have been risky. We don’t keep the rooms locked. This is a private club. But people are in and out of these offices all the time. And even on a weekend night, if the night manager had seen a light he wasn’t expecting coming from under Sally Martindale’s door—well. He would have looked.”
“I think we ought to keep the doors locked,” Sally Martindale said. “It isn’t the way it was when I was growing up. People aren’t the same. Kids aren’t the same.”
“I’m not going to turn my club into an armed camp,” Thomas Mortimer said. “The members would never stand for it.”
“The members won’t stand for having their accounts stolen from,” Mrs. Grandmere said sharply. “I mean, Thomas, really. That’s what we’re talking about here. Somebody stole two hundred dollars from Kayla Anson’s club account on the night she was murdered.”
Sally Martindale put her face in her hands.
Gregor stood looking at the three of them. He was half-sure that they must have thought of what he was thinking of now, but he could never tell. Some people were almost criminally naive. He looked from one to the other of them and then at Stacey Spratz, who for all his loud-voiced bumbling had picked up on the thread immediately.
“Do you have access to the rest of Kayla Anson’s records?” he asked them.
“We’ve got copies,” Mrs. Grandmere said.
“And you have records on all the other accounts for all the other members of the club?”
“Yes, of course we do,” Mrs. Grandmere said. “What are you getting at, Mr. Demarkian?”
It was Sally Martindale who said it. It burst out of her like an explosive cough. “He’s saying we should check it all,” she said, seeming near tears. “Every last account. Because two hundred dollars from Kayla Anson’s account last Friday probably wasn’t the first time, and Kayla Anson probably isn’t the only one whoever it was took money from.”
Four
1
For Margaret Anson, the only real blessing was that it was Monday. On Monday, people had to be where you expected them to be. The long weekend had been an agony beyond anything she could have imagined. It had been a little like being in jail, with the press people in the road day and night and nowhere to go that she could have gotten to. This morning it had occurred to her that she could have gone away completely. She could have gotten on the train and gone to the city and put up at a hotel, or even left the country. She had her passport in a leather passport holder in the bottom of her bag. She supposed, if she’d done it, that she would have been followed. Maybe she would be followed everywhere now. Maybe it would only last as long as it took to put someone in jail for these two murders, assuming they ever put anyone in jail for them at all. She was still angry beyond belief that Zara Anne Moss had been in her garage. Surely there was somewhere else the girl could have gone, somebody else she had wanted to see. Surely there was some place the girl might have fit. All that batik cotton and jangly cheap gold jewelry, like an actress playing a Gypsy in a cut-rate movie. All that simpering innocence.