Skeleton Key(88)
“Maybe there wouldn’t have been anything, if the murder had taken place in the car.”
“In that case, the murderer must have been Margaret Anson. She’s the only one who could have committed it in the car and in the garage and not have had to worry about leaving evidence of herself someplace on the property. And she’s my favorite suspect at the moment. The most likely person, so to speak. But even if it is Margaret Anson.…”
“Yes?”
Gregor’s drumming became a pounding. “There should be footprints.”
“What?”
“There should be footprints. Or something. The Jeep had to have been ditched first. Or ditched and then come back for. I wish I had a map.”
“I can get you maps—”
“Not that kind of map,” Gregor said. “I keep telling you, I want to draw a map that shows where everything is. How far it would be to walk. Because whoever killed Kayla Anson had to do a fair amount of walking on the night of the crime. He had to ditch the Jeep completely or ditch it and then come back for it. He had to get home. You ride around on these roads out here and you feel that everything is a million miles apart. The whole scenario seems impossible.”
“Things aren’t millions of miles apart,” Stacey said. “But you keep saying ‘he.’ Are you so sure it isn’t Margaret Anson?”
“No, I’m not. I was just speaking the way we were taught to speak before political correctness. And Margaret Anson would have the easiest time of it here—ditch the Jeep, bring the body back in the car, park it in the garage, and walk across the drive to her own living room. Much the simplest possible sequence of events.”
“But you don’t believe it,” Stacey said.
“I believe that I need to make that map,” Gregor said. “Let’s go somewhere and do it. There has to be somebody around here who would understand the kind of thing I mean and has some decent information about distances. And after that, we can talk to Peter Greer.”
“Why Peter Greer?”
“I’ll explain to you about Peter Greer later. Let’s go.”
Stacey Spratz looked down at the table and blinked.
“But Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “You haven’t finished your fries.”
Six
1
The last thing Annabel Crawford wanted to do, this afternoon or at any other time, was to drive out to Margaret Anson’s house. To Kayla’s house, she kept telling herself, as if, if she said it often enough, she could stop thinking of that place as having nothing to do with Kayla at all. It was just a place for Kayla to die in, that’s what Annabel thought. All that worried nattering on the television news was just so much nonsense. Of course Kayla had died there, in the garage, with the bats roosting in the rafters over her head. She had died there just the way that woman from Faye Dallmer’s place had died there. It was a miracle that the bats hadn’t had at both of them—or maybe they had. That was the problem with knowing so little firsth and, with not being able to see for yourself. It was impossible to get the whole thing straight in her mind. Maybe the bats had roosted in Zara Anne Moss’s hair. Maybe they had pecked against the window of the car where Kayla’s body was, desperate to get in.
Annabel had spent all afternoon at the club—again. Since Kayla had died, she seemed to hate the idea of being home. Jennifer was at home, treating this whole thing like one more soap opera, except that Jennifer didn’t watch soap operas. Soap operas were not considered a good thing by the run-of-the-mill Litchfield County lady. They were too low-rent for one thing. They were the kind of thing that housewives in small Cape Cod houses with jobs at the local Kmart watched and thought they were getting a glimpse into the life of upper-middle-class suburban ease. The clothes were all wrong. That’s what Jennifer and her friends always said, when they talked about the women in those Cape Cod houses, the women who contributed ten dollars in cash to the latest Cancer Society fund drive. Annabel sometimes wondered what it was like, living the way those people lived, going to public schools, doing your own lawn, having a bedroom that was barely as big as her walk-in closet back home. She couldn’t imagine it. She had always lived like this. She always wanted to. She didn’t believe Mallory Martindale when she said that that other way was real life, and that this was all a fantasy that they were indulging in only because they could. Mallory Martindale said that she was going to go to nursing school and then get a job in a hospital somewhere. She was going to have one of those Cape Cod houses of her own, if she could ever afford to buy a house.