She’d admitted the two of them kept in touch. I was betting that when they did talk, Adam usually used his cell, as the phone bill had suggested. Even if Miriam knew he kept in touch with his ex, she probably didn’t like it.
Odd, though, that she would leave a message like that one. Felicia would have to know there was a good chance Miriam would end up hearing it.
The same would be true of any other woman calling here for Adam.
Maybe, when you were in the “lifestyle,” you didn’t worry about that sort of thing.
A thought that led me to pay another visit to the downstairs playroom. I could search through Adam’s e-mails later.
Hitting light switches along the way, I descended the stairs to the bookcase. Lucy had slid it shut, concealing the room, before we left the house earlier in the day. No sense leaving it exposed in case someone else decided to break in.
It really was a marvel of engineering. Despite being loaded with books, the shelves practically floated on hidden casters. You had to put your back into it at first, pushing the case to the left, but once it was moving, it moved quite freely. The three-foot-wide doorway was revealed. I reached around inside, found the switch, and exposed the room to the light.
At a glance, nothing appeared to have changed since my first visit, suggesting that whoever had paid a visit here after the death of Adam and Miriam Chalmers hadn’t returned.
It really was some room. Erotic photos on the wall, sex toys in the cabinet, expensive camera equipment under the bed. There were two small tables on either side of the bed, each with a drawer. I found the same thing in each of them. Condoms. A wide assortment. Different textures, different colors, lubricated and nonlubricated.
If there was something to be found here, I wasn’t seeing it.
Then I thought: Bathroom.
Visits to bathrooms followed sex the way heartburn followed pizza. I figured there had to be a downstairs bathroom where folks could clean up, take a shower.
I came out of the playroom, crossed the large rec room area full of games, entered a short hallway leading to a storage room, a furnace room, and a bathroom. Not some rinky-dink basement powder room, either. There was a large marble-tiled shower big enough for two to soap up comfortably. And beyond that, a handsome wood door to a small cedar-lined sauna.
Everything was sparklingly clean and tidy. There was a stack of perfectly folded towels on chrome racks bolted to the wall over the toilet. The contents of the medicine cabinet indicated this was strictly a bathroom for visitors. New toothbrushes still in the packaging. Unopened tubes of toothpaste. Scented soaps wrapped in tissue paper. Mouthwash and small throwaway paper cups.
There was nothing in the garbage can.
Nothing particularly helpful at all in—
“Hello? Adam?”
A woman’s voice coming from upstairs. At the front door. I hadn’t heard anyone knock or ring the bell.
I exited the downstairs bathroom, made my way to the stairs at a steady pace. I could hear footsteps, what sounded like high heels, coming into the house.
“Adam?” she shouted again, sounding uncertain, but also slightly annoyed.
I reached the top of the stairs. I didn’t see the woman, but I did see a leather overnight bag on the floor in the front hall. I was guessing the visitor had gone into the kitchen.
“Ma’am?” I said. “Hello?”
The heels turned, started marching furiously in my direction. When she materialized, she looked at me with a mix of fury and fear.
“Who the hell are you?” she demanded. “Is that your car out front?”
She was late twenties, early thirties, and, not to put too fine a point on it, a stunner. Five-six, long brown hair, wearing a knee-length black dress that clung to her like a second skin. She looked familiar. I was pretty sure I’d seen her picture around the house.
I was reaching for my ID. “My name is Cal Weaver. I’m a private investigator and I’m here with the permission of Lucy Brighton, who’s the daughter of Adam Chalmers, and—”
“I know who the hell my stepdaughter is,” the woman said.
I said, “Excuse me?”
“I said I know who my stepdaughter is.”
I said, “Miriam Chalmers?”
“Who the hell else would I be? This is my house. And you better get the fuck out of it, but not before you tell me where my husband is.”
Thirty-seven
After interviewing Victor Rooney, Detective Duckworth picked up three coffees at the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through on the way to the Promise Falls courthouse. He parked around back. The courts were not in session this time of night, but the wing where the jail cells were located was a 24-7 operation. Duckworth had called ahead to let them know he wanted to talk to Bill Gaynor, and that his lawyer, Clark Andover, would be in attendance.
Andover had tried, without success, to get Gaynor out on bail while he awaited trial. He’d argued that Gaynor had never been in trouble with the law before and was an upstanding member of the community. The judge didn’t buy it.
Gaynor was due to be transferred to another facility, given that the local jail was not intended to keep those awaiting trial for extended periods.
“What’s this about?” Andover, dressed casually in jeans and a button-down collared white shirt, asked Duckworth.
“Like I said, a few questions,” the detective told him.
Bill Gaynor, a good five or more pounds thinner since Duckworth had last seen him, was brought to an interrogation room. He was wearing lightweight hunter green pants and a T-shirt. He and Andover sat side by side across the table from Duckworth.
“What’s this about?” Gaynor asked. “What’s going on?”
“Mr. Gaynor,” Duckworth said, setting down a cardboard tray with three coffees. “There’s some creams and sugars here if you need them.”
Gaynor looked at his lawyer, then back at Duckworth.
“How are you this evening?” the detective asked, setting a coffee in front of him.
“How am I? Seriously? They wouldn’t even let me attend my own wife’s funeral. That’s how I am.”
Duckworth nodded sympathetically. “That’s a terrible shame. You’d have thought they could have found a way to accommodate you.” He pried off the plastic lid of his coffee, blew on it. “Mr. Gaynor, how long have you lived in Promise Falls?”
“What?”
“You didn’t grow up here — isn’t that right?”
“I grew up in Albany,” he said, ignoring the coffee in front of him. Andover, however, had reached for the third one and was tearing off the ends of two sugar packets. “When Rosemary and I were looking for our first house, we came here. Houses were more affordable here, and it was an okay commute to my work in Albany.”
“When was that?”
“That was around — it was in 2002.”
“And you’ve been in that house ever since?”
“No. We were there eight years. Then we moved to Breckonwood.”
“Your current residence.”
“This,” he said, looking around, “is my current residence.”
“Not for long,” Andover said, his eyes on Duckworth.
“And you were still commuting to Albany all that time? Every day?”
“Not every day. I usually worked from home one or two days a week. I have — had a lot of local clients.”
“That’s going to get cold.”
“I don’t want it,” Gaynor said.
“So, three, four years ago, you’d have been working from home, as you say, a couple of days a week.”
“That’s right. Usually Thursday and Friday.”