“Okay,” I said cautiously. “So Kathleen Treacy from Philadelphia was at your boarding school in Virginia?” Something seemed odd there. “What’s the problem?”
“Kathleen-can I stick to that for now? Because that’s how I knew her.” When I nodded, he continued. “Kathleen didn’t want to be there any more than I did. She was one of the ‘difficult’ kids”-Eric made air quotes-“that the school took on. She didn’t hide that.”
I still didn’t see where this story was going. “Look, you two, this is all very nice, but what’s it got to do with anything?”
“Because Kathleen hated her mother, and she was always talking about it to anybody who would listen.”
It must have been a small school. “Lots of teenagers claim to hate their parents, or so I’m told-obviously I can’t speak from experience.”
Shelby spoke for the first time. “Kathleen was there for four years, and I never once saw Arabella at any school event, and I was at most of them. Melissa wasn’t a boarder, and she always brought home the kids with nowhere to go for Thanksgiving. And Kathleen was always among them, not that she was exactly sociable. But I really couldn’t understand Arabella. Kathleen’s an only child, right? Doesn’t that seem rather harsh, to send her off and not even visit? The school wasn’t all that far from Philadelphia.”
I was beginning to understand their concern. “You’re saying that Arabella, who runs a children’s museum, didn’t spend any time with her own child?”
Shelby nodded. “That’s about the size of it. Of course, Kathleen said she didn’t care. She didn’t want to see her mother anyway. But that’s what a lot of the so-called orphan kids said. I even took her out to dinner once, along with Melissa, but she wasn’t exactly easy to talk to.”
“It was more than teenage sulking?”
“I think so. I asked Melissa about it after we got through that endless dinner, and she said Kathleen was like that most of the time. Melissa said she had real trouble making friends, and she was always blurting out the most inappropriate things. You know, I’m going to say what I think and I don’t care who it hurts.”
“Interesting. She graduated, right?”
Eric answered. “Yes, she did, and she went off to college. She had good grades, and she worked hard-maybe because she didn’t have many friends. I certainly wasn’t one of them.”
“So let me get this straight. We’ve got a young woman who had a few difficult years in her teens, and who said things that sound like what a lot of moody, resentful teenagers say. Her mother sent her away to school and didn’t visit her much. But Arabella was a single mother after her husband left, and I heard she took a lot of night classes while she was working full-time. And she must have found a way to pay Caitlin’s tuition. Sure, maybe Caitlin resented it, but now she’s here working for the mother she claimed to hate back then. You don’t think she just grew up and got past whatever her earlier problems were?”
Eric and Shelby exchanged a glance. “Maybe,” Shelby said. “Look, I’m no expert, but I am a mother, and I think Kathleen might have needed more help than the school gave her, at least early on. Maybe you’re right, and she grew past her problems and patched things up with her mother, and everything’s peachy. And I’ll admit it’s been a few years since I saw her, but she’s the last person I would have expected to move back and work for her mother. I would have imagined she’d head for someplace like California, to get as far away as she could.”
I looked at each of them in turn. “Okay, let me say what you’re not saying. You think Arabella’s daughter could be behind the incidents at Let’s Play?”
Shelby said carefully, “I wouldn’t rule it out, based on what I know of her.”
“But her boyfriend Jason was the first victim! And she’s got to have been working at Let’s Play for at least a couple of years. Why now?”
“That’s true. But maybe the incident with Jason was a mistake or a warm-up for the real thing. Or maybe it’s because Daddy’s back in town and that’s reopened a lot of old wounds.”
We all fell silent, briefly. Nolan had implied he hadn’t been in touch with his daughter since he’d arrived. Maybe he had ducked the question because he didn’t want to upset Arabella further. “What is it you think I-or we-should do, then? Talk to Arabella? Ask Caitlin directly if she’s killed anyone lately?”
“I don’t know,” Shelby said. “But it’s better to have the whole picture, don’t you think?”
“I guess.” I didn’t want to know this. I didn’t want to have to go to Arabella and ask her whether her daughter was a potential murderer, and I wasn’t about to complicate things by taking a vague suspicion to the police. So I made an executive decision: I would sleep on it. Maybe in the cold light of morning the situation would look clearer, or at least different. “I’d like a little time to think it over before I go to Arabella. She’s got enough to worry about right now as it is. Are you comfortable with that?”
Shelby stood up. “I think that’s fair, Nell. Maybe I’ll call Melissa tonight and see if she knows anything more.”
“Eric, are you good with this?”
“Sure. Let’s hope it’s just one of those weird coincidences.”
I hated that word.
CHAPTER 26
At home that night I kept vacillating. I was not a mother, and I had little insight into the complexities of a mother-daughter relationship. But I had, of course, been a teenager once, and I knew it was a time of extremes, often hormone inspired, that led teens to say and do things that were overdramatic and sometimes irrational. Most of us survived the teen years and became normal, reasonable adults. Since Caitlin was working daily with her mother at the museum, I had to assume that they’d patched things up. I also had to believe that Caitlin was professionally competent; the exhibit planning and installation had gone smoothly… up until the point where someone had died, of course. And she’d managed to handle Hadley, which was definitely a plus in my opinion. Running a small museum was challenging under the best of circumstances-it seemed that the less money, the more internal clashes, as each department fought to defend its turf and compete for the small pot of available funds.
The next morning I woke up late. One look out the window and I decided that I couldn’t face walking to the station and waiting in the spitting icy rain and gusty wind, so I decided to drive into the city. I went to work and threw myself into the day, and by the time I looked up it was lunchtime. How did that keep happening? At least if I kept skipping meals like this, I might lose a few pounds, which wouldn’t be a bad thing. Of course, if I kept sitting at my desk digging through piles of papers that needed my signature or my sage comments, my derriere was going to spread far and wide-one reason why I tried to walk as often as I could around the city.
The phone rang. Eric answered it and then called out, “It’s Mrs. Heffernan.”
“I’ll pick up.” I matched my actions to my words. “Hello, Arabella. Thank you for sending the lovely gift basket. What’s up?”