She did not tell him that she had almost no appetite.
Dirty Harry moseyed over and sniffed her ankles desultorily, offering no sign that he recalled it was she who had rescued him from out behind that bar in Ansonia, where drunks were throwing beer bottles at him. She who had nursed him and fed him. She who had given him a loving home for nearly three months until she had placed him with Bliss. Not so much as a hello. Not that Des expected any gratitude. He was, after all, a cat.
The kayakers were still making their way across the lake. The sound of their carefree laughter carried extraordinarily well off of the water. It seemed as if they were only a few feet away.
“What can I help you with?” Bliss asked her as he cleaned his own plate.
“Mitch Berger claims that somebody locked him in his crawl space a few days before he dug up Niles Seymour’s body. To scare him off, possibly.”
The resident trooper helped himself to some more fruit salad, his solemn face revealing nothing.
“One of the other islanders recalls seeing your cruiser out there on the afternoon in question. I wondered if you might have observed anything. Seen anyone near his carriage house. Anything like that.”
Bliss munched on his salad thoughtfully. “Not that I recall.”
“Mind if I ask what you were doing out there that day?”
“I’d swung by to look in on Dolly. She wasn’t home, as it turned out.”
“You often do that?”
“Drop in on her? Sure. She’s gone through some tough, tough times. And we’re old friends. And she’s…” He trailed off, grimacing slightly. “Oh, hell, there’s no sense in my being cute about it. The truth is that I’ve been carrying a torch for Dolly since we were eight years old.”
“Does she know that?”
He let out a dismal laugh. “I think it’s painfully obvious to everyone-including her. Sad to say, I’ve never been much more than good ol’ Tal to her. First, there was Bud. Her class of people, unlike me. Except that he was never worthy of her. Bud Havenhurst’s a weakling. Someone who needs a babysitter.”
“I’d hardly call Mandy a babysitter,” said Des.
“I would,” he countered. “To me, she’s a woman who exists solely to feast upon a man’s frailties. Bud’s little more than a blubbering child with her around.” Bliss gazed out at the lake for a moment, his face hardening. “And then Niles Seymour blew into town. A truly low-class individual, if ever I saw one. But a charmer when it came to women. You know how the story goes from there.” His eyes met hers across the table. “We’ve both got a lot of good years left. We could be happy. I could make her happy. But who knows-some things are meant to be, and most things aren’t.” He put down his fork and patted his mouth with his napkin. He was a very tidy eater. “What else can I help you with, Lieutenant?”
“You told me that Tuck Weems’s parents were killed when you two were serving in ’Nam…”
“Correct.” His eyes narrowed at her ever so slightly.
“Only you didn’t tell me that you were actually home on leave when it happened. It was you who found Dolly and the victims in the carriage house. You who phoned it in. I found your name in Crowther’s report.”
“I know I didn’t,” he conceded. “It’s not something I like to talk about. Or think about. Not if I can help it. I just… What is it you’d like to know?”
“What you saw.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
Bliss gazed at her curiously before he shrugged his broad shoulders and looked down at his hands. “We were supposed to play tennis on their court out there on the island that day,” he began. “Mixed doubles. She and Bud versus me and some girl Dolly was trying to pair me up with. She was constantly fixing me up with her friends. They were always big girls, horsy girls…” He broke off, sighing. “Bud hadn’t gotten there yet. He was late. Or maybe I was just early. I often was. It gave me a chance to be with her. No one else was around. Her parents were in Bermuda.”
“What about her brother, Redfield?”
“Red was at the Naval Academy,” he replied. “I’d just gotten out of my car when… It was her screams I heard first. I’d never heard anyone scream like that before. I ran toward the sound. And I found her out there in the carriage house on her hands and knees at the bottom of the stairs, her clothing ripped to shreds, blood all over her-their blood, her own blood. She was scratched up pretty bad. Her nose was broken, shoulder dislocated. And she was in shock. Kept mumbling the same thing over and over again: ‘The mother is hurt. The mother is hurt.’ And I can…” Bliss ran a hand over his face, his chest heaving. “I can remember the sound of the dripping.”
“What dripping?”
“The blood from upstairs. It had soaked through the floorboards of the loft and it was dripping right down onto the living room rug. I went up there. Up to the sleeping loft. And I found them up there together. Tuck’s mom was facedown on the bed with one side of her head blown off. Roy was propped up against the headboard next to her, still clutching his shotgun. After he’d shot Louisa he’d fired up through the roof of his own mouth. The wall behind him was covered with his brains and his blood. There was so much blood… I phoned the police from the kitchen. Then I tried to make Dolly comfortable until they arrived. But it was a long, long time before she got over it. In fact
…” He reached for his coffee mug with an unsteady hand. “I don’t believe she ever has. Not really.”
“Anything more to it than that?” Des asked.
The resident trooper was far away for a moment. Lost in the horror. Then he shook himself and said, “Such as what, Lieutenant?”
“Is it possible that it didn’t go down as you described?”
“I can’t imagine what you mean.”
“I mean is there anything that happened that day thirty years ago, anything at all, that could possibly shine a light on what’s happening now?”
“Louisa Weems walked in on her husband raping Dolly Peck,” Bliss said, a harder edge creeping into his voice. “They fought. He shot her. And then he shot himself.”
“Okay, but how do you know this? What I mean is, if Mrs. Seymour remembers nothing of that day, if the victims were already dead when you got there-how do you know it went down that way?”
“Because there’s no other way it could have happened. Everyone said so-Crowther, the coroner, the district prosecutor. There was no doubt in anyone’s minds. And no attempt to cover anything up.”
“I wasn’t saying there was.”
“You didn’t have to. Your eyes did it for you.” The resident trooper’s own eyes were glaring across the table at her. “Crowther did his job. It was all by the book. And in answer to what is no doubt your next question, the superintendent and I have no relationship whatsoever. He wouldn’t know me from a hole in the ground. There’s nothing there, Lieutenant. Nothing at all.” He abruptly got up and began clearing the table. “Now, is there anything else I can fill you in on?”
“Yes, there is,” she replied, helping him stack the dishes. “We ran a check at the Dorset Pharmacy to see if anyone filled a prescription in recent weeks for Diprolene, the brand name for betamethasone dipropionate. Your name showed up. Doctor Knudsen of the Shoreline Family Practice wrote you out a prescription for it on April the nineteenth. You filled it that same day. Diprolene is prescribed for patients who’ve suffered a severe allergic reaction to poison ivy.”
“That’s absolutely right.” Bliss headed back inside with the dishes. Des followed him. “I was hiking in the woods up by the Devil’s Hopyard with the Boy Scouts. Came in contact with it up there. I’m highly susceptible. When I get it, I get it but good-hands, face, everywhere.” He began piling things in the kitchen sink, glancing at her curiously. “Why are you interested in that?”
Des was not liking this. Tal Bliss had invited her into his home. She had eaten his food. At this particular moment she would have given anything to be somewhere else-such as in her studio with a piece of charcoal in her hand… “You are leading somebody else’s life.”… “The reason I’m interested,” she said slowly, “is that your outbreak occurred the same day Torry Mordarski’s body was found in the woods by Laurel Brook Reservoir. There was some nasty poison ivy at that crime scene. Two tekkies got it bad.”