It had been her husband arriving fifteen minutes ago, after all, driving up the back driveway for reasons he still hadn’t explained.
Elizabeth now pulled her cashmere sweater around her shoulders and lit a vanilla-scented candle, which sat on the table in front of her. She glanced at the bottle in his hand and laughed.
“What?” her husband asked.
“I was reading some of the things your doctor gave you.”
He nodded.
“And it said that some wine is good for you.”
“I read that, too.” He blew some dust off the bottle, examined the label.
“That you should have a glass or two every day. But cognac wasn’t on the list. I don’t know how good that is for your health.”
Sam laughed, too. “I feel like living dangerously.”
He expertly opened the bottle, whose cork stopper was close to disintegrating.
“You were always good at that,” his wife said.
“I never had many talents — only the important skills.” He handed her a glass of the honey-colored liquor and then he filled his. They downed the first glass. He poured more.
“So what’ve you got there?” she asked, feeling even warmer now, giddier, happier. She was nodding toward a bulge in the side pocket of his camel hair sports coat, the jacket he always wore on Sundays.
“A surprise.”
“Really? What?”
He tapped her glass and they drank again. He said, “Close your eyes.”
She did. “You’re a tease, Samuel.” She felt him sit next to her, sensed his body close. There was a click of metal.
“You know I love you.” His tone overflowed with emotion. Sam occasionally got quite maudlin. Elizabeth had long ago learned, though, that among the long list of offenses in the catalog of masculine sins sentiment was the least troublesome.
“And I love you, dear,” she said.
“Ready?”
“Yes, I’m ready.”
“Okay…Here.”
Another click of metal…
Then Elizabeth felt something in her hand. She opened her eyes and laughed again.
“What…Oh, my God, is this—?” She examined the key ring he’d placed in her palm. It held two keys and bore the distinctive logo of a British MG sports car. “You…you found one?” she stammered. “Where?”
“That import dealer up the road, believe it or not. Two miles from here! It’s a ’fifty-four. He called a month ago but it needed some work to get in shape.”
“So that’s what those mysterious calls were about. I was beginning to suspect another woman,” she joked.
“It’s not the same color. It’s more burgundy.”
“As if that matters, honey.”
The first car they’d bought as a married couple had been a red MG, which they’d driven for ten years until the poor thing had finally given out. While Liz’s friends were buying Lexuses or Mercedes she refused to join the pack and continued to drive her Cadillac, holding out for an old MG like their original car.
She flung her arms around his shoulders and leaned up to kiss him.
Lights flashed into the window, startling them.
“Caught,” she whispered, “just like when my father came home early on our first date. Remember?” She laughed flirtatiously, feeling just like a carefree, rebellious Sarah Lawrence sophomore in pleated skirt and Peter-Pan-collared blouse — exactly who she’d been forty-two years ago when she met this man, the one she would share her life with.
Tal Simms was hunched forward, examining the details of suicide, jotting notes, when the dispatcher’s voice clattered though the audio monitor, which was linked to the 911 system, in the darkened detective pen. “All units in the vicinity of Hamilton. Reports of a possible suicide in progress.”
Tal froze. He pushed back from his computer monitor and rose to his feet, staring at the speaker, as the electronic voice continued. “Neighbor reports a car engine running in the closed garage at 405 Montgomery Way. Anyone in the vicinity, respond.”
Tal Simms looked up at the speaker and hesitated only a moment. Soon, he was sprinting out of the building. He was halfway out of the parking lot, doing seventy in his tinny auto, when he realized that he’d neglected to put his seat belt on. He reached for it but lost the car to a skid and gave up and sped toward the suburb of Hamilton on the Hudson, five miles away from the office.
You couldn’t exactly call any of Westbrook County desolate but Hamilton and environs were surrounded by native-wood parks and the estates of very wealthy men and women who liked their privacy; most of the land here was zoned five or ten acres and some homes were on much larger tracts. The land Tal was now speeding past was a deserted mess of old forest, vines, brambles, jutting rocks. It was not far from here, he reflected, that Washington Irving had thought up the macabre tale of the Headless Horseman.
Normally a cautious, patient driver, Tal wove madly from lane to lane, laying on the horn often. But he didn’t consider the illogic of what he was doing. He pictured raspberry-brown blood in the Bensons’ den, pictured the unsteady handwriting of their last note.
We’ll be together forever…
He raced through downtown Hamilton at nearly three times the speed limit. As if the Headless Horseman himself were galloping close behind.
His gray Accord swerved down the long driveway leading to the Whitley house, bounding off the asphalt and taking out a bed of blooming azaleas.
He grimaced at the damage as he skidded to a stop in front of the doorway.
Leaping from his car, he noticed a Hamilton Village police car and a boxy county ambulance pull up. Two officers and two medical technicians jogged to meet him and they all sprinted to the garage door. He smelled fumes and could hear the rattle of a car engine inside.
As a uniformed cop banged on the door, Tal noticed a handwritten note taped to the siding.
WARNING: The garage is filled with dangrous fumes. We’ve left the remote control on the groun in front of the flower pot. Please use it to the door and let it air out before entring.
“No!” Tal began tugging futilely at the door, which was locked from the inside. In the dark they couldn’t immediately find the remote and a fireman with an axe ran to the side door and broke it open with one swing.
But they were too late.
To save either of them.
Once again it was a multiple suicide. And another husband and wife, too.
Samuel and Elizabeth Whitley were in the garage, reclining in an open convertible, an old-fashioned MG sports car. While one officer had shut off the engine and firemen rigged a vent fan, the medical techs had pulled them out of the car and rested them on the driveway. They’d attempted to revive them but it was futile. The couple had been very efficient in their planning; they’d sealed the doors, vents and windows of the garage with duct tape. Shades had been drawn, so no one could look inside and interrupt their deaths.
Talbot Simms stared at them, numb. No blood this time but the deaths were just as horrible to him — seeing the bodies themselves and noting the detachment in their planning: the thoughtfulness of the warning note, its cordial tone, the care in sealing the garage. And the underlying uneasiness; like the Bensons’ note, this note was written in unsteady writing and there were misspellings—“dangrous”—and a missing word or two: “use it to the door…”
An interview of the neighbors who happened to hear the car engine’s unusual rattle wasn’t helpful. They’d seen nothing.
The uniformed officers made a circuit of the house, to make certain nobody else was inside and had been affected by the carbon monoxide. Tal entered, too, but hesitated at first when he smelled a strong odor of fumes. But then he realized that the scent wasn’t auto exhaust but smoke from the fireplace. A glance at the brandy glasses and a dusty bottle on the table in front of a small couch. They’d had a final romantic drink together in front of a fire — and then died.