Well, job placement was out of the question, but now he could make the proper referral for long-term therapy. Mallory may have saved the boy’s life with this information, stolen or not. Charles looked up at the armchair – Louis’s chair. His old friend, the dead man, shrugged, then splayed one hand to say, This is how it begins – the seduction.
Charles found himself nodding in agreement with a man who was not there. Yes, he had actually rationalized a breach of ethics, an unnecessary violation. In truth, Mallory’s theft had only supported his own suspicions. He was actually quite good at his craft, though he applied his skill to analyzing a potential client’s gifts and suitability for employment.
Retiring to the couch, he stretched out to finish his reading in comfort. He was surprised to turn a page and find Mallory’s job proposal for placing the boy in a remote scientific community. There, he would not be a solitary freak, but one of many such freaks, and he would cease his ritual attempts to kill himself every Halloween; this had been Mallory’s argument for selling an unbalanced job candidate.
Oh, of course. Never mind the fee. And here he countered with her own trademark line, „Yeah, right.“
Mallory, the humanitarian, had also secured the client on the profit side of this transaction. The New Mexico think tank was funded with a truly obscene amount of grant money. Best of all – and this was her final salvo – the personnel director had not balked at the disclosure of the boy’s suicidal ideation, and the project would provide long-term therapy.
Thus far, this was the only argument for job placement.
All that remained was the detail of signing off on Mallory’s paperwork.
He slowed his reading to a normal person’s pace, for his partner sometimes deviated from the standard boilerplate contract, and he had learned to go slowly and scrutinize every line before signing anything. True to form, she had named a staggering fee that he would never have had the gall to charge, and her conditions straddled a borderland between ethics and all that the traffic would bear. She had added a penalty clause, doubling their fee if the New Mexico project failed to keep the boy alive through Halloween.
Charles stared at the ceiling, averting his eyes from the laughing dead man.
Reading that final contract clause in the best possible light, Mallory was not actually planning to profit on a death. No, she only wanted to ensure the boy’s ongoing survival. He turned to face his memory of the late Louis Markowitz, who knew her best.
The old man lifted one eyebrow to say, But you ‘re not really sure, are you, Charles?
On a normal day, he would be madly rewriting the terms of Mallory’s contract, but now he simply bowed to the absurd and signed his name on the dotted line.
Done with the business of the day, he turned his attention to the telephone on the other side of the room, willing it to ring. He was looking forward to another conversation with Susan McReedy, the lady from Maine. Mallory had insisted that the woman would call again. The detective’s contracts were a bit dicey, but her instincts were superb. Yes, Ms. McReedy would definitely call back. He could see the woman clearly now, sitting by her own telephone, her hair gone to gray and her life as well, facing the tedium of her retirement years. This very moment, all of Ms. McReedy’s thoughts would be consumed by old acquaintance with a memorable icepick-wielding redhead.
He reached out to the near table and picked up his history book. As he turned the pages, he marveled anew that Riker could have ingested this dry text without the skill of speed reading and the mercy of a quick end. While scanning the pages, Charles revisited Mallory’s theory on a twelve-year-old girl’s involvement in the Winter House Massacre.
In a bibliophile’s act of heresy, he threw the book across the room. Next, he abandoned logic, replacing it with faith and feeling. He liked Nedda Winter. Between dinner at eight and the last bottle of wine in the early hours of a morning, he had come to think of her as a friend.
Head bowed over her plate, Nedda Winter finished supper in the kitchen, then disregarded the automatic dishwasher to clean her plate in the sink. She planned to retire early and spare her siblings one more encounter, though she craved their company, any company at all, rather than to be alone, that state where memory consumed her.
One benign recollection was of Mrs. Tully, wide as she was tall, the cook and housekeeper who had died in the massacre. This kitchen had been that old woman’s domain, and October had been Tully’s favorite time of the year. For weeks in advance of Halloween, she had always been allowed free rein to terrify her employer’s offspring. That last time, when five of the Winter children had only a few more days to live, they had all gathered in the kitchen, all except Baby Sally. The youngsters, rocking on the balls of their feet, had wafted back and forth between terror and delight. And then the long-awaited moment came when the housekeeper threw open the cellar door to absolute darkness and led them all down the stairs.
Five-year-old Cleo had alternately laughed and squealed in anticipation before Tully had even begun her scary work. Erica, who had turned nine that year, was much more ladylike, practicing to be blase and determined that the old woman would not make her scream. And the rest of them could hardly wait to be scared witless.
„I never use mousetraps,“ the old woman said, as she led the parade of children into the dank basement by the light of a single candle. She held the flame below her face to make it seem evil when she grinned at them. „No, traps won’t do. Might catch a child or two by mistake and break your little fingers and toes. But no fear. The house likes you – all of you. But the house hates vermin. Kills ‘em dead, it does.“ Tully had bent low to hold her candle over the small moldering body of a field mouse underneath a fallen box. Another mouse was found crushed by a wrench that had dropped from a shelf of tools. „Looks accidental, don’t it? But look around you, my little dears. Did you ever see so many accidents in one place?“ And then she had laughed, high-throated, wicked, shining candlelight into corners, illuminating other tiny corpses caught and crushed in the circumstances of apparent mishaps.
So many of them.
Erica screamed.
Nedda glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall. She should go upstairs now. Lionel and Cleo might come home at any moment.
After passing through the dining room, she walked toward the stairs at an odd angle so that she might avoid the prone and lifeless Mrs. Tully in her plain gray dress. Nedda began her ascent by hugging the rail and keeping to a narrow path so as not to tread on any part of her father’s body. She paused, as she always did. Farther up the staircase was her stepmother’s corpse. A small spot of blood marred the breast of a blue silk dressing gown, and the eyes were rolled upward, as if mortified to be seen in this unflattering sprawl of limbs.
Nedda lifted one foot, for she had just stepped on her father’s dead white hand.
Sorry, so sorry.
She looked down at his upturned face, his startled eyes, so surprised to be dying.
Behind her, she heard the familiar voice of Uncle James calling out to her from across the room and more than half a century, asking in a plaintive tone, „My God, Nedda, what have you done?“
Mallory climbed the stairs behind her partner. His new apartment was located on the floor above a saloon – Riker’s big dream. „My grandfather was never on the case,“ he said, „but the old man worked it on the side – worked it all his life. He visited every crime scene where an ice pick was used as weapon.“ After opening the door and flicking on the light, he waved her inside.