“Five years.”
“Then of course the only thing you have to go by is a record that may have been tidied up.”
“I am going by the record in front of me.”
“May I ask if the Westerfields have made any significant contributions to Carrington Academy?”
“At the time Rob was a student, they helped to renovate and refurbish the athletic center.”
“I see.”
“I don’t know what you see, Ms. Cavanaugh. Please try to understand that many of our students have had an emotionally rough time and need guidance and compassion. Sometimes they’ve been pawns in nasty divorces. Sometimes one or the other parent simply walked out of their lives. You’d be amazed at what that can do to a child’s sense of worth.”
Oh, no, I wouldn’t be amazed at all, I thought. In fact, I understand perfectly.
“Some of our students are young people who can’t seem to get along with their peer group or with adults or both.”
“That would seem to have been Rob Westerfield’s problem,” I said. “But unfortunately for the rest of us, his family has always tried to either cover up for him or buy him out of trouble.”
“Please understand that we run a tight ship here. We believe that an important step in healing an emotional problem is helping to build a sense of self-worth. Our students are expected to keep up their marks, take part in sports and other activities, and volunteer for the community programs that our school sponsors.”
“And Rob Westerfield achieved all these goals willingly and joyfully?”
I could have bitten my tongue. Jane Bostrom had given me the courtesy of an interview, and she was answering my questions. However, it was clear that if there had been any big problems at this school with Rob Westerfield, they had not been put on his record.
“Rob Westerfield apparently achieved those goals to our school’s satisfaction,” she said stiffly.
“Do you have a list of the student body while he was enrolled here?”
“Of course.”
“May I see it?”
“For what purpose?”
“Dr. Bostrom, when he was high on drugs in prison, Rob Westerfield made a statement to another convict. He said, ‘I beat Phil to death, and it felt good.’ Since he assaulted a fellow student at his previous prep school, it is not unlikely that while he was here, he had an encounter with a student named Phil or Philip.”
Her eyes darkened and became progressively more concerned as she absorbed the implications of what I was saying. Then she stood up.
“Ms. Cavanaugh, Dr. Douglas Dittrick has been with Carrington for forty years. I’m going to invite him to join us. I’ll also send for the student roster for those years. I think we’d better go into the conference room. It will be easier to spread out the lists on the table there and go through them carefully.”
* * *
DR. DITTRICK SENT WORD that he was in the middle of a lecture and would join us in fifteen minutes. “He’s a great teacher,” Jane Bostrom told me as we opened the rosters. “I think if the roof was falling down, he wouldn’t budge until he finished his lecture.”
She seemed more comfortable with me by then, and certainly willing to help. “We want to watch for ‘Philip’ as the middle name as well as the first,” she warned. “We have many students who are known by their middle names when they’ve been named after fathers and grandfathers.”
The student body totalled about six hundred during Rob Westerfield’s time at Carrington. I quickly realized that Philip was not a common name. The usuals, James and John and Mark and Michael, showed up regularly on the lists.
And a host of others: William, Hugo, Charles, Richard, Henry, Walter, Howard, Lee, Peter, George, Paul, Lester, Ezekiel, Francis, Donald, Alexander . . .
And then a Philip.
“Here’s one, I said. “He was a freshman when Westerfield was a sophomore.”
Jane Bostrom got up and looked over my shoulder. “He’s on our board of trustees,” she said.
I kept looking.
Professor Dittrick joined us, still wearing his academic gown. “What’s so important, Jane?” he asked.
She explained and introduced me. Dittrick was about seventy, of medium build with a scholarly face and a firm handshake.
“I remember Westerfield, of course. He’d only been graduated two years before he killed that girl.”
“She was Ms. Cavanaugh’s sister,” Dr. Bostrom interjected quickly.
“I’m very sorry, Ms. Cavanaugh. That was a terrible tragedy. And now you’re looking to see if someone named Phil who was here around his time became a homicide victim.”
“Yes. I do realize it may seem farfetched, but it’s an avenue I have to explore.”
“Of course.” He turned to Dr. Bostrom. “Jane, why don’t you see if Corinne is free and ask her to come over. She wasn’t the director of the theater twenty-five years ago, but she was on staff then. Ask her to bring playbills from those performances Westerfield was in. I seem to remember that there was something funny about the way he was listed in the program.”
Corinne Barsky arrived twenty minutes later. A vivacious, slender woman of about sixty with dark snapping eyes and a rich, warm voice, she was carrying the playbills that had been requested.
By then we had isolated two former students with the first name Philip and one with Philip as a middle name.
The first one we’d found, as Dr. Bostrom had told me, was a current trustee of the school. Dr. Dittrick remembered that the student with the middle name Philip had attended his twentieth class reunion two years ago.
That left only one to check. Dr. Bostrom’s secretary ran his name through the computer. He lived in Portland, Oregon, and made annual contributions to the alumni fund. The latest was last June.
“I’m afraid I’ve wasted a lot of your time,” I apologized. “If I can have a quick look at the playbills, I’ll be on my way.”
In each of them Rob Westerfield played the male lead. “I remember him,” Corinne Barsky told me. “He was genuinely good. Very full of himself, very arrogant toward the other students, but a good actor.”
“Then you had no problems with him?” I asked.
“Oh, I remember him having a row with the director. He wanted to use what he called his stage name instead of his own name in the show. The director refused.”
“What was his stage name?”
“Give me a minute, I’ll try to remember.”
“Corinne, wasn’t there some kind of flap about Rob Westerfield and a wig?” Dr. Dittrick asked. “I’m sure I remember something about that.”
“He wanted to wear a wig he used in a performance at his previous school. The director wouldn’t allow that, either. During the play Rob would come out of the dressing room wearing his own wig and only switched to the appropriate one at the last second. I understand that he wore his wig around campus as well. He got detention any number of times because of it, but he kept on doing it.”
Dr. Bostrom looked at me. “That wasn’t in his file,” she said.
“Of course his file was sanitized,” Dr. Dittrick said impatiently. “How else do you think the athletic center got a total renovation at that time? All it took was President Egan’s suggestion to Westerfield’s father that Rob might be happier in school elsewhere.”
Dr. Bostrom looked at me, alarmed. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to print that,” I told her.
I looked around for my shoulder bag and fished out my cell phone. “I’m going to get out of your way,” I promised them, “but there’s one call I’d like to make before I leave. I’ve been in contact with Christopher Cassidy who was a student at Arbinger with Westerfield. In fact, he’s the one Rob beat up in his sophomore year. Mr. Cassidy told me that Rob sometimes used the name of a character he played on stage. He was going to try to find out what it was.”
I looked up the number and dialed it.
“Cassidy Investment Firm,” the operator said briskly.
; I was in luck. Christopher Cassidy was back from his trip, and I was put through to him immediately. “I checked around,” he said, sounding triumphant. “I have the name Westerfield used, and it is from one of the plays he was in.”
“I remember the name,” Corinne Barsky was saying, excitement in her voice.
Cassidy was in Boston. Barsky was a few feet away from me in Maine. But they said it together.
“It’s Jim Wilding.”
Jim, I thought! Rob had drawn the diagram himself.
“Ellie, I have to take another call.” Cassidy apologized.
“Go ahead. That’s all I needed to know.”
“What you wrote about me for the Website is great. Put it on. I’ll back you one thousand percent.”
He clicked off.
Corinne Barsky had opened one of the playbills. “You may be interested in this, Ms. Cavanaugh,” she said. “The director used to have every member of the cast sign a playbill next to where they are listed in the cast.”
She held it up and pointed. With defiant emphasis Rob Westerfield had signed not his own name but “Jim Wilding” instead.
I stared at it for a long minute. “I need a copy of this,” I said. “And please take very good care of the original. In fact, I wish you’d lock it in a safe.”
* * *
TWENTY MINUTES LATER I was sitting in my car, comparing the signature on the diagram with the one on the playbill.
I’m no handwriting expert, but when I compared the way the name “Jim” was signed on both documents, the signatures seemed identical.
I began the long drive back to Oldham, exulting in the prospect of exhibiting them on the Internet side by side.
Mrs. Dorothy Westerfield would have to face the truth. Her grandson had planned her death.
I must confess I thoroughly enjoyed the benevolent feeling that I was about to make a number of charities, medical facilities, libraries, and universities very, very happy.
39
I KEEP MY CELL PHONE on the other pillow. Tuesday morning it began to ring and woke me up. As I gave a sleepy “Hello,” I glanced at my watch and was shocked to see that it was nine o’clock.
“Must have had a night on the town.”
It was Pete.
“Let’s see,” I said. “Driving from Maine to Massachusetts and across New York State. It was the most exciting night of my life.”
“Maybe you’re too tired to come down to Manhattan.”
“Maybe you’re trying to wiggle out of the invitation to come to Manhattan,” I suggested. By now I was awake and on the verge of being disappointed and angry.
“My suggestion was going to be that I drive to Oldham, pick you up, and we’ll find a place for us to have dinner.”
“That’s different,” I said cheerfully. “I have a great spot in mind, and it’s only fifteen minutes from the inn.”
“Now you’re thinking. Give me directions.”
I did, and he congratulated me. “Ellie, you’re one of the few women I know who can give lucid directions. Is it something I taught you? Never mind answering. I can be there around seven.”
Click.
I sent for room service, showered, washed my hair, and phoned a nearby nail salon to make an appointment for four o’clock. I had broken several nails when I fell in the parking lot and wanted to do something about them.
I even took time to study my limited wardrobe and decide on the leaf brown pantsuit with the caracul collar and cuffs. The suit had been an impulse buy at the end of the season last year, expensive even at half price, and I had yet to wear it.
Parading it out for Pete seemed like a good idea.
Actually, it was comforting to have something to anticipate at the end of the day. I knew it was not going to be easy to spend the afternoon writing Alfie’s story about the break-in and tying the incriminating diagram to Rob Westerfield’s use of the name Jim in school.
By not easy, I meant emotionally not easy, because of the unbearable certainty that if Rob Westerfield had been convicted of that crime, Andrea would not have met him.
He’d have been in prison. She would have grown up and gone to college, and, like Joan, probably gotten married and had a couple of children. Mother and Daddy would still be in that wonderful farmhouse. Daddy would have come to love it as much as she did and by now realized what a great buy it had been.
I would have grown up in a happy home and gone to college. Choosing to study journalism had nothing to do with Andrea’s death, so I probably would be in the same kind of job. It’s the career that held a natural attraction for me. I still wouldn’t be married. I think I always wanted a career before a commitment.
If Rob had been convicted, I would not have spent my life grieving for my sister and yearning for what I had lost.
Now, even if I manage to convince Rob’s grandmother and the rest of the world of his guilt, he still will get away with it. The statute of limitations has run out on that crime.
And even if his grandmother changes her will, his father has plenty of money, at least plenty by normal standards, so Rob will live well.
Disgusting liar that he is, in a second trial Will Nebels’s story might throw enough doubt in jurors’ minds to give Westerfield an acquittal.
Then his record will be expunged.
I beat Phil to death, and it felt good.
There is only one way I can get Rob Westerfield back behind bars and that is to track down Phil, that other person whose life he extinguished. Fortunately, there is no statute of limitations for murder.
* * *
BY THREE-THIRTY I was ready to transfer everything to the Website: Christopher Cassidy’s story of being beaten by Rob Westerfield in prep school; Rob’s insistence on being called “Jim” because of the character he had played on stage; Rob’s role in planning the attempt on his grandmother’s life.
I wrote that William Hamilton, Esq., was the court-appointed lawyer who had destroyed the original diagram implicating Westerfield in the crime. I ended the piece with the diagram and playbill displayed side by side. On screen the “Jim” signatures were startling in their similarity.
I kissed my fingers in a salute to the story, pressed the appropriate keys on the computer, and an instant later it was out there on my Website.
40
IT WAS A QUARTER OF FIVE when I got back to the inn. The multibillion-dollar cosmetic industry would go broke if it relied on people like me. What little makeup I had was lost in the fire. I had picked up a compact and lipstick at a drugstore a day or two later, but it was time to spend half an hour replacing items like mascara and blush.
Even though I had slept till nine o’clock this morning, I was still sleepy and wanted to take a nap before it was time to dress for my date with Pete.
I wondered if seeing the finish line felt like this. The athlete runs the marathon and knows the end of the race is near. I’ve heard that there is an interval of a few seconds when the runner actually slows, regroups, and then goes into the final sprint toward victory.
That was the way I felt. I had Rob Westerfield on the ropes, and I was convinced that I was about to learn the truth of what he had done to Phil and where it had happened. If I was right, it would send him back to prison.
I beat Phil to death, and it felt good.
And then when he had been brought to real justice, when the Committee for Justice for Rob Westerfield had been dissolved and slunk away into oblivion, then and only then, like a newly hatched chicken, would I take my own tentative steps into the future.
Tonight I was meeting someone I wanted to see and who wanted to see me. Whither do we wander? I didn’t know and wasn’t looking ahead that far. But for the first time in my life I was beginning to anticipate the future with my debt to the past nearly paid. It was a hopeful, satisfying feeling.
Then I walked through the door of the inn, and my half-brother Teddy was standing there waiting for me.
This time he was not smiling. He looked uncomfortable, y
et determined, and his greeting to me was abrupt. “Ellie, come inside. We have to talk.”
“I invited your brother to wait in the sunroom, but he was afraid that he might miss you,” Mrs. Willis said.
You’re absolutely right, I would have missed him, I thought. I would have been upstairs like a shot if I had known he was waiting.
I didn’t want her to hear whatever he was going to say, so I walked ahead of him into the sunroom. This time he closed the door, and we stood facing each other.
“Teddy,” I began, “you have to listen to me. I know you mean well. I know your father means well. But you can’t be trailing after me. I am perfectly fine, and I can take care of myself.”
“No, you can’t!” His eyes were flashing, and in that moment he looked so like my father that I was transported back to the dining room at home, and Daddy was telling Andrea that she was forbidden to ever have anything to do with Rob Westerfield.
“Ellie, we saw what you put on the Website this afternoon. Dad is beside himself with worry. He said that the Westerfields now have to stop you, and they will stop you. He said you’ve become a terrible danger to them, and in the process you’ve put yourself in great danger. Ellie, you can’t do this to Dad or to yourself. Or to me.”
He was so upset, so vehement, that I felt sorry for him. I put my hand on his arm. “Teddy, I don’t want to upset you or your father. I’m doing what I have to do. I don’t know how many ways to say it to you, but please, just leave me alone. You’ve gotten along without me all your life, and your father has gotten along without me since I was a small child. What is all this about? I tried to tell you the other day—you don’t know me. You have no reason to worry about me. You’re a nice kid, but let’s leave it at that.”
“I’m not just a nice kid. I’m your brother. Whether you like it or not, I’m your brother. And stop saying ‘your father’ to me. You think you know everything, but you don’t, Ellie. Dad never stopped being your father. He’s always talked about you, and I always wanted to hear about you. He told me what a great little kid you were. You don’t even know it, but he went out to your college graduation and sat in the audience. He got a subscription to the Atlanta News when you started working there, and he’s read every article you’ve ever written. So stop saying he’s not your father.”