“Dear God!” Sarah Cushing’s voice was shocked.
Letitia Bainbridge did not flinch. “Are you talking about neglect or murder?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Neil said. “I just know that Maggie started an investigation that’s already leading to an order for the exhumation of at least two of the dead women, and now she’s disappeared. And I’ve just learned that Dr. Lane has been fired.”
“I just found out that too, Mother,” Sarah Cushing said. “But everyone thinks it’s because of the bookkeeper.”
“What about Nurse Markey?” Mrs. Bainbridge asked her daughter. “Is that why the police questioned her? I mean because of the deaths?”
“Nobody is sure, but she’s mighty upset. And, of course, so is Mrs. Lane. I hear that the two of them are closeted in Markey’s office.”
“Oh, those two are always whispering together,” Letitia Bainbridge said dismissively. “I can’t imagine what they have to say to each other. Markey may be terribly annoying, but at least she has a brain. The other one is as empty-headed as they get.”
This isn’t getting me anywhere, Neil thought. “Mrs. Bainbridge,” he said, “I can only stay a minute longer. There’s one other thing I’d like to ask you. Were you at the lecture Professor Bateman gave here? The one that apparently caused such an uproar?”
“No.” Mrs. Bainbridge shot a look at her daughter. “That was another day when Sarah insisted I rest, so I missed all the excitement. But Sarah was there.”
“I can assure you, Mother, that you wouldn’t have enjoyed being handed one of those bells and being told to pretend you were buried alive,” Sarah Cushing said spiritedly. “Let me tell you exactly what happened, Mr. Stephens.”
Bateman has to be crazy, Neil thought as he listened to her version of the events.
“I was so upset that I gave that man a real tongue-lashing and nearly threw the box with those appalling bells after him,” Sarah Cushing continued. “At first he seemed embarrassed and contrite, but then a look came over his face that almost frightened me. I think he must have a fearful temper. And, of course, Nurse Markey had the gall to defend him! I spoke to her about it later, and she was quite impudent. She told me that Professor Bateman had been so upset that he said he now feared he wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of the bells, which apparently had cost him quite a bit of money.”
“I’m still sorry I wasn’t there,” Mrs. Bainbridge said. “And as far as Nurse Markey goes,” she continued reflectively, “in perfect fairness, many of the residents here consider her an excellent nurse. I just find her to be nosy and pushy and intrusive, and I want her kept away from me whenever possible.” She paused, then said, “Mr. Stephens, this may sound ridiculous, but I think that whatever his faults and shortcomings, Dr. Lane is a very kind man, and I’m a pretty good judge of character.”
* * *
A half-hour later, Neil and his father drove to Maggie’s house. Dolores Stephens was already there. She looked at her son and reached up and took his face between her hands. “We’re going to find her,” she said firmly.
Unable to speak, Neil nodded.
“Where’s the key, Dolores?” Robert Stephens demanded.
“Right here.”
The key fit the new lock on the back door, and as they walked into the kitchen, Neil thought, It all started right here, when Maggie’s stepmother was murdered.
The kitchen was neat. There were no dishes in the sink. He opened the dishwasher; inside were a few cups and saucers, along with three or four small plates. “I wonder if she had dinner out last night,” he said.
“Or made a sandwich,” his mother suggested. She had opened the refrigerator and seen a supply of cold cuts. She pointed to several knives in the utensils basket of the dishwasher.
“There’s no message pad near the phone,” Robert Stephens said. “We knew she was worried about something,” he snapped. “I’m so damn mad at myself. I wish to God that when I came back here yesterday, I had bullied her into staying with us.”
The dining room and living room both were orderly. Neil studied the vase of roses on the coffee table, wondering who had sent them. Probably Liam Payne, he thought. She mentioned him at dinner. Neil had only met Payne a few times, but he could have been the guy Neil had glimpsed leaving Maggie’s Friday night.
Upstairs, the smallest bedroom contained the evidence of Maggie’s packing up her stepmother’s personal effects: Neatly tagged bags of clothing, purses, lingerie, and shoes were piled there. The bedroom she had used initially was the same as when they had fixed the window locks.
They went into the master bedroom. “Looks to me as though Maggie planned to stay in here last night,” Robert Stephens observed, pointing to the freshly made bed.
Without answering, Neil started upstairs to the studio. The light that he had noticed last night, when he parked outside waiting for Maggie to come home, was still on, pointed toward a picture tacked to the bulletin board. Neil remembered that the picture had not been there Sunday afternoon.
He started across the room, then stopped. A chill ran through his body.
On the refectory table, in the glare of the spotlight, he saw two metal bells.
As surely as he knew that night followed day, he knew that these were two of the bells that Earl Bateman had used in his infamous lecture at Latham Manor—the bells that had been whisked away, never to be seen again.
85
HER HAND ACHED AND WAS COVERED WITH DIRT. She had continued to move the string steadily back and forth, hoping to keep the tube open, but now no more dirt seemed to be falling through the air vent. The water had stopped trickling down, too.
She couldn’t hear the beating of the rain anymore either. Was it getting colder, or was it just that the dampness inside the coffin was so chilling? she wondered.
But she was actually starting to feel warm, even too warm.
I’m getting a fever, Maggie thought drowsily.
She was so lightheaded. The vent is sealed, she thought. There can’t be much oxygen left.
“One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .”
Now she was whispering the numbers aloud, trying to force herself to stay awake, to start calling out again when she reached five hundred.
What difference would it make if he came back and heard her? What more could he do than he already had done?
Her hand was still flexing and unflexing.
“Make a fist,” she said aloud. “All right, relax.” That’s what the nurses had told her to do when she was little and they were taking a blood sample. “This is so you’ll get all better, Maggie,” they had said.
After Nuala came to live with them, she had stopped being afraid of needles. Nuala had made a game of it. “We’ll get that out of the way first and then we’ll go to a movie,” she would say.
Maggie thought of her equipment bag. What had he done with it? Her cameras. They were her friends. There were so many pictures she had planned to take with them. She had so many ideas she wanted to try out, so many things she wanted to shoot.
“One hundred fifty . . . one hundred fifty-one . . .”
She had known Neil was sitting behind her that day in the theater. He had coughed a couple of times, a peculiar little dry cough that she had recognized. She knew he had to have seen her, to have seen her unhappiness.
I made it a test, she thought. If you love me, you will understand that I need you—that was the thought she had willed him to hear and to act on.
But when the film ended and the lights went on, he was gone.
“I’ll give you a second chance, Neil,” she said aloud now. “If you love me, you’ll know that I need you, and you’ll find me.”
“Four hundred ninety-nine, five hundred!”
She began to cry out for help again. This time she screamed until her throat was raw. There was no use trying to save her voice, she decided. Time was running out.
Still, resolutely she began to count again. “One . . . two . . . thr
ee . . .”
Her hand moved in cadence with the count: flex . . . unflex . . .
With every fiber of her being, she fought the urge to sleep. She knew that if she slept, she would not wake up again.
86
WHILE HIS FATHER STARTED DOWNSTAIRS TO PHONE POLICE headquarters, Neil hesitated for a moment, studying the picture he had found pinned to the bulletin board.
The inscription on the back read, “Squire Moore Birthday Anniversary. September 20th. Earl Moore Bateman—Nuala Moore—Liam Moore Payne.”
Neil studied Bateman’s face. The face of a liar, he thought bitterly. The last man to see Maggie alive.
Aghast at what he feared his subconscious was telling him, he dropped the picture next to the bells and hurried to join his father.
“I have Chief Brower on the phone,” Robert Stephens said. “He wants to talk to you. I told him about the bells.”
Brower came immediately to the point. “If these are two of the same bells Bateman claims are locked in the storeroom of his museum, we can bring him in for interrogation. The problem is that he’ll know enough to refuse to answer questions, and he’ll call a lawyer, and everything will get delayed. Our best bet is to confront him with the bells and hope that he’ll say something to give himself away. When we talked to him about them this morning, he went berserk.”
“I intend to be there when you confront him,” Neil said.
“I have a squad car watching the museum from the funeral parlor parking lot. If Bateman leaves the premises, he’ll be followed.”
“We’re on our way,” Neil said, then added, “Wait a minute, Chief, I know you’ve been questioning some teenagers. Did you find out anything from them?”
He heard the hesitation in Chief Brower’s voice before he answered. “Something that I’m not sure I believe. We’ll talk about it when I see you.”
“I want to hear about it now,” Neil snapped.
“Then please understand we don’t necessarily credit the story. But one of the kids admitted that they were in the vicinity of the museum last night, or more specifically that they were across the street from it. At about ten o’clock that kid claims he saw two vehicles—a hearse, followed by a station wagon—drive out of the museum’s parking lot.”
“What kind of station wagon?” Neil asked urgently.
“The kid isn’t sure of the make, but he swears it was black.”
87
“TAKE IT EASY, EARL,” LIAM MOORE PAYNE SAID FOR THE tenth time in an hour.
“No, I won’t take it easy. I know how much this family has ridiculed the Batemans, and me especially.”
“No one’s ridiculed you, Earl,” Liam said soothingly.
They were sitting in the office of the museum. It was nearly five o’clock, and the old-fashioned globed chandelier spread a murky glow over the room.
“Look,” Liam said, “you need a drink.”
“You mean you need a drink.”
Without answering, Liam got up, went to the cupboard over the sink, got out the scotch bottle and glasses, then the ice tray and a lemon from the refrigerator.
“Double scotch on the rocks, with a twist, coming up, for both of us,” he said.
Mollified, Earl waited until the drink was set in front of him, then said, “I’m glad you stopped by, Liam.”
“When you called, I could tell how upset you were. And, of course, I’m more than upset about Maggie’s disappearance.” He paused. “Earl, I’ve dated her casually over the last year or so. You know, I’d call and we’d go out for dinner when I was in New York. But that night at the Four Seasons, when I realized she’d left without saying a word to me, something happened.”
“What happened was that you ignored her because you were glad-handing everyone at the party.”
“No, what happened was that I realized what a jerk I’d been, and that if she told me to go to hell, I’d have crawled there on my hands and knees, trying to make it up to her. But besides making me realize how important Maggie has become to me, that night gives me hope that maybe she’s okay.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The fact that she walked out without saying a word when she was upset. God knows she’s had plenty of reason to be upset since the minute she arrived in Newport. Maybe she just needed to get away.”
“You seem to have forgotten that her car was found abandoned.”
“For all we know she got on a plane or train and left her car parked somewhere and someone stole it. Maybe even kids joyriding.”
“Don’t talk to me about joyriding kids,” Earl said. “My theory is those same kind of juvenile delinquents committed the theft here last night.”
The shrill sound of the doorbell startled both men. Earl Bateman answered his cousin’s unasked question: “I’m not expecting anyone,” he said, and then smiled brightly. “But then, maybe it’s the police telling me they found the casket.”
* * *
Neil and his father joined Chief Brower in the funeral museum parking lot, and the chief cautioned Neil to control his tongue and to leave the questioning to the police. The bells from Maggie’s house had been placed in a shoe box, which Detective Haggerty now carried unobtrusively under his arm.
When Earl took them to the museum office, Neil was startled to see Liam Payne sitting there. Suddenly uncomfortable in the presence of his rival, he greeted him with minimum courtesy, although he took some comfort in knowing that neither Earl nor Liam knew of his relationship with Maggie. He and his father were introduced simply as two of her concerned friends from New York.
Bateman and Payne went to get chairs for the men, taking them from the funeral scene in the front room. The irritation was clear on Bateman’s face when they returned. He snapped at his cousin. “Liam, your shoes are muddy, and that’s a very expensive carpet. Now I’m going to have to vacuum that whole viewing room before I leave.”
Then, in an abrupt shift, he turned to the detectives. “Have you any news about the casket?” he asked.
“No, we don’t, Professor Bateman,” Brower said, “but we do have news about some other artifacts we think you own.”
“That’s ridiculous. Nothing else is missing except the catafalque,” he said. “I checked. The casket is what I want to know about. You have no idea the plans I had for it. The outdoor display I told you about. That casket was going to be part of the most important exhibit there. I’ve even ordered mannequins of horses with black plumes, and I’m having a replica built of the kind of funeral carriage the Victorians used. It will be a stunning display.”
“Earl, take it easy,” Liam Payne said soothingly. He turned to Brower. “Chief, is there any new information about Maggie Holloway?”
“No, unfortunately there isn’t,” Brower told him.
“Have you considered my suggestion that Maggie simply wanted to escape the terrible pressures of the last week and a half?”
Neil looked at Liam scornfully. “You don’t know Maggie at all,” he said. “She doesn’t try to escape problems. She faces them head on.”
Brower ignored both men and spoke to Bateman. “Professor, at this point we’re simply trying to clarify a few matters. You’re not required to answer our questions. You do understand that?”
“Why wouldn’t I answer your questions? I have nothing to hide.”
“All right. From what we understand, the bells that you had cast for your lecture on Victorians who feared being buried alive are all packed away. Is that true?”
The anger was clear on Earl Bateman’s face. “I simply will not go into that Latham Manor incident again,” he said sharply. “I’ve told you that.”
“I understand. But will you answer the question, please?”
“Yes. I packed the bells away. Yes.”
Brower nodded to Haggerty who opened the shoe box. “Professor, Mr. Stephens found these bells in Maggie Holloway’s home. Are they similar to the ones you have?”
Bateman paled. He picked up one of the be
lls and examined it minutely. “That woman is a thief!” he exploded. “She must have come back here and stolen these last night.”
He jumped up and ran down the hall and up the stairs, the others following him. On the third floor, he threw open the door of the storeroom and hurried to a shelf on the right-hand wall. Reaching up, he yanked at a box that was wedged between two others and pulled it out.
“It’s too light. I can tell already,” he muttered, “some of them are missing.” He rifled through the protective plastic popcorn until he had satisfied himself as to the carton’s contents.
Turning to the five men standing behind him, his face a deep crimson, his eyes blazing, he said, “There are only five of them here. Seven are missing! That woman must have stolen them. No wonder she kept harping on them yesterday.”
Neil shook his head in dismay. This guy is crazy, he said to himself. He really believes what he’s saying.
“Professor Bateman, I must ask you to accompany me to police headquarters,” Brower said, his tone formal. “I have to inform you that you are now a suspect in the disappearance of Maggie Holloway. You have a right to remain silent—”
“You can forget your damned Miranda warning,” Earl shouted. “Maggie Holloway sneaked back in here, stole my bells—and maybe even my casket—and you blame me? Ridiculous! I think you should be looking for the person who helped her. She never did this alone.”
Neil grabbed the lapels of Bateman’s coat. “Shut up,” he shouted. “You know damn well Maggie never took that stuff. Wherever she found the two bells she had, they meant something mighty significant to her. And you answer me something. Some kids saw a hearse and Maggie’s station wagon leave here around ten o’clock last night. Which one were you driving?”
“You shut up, Neil,” Brower ordered.
Neil saw the anger on the police chief’s face as Robert Stephens yanked him away from Earl Bateman.
I don’t give a damn, he thought. This is no time to tiptoe around this liar.