But she still didn’t see a pattern emerging that would point the finger of guilt at the nineteenth-century killer.
* * *
REBA ASHBY had been on the scene on Monday, and was back on Tuesday, furiously scribbling her impressions. This was the hottest story of her entire career, and she intended to milk it dry.
Near her, Irene Cornell of CBS radio was on-air with her report: “Shock and disbelief are on the faces of the residents of this quiet Victorian town as they wait to see if the body of yet another missing young woman will be found,” she began dramatically.
At 9:30, nearly an hour and a half after the excavation began, the onlookers saw the backhoe abruptly stop digging and the forensic crew rush to look down into the hole from which the last shovelful of dirt had been taken.
“They’ve found something!” one person cried.
Reporters standing on the lawn, their backs to the house, their cameras focused on the backhoe, began talking urgently into their mikes.
The local spectators, some grasping a friend’s hand, waited silently. The arrival of the hearse from the morgue confirmed to all of them that human remains had been found. The prosecutor arrived in a squad car and promised to make a statement shortly.
A half hour later, Elliot Osborne stepped up to the microphones. He confirmed that a full skeleton wrapped in the same heavy plastic that had contained the remains of Martha Lawrence had been uncovered. A human skull and several loose bones had been found only inches farther down. There would be no further statements until the medical examiner had had the opportunity to complete a thorough examination and give his report on the findings.
Osborne refused to answer the dozens of questions shouted at him, the loudest of which was, “Doesn’t this absolutely prove you have a reincarnated killer stalking this town?”
TOMMY DUGGAN and Pete Walsh had planned to follow the hearse from the crime scene to the morgue, but delayed to speak to Margo Thaler, the eighty-two-year-old present owner of the house.
Visibly upset, she was sitting in her living room, sipping a cup of tea a neighbor had prepared for her.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to go out in my backyard again,” she told Tommy. “I had rose bushes where they found that skeleton. I used to be out there on my knees, weeding right above that very spot.”
“Mrs. Thaler, we’ll make very sure that any remains have been removed,” Tommy said soothingly. “Your rose bushes can be replanted. I’d just like to ask you a few questions, and then we’ll get out of your way. How long have you lived here?”
“Forty years. I’m the third owner of the house. I bought it from Robert Frieze, Senior. He owned it for thirty years.”
“Would he be the father of Robert Frieze, the owner of The Seasoner?”
A look of disdain came over Margo Thaler’s face. “Yes, but Bob’s nothing like his father. Divorced his lovely wife and married that Natalie woman! Then he opened that restaurant. My friends and I tried it out once. High prices and bad food.”
Bob Frieze certainly doesn’t have many fans in this town, Tommy thought, as he began to do some arithmetic.
Frieze was about sixty years old. Mrs. Thaler had owned the house for the past forty years, and the Frieze family owned it for thirty years before that. That meant that Bob Frieze was born ten years after his father bought the house and lived in it for the first twenty years of his life. Tommy filed the information in his head for further consideration.
“Mrs. Thaler, we believe that the skeleton will prove to be the remains of a young woman who disappeared about two years ago, on August 5th. It seems to me that you would have noticed if someone had dug up your yard at that time of year.”
“I certainly would have noticed, yes.”
Which means that the remains had to have been kept somewhere else until they could safely be buried here, Tommy thought.
“Mrs. Thaler, I was on the police force here for eight years,” Pete Walsh said.
She looked sharply at him. “Oh, of course. Forgive me. I should have recognized you.”
“I seem to remember that it was your habit to leave for Florida in October and not return until May. Do you still do that?” Pete asked.
“Yes, I do.”
That explains it, Tommy thought. Whoever murdered Carla kept her body somewhere else, maybe in a freezer, until he could safely bury it here.
He stood up. “You’ve been very cooperative and also very kind to let us talk to you now, Mrs. Thaler.”
The elderly woman nodded, then after a pause said, “I realize how selfish it sounds for me to be concerned that I was in essence kneeling on a grave. It won’t be too terribly long, I’m sure, before my children and grandchildren will be kneeling at mine. The roses were beautiful. If they don’t recover from being uprooted, I’ll replace them. In a way maybe it wasn’t so bad that they were decorating that poor girl’s grave.”
Tommy was on his way out when another question occurred to him. “Mrs. Thaler, how old is this house?”
“It was built in 1874.”
“Do you know who owned it then?”
“The Alan Carter family. They owned it for some fifty years before selling it to Robert Frieze, Senior.”
DR. O’BRIEN WAS STILL conducting his examination of the remains when Tommy Duggan and Pete Walsh arrived at the morgue.
An assistant was taking down the information as O’Brien dictated it.
As Tommy Duggan listened to the statistics, he visualized the description of Carla Harper that lay on top of his desk: Five feet four inches tall, one hundred and two pounds, blue eyes, dark hair.
The picture in the file showed an appealing, vivacious young woman with shoulder-length hair. Now, as he listened to the stark description of the weight of her bones and the size of her teeth, Tommy thought, I’ll never be tough enough to get used to this part of it.
The sum of the findings was nearly identical to the ones they had heard on Thursday. The skeleton was that of a young female. The cause of death was strangulation.
“Look at this,” O’Brien said to Duggan and Walsh. With his gloved hands he held up threads of material. “See those metal beads? This is a piece of the same scarf that we found around Martha Lawrence’s neck.”
“You mean that when someone stole that scarf at the party—assuming that’s what happened—he not only killed Martha with it, but cut it up so that he could use it again?” Pete Walsh sounded disbelieving.
Duggan looked at him sharply. “Go outside and get some air. I don’t want you to pass out on me.”
Walsh nodded, gagging as he hurried out of the morgue.
“I don’t blame him for getting sick,” Tommy Duggan said angrily. “You see what this means, Doc? This killer is following the 1890s timetable. There may not even have been anything personal about killing either Martha Lawrence or”—he looked at the figure on the table—“or Carla Harper, if this is her. The only reason they would have been chosen is that both Martha and Carla were around the age of the women who vanished in the1890s.”
“A comparison of dental records will establish if this is Carla Harper.” Dr. O’Brien adjusted his glasses. “The separate skull we found had been in the ground much longer than the full skeleton. My estimate is it’s been there at least one hundred years. We can reconstruct the features on the skull, but that will take time. My educated guess, though, is that it was part of the body of a young woman not more than twenty years old.”
“Carla Harper and Letitia Gregg,” Tommy Duggan said softly.
“Judging from the names printed on that postcard, it would seem likely,” Dr. O’Brien agreed. “There’s something else here you’ll be interested in.”
He was holding up a small plastic bag for Duggan to see.
“It looks to me to be a pair of old-fashioned earrings,” O’Brien explained. “Garnets set in silver, with a pearl teardrop. My wife’s grandmother had a pair something like that.”
“Where did you find them?”
r />
“Same as before. Folded in the hand of the skeleton. Guess the killer couldn’t find a finger bone but wanted you to get the connection between the two sets of remains.”
“Do you think he found those earrings in the ground?”
“I don’t think anyone can answer that. My guess is he’d be mighty lucky to find both of them. Even though, if she had been wearing them, they’d still be intact, they’d have been fastened to the earlobes, and those are long gone, of course. When in the 1890s did you say the third girl disappeared?”
“Ellen Swain disappeared on March 31st, thirty-one months and twenty-six days after Letitia Gregg vanished on August 5th. Carla Harper disappeared on August 5th. Thirty-one months and twenty-six days this Saturday, March 31st.” Tommy knew he was not so much responding to the question as thinking aloud.
“Madeline and Martha on September 7th, Letitia and Carla on August 5th, and now you have the next anniversary coming up this Saturday,” Dr. O’Brien said slowly. “Do you think that this killer plans to choose another victim and bury her with Ellen Swain?”
Tommy Duggan felt overwhelmingly weary. He knew that this question was exactly the one the media would ask. “Doctor O’Brien, I hope and pray that isn’t the scenario, but I promise you that everyone connected with law enforcement in this area is going to act on the premise that a psycho is planning to choose and kill another young woman from this town four days from now.”
“In your boots, I would assume that too,” the medical examiner said crisply, as he stripped off his gloves. “And with all due respect to our law-enforcement people, I’m sending my two daughters to visit their grandmother in Connecticut over the weekend.”
“I don’t blame you, Doctor,” Tommy agreed. “I completely understand.”
And I’ll be talking to Dr. Clayton Wilcox, whose own wife admits she gave him the scarf the night of the Lawrences’ party, he thought, as he felt anger building up within him.
Pete and I both sensed Wilcox was lying to us the other day at Will Stafford’s house, he told himself. Now it’s time to sweat the truth out of him.
Wednesday, March 28
forty-seven ________________
THEY HAVE BEGUN TO BELIEVE IN ME, he realized. This morning the highlight of the Today show was an interview with Dr. Nehru Patel, prominent philosopher and writer on the subject of psychical research. He firmly believes that I am the reincarnation of the serial killer of the late nineteenth century!
What puzzles the good Dr. Patel, as he explained to the interviewer, Katie Couric, is that I am acting against the laws of karma.
Patel said that some may choose to return near to where they had lived in a previous lifetime because they need to meet again people whom they knew in a previous incarnation. They wish to repay the karmic debts they may owe to these people. On the other hand, these karmic actions are supposed to be good, not evil, which was very puzzling.
It is possible, he continued, that in a previous lifetime Martha Lawrence had been Madeline Shapeley, and Carla Harper had been Letitia Gregg.
That’s not true, but it’s an interesting concept.
Dr. Patel voiced the thought that by repeating the crimes of the nineteenth century, I am flying in the face of karma and will have much to atone for in my next incarnations.
Maybe. Maybe not.
Finally he was asked whether it is possible that Ellen Swain is now alive in a different body and that I have recognized her and will seek her out on Saturday.
Well, I have chosen my next victim. She is not Ellen, but she will sleep with Ellen.
And I have conceived of a novel plan to throw the police off the track.
It is quite delicious and pleases me very much.
forty-eight ________________
WHEN THE PHONE RANG AT 9:30, Clayton Wilcox was in his study with the door closed. Rachel had been intolerable at breakfast. A friend who had bought a copy of that sensationalist rag The National Daily, had phoned and warned her that it contained a lurid front-page story about her lost scarf.
He picked up the receiver, filled with dread, sure that it was the police wanting to question him again.
“Dr. Wilcox?” The voice was silky.
Even though it had been more than twelve years since he had heard it, Clayton Wilcox recognized it immediately. “How are you, Gina?” he asked quietly.
“I’m fine, Doctor, but I’ve been reading a lot about Spring Lake and everything that’s going on there. I was sorry to hear that it was your wife’s scarf that was used to strangle that poor girl Martha Lawrence.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Reba Ashby’s column this morning in The National Daily. Have you read it?”
“I have heard about it. It is rubbish. There is no official verification that it was my wife’s scarf that was used by the killer.”
“In the column it says that your wife swears she gave it to you to put in your pocket.”
“Gina, what do you want?”
“Doctor, I’ve been feeling for a long time that it wasn’t right for me to have settled for so little money, after what you did to me.”
Clayton Wilcox tried to swallow, but the muscles in his throat did not respond. “Gina what I ‘did to you,’ as you put it, was to respond to your overture.”
“Doctor . . .” The teasing note was still in her voice. Then it disappeared. “I could have sued both you and the college and gotten a very big settlement. Instead, I let you talk me into a paltry one hundred thousand dollars. I could use more money right now. What do you think Reba Ashby’s tabloid would pay for my story?”
“You wouldn’t do that!”
“Yes, I would. I have a seven-year-old child now. I’m divorced, and I think my marriage failed because I was still psychologically damaged by what happened to me at Enoch. After all, I was only twenty years old then. I know it’s too late to sue the college now.”
“How much do you want, Gina?”
“Oh, I think another hundred thousand will do it nicely.”
“I can’t put my hands on that much money.”
“You could last time. You can this time. I’m planning to come to Spring Lake on Saturday, to see either you or the police. If you don’t pay me, my next step is to find out how much The National Daily is willing to pay for a juicy story about the revered former president of Enoch College who just happened to lose his wife’s scarf before it was used to kill a young woman. Remember, Doctor, I have long blond hair too.”
“At Enoch College, did you ever learn the meaning of the word ‘blackmail,’ Gina?”
“Yes, but I also learned the meaning of some terms like ‘sexual harassment’ and ‘unwanted personal overtures.’ I’ll call you Saturday morning. ’Bye, Doctor.”
forty-nine ________________
NICK TODD HAD PICKED UP the phone a dozen times on both Monday and Tuesday, intending to call Emily, and each time he put it down. He knew that before leaving her on Sunday night he had overdone his insistence that she stay in her Manhattan apartment until whoever was stalking her had been exposed and arrested.
She had finally shown a flash of anger and said, “Look, Nick, I know you mean well, but I’m staying here, and that’s final. Let’s talk about something else.”
Mean well, Nick thought. Surely there is nothing worse than to be the kind of pain in the neck who “means well.”
It did not please his father, either, when he relayed the message that Emily had firmly refused to start work before May 1st—unless, of course, she solved the mystery of her ancestor’s murder before then.
“Does she really think that she’s going to solve a crime, or a series of crimes, that occurred in the 1890s?” Walter Todd had asked incredulously. “Maybe I should take a second look at hiring that young woman. That has to be the single flakiest proposition I’ve heard in the last fifty years.”
After that, Nick decided not to tell his father that either the stalker who had haunted Emily in
Albany or a copycat was now shadowing her in Spring Lake. He knew his father’s reaction would be exactly like his own: Get out of that house. You’re not safe there.
On Wednesday, after reading stories in the morning papers about the grisly discovery of two more victims, one from the present, one from the past, Nick was not surprised to see his father barge into his office, his face set in the angry and frustrated expression that sent chills down the spines of new associates in the firm.
“Nick,” he snapped, “there’s a psycho on the loose down there, and if he knows that Emily Graham is trying to establish a link between himself and the killer of the 1890s, she could be in danger.”
“That has occurred to me,” Nick replied calmly. “In fact I discussed it with Emily.”
“How did they know where to start digging for those remains yesterday?”
“The prosecutor would only say that it was an anonymous tip.”
“Emily had better be careful, that’s all I can say. She’s a smart woman. Maybe she’s onto something with that link she’s investigating. Nick, call her. Offer her a bodyguard. I have a couple of guys who’d watch out for her. Or maybe you want me to call her.”
“No, that’s fine. I was planning to give her a ring.” As his father left the office, Nick thought of Lindy, the fashion editor he’d dated on and off for several years. Six months ago, when he was dropping her off at her home, he had said, “I’ll give you a ring.”
She’d replied, “Good. I hope you mean the one I want.”
Seeing the startled look on his face, Lindy had laughed. “Nick, I think it’s time for both of us to move on. As a couple, we’re not going anywhere, and I’m not getting any younger. Ciao.”
I don’t know whether Emily will want even a ring of the telephone from me, Nick thought as he dialed her number.
fifty ________________
ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, Emily got up at six o’clock, and with the inevitable cup of coffee in her hand went straight into the dining room to work on her project.