A moment later Menley did not need the baby monitor to inform her that Hannah was awake and hungry. “I’m coming, Crabby,” she called as she hurried into the nursery.
Amy arrived at nine o’clock. It was obvious that she was upset. It didn’t take long to find out what was wrong. “Elaine was at our house when I got home last night,” she said. “Mr. Nichols had asked her about the tape of Bobby, and I guess she must have figured out that I borrowed it. She asked me for it.
“I wouldn’t give it to her. I said it belonged to you and I had promised to give it back to you. She said it was a backup copy she’d made because Mr. Nichols was so distraught last year she was afraid he’d lose it, and she knew you hadn’t seen it.” Tears glistened in Amy’s eyes. “My dad sided with Elaine. He’s mad at me too.”
“Amy, I’m sorry you’ve had a problem about this. But I don’t believe that Elaine made a copy of that tape with me in mind. And I’m glad you didn’t give it to her. Where is it now?”
Amy reached in her bag. “Here it is.”
Menley held the cassette in her hand for a moment, then laid it on the refectory table. “I’ll watch it later. I think it would be a good idea if you put Hannah in the carriage and went for a walk. When that storm breaks, it’s supposed to last until sometime tomorrow afternoon.”
* * *
Adam phoned an hour later. “How’s it going, love?”
“Fine,” she told him, “but the weather’s changing. There’s a storm predicted.”
“Did Amy bring the tape of Bobby?”
“Yes.”
“Have you watched it yet?”
“No. Adam, trust me. I’m going to watch it this afternoon while Amy is with Hannah, but I know I can handle it.”
When she hung up, she looked at the computer screen. The last sentence she had written before the phone had begun to ring was, “It would seem that Mehitabel implored her husband to trust her.”
At eleven o’clock she reached the contractor Nick Bean, who had renovated the house. An affable man, Bean was both open and informative about Remember House. “Priceless workmanship,” he said. “Not a nail anywhere in the original construction. All mortise-and-tenon joints.”
She asked him what he knew about hidden rooms in the homes of early settlers.
“I’ve come across them in some of these old places,” he explained. “People glamorize them. Originally they were called ‘Indian rooms,’ the idea being that they were where the family hid from the Indians when they were attacked.”
Menley could hear the amusement in his voice as he continued: “Only one problem. The Indians on the Cape weren’t hostile. Those rooms were where bootleg cargo was kept or where people who were going on a trip would hide their valuables. Their version of a safety deposit box, I guess you could call it.”
“Do you think it’s possible Remember House has a hidden storage area?” Menley asked.
“It’s possible,” Bean confirmed. “Seems to me my last workman on the job mentioned something about that. There’s a fair amount of space between the rooms and the center of the house, where the chimneys were built. But that doesn’t mean we’d ever find one if it exists. It may have been boarded over to the point where it would take a genius to locate it. One place to start looking is the minister’s cabinet in the parlor. Sometimes a removable panel behind it led into a storage area.”
A removable panel. As soon as Menley hung up, she hurried to check the minister’s cabinet in the main parlor. It was to the left of the fireplace. She opened it, and a musty smell assailed her nost ils. I should leave the door open and let it air out, she thought. But the back of the built-in cabinet had no seams to indicate an entrance to a storage area.
Maybe when we own the house we can explore this further, she thought. You just can’t go around smashing walls. She went back to the desk but realized she was becoming more and more distracted. She wanted to see the tape of Bobby.
She waited until after lunch, when Amy brought Hannah up for her afternoon nap. Then she picked up the cassette and brought it into the library. A lump was already forming in her throat when she put the tape in the VCR and pressed the start button.
They had visited one of Adam’s partners in East Hampton that weekend. Lou Miller had a video camera and had brought it out on Sunday afternoon after brunch. Adam had Bobby in the pool. She had been sitting at the umbrella table talking with Lou’s wife, Sherry.
Lou took shots of Adam teaching Bobby how to swim. Bobby looked so much like Adam, Menley thought. They were having such a good time together. Then Adam lifted Bobby onto the deck. She remembered Lou turning off the camera and saying, “Okay, enough of the aquacade. Let’s get some shots of Bobby with Menley. Adam, put him on the deck. Menley, you call him.”
She heard her own voice next. “Bobby, come on over here. I want you.”
I want you, Bobby.
Menley dabbed at her eyes as she watched her two-year-old, arms outstretched, running toward her, heard him calling her, “Mommy, Mommy.”
She gasped. It was the same joyous voice she had heard when she thought Bobby was calling her last week. He had sounded so vibrant, so alive. It was the way he had just started to say “Mommy” that struck her now. She and Adam had joked about it. Adam had said, “Sounds more like Mom-me, with the emphasis on me.”
That was exactly the way he had called to her the night that she’d searched the house for him. Had that been simply a vivid waking dream rather than a flashback? Dr. Kaufman had told her that happy memories would begin to replace the traumatic one. But the train whistle had certainly been a flashback.
The tape was rolling. Bobby flinging himself into her arms; turning him to the camera. “Tell us your name.”
She began to sob as he said proudly. “Wobert Adam Nikko.”
Tears choked her, and when the tape was finished, she sat for a few minutes, her face buried in her hands. And then a reassuring thought assuaged the pain: in another two years Hannah would be answering the same question. How would she pronounce Menley Hannah Nichols?
She heard Amy coming down the stairs and called to her. Amy came in, her expression concerned. “Are you okay, Mrs. Nichols?”
Menley realized that her eyes were still welling with tears. “I really am,” she said, “but I’d like you to watch this with me.”
Amy stood beside her as she rewound the videotape and played it again. When it was finished, Menley asked, “Amy, when Bobby was calling me, did you notice anything special about the way he sounded?”
Amy smiled. “You mean ’Mom-me’? It sounded as though he was saying, ‘Hey, Mom, you come to me!’ “
“That’s what I thought. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t imagining that.”
“Mrs. Nichols, do you ever get over losing someone you love?” Amy asked.
Menley knew Amy was thinking about her own mother. “No,” she said, “but you learn to be grateful that you had the person at all, even though it wasn’t long enough. And to quote my own mother, she always told my brother and me that she’d rather have had twelve years with my father than seventy years with anyone else.”
She put an arm around Amy. “You’ll always miss your mother the way I’ll always miss Bobby, but we’ve both got to keep that thought in mind. I know I’m going to try.”
Even as she was rewarded by Amy’s grateful smile, Menley was struck by the thought that both times she had awakened to the sound of the train whistle, Hannah had heard it too.
The calling, the train. What if she hadn’t imagined it?
96
Graham and Anne Carpenter spent most of Wednesday packing. At two o’clock, Graham saw the mail van go by and walked down to the mailbox.
When he took out the mail he glanced into the box and was surprised to see a small package in the far-back corner. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine, so he knew it wasn’t one of those soap samples that regularly made an appearance in the box.
The package was add
ressed to Anne, but there was no postage and no return address on it. Graham carried it up to the house and brought it to the kitchen, where Anne was talking to the housekeeper. When he told them about finding it, he saw a look of concern cross his wife’s face.
“Do you want me to open it for you?” he asked.
Anne nodded.
He saw her expectant expression as he cut the twine. He wondered if she was thinking the same thing he was. There was something distinctly odd about the neatly lettered, tightly sealed package.
When he opened it, his eyes widened in shock. The fine deep green of the heirloom emerald ring gleamed through a plastic sandwich bag.
The housekeeper gasped, “Isn’t that . . . ?”
Anne grabbed the bag and pulled out the ring, folding it in her hand. Her voice was shrill, on the verge of hysteria as she cried, “Graham, where did this come from? Who brought it here? Remember, I told you that emeralds always find their way home?”
97
Nat Coogan was in his car on the way to Orleans when he received a call at 3:15 from the district attorney’s office. An assistant DA informed him that the emerald ring had been returned to the Carpenters’ house last night and that at exactly 10:00 P.M. an elderly neighbor, Preston Crenshaw, had noticed a strange car slow up at the Carpenters’ mailbox.
“We can’t be sure that whoever was in the car left the ring, but it gives us something to go on,” the assistant DA told him. “Mr. Crenshaw’s description of the vehicle he saw is pretty good. A dark green or black Plymouth, Massachusetts plates with a 7 and a 3 or 8 in the numbers. We’re running a check.”
Plymouth, Nat thought. Dark green or black. Where had he seen one recently? Then he remembered. It had been in Fred Hendin’s driveway, and then he had seen Fred and Tina in it after the inquest. “Tina Arcoli’s boyfriend, Fred Hendin, drives a dark green Plymouth,” he said. “Run a check on his plates.”
He waited. The assistant DA came back on the phone, sounding triumphant. “Hendin’s license plate number has both a 7 and a 3 in it. The boss says he wants you to go along when we pick him up for questioning.”
“Then let’s meet at Hendin’s house at five o’clock. I’m on my way to something that may turn out to be another lead.”
The aerial photographer, Walter Orr, had picked up his messages and returned Nat’s call. Nat was to meet him in his office at four o’clock.
It’s unraveling, Nat thought exultantly, snapping the phone back on the dashboard.
Ten minutes later he was turning off Route 6 onto the Orleans exit. Five minutes after that he was in Orr’s office in the center of town.
* * *
Orr was about thirty, a brawny man who looked more like a dockworker than a photographer. He was in the process of making coffee. “Long day,” he told Nat. “I was doing a shoot in New London. Believe me, I was glad to get back here. That storm is going to hit us in a couple of hours, and I wouldn’t want to be flying in it.”
He held out a mug. “Coffee?”
Nat shook his head. “No thanks.” He took out the mangled aerial photo. “You took this?”
Orr studied it briefly. “Yes, I did. Who slashed it?”
“That’s part of what we’re investigating. I understand Elaine Atkins hired you to take it and that she has the negative.”
“That’s right. She specifically wanted the negative and paid extra to get it.”
“All right, take a look at this print.” Nat unrolled the copy that Elaine had given him. “You see the difference?”
“Sure. The boat’s been taken out. Who did that? Elaine?”
“That’s what I’m told.”
“Well, it’s hers to mess around with, I guess.”
“On the phone you told me that when you take aerial photos, the exact time and date is being registered on the film.”
“That’s right.”
Nat pointed to the lower right-hand corner of the original photo. “This is marked Friday, 15 July, 3:30 P.M.”
“And the year is above it.”
“I see that. The point is that this is the absolutely accurate time the photo was made. Is that right?”
“Absolutely.”
“I need to get a blowup of that missing boat. How many photos did you shoot, and is there another one that’s similar?”
Orr hesitated. “Listen, is this important to you? You think the boat is carrying drugs or something?”
“It might be important to a lot of people,” Nat said.
Orr pressed his lips together. “I know you’re not here because you want to admire my photography. Just between us, I did sell Elaine the whole roll of film, but I made a duplicate negative of this shot for myself. I wouldn’t have sold it to anyone else, but it’s damn good photography. I wanted it as a sample of my work.”
“That’s very good news,” Nat said. “Can you make another print, fast?”
“Sure. Exactly like this one?”
“Yes, exactly like the original, but it’s really the boat I’m interested in.”
“What do you want to know about it?”
“Everything that your skills can reveal to me.” He scribbled the number of his cellular phone on the back of his card and handed it to Orr. “As soon as possible. I’ll be waiting for your call.”
98
Fred Hendin was picked up shortly after five o’clock and brought to the district attorney’s office in the courthouse. Quietly and courteously, he answered the questions that were flung at him. No, he had never met Vivian Carpenter. No, he had never met Scott Covey either, although he had seen him hanging around the Daniel Webster Inn last year. Yes, he was engaged to Tina Arcoli.
The ring? He had no idea what they were talking about. He hadn’t been in Osterville last night. He had been out with Tina and then gone directly home to bed.
Yes, at the inquest he had heard a lot of talk about a missing ring. The Cape Cod Times yesterday gave a description of it. Nearly a quarter of a million dollars was a lot of ring. Whoever gave it back was certainly honest.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” Fred told his interrogators. “I’m driving my fiancée to Logan Airport. She’s got a flight to Denver at nine o’clock.”
“I think Tina’s going to miss her flight, Fred,” Nat said. “We’re going to bring her in now.”
He watched as the telltale flush appeared on Fred’s neck and worked its way up to his face. They were getting to him.
“Tina wants to visit her brother and his family,” Fred said angrily. “All this business has upset her.”
“It’s upset a lot of people,” Nat said mildly. “If you have sympathy for anyone, I suggest you start with the Carpenters. Don’t waste it on Tina.”
* * *
Nat drove with Bill Walsh, an investigator from the district attorney’s office, to Tina’s home. At first she refused to let them in, then finally opened the door.
They found her surrounded by luggage. The living room obviously had been stripped of personal belongings. She had no intention of coming back, Nat thought.
“I have no time for you,” Tina snapped. “I have to make a plane. I’m waiting for Fred.”
“Fred’s at the district attorney’s office, Tina,” Nat told her. “We have to talk to him, and it’s very important that we talk to you as well. If everything gets straightened out quickly, you can still make your plane.”
Tina looked startled. “I have no idea why you want to talk to Fred or me. Let’s get this over with fast.”
99
Mently walked Amy to the door. “Dad and I are going to Elaine’s for dinner tonight,” she said. “We’re supposed to talk out my relationship with her.”
“You mean to try to get it on a more even keel?” Menley asked.
“Last night she said something about not walking into such a hostile situation.” Amy shrugged. “I’m going to tell her that I’ll be in college in a couple of weeks and if there’s a problem about my being around on school breaks, then
I’ll stay away. My grandmother still lives in Pennsylvania; she’ll be glad to have me. At least then I won’t have to watch Elaine make a jerk out of Dad.”
“Sometimes it gets worse before it gets better,” Menley said, opening the door. A gust of wind swept through the room. “I’m glad Adam isn’t flying today,” she commented.
After Amy left, Menley fed Hannah, bathed her, then watched the six o’clock news from Boston with the baby in her lap. At quarter past six a bulletin ran across the bottom of the screen. The storm would break at about seven, and a particular warning was issued to residents of the Cape and area islands.
“We’d better get the candles and flashlights out,” Menley told Hannah. The sky was completely overcast. The water, dark gray and angry, was now crashing on the shore. The first drops of rain began to beat against the window. She went from room to room, turning on lights.
Hannah began to fuss, and Menley settled her in her crib, then came back downstairs. Outside the wind was increasing in velocity, and she heard the faint call that it made as it whooshed around the house: Remmmmbaaaa . . .
Adam phoned at quarter of seven.
“Men, the dinner I was staying for got canceled at the last minute. I grabbed a cab to the airport to make the direct flight. We were on the runway when they got word Barnstable Airport is closed. I’ll take the shuttle to Boston and rent a car there. With luck I’ll be home between nine-thirty and ten.”
Adam was coming home tonight! “That’s terrific,” Menley said. “We’ll weather the storm together.”
“Always.”
“You haven’t had a chance to eat, have you?” she asked.
“No.”
“I’ll have dinner waiting. It probably will be by candlelight, and not just for effect.”
“Men . . .” He hesitated.