A Perfect Crime Page 25

  “Yes. That was the policeman again. They’ve made an identification. It’s some poor woman from Dedham.”

  “Dedham?”

  “Yes. I have no idea what she was doing there-her name wasn’t familiar to me at all. Franklin, I think he said. Anne Franklin.”

  On the edge of frenzy, mental and physical, she tried the number, Anne and Ned’s number, in Dedham, almost incapable of hitting the right buttons. Busy. She tried again and again and again. Busy, busy, busy. She snapped on lights, ran down to the kitchen, threw open the door to the basement-more light, more light-ran down those stairs, too, burst into Roger’s room.

  Roger: not sleeping on his couch but sitting in front of the computer, face silvery in its light, bent over a sheet of paper covered with a pattern of connected boxes, pen moving rapidly. He swung around, startled, as she came in.

  “Oh, Roger, something terrible’s happened.”

  “What would that be?” he said, rising, pocketing the sheet of paper.

  “Anne. She’s been killed, Roger. Murdered.”

  Francie went to him, almost staggering, clung to him, began to shake. She buried her face in his chest. He patted her back.

  Peter Abrahams

  A Perfect Crime

  29

  In the kitchen, Francie tried the Dedham number, over and over, getting a busy signal every time. Murdered. In the cottage? Had there been an arrest? How? When? Why? Brenda had told her almost nothing. She called Rome, heard Brenda in Italian: “Questa e la segretaria telefonica di…” She left a message, ran upstairs, threw on some clothes. When she came back down, Roger was waiting in his crimson robe with a package wrapped in foil.

  “What’s this?” she said.

  “I made tuna sandwiches. Isn’t it customary to bring food?”

  “Are you coming?” she said.

  He spread his arms, like great red wings. “It wouldn’t be right,” he said. “My relationship was peripheral.”

  But he walked her down to the garage. Their cars sat side by side, both in pools of wintertime snowmelt. Francie saw that his rear window was shattered.

  “Oh, that,” said Roger, although she hadn’t said anything. “Some smash-and-grabber, it would seem, but nothing was taken. The alarm must have scared him off.” He handed her the sandwiches. “Don’t forget to offer my condolences.”

  Francie drove west on Storrow. Not yet dawn, but incoming commuters were already on the road, a yellow stream of headlights paralleling the dark one of the Charles. Their world was no longer hers. Murder: all those questions and many others roiled in her mind, including the one she most wanted to avoid-what had Anne been doing at the cottage in the first place? Wasn’t there only one thing she could have been doing? And didn’t that mean she must have found out about what went on in that cottage? But how? Had Ned confessed? Something’s come up, he’d said. She’d asked, Something about Anne? And he’d said, Nothing like that. Work related. Therefore? Francie had no idea. And murder? Francie was lost.

  She parked in front of the house in Dedham. The downstairs lights were on, silhouetting the stocky form of a snowman in the front lawn, a ski pole over one shoulder like a sentry’s rifle. Francie walked up the path, unshoveled but packed down by many footsteps going in both directions. Worse than lost, Francie, because at that moment, standing at the door with its Christmas wreath, she had the most unworthy thought of her whole life: Perhaps there would now be some future for her and Ned after all. Even with Anne’s wreath hanging there, Francie had that thought. What was she made of? She knocked on the door.

  “Who is it?” said a woman almost at once, as though she’d been waiting by the door. Francie didn’t recognize her voice.

  “Francie Cullingwood,” she said, and added, “a friend of the family.”

  The door opened. A gray-haired woman in a quilted housecoat stared out at Francie with big dark eyes: Ned’s eyes. The woman didn’t have to tell Francie who she was.

  “I’m Ned’s mother. You’ve heard?”

  “Yes.”

  The dark eyes gazed past her, into the sky, graying in the east. She shivered. “Come in.”

  Francie went into the little hall. Everything looked the same: a stack of mail on the table, a few audiotapes, irises in a vase. Francie glanced sideways into the living room, ahead into the kitchen.

  “Ned’s gone,” the woman said, as though reading her mind, and Francie thought, Does she know? Francie saw no sign of any such knowledge in the woman’s face, and besides, she hadn’t seemed to recognize her name. “The police came down from New Hampshire,” Ned’s mother went on, “and took him to do… what needed to be done.”

  They went into the kitchen. “Tea?” said Ned’s mother. “Or maybe coffee? I suppose you’d call it morning.”

  “Nothing for me.”

  “I’ll have tea,” the woman said, going to the stove. “Keep moving.” She had trouble with the switches. “Why anyone would need such an elaborate oven I have no idea.” Gas ignited with a pop, settled down to a steady blue flame.

  Francie tried to remember what Ned had said about his mother, recalled nothing. He almost never spoke of family life; she thought of the Chinese walls dividing different departments of Wall Street law firms in the interest of preserving the appearance of something or other. But didn’t his mother live in Cleveland? Weren’t they all from Cleveland?

  “How did you get here so fast?” Francie said.

  The woman paused, tea bag dangling in her hand. “I don’t follow you.”

  “I thought you lived in Cleveland.”

  “True. I flew in yesterday, to spend the holidays.”

  He hadn’t mentioned that either.

  “Holidays,” Ned’s mother said, coming to the table, cup clattering on the saucer. “Can you imagine?” Their eyes met and Francie sensed that this was the moment for tears, but none came. Big dark eyes, just like Ned’s on the surface, but much drier underneath.

  “It’s a good thing you’re here, Mrs. Demarco,” Francie said.

  The woman shrugged that aside. “There’s nothing good,” she said. “And it’s Mrs. Blanchard, actually. I remarried.” She sat down, sipped her tea; Francie remained standing. “What was your connection again?” said Mrs. Blanchard.“To the family, I mean.”

  Francie hadn’t said. “Anne and I… ” Tears were on the way now, but hers; she stopped them, cut them off completely and at once, went on. “We were tennis partners.”

  “Oh, yes, the tennis,” said Mrs. Blanchard. Tea slopped out of her cup, splashed on the table, dripped off the edge, stained her housecoat. She didn’t appear to notice. “As a friend of hers,” she said, “can you give me any idea what in God’s name she was doing-”

  The phone rang. Mrs. Blanchard crossed the room and grabbed it off the wall before it could ring again.

  “Yes? Are you all right, dear? What’s hap-no, nothing.” Her eyes shifted to Francie, sponging up the spilled tea. “There’s a visitor, that’s all.” She covered the mouthpiece, spoke to Francie. “What was your name again?”

  Francie repeated it. The woman talked into the phone, raised her eyebrows, held it out for Francie. “It’s Ned,” she said. “He wants to speak with you.”

  Francie took the phone. “Ned. Ned. I-” Mrs. Blanchard sat at the table, back to Francie, head still, still and alert. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Don’t say anything, Francie,” he said.

  “Oh, but Ned, it’s so-”

  “Don’t say anything to anybody,” he went on, and she realized she’d misinterpreted him; he hadn’t been referring to the uselessness of words at a time like this. “And don’t say Ned like that, not to anybody,” he continued. “You sometimes look in at the cottage as a favor to your friend, that’s an unavoidable fact, no hiding it, but nothing more, nothing about me, nothing about you and me.” Francie had never heard his voice like this, low and pressing, the words coming fast. “Do you understand?” he said.

  “Not really.
” She turned her back, hunched over, spoke softly and right into the phone so Mrs. Blanchard couldn’t hear. “I don’t see how it makes-”

  “Is my mother there? Nearby, I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then shut up, for Christ’s sake. She misses nothing.” Francie heard a coin dropping into a pay phone. “But you’re wrong about what you were going to say, Francie. It does make a difference. Just think about it.”

  “How?”

  “Goddamn it. Why are you doing this? Don’t you care about me at all, Francie?”

  She did, much more and without a doubt, but the thought of replying to the question at that moment sickened her. And she still didn’t understand what difference it made now if their relationship was known; also knew that she wasn’t going to find out, not with Ned’s mother in the room. She changed her tone for him, tried to approximate the tone she’d have used if she really had been nothing more than Anne’s tennis friend, but had no idea what that would sound like either. “Do they-do they know what happened?”

  A pause, a long one. Then came a sob, thick and ragged. “She was slaughtered, Francie. Slaughtered. That’s what happened.”

  Click.

  Francie put down the phone. Mrs. Blanchard was on her feet.“He didn’t want to speak to me?”

  “He had to go.”

  Ned’s mother gave her a close look. She might have been about to say something, but at that moment Em walked into the room in her pajamas.

  “Morning, Grandma,” she said, and then noticed Francie.“Oh, hi.”

  “Hi,” said Francie.

  Em brushed her hair out of her eyes. “Getting ready for another tournament?”

  “No.”

  The girl hit the button on the countertop TV, reached up in the cupboard for cereal and a bowl, put them on the table. On the screen, a commercial for pain relievers ended and two newscasters appeared at a desk. Francie was right beside the TV; she switched it off. Em and her grandmother both turned to her, understanding registering on the woman’s face, surprise on Em’s. Francie, unable to invent any explanation for her conduct, said nothing. She went to the fridge, opened it, said, “Two percent or nonfat, Em?”

  “Two percent,” said Em, glancing at the dark screen of the TV.

  Francie poured milk in her bowl. “How about some strawberries on top?” She’d seen them in the fridge.

  “Sure.”

  Francie took a handful of strawberries from their carton, washed them in the sink. Not a good idea, strawberries, because a strawberry couldn’t remain a simple strawberry, of course, but had to be red, ripe and full of life. Francie put them on a plate, set it before Em.

  “Thanks,” said the girl, popping one in her mouth and placing the others one at a time among the cornflakes in a star-shaped pattern. She raised her head. “Mom up yet?”

  Francie and Ned’s mother looked at each other; neither answered.

  “Hey,” said Em. “What’s up, Grandma?”

  “Maybe you’d better go,” Ned’s mother said to Francie.

  “I’d like to help.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” said Ned’s mother. “Most considerate of you, but it’s a family matter.”

  Francie turned to Em, but what could she say? Em’s mouth opened, strawberry-red inside.

  Francie didn’t put up a fight; she left, now a coward on top of everything. She was outside on the walk, almost to her car, when she heard Em’s wail: piercing, unmitigated, unbearable-catastrophe beyond repair.

  And she’d forgotten to leave the sandwiches, somehow still in her hand. She realized she’d loved Anne. It wasn’t too strong a word.

  30

  Back in her own house, Francie found a stranger talking to Roger in the living room. “Here she is now,” said Roger as Francie came in. The stranger rose, a big, broadly built man with a broad face; he reminded her of the blacksmith in the background of a Dutch genre painting she could picture but not identify at that moment.

  “Francie, this is Mr. Savage, chief of police in Lawton Center,” said Roger. “Mr. Savage, my wife.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” said the chief, speaking to Roger although his eyes were on Francie. “And it’s Savard. Joe Savard.”

  “My apologies,” said Roger. “Will you be needing me any longer?”

  “No,” said Savard. “Thanks for your help.”

  “Think nothing of it,” said Roger. He came to Francie, took both her hands in his, said, “Oh, Francie. It’s dreadful, just dreadful.” Then he left, pausing to pick a few dead leaves from the base of a plant as he went out.

  “Please sit down,” Francie said. Savard sat on the window seat, back to the morning outside, darkened by thick, low clouds; Francie couldn’t sit, but leaned on the arm of a chair by the fireplace, about three steps away. “What happened to Anne?”

  “She was murdered sometime last night, Mrs. Cullingwood, in the cottage owned by your friend-” He leafed through his notebook.

  “Brenda.”

  He found the page. “It says here Countess Vasari.”

  “She’s not a real countess,” Francie said, an unconsidered remark that made her sound like a pompous fool, exactly the opposite of her intent.

  Savard looked up from his notebook. “What’s the difference?”

  A good question. What had she meant? That Brenda was back to being plain Brenda Kelly again; that she didn’t want this man to form a false impression of her, Francie, because of some improbably and temporarily titled friend. “Nothing. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “There’s not much to interrupt at this stage. The lab guys are still at the scene and we haven’t got a suspect.” Savard closed the notebook, laid it on his knee. His hand was big, thickened by some sort of hard work, but not ugly. “I’m hoping for some help from you,” he said.

  “Anything,” Francie said.

  He nodded. “Your friend says she hasn’t been to her place for two or three years-she couldn’t remember exactly-and that you kept an eye on it for her.”

  “That’s true.”

  “How often did you go up there?”

  “A few times a month in summer. Sometimes more.”

  “And in winter?”

  “Almost never.”

  “When was the last time?”

  A Friday. The day after she’d fallen through the ice. Ned had called her for the first time on her car phone, had been waiting there, surprising her on the darkened porch with his fury over her call to the radio show. She made the calculations in her head-it took longer than it should have because she kept remembering him out on the river: Wouldn’t there be something wrong with two people who could just throw it away? — and gave Savard the date.

  He wrote it down. “Did you notice anything unusual when you were there?”

  “No.”

  “No sign of a break-in, or an attempted one?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing missing or out of place?”

  “No.”

  “Anything spilled, knocked over, broken?”

  “No.”

  There was a pause. Francie had a cast stone figure by Jean Arp on the bookcase-Roger’s wedding present to her, not a big or important one, but Arp nevertheless-and the policeman’s eyes were on it: whether taking it in or thinking about something else, she couldn’t tell.

  His gaze swung back to her. “I assume you have a key to the cottage?”

  “Two,” Francie said. “One for the gate, one for the door.”

  “Have you ever lost them?”

  “No.”

  “Given them to someone else?”

  “No.”

  “Had copies made?”

  “No.” Although Ned had asked for one, she now recalled: Might help if I had a key. It’s cold out there. But she’d never gotten around to doing it: everything had fallen apart first.

  “You know of no other person with access to the cottage, then?”

  “No.”

  “Would you mind
showing them to me?”

  “Showing what to you?”

  “The keys, Mrs. Cullingwood.”

  They were in her car in the garage, hanging from the ignition. When she came back with them, Savard was standing by the bookcase, bent over the Arp, his hands behind his back. Francie almost said, You can touch it if you want.

  But did not. Instead she said, “Here they are,” and handed him the keys.

  Savard glanced at them, handed them back. Standing next to him by the bookcase, Francie sensed his physical strength. Not that he made himself look big or puffed out his chest-he slouched a little, if anything. Neither was he dressed in clothes designed to show off his physique-he wore a baggy gray suit, a little shiny at the elbows. But she sensed it, all the same.

  “So Anne Franklin didn’t have keys to the cottage.”

  “No.”

  “Did she know your friend Brenda?”

  “No.”

  He nodded to himself. It suddenly hit Francie that this man, or an assistant, had probably asked Ned these same questions already, hours before, that he might be searching for discrepancies as well as facts. She was considering the implications of that, and how they fit with Ned’s instructions- nothing about you and me- when Savard said,“How long has she known about it, then?”

  Francie felt a strange rush of blood to her face and neck, as though she were going scarlet; couldn’t have been, of course, not with her complexion. “It?” she said.

  “The cottage.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Its existence and location,” Savard said.“When did you first tell her about it?”

  Discrepancies: awareness that he might be searching for them was no help without knowing what he’d heard already from Ned. She stuck to the truth. “I never did.”

  “So she made no mention to you of going up there?”

  “We never discussed the cottage.”

  Savard opened his notebook, read to himself. Francie, reading upside down, saw lines of neat handwriting too small to make out, culminating in a circled notation writ larger at the bottom of the page: FC-nexus? That scared her for many reasons, not the least of which was the presence of a word like that in the notebook of a man who looked like this. She realized she had no idea what was coming next.