Carol O’Connell: Winter House

„Well,“ he began, picking his words more carefully this time, „I’m guessing – not assuming, mind you – that the ice pick near the body doesn’t belong to the burglar.“ So far, if he interpreted her silence correctly, he was on safe ground. „I suppose the man found the pick after he broke into the house?“

„Looks that way, doesn’t it?“ she said.

And so, of course, his theory must be dead wrong. All right, the bedrock of logic was a bit shaky here. Mallory had already conceded self-defense, so either the pick belonged to the burglar or the man had found it in the house. One of these two things must be true – or not.

He sighed.

Mallory paused on the stairs and turned to face him. „The dead man wasn’t a burglar. He was a serial killer out on bail. I’m the one who arrested him. He always used a hunting knife. I found one strapped to his leg. He never had a chance to pull it out before one of those women stabbed him. There’s only one line in her statement that rings true. She said it was done in the dark. Now that part’s true. If the lights had been on, she’d never have gotten close enough to kill him.“

„This serial killer was out on bail?“ Dangerous, but he had to ask. „How is that possible?“

„Bad judge, good lawyer.“ Mallory glanced over the railing, looking down at the front room below and the dead man at its center. „So that ice pick was out of character for him – and one weapon too many.“ She resumed her climb.

„Well,“ said Charles to Mallory’s back, „given his history with women, the very fact that he broke in with a knife strapped to his leg, that should be enough to – “

She paused on the second-floor landing to stare at him in a way that asked whose side he was on. „Neither one of those women knew he had a knife.“ Mallory turned her back on him and approached a door to the right of the stairs. „Odds are, they still don’t know.“ She rested one hand on the knob. „When Riker and I showed up, the West Side cops were still trying to get Bitty Smyth to unlock this bedroom door. I had better luck.“

Charles was not certain that he wanted more detail on this.

„I told her to open up or I’d shoot off the lock. That’s when Bitty decided to come out.“ Mallory opened the door and waved him into the darkness ahead of her, saying behind his back, „And this is what she didn’t want the cops to see.“

What a flair she had for drama.

The lights switched on, and, in the sudden bright light, Charles faced a wall lined with scores of photographs and saw his own face looking back at him from the picture frames.

His eyes gravitated first to a shot taken when he was a child of ten. The backdrop was a birthday party in Gramercy Park. A neighboring frame held a small portrait with the gray grain of newsprint and a companion article about the youngest student ever to matriculate at Harvard University. Next was a picture of a child in cap and gown, inches taller than his graduating class of young adults. In successive photographs, he passed through puberty, collected more academic credentials and entered a prestigious corporate think tank. The caption of an old photo cut from Fortune had him escaping the corporation to strike out on his own. And the rest were a collection of society-page shots from weddings and funerals.

The most recent picture of the lot was a candid photograph taken on the streets of SoHo. This one was framed in silver on the table beside Bitty’s bed.

„So you have a stalker.“ Mallory turned to the bureau and picked up a stack of three diaries, each with a flimsy lock that had been opened. „Take a look at these. I need to know if she’s dangerous.“

„You’re joking.“

Her chin jutted forward, and an angry line appeared between her eyes, an unsubtle reminder that she had no sense of humor. Mallory held out the journals.

Charles recoiled as if she were offering something unclean. „This can’t be right, reading her personal – “

„This is a crime scene, Charles. I don’t need a warrant.“ And her subtext was unmistakable: she was the law; friend and business partner aside, he should not push his luck with her tonight.

A third voice chimed in to say, „What?“

They looked over to the far corner of the room to see a bird emerge from a large cage on the floor. It was smaller than a parrot but somewhat larger than a parakeet. A comb of yellow feathers unfurled at the top of its head in a gesture of surprise.

„It’s a cockatiel,“ said Charles.

Mallory looked down at the bird, clearly regarding it as something that she planned to wipe off the sole of her shoe. Charles sensed that this was not their first meeting. The tiny creature was too quick to pick up on her hostility. It opened its beak wide, but not to scream. The posture reminded Charles of a baby bird begging for worms, or, in this instance, begging for its life. The cockatiel flattened its comb of yellow feathers and, head ducked low to floor, retreated behind the fringe of the bedspread.

Charles, however, had nowhere to hide. He stared at the journals as Mallory pressed them into his hands. He shook his head. „Bitty Smyth impressed me as a very fragile personality. Reading her diaries would be rather like an assault.“

„Read fast and she’ll never know.“ Mallory turned away from him to rifle the contents of the closet shelves.

He sat down on the unmade bed as he took in all the items of the room. Bitty’s interests were not limited to himself. His photographs shared a bit of wall space with the Virgin Mary, and small statues of saints decorated her dresser alongside lipstick tubes and other toilet articles. There was also a collection of equestrian figurines from a young girl’s horse-crazy stage of life, and stuffed bears abounded here. Apart from the religious themes, the underlying decor was that of a teenage girl, who was approximately forty years old.

He opened the earliest of the diaries and read it as fast as he could turn pages. Even given his skill as a speed reader, this was a waste of time. All the famed diarists in history had written with posterity and an audience in mind, and so did damn near everyone else on the planet. Consequendy, the entries were usually absent anything as embarrassing as truth. In a matter of minutes, he was reading the final page of handwriting, small and neat, and not one line to support the idea of Bitty Smyth as an obsessive stalker. „I’m not in any of these diaries,“ he said. „Satisfied?“

„No.“ Mallory stood before the open closet, holding a sheaf of papers bound in clear plastic. „This is a Ph.D. dissertation – yours. Think she read it?“ Mallory held up a worn sock with a hole in it. „Or did she just want another souvenir like this one?“ She tossed the sock into his lap. „Your size, I think.“

Charles shrugged this off. „Bitty moved on to another obsession two years ago.“ He stacked the diaries on the bedside table. „All she wrote about were her religious retreats on the weekends.“

His Ph.D. dissertation flew across the room to join the holey sock in his lap, and he looked down at the cover sheet of this paper authored before he was out of his teens. The subject was prodigies, his own peer group. Charles rose from the bed, drawn to the wall of framed pictures and another sort of peer group – children ganged by age and social strata. „This one,“ he said, staring at the group photograph taken at his tenth birthday party. „This is the connection between Bitty and me.“

Mallory crossed the room to stand beside him as he pointed to the smirking face of one child in the crowd.

„That boy is Paul Smyth. Must be a relative. I don’t remember meeting Bitty Smyth as a child, but I suppose she could have been at this party. Though… I don’t see her in the picture. Odd. She has the kind of face that never changes – gamine, all eyes. Maybe she was the one with the camera. The shot angles upward, a child’s point of view – a child smaller than the others.“