Carol O’Connell: Winter House

Riker’s pen hovered over his open notebook. „Is she one of those hyphenated people?“

„I’m afraid so. My brother, Lionel, lives here, too. But tonight they’re both at the summer house in the Hamptons.“

„Why don’t we give ‘em a call and ask where the ice pick is?“

„You could leave a message on their machine. They never pick up the phone out there. They have privacy issues.“

Riker turned toward the sound of heavy footsteps from the hallway. He was surprised to see the head of Forensics making a personal appearance. Heller, a great bear of a man, hovered in the doorway. A baby-faced technician stood by his side, and this was a new face. A trainee? The chief crime-scene investigator had always taken great pride in the hands-on training of his crews. This might explain his presence here tonight. The man owed none of the detectives any favors that would warrant turning out for a penny-ante burglary gone wrong.

Heller remained in the hall as his new recruit entered the kitchen with a fingerprint kit. The younger man was shaking his head and muttering, „Why elimination prints? The perp’s dead.“

„Just do it, kid.“ Heller’s tone conveyed that he would deal with the youngster’s attitude problem later. He turned his back and ambled away down the hall.

The rookie opened his kit on the table, then laid out his white cards, an ink pad and a roller. When he picked up Miss Winter’s right hand, he treated it as an inanimate object. Without a word spoken, no May I? or Excuse me, ma ‘am, he bent over his work, inking her thumb, then rolling it across a small square on the card.

Nedda Winter looked up at the young man’s face, but the technician clearly did not see her. She bowed her head in resignation, understanding that she was invisible to him, all but the fingers of her captive hand. It was a revealing moment and not the response that Riker would have predicted, not at this posh address. Ensconced in a mansion, this grande dame was accustomed to indifferent manhandling by minions. And so he needed no psychiatrist to tell him that she had spent some time in an institution – a long time.

Prison? Or the nuthouse?

As her hand was being manipulated by the technician, so carelessly, impersonally, the sleeve of her robe slipped down her right arm, exposing a long and jagged welt of old scar tissue that told a story of a body torn to the bone.

Riker rose quickly, knocking over his chair as he turned on the crime-scene technician. „Let her alone! Tell Heller I want someone else to do it.“ When the younger man only gawked at him, the detective yelled, „Get outl“

Bitty Smyth sat alone in the dining room, waiting for someone, anyone, to give her life direction, or that was Charles Buder’s impression when he sat down on the other side of the table. If he could caption the look on her face, her unspoken words would be – at last – as if she had been expecting him for all of the thirty years that had passed since his tenth birthday party, waiting in absolute faith that he would come.

„I’m sorry,“ she said. „The police dragging you here so late and all. It was because of the pictures in my room, wasn’t it?“

His one and only stalker seemed not at all embarrassed about the shrine in her bedroom, and he wondered if this was a first warning sign. He gravitated toward the possibility of a harmless, almost magical fixation that would not interfere with the everyday function of her life. He preferred this to the darker diagnosis of an obsessive psychotic. For a moment, he was lost in her eyes, so large, so dark, the antithesis of his own small blue irises. Physically pulling away from her, he sat well back in his chair.

It was his everyday job to observe people and pass judgments upon their mental well-being before marrying them to the proper think tanks, but there was something at work here that was quite beyond him for the present.

Her face was heart shaped. He would not call it pretty, and yet he was charmed by it and leaning toward her once more without understanding why. Perhaps magical thinking worked both ways tonight, for he was reverting to his earlier impression of a pointed-eared elf.

„I can’t imagine,“ she said, „what the police must have thought of my little gallery of photographs.“

„Yes, the pictures,“ he said. „I’m sure they assumed I was a friend of the family.“ He handed her a business card for Butler and Company. An earlier version of the card had born the name Mallory and Buder, but NYPD had ordered her to dissolve the business partnership. In Mallory’s version of compliance, she had removed her name from the stationery.

Bitty Smyth never glanced at the card. „I was at your birthday party in Gramercy Park.“

„I know,“ said Charles, though he still had no memory of her. Granted, she would be inclined to remember him, the tallest boy, the one with the beak of an eagle, the eyes of a frog. But he had been blessed with eidetic memory, and he wondered how he could have forgotten her. She would have been unusually small, given her camera’s low point of view when she had taken the party photograph. All the other children had been normal size – at least a head smaller than himself. Gradually, he formed a portrait of a little person who did her best to blend into every wall she leaned against. And now he imagined her as a little girl watching from behind the foliage of Gramercy Park, hiding out – the shy child and perhaps the only one not to take part in the incident of the unfortunate frog.

She leaned toward him. „Wasn’t it your uncle who did the magic show?“

„No, he was my cousin, Max Candle. Old enough to be my uncle, though. So… how’s Paul? Forgive me if I don’t recall the relationship. Was Paul your – “

„My brother,“ said Bitty, „half brother. We have the same father.“

„So now you look after your aunt, is that right?“ He wondered if she had forgotten to breathe for a moment. Why should her aunt’s health be a touchy subject? „I’m told there’s a lot of medication in Miss Winter’s room. I assumed you were – “

„Yes, you must have been talking to the medical examiner. He wanted to give me a sedative, but I can’t swallow pills. Now what was I – Oh, Aunt Nedda. Yes. Endstage cancer.“

„But she appeared to be in rather good health.“

Bitty lowered her eyes with a modest smile, as if taking this as a personal compliment. „You should have seen her six months ago. Her skin was all yellow.“

„So she had a successful surgery, something like that?“

„No.“

And now he noticed something new in her eyes: the pupils were dilating. This was the unconscious tactic of a small child anxious to curry favor with an adult, and it usually worked, enhancing the unwitting adult’s concern and affection. It was a child’s act of self-preservation carried into adulthood. He wondered what other tactics she might have, both instinctive and deliberate ones for negotiating her way through a forest of taller beings.

„How do you account for your aunt’s recovery? A miracle? Or the wrong diagnosis?“ This was a trick question, a trap, and he wondered if she had guessed that.

She was staring at her Bible, reaching toward it and its pious explanations for all things miraculous, but then she pushed it away, electing not to play the Bible-thumping zealot, not with him.

It occurred to him, in that moment, that the Bible and the journals were props for an illusion, rather like the trick of the eyes. More survival tactics? This intuition posed an ethical dilemma: either this woman was more vulnerable than anyone imagined, or she was a worthy adversary for Mallory. He decided to keep his silence. If he guessed wrong, Mallory might shred this woman into pieces.