Carol O’Connell - Winter House

Half the contents of her knapsack had been spilled across the desk blotter. He picked up a bottle with the hospital’s pharmacy label. It was filled with pain medication prescribed for her broken hand. There was no need to count out the tablets; he knew that she had taken none of them. Mallory would not want to dull her beautiful brain, not while she was obsessing over all the details of one terrible night gone awry. However, he was also assured that she was not suffering, not likely to pay much attention to the aching throb of broken bones and damaged muscle. To paraphrase an old song from his youth, she did not have time for the pain.

And so – he felt the pain.

Thus crippled, he picked up her pen and passed an hour writing letters to Mallory, long sorry lines of apology, taking all the blame for Nedda’s death. And then he had the good sense to lay down the pen. How unfair to burden her with his own obsession. Charles smashed the pages into the pockets of his robe, then rose from the chair to stretch his legs. He walked the length of the giant bulletin board, a disaster zone on several levels.

Well… maybe not.

At first, her pushpin style had been perfect in every alignment of paper, and then, as she had continued down the wall, pinning up new documents, they hung increasingly askew, as if she had become more and more agitated in her rush from one end of the wall to the other. The new configurations of diagrams and photographs, text and sundry bits of paper were laid out like a jigsaw puzzle without any helpful irregularities in the pieces. He had only the gist of the thing: neither of them could quite let go of Nedda Winter. And, truly, it seemed impossible that such a person could be removed from the planet by a freak accident. Mallory’s linear paper storm relentlessly moved on down the wall toward that same conclusion.

At the very end of the wall, a report from the fire marshal knocked everything else out of his head. This was not possible. He read it twice. There were no portable radios in Winter House, none that would work without current, and the antique radio in the front room had not been in working condition for many years.

Oh, no. Madness was a recent thing with him, and there was nothing wrong with his memory.

Charles returned to the desk, took up pen and paper once more, then left a note pinned over the technical report. The bold lines of red marking pen stood out from all the rest, and this bit of tampering with her wall could not fail to annoy her the moment she walked in the door. It was a simple message – Mallory loved brevity – only three words writ large, This is wrong.

It was late afternoon when Bitty Smyth approached her own home like a thief, stealing through the park, keeping to the elongating shadows of rock formations and evergreens. The police vehicles were no longer parked in front of Winter House. The reporters were long gone, and there was a sense of emptiness about the place.

And desolation. As Aunt Nedda would say, „Poor house.“

Bitty eased herself over the low stone wall and sprinted across the wide boulevard, dodging traffic, her fugitive brown eyes darting left and right. She raced up the front steps and faltered with the keys, dropping them twice before she could undo the locks. Finally, she opened the door to an acrid smell of stale smoke and mildew. Three days later, the air was still dank from the water hoses. Fearing an electrical fire, she hesitated to turn on the foyer light. Fear of the dark finally weighted her decision to flip the wall switch. The lights flickered on and off.

And Bitty sucked in her breath.

Vandals.

The smoke-stained walls of the foyer had suffered fresh damage. They were cracked by huge nails driven into the plaster with great force. Each nail staked a sheet of paper.

Senseless violence.

As she scanned the papers, Bitty fancied that she could hear the echo of every nail hammered in anger: BANG! – a fire marshal’s diagram of her bedroom, the point of origin for the blaze; BANG! – another diagram showing the location of the cellar fuse box; BANG! – an official finding of arson.

Impossible.

The fire had been the pure accident of a candle falling into a wastebasket. Neither she nor Aunt Nedda had been near the candlestick when it had fallen off the bureau.

BANG! – a drawing of the cellar that marked the place where the pulled-out fuses and the spares had been hidden; BANG! – a forensic report on a flashlight recovered from the ashes of a bedroom closet; its round head matched to paint chips and a circular pattern of dust on the fuse box in the cellar.

BANG, BANG, BANG! A score of documents led to the end of the wall and turned a corner.

Bitty screamed.

No, no, no!

Rags. This was too cruel. Her pet cockatiel had been staked to the next wall, one nail for each tattered wing, and, for a few moments, the flickering lights gave the dead bird the illusion of flapping feathers and flight.

BANG! – beside Rags’s tiny carcass was Mallory’s witness statement. The detective had found three prone victims trapped above the fire’s point of origin. Most damning were the final words: The only survivor will inherit millions.

BANG! – an application to freeze the assets of the Winter fortune in probate limbo.

Though the house was utterly silent, absent all but imaginary hammers, Bitty’s hands rose up to cover her ears.

And then she held her breath – the better to listen.

She heard no voice or footfall, yet Bitty knew that she was not alone in the house. Creeping toward the threshold of the front room, her eyes were slowly adapting to the soft remains of sunlight slanting through the parted drapes and falling from the skylight dome at the top of the house. Now she could see every detail of a workman’s scaffolding inside the curve of the blackened staircase. It was a network of wooden planks and buttressing metal rods swirling upward.

Mallory, dressed in dusty blue jeans, a T-shirt and a gun, hung there in midair.

Bitty blinked.

No, the detective stood on a high platform at the center of this giant skeleton of wood and steel, a suitcase resting at her feet, so like a woman waiting for a train or a bus to pass by high in the air. And so patiently – as though Mallory had been waiting there all this time, days and days. One crippled hand in a plaster cast dangled at her left side. Her hair and clothes bore a darker dust of ashes that had come down from the second floor with the metal suitcase, the one that Aunt Nedda had kept under her bed.

Always locked.

The detective picked up the suitcase, held it high over her head and sent it crashing to the floor below. It fell open, disgorging leather-bound journals, the sort that came with small locks and keys – decades of diaries.

„I like money motives,“ said Mallory. „And now… you have one.“

Bitty was shocked into a calmer state than she could otherwise have managed. She moved farther into the room, drawn along, as people are drawn to accident scenes. The lawyer in her was surfacing, and it wanted a look at those diaries. At last, she stood before the scaffolding, believing that there was hardly any fear in her voice when she forced a smile and looked upward, saying, „What a droll sense of humor.“

„I’m not known for that.“

Still smiling, Bitty splayed her hands. „But I haven’t committed any crimes.“

„No?“ Mallory bent down to pick up two electrical cords. „Let’s count them.“ In a sleight of her one good hand, she joined the cords together, plug and socket. The room flooded with light from all quarters, brilliant spotlights, a dozen or more white-hot suns perched atop high poles. Bitty covered her face with both hands and closed her blinded eyes.