Carol O’Connell - Winter House

„Well, I know it wasn’t this one. Even if this radio had been in working condition, Bitty pulled out all the fuses that night – no electricity. What I heard was probably a small portable. It must’ve been destroyed in the fire.“

He seemed so suspicious now. Did he know she was lying? No, there was also doubt in his face. Her lie was making sense to him. Apparently, Charles did believe in the rules governing electricity.

In truth, if a battery-operated radio had been in the house – even if it had been near the fire’s point of origin, the investigators would have found residue materials, but there were none. And because it was so important to account for everyone in the house on that night, the arson team had gone looking for signs of Mallory’s radio operator, the one who had turned the music on and off. They had even run tests for music seeping in from neighboring buildings – all negative. Yet, like Charles, Mallory could not admit to imaginary songs. She never would. He must.

„I saw her play this radio twice,“ he said, insistent. „The first time was at the crime scene. And I’ve got a lot of witnesses for that performance.“

She nodded. „I heard music that night, but the built-in sound system – “

„And I heard it again,“ said Charles, angry now. „The night of the dinner party. It was a warm night. Nedda opened the front windows. We sat outside on the stoop. We drank wine and listened to this radio for hours.“

„When Nedda thought she was disabling the alarm, she probably hit the control panel for the stereo system. I’m sure Nedda believed the music came from the radio, but she was insane.“

„No, she wasn’t. I never had a conversation with her that wasn’t perfectly lucid.“ He turned his back on Mallory and left the house. She followed him as far as the open front door and watched him sit down on the steps.

After a few minutes of scavenging, she had found a wine cabinet behind the bar, and the rubber seal on its door was still intact. She selected a good sturdy merlot, the only wine that had a prayer of surviving the heat of the fire on the upper floor. With the wine and two glasses in hand, Mallory joined Charles outside on the steps. Indian summer was long gone, but he did not seem to feel the cold night air of fall.

„All right,“ she said, „we’ll restage what happened that night.“ She held up the bottle for his inspection, and he examined the label.

„This was served at the dinner party. I always wondered how Sheldon Smyth knew the vintner of my private stock. Do you have any idea what these bottles cost?“

„Not a problem, Charles. You’re receiving stolen goods from a police officer.“ She uncorked the wine and set the bottle down on the steps to let it breathe. He would consider it a worse crime if she simply filled their glasses before the wine had time to mellow. And Mallory had brought some reading material to pass the time. She opened her knapsack and withdrew a small leather-bound book. „This is Nedda’s last diary. I used it to run a bluff on Bitty Smyth. Open it.“

He did.

Every line was the same, the same words written over and over: Crazy people make sane people crazy. Charles flipped through page after page, incredulous. He turned his stricken face to hers.

„I have a whole suitcase full of them,“ she said, „all exactly alike. I believe Nedda was sane when she went into the first asylum – but not when she came out of the last one. That would be expecting too much from her. You know why? These lines are true, Charles. Any cop will tell you that. We deal with crazy all the time. And it rubs off. It gets into your head and your gut. It drives you crazy. Nedda wanted me to have her diaries. She asked me to show them to Cleo and Lionel. Maybe she thought she’d written something else on those pages. And I’m sure that Nedda believed she heard music on the radio.“

„Totally mad.“ He continued to turn the pages. „And I didn’t see it. How could I have failed this woman so badly?“

„After a few therapy sessions? You said all her conversation with you was lucid, and I’m sure it was. Trust me, she was a strong lady, very good at holding things together in situations… where all the sane people crack up.“ Mallory took the diary from his hand and looked down at the pages, lines of madness, lines of truth. „Not your fault, Charles. She seemed sane enough to me, too. Nedda was probably using all her energy to keep her mind together – for a while. She had unfinished business with her brother and sister.“

He nodded. „If Cleo and Lionel had seen the diaries, the relationship would have been quite different.“

„They would’ve taken better care of her,“ said Mallory. „So if Nedda listened to a radio that never worked – “

„But I’m not insane.“ He hung his head, suddenly recognizing that this was now open to debate. „The night you called me to the crime scene, I saw her play that radio. She raised the volume and turned it off with the dial.“

„The whole face of the radio would’ve lit up when it played. Did you see that?“

„Yes.“ Less sure of himself, he added, „I think so.“

„You’re no worse than the average eyewitness. People see what they expect to see.“ She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a sheaf of papers. „This is the play list for all the radio stations. The night of the dinner party, Nedda told you her station only played jazz from the forties. That’s wrong. There’s only one that plays jazz that time of night. But it’s a mix of contemporary and – “

„I know what I heard.“

„Do you? Your sound system only plays classical music. When I programmed the channels, those were the only ones you wanted to hear, remember? Nedda was the expert on jazz. I don’t know what tunes you were listening to that night, but she only heard what she wanted to hear.“

„I know jazz when I – “

„Listen to me. One more time, all right? Before Nedda came outside with the wine, she probably tried to disable the alarm. I’m betting it wasn’t even turned on. So she tapped the control buttons for the sound system by mistake. That was the music you heard, a local station that plays – “

„No, that’s not it. Her sister had that system programmed for popular music, rather crass – and, I promise you, nothing as elegant as Duke Ellington.“

„You know how easy it is to mess up the programming.“ She had reset the channels on his own sound system many times before painting the on/off switch with nail polish and forbidding him to touch any other buttons. „You wouldn’t know the dates of every piece you heard that night. Nedda would, but she was listening to music inside her head – no songs older than the Winter House Massacre.“

„So first,“ said Charles, still the skeptic, „she mistook the stereo panel for the alarm. Then she just got lucky with all those buttons and called up the one jazz station out of all – “

„What, at core, do you believe in? Coincidence and luck – or a haunted radio?“

Her solution had trumped his ghost story. She could see that he was defeated. At least, he had ceased to resist her take-no-prisoners logic. A graceful loser, Charles smiled, but not in the usual inadvertent manner of a happy loon. He had learned a new expression, more sardonic, and Mallory knew that he would never be the same; the cost of closing her cases had become too damned high.

She poured the wine, the medicine, into their glasses, then lifted hers in a toast. „To the lady who loved jazz.“

Charles clinked his glass with Mallory’s, and they sat very close together in the chill night air, sharing wine and a bit of body heat and the illusion that life had not been forever changed by a death too many.