Skeleton Key Read online

“Well, dear. I think that’s only sensible. You wouldn’t have wanted the boy to drive you home if he was drunk.”

  “Right,” Annabel said.

  On any other day, Jennifer would have caught onto it immediately—if the boy was drunk, the chances were that Annabel had been drinking. Her father would catch onto it, if her father heard about it. He didn’t seem to be around.

  “Did Daddy go into the city?” Annabel asked.

  “What? Oh, yes. He had some kind of conference or something. They say they’re going to get that famous detective out here to help. You know the one. The Hungarian.”

  “Hungarian?”

  “Gregory something.”

  “Oh,” Annabel said. “Gregor Demarkian. He’s not Hungarian. He’s from Philadelphia.”

  “When I was growing up, you never heard about people with names like that. If they got famous, they changed them. Now, I don’t know what to think, half the time. I wish they’d be more clear about what happened. They keep saying she was found in her own car in her own garage, as if she’d committed suicide with carbon monoxide. Or somebody had killed her that way. Do you think that could be it?”

  “I think I’ve got to get the car back to Tommy,” Annabel said.

  Jennifer blinked. She wandered back into the little sitting room again. Annabel heard her sigh. “Now they’ve got Diane Smith at the scene,” she called out, “except it isn’t exactly at the scene because the driveway’s blocked off. It’s just out in front of Margaret’s house. Oh, Margaret must be having a fit.”

  “Right,” Annabel said.

  Her pocketbook was just where she had left it the night before, on the kitchen counter next to the refrigerator. She picked it up and made sure she still had Tommy’s keys tucked into the open pocket on the side. She would drive the car over to Tommy’s house and ask him to drive her home—if he was in any shape to do any such thing. If he wasn’t, she would explain the whole thing to Tommy’s mother and have Tommy’s mother drive her home. Annabel didn’t think she had to worry about Tommy’s father. None of the fathers she knew was ever home, not even on the weekends. If they didn’t work themselves to death, they wouldn’t have enough money to buy their children Corvettes.

  “I’m leaving,” Annabel called out.

  “Drive carefully,” Jennifer called back.

  Annabel went out and got into the Corvette and started it up. The radio was on. A woman announcer was giving a littie capsule report on “the murder in Washington Depot.” She said something about “tragedy” and something about “the only child of entrepreneurial pioneer Robert Anson.” Annabel turned her off.

  Now that she was out here, on her own, without her mother nattering to her, Annabel suddenly realized that this was all for real. Kayla was really dead. It had happened and it would not un-happen. The whole thing seemed worse than impossible. People didn’t just die. They didn’t get murdered in the Northwest Hills, either, where nothing much ever happened in the way of violence except wild turkeys chasing small cats. In all the years and years Annabel and her family had been coming to Litchfield County, there had only been one murder, not counting this one. A few years ago, a boy had gone into the convenience store in Four Corners and shot his ex-girlfriend and then himself. They were both in high school and she had wanted to be free to date other people.

  If it had happened in Waterbury, that would be a different thing, Annabel thought—but that wasn’t really true, of course. It wouldn’t have mattered where it happened. It wasn’t where it happened that was bothering her.

  If it was really real, she thought to herself—and then it struck her. This was it. This was what was bothering her.

  She didn’t know what was really real. She had no idea what she was talking about when she said something was really real. She had no idea what “real” meant.

  It seemed to her that she had lived her whole life in a fog.

  3

  It was well after noon before Peter Greer decided that he had to go to sleep—to bed, to sleep, to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom off the loft, where he kept a small bottle of contraband prescription sleeping pills. The first news of the murder had come across in a bulletin on WTNH. The next thing he knew, it seemed to be all over everywhere, on CNN, on the major networks. It made sense, of course, because she had been who she’d been, because she’d had so much money. It was the money that really made all the difference.

  Years ago, when he had been growing up in Litchfield County, Peter Greer had made decisions for himself, decisions he had known, even then, that he would never change. Unlike Kayla Anson and her friends, Peter had not been part of the country-club and private-school segment of Litchfield County. His parents had had a small Cape Cod house in Morris, and he had gone to Morris Elementary School and to the regional high school, just like everybody else. He couldn’t even remember when he had first realized that there was a difference, or that the difference would matter in the long run in ways nobody ever admitted to themselves out loud. He did remember walking down South Street in Litchfield and looking at the big houses there, the white ones set back from the road with their tall columns and curving front drives. He did remember sitting on the Litchfield Green and listening to them talk, the ones they called the pink-and-greens, who went to Rumsey Hall and then got sent away to prep school. Their voices were so different from the ones he was used to, it was almost as if they were speaking anther language.

  There were people who said that Peter Greer was an opportunist, and a social climber, but it wasn’t exactly true. It was true that he had always intended to live in that Litchfield County instead of in the one that he was used to. He thought anybody on earth would want to make that change, once they understood what it was about. It was even true that he intended to make as much money as possible, without having to be tethered to a desk like the Wall Street bankers who kept houses out here for the summer. In his better moments, he imagined himself becoming his generation’s version of Steve Fossett, a multimillionaire adventurer, taking up mountain climbing or around-the-world sailing as a hobby in his old age.

  What he really wanted, when he thought about it, was a kind of rest—the end to his own dissatisfaction, the end to this feeling he had had all his life that he wasn’t getting enough, wasn’t doing enough, wasn’t respected enough to be able to relax and let it all go. It was as if he were strapped to the front of an express train and being pushed ever onward, ever faster. He had worked for years to be valedictorian of his high school class, and when he had achieved it he felt only that it would have been better if his grade point average had been five points higher than it was, if it had been perfect. He had worked those same years to make sure he got a scholarship big enough so that he could go to Amherst without piling up debts he would never be able to pay. Then, when he got to Amherst, he thought only that he should have tried for Harvard. It went on and on, on and on, and there didn’t seem to be any way he could stop it.

  For a while there, he had thought Kayla Anson was going to stop it for him. He had thought she was going to be his resting place. He honestly couldn’t imagine how much higher he could go, than being married to her and having for himself what being married to her would mean. Even if it didn’t last forever. Even if she couldn’t love him always. None of those women could ever love for always. They weren’t built for it.

  Right now, he could hear Deirdre in his shower. She had slept through the night and the morning. She didn’t give a damn about the news or even about the way Kayla Anson had died. She seemed to think it had nothing to do with her.

  Peter wondered if he would feel differently if he and Kayla had been closer than they were, if what they had had together hadn’t already begun to wind down, if she hadn’t been on her way out his door. On her way, but not completely gone yet. On her way, but waiting for the right time to make a scene. All women felt they had to make scenes, to justify the end of a relationship. Even Deirdre was going to feel the need to make a scene, and she was going to be good a
t it.

  Once, when he and Kayla were first going out together, she had taken him to a hunt breakfast up in Salisbury. They hadn’t actually gone on the hunt—Kayla didn’t approve of hunting, but she didn’t disapprove of the people who approve of it—and they had walked together along the wide halls of one of those mock-Tudor houses everybody had been building in the twenties. In that one moment, Peter Greer had been perfectly and unquestionably at peace. He had suddenly been able to see himself in just the place where he belonged. It was so far in the past, he could never reach it, but it was there. It wasn’t just a figment of his imagination.

  Now he would never reach even an approximation of that place. He was sure of it. She would not be coming back to him.

  And although it was true enough that she would not have come back to him even if she had lived—that she was more than on her way out the door the last time he talked to her, she was all the way out and just running back to clear up a few loose ends—it somehow made an enormous difference that she was dead.

  That did not, however, mean that he was sorry she was dead.

  The news reports all said strangled, and he could see her strangled. He could see the hands around her throat and the arms pressing her neck down, down, so far down that it would break. He could see her eyes bulging in their sockets and the skin of her face going red.

  His anger was so broad and so deep, it welled out of him like lava.

  Four

  1

  The newspapers were lying in a stack at the foot of the bed when Gregor Demarkian woke up—lying there in the way, so that every time he turned he brushed them with his feet. He felt fuzzy, the way he often did when he was off-schedule. He liked to keep regular hours. He couldn’t remember when he had last slept in this off-and-on way. Maybe it was when he had still been on kidnapping detail, sitting with a partner in an unmarked car at the side of some road somewhere, drinking bad coffee and waiting for hours for something to happen. Mostly, nothing ever did. In those days, all new agents with the Bureau started either on kidnapping detail or on tax patrol. It was either boredom in a car or boredom in a back office somewhere, trying to decide if one mobster or another might be illegally deducting hit men fees from his income taxes. Although why such a deduction would be illegal, Gregor thought now, wasn’t that easy to explain. He could make a decent case in tax court that hit men were a legitimate business expense, at least if the businessman in question was a member of the Gambino family.

  In those days, too, there was the ethnic thing. There were no black agents, and Gregor was one of the very few who could not claim to be at least partly Anglo-Saxon. Hoover had been strange that way, as he had been in many ways. It wasn’t quite that he had been an unrelieved bigot. He didn’t hate all people who were not “true Americans,” as he put it. He just picked and chose. The Bureau had a good sprinkling of Greeks, but no Italians. It had Armenians, but no Portuguese. People of color, as they would be called now, were simply out of the question—but if Hoover had been required to hire one, he would have taken an African American over a Chinese or Japanese. He was, however, passionately committed to Irish Catholics. He always said he thought they made the best Americans. It made no sense, because Hoover himself made no sense. Even in Gregor’s earliest days at the Bureau, the consensus had been that the old man was not really mentally well—and that was when the agents were being polite. A dangerous paranoid jerk, was what Gregor had thought, the third or fourth time he met the man. By now he knew perfectly well that he’d been right.

  He swung his legs over the side of the bed and looked around. This was Bennis’s bedroom in the Mayflower Inn. She also had a sitting room. The bed was a big antique-looking sleigh, piled high with blankets and quilts and pillows. Bennis must have asked for extra. Gregor pulled the papers to him and looked at their front pages: the Water-bury Republican, the Torrington Register-Citizen, the Litchfield County Times. The Litchfield County Times was set up to look exactly like The New York Times, so much so that Gregor had thought it was The New York Times until he’d brought it closer and could read the masthead. The other two papers were standard small-town sheets. They used the cheapest possible ink. Their headlines were much too large. None of them had anything at all about Kayla Anson’s murder.

  Gregor got off the bed and went to his suitcase. His favorite robe was still there, folded. Bennis not only hadn’t taken it, she hadn’t even gone looking for it. Gregor put it on over his pajamas and tightened the belt on his waist He thought of how surprised Bennis had been when she saw he wore pajamas and then put it out of his mind. In his day, nice men didn’t go to bed in the nude, or just their underwear. He was far too old to change now.

  He folded the newspapers and put them under his arm. He opened the bedroom door and looked out into the sitting room. Bennis was sitting at a small writing table next to a window, working away busily on a laptop that was plugged into the wall. The window was open, letting in air that was downright cold. Bennis’s hair was pinned up and coming undone. Great black clouds seemed to surround her head, like some kind of alternative halo. Gregor suddenly felt wonderful, watching her sitting there. This was the way he wanted to think of her, the way he wanted to remember her, not the way he had been remembering her the last day while she’d been gone.

  He shifted the newspapers from one arm to the other and cleared his throat. Bennis turned away from the keyboard and looked at him.

  “You’re up. It’s after five o’clock. I thought you were going to sleep through dinner.”

  “I couldn’t have. I’m too hungry. What are you doing?”

  “E-mail. I’ve got an address just for fan mail. It’s on my interview at Amazon-dot-com. You want to see some of this stuff?”

  “No.” Gregor dropped the newspapers on a coffee table near the small couch. Bennis wrote fantasy novels, full of knights and ladies and trolls and jousts. Her fan mail tended to consist of long missives from middle-aged women who used the word forsooth at least once every paragraph.

  Bennis was still pecking away at her fan mail. “So,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here. We’re supposed to have dinner later with the resident trooper up in Caldwell. That’s where he’s from. Not Cornwall Bridge.”

  “I was thinking about J. Edgar Hoover,” Gregor said. He sat down on the little couch, in front of the papers. There was a television across the room and a remote on the coffee table. He picked up the remote and turned the set on.

  “Start with channel eight,” Bennis said. “That’s WTNH. It’s the one I like best. Thinking about Hoover always puts you in a bad mood.”

  “My mood is fine. I was thinking about the Bureau, maybe. About who Hoover hired and who he didn’t hire. About racial and ethnic discrimination, we’d call it today.”

  “Ethnic?”

  “In my class at Quantico, I was the only Armenian. There was one Greek. Everybody else was at least white. And WASP or Irish Catholic. It was a strange situation.”

  “Did it bother you? Did you feel—I don’t know. Disrespected?”

  “Not really. I was just thinking that it explained some of the things some of those people did later. Charley Constantinus going to jail for trying to cover up for Nixon. Mike Seranian going into the State Department and becoming such a bloodthirsty hawk he embarrassed Lyndon Johnson. Hyper-Americans, if you know what I mean. Going that extra mile just to prove that their loyalty was absolute.”

  “And you didn’t do that?”

  “I think it’s because I knew the type. Hoover’s type. I knew what was wrong with him. Although I don’t think I could have explained it at the time. We had a priest at Holy Trinity when I was growing up who was very much the same as Hoover was. I’ve come to think of it as a syndrome.”

  “You’ve got to stop reading Tibor’s copies of Psychology Today.”

  Gregor pumped up the sound on the television. A blonde woman—“Ann,” everybody kept calling her—was reporting a story on child abuse in a town called Manchester. She had a seri
ous look on her face, but it was a pixie-ish face. He could imagine her laughing.

  Bennis stopped doing e-mail and shut down her machine. Then she came across the room to sit in the small armchair next to the couch.

  “So,” she said. “Is that what we’re doing today? Thinking about J. Edgar Hoover? Have you thought about Kayla Anson at all?”

  “I haven’t had much to think about. Except that I’ve been wondering about people—about how many people seem to need to fight other people off. How many of them need to be isolated. Not that they’re forced to be, but that they want to be.”

  Bennis got out a cigarette. There was an ashtray on the little writing table next to the laptop. Gregor hadn’t noticed it before, although he had noticed the smell of smoke in the room. It hadn’t registered as smoke, because it was the smell he’d come to recognize as part-of-Bennis, along with the lavender sachet that she put in all her underwear drawers. Now Bennis lit up and then went back across the room to get the ashtray. She dumped the small pile of butts into the wastebasket next to the table and brought it back almost clean. Gregor could see traces of ash in the bottom of it.

  “I wish you’d stop doing that,” he said.

  “You were telling me about people being isolated.”

  Bennis was coughing. It was a sort of underground cough, held back, not full-throated, but it was there. Gregor pumped the volume on the television even higher.

  “I was just thinking what I was telling you I was thinking. About how so many people seem to want to chase off anybody who might be close to them. Anybody who even tries to get close to them. I keep trying to come to some sort of understanding about why people kill each other. Not people on the street—not killings in the middle of a robbery, or drive-by shootings, or that kind of thing. I don’t even mean serial killers. Do you remember Ginny Marsh?”

  “Ginny Marsh who killed her baby.”

  “That’s right And all the others, really. The people who do it deliberately. Who do it out of some sense of connection, out of wanting to get rid of that sense of connection. I suppose I’m not making much sense of anything, myself.”