Amy was right about the search. In this bare place, it took very little time. I pulled latex gloves from my bag and handed her a pair.
“We’ll quarter the room,” I said. “Everything you touch, you put back exactly as you found it.”
“You think there’s been a crime.”
“He left on foot Sunday evening. How did he get to New Solway? If he went out there to die, surely he would have driven, instead of taking a train to a remote town, followed by a five-mile hike to that pond. No one goes to that much work to kill themselves.”
“Then-the police?”
“If I can persuade one of my acquaintances there. But first let’s check this out ourselves.”
Amy was a scholar, a dogged researcher. She was willing to collect data before pushing me into further action. She was thorough, not as fast as me on her first search, but careful and tidy. We went through the drawers, shelves, looked in the books, looked behind pictures, under the neat stack of sweaters in his closet. Nothing. Nothing about Kylie, about the Federal Negro Theater, about New Solway. No datebook. No notebooks. We logged onto his laptop. The word-processing files had been wiped clean. Nothing anywhere.
Back in the kitchen, Harriet had somehow persuaded Rita Murchison and her mother to a cease-fire. Ms. Murchison was making coffee, her lips a thin angry line. Mrs. Whitby was in the living room, staring blankly at a photograph of her son in front of the old Ingleside Theater.
I had only seen Marc Whitby dead, by flashlight. In the picture, he was smiling, pointing at the theater doors, but his essential seriousness was still evident. Despite having his father’s height, he looked very like his mother, with her slender bones and bronze skin.
“I took that,” Amy said. “We went on a walking tour of Ballantine’s haunts, and of FTP sites, and he liked this one particularly.”
Mrs. Whitby clutched it to her breast, her face finally cracking into grief. “My baby, my baby,” she crooned.
Harriet and Amy pulled her to a chair and knelt on either side of her. I went back to the kitchen to confront the angry housekeeper.
“Did anything in this house look different to you when you came in this morning?”
“Don’t start in on me about the dust, I’ve had it. If it wasn’t for Mr. Whitby being dead and me knowing him all this time, I wouldn’t stay around here to be insulted.”
“I don’t care about dust or no dust,” I said. “It’s the house. I’ve been looking for his papers; they’re gone.”
“If you’re accusing me of stealing-” She smacked the coffeepot down so hard the glass carafe broke. “Now see what you’ve done.”
“Listen to me for a minute,” I said, my voice rising a half register in exasperation. “I know you and Mrs. Whitby have been in each other’s hair, but I’m not part of that fight. I want to know where he kept his papers. I want to know what you noticed when you came in. Maybe someone was here stealing them, or maybe he kept them someplace else.”
She began to pick up the pieces of glass. “The door. It wasn’t locked right. I thought, maybe he left in a hurry and forgot to put the deadbolt on, but he was a careful man, careful and saving, you know, because he didn’t make a lot of money at that magazine, and what he made he spent on this house, this house and that dancer he was so crazy about. But I never came here once all the years I’ve been working for him and found only the one lock on.”
I nodded. So someone had been in here. “Did you ever find anyone here with him when you came in? Or signs of a lover?”
“He was a man. He had a man’s normal instincts.”
I looked at her speculatively. She wasn’t that old, and beneath her frown and ostentatious bustle she wasn’t unattractive, but when I put out a tentative question she bristled. She’d been interested and he hadn’t? It might explain her aggressive possessiveness when the Whitbys arrived this morning. Something to ask the neighbors, whether anyone had come and gone at odd hours. An angry lover could have keys. She-he-could have driven Marcus Whitby out to a remote place to die.
In the meantime, I went through the motions here, asking Rita Murchison to come with me to the second floor to see what was out of place. She opened the drawers and cupboards Amy Blount and I had already inspected, but all she could tell me was that the stack of notebooks he usually had on his desktop was gone.
CHAPTER 16
I found Mr. Whitby in the basement, inspecting the furnace. “He got a good model, the one I told him to buy. Good fuel rating. I told him he needed that up north here. Of course he knew all about winter, going to the University of Michigan like he did. He wasn’t good with his hands, I never wanted him to have to be a handyman, but I talked him through some of the work when he decided to do this house himself. He was methodical, he did things right. You see how he laid that tile in the bathroom? He called me, we talked it through, he did it right. ‘Course, a furnace, I told him not to try installing that himself, get a plumber, spend the extra money, but he bought the model I recommended.”
I looked respectfully at the furnace for a few minutes before taking Mr. Whitby upstairs to collect his family. I persuaded Rita Murchison to give me her keys just a loan, I said, offering to pay her for the time she’d taken to come here. Money and keys changed hands while the family lingered in the living room.
While I drove the family back to the Drake, I tried to urge Mrs. Whitby to return to Atlanta. “There’s something serious going on here, and I don’t know how much time it will take before we can get it sorted out.”
“I know something’s serious,” she said in her leaden voice. “My son is dead.”
“But how he died-“
“I don’t care how he died.”
“Edwina,” her husband said. “Edwina, we’ve had all this out before now. Listen to the lady. What do you mean, Miss-I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Warshawski,” I said, “but people call me VI. All of your son’s papers are missing. I think someone came back to his house with his keys and scooped up all his notes and computer files. They even took time to wipe out his hard drive. This is a street where the kids at least notice who’s coming and going; I might be able to canvass the neighbors and see if anyone noticed a stranger here Sunday night. In the meantime, getting a proper autopsy performed is the most urgent task. We need to know how Marc died.”
In the seat next to me, Mrs. Whitby moaned but didn’t interrupt again. “I will be looking at everything your son was doing over the last few weeks,” I continued. “I don’t expect anything terrible to emerge about him, but-if it comes to that, I won’t hide evidence of a crime. Within that constraint, I will be working for you and-“
“My boy never did a criminal deed in his life,” Mr. Whitby growled. “If you’re trying to imply that he did, we’ll stop this business right now and take him home.”
“No, sir, I’m not implying that. I just want you to be aware that an investigation like this doesn’t follow a straight path.”
“I am not having any investigation done that frames my baby as a criminal,” Mrs. Whitby said. “That’s why I never wanted you to start your digging around in the first place.”
I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Amy lean over to murmur something to Harriet. After a short dialogue, Harriet said, “VI. isn’t out to frame Marc. And if we don’t let her finish the investigation, we’ll always have that nagging worry about why he did die. And Mama, Daddy, you two should go home. We’re spending a fortune on that hotel. I can stay with Amy until-until things are cleared up: the office urged me to take all the time I need.”