“What about the house?” he said.
“I have to see it. The house was the beginning. The house was where it all started.”
“Where all what started?”
“The four murders.”
“Four?” he said. “There’ve only been three.”
“Four,” she repeated.
“Gregory Craig, Marian Esposito, Daniel Corbett…”
“And Stephanie Craig,” she said.
9
The house was on the edge of the ocean, 1.8 miles from the Bight, according to the odometer. He parked the car in a rutted sand driveway covered with snow and flanked by withered beach grass and plum. A solitary pine, its branches weighted by the snow upon them, stood to the left of the entrance door like a giant Napoleonic soldier outside Moscow. The house was almost entirely gray: weathered gray shingles on all of its sides; gray shingles of a darker hue on its roof; the door, the shutters, and the window trim all painted a gray that was flaking and faded. A brick chimney climbed the two stories on its northern end, contributing a column of color as red as blood, a piercing vertical shriek against the gray of the house and the white of the whirling snow. This time he had remembered to take along the flashlight. He played it first on a small sign in the window closest to the entrance door. The sign advised that the house was for rent or for sale and provided the name and address of the real estate agent to be contacted. He moved the light to the tarnished doorknob and then tried the knob. The door was locked.
“That’s that,” he said.
Hillary put her hand on the knob. She closed her eyes. He waited, never knowing what the hell to expect when she touched something. A snowflake landed on the back of his neck and melted down his collar.
“There’s a back door,” she said.
They trudged through the snow around the side of the house, past a thorny patch of brambles, and then onto a gray wooden porch on the ocean side. The wind here had banked the snow against the storm door. He kicked the snow away with the side of his shoe, yanked open the storm door, and then tried the knob on the inner door.
“Locked,” he said. “Let’s get back to town.”
Hillary reached for the knob. Carella sighed. She held the knob for what seemed an inordinately long time, the wind whistling in over the ocean and lashing the small porch, the storm door banging against the side of the house. When she released the knob, she said, “There’s a key behind the drainpipe.”
Carella played the light over the drainpipe. The spout was perhaps eight inches above the ground. He felt behind it with his hand. Fastened to the back of the spout was one of those magnetic little key holders designed to make entrance by burglars even easier than it had to be. He slid open the lid on the metal container, took out a key, and tried it on the lock. It slid easily into the keyway; when he twisted it, he heard the tumblers fall with a small oiled click. He tried the knob again, and the door opened. Fumbling on the wall to the right of the door, he found a light switch and flicked it on. He took a step into the room; Hillary, behind him, closed the door.
They were standing in a living room furnished in what might have been termed Beach House Haphazard. A sofa covered with floral-patterned slipcovers was on the window wall overlooking the ocean. Two mismatched upholstered easy chairs faced the sofa like ugly suitors petitioning for the hand of a princess. A stained oval braided rug was on the floor between the sofa and the chairs, and a cobbler’s bench coffee table rested on it slightly off-center. An upright piano was on a wall bearing two doors, one leading to the kitchen, the other to a pantry. A flight of steps at the far end of the room led to the upper story of the house.
“This isn’t it,” Hillary said.
“What do you mean?”
“This isn’t the house Greg wrote about.”
“I thought you said…”
“I said it started here. But this isn’t the house in Deadly Shades.”
“How do you know?”
“There are no ghosts in this house,” she said flatly. “There never were any ghosts in this house.”
They went through it top to bottom nonetheless. Hillary’s manner was calm, almost detached. She went through the place like a disinterested buyer whose husband was trying to force upon her an unwanted purchase—until they reached the basement. In the basement, and Carella was becoming used to these sudden shifts of psychic mood, she bristled at the sight of a closed door. Her hands began flailing the air, the fingers on each widespread like those of a blind person searching for obstacles. Trembling, she approached the door. She lifted the primitive latch and entered a shelf-lined room that contained the house’s furnace. Carella was aware all at once that the house was frighteningly cold. His feet were leaden, his hands were numb. On one of the shelves were a diver’s mask, a pair of rubber fins, and an oxygen tank. Hillary approached the shelf, but she did not touch anything on it. Again, as she had with the dinghy in the cave, she backed away and said, “No, oh, God, no.”
He felt something almost palpable in that room, but he knew better than to believe he was intuiting whatever Hillary was. His response was hard-nosed, that of a detective in one of the world’s largest cities, compounded of years of experience and miles of empirical deduction, seasoned with a pinch of guesswork and a heaping tablespoon of hope—but hope was the thing with feathers. Stephanie Craig, an expert swimmer, had drowned in the Bight in a calmer sea than anyone could remember that summer. At least one of the witnesses had suggested that she’d been seized from below by a shark or some other kind of fish. In the basement room of the house her former husband, Gregory, had rented for the summer, they had just stumbled upon a diver’s gear. Wasn’t it possible…?
“It was Greg,” Hillary said. “Greg drowned her.”
At the Hampstead Arms they booked a pair of connecting rooms for the night. As Carella dialed his home in Riverhead, he could hear Hillary on the phone next door. He did not know whom she was calling. He knew only that in the car on the way back to town she had refused to amplify her blunt accusation. Fanny answered the phone on the fourth ring.
“Hi,” he said, “I’m stuck up here.”
“And where’s up there?” Fanny asked.
“I asked Cotton to call…”
“He didn’t.”
“I’m in Massachusetts.”
“Ah,” Fanny said. “And what, may I ask, are you doing in Massachusetts?”
“Checking out haunted houses.”
“Your Italian sense of humor leaves much to be desired,” Fanny said. “Teddy’ll have a fit. She’s been thinking you were killed in some dark alley.”
“Tell her I’m all right and I’ll call again in the morning.”
“It won’t mollify her.”
“Then tell her I love her.”
“If you love her, then what the hell are you doing in Massachusetts?”
“Is everything all right there?”
“Everything’s fine and dandy.”
“It hasn’t snowed again, has it?”
“Not a flake.”
“It’s already snowed eight inches up here.”
“Serves you right,” Fanny said, and hung up.
He dialed Hawes at the squadroom and got him on the third ring.
“You were supposed to call and tell my wife I went to Massachusetts,” he said.
“Shit,” Hawes said.
“You forgot.”
“It was jumping today. Three guys tried to stick up a bank on Culver and Tenth. Locked themselves inside when the alarm went off, tried to hold off the whole damn Police Department. We finally flushed them out about four o’clock.”