I stared at the white envelope for a moment before I opened it. There was no way to do this that wasn't awkward. The envelope contained a check for forty thousand dollars. It was the reward money for finding Tabitha's body. With this money added to what we had in savings, we'd be able to buy a house. My eyes filled with tears. I hadn't wanted to earn it this particular way, but I was glad to have it.
"You're shaken, I can see," Mr. Hart said, sounding pretty shaken himself. "You may not want to accept this, Miss Connelly, but you did the work and you deserve it."
I did want to accept it, and I had every intention of accepting it. I did deserve it. But somehow his words shamed me, and I felt abruptly sick.
To my horror, I saw a tear trail down Fred Hart's cheek.
"Mr. Hart?" I said, in a very small voice. I was not qualified to deal with a weeping man, especially since I didn't know the trigger for his tears.
He sat down heavily in the closest chair, which happened to be one of the wing chairs. Tolliver settled in the other, his face unreadable, and I perched on the edge of the love seat across from them. We had just had a very strange talk with Anne Nunley; now it looked as though we were going to have one with Fred Hart.
Of course, alcohol was playing a major role in opening Fred Hart's emotional conduits.
"How are Joel and Diane?" I asked, another stupid thing to say. I was trying to divert him, since I had no idea what to do.
"Bless them, they're fine," he said. "Diane is such a good girl. It was hard to see him marry again, see someone take Whitney's place. Diane should never have married him. I never should have let Whitney marry him. Out of her league, and I knew it."
"What do you mean? Was he mean to Whitney?"
"Oh, no, he loved her! He was good to her, and he adores Victor, though he doesn't understand him at all. That happens a lot with fathers and sons, though… and fathers and daughters, too."
"You mean Joel didn't understand Tabitha?"
He looked at me with a face that was still wet, but now impatient, too. "No, of course not. No one 'understands' a girl that age, especially the girl herself. No, what I mean is… it doesn't make any difference what I mean."
My heart was pounding fast with anxiety. I felt we were close, so close, to understanding what had happened at the Morgenstern house that spring morning.
"Are you saying Joel molested Tabitha?"
I knew I'd made a terrible mistake the minute his face shut down.
"What a dreadful suggestion. Abominable. I'm sure you see a lot of that kind of thing in your work, but it's not something that's happened in our family, young lady."
I'm not sure what he was referring to when he said "my work," and I'm not sure Fred did, either, but the point was, he now felt entitled to be angry with me, and he was taking full license.
"Something awful did happen in your family, though," I said, as quietly and gently as a snowflake falling.
His face crumpled for a minute, like tissue paper. "Yes," he agreed. "Yes, it did." He heaved himself to his feet. "I have to go."
"You sure you're okay to drive?" Tolliver asked, in the most neutral voice possible.
"Actually, I don't believe I am," Fred admitted, much to my surprise. I don't think I'd ever heard a man admit he was incapable of driving, and I have watched scores of men in many states of being high. They all thought they could manage a car, or a truck, or a boat.
"I'll get him home in his car, you follow us," Tolliver said.
I nodded. I wasn't especially pleased at the prospect of getting the car back out of the hotel garage, but I didn't see anything else we could do. I stored the check in Tolliver's laptop case for safekeeping while Tolliver called downstairs about the cars. We got Mr. Hart up between us, and we went to the elevator. He kept telling us over and over how much he appreciated our help, and how sorry he was he'd spoken to me in an angry way.
I couldn't figure out Victor's grandfather. Finally I stopped trying. It was obvious to me that this man was under a nearly unbearable strain, and the weight of it was crushing him. But why Fred Hart? If our distraught caller had been Joel, I could have understood it better. After all, it was his daughter who was dead, it was his family who was under suspicion, it was his wife who was about to give birth under extremely unhappy circumstances.
With some difficulty, and a little help from the bellboy, we got the older man into the passenger's seat of his car. He was driving his Lexus hybrid, the one like his son-in-law's, and even under the circumstances I could read Tolliver's flush of pleasure at getting to drive the car. I was smiling to myself as I slid into our car, which was very humble in comparison.
Fred had given Tolliver directions, though he was speaking less and less and seemed ready to go to sleep. I followed Tolliver east, again, this time past the Bingham College area to Germantown. We turned so many times I was worried about Tolliver and me escaping from the suburb after we'd deposited Fred at his home.
When Tolliver pulled into a driveway that led into a large corner lot, I was trying not to be stunned by the obvious richness of the area. Fred Hart's place had been new maybe twenty-five years ago. The whole neighborhood appeared to date from the same era; the homes looked fairly modern in style, but the trees showed a good growth and all the landscaping seemed well-established.
What astonished me so was that all these houses had taken steroids. Not one of them would have less than four bedrooms, and that would only be the beginning of it. I imagined each one of them cost a million, probably way more; this was not the kind of place I planned to look at when Tolliver and I began house hunting. I pulled into the multi-car garage, which could hold two more cars besides the Lexus and ours. Besides being big enough to hold four third-world families, the garage had a large closet at the far right side that must act as a toolshed. And there wasn't a single oil stain.
I jumped out to help Tolliver, who was having trouble getting Fred out of the car.
"He pretty much passed out during the drive," Tolliver explained. "At least he'd already given me directions. I hope the house key works. If we're at the wrong house, we're screwed." We both laughed, but not too merrily. I sure didn't want to have to talk to the police again, for any reason.
Tolliver handed me a key ring he'd extracted from Fred's pocket, and while he resumed pulling Fred out of the car I hurried over to the door. The second key I tried turned in the lock, and his security system, if he had one, wasn't on, because nothing began to tweet or blare when Tolliver got the stumbling man into the house. I moved ahead to find the best place to stow him. I had to stop and gape. I'd thought the Morgenstern house was so pretty and big, but this house was overwhelming. The kitchen we'd entered was huge, just huge. I passed from there into the family room, or den, or living room. I didn't know what to call it. It had exposed beams in the cathedral ceiling, an enormous fireplace, and conversation groupings.
"If I had been brought up here, I would believe I could have anything I wanted," I said, stunned.
"Where do we go?" Tolliver asked impatiently, not in the mood to listen to sociological reflections. I made my feet move. The master bedroom, I discovered, was downstairs, which was a great relief. Together, Tolliver and I got Fred onto the (of course) king-size bed, got his coat and shoes off, and covered him with a soft afghan that had been thrown artfully over the back of a huge leather chair… in front of the master bedroom's very own fireplace and conversational grouping. I didn't know who was supposed to have conversations here, since Fred appeared to live by himself. I predicted I'd find a walk-in closet and a bath with a sunken tub somewhere very close. I opened the closet door, and then the bathroom door. Yep. All that and more.