We would have preferred to go see Tess without bringing Grace along, but it would have been a scramble to find a sitter with no notice. And not only that, knowing that someone had been watching the house made us uneasy about putting Grace in anyone else’s care at the moment.
So we told her to bring some things to entertain herself-she grabbed her Cosmos book again and a DVD of that Jodie Foster movie Contact-down in Tess’s basement, allowing the rest of us to talk privately.
Grace wasn’t her usual chatty self on the way up. I think she was picking up the tension in the car, and decided, wisely, to lay low.
“Maybe we’ll get some ice cream on the way back,” I said, breaking the silence. “Or have some of Tess’s. She probably still has some left from her birthday.”
When we pulled off the main road between Milford and Derby and drove down Tess’s street, Cynthia pointed. “Her car’s home.”
Tess drove a four-wheel-drive Subaru wagon. She always said she didn’t want to be stranded in a snowstorm if she needed provisions.
Grace was out of the car first and ran up to the front door. “Hold on, pal,” I said. “Wait up. You can’t just go bursting in.”
We got to the door and I knocked. After a few seconds, I knocked again, only louder.
“Maybe she’s around back,” Cynthia said. “Working on her garden.”
So we walked around the house, Grace, as usual, charging on ahead, skipping, leaping into the air. Before we’d rounded the house, she was already running back, saying, “She’s not there.” We had to see for ourselves, of course, but Grace was correct. Tess was not in her backyard, working in the garden as twilight slowly turned to darkness.
Cynthia rapped on the back door, which led directly into Tess’s kitchen.
There was still no answer.
“That’s weird,” she said. It also seemed strange that, as night was falling, there were no lights on inside the house.
I crowded Cynthia on the back step and peered through the tiny window in the door.
I couldn’t be certain about this, but I thought I saw something on the floor of the kitchen, obscuring the black and white checker-boarded tiles.
A person.
“Cynthia,” I said, “take Grace back to the car.”
“What is it?”
“Don’t let her come into the house.”
“Jesus, Terry,” she whispered. “What is it?”
I grasped the knob, turned it slowly, and pushed, testing to see whether the door was locked. It was not.
I stepped in, Cynthia looking over my shoulder, and felt along the wall for the light switch, flipped it up.
Aunt Tess lay on the kitchen floor, facedown, her head twisted at an odd angle, one arm stretched out ahead of her, the other hanging back.
“Oh my God,” Cynthia said. “She’s had a stroke or something!”
I didn’t exactly have a medical degree, but there seemed to be an awful lot of blood on the floor for a stroke.
20
Maybe, if Grace hadn’t been there, Cynthia would have lost it completely. But when she heard our daughter running up behind us, preparing to leap right over the step and into the kitchen, Cynthia turned, blocked her, and started moving her around to the front yard.
“What’s wrong?” Grace shouted. “Aunt Tess?”
I knelt next to Cynthia’s aunt, tentatively touched her back. It felt very cold. “Tess,” I whispered. There was so much blood pooled under her that I didn’t want to turn her over, and there were these voices in my head telling me not to touch anything. So I shifted around, knelt even closer to the floor, to see her face. The sight of her open, unblinking eyes staring straight ahead left me chilled.
The blood, as best I could tell with my untrained eye, was dry and congealed, as though Tess had been this way for a very long time. And there was a terrible stench in the room that I’d only just now begun to notice, so shocked was I by this discovery.
I stood up and reached for the wall-mounted phone next to the bulletin board, then stopped myself. That voice again, telling me not to touch anything. I dug out my cell and made the call.
“Yes, I’ll wait here,” I told the 911 operator. “I’m not going anywhere.”
But I did leave the house by the back door and walk around to the front, where I found Cynthia sitting, with Grace in her lap, in the front seat of our car with the door open. Grace had her arms around her mother’s neck and appeared to have been crying. Cynthia seemed, at the moment, too shocked to weep.
Cynthia looked at me, her eyes sending a question, and I answered by shaking my head back and forth a couple of times, very slowly.
“What is it?” she asked me. “Do you think it was a heart attack?”
“A heart attack?” said Grace. “Is she okay? Is Aunt Tess okay?”
“No,” I said to Cynthia. “It wasn’t a heart attack.”
The police agreed.
There must have been ten cars there within the hour, including half a dozen cop cars, an ambulance that sat around for a while, and a couple of TV news vans that were held back at the main road.
A couple of detectives spoke to me and Cynthia separately while another officer stayed with Grace, who was overwhelmed with questions. All we’d told her was that Tess was sick, that something had happened to her. Something very bad.
That was an understatement.
She’d been stabbed. Someone had taken one of her own kitchen knives and driven it into her. At one point, while I was in the kitchen and Cynthia out in one of the patrol cars, answering another officer’s questions, I overheard a woman from the coroner’s office telling a detective that she couldn’t be certain at this point, but there was a good chance the knife got her right in the heart.
Jesus.
They had a lot of questions for me. Why had we come up? For a visit, I said. And to have a bit of a celebration. Tess had just received some good news from the doctor, I said.
She was going to be okay, I said.
The detective made a little snorting noise, but he was good enough not to laugh.
Did I have any idea who might have done this, he asked. No, I said. And that was the truth.
“It may have been some kind of break-in,” he said. “Kids looking for money to buy drugs, something like that.”
“Does it look to you like that’s what happened?” I asked.
The detective paused. “Not really.” He ran his tongue over his teeth, thinking. “Doesn’t look like much was taken, if anything. They could have grabbed her keys, taken her car, but they didn’t.”
“They?”
The detective smiled. “It’s easier than saying ‘he or she.’ It might have been one person, might have been more. We just don’t know at this point.”
“This might,” I said hesitantly, “be related to something that happened to my wife.”
“Hmm?”
“Twenty-five years ago.”
I told him as condensed a version as possible of Cynthia’s story. About how there had been some strange developments of late, particularly since the TV item.
“Oh yeah,” said the detective. “I think I might have seen that. That’s the show with what’s her name? Paula something?”
“Yeah.” And I told him that we had engaged a private detective in the last few days to look into it.
“Denton Abagnall,” I said.
“Oh, I know him. Good guy. I know where to reach him.”
He let me go, with the proviso that I not yet go back to Milford, that I hang around a while longer in case he had any last-minute questions, and I went back out to find Cynthia. No one was asking her anything when I found her where she’d been before, in the front of the car with Grace in her lap. Grace looked so vulnerable and afraid.
When she saw me, she asked, “Is Aunt Tess dead, Dad?”
I glanced at Cynthia, waiting for a signal. Tell her the truth, don’t tell her the truth. Something. But there was nothing, so I said, “Yes, honey. She is.”