“Very well,” he said heatedly. “Dolly occasionally… She wanders in the night. She’s not a well woman, Lieutenant. It’s important for you to understand that. It goes back to an incident that happened here quite a number of years ago.”
“The Weems shootings?”
He glanced at her sharply. “I suppose Tal Bliss told you.”
“He said Mrs. Seymour found them.”
“Hell of a thing for her to experience,” Havenhurst recalled. “She went into a serious clinical depression directly after that. There were suicide attempts, several of them. She had to be hospitalized. We almost lost her, Lieutenant. She remains, to this day, an extremely vulnerable creature. If I seem perhaps a bit overly protective toward her, that is why.”
“I understand, Mr. Havenhurst.”
“No, you don’t understand,” he insisted vehemently. “Because there’s more to it than the simple fact that she found the bodies. Certain details were not included in the newspaper accounts. It was possible to keep such things from the public in those days. But as I’ve no doubt you will soon dig up the official report for yourself, I’ll tell you right now what you will find in it.”
“And what is that, Mr. Havenhurst?”
“She was raped, Lieutenant,” the lawyer answered bitterly. “Roy Weems, the Peck family’s own caretaker, forcibly and savagely raped my Dolly. She was a virgin. A carefree, sunny, lovely seventeen-year-old virgin. And that bastard took that away from her forever. He-” Havenhurst broke off, pausing a moment to compose himself. “We believe that his wife walked in on it… happening. And that she threatened to have him arrested. So he shot her. And then turned the gun on himself. And that poor Dolly witnessed the entire thing.”
Des frowned. “You say that you believe she witnessed it…”
“That’s correct,” Havenhurst affirmed, nodding. “We have never known for sure. Not really. You see, Lieutenant, Dolly retains no memory of the incident. To this day, she remembers nothing about it whatsoever.”
It was a small convoy of cruisers that headed up the Old Boston Post Road toward Uncas Lake. Resident Trooper Bliss, who knew where they were going, took the lead. Des followed in her car. A third state trooper brought up the rear as precautionary backup.
Soave remained behind on Big Sister to attend to the Seymours’ computer and business records. He had, he informed Des, learned very little from the victim’s stepson, Evan Havenhurst. As for the sister-in-law, Bitsy Peck, Soave reported, “Loot, I never heard someone talk so much and say so little in my whole life.” He still had to take a statement from Jamie Devers. And the island was still being searched for weapons. Two of the islanders remained at large. Redfield Peck, who was still en route to Tokyo, and Mandy Havenhurst, who had not yet returned any of the calls placed to the Havenhursts’ New York apartment. According to her husband, she had intended to spend the day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In reality, there were two Dorsets, Des reflected as she drove. One was the Dorset of the Pecks and the Havenhursts, the old money WASP gentry who’d long ago claimed the lush meadows and pastures, the precious Long Island Sound frontage, the village’s power structure and its upper social rung. The other Dorset was made up of the people who plowed that gentry’s driveways and mowed their lawns and pumped out their septic tanks. Some of them held low-end factory jobs at the Electric Boat submarine plant in Groton. Or toiled as chambermaids at the mammoth Indian reservation casinos in Uncas. Most of these lower-rung people were crowded into the mildewed cabins and cinder-block ranchettes that were squeezed, shoulder to shoulder, around Uncas Lake. The fetid, sulphurous lake was situated five miles inland from the shore. The soil was rocky here, the roads narrow and dark. Kids in dirty diapers rolled around unattended on scraggly front lawns. Dogs roamed loose, sometimes in packs. Idle men sat on their front porches drinking beer in the middle of the day.
There was a name for white people such as these. They were called swamp yankees.
Bliss slowed his cruiser way down when he turned off of the Post Road and started his way through their squalid enclave. The resident trooper knew the territory well. He knew it because he lived here himself.
He pulled up in front of a seedy cottage where a rusty pickup with no tires rested up on blocks in the driveway. An ancient sofa was set out in the weeds out front, surrounded by empty beer cans. He parked and got out. Des did the same. She heard music blaring from somewhere, a dog barking, a baby crying. She could smell spaghetti sauce. And feel a million eyes watching them through windows up and down the street. As always she felt the same mix of anger and intolerance that smoldered within her whenever she was in such a neighborhood, whatever its racial or ethnic make-up. She simply could not understand how people could sit around all day doing nothing with their lives.
The third trooper remained back at the corner of the Post Road, a shotgun mounted to his dashboard.
She and Bliss strode up to the front porch together. The sound of a television blared through the screen door. Bliss knocked on it. A girl’s voice called, “It’s open-come on in!”
The room was stuffy and reeked of cigarette smoke and soiled diapers. A slovenly, rather bovine-looking girl of no more than eighteen lay sprawled lazily on the sofa, drinking a diet soda and watching one of those trashy daytime talk shows. A naked baby, a boy, dozed peacefully next to her on a blanket. The girl wore a tank top and cut-offs. She had red hair and fair skin and a small, mean face. Her bare arms and legs were soft and sprinkled with freckles. Her feet were pudgy and dirty. She painted her toenails black and wore rings around two of her toes. Also one in her right nostril. She exuded a certain ripe concupiscence in spite of her chubbiness. By age thirty, Des reflected, she would be jowly and jiggly, a pig. By forty she would be an old woman, her tits hanging down like a pair of accordians. Right now, she was just about the same age Dolly Seymour had been when Tuck Weems’s father had raped her.
The girl eyed them warily as they stood there in the room with her. But she did not stir from the sofa. Or turn down the volume on the TV “Whoa, it’s the resident trooper man,” she said in a mocking voice.
On the sofa next to her, the baby continued to sleep peacefully.
“Darleen, isn’t it?” Bliss said pleasantly.
“Yeah, so what?” she shot back defiantly. “Who’s she?”
Des told her.
“You can think of her as my boss,” Bliss added, by way of explanation.
“No way,” Darleen exclaimed. “That is so weird. No offense or nothing. I mean, it just is, isn’t it?”
“We’re looking for your father, girl,” Des said.
The girl’s eyes went back to the TV “My father’s been dead for fifteen years, ma’am,” she said sullenly. “If you’re looking for Tuck he’s not around. And I haven’t seen him since…” She trailed off into silence for a moment. “Why, what did he do?”
“Where is he, Darleen?” Bliss asked.
“How should I know? God, can you believe these people?” She meant the ones on the TV-two women who had wrestled each other to the floor and were throwing punches. The show’s host was egging them on. “Can you believe somebody would go on TV and actually do that over some man? I mean, why would they do that?”
Because cows like you actually sit here all day and watch it, Des said to herself. This was the truly remarkable part. “Darleen, Tuck may be in a lot of trouble. I’m not saying he is. I’m saying he may be. He’s wanted for questioning in connection with a murder, okay?”
Darleen’s eyes widened. “Murder? No way…”
“If we don’t find him, and talk to him, then I’ll have to alert every trooper in the state to be on the lookout for him,” Des told her. “Believe me, that will not be a good thing. He will be considered a dangerous person. And I cannot promise that he will not be hurt. All we want to do is ask him some questions. If you care about him, you’ll help us.”