„I didn’t say that. I said it didn’t quite ring true in all the details. Lionel had an odd reaction that I couldn’t put down to – Oh, how should I put this?“
„Put it briefly,“ said Riker. „If you weren’t such a good cook, Mallory would’ve shot you twenty minutes ago.“
She nodded, as if in agreement, while reading the marked passage on the youngest Winter child. „This author follows Cleo and Lionel from grammar school through the college years. He’s got dates of enrollments and graduations. But all he’s got on Sally is her date of birth.“ She looked up at Charles. „Could be another homicide. Did you question them about it?“
„Well… no. After Bitty’s little exhibition on the staircase, the rest of them were sliding into shock. It would have been rude to ask if they’d murdered Baby Sally.“
By the rapid clicking of Mallory’s pen, he deduced that a simple no would have sufficed.
„Good for Bitty,“ said Riker, who was apparendy allowed to make extraneous remarks between forkfuls of strawberry crepes. „I never thought she had it in her.“
„She had to get drunk to do it,“ said Charles. „She’s a passive-aggressive personality. It was wildly out of character to – “
„How aggressive?“ Mallory leaned forward, liking this detail.
„Oh, not in the physical sense. She’ll take a sniper shot from the woods, but it’s strictly verbal. I think Nedda was being truthful when she confessed to killing that burglar the other night. Bitty simply could not have done that.“
„I never thought she did,“ said Mallory, and her tone was a rather pointed reminder that she had said as much the other night and disliked repeating herself. „Bitty’s a mouse.“
Riker was more charitable. „But last night she nailed her whole family.“
„I’m guessing that was a tactic to get attention,“ said Charles. „Bitty’s emotional maturity is a bit stunted.“
„What gave her away?“ asked Riker. „Was it the prom dress or the teddy bears in her room?“
Charles ducked this sarcasm by filling his mouth with food. Last night, the significance of Bitty’s outlandish makeup and dinner dress had nearly escaped him. At first, he had believed that her mother must have engineered that fashion travesty. Later, he had realized his error. Cleo Winter-Smyth would never have taken that much interest in her daughter. The mother had simply neglected to save her child from ridicule. The absence of parental bonding would explain a great deal. And now he quietly cleaned his plate, having learned not to volunteer any more elaborate explanations.
Riker wore a satisfied smile as he laid his napkin to one side. „So it’s a dysfunctional family.“
„A bit more bizarre than that,“ said Charles, filling Riker’s coffee cup and instantly forgetting all his lessons in brevity. „There’s no real family dynamic. They’re like islands, all of them. I had the distinct feeling that Sheldon Smyth was only going through the motions of playing a father to Bitty. Same thing with Cleo and Lionel. Correct responses without any matching nuances in tone or expression.“
„I got it,“ said Riker. „Like a pack of aliens imitating a human family?“
„Exactly. It suggests – “
„You haven’t mentioned Nedda yet.“ Mallory tapped her pen on the table. „How did she fit in?“
„She didn’t. I’d say she was more of a watcher on the sidelines. Though I did see genuine affection for Bitty. And there was a bit of tension with her sister and brother. Nedda never exhibited any aberrant behavior-if that’s what you’re asking.“
„But she’s been away for a long time,“ said Riker. „We think she’s been institutionalized.“
„Well, I could be wrong,“ said Charles, „but in a case like that, you’d expect to see more signs of – “
„Vm positive“ said Mallory, „and I know it wasn’t prison. We ran her prints. No criminal record.“
Charles pushed back from the table. „So you think she’s been in an asylum all these years? Well then – that dinner party should’ve made her feel quite at home. But she was the normal one at the table. And quite charming.“
He could see that Riker was also rejecting Mallory’s idea of Nedda as a certified lunatic with a bloody past. This detective was Charles’s only ally in the theory of an innocent runaway child. The man seemed very much on Nedda’s side, wanting to believe in her.
However, when the subject turned to an old deck of tarot cards produced at the dinner table last night, a deck belonging to Nedda Winter, the light in Riker’s eyes simply died.
A light breakfast had revitalized Bitty Smyth, and now she climbed toward the top of the house, almost cheerful as she led the expedition to the attic.
Following close behind her niece, Nedda Winter pressed close to the banister to avoid treading upon the corpses of her stepmother and her father. On the third floor, they passed the door to Henry’s room, where the budding artist, four years of age, lay dead among his sticks of chalk and pencils and drawing papers. Her little brother Wendell, only seven when he died, lay on the floor of the next room.
Upward they climbed, passing a hall closet where her nine-year-old sister, Erica, huddled in terror and absolute darkness, listening for the footsteps of a monster and hoping that death would pass her by. Nedda trod quietly past this door and fancied that she could hear the beat of a child’s wild heart.
I’m so sorry.
The staircase narrowed as they approached the last landing below the attic. Here she skirted a small corpse on the stairs. Mary had escaped the nursery in a two-year-old’s version of mad flight, and she had died in a toddle down the steps.
The dead were invisible to Bitty, who resided solidly in the present. Nedda lived much of her life in the past, where the nanny on the hallway carpet was more recently deceased, the flesh still warm, and the bit of blood on her breast had not yet dried. Nedda looked down at the face of this teenager, Gwen Rawly, who had previously believed that she was immortal. The girl’s lips were parted, as if to ask Why? Beyond the young nanny’s body was the door of the nursery.
It was closed in the current century.
Bitty and Nedda paused beneath the great glass dome that crowned the fourth floor and divided the two attics. Here the stairs were split like a forked tongue. The steps curving to their right led to the north attic used for storage. Bitty climbed toward the south attic, a repository for personal effects of the dead. This was a family custom begun in the eighteen hundreds.
Following her niece, Nedda entered the narrow room of slanting rafters and the old familiar smells of rotting history and dust. It was illuminated by a row of small gabled windows, and appeared to be unchanged. Early memories were clear pictures in her mind, all that she had had to feed upon for so many years.
She looked at the trunks stacked in rows and representing generations of her forebearers. The contents were the odds and ends of life on earth. Her eyes gravitated to her mother’s trunk. As a child, she had spent many hours counting up the dresses, lace handkerchiefs, hairpins and such, souvenirs of a woman who had loved her, a woman who had died when Nedda was too young to memorize her living face. This morning, she passed it by, following her niece between the rows of the murdered Winters, adults and children.
„You know what this place reminds me of?“ Bitty reached up to pull on strings that switched on the overhead bulbs as she walked the length of the attic. „Early Christian catacombs, corpses stacked up like cordwood. Of course, there are no actual bodies.“
All the brass plates on this row of trunks had been polished by a ringer through the dust, the better to make out the letters etched in old-fashioned script. Nedda knelt on the floor to read the names.
Bitty squatted down beside her. „I couldn’t find a trunk for Baby Sally. It’s not in the north attic or the basement.“ She looked up at her aunt. „Sally had a trunk of her own, didn’t she?“