A Body to Die For (30 page)

“It’s just one of those early fall colds, but it’s a doozer. Why don’t you come in and have a seat. At the very least, it’ll
give the neighbors something to talk about. One of them is probably phoning my wife at work right now.”

The house smelled of chicken soup and Vicks VapoRub. Kass led me past a formal-looking living room, through a kitchen, and
into a family room/den with a brick fireplace, a hunter green sofa, and two matching recliners. The mantel of the fireplace
was lined with family photos. Sliding doors looked out onto a redwood deck with an aboveground swimming pool, covered for
the season. Kass motioned for me to take a seat, and as I did the dog waddled over and wedged her nose smack in the middle
of my crotch.

“Peaches, get over here,” Kass commanded. “Come on now.” As Kass broke into a hacking cough, the dog begrudgingly skulked
over toward the recliner his master had taken and flopped to the floor.

“I can’t believe Anna was murdered,” Kass said after his coughing had subsided. “Do they have a suspect?”

“They haven’t arrested anyone yet. What concerns my friend, the owner of the inn, is that the police don’t seem to be very
thorough or imaginative in their efforts.”

“The inn?” Kass asked, perplexed.

“Yes. Anna was working as a massage therapist at my friend’s inn and spa in Warren. There was quite a bit of local press coverage
on the murder up there, but Anna was still using her married name, Cole, and that probably explains why you hadn’t heard about
her death down here.”

“As far as I know, she’s got no family in town, so that’s another reason we wouldn’t have heard. She didn’t finish high school
here. She moved a few towns over and did her senior year there.”

“So you said on the phone that there
was
an incident in Anna’s past?”

“Yes,” he said. “I won’t bore you with a big preamble. She was baby-sitting one afternoon for a family named Ballard, and
the little girl she was taking care of drowned in the swimming pool.

“It was a terrible tragedy,” he continued after about thirty seconds, obviously interpreting my lack of response as shock
at the horror of his revelation. But what I was really experiencing was total surprise. I’d never once considered anything
like that.

“Do you know any specifics about the incident?” I asked.

“It was in the summer, late, if I remember. The mother was out for the day. She was a widow, by the way, though still quite
young. I guess she’d had Anna baby-sit a few times before and felt comfortable with her. Anna was around sixteen at the time.
The girl was just three or four. She could swim a little, but she fell into the deep end of the pool and apparently panicked.”

He glanced out toward his own pool. “We didn’t buy ours until our youngest was seven just for that reason. All it takes is
getting distracted for a second….”

“Is that what happened with Anna—she got distracted?”

“That was the funny thing,” he said. “She changed her story about what happened. At first she said she’d put the girl in her
room for a nap and then gone into the living room to make a phone call. She said the girl must have slipped out of her room.
But the police either obtained the phone records or said they were
going
to, and then Anna quickly offered up a new version. She said she had actually fallen asleep on the couch but had been too
ashamed to say so earlier. In the end it didn’t really matter how it happened. The family was devastated, especially the other
kids.”

“How many were there?”

“Two brothers—older. One, Carson, was sixteen at the time, and the other—Harold, I think—was just going into high school.
He was maybe thirteen or fourteen.”

“And Anna—how did she react?”

Kass took a minute to blow his nose on a big white handkerchief, making a sound like geese honking their way across an autumnal
sky. “I assume she was pretty shaken up, but since I didn’t really know her, I can’t answer that. She wasn’t on the college
track, so our paths didn’t cross much. Obviously her family felt pretty uncomfortable because they moved within a few months.
I
did
know the Ballards, though—especially the older guy, Carson. He was a brilliant kid, a real math whiz, and he had his heart
set on MIT or someplace like that. His grades plummeted when he came back to school that fall.”

“He was that distraught?”

“Yes, both boys were. But not just over the sister’s death. The mother went into a deep depression after that.”

Of course, I knew all about what could happen with a death in the family. And the Ballard boys had lost both a father and
a sister.

“That’s awful. Do you know where the boys are now?”

“They’re not here anymore, that much I know. They left town, too, about a year later, moved to be near the mother’s family
somewhere. I heard she eventually remarried. Carson didn’t end up at MIT, but someone told me he became a pilot out in California
someplace. But you’re not thinking that this could be connected to Anna’s death, are you?”

“Not necessarily. I’m just trying to turn over every stone. Go back to the incident for a second, will you? Was there ever
any suspicion that Anna had hurt the little girl?”

He looked surprised, then shook his head. “Gosh, I don’t think that ever crossed my mind—or anybody else’s, for that matter.
But then this was before the days when nannies set their employers’ houses on fire. It’s a possibility, I suppose, but at
the time the girl’s death was all chalked up to carelessness.”

“But why would Anna change her story?”

“The thought at the time—and there was never any proof, as far as I know—was that she had a boy with her. And that they were
preoccupied, if you will. Anna had a reputation for being somewhat advanced as far as the boys were concerned. Now we call
it girl power, but back then she was considered fast—or trampy or whatever name you want to give it.”

He began to hack again and spat something into the hankie, almost triggering my gag reflex.

“I should let you get back to recuperating,” I said. “I just wondered if you know what town Anna ended up moving to.”

“Milford. My wife saw her there a year or so later.”

“I hear she married young. You wouldn’t know if her husband was from there?”

“No, haven’t the foggiest.”

I had just one more request. As we’d been talking, I noticed rows of high school yearbooks in the bookshelves that framed
the fireplace. I asked him if there would be a picture of Anna in one of them. He hoisted himself out of a chair and pulled
out a volume, flipped to a page with group shots of juniors, and pointed to Anna’s picture. She didn’t look that different
from the way she did in the picture Danny had showed me—pretty, sensuous looking, her dark hair below her shoulders back then.
She faced the camera smiling. The picture had been taken before the drowning and she appeared not to have a care in the world.

“And Carson Ballard?” I asked. “Would he be in here, too?”

Kass’s eyes roamed the spread of group shots and lighted onto a caption. He pointed to a notation at the end. It stated that
Carson T. Ballard had been absent the day the photo was taken.

Kass snapped the yearbook shut, as if that one addendum on the caption somehow summed up all he’d been trying to say. I thanked
him, and he walked me to the front door. Peaches trailed behind us and, with the single-mindedness of a drug dog searching
for contraband, made several more stabs at my crotch. Before I departed I asked Kass how far Milford was. He told me twenty
minutes—to the east.

After finding my way back to the center of town, I bought a fresh cup of coffee and drank it in the car as I jotted down everything
Kass had said during our conversation. I still felt stunned by what I had learned. Ever since Eve had told me there was something
disturbing in Anna’s past, I’d let my imagination run with it. I’d considered everything from abuse to pregnancy to vehicular
manslaughter, but nothing close to what the incident actually was. I wondered how much it had tortured Anna. Was that the
reason she had constantly been on the move and had enjoyed living on the edge? Eve had claimed Anna carried emotional pain
in her body. On the other hand, though, people had described Anna as cold and distant. Maybe it had been years since she’d
given the little girl’s death another thought.

I was anxious to be on the road back to Warren, yet suddenly I found the town of Milford beckoning me. According to Anna’s
sister, she had married a guy she’d met her last year in high school. If I dropped into the school in Milford, I could look
for a Cole in the yearbook and later try to track him down along with the Ballards. No sooner had the idea thrust itself into
my head than I tried to talk myself out of it. Stopping in Milford would not only delay my return to Warren by at least an
hour, but would all be for a long shot: the idea that Anna’s husband might somehow be linked to her death. Connie had said
Anna hadn’t been in touch with him for years. But there was no letting go of the idea now that it was tugging so hard at my
brain. If I didn’t do it when I was this close, I might regret it later. An old reporter I’d worked with at the
Albany Times Union
had once told me that whenever you caught yourself trying to rationalize away the need to conduct a piece of research, it
meant you damn well better do it. I picked up the map from the passenger’s seat and attempted to figure out the best route
to Milford.

Getting into the school library turned out to be easier than expected. I showed my
Gloss
business card to a woman at a desk in the lobby of the school and explained I needed to look at old yearbooks for background
on a profile I was doing on a former student, and she called down to the library for me.

“It’s fine,” she said, putting down the phone. “You walk all the way down that hall there, take a left, and you can’t miss
it. Can I ask you something? Does
Gloss
still do makeovers? I could really use one of those.”

That was for sure. She’d rimmed her eyes all the way around with jet-black eyeliner and her lipstick was the color of Pepto
Bismol.

“Gosh, we don’t really do those anymore. Sorry.”

I actually had no idea whether
Gloss
did makeovers or not. The only part of the beauty pages I ever looked at was the weird “Beauty Q&A” column, where they
printed questions like “Help, I shave my chin hair. Will it grow back like a beard?” But I had no time to spare for chatting.

The library was half-filled with students, most of them fidgety from hormone overload. I took a seat at a table in a corner
near a shelf filled with decades’ worth of yearbooks. I found Anna’s year and went straight to the individual senior photos.
There she was, preserved forever in a kind of tribute to
Charlie’s Angels,
her hair now featuring wings along both sides of her face. This time she had a somber look on her face, far different from
the previous picture. And though she was pretty—those dark, dark eyes and sensuous lips—there was something trampy about her
this time. She looked like a girl who’d already clocked a lot of miles on a mattress.

After noting that her only activities had been girls soccer and senior prom committee, I flipped quickly back to the Cs. No
Cole. I pulled down the previous three years’ worth of books from the shelf and looked through them, but there was no one
with that last name. I was just about to close the last one, three years ahead of Anna, when I caught my breath.

I almost didn’t recognize him because he had a full head of hair. It was Rich Wyler. And if I’d had any doubts that it was
one and the same, the caption would have swayed me: “Tennis 1, 2, 3, 4 (captain).”

He would have graduated from the school before Anna arrived, but he easily could have met her around town. He’d obviously
recognized her when he started working at the inn. Maybe the “buzzing around her” that Danny had witnessed was him trying
to form a connection again. But Anna hadn’t liked him, Piper said. Had he been threatening to her in some way? Was that why
he hadn’t admitted to knowing her?

I made a few notes in my composition book before I left and then hurried to my Jeep. I was famished, but I wasn’t going to
take time to find a place to sit down and eat. Instead I pulled into a Burger King just before leaving town and ate my Junior
Whopper while I found my way back toward the highway.

My mind was racing. I’d gone digging for information about Anna and hit the mother lode. What I’d found seemed so profound
and significant: A child had died when she was under Anna’s care. Yet I had to remind myself that it had happened twenty years
ago and might have no significance whatsoever to Anna’s murder. If Anna, as I suspected, had been planning to go on some kind
of date last Friday night and that person had murdered her, her past didn’t really matter in the scheme of things. I would
try to find the whereabouts of the Ballard brothers, just so I could take them off my radar screen, but what I really needed
to do now was put as much effort as possible into finding out if Anna had been dating someone new.

The trip back to Warren seemed to take far longer than the drive down, probably because I felt so antsy and anxious to get
back. As soon as I was settled in my room at the inn—and had glanced around it to make sure no one had been snooping again—I
phoned one of the interns at
Gloss
whom I used for research on stories. She had access to a special service that tracked people who had used credit at any point
in their lives. If you typed in a name, it spat out a list of everyone with a match in the system, as well as each person’s
address. Then you could click on individual names to get more info—in most cases a birth date would be listed—and through
a process of elimination, you could generally figure out where the person you were looking for was living. It was great for
research and also a handy little tool when you found yourself fantasizing about some guy you’d had a carnal coupling with
ten years before on a weekend in New Orleans and wondering if he still existed on this planet.