A Drunkard's Path (32 page)

I walked out of the police station and headed for my car. I wasn’t going anywhere, but it was the only place I could find that would give me the privacy I needed. As soon as I closed the door, I dialed my phone.

It rang. And rang again. I didn’t want to leave a message but was beginning to think I’d have no choice when a woman finally answered.

“Violet Kelly?” I asked.

“No, she’s sleeping,” a friendly woman said. “This is her daughter. Can I help you?”

“This is Rachel?”

“Who is this?”

I had two options, mentioning her daughter and finding out if she knew her child was dead, or mentioning her father. Either way was a minefield.

“Do you know who Oliver White is?” I asked.

“Are you from the police?”

“You’ve talked to police?” I asked.

“Why? Who are you?”

“I’m . . .” I hesitated just long enough to sense a change on the other end of the phone.

“Are you a friend of his or something?” Her tone had turned hostile. “Look, if you are a friend of his, tell him I will never forgive him for what he did to my mother, or to my daughter.”

And then she hung up.

I sat back in the car. I was sure now. Jesse was convinced Oliver was the killer. Powell seemed to be as well. In fact it seemed obvious.

Except I kept coming back to something Oliver said to me in class: “Let yourself be wrong.” Something about Oliver being the killer felt too easy. Or maybe it was just that as I got to know Oliver and saw the effect he had on my grandmother, I wanted to be wrong.

When I walked into class on Thursday, I watched Oliver unpack a box of small wooden figures. He was so friendly and relaxed and seemed to genuinely enjoy talking with the students. Gone were the pretentious speeches of the early classes. Now he had gotten to know everyone by name and was as much a cheerleader as teacher, seeing something to praise in everyone’s work. When I forgot about all that was happening outside of the studio, this was my favorite class.

“Since quite a lot of you seemed to feel intimidated by our live model, I’ve decided to take a step back and introduce you to these,” Oliver said as he held up one of the wooden figures. “They are a tried-and-true way to practice drawing the human figure in poses. Not as much fun as the real thing, but this way we can focus on proportion without getting hung up on nudity. You’ll each get one, and you will use it to draw three poses, focusing on the basic human form. No need for great artistry here, just technique. For those of you who cannot avoid great artistry, feel free to embellish.”

As he said it, his eyes went to the easel behind mine, where Kennette usually worked, and I realized Kennette wasn’t there. She had been making her self scarce in the couple of days since Carrie’s café had opened. I hadn’t been able to find her when it was time to drive to school, but I assumed she’d get the bus. It had never occurred to me that without me to give her a ride she wouldn’t come to class, and I felt horribly guilty about it.

“No sign of our Kennette, I see,” Oliver said as he handed me one of the wooden models.

“I don’t know what happened to her.”

“She’ll come next week, I hope. It’s our last class and I have a surprise for her.” His eyes twinkled and he moved on before I could ask what he meant. Instead I focused on what was in front of me—a tiny wooden man. I made him stand with one arm on his hips, with one leg bent, and then with his legs crossed over each other as if he were meditating. I found it easy to focus only on the proportion, the line, and the shadow without adding the emotion that’s hard to escape with a real model—and in life. Maybe that was my problem with the investigation. I felt like the answer was out there, in hard lines and cool shadows, but I couldn’t get past my emotions and see it.

It didn’t help that halfway through class my phone beeped. When I checked, I saw that it was a text from Powell. It read: “It’s a match.”

I looked up at the happy professor at the front of the class, advising one of the students on a new pose for his wooden model. It was odd. Now that I had exactly the information that could finally finish this investigation and answer the questions I’d been nagged by for weeks, I felt, well, disappointed. I had wanted to “let myself be wrong” but there was little doubt that I hadn’t been.

“Why the long face?” Oliver smiled at me as I gathered my things after class. I had been slow to finish; I’d lost my motivation after the text message. Now nearly everyone in class was already gone.

“You’re Lily’s grandfather,” I said flatly.

Oliver turned white. “Why don’t you come to my office?”

I followed him out of class, down the hall, and into his office without either of us saying another word. Once he closed the door behind me, I realized I’d left my purse, and my cell phone, back in the class. A decision I deeply regretted. I positioned myself near the door in case I needed a quick escape.

“I’d ask you how you know something like that but obviously you have a very curious mind,” he said.

“So you don’t deny it?”

“No. It was brought to my attention recently. Too late for me to do anything to help the child.”

“After she was dead?”

“Apparently. Though I didn’t know it at the time. Sandra was acting as liaison. She told me about Lily and showed me a photo of my former wife, Lily’s grandmother. But she told me that Lily wasn’t willing to come see me,” Oliver sighed. “Sandra was trying to talk her into it.”

“Sandra sent you the text. The one about needing more time.”

He seemed confused, but then nodded. “How have you figured this all out? I thought I had hidden it well,” he said. “Sandra told me about Lily, not that she was dead, but that she was my granddaughter, after the first class. She told me Lily was angry and didn’t want to see me. Sandra was quite upset about it. She said she needed money to help pay for expenses—Lily’s expenses. Perhaps I was gullible but I thought she was trying very hard on my behalf. I think now that she wasn’t.”

If Sandra had killed Lily, which now seemed likely, then Oliver was giving himself a good motive for having killed Sandra. Maybe Susanne’s hope that Oliver had killed out of grief over the loss of his granddaughter was true. And maybe it was reason enough to let him off the hook. The only problem was that Powell now had evidence against Oliver, evidence I’d supplied.

“Do you think Sandra was conning you?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I think that’s a fair assumption. She knew I had quite a bit of money and that I was donating it to the school. Of course the papers hadn’t been finalized yet.”

“And you backed out of the deal.” I suddenly remembered the signs that read “On Loan” in the gallery.

“I chose several of my more personal paintings to remove from the endowment. If I had a family, then I wanted certain paintings to go to them.”

“Why care now? You abandoned your wife and daughter more than fifty years ago.”

Oliver sank into a chair. “I did.”

“Is that why you killed Sandra, because she killed Lily?”

Oliver looked up at me. “You think Sandra killed Lily? Oh God, if Lily came here looking for me and died as a result, then . . .” His voice trailed off.

The man who only twenty minutes before had been so happy, now seemed broken and old. I wasn’t afraid of him, nor was I willing to be the one to call the police, but that didn’t mean I liked any of his answers.

“How could you do it?” I asked.

Oliver just shook his head, “I thought the past should stay in the past. I guess that’s not possible.”

“I think you should stay away from my grandmother,” I said.

He nodded. “I’m sorry, Nell. I did not intend to cause you, or Eleanor, any pain.”

It was an unsatisfying end to a puzzle I’d been working on for more than a month. I walked out of his office, and the school, feeling as though I was somehow guilty too. Not of murder, obviously, but of stirring up ghosts and breaking my grandmother’s heart. And somehow, at least at that moment, my crime seemed worse than Oliver’s.

 

 

 

 

W
hen I got to the shop, I noticed that it was quiet. One customer was finishing up her purchase as I walked in. Bill Vogel, the artist from Spuyten Duyvil, was pulling bolts of bright solids that had just arrived.

“I’m doing something Amish but not,” he was telling Eleanor. “It’s a whole new direction for me.”

Eleanor was listening, but she didn’t seem enthusiastic. “You’re always testing boundaries,” she said flatly. It was unlike her to be anything but excited about what might happen to her fabric once it left her shop. But Bill didn’t seem to notice.

“I suppose artists are always testing boundaries.” He smiled. “That’s what makes great art.”

“Perhaps it’s not such a great quality in people, though,” Eleanor said. She looked up and saw me standing near the front counter. “Ring up Bill, will you, Nell?’

I nodded. As I finished Bill’s sale, I noticed that Barney was following Eleanor around. When she walked toward the office, he followed. When she walked to the cutting table or the checkout desk, or to straighten a bolt of fabric, he followed. I knew what it meant. He was worried. And it made me worried too.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Eleanor looked at me. Her eyes had the glassy brightness of someone who had just been crying.

“Slow day,” she said. “I’m thinking of making kits of that Irish chain you’ve been working on. You picked really lovely colors, and I think the customers would like it. Of course you need to finish it.”

“You’re rambling.”

“Am I? I thought I was making a point. Well you would know better than I, Nell. You seem to know better than anyone about everything.”

Ouch. “You talked to Oliver.”

Eleanor picked up a twelve-inch acrylic ruler as if she were about to slap my hand with it. “Why do you feel the need to protect me? I’ve been around awhile, you know. I’ve done a fair job of keeping myself fed and clothed without your help.”

“He was lying to you.”

“About what?”

“Well, he killed someone for starters.”

“Which he admitted?”

“Not exactly.”

“But you have proof?”

“Not really,” I said. “But it adds up. I know that Lily, the first victim, was his granddaughter. I know he abandoned his pregnant wife in England.”

“She was not pregnant with his child. At least that’s what she told him. She said she had an affair with the man she later married. So he left. Maybe it was foolish, but they were young and the marriage was difficult. When he discovered that the child was his, he tried to find them, but Violet had remarried, the child had a father, and Oliver felt that perhaps it was best to leave things alone. It nearly destroyed him to let go of his only child. That’s why he took up drinking.”

“He told you that?”

“The first night we had dinner.”

I hadn’t expected that. I had worked so hard to uncover all of it that I assumed it was a secret. “But he’s lying about his name. Maggie found out—”

“So that’s what all those secret meetings were about.”

“You knew we were meeting secretly?”

Eleanor laughed, but there was no joy in it. “At Bernie’s pharmacy, at Susanne’s house, and Carrie’s. Honestly, Nell, I know all your cars, all your schedules.”

I was losing, so I changed tactics. I sat on the stool near the cash register and shrugged. “We were trying to protect you, whether you needed it or not. And we found out that Oliver’s last name—”

“Is Lyons,” she finished the sentence. “He changed it to White when he came to the States because he felt like a new life needed a blank canvas. Nothing sinister in it.”

“I told him to stop seeing you,” I admitted. She knew everything else. There was no point in hiding it.

“I’m aware of that,” she countered. “I told him that you don’t have the authority to determine who my friends are, but he already felt that somehow his past and my . . . ‘lifetime of decency,’ he calls it, make him unworthy of me. I thought we were finally getting to a place where he was making peace with it. But now he feels that without your blessing it would be a mistake to continue our friendship.”