I'll Be Seeing You (31 page)

Meghan knew Phillip Carter was right, that the assistant state attorney would be sure to ask how she knew to go to Scottsdale.

When he left, Catherine said, “This is dragging Phillip down too.”

An hour later, Meghan tried calling Stephanie Petrovic. There was still no answer. She called Mac at his office to see if he had managed to reach her.

When Mac told her about the note Stephanie had left, Meghan said flatly, “Mac, that note is a fraud. Stephanie never went with that man willingly. I saw her reaction when I suggested going after him for child support. She's mortally afraid of him. I think Helene Petrovic's lawyer had better report her as a missing person.”

Another mysterious disappearance, Meghan thought. It was too late to drive to southern New Jersey today. She would go tomorrow, starting out before daylight. That way she might evade the press.

She wanted to see Charles Potters and ask him to take her through the Petrovic house. She wanted to see the
priest who had conducted the service for Helene. He obviously knew the Rumanian women who had attended it.

The terrible possibility was that Stephanie, a young woman about to give birth, might have known something about her aunt that was dangerous to Helene Petrovic's killer.

S
pecial investigators Bob Marron and Arlene Weiss requested and received permission from the Manhattan district attorney to question Frances Grolier late Thursday morning.

Martin Fox, her attorney, a silver-haired retired judge in his late sixties, was by her side in a suite in the Doral Hotel, a dozen blocks from the medical examiner's office. Fox was quick to reject questions he felt inappropriate.

Frances had been to the morgue and identified Annie's body. It would be flown to Phoenix and met by a funeral director from Scottsdale. Grief was carved on her face as implacably as it would be in one of her sculptures, but she was composed.

She answered for Marron and Weiss the same questions she had answered for the New York homicide detectives. She knew of no one who might have accompanied Annie to New York. Annie had no enemies. She would not discuss Edwin Collins except to say that, yes, she did think there was a possibility he chose to disappear.

“Did he ever express any desire to be in a rural setting?” Arlene Weiss asked.

The question seemed to penetrate Grolier's lethargy. “Why do you want to know that?”

“Because even though his car had been recently washed when it was found in front of Meghan Collins' apartment building, there were traces of mud and bits of straw embedded in the tread on the tires. Ms. Grolier, do you think that's the kind of place he might choose to hide?”

“It's possible. Sometimes he interviewed staff members at rural colleges. When he talked about those trips, he always said that life seemed so much less complicated in the country.”

Weiss and Marron went from New York directly to Newtown to talk to Catherine and Meghan again. They asked them the same question.

“The last place in the world I could see my husband is on a farm,” Catherine told them.

Meghan agreed. “There's something that keeps bothering me. Doesn't it seem odd that if my father were driving his car, he'd not only leave it where it was sure to be noticed and ticketed but would also leave a murder weapon in it?”

“We haven't closed the door to any possibilities,” Marron told her.

“But you're concentrating on
him
. Maybe if you take him out of the picture completely, a different pattern will start to emerge.”

“Let's talk about why you made that sudden trip to Arizona, Miss Collins. We had to hear about it on television. Tell us yourself. When did you learn that your father had a residence there?”

When they left an hour later, they took the tape containing the Palomino message with them.

“Do you believe anyone in that office is looking beyond Dad for answers?” Meghan asked her mother.

“No, and they don't intend to,” Catherine said bitterly.

They went back into the dining room where they'd been studying the files. Analysis of the California hotel charges pinpointed year by year the times Edwin Collins had probably stayed in Scottsdale.

“But that isn't the kind of information that Victor Orsini would care about,” Meg said. “There's got to be something else.”

On Thursday at the Collins and Carter office, Jackie, the secretary, and Milly, the bookkeeper, conferred in whispers about the tension between Phillip Carter and Victor Orsini. They agreed that it was caused by all the terrible publicity about Mr. Collins and the law suits being filed.

Things had never been right since Mr. Collins died. “Or at least since we thought he died,” Jackie said. “It's hard to believe that with a nice, pretty wife like Mrs. Collins, he'd have someone on the side all these years.

“I'm so worried,” she went on. “Every penny of my salary is saved for college for the boys. This job is so convenient. I'd hate to lose it.”

Milly was sixty-three and wanted to work for two more years until she could collect a bigger social security check. “If they go under, who's going to hire me?” It was a rhetorical question that she frequently asked these days.

“One of them is coming in here at night,” Jackie whispered. “You know you can tell when someone's been going through the files.”

“Why would anyone do that? They can have us dig for anything they want,” Milly protested. “That's what we're paid for.”

“The only thing I can figure is that one of them is trying to find the file copy of the letter to the Manning Clinic recommending Helene Petrovic,” Jackie said. “I've looked and looked and I can't put my hands on it.”

“You'd only been here a few weeks when you typed it. You were just getting used to the filing system,” Milly reminded her. “Anyhow, what difference does it make? The police have the original and that's what counts.”

“Maybe it makes a lot of difference,” Jackie said. “The truth is, I don't remember typing that letter, but then it was seven years ago and I don't remember half the letters that go out of here. And my initials
are
on it.”

“So?”

Jackie pulled out her desk drawer, removed her purse and plucked from it a folded newspaper clipping. “Ever since I saw the letter to the Manning Clinic about Petrovic reprinted in the paper, something's been bothering me. Look at this.”

She handed the clipping to Milly. “See the way the first line of each paragraph is indented? That's the way I type letters for Mr. Carter and Mr. Orsini. Mr. Collins always had his letters typed in block form, no indentation at all.”

“That's right,” Milly agreed, “but that certainly looks like Mr. Collins' signature.”

“The experts say it's his signature, but I say it's awfully funny a letter he signed went out typed like that.”

At three o'clock, Tom Weicker phoned. “Meg, I just wanted you to know that we're going to run the story you did on the Franklin Clinic in Philadelphia, the one we were going to use with the identical twin special. We'll schedule it on both news broadcasts tonight. It's a good, succinct piece on in vitro fertilization and ties in with what's happened at the Manning Clinic.”

“I'm glad you're running it, Tom.”

“I wanted to be sure you saw it,” he said, his voice surprisingly kind.

“Thanks for letting me know,” Meg replied.

*   *   *

Mac phoned at five-thirty. “How about you and Catherine coming over here for dinner for a change? I'm sure you won't want to go to the inn tonight.”

“No, we don't,” Meg agreed. “And we could use the company. Is six-thirty all right? I want to watch the Channel 3 news. A feature I did is being run.”

“Come over now and watch it here. Kyle can show off that he's learned to tape.”

“All right.”

It was a good story. A nice moment was the segment taped in Dr. Williams' office, when he pointed to the walls filled with pictures of young children. “Can you imagine how much happiness these kids are bringing into people's lives?”

Meg had instructed the cameraman to pan slowly over the photographs as Dr. Williams continued to speak. “These children were born only because of the methods of assisted reproduction available here.”

“Plug for the center,” Meg commented. “But it wasn't too heavy.”

“It was a good feature, Meg,” Mac said.

“Yes, I think so. Suppose we skip the rest of the news. We all know what it's going to be.”

Bernie stayed in the room all day. He told the maid that he wasn't feeling well. He told her that he guessed all the nights he'd spent at the hospital when his mother was so sick were catching up with him.

Virginia Murphy called a few minutes later. “We usually only have continental breakfast room service, but we'll be glad to send up a tray whenever you're ready.”

They sent up lunch, then later Bernie ordered dinner. He had the pillows propped up so it looked like he'd been in bed resting. The minute the waiter left, Bernie was back at the window, sitting at an angle so nobody who happened to look up would notice him.

He watched as Meghan and her mother left the house a little before six. It was dark, but the porch light was on. He debated following them, then decided that as long as the mother was along, he would be wasting his time. He was glad he hadn't bothered when the car went right instead of left. He figured they must be going to the house where that kid lived. That was the only one in the cul-de-sac.

The squad cars came regularly through the day, but not every twenty minutes anymore. During the evening, he noticed flashlights in the woods only once. The cops were easing up. That was good.

Meghan and her mother got back home around ten. An hour later, Meghan undressed and got into bed. She sat up for about twenty minutes, writing something in a notebook.

Long after she turned off the light, Bernie stayed at the window thinking about her, imagining being in the room with her.

D
onald Anderson had taken two weeks off from work to help with the new baby. Neither he nor Dina wanted outside assistance. “You relax,” he told his wife. “Jonathan and I are in charge.”

The doctor had signed the release the night before. He wholeheartedly agreed that it was better if they could avoid the media. “Ten to one some of the photographers will be in the lobby between nine and eleven,” he'd predicted. That was the time new mothers and babies usually were discharged.

The phone had been ringing all week with requests for interviews. Don screened them with the answering machine and did not return any of them. On Thursday their lawyer phoned. There was definite proof of malfeasance at the Manning Clinic. He warned them that they'd be urged to join the class action suit that was being proposed.

“Absolutely not,” Anderson said. “You can tell that to anyone who calls you.”

Dina was propped up on the couch, reading to Jonathan. Stories about Big Bird were his new favorites. She glanced up at her husband. “Why not just turn off that phone?” she suggested. “Bad enough I wouldn't even look at Nicky for hours after he was born. All he'd need to know when he grows up is that I sued someone because he's here instead of another baby.”

They'd named him Nicholas after Dina's grandfather, the one her mother swore he resembled. From the nearby bassinet, they heard a stirring, a faint cry, then a wholehearted wail as their infant woke up.

“He heard us talking about him,” Jonathan said.

“Maybe he did, love,” Dina agreed as she kissed the top of Jonathan's silky blond head.

“He's just plain hungry again,” Don announced. He bent down, picked up the squirming bundle and handed it to Dina.

“Are you sure he's not my twin?” Jonathan asked.

“Yes, I'm sure,” Dina said. “But he's your brother, and that's every bit as good.”

She put the baby to her breast. “You have my olive skin,” she said as she gently stroked his cheek to start him nursing. My little paisano.”

She smiled at her husband. “You know something, Don. It's really only fair that one of our kids looks like me.”

Meghan's early start on Friday morning meant that she was able to be in the rectory of St. Dominic's church on the outskirts of Trenton at ten-thirty.

She had called the young pastor immediately after dinner the night before and set up the appointment.

The rectory was a narrow, three-story frame house typical of the Victorian era, with a wraparound porch and gingerbread trim. The sitting room was shabby but comfortable with heavy, overstuffed chairs, a carved library table, old-fashioned standing lamps and a faded Oriental carpet. The fireplace glowed with burning logs and breaking embers, dispelling the chill of the minuscule foyer.

Fr. Radzin had opened the door for her, apologized that he was on the phone, ushered her into this room and vanished up the stairs. As Meghan waited, she mused that this was the kind of room where troubled people could unburden themselves without fear of condemnation or reproach.