Killing Cassidy (27 page)

Well, he had a point there.

In Madison the Tour of Homes was in full swing. We found the Lanier mansion with no difficulty, but parking was another matter. In the end we had to park several blocks away and walk to the mansion.

There was a long line of people waiting to enter, which gave me plenty of time to get cold feet. Metaphorically, not literally. The October sun increased in strength by the minute, and we were positively hot by the time we reached the table where tickets were being sold.

One glance told me our quarry wasn't there. Two harried-looking women were selling the tickets. We bought two, donned the blue surgical bootees that were required footgear, and proceeded to tour the lovely old home at breathtaking speed. No one, guide or tourist, was very pleased with us as we whisked in and out of the many rooms.

It's a very impressive house, Greek Revival with its own exuberant Victorian touches. But I'd seen it before, of course, many times, and Alan is on visiting terms with several noble English families in their country houses, much larger and older than this one. Still, I admit it was rude of us to glance into a room, push our way back out of the crowds, and join the next group in the next room.

“You're supposed to stay with your group, you know,” said one docent reprovingly.

“Yes, sorry,” Alan replied with a placating smile. “Actually, we're looking for—”

“A friend,” I put in hastily. “We were supposed to meet at the front door, but we seemed to have missed connections. I'm sure we'll catch up sooner or later. Oh!”

I had caught a glimpse, out a window, of a back that looked familiar. “Alan!” I pulled him away; we made for the back stairs.

The crowds were thick. The weather was gorgeous; the tickets were expensive. The tourists were intent on seeing their fill. Without actually shoving people aside, we could make but slow progress. We finally escaped from the house and stood in the back garden, peering about us.

“Gone.” I took a deep breath. “Onward!”

We headed for the next house at the nearest approach to a trot that we could manage, given the crowds, the irregular side-walks, and our aging limbs.

“Dorothy, why are we in such a hurry?”

“I don't know. Come
on
!”

The Shrewsbury-Windle house. The Schofield house. The Demaree house. I'd never been inside most of them. I spared a bitter thought for the wasted opportunity as we rushed in and out of parlors and four-posted bedrooms, up and down curving staircases that were miracles of engineering and graceful design. We scarcely noticed them. We barely heard the docents' recitations of architects who had designed the houses and families who had lived in them.

“I shall have nightmares,” Alan muttered.

“I know. It's exactly like eating a rich meal too fast. We're both going to get mental indigestion.”

“If not worse.”

That was a sobering thought. We pressed on.

It was at the Jeremiah Sullivan house that we finally caught up, and it was my unfortunately expressive face that undid us.

We were at the back of the crowd moving from the dining room into the serving kitchen when we saw her. She was acting as docent, standing in, I presumed, for some tired woman who was taking a break.

She saw us, too, and opened her mouth for a greeting. Then she saw the look on my face, and her own altered.

“Hello, Hannah. We've been looking for you.”

S
HE
bolted. The tourists, bewildered at the loss of their guide, looked around at us and then back to the doorway through which she had disappeared.

“What's through there?” Alan asked urgently.

“The cellar.”

“Is there a way out?”

“I don't think so.”

“Let's go!”

We pushed through the crowd, uncaring now about the usual courtesies, and ran down the steep stairs.

The Sullivan house is the oldest in Madison, built circa 1818 in Federal style, very colonial in feel. The old cooking kitchen is in the cellar. It's full of wicked-looking implements made of cast iron and heavy wood. I could only guess at their original purposes. They are not, of course, meant to be touched.

Alan picked up a sharp one, I a heavy, blunt one.

The main cellar room was well lit, both by daylight from large sunken windows and by modern electric lighting. There was no place to hide. Hannah was not there.

“But where—?”

“Through there!” I pointed to the door marked “No Admittance.” Footsteps sounded on the stair. An angry docent's voice floated down, shouting commands at us.

The door wasn't locked. We slipped through into the storage cellar.

I'd been in there once before with a friend who worked for Historic Madison. I hadn't liked it then. I liked it even less now.

It wasn't dark and gloomy, for it, too, had large windows. But it also had spiders. Many busy spiders. Dusty cobwebs hung everywhere, brushing one's face. I clawed one aside with a deep shudder.

There was no one in the room but ourselves.

I pointed to the little wooden door at the far end. Alan raised his eyebrows again in silent question; I shrugged. I assumed it was some kind of closet, perhaps intended originally as food storage. It was certainly the only place in the room to hide.

A cobweb dangled loosely from the top corner of the structure. That door had been opened, and recently. I was glad enough to let Alan move ahead of me and open it now.

It was empty.

“But—”

It was Alan's sharp policeman's eye that spotted the other door, the heavy door in the outside wall. It looked as though it hadn't been opened in a century or so.

Except that it, too, had a torn cobweb in one corner.

We wasted precious minutes opening the door and going up a step or two of the steep cellar stairs. It was no use. The sloping outside door was immovable.

“She's locked it!”

“Or put something heavy on top. We'll have to go the other way.”

We were met in the main cellar room by outraged docents. We brushed them off, dropped our antique weapons, and sprinted up the stairs and out the back door. I would not have thought my aging knees could move that fast.

There was no clue, of course, as to which way she had gone. No helpful tourist was pointing “that-a-way.” I thought fast.

“She'll have parked by the Lanier mansion. My bet is that she'll head for her car.”

“I hope,” said Alan, panting a little as we jogged that way, “that we can catch her up first. She's in a fragile emotional state, and one never knows …”

I put forth a little more effort and picked up the pace.

We saw her when we were a half-block away. She reached her car, tugged at the door.

The door was locked.

“Her keys must be in her purse,” I said between gasps, “and she'll have tucked that away somewhere.”

She looked up at the mansion, surrounded by its crowds of tourists, and at the same time saw us, nearly upon her.

She ran. Straight for the river.

I will never know how I managed that burst of speed. I can't run that fast, but I did, with Alan right beside me. We pelted down the gentle slope of gardens, raced across the street, and reached the rickety pier just as Hannah arrived at its end.

We all stopped. I think I called out to Hannah, but time at that point went into slow motion. Slowly, slowly I walked down the pier, my hand outstretched.

Slowly, slowly Hannah turned to face us, then turned away, and with the grace of a Japanese ritual, stepped out onto the air.

The splash broke the spell. I screamed. I ran to the end of the pier, Alan shouting “NO!”—and jumped into the river.

I was dead, but I was in a place of some discomfort: noisy, bright. Something tight was around my arm, something sharp pricked it. Shackles? Pitchforks? Was that Nick Shadow? Was I in …?

I drifted away.

“Dorothy.”

The voice was soft and gentle. Someone was holding my hand. Reluctantly I opened my eyes again and focused on a face.

Alan's face.

“Oh. You're dead, too. How lovely.”

Murmurs. An interval.

“Dorothy.”

This time I saw more. The ceiling. The curtain around the bed. The IV line attached to my arm.

“What … where …?”

“You're fine, love.” Alan cleared his throat. “You're doing splendidly. You're in hospital. Don't worry. Rest.”

“Oh. I'm alive?”

“Yes.” His voice cracked. He cleared his throat again.

“Don't go away.”

“No.”

They must have given me some fairly powerful sedative, because when I woke to full consciousness, the sun was streaming brightly in the window. I was sure it had been dark only a moment or two before.

“Alan!”

He had been asleep in the big recliner. He was at my side in an instant, hair wildly askew, clothes rumpled.

“Alan, tell me—”

He was kissing me before I could get out another word. It was very satisfactory.

“How are you feeling?”

I considered. “Not too bad. A little woozy, still. What did they give me, anyhow? And what happened?”

“You don't remember?”

“I remember—oh! Hannah! We were trying to stop Hannah from …” I grasped Alan's hand hard. “Alan, where's Hannah?”

“What's the last thing you can remember?”

“She was … she was running. … Was she running through the Lanier garden?”

Alan gripped my hand and looked at me with his heart in his eyes. “She was running for the river. Dorothy, love, she jumped in. You jumped in after her.”

“Did I—did she—”

“You tried to save her, but you were both caught by the undertow. I managed to pull you out.”

“And—?”

He shook his head.

“Maybe it was for the best,” I said finally, with a gusty sigh. “I hated the idea. …”

“Perhaps, yes.”

“I wish, though, we'd been able to talk to her and be sure. We never had the chance to try our plan—offer her a headache pill we said we'd found in Jerry's trailer and see if she recoiled.”

“You know we never thought it an especially good plan, my dear. She wasn't a dunce. If she'd planted only one capsule laced with cyanide, she'd have known the rest were perfectly harmless.”

“It was all I could think of at the time. But you're right, it was pretty silly. Why on earth would we have taken anything from that filthy place? I still wish we could have tried it. I—I worry …”

“Don't, love. We're sure.”

I sighed again. “I suppose we are. Her flight—”

“Not only that. I've not been idle while you've been taking your ease.”

“How long have I been here?”

“The best part of twenty-four hours. Once you were snoring away—”

“I was not!”

“You were, though. And you sounded perfectly normal, and I was certain you were going to be all right, so I went to visit Darryl.”

I scrunched myself up in bed. “What did he say? Was he furious?”

Alan raised the head of the bed and adjusted my pillows. “He was, but with himself, principally. He's an intelligent fellow at bottom. After he'd finished calling himself names, he launched an immediate search of Kevin's house and Jerry's trailer. Of course, Hannah's … death … made my story far more convincing.”

“Hannah's suicide, Alan. We might as well be honest with ourselves.”

“Not if you're working up guilt about it,” he retorted. “You're quite good at that, you know, and I won't have it. Hannah was an unstable woman with a monomania. Something would have driven her over the edge eventually.”

He sat on my bed looking into the distance, his fingers tented. “She was fond of Kevin, I think, in a distant sort of way, but she got it into her head that she was going to have to repay the money he'd contributed to her cause. It was substantial, by the way. We found the records. And it wasn't just the contributions. He'd also made some of his famous loans to Hannah, personally. She'd been working fewer and fewer hours, devoting all her time to the cause, and she was in fairly serious need of money.”

“Just as we guessed. But you said there was proof?”

“Oh, yes, once I persuaded Darryl to look for it, his men found ample evidence of Hannah's visits to both Jerry's trailer and Kevin's house. Fibers from her clothing and a couple of her hairs behind the stove, and believe it or not, her fingerprints on the lid of the pill bottle from Jerry's kitchen counter.”

“Alan! You'd have thought she'd be more careful.”

“Hannah is our age, darling. Have you ever tried to manipulate the lid of a prescription bottle with gloves on? And you'll scarcely credit it, but they found Kevin's tricycle in her cellar. Tidily disassembled. I've no idea what she planned to do with it. We also found a reel of solder that looked slightly odd. We think Hannah doctored it with something to make it even more dangerous and planned to leave it in Kevin's workshop. His caution with the masks made that plan unworkable.”

I shook my head sadly. “That's why she didn't want us to know she'd been in the workshop, then. Alan, it was all so unnecessary. That's what eats at me. She killed Kevin because she thought the state would take her money away, and they wouldn't have. She killed Jerry because she thought he'd seen her the morning she—did what she did—and he hadn't, or at least he never told anybody. And then she thought she had to kill herself. Three people dead, and for what?”

“They died because of Hannah's principles. Her preservation cause was more important than anything else, including human life. If someone else had got in her way, in some other fashion, he might have died, too.”

I took his hand again. “You and Lord Peter said it. Principles are dangerous.”