Someone Must Die (20 page)

C
HAPTER
34

There was something about grand buildings with their soaring ceilings and hushed echoes that made Diana’s chest contract. Even the Miami-Dade Library with its Spanish-style architecture, terra-cotta tiled floors, and arched hallways reminded her of that other library, that other time. She darted into the cool, dark building from the too-hot, too-bright courtyard, bought a five-dollar guest card so she could use a computer, and then found a remote cubby.

“To stop murder, we have to kill.”
Gertrude’s war chant. Her prophecy.

Now there was more death, and once again, Diana was to blame. But she wasn’t going to think about Jonathan now. She just couldn’t.

She logged on to the library computer and searched for articles about April Fool that had appeared shortly after the brownstone explosion.

Although she was unable to log in to the
New York Times
without a subscription and didn’t want to create a trail to her whereabouts, she found references to a few articles on recent blogs. She read through them, but they all contained the same information. The explosion at the brownstone had been an accident.

Three Stormdrain members had died—Michael Shernovsky, Gary Cohen, and Gertrude Morgenstern. They had been assembling a bomb intended to be used to blow up the Lexington Avenue Armory. A fourth Stormdrain member, Linda Wilsen, escaped the explosion with third-degree burns.

Nothing more. No speculation. No uncertainty. The explosion had been an accident.

She entered “April Fool, Columbia Low Library” in the search engine. Dozens of hits, but only one that included both references. A human-interest story published in 2000. The journalist had interviewed several former Columbia students who had been attending the university in April 1970. She didn’t recognize their names, and none of the interviewees claimed to have been involved with Stormdrain. She read the article, stopping at the line she’d been hoping to find.

Radicals from Stormdrain were making bombs to destroy property. There’d been rumors that Columbia’s Low Library was a target, but it was never confirmed.

Never confirmed.

The brightness from the computer screen made her head hurt. She closed her eyes and listened to the hushed noises around her—footfalls and whispers.

Di walked through the Rotunda at Columbia’s Low Library, hearing her own footfalls echo in the massive domed room, along with whispers from prospective freshmen and their parents admiring the neoclassical architecture and busts of Greek gods and goddesses.

She’d been taking notes for her art-history class, pretty sure there would be questions about Columbia’s own art legacy on the exam, but now she had only a few hours to prepare for her calculus exam before she needed to leave to meet Lawrence.

She hurried down the broad steps of the library, past the bronze statue of Alma Mater with her raised arms and scepter, and wondered fleetingly whether that was going to be on the art exam, too. Mostly she was thinking about later. Lawrence was taking her to dinner at a restaurant he’d discovered down in the Village, then over to the Fillmore East to hear the Grateful Dead.

She unlocked the door to her dorm room, relieved Gertrude wasn’t there. She didn’t want to have to tell her roommate about her plans with Lawrence and listen to her sarcasm.

They each had a desk, but Gertrude was as bad with personal boundaries in their dorm room as she was in her sex life. Papers and open books that hadn’t been there that morning were piled on Di’s desk. Disgusted, Di gathered up the books. Chemistry, she noted. Gertrude wasn’t taking chemistry.

A large piece of paper with blue diagrams was open on the desk. An architectural drawing. But Gertrude wasn’t taking architecture.

Di examined the blueprint. Printed at the top of the page was “LOW LIBRARY,” where she had just been. There was a diagram of each floor, including the basement. Notes had been written on the paper in black ink in a confident hand.

Administrative center. President’s office.

Career Day, 4/3, Rotunda. Fortune 100 Corps. Several hundred students expected.

On the diagram of the basement, several points had been marked with a red
X
. Di matched the location of the
X
s to the floor above. The Rotunda, where major events were often held.

Including the upcoming Career Fair in a few days.

Dear God.

The door opened behind her. Gertrude came in, carrying several books. She frowned. “You said you’d be gone all afternoon.”

“What is this?” Di held up the blueprint.

“What does it look like?” Gertrude dumped the books on her bed.

“Like a plan to blow up Low Library.”

“We’re planning to blow the armory,” Gertrude said. “You know that.”

“Then what’s this all about?”

Gertrude shrugged. “An intellectual exercise.”

“You’re planning to kill innocent people, aren’t you?”

“Innocent?” Gertrude said. The pupils in her eyes seemed to throb, like they always did when she was angry. “You don’t mean the big corporations that are financing the war machine, do you?” She stepped closer. “Or the bourgeois students who want to go work for them? Are those the innocents you mean?”

Di could smell her breath—cigarettes and something minty. Gertrude took the blueprint from Di and folded it on the creases.

“Who knows about this?” Di asked.

“Just a couple of the anointed. They’re helping me build the bombs. Real whoppers.”

“I think you’ve gone crazy, Gertrude.”

“Bring the war home, baby.”

Di shook her head. “No, Gertrude. The point was to end the war. Not start a new one.”

Gertrude laughed. “You really are a Pollyanna.”

“Well, you’re no Che Guevara.” Di brushed past her to the door.

“Hey, Pollyanna.”

Di turned to face her from the doorway.

“I was right about you,” Gertrude said. “You don’t have what it takes to change the world.”

Di felt a flash of rage. “Is that so, Gertrude?” she said. “That just goes to show how little you really know about me.”

Diana opened her eyes and faced the glaring computer screen. She checked the throwaway phone she had picked up before coming to the library so she could call Aubrey when she was ready. It was after three o’clock.

She knew what she had to do. It was the only way to finally make peace with herself.

She left the cool, dark library and stepped back outside into the sharp, harsh sunlight.

She would make her peace, and then she would tell Aubrey.

She prayed her daughter would understand.

C
HAPTER
35

Aubrey put her mother’s box in a drawer of her desk. If there was a connection between Ethan’s kidnapping and either her mother or father, she was at a loss as to how to find it. She hoped her mother was having more success, whatever it was she was doing.

She checked the time. Just after three.

With Jonathan dead, the Tuesday midnight deadline no longer applied, but Ethan had been missing for forty-eight hours. Forty-eight hours away from his mom and dad. She didn’t want to think about how terrified he must be. She needed to try something else.

Her laptop was synced with her iPhone and contained all her photos. She went to the album she had set up for Ethan, hoping there was some clue in the photo that had caught her attention in her mother’s office. Ethan at his grandfather’s apartment making an ugly face while an old woman watched him. As she had told Smolleck, something about the woman was familiar.

She scrolled through Ethan’s baby pictures, photos of him learning how to walk, then the recent ones of him, until she came to the selfie he had taken with the old woman in the background. She checked to see whether the woman was in any other photos. She wasn’t. She “snipped” out the woman’s face and enlarged it. The woman’s hair was short, gray, and curly. She had blue eyes that were a little out of focus, and a long chin. Her lips reminded Aubrey of a 1920s film star, the upper one thin and bowed, the lower full and pouty. Aubrey enlarged the photo further. Above her bowed lip was a small beauty mark. That’s when she noticed what wasn’t in the photo. Wrinkles. The woman wasn’t old. She had the skin of someone around forty. She could have been prematurely gray, or had had a facelift, or maybe something else was going on here.

Aubrey studied the frown on the woman’s face as she looked at Ethan. It was the expression that was familiar, but what did it remind her of?

Something recent.

She went to her e-mails, opened the one from Smolleck with the photos from the carnival, and found the photo of the woman in sunglasses staring in Ethan’s direction. There it was. The same frown.

She “snipped” out the face of the woman at the carnival and put it next to the face of the gray-haired woman. Same bowed lips and prominent chin. Just above the upper lip, in the exact same place, was a tiny mole.

This must be the same woman.

She was about to call Smolleck when a disturbing thought stopped her.

The gray-haired woman had been at her father’s apartment. What had she been doing there, and what was her father’s involvement? Instead of Smolleck, she called her father’s cell phone, impatient as it rang and he didn’t pick up.

“Aubrey?” he said, answering on the fifth ring. He sounded breathless.

“Yes, it’s me. Where are you?”

“At the time-share.”

“I have to ask you something,” she said.

“What is it?”

“There was a woman with gray hair at your house when Ethan visited you a couple of weeks ago. Who was she?”

Through the phone, she could hear the sound of things being moved around. Drawers opening and closing. What was he looking for? “Dad? Do you know who the woman was?”

“Woman? Oh, you must mean the babysitter.” He paused. “Why are you asking about her?”

“Do you remember her name?”

“Let me think. She told Ethan to call her Miss Alice. She seemed very nice, and Ethan liked her. What’s going on?”

“Where did she come from?”

“Some babysitting service. Star made the arrangements.”

“Is Star there? Can you ask her?”

“She isn’t here.” His voice sounded strange.

“Tell me what you know about the babysitter.”

She listened to him breathe and wondered whether he was trying to come up with a story.

“I remember it was last minute,” he said finally. “I don’t like going off without Ethan when he visits, but Star hadn’t known he was coming. She surprised me with tickets to a concert. She said we didn’t have to go, but I didn’t want to disappoint her. She said she’d find a trustworthy babysitter. A grown-up, not some kid.”

Through the phone, she heard a zipper open. Then another. As though he were going through their suitcases.

“Was that the only time Alice watched him?” she asked.

“She came the next night, too. Like I said, Ethan seemed to like her. I didn’t think there was a problem. Is there a problem?”

“She looks like a woman who was in one of the photos at the carnival watching Ethan.”

“What are you saying? You think the woman we hired to babysit Ethan kidnapped him? That’s ridicu—” He stopped abruptly.

She heard a rustling, like her father was shaking out a large piece of paper, maybe a sheet of newspaper. “What the hell,” he said.

“What’s the matter? Did you find something?”

His breathing was all wrong, like he couldn’t quite catch it. “What is it, Dad?”

“Nothing,” he said. There was a muted shuffling noise, as though he were folding the paper.

Then she heard a woman’s voice in the background. “Larry, are you here?”

“I’ve gotta go,” he said, and before she could say another word, he had disconnected from the call.

She stared at the phone in her hand, wondering what the hell that was all about.

C
HAPTER
36

Her father was behaving strangely, but at least Aubrey had gotten some information from him. Now she had something to work with.

Starting with Star. She had hired the babysitter, which meant that she might have something to do with the kidnapping.

But what about Dad? Was he involved? He had seemed genuinely surprised when Aubrey asked about the babysitter, so for now, she’d stay with the assumption he wasn’t.

But that created a troublesome possibility. What if her father mentioned to Star that Aubrey was interested in the babysitter? Would he be putting himself in danger? But her father had seemed so preoccupied by whatever it was he had found, it seemed unlikely he would bring it up. Besides, it was possible Star had nothing to do with the kidnapping and that the babysitter had been working independently or for someone else.

Of course, all this hinged on the assumption that the babysitter and woman at the carnival were the same person, and that she was the kidnapper, which was yet to be proven.

“Alice,” her father had called her, but who was she?

She sent Smolleck an e-mail with a brief explanation and attached the two photos:

Woman at my father’s apartment two weeks ago appears to be same as woman at carnival watching Ethan. Note similarities in lips, chin, and mole over lip. My father said she was a babysitter from an agency that Star contacted. She watched Ethan two evenings in a row and Ethan seemed to like her.

If they got lucky, the FBI would be able to identify her. Maybe even confirm that the babysitter and the woman at the carnival were the same. But would that lead them to Ethan?

A moment later, she got a reply from Smolleck.

Thanks. Will check into it.

She was surprised he hadn’t called or come upstairs. She went to the window. One of the black sedans was gone. Smolleck had probably left the house after their confrontation in her mother’s office. She wondered whether he had returned to Jonathan’s condo or was out looking for her mother.

She returned to her computer and stared at the screen.

If the babysitter had come from LA and was waiting for Ethan at the carnival, where would she have taken him?

Aubrey discounted a hotel, because with all the publicity about Ethan, someone might notice a woman and little boy checking in on Sunday. So where would a kidnapper bring a child and not expect to be noticed? Probably not a condo, because of nosy neighbors. Maybe they had rented a private house for the purpose, but Aubrey had a different idea.

It was a long shot, but she googled “How to find who owns property in Florida.” There were several links to Miami Beach property records. She chose one that charged a small fee, figuring she would get access to more complete information. Because of Star’s possible connection to the babysitter, she decided to start there. She entered Star Matin’s name. There were no matches. She entered her father’s name, and was relieved when only the house in Coconut Grove came up. Full ownership had been transferred to her mother eight years ago. Next, she tried the address of the time-share her father and Star were staying at. She was hoping to see Star’s name, but the property had been acquired two years before by Time-Share Dreams for $1.2 million.

That sounded like a legitimate business, but she googled “Time-Share Dreams” to see what other properties the company owned. She found nothing, nor any online marketing presence, which she would have expected for a company selling time-share properties. She returned to the county-records website and went deeper into the ownership behind Time-Share Dreams, finally finding a document identifying J. W. Hendrix as the president, and an address in Atlanta.

J. W. as in Jonathan Woodward, or was that a coincidence?

She left the county website and googled “J. W. Hendrix, Atlanta.” There were a couple of near hits, including Janis Hendrix. She pulled up images of “Janis Hendrix.” The photos were all of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, two famous performers from Woodstock, who had died young. She went through the other images. If one of them was Janis Hendrix, she had no way of knowing. She searched every link for Janis Hendrix, but found nothing helpful, so she couldn’t confirm that J. W. Hendrix was Janis Hendrix.

Her research into the time-share was another dead end, but it was very likely a flawed assumption anyway. If Ethan had been in the apartment with her father and Star, Aubrey would never have been invited to come over.

She had wasted almost an hour and was no closer to finding Ethan. Her eyes settled on her still-life paintings. A solitary apple. A vase. A bronze horse in the center of an empty table.

Maybe the problem was that she was looking at each aspect of Ethan’s kidnapping in isolation. She needed to put all the pieces together. So far, she had photos of a woman who had babysat Ethan in LA and who also had appeared at the carnival. Then there was Smolleck and her parents’ interest in Stormdrain, so she assembled the names of people involved with the organization: Steve Robinson, Jeffrey Schwartz, Albert Jacobs, Linda Wilsen, and Gertrude Morgenstern.

Linda Wilsen and Gertrude Morgenstern had been friends of her mother’s. Someone claiming to be Jeffrey Schwartz had gone to the FBI twenty years ago, insisting that the brownstone explosion hadn’t been an accident and that he knew who had blown it up. That had been right around the time her parents’ marriage began to fall apart. Was there a connection?

There was still the big hole in her information. She didn’t know what her parents’ involvement had been in Stormdrain or with the explosion.

She opened her desk drawer and took out her mother’s small box. She studied each photo again, but kept going back to the one with Linda and Gertrude, the two women who had been in the explosion.

Linda had been injured. No one knew what had become of her.

She set the photo down on the desk and pulled up the photos of the babysitter on her computer, but except for eye color, there wasn’t even a remote resemblance to Linda. And of course, her age was all wrong. Linda would now be in her early sixties, and the babysitter was probably twenty years younger than that.

Aubrey looked at the pretty blonde, blue-eyed woman. Even in the photo, she could tell that Linda had been delicate and graceful.

A lot like Star.

Jesus. Could Star be Linda Wilsen?

Linda could have had extensive reconstructive surgery and no longer be recognizable as the Barnard College student in the photo. She could have changed her identity and returned to seek revenge for her friend’s death and her own disfigurement. But why wait so long? Unless she had been planning and waiting for every detail to be perfect.

Aubrey felt a flurry in the pit of her stomach as pieces started fitting together. Star had been responsible for Kevin and her mother’s reconciliation, which would have set up the opportunity for Ethan to visit Mama. Star had hired the babysitter, perhaps to establish a rapport between the babysitter and Ethan so he would leave the carnival with her willingly. And for the last eight years, Star had turned Aubrey’s father against her mother and had been manipulating him.

She needed to call her father now.

She touched his number on her phone and listened to it ring. Three, four, five rings, then it went to voice mail. She grabbed her handbag and car keys and ran down the stairs. Her phone rang as she stepped outside.

Smolleck. She answered. “Hello?”

“Aubrey.” Smolleck’s voice was raw.

Something must have happened with Mama. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“You were just calling your father.”

“What? How do you know that?”

“I have his phone.”

“Oh,” she said, confused. “Where is he? Is he there?”

“He’s been in a car accident. Actually, he was hit by a car.”

Her legs went weak. “He couldn’t be. I spoke to him a little while ago. He was in the apartment. It’s a mistake.”

“Aubrey?”

She sat down on the grass in the front yard and stared at the deep ruts that had been made by the reporters’ vans. She knew it wasn’t a mistake. “Is he . . .”

“Your father’s in a coma. The ambulance brought him to Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach.”

A coma. Her father was in a coma. He’d been hit by a car. Had Star tried to kill him when he asked her about the babysitter? Was this Aubrey’s fault?

“Who,” she said. “Who was driving the car?”

“It was hit-and-run,” Smolleck said. He coughed to clear his throat. “But there was an eyewitness who saw the driver.”

Hit-and-run.

Not Star.

“Have you apprehended him?”

“It was a woman,” he said. “She was wearing sunglasses, but she had shoulder-length dark hair and a white blouse.”

Her heart was pounding too hard. It hammered in her ears.

“Aubrey. You need to tell me where your mother is.”