Spackled and Spooked (28 page)

“Have you two met?” I added. “This is Caitlin McGillicutty. Kate, this is Denise . . . I’m sorry, Denise, I don’t know your last name.”

“Robertson,” Denise said, shaking Kate’s hand. “What can I do for you?” She folded her arms across her chest.

Kate glanced at me. I said, “I wanted to talk to you about your friend Holly.”

Denise looked surprised, and a little wary. “Why?”

“Well . . .” I glanced over at Kate, who nodded encouragement, “it’s not on the news yet, but that skeleton under the house up the street . . .”

“Oh, my God!” Her eyes turned huge and her mouth dropped open. “That was Holly? Oh, my God. But . . . she’s in California.”

“Obviously not,” Kate muttered.

“Dr. Whitaker—you know, the dentist?”

Denise nodded.

“He checked the dental records and identified her. And one of the students at Barnham did what’s called a forensic facial reconstruction, and Brandon Thomas—you know Brandon, with the Waterfield PD?—he recognized her from that, as well.”

“Oh, my God,” Denise repeated. “Yes, of course I know Brandon. We went to school together. He and Holly dated.”

I nodded. “He’s breaking the news to Linda White right now. It’ll probably help her to have someone who knew Holly do it, don’t you think?”

“I guess,” Denise said.

“I’ve been wondering about something,” Kate began, now that the difficult imparting of news was over. “Avery said you told her that Holly went to California, right?”

Denise nodded. “Right after final exams. It was what she always said she wanted to do. Go to Hollywood and be discovered. She didn’t even stay for the graduation ceremony. Just up and left one night.” She stopped as the impact of what she’d just said sank in. “Oh, my God,” she added, “she didn’t go to California, did she?”

“It doesn’t seem that way,” I answered, diplomatically. “Didn’t you ever wonder? I mean, even if she talked about going, didn’t you think it was strange that she didn’t tell anyone she was leaving? Or send a card or something?”

Denise shrugged, a little helplessly. “She left a note,” she offered. “For her mom. And packed a bag and everything.”

“Really?”

She nodded. “Oh, yeah. Mrs. White showed it to me. The next morning, when I knocked on the door to see why Holly wasn’t at the bus stop. It said not to call her, she would call her mother instead.”

“And she never did?” Kate asked. Denise turned to her.

“I never heard from her again. I guess once she got out of here, we weren’t good enough for her anymore.” She looked stricken and added, “I mean, that’s what I thought. That once she left, and she had this great life that she’d always dreamed of, she forgot about all of us.”

“Even her mom?”

“Holly and her mom never got along,” Denise said. “Mrs. White wanted Holly to go to college and get an education. She’s a waitress at the Shamrock. She wanted Holly to do better, but all Holly wanted was to finish high school so she could go somewhere—like Las Vegas or Hollywood—and be discovered.”

“She wanted to be an actress?” I’d met my share of those, living in New York.

Denise nodded. “She usually got cast in the school plays, although it was mostly because she was so pretty, I think.” She sounded a little envious, and I could certainly relate. Not that there was anything wrong with Denise’s appearance—other than the fact that she looked exhausted—but Holly had been exceptionally pretty, and it’s difficult not to feel inferior when you come up against that type.

“So she wanted to be famous?”

Denise nodded. “She wanted to wear fancy dresses and diamonds and have her picture in the papers and marry somebody rich and famous, like an actor or a sports star or somebody.”

She made Holly’s ambitions sound very immature, but of course Holly had been very young. “How old was she?”

Denise turned to me. “She’d just turned eighteen in April. Just a month before graduation.” Her eyes started filling with tears as the reality of what had happened began to sink in. “I can’t believe she’s dead.”

“Do you have any idea why someone would have wanted to get rid of her? Did she have any problems? Anyone bothering her? Maybe she argued with someone? Stole another girl’s boyfriend?”

“Who told you that?” Denise said, and then sniffed. “Most of the boys liked her, but she was dating Brandon exclusively before she left. I mean, before she died. I don’t remember her having anything to do with anyone else.” For a second I thought I heard something in her voice, a false note, but it could have been just emotion.

“What about Lionel? Did they ever date?” Hard to imagine that the beautiful and popular Holly would have gone out with the awkward Lionel Kenefick, but I felt I had to ask.

Denise shook her head. “Holly would never date Lionel. He wasn’t popular enough. He liked her, just like all the other guys, but they were just friends. Like her and me.” She sniffed.

“So who do you think killed her?” Kate asked. “And buried her in the crawlspace?”

But Denise had no idea, or so she said. We took our leave and went back to the car, none the wiser.

I was just getting into the Volvo when Lionel Kenefick’s dirty paneled van came cruising up the street. He must have recognized me, because he pulled to a stop and rolled the window down. “Ms. Baker.”

“Hi, Lionel,” I said politely, moving a few feet closer.

“You OK? That was quite a knock you took earlier.” His examination of my figure was a little too thorough.

“I’m fine, thanks for asking.” I folded my arms across my chest.

“Anything going on with Denise?”

I shook my head. “Nothing at all. We just had to deliver some bad news.”

“What’s that?”

I hesitated, but ultimately there seemed to be no reason not to tell him. We’d told Denise, and by all accounts, Lionel had grown up with Holly, too, and been friendly with her. Maybe he’d even have something useful to add to what we already knew. “Those bones in the crawlspace up the street? They’ve been identified.”

Lionel blinked but didn’t say anything.

“It was Holly. Holly White.”

“Damn,” Lionel said. I nodded.

“I’m sorry. You two grew up together, right? Denise said you were friends.”

Lionel nodded. “Neighbors. Took the school bus together in the mornings, that sort of thing.”

“It’s strange that no one realized she was missing for four years.”

“We weren’t
that
close,” Lionel said with a shrug of his scrawny shoulders. “Especially after she started dating Brandon Thomas. Thought she was too good for the rest of us once she had a rich boyfriend.”

“Rich?” Brandon was a cop, one who had joined the police force pretty much straight out of high school; how could he be rich?

“He was going to go to college and become a lawyer or something,” Lionel said, “but then he changed his mind and joined the police instead.”

“Really? That’s interesting.”

Lionel shrugged. Apparently it wasn’t that interesting to him. I let it go for now and returned to the question of Holly White and her disappearance.

“You never suspected that Holly hadn’t left of her own free will? That something was wrong?”

“Didn’t see her much,” Lionel said with another shrug. “She was always with Brandon. And then she just disappeared one day. I thought she’d gone to LA. She always said she was going to. Get out, be somebody. Leave us all in the dust.”

“Denise said Holly left a note for her mom,” I said.

“Don’t know nothing about that,” Lionel answered and put the van in gear. “I gotta go.”

“Sure.” I stepped back, and he drove away up the street.

“What was that all about?” Kate asked when I climbed into the Volvo next to her.

“I’m not really sure,” I answered. “I guess he just wanted to know what we’d been talking to Denise about, and then things kind of developed from there.”

I repeated what Lionel had said, and when I got to the part about Brandon and law school, Kate nodded. “He’s from the Village. His family owns a Victorian a block or two away from your house. To a kid from the suburbs, that might sound like Brandon’s rich, although I don’t think they’ve got much money. They’ve owned the house for several generations, and it hasn’t been updated in donkey’s years. Still, he might have made it to law school if he’d wanted to. I guess he must have decided he’d rather be a detective.”

“Guess so,” I said.

17

Dinner at Kate’s that night turned out to be a lively affair, in spite of the circumstances. Since it was late afternoon by the time we finished talking to Denise, I went along with Kate to Shaw’s Supermarket to pick up the ingredients for Irish stew, mashed potatoes, and soda bread, and then helped her mix and chop and prepare.
Between Kate and Cora, I might learn to cook yet,
I reflected as I creamed potatoes and butter and a dollop of sour cream in a lovely, turquoise Fiesta dinnerware bowl that would work wonderfully as a vessel sink for the main bathroom in the house on Becklea.

We had called Derek to let him know what was going on. He was still at Cortino’s, hanging out with Jill while Peter was finishing the work on the truck, and he promised to come to Kate’s when he was done there. Kate tried to call Wayne, too, to tell him about our conversation with Denise, but his phone was busy all afternoon. Poor guy, he was probably scrambling to get everything done without Brandon’s help. At five o’clock, after Josh had dropped Shannon off, he drove out to Becklea to kidnap his father. Ricky seemed to feel that going back to Becklea was preferable to being stuck in Kate’s house with us three women, so they took off together.

“Where’s Paige tonight?” I asked Shannon as the two of us got busy setting the table in the dining room. She shrugged.

“She has a project due tomorrow that she has to work on. Ricky offered to help her, but she told him to go with us instead.”

“How long have you known him?”

“Just a couple of weeks. He transferred in from Carnegie Mellon the beginning of the semester. Why?”

It was my turn to shrug. “No reason. I just wondered how long he’s been in town. That kind of thing.”

“Not long enough to have killed Holly White,” Shannon said.

“I wasn’t really thinking that.” Or maybe I was. He was the right age to have known her. Same age as Brandon Thomas, more or less: a couple of years older than the others. Same age as Lionel Kenefick and Denise. “Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure,” Shannon said. “This is my second year at Barnham. It’s a small school. He didn’t attend last year, or I’d have seen him.”

“Why did he choose to come here? From Carnegie Mellon? Had he been to Waterfield before? Does he have family here?”

“Not as far as I know,” Shannon said, folding cloth napkins into precise triangles and setting them upright on every plate. “If he does, he hasn’t mentioned it. I don’t know why he chose to come here. Maybe someone told him about Barnham.”

“Have you asked?”

She rolled her eyes. “No, I haven’t. Why would I? I don’t care why he chose to come here. We have students from all over the country, and some from abroad, too. I just assumed he had heard about it at some point and decided he’d like to go to school in a small town in Maine. Pittsburgh’s a big city, right?”

“I guess.”