An Illustrated Death (11 page)

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
F
OUR

I
MANAGED TO
get Bianca out on her front porch to wait for Detective Marselli, but I couldn’t persuade her to go up and tell her family. I knew why she dreaded doing it, knew that telling people would make what happened real and set the family on another grief-stricken journey. Perhaps a guilt-filled one as well. Why
hadn’t
anyone gone looking for Gretchen?

I hadn’t realized how close to the edge I was until the police-issue navy sedan screeched into the gravel area and I slumped back in the rocker. “That’s him.”

Bianca sighed and pushed out of her rocker. “Let’s make this quick.”

She still didn’t get it.

We had nearly reached the car when Claude barreled out of the house and down the steps. “You can’t park there. This is private property!”

“I don’t doubt it,” Marselli said easily.

I couldn’t understand what had provoked Claude’s outburst. Marselli was wearing pressed khaki slacks, a pin-striped shirt, and a navy blazer. His olive skin was smooth, his buzz cut trim. With his clipboard he looked like a building inspector.

“You’ll have to leave.”

“Claude—” Bianca began.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Marselli interrupted, smiling. He wasn’t always in such good humor. “I was invited. Suffolk PD.” He took out a black leather case.

“You’re from the police? Did my sister send you? She thinks something’s happened to my aunt. Nothing’s happened to my aunt.”

Marselli gave me a puzzled look.

“Claude, we
found
her.” Bianca finally finished her sentence. She moved over to him and held his sleeve. They started to whisper intently.

“So what’s the story?” Marselli asked me, as if we had just seen each other the day before.

“She’s down in the pool. The thing is, she’s Nate Erikson’s cousin.”

He didn’t react.

“The illustrator? Like Norman Rockwell? You’ve heard of him, you must have. The family is
famous
around here.”

“Your point?”

“Everyone thought Gretchen had gone off to visit one of her nieces, so no one was very concerned. But then that niece, Regan, came looking for her, and found her body— I’m not sure how—”

“Are the locals here?”

We were walking down a slope of grass that had already lost its dewy luster. From this angle the pool was still blocked from view.

“No, they wouldn’t let me call anyone. They wanted to shuffle her off to the funeral home.”
Or bury her on the back forty.

“The funeral home would have set them straight.”

“They did. But the Eriksons aren’t like most people. They’re terrified of bad publicity.”

“Not that unusual.”

He stopped as Bianca and Claude caught up with us and the opening to the pool came into view. “In there?”

I nodded.

“Stay back.” Marselli stepped away from us and pulled a thin pair of vinyl gloves from his pocket. He put them on and glanced up the hill past the garden to the house, staring at everything for so long that Claude impatiently pushed past him to the edge of the pool. When I caught up with him, he was already staring down.

“My God,” he croaked. “Is that Gretchen? It’s not her—it’s just some old clothes someone threw in.”

Except for the twist of golden braid.

Marselli waved us away and I stepped back, glad to get farther from the nauseating smell. Once again I was breathing through my mouth.

Claude seemed frozen in place for a moment, then twisted away and retreated to the other side of the cedars.

Marselli walked to the shallow end and started down the tile steps into the pool. I noticed that he didn’t touch the metal railing for support. Moving slowly, he finally reached the navy shape and knelt beside it. I stepped forward enough to see him lift her head out of the water. Then he was doing something to her face, perhaps examining her eyes and mouth. I looked away.

On the other side of the hedge I found Bianca, lips as thin as a ruled line, arms tightly crossed as if trying to keep warm. Claude was rocking back and forth on his heels, looking gray. They paid no attention to me.

Marselli came out several minutes later. Without looking at any of us, he reached into his inside pocket and took out a cell phone. Then he moved away and started talking.

Bianca grabbed at my arm. “Who’s he calling?”

“Probably the medical examiner. Someone has to sign the death certificate. You know that.”

“Why can’t
he
do it? Gretchen fell and hit her head. It’s not rocket science. Look, there’s the wheelbarrow Regan was talking about.”

I looked up and saw its red metal cradle half covering a bush.

Marselli snapped his phone shut and stalked over. “Who found her?”

“My sister Regan,” Bianca said.

“She’s in the house?” He looked up. From here it seemed to stretch for stories.

“No, she went home. She lives upstate.”

“She went home?” His earlier good humor spiraled down the drain, leaving the detective I had come to love. “She left?”

“I told her she had to stay, that you needed to talk to her.” I felt like a tattletale, but I didn’t care.

“She had to get home for her kids,” Bianca said defensively.

Oh, please.
“Those kids are in school.”

“She’s always been irresponsible,” Claude said. He had morphed from lord of the manor into concerned citizen. “Always wants to blame everyone else.”

I wasn’t sure what that had to do with this situation.

“But any of us could have found Gretchen,” Bianca protested.

“Why are you defending her?” Claude was outraged. “You know what she’s like.”

“How come your sister from out of town was the one who found her? Didn’t the rest of you realize she was missing? A family member disappears for several days and you don’t notice?”

Bianca looked slapped. “We thought she’d gone off to my sister’s in Kinderhook.”

“The same sister who found her? Did she do that often?”

“Sometimes.”

It had to be a lie. If Gretchen was expected to cook every day, she would have had to make arrangements to be away. Her not doing so was one more red flag.

I shivered in the sunless day.

“Okay, wait for me in the house. Stay indoors and don’t wander around. For now I’m treating this as a crime scene.”

“Just because we didn’t look for her?” Claude cried.

Marselli waved that away. “Because we don’t yet know how she died.” He pulled out his cell phone again and waited for us to leave.

A
S WE MOVED
toward the main house, Bianca yanked at my sleeve. “I thought you said he’d take care of things quietly. He’s turning it into a circus!”

“He has to find out what happened.”

“We know what happened. She tripped and hit her head. It’s a terrible thing, but she was old and probably got dizzy.”

Claude turned on us. “Whose bright idea was it to call the police?”

“Hers.” Bianca jerked her head at me.

“Oh, come on! The funeral home said you had to call the police.”

“No they didn’t, they just said we needed a doctor’s note.”

Please excuse Gretchen Erikson for being dead.

“This is going to kill Mama,” Claude said.

I didn’t know if he meant Gretchen’s death or the return of the police.

C
H
A
P
T
E
R
T
W
E
N
T
Y
-
F
I
V
E

T
HERE WAS NO
sitting down to a normal lunch after that. At Bianca’s request I went into East Hampton and bought back a fruit and cheese platter, chicken salad, and bread. Grimly she arranged everything on the coffee table in the great room as if creating an intricate work of art. No pretense of iced tea today. Claude brought out several dusty bottles of red wine that were emptied immediately.

Nobody talked. We might have been strangers waiting to board the same plane. Through the open window I could hear vehicles skidding on the gravel and pictured officers going about their various tasks—photographing Gretchen’s body, examining the area for physical evidence, preparing to move her to the morgue for the autopsy. A policewoman was already in the house going over her room. Claude, still in cooperative mode, had signed a consent form for Gretchen’s room to be searched.

Marselli had explained that the local police had to be involved, that as a detective from the Homicide Bureau he might or might not be staying on the case.

It seemed odd that he didn’t warn us not to discuss what had happened among ourselves. Evidently that caution was only on TV procedurals, although the patrolman standing inside the door was a deterrent to any collusion. We had been told not to leave the premises, though only Bessie and I had anywhere else to go. She was sitting on the couch, looking grave, her big hand clutching Eve’s slender one. Eve wasn’t saying anything, but seemed to know what was going on. Puck, facing away from us in a recliner by the window, was paging through the
New Yorker
, occasionally sipping his wine and chuckling over a cartoon. The rest of us sat like patients awaiting a bad diagnosis.

“Where’s Rosa?” I suddenly realized she was missing.

Something bad is going to happen to me.

The family looked at each other.

“I guess nobody told her,” Bianca said. “She gets so involved in what she’s doing.”

“I’ll get her.” Claude bounded up from the love seat, jostling Lynn. He seemed happy to leave the room.

C
LAUDE AND
R
OSA
had been back for ten or fifteen minutes when Marselli finally appeared in the doorway. I was relieved to see that Rosa was unharmed. I had expected her to be upset, perhaps weeping, but she seemed to have turned any emotion she was feeling in on herself. Her expression was stony above her paint-smeared blue smock and she didn’t speak to anyone.

As soon as he saw Marselli, Claude was on his feet. “What’s going on?”

“Early days. They’re still investigating.”

“What’s to investigate? Do you always investigate domestic accidents this way? Or is it because of who we are?”

Marselli eyed him. “According to the medical examiner, this was not a natural death.”

I had wondered why the police were searching Gretchen’s room.

“What does
that
mean?”

I held my breath. Marselli did not take well to belligerence.

“It means Ms. Erikson did not stumble into the pool and hit her head. She was dead before she ever went outside.”

The whole room seemed to inhale.

Claude rallied first. “Then she must have had a heart attack. Or suffered an embolism.”

“Maybe. But she didn’t put herself in the pool.”

“She could have fallen in by accident. Maybe she was looking at something that scared her so much her heart gave out.”

Evidently he hadn’t processed the information that Gretchen died indoors.

Marselli frowned, as if he had used up his supply of civility. “I’m not officially on this case yet. I said I’d get some background. Where’s a good place to talk?”

Silence. Lynn opened her mouth, then closed it again.

Finally Bianca said, “I guess you could use the dining room. It’s on the other side of the hall.”

“Okay, good. Ms. Laine, come with me please.”

Everyone looked startled. Surely I knew less about Gretchen than anyone else. This wasn’t an Agatha Christie novel in which I was her long-lost daughter given up for adoption, come back to wreak revenge.

I followed Frank Marselli back into the hall and led him to the dining room. He sat at the head of the table in Eve’s chair, and I sat down on his right.

“Odd ducks,” Marselli commented.

“I think they’re more upset than they let on. Why do you think Gretchen didn’t die in the pool? She could even have drowned.”

“She didn’t drown. Lividity shows she was lying on her back and wasn’t moved for several hours. She probably died in bed. From the look of her eyes and mouth, I’d say she was suffocated, but the ME won’t confirm that yet. The only reason I’m telling you is because I need some help with these people. One of them has to know what happened. What are you doing so far from home?”

I told him about the book assessment, what had happened to Nate Erikson and Morgan, and about Gretchen’s odd position in the family.

“Did you ever have a conversation with Ms. Erikson?”

“Yes. We talked about her vegetable garden.”

“And?”

“She loved it, but was still in mourning for Nate and Morgan. She didn’t seem to feel that cooking for the family was demeaning though. She and Eve Erikson had tea every afternoon.”

He drummed his fingers on the beautiful cherry table. “So everybody loved this lady.”

“The girls more than their brothers, I think. But there is one thing. She said she had an important announcement to make at the memorial for Nate on Saturday night, but that she had to check something out first. And no one ever saw her again. She wasn’t there to say what she had planned.”

“Where does their money come from?”

It was a good question. “I think Nate Erikson earned most of it. He was paid well for illustrating the books, and he sold the paintings they were based on for a lot more, especially in the seventies and eighties. I think Mama owns the bank now. According to Bianca, the kids need money and she won’t give them any.” Should I tell him about Regan and the controversial inheritance? That seemed too complicated and tangential.

“But Mama wasn’t the one who was killed.”

“No.”

“And there’s no mistaking the two women. Did Gretchen Erikson have money?”

“I doubt it. Where would she get it? As far as I know, she’s lived here since the kids were little, and never worked. She may have inherited money from her own family, but in that case, why hang around?”

“You tell me.”

“I don’t know. It
was
her home. But she only had one room in the main house, not even her own cottage like the kids. Regan didn’t stick around anyway.”

“The missing sister? What’s her story?”

I looked over at Nate Erikson’s portrait. “She’s estranged from the rest of the family. I was the one who called her. Gretchen didn’t seem like the type to go off without telling anyone. She was—I don’t know—too mellow. So I called to check. The family would kill me if they knew I contacted her.”

“My lips are sealed. You’re saying the only reason Ms. Erikson was found was because this sister came looking for her?”

“Well, no one else was looking.” It was chilling to think of Gretchen lying there, decomposing into something less and less human until . . . “But you can see why they might think that. Regan was down on Long Island for the memorial last Saturday when Gretchen disappeared.”

“You think she had anything to do with it? She knew where the body was.” He wrote something in his notebook. “Another reason for the skedaddle home. So what’s your theory? You always seem to have one.”

But I didn’t, not yet. “Can I think about it?”

He swept a hand toward me. “You can do anything you want to, Ms. Laine.”

An improvement. In the past he had treated me like one of those pesky kids, a cub reporter or amateur sleuth, hanging around the pros and whining,
What’s going on? Huh, huh?
Now he at least considered my ideas.

O
NCE
I
WAS
dismissed, it didn’t feel right to go back to the studio and research books. How could I, haunted by the image of Gretchen’s body crumpled and motionless? I didn’t want to sit with the family either, so I went into the great room to say good-bye to Bianca.

She jumped up when she saw me and walked me to the front door. “What did he ask you?”

“Oh, you know. He wanted to know who lived here. I told him no one had ever left except Regan. If you have other missing brothers or sisters, tell me now.”

She laughed. “But what you said isn’t technically true. Claude and Lynn were gone for a year.”

“Really? Where’d they go?” To peddle Paper Pusher in Japan?

She sat down on the front steps, and after a moment I did too.

“Claude finally insisted on going to college. He always loved science, he’d had his heart set on MIT or somewhere, but my parents wouldn’t allow it. They said college would be a ‘waste of his creativity.’ ” She gave me a droll look. “Like he had any. They were really afraid that if he went off, he wouldn’t come back.”

“He seems very bright.”

“He’s brilliant. He’s constantly researching things on his own. So my father finally agreed and Claude and Lynn went off to Rochester. RIT.” She rubbed absently at a spot on the wooden tread. “It was a disaster. Maybe because he’d never been to school and had to sit in class, but he failed everything. There was no point in his going on, so they came home and Claude went back to his Rube Goldberg ‘inventions.’ ”

“That’s so sad.”

“It was. The only bright spot was that they had missed Peter, their son. The agreement was that he would stay at Hampton Day, and Gretchen would supervise him.”

“Your parents held Peter hostage?”

I meant it as a joke mostly but Bianca said, “Oh, don’t be so dramatic. It was the best arrangement for everyone. But Claude’s serious about inventing things now. That’s why he’s so anxious to get the books appraised and sold, so he can set up a real lab. My father wouldn’t hear of his building anything on the property, but he sees this as his chance.”

Good luck getting it past Eve.

Bianca pushed herself up. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Same time, same place.” Hard to believe that it would be only Thursday. “Do you want me to try and order film over the Internet?”

“Wait on that. We need to sit down with the poems first. Do you have more tinted photos of children?”

I knew I didn’t, but I said, “I’ll look.”