Cruel and Unusual - Cornwell Patricia (книги онлайн полные версии .txt) 📗

“Has the light been going on and off lately?” I asked.

“Was still doing it last night. I don't know about now. To tell you the truth, I haven't looked.”

“So you're saying that she somehow had an effect on the lights in the church steeple,” Marino said mildly.

“I'm saying that more than one person on this street decided about her some time ago.”

“Decided what?”

“About her being a witch,” Mrs. Clary said.

Her husband had started snoring, making hideous strangling noises that his wee did not seem to notice.

“Sounds to me like your husband there started doing poorly about the time Miss Deighton moved here and the lights staffed acting funny,” Marino said She looked startled: “Well, that's so. He had his stroke the end of September.”

“You ever think there might be a connection? That maybe Jennifer Deighton had something to do with it, just like you're thinking she had something to do with the church lights?”

“Jimmy didn't take to her.” Mrs. Clary was talking faster by the minute.

“You're saying the two of them didn't get along,” Marino said.

“Right after she moved in, she came over a couple of times to ask him to help out with a few things around the house, man's work. I remember one time her doorbell was making a terrible buzzing sound inside the house and she appeared on the doorstep, scared she was about to have an electrical fire. So Jimmy went over there. I think her dishwasher flooded once, too, back then. Jimmy's always been real handy.”

She glanced furtively at her snoring husband.

“You still haven't made it clear why he didn't get along with her,” Marino reminded her.

“He said he didn't like going over there,” she said. “Didn't like the inside of her house, with all these crystals everywhere. And the phone would ring all the time. But what really gave him the willies was when she told him she read people's fortunes and would do it for him for nothing if he'd keep fixing things around her house. He said, and I remember this like it was yesterday, 'No, thank you, Miss Deighton. Myra's in charge of my future, plans every minute of it.'“

“I wonder if you might know of anybody who had a big enough problem with Jennifer Deighton to wish something bad on her, hurt her in some way,” Marino said.

“You think somebody killed her?”

“There's a lot we don't know at this point. We have to check out every possibility.”

She crossed her arms under her sagging bosom, hugging herself.

“What about her emotional state?” I inquired. “Did she ever seem depressed to you? Do you know if she had any problems she couldn't seem to cope with, especially of late?”

“I didn't know her that well.” She avoided my eyes.

“Did she go to any doctors that you're aware of?”

“I don't know.”

“What about next of kin? Did she have family?”

“I have no idea.”

“What about her phone?” I then said. “Did she answer it when she was home or did she always let the machine do it?”

“It's been my experience that when she was home, she answered it.”

“Which is why you got worried about her earlier today when she wasn't answering the phone when you called,” Marino said.

“That's exactly why.” Myra Clary realized too late what she had said.

“That's interesting,” Marino commented.

A Bush crept up her neck and her hands went still.

Marino asked, “How did you know she was home today?”

She did not answer. Her husband's breath rattled in his chest and he coughed, eyes blinking open.

“I guess I assumed. Because I didn't see her pull out. In her car…” Mrs. Clary's voice trailed off.

“Maybe you went over there earlier in the day?”

Marino offered, as if trying to be helpful. “To deliver your cake or say hello and thought her car was in the garage?”

She dabbed tears from her eyes. “I was in the kitchen baking all morning and never saw her go out to get the paper or leave in her car. So mid-morning, when I went out, I went over there and rang the bell. She didn't answer. I peeked inside the garage.”

“You telling me you saw the windows all smoked up and didn't think something was wrong?” Marino asked.

“I didn't know what it meant, what to do.”

Her voice went up several octaves. “Lord, Lord. I wish I'd called somebody then. Maybe she was -” Marino cut in. “I don't know that she was still alive then, that she would have been” He looked pointedly at me.

“When you looked inside the garage, did you hear the car engine running?” I asked Mrs. Clary.

She shook her head and blew her nose.

Marino got up and tucked his notepad back in his coat pocket. He looked dejected, as if Mrs. Clary's spinelessness and lack of veracity deeply disappointed him. By now, there wasn't a role he played that I did not know well.

“I should have called earlier.” Myra Clary directed this at me, her voice quavering.

I did not reply. Marino stared at the carpet.

“I don't feel good. I need to go lie down.”

Marino slipped a business card out of his wallet and handed it to her. “Anything else comes to mind that you think I ought to know about, you give me a call.”

“Yes, sir,” she said weakly. “I promise I will.”

“You doing the post tonight?” Marino asked me after the front door shut.

Snow was ankle-deep and still coming down.

“In the morning,” I said, fishing keys out of my coat pocket.

“What do you think?”

“I think her unusual occupation put her at great risk for the wrong sort of person to come along. I also think her apparent isolated existence, as Mrs. Clary described it, and the fact that it appears she opened her Christmas presents early makes suicide an easy assumption. But her clean socks are a major problem.”

“You got that right,” he said.

Jennifer Deighton's house was lit up, and a flatbed truck with chains on its tires had backed into the drive way. Voices of men working were muted by the snow, and every car on the street was solid white and soft around the edges.

I followed Marino's gaze above the roof of Miss Deighton's house. Several blocks away, the church was etched against the pearl gray sky, me steeple shaped weirdly like a witch's hat. Arches in the arcade stared back at us with mournful, empty eyes when suddenly the light blinked on. It filled spaces and painted surfaces a luminescent ocher, the arcade an unsmiling but gentle face floating in the night.

I glanced over at the Clary house as curtains moved in the kitchen window.

“Jesus, I'm out of here.” Marino headed across the street.

“You want me to alert Neils about her car?” I called after him.

“Yeah,” he yelled back. “That'd be good.”

My house was lit up when I got home and good smells came from the kitchen. A fire blazed and two places had been set on the butler's table in front of it. Dropping my medical bag on the couch, I looked around and listened. From my study across the hall came the faint, rapid clicking of keys.

“Lucy?” I called out, slipping off my gloves and unbuttoning my coat.

“I'm in here.”

Keys continued to click.

“What have you been cooking?”

“Dinner.”

I headed for my study, where I found my niece sitting at my desk staring intensely at the computer monitor. I was stunned when I noticed the pound sign prompt. She was in UNIX. Somehow she had dialed into the computer downtown.

“How did you do that?” I asked. “I didn't tell you the dial-in command, user name, password, or anything.”

'You didn't have to tell me. I found the file that told me what the bat command is. Plus, you've got some programs in here with your user name and password coded in so you don't get prompted for them. A good shortcut but risky. Your user name is Marley and password is brain.”

“You're dangerous.” I pulled up a chair.

“Who's Marley?”

She continued to type.

“We had assigned seating in medical school. Marley Scates sat next to me in labs for two years. He's a neurosurgeon somewhere.”