“The police lady. Is she mad at us?”
I stare at Teddy, bewildered. Nothing about this conversation makes any sense. “No, buddy, everything’s fine. No one’s getting arrested. Just finish up, okay?”
I close the door and he latches it behind me.
Detective Briggs is still waiting.
“Everything all right?”
“He’s fine.”
“I mean you, Mallory. You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
I sink into a chair to steady my thoughts, and I say I’m still reeling from the phone call. “I’d convinced myself that Annie Barrett was murdered. I can’t believe people have been spreading this story for seventy years.”
“Well, the truth doesn’t reflect well on Spring Brook. If the town had been a little more tolerant, maybe Willie and Annie could have stayed here. Maybe George wouldn’t have felt the need to stage a crime scene.” Briggs laughs. “You know, there’s still guys in my department who think the murder really happened? I tell them the truth, and they act like I’m trying to stir things up, a black woman cop handing out race cards.” She shrugs. “Anyhow, I don’t want to keep you long. I just had a quick question. We found Mitzi’s cell phone in her kitchen. The battery had run down but we found a charger and got it working again. Seems she was in the middle of sending you a text. It doesn’t make any sense to me, but maybe it’ll mean something to you.” She looks down at her notepad, squinting over the tops of her reading glasses. “Here’s what it says: ‘We need to talk. I was wrong about before. Anya isn’t a name, it’s’”— Briggs stops and looks to me. “That’s as far as she got. Do those words mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“How about Anya? Is that possibly a typo?”
I nod in the direction of the shower stall. “Anya is the name of Teddy’s invisible friend.”
“Invisible friend?”
“He’s five. He has an active imagination.”
“I know she’s not real,” he calls out. “I know she’s just make-believe.”
Briggs furrows her brow, puzzled by the cryptic message. Then she flips forward a few pages in her notepad.
“Yesterday I spoke with Caroline Maxwell, and she says she heard Mitzi having an argument on Thursday night. She saw Mitzi leave her house in a nightgown around ten thirty P.M. Did you happen to hear anything?”
“No, but I wasn’t here. I was at Adrian’s house. Three blocks away. His parents were having a party.” At ten thirty Thursday night, I was sitting in the gardens of the Flower Castle, wasting my time with The Collected Works of Anne C. Barrett. “Does the coroner know how Mitzi died?”
Briggs lowers her voice so Teddy won’t hear. “Unfortunately it appears to be drug-related. Acute lung injury stemming from an overdose. Sometime Thursday night or early Friday morning. But don’t go printing that on Facebook. Keep it under your hat for a few days.”
“Was it heroin?”
She’s surprised. “How did you know?”
“It’s just a guess. I saw some things in her house. There were needle caps all over her living room.”
“Well, you guessed right,” Briggs says. “You don’t hear about older people using hard drugs, but the Philly hospitals see them every week. It’s more common than you think. Maybe her visitor was a dealer. Maybe they got in an argument. We’re still piecing it together.” She offers me another business card but I tell her I still have the first one. “If you think of anything else, give me a call, okay?”
After Briggs leaves, Teddy opens the door to the shower stall, squeaky clean and dressed in his fire truck pajamas. I give him a hug and tell him I’ll see him in the morning, to say my goodbyes. Then I walk him over to the patio and send him inside the house.
I manage to keep my composure until I’m back inside my cottage and I’ve locked my door. Then I fall forward onto my bed and bury my face in my pillow. There have been so many bombshell revelations in the last thirty minutes, I can’t begin to process them all. It’s too overwhelming. The pieces of the puzzle seem more scattered than ever.
But there’s one thing I know for sure:
The Maxwells have been lying to me.
26
I wait until dark, until I’m sure Teddy is asleep in bed, before going into the house to speak with Ted and Caroline. They’re sitting in the den, at opposite ends of the sofa, surrounded by all my crazy sketches of dark forests, lost children, and winged angels. In one corner of the room, there’s a drop cloth and some painting supplies—rollers, drywall compound, two gallons of Benjamin Moore Atrium White. Like they’re planning to paint in the morning, after Russell takes me away.
Caroline is sipping a glass of wine and there’s a bottle of Kendall-Jackson merlot within reach. Ted is holding a mug of hot tea, he’s carefully blowing across its surface, and they’re listening to some yacht rock radio station on their Alexa speaker. They look happy to see me.
“We were hoping you’d come by,” Caroline says. “Are you all packed?”
“Just about.”
Ted holds out his mug, encouraging me to smell it. “I just boiled some water. For ginkgo biloba tea. Can I pour you some?”
“No, that’s all right.”
“I think you’d like it, Mallory. It’s good for inflammation. After a long workout. Let me get you some.” It’s not really a choice anymore. He darts into the kitchen and I swear I see a flicker of annoyance in Caroline’s eyes.
But all she says is, “I hope you enjoyed the dinner?”
“Yes. It was really nice. Thank you.”
“I’m glad we could give you a proper sendoff. And I think it was good for Teddy. To give him a sense of closure. It’s important for children.”
There’s an awkward pause. I know the questions I need to ask, but I want to wait until Ted is back, so I can see both of their reactions. I allow my eyes to drift around the room and my gaze lands on two drawings that I’d somehow overlooked—small and fairly close to the floor. It’s no wonder Adrian and I missed them. The pictures are near an electrical outlet—in fact, one drawing is composed around the outlet, as if the electricity was surging out of the socket and into the picture. The angel is wielding some kind of magic wand, pressing it to Anya’s chest—surrounding her in a field of energy, paralyzing her.
“Is that a Vipertek stun gun?”
Caroline smiles over her glass of wine. “I’m sorry?”
“In these drawings. I didn’t notice them on Friday. Doesn’t her wand look just like your Viper?”
Caroline reaches for the wine bottle and tops off her glass. “If we try to interpret all the symbols in these pictures, it’s going to be a long night.”