When we’d hung up, I managed to shoo Mr. Contreras out of the apartment. He disapproved heatedly of my setting up an appointment this late in the day: I was sick, these weren’t people he knew, nothing was so important it couldn’t wait until morning.
“You’re right,” I said. “I’m sure you are, but this is the dead man’s sister. She needs special consideration. If you take the dogs downstairs, I can rest for twenty minutes until she gets here.”
He huffed and puffed, but when I pulled the blanket up to my chin and stretched out he rattled the dishes out to the kitchen and left.
CHAPTER 8
Twinkle,Twinkle, Little Light
(Wonder If You’re There Tonight)
Aloud knock on my own door jerked me awake forty minutes later. I hadn’t heard the bell for the simple reason that Mr. Contreras had been on the watch for my visitors: he let them in and brought them upstairs before they could announce themselves. It’s a perennial source of conflict between us, his monitoring of my company. At least the pulse of anger I felt at his intrusion woke me up enough to greet the two women with some show of alertness.
Amy Blount looked much as she had when I last saw her, her long dreadlocks twisted in a bundle behind her head, her expression wary, solemn. She had an arm around the other woman, whose face had the drained, pinched look that follows on loss. We murmured introductions and condolences. While I got them settled on the couch, with herbal tea for Harriet Whitby and me, a glass of wine for Amy Blount, I managed to force Mr. Contreras to return to the first floor. He blurted out a final admonishment, directed at my guests, that I wasn’t to stay up late: I was sick, remember?
As soon as he disappeared, Amy began. “When we heard your name on TV, I told Harriet I knew you. We’d been talking over what we could do, because it’s outrageous to think Marc committed suicide. He was the most, oh, not optimistic, I wouldn’t say that-“
“Hopeful. He was a hopeful man,” Harriet Whitby said. “And he knew
how much our parents not just loved him, but relied on him to make a difference with his life. You know, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his piece on the Federal Negro Theater Project and he’d won several other awards. He wouldn’t do something like this to Daddy and Mother.”
I made noncommittal noises. It can be hard, when everyone relies on you, to let them know that you’re feeling despair, but I didn’t think it would be helpful to suggest that.
“How did you find him?” Harriet asked. “I don’t know Chicago at all, but Amy says that mansion where he-he died-is forty or fifty miles away, in some kind of wealthy town most people never heard of.”
“Your brother never mentioned New Solway or Larchmont Hall to you or your parents?”
She shook her head. “But he worked on a lot of different stories. If he was doing research, or even if he had a friend out there-we talked once a week or so, but he wouldn’t go into those kinds of details, not unless it was something that was becoming, well, a regular part of his life. Did you think he was in danger? Is that why you went out there?”
I told them about Darraugh Graham and his mother, and the family connection to Larchmont. At Harriet’s prodding, I told them about finding her brother, hefting him out of the water, trying to revive him. But I didn’t mention Catherine Bayard.
I expected them to leave then, but they looked at each other with the kind of wordless communication that old friends or lovers develop. When Harriet nodded, Amy Bount said, “We want you to ask some questions about Marc’s death. Mr. and Mrs. Whitby are too shattered to take any action, but we think, well, at a minimum, we want a better answer to what happened to him than the DuPage County sheriff is giving us.”
Harriet Whitby nodded again. “It’s not that Marc didn’t drink, but he wasn’t a drinker, if you understand me, and he didn’t use alcohol to bolster his courage. What they said on TV was a cruder version of what they told us this afternoon when my parents and I met with them, that he’d been drinking and fallen in this pond and drowned. If he-oh, it’s too hard to explain, but nothing about his death makes sense to me. Even if he had wanted to die, which I don’t believe for one minute, he wouldn’t do it like that. But they’re saying that their examination showed he drowned and that he’d been drinking. Would they make that up?”
“No. But they don’t do a complete autopsy on every body that comes to them. It’s too expensive, and this-your brother-must have looked straightforward to them. They wouldn’t do a complete screen for drugs or poison if they’d found traces of alcohol.”
Harriet and Amy looked at each other again, and again it was Amy who spoke. “Do you think they could be making that up? The alcohol?”