“Jesus please us,” Izzy says. “This is silly.” She looks pointedly at her watch and stands.
Pete gets up, too. Holly remains seated, looking down at her filched copy of Inside View. Hodges also stays put, at least for the moment. “You’ll go back to the Frias-Countryman photos, right, Pete? Check it out, just to be sure?”
“Yes,” Pete says. “And Izzy’s probably right, I was silly to get you two out here.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“And . . . I still feel bad about the way we handled Mrs. Trelawney, okay?” Pete is looking at Hodges, but Hodges has an idea he’s really speaking to the thin, pale woman with the junk newspaper in her lap. “I never once doubted that she left her key in the ignition. I closed my mind to any other possibility. I promised myself I’d never do that again.”
“I understand,” Hodges says.
“One thing I believe we all can agree on,” Izzy says, “is that Hartsfield’s days of running people down, blowing people up, and architecting suicides are behind him. So unless we’ve all stumbled into a movie called Son of Brady, I suggest we exit the late Ms. Ellerton’s house and get on with our lives. Any objections to that idea?”
There are none.
7
Hodges and Holly stand in the driveway for a moment before getting into the car, letting the cold January wind rush past them. It’s out of the north, blowing straight down from Canada, so the usually present smell of the large, polluted lake to the east is refreshingly absent. There are only a few houses at this end of Hilltop Court, and the closest has a FOR SALE sign on it. Hodges notices that Tom Saubers is the agent, and he smiles. Tom was also badly hurt in the Massacre, but has come almost all the way back. Hodges is always amazed by the resilience of which some men and women are capable. It doesn’t exactly give him hope for the human race, but . . .
Actually, it does.
In the car, Holly puts the folded Inside View on the floor long enough to fasten her seatbelt, then picks it up again. Neither Pete nor Isabelle objected to her taking it. Hodges isn’t sure they even noticed. Why would they? To them, the Ellerton house isn’t really a crime scene, although the letter of the law may call it that. Pete was uneasy, true, but Hodges thinks that had little to do with cop intuition and was a quasi-superstitious response instead.
Hartsfield should have died when Holly hit him with my Happy Slapper, Hodges thinks. That would have been better for all of us.
“Pete will go back and look at the pictures from the Frias-Countryman suicides,” he tells Holly. “Due diligence, and all that. But if he finds a Z scratched somewhere—on a baseboard, on a mirror—I will be one surprised human being.”
She doesn’t reply. Her eyes are far away.
“Holly? Are you there?”
She starts a little. “Yes. Just planning how I’ll locate Nancy Alderson in Chagrin Falls. It shouldn’t take too long with all the search programs I’ve got, but you’ll have to talk to her. I can do cold calls now if I absolutely have to, you know that—”
“Yes. You’ve gotten good at it.” Which is true, although she always makes such calls with her trusty box of Nicorette close at hand. Not to mention a stash of Twinkies in her desk for backup.
“But I can’t be the one to tell her that her employers—her friends, for all we know—are dead. You’ll have to do it. You’re good at things like that.”
Hodges feels that nobody is very good at things like that, but doesn’t bother saying so. “Why? The Alderson woman wouldn’t have been there since last Friday.”
“She deserves to know,” Holly says. “The police will get in touch with any relatives, that’s their job, but they’re not going to call the housekeeper. At least I don’t think so.”
Hodges doesn’t, either, and Holly’s right—the Alderson woman deserves to know, if only so she doesn’t turn up to find an X of police tape on the door. But somehow he doesn’t think that’s Holly’s only interest in Nancy Alderson.
“Your friend Pete and Miss Pretty Gray Eyes hardly did anything,” Holly says. “There was fingerprint powder in Martine Stover’s bedroom, sure, and on her wheelchair, and in the bathroom where Mrs. Ellerton killed herself, but none upstairs where she slept. They probably went up long enough to make sure there wasn’t a body stashed under the bed or in the closet, and called it good.”
“Hold on a second. You went upstairs?”
“Of course. Somebody needed to investigate thoroughly, and those two sure weren’t doing it. As far as they’re concerned, they know exactly what happened. Pete only called you because he was spooked.”
Spooked. Yes, that was it. Exactly the word he was looking for and hadn’t been able to find.