Page 37 of A Talent for Murder

He went back out to the sidewalk, not surprised to see Lily still on the bench. She turned to look at him and he said, “I thought you looked familiar.”

She hadn’t admitted anything, of course, pretending that she was randomly in Saratoga Springs for the same conference that Peralta happened to be working. In the middle of their conversation, though, he was suddenly filled with certainty that it was now time to put an end to this whole fucking Peralta caper. He saw a taxi with its light on cruising down the street. He hailed it and jumped in.

During the ride back to his own hotel, and to his Kia, Ethan thought about Martha. At the time he’d walked away from her, he told himself that she’d been too easy to manipulate anyway, but the truth was that he’d been one-upped by Lily, a fucking librarian who looked like she’d get blown over in a sharp breeze.

He’d been mad then, and he was mad now.

He thought about killing Lily. He could double back and follow her to wherever she was staying, probably at the conference hotel. But that would be almost too easy. No, he got another idea, one that would take the legs right out from under her and teach her to not play Nancy Drew with her friends. He needed to show Lily that she’d made a big mistake.

And, suddenly, he wasn’t angry anymore. He was happy as a clam.

Chapter20

Martha didn’t call me back after I told her that I’d spotted Ethan Saltz. I tried several times to reach her and even sent her a text. But somehow I knew in my heart she was dead.

I didn’t even try to sleep that night. I was waiting for my phone to make a noise that would tell me Martha was okay, even though I doubted that she was. Just after dawn, I opened up a browser on my phone and did a search for Alan Peralta and Martha Ratliff, adding Portsmouth, figuring that their purchase of a house would be public record. It came up almost immediately: 55 Birchvale Road. They’d paid $650,000 for it the previous year.

I checked out of my motel, and got into my car, the address loaded onto my phone. I drove as fast as I dared and made it to Portsmouth by ten that morning, driving through the center of town on cobblestone streets, brick buildings on either side. It was sunny, but the kind of misty sunshine that indicated that it had probably been rainy in the recent past. After passing through the center, I took several turns along residential streets, eventually finding Birchvale, a lightly wooded street of modest homes that all looked like they’d been built in the 1950s. The address on Birchvale was one of the spiffier houses on the street, freshly painted an olive green, daffodils poking up in its neat front yard. There was a Subaru Outback in the driveway. I drove past the house about half a block and pulled up beneath a large maple tree on the edge of a small cemetery.

If I was about to find what I thought I was going to find inside of the house, then it made sense to not draw attention to myself. I reached back and unzipped my bag that was resting on the backseat of my car. Inside was a blue baseball cap without a logo. I could at least tuck my red hair up under the hat. It wasn’t exactly a disguise, but if I were identified later, it might muddy the waters a little bit.

I left the car and walked down the street as casually as possible, skirting puddles on the sidewalk. When I reached Martha and Alan’s house I turned down their driveway, then crossed the small yard that led to the front door. The bland façade of the small pretty house filled me with even more dread than I’d been feeling. I somehow knew what I was going to find behind its walls. I rapped on the door, then turned the doorknob. It wasn’t locked, so I pushed the door open and yelled “Yoo-hoo,” into the house as I stepped inside. I closed the door behind me.

I was in a dim living area, the curtains still pulled, a stairway to my right. A cat padded heavily down the stairs, stopping at the bottom and meowing.

“Hey, there,” I said, crouching and holding out my hand. “Where’s your mom?”

I yelled another hello into the house, then listened. The cat had sniffed at my fingers and was now rubbing up against one of my ankles. I stood up, deciding to look upstairs first.

At the top landing there was a wide carpeted hallway, three doors leading off from it on one side, and one on the other. Only one of the doors was opened, the one to the right, and judging by its position in the house it made sense that it was the master bedroom. I took a step toward it, suddenly wishing I’d brought my Mace, or even my stun gun. I didn’t think there was anyone behind the door, at least no one alive, but I couldn’t be sure. I pulled down the sleeve of my sweater, covering my hand so as not to leave any prints on the knob, and pushed the door open.

I could smell the blood before my eyes adjusted enough to see the room. The curtains were open, light from outside illuminating Martha, lying on the floor, blood soaking an area rug that framed her with almost precise geometry.

I looked around, moving carefully. There was a spray of blood across the hardwood floor and even along some of the beige wall beside the door. Martha had bled out from a major artery. Nothing else in the room seemed disturbed. Not that I’d known what the room looked liked before, but it was neat, the bed made, no clothes on the floor.

There was no sign of a struggle.

A wave of faintness passed over me, and I shut my eyes for a moment. When I opened them, nothing in the room had changed. Martha was still dead. As I turned to leave, I noticed a framed print on the wall next to the door, a pen-and-ink drawing advertising the Berkshire Literary Festival. It was familiar to me, and then I remembered that it was a piece of art that Martha had hung in her dorm room back when we’d been students together. I wondered if Martha’s killer had seen the print as well, and if he remembered it as I had.

Back downstairs I looked around for the cat, but didn’t see him, then I peered through the strip of beveled glass beside the front door, just to make sure that there weren’t immediate witnesses in the area. I pulled my sweater down over my hand again and exited the house, walking briskly back down the road to my car.

I drove for a while, not in any particular direction, then I pulled into the empty parking lot of a clam shack that hadn’t yet opened for the season. I shut off my engine and thought about Martha, taking a moment to digest the fact that she was longer alive. My hands shook, and I rubbed them on my legs even though they weren’t sweaty.

I sat in the car for ten minutes, just staring through my windshield. I had several decisions to make. One of the decisions was whether I was going to call in to the police and report a dead body at 55 Birchvale Road. It would spare Alan from coming home and discovering his wife’s corpse, but on the flip side, it might hurt the investigation, especially if I called in anonymously, which was what I would do. The other possibility was to simply go to the police with everything I knew, but I was not inclined to do that, partly because what I was thinking still sounded so ludicrous to me that it was hard to imagine the police believing my story. I decided not to make the call, as myself or anonymously. It wouldn’t help Martha, and it wouldn’t help me in finding the person who had killed her.

My next decision took a little longer for me to make. Over a year ago Henry Kimball had come to me for help when he’d been entangled with Joan Whalen Grieve and Richard Seddon. I’d helped him, but not until after he’d nearly died. I didn’t particularly want to get Henry involved in something dangerous—I believe he’d suffered enough because of me—but (a) I knew that he would help me no matter what I asked him to do, and (b) I knew that he would keep whatever we found out together a secret. It was hard to explain our relationship, even to myself, but it was an alliance. Maybe for Henry it had to do with love. Maybe for me as well. But most importantly we trusted one another. And he knew things about me that no one else in the world knew.

Before I left the parking lot, I’d made my decision. I drove to Arlington, a suburban town next to Cambridge, and parked outside the office building where Henry now worked. I thought about just knocking on his door but decided to call instead. He picked up right away.

“Hey,” he said.

“Are you in your office?”

“I am.”

“I’m outside. Do you mind if I come up?”

“No, not at all. When you get to the door press the button next to my name and I’ll buzz you up.”

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