I 've Heard That Song Before

32

The weather the next morning was almost unchanged. The temperature had risen so it was no longer sleeting, but the rain continued, a steady, dismal downpour.

“Looks as though our dogs get another day off,” Moran observed when he went into Krause’s office a few minutes after nine A.M. “No use having them sniffing around the Carrington estate today.”

“I know. It would only be a waste of the taxpayers’ money,” Krause agreed. “Besides, we’re not going to find anything there. I’ve been going over the little evidence they took from the mansion and the stepmother’s house. The entire search seems to have resulted in a big nothing. But I don’t suppose we really expected to find much after twenty-two years. If Peter Carrington was smart enough to get rid of his formal shirt right after he killed Susan, the odds are that there was nothing else for him to worry about.”

“I’d guess if there had been anything, we would have found it the first time around,” Moran shrugged.

“Just one thing kind of interests me. Take a look at this.” Krause handed a sheet of paper to Moran. It was a landscaping design sketch.

Moran looked at it carefully. “What about it?”

“It was in a file drawer in a room on the top floor of the mansion. Apparently, over the years, the family has treated a couple of rooms there as an attic, the place where you stick things that you don’t want to be bothered going through. The guys tell me that you could furnish a house with the stuff that’s up there, from couches and chairs and carpets and china and silverware and pictures and bric-a-brac, to family letters that go back to the nineteenth century.”

“I guess they never heard of yard sales or eBay,” Moran commented. “Wait a minute, I see what this is. It’s a drawing of the outside area of the Carrington estate, the place where the girl’s body was found, except that there are plantings on it.”

“That’s right. Actually, it’s a copy of an original sketch.”

“What about it?”

“Look at the name in the corner.”

Moran held it closer to the lamp on Barbara Krause’s desk. “Jonathan Lansing! That was the landscaper, the guy who took a dive into the Hudson not long after Susan Althorp disappeared. He was the present Mrs. Carrington’s father.”

“That’s right. He was fired by the Carringtons a few weeks after Susan went missing, and he apparently committed suicide. I say ‘apparently,’ because his body was never recovered.”

Moran stared at his boss. “You’re not suggesting there’s a connection between him and Susan Althorp?”

“No, I’m not. We’ve got the guy who killed her. What I’m seeing is that Lansing was the one who suggested that the fence be moved those fifty feet back from the street. Looking at this, it would seem as though he didn’t intend to leave the area between the fence and the curb untended. This sketch is a design for some perennials to be planted on the outer side of the fence.”

“Then he was fired, and the family didn’t bother to do anything but throw some grass seed on it,” Moran said matter-of-factly.

“Looks like it,” Barbara Krause agreed. She put the sketch back in the file folder… “I don’t know,” she said, more to herself than to Moran. “I just don’t know…”