Let Me Call You Sweetheart

52

At eleven o’clock, Grace Hoover phoned Kerry and invited her and Robin for Sunday dinner. We haven’t seen nearly enough of you two lately, Grace told her. “I do hope you can come. Celia will outdo herself, I promise.”

Celia was the weekend housekeeper and a better cook than the Monday-to-Friday live-in. When she knew Robin was going to be coming, Celia made brownies and chocolate chip cookies to send home with her.

“Of course we’ll come,” Kerry said warmly. Sunday is such a family day, she thought as she hung up the phone. Most Sunday afternoons she tried to do something special with Robin, like going to a museum or a movie or occasionally to a Broadway show.

If only Dad had lived, she thought. He and Mother would be living nearby at least part of the time. And if only Bob Kinellen had been the man I thought he was.

Mentally she shook herself to shrug off that line of reflection. Robin and I are darn lucky to have Jonathan and Grace, she reminded herself. They’ll always be there for us.

Janet, her secretary, came in and closed the door. “Kerry, did you make an appointment with a Mrs. Deidre Reardon and forget to tell me?”

“Deidre Reardon? No, I did not.”

“She’s in the waiting room and she says she’s going to sit there until you see her. Shall I call security?”

My God, Kerry thought. Skip Reardon’s mother! What does she want? “No. Tell her to come in, Janet.”

Deidre Reardon got directly to the point. “I don’t usually force my way into people’s offices, Ms. McGrath, but this is too important. You went to the prison to see my son. You had to have had a reason for that. Something made you wonder if there had been a miscarriage of justice. I know there was. I know my son, and I know that he is innocent. But why after seeing Skip did you not want to help him? Especially in light of what’s been uncovered about Dr. Smith.”

“It’s not that I didn’t want to help him, Mrs. Reardon. It’s that I can’t help him. There’s no new evidence. It’s peculiar that Dr. Smith has given other women his daughter’s face, but it’s not illegal, and it might be simply his way of coping with bereavement.”

Deidre Reardon’s expression changed from anxiety to anger. “Ms. McGrath, Dr. Smith doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘bereavement.’ I didn’t see much of him in the four years Suzanne and Skip were married. I didn’t want to. There was something absolutely unhealthy about his attitude toward her. I remember one day, for example, there was a smudge on Suzanne’s cheek. Dr. Smith went over to her and wiped it off. You’d have thought he was dusting a statue the way he studied her face to make sure he’d gotten it all. He was proud of her. I’ll grant you that. But affection? No.”

Geoff had talked about how unemotional Smith was on the stand, Kerry thought. But that doesn’t prove anything.

“Mrs. Reardon, I do understand how you must be feeling-“ she began.

“No, I’m sorry, you don’t,” Deidre Reardon interrupted. “My son is incapable of violence. He would no more have deliberately taken that cord from Suzanne’s waist and pulled it around her neck and strangled her than you or I would have done such a thing. Think about the kind of person who could commit a crime like that. What kind of monster is he? Because that monster who could so viciously kill another human being was in Skip’s house that night. Now think about Skip.”

Tears welled in Deidre Reardon’s eyes as she burst out, “Didn’t some of his essence, his goodness, come through to you? Are you blind and deaf, Ms. McGrath? Does my son look or sound like a murderer to you?”

“Mrs. Reardon, I looked into this case only because of my concern over Dr. Smith’s obsession with his daughter’s face, not because I thought your son was innocent. That was for the courts to decide, and they have. He has had a number of appeals. There is nothing I can do.”

“Ms. McGrath, I think you have a daughter, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then try to visualize her caged for ten years, facing twenty years more in that cage for a crime she didn’t commit. Do you think your daughter would be capable of murder someday?”

“No, I do not.”

“Neither is my son. Please, Ms. McGrath, you are in a position to help Skip. Don’t abandon him. I don’t know why Dr. Smith lied about Skip, but I think I’ve come to understand. He was jealous of him because Skip was married to Suzanne, with all that implies. Think about that.”

“Mrs. Reardon, as a mother I understand how heartbroken you are,” Kerry said gently as she looked into the worn and anxious face.

Deidre Reardon got up. “I can see that you’re dismissing everything I’m telling you, Ms. McGrath. Geoff said that you’re going to become a judge. God help the people who stand before you pleading for justice.”

Then as Kerry watched, the woman’s complexion became ghastly gray.

“Mrs. Reardon, what is it?” she cried.

With shaking hands, the woman opened her purse, took out a small vial and shook a pill into her palm. She slipped it under her tongue, turned and silently left the office.

For long minutes Kerry sat staring at the dosed door. Then she reached for a sheet of paper. On it, she wrote:

1. Did Doctor Smith lie about operating on Suzanne?

2. Did little Michael see a black, four-door Mercedes sedan in front of the Reardons’ house when Dolly Bowles was baby-sitting him that night? What about the partial license-plate numbers Dolly claims she saw?

3. Was Jimmy Weeks involved with Suzanne, and, if so, does Bob know anything about it, and is he afraid of having it come out?

She studied the list as Deidre Reardon’s honest, distressed face loomed accusingly in her mind.