Let's Play Dead

CHAPTER 25

I decided to work through the lunch hour, and sent Eric out to find a sandwich and bring me something back whenever he was done. He was still acting like a whipped puppy, and he was thrilled to be able to do something for me. He’d been gone for half an hour or so when Front Desk Bob called up to say that Caitlin Treacy was in the lobby. What did she want this time? “I’ll be right there, Bob.”

When I entered the lobby I found Caitlin standing there, dwarfed by a large basket of not only cookies and flowers but also what appeared to be a stuffed animal lurking amidst the greenery. “Hi, Nell,” she said. “Mother wanted to thank you for helping sort things out over the weekend.” She held out the basket. I took it-and nearly dropped it. Arabella must have been really grateful.

“So she told you about it?”

“You mean about my father? Yes. Anyway, I’ve got to get back to Let’s Play. And I’ve been using the advice you gave me the other day. It’s been a big help. Bye.” She turned to go, leaving me with a hefty basket and a lot of unanswered questions. Not much of a response for a woman who hadn’t seen her father in twenty years.

Eric pulled open the door from outside and stopped to hold it for Caitlin. He continued to hold it, staring after her, until I called out to him. “Eric? Is that my lunch?”

He started, then turned to me. “Oh, sorry, yes. Who was that who was leaving?”

“That was Caitlin Treacy, Arabella’s daughter. She works at Let’s Play-she’s the person who’s handling the Harriet exhibit.”

“Huh,” Eric said, still looking puzzled. “I thought she looked familiar, but I’ve never been to Let’s Play. Anyway, I assume you want to eat your lunch?”

“Definitely.”

Upstairs I took my lunch to the staff room at the rear of the building, both to keep my desk clean and to hide out from anyone who might come looking for me. Since it was past the lunch hour, there was no one around, and I managed to enjoy a few minutes of peace and a good sandwich. I was just folding up the wrapper to throw it away when Eric appeared, looking triumphant.

“I knew I’d seen her somewhere!” he announced.

“Who? Caitlin?”

He dropped into a chair across from me. “Yes, only when I knew her she was Kathleen Treacy. I didn’t put it together with Caitlin, or with Heffernan, her mother’s last name.”

“I thought you grew up in Virginia. How did you know Caitlin?”

Eric looked around, then leaned toward me. “It’s kind of complicated. Maybe we should take this to your office. And ask Shelby to join us. I think she knows Kathleen, or Caitlin, or whoever she thinks she is, too.”

“Okay,” I said, mystified. I gathered up my trash, threw it out, and followed Eric back down the hall. As we walked, I asked, “What’s with the confusion of names?”

“Something about honoring her Irish roots, I think. That’s what I heard.”

As soon as we reached his desk, Eric dialed Shelby, who appeared a few moments later. I led them both into my office and shut the door, and we distributed ourselves between the damask-covered visitors’ settee and the matching armchair. “What’s going on? Why so hush-hush?”

“Let me back up a minute,” Eric began. “Shelby, you can fill in as I go. You’re right, Nell-I grew up in Virginia. I knew pretty early that I was gay, but my folks thought that maybe a good private school could straighten me out-uh, pun intended-so for high school they sent me to Bishop’s Gate School. It’s a boarding school, and I think they were glad to have me out of the house. It was a good school academically, but it also had a reputation for helping out kids with issues, which I guess is what they thought I had. I did well enough there to get into a good college, even though it didn’t change the fact that I liked boys. I met Shelby’s daughter, Melissa, at Bishop’s Gate, although she was a year behind me-and Caitlin or Kathleen or whatever she wants to call herself was a year ahead. But it was a small school, so everybody knew everybody else.”

“Okay,” I said cautiously. “So Kathleen Treacy from Philadelphia was at your boarding school in Virginia?” Something seemed odd there. “What’s the problem?”

“Kathleen-can I stick to that for now? Because that’s how I knew her.” When I nodded, he continued. “Kathleen didn’t want to be there any more than I did. She was one of the ‘difficult’ kids”-Eric made air quotes-“that the school took on. She didn’t hide that.”

I still didn’t see where this story was going. “Look, you two, this is all very nice, but what’s it got to do with anything?”

“Because Kathleen hated her mother, and she was always talking about it to anybody who would listen.”

It must have been a small school. “Lots of teenagers claim to hate their parents, or so I’m told-obviously I can’t speak from experience.”

Shelby spoke for the first time. “Kathleen was there for four years, and I never once saw Arabella at any school event, and I was at most of them. Melissa wasn’t a boarder, and she always brought home the kids with nowhere to go for Thanksgiving. And Kathleen was always among them, not that she was exactly sociable. But I really couldn’t understand Arabella. Kathleen’s an only child, right? Doesn’t that seem rather harsh, to send her off and not even visit? The school wasn’t all that far from Philadelphia.”

I was beginning to understand their concern. “You’re saying that Arabella, who runs a children’s museum, didn’t spend any time with her own child?”

Shelby nodded. “That’s about the size of it. Of course, Kathleen said she didn’t care. She didn’t want to see her mother anyway. But that’s what a lot of the so-called orphan kids said. I even took her out to dinner once, along with Melissa, but she wasn’t exactly easy to talk to.”

“It was more than teenage sulking?”

“I think so. I asked Melissa about it after we got through that endless dinner, and she said Kathleen was like that most of the time. Melissa said she had real trouble making friends, and she was always blurting out the most inappropriate things. You know, I’m going to say what I think and I don’t care who it hurts.”

“Interesting. She graduated, right?”

Eric answered. “Yes, she did, and she went off to college. She had good grades, and she worked hard-maybe because she didn’t have many friends. I certainly wasn’t one of them.”

“So let me get this straight. We’ve got a young woman who had a few difficult years in her teens, and who said things that sound like what a lot of moody, resentful teenagers say. Her mother sent her away to school and didn’t visit her much. But Arabella was a single mother after her husband left, and I heard she took a lot of night classes while she was working full-time. And she must have found a way to pay Caitlin’s tuition. Sure, maybe Caitlin resented it, but now she’s here working for the mother she claimed to hate back then. You don’t think she just grew up and got past whatever her earlier problems were?”

Eric and Shelby exchanged a glance. “Maybe,” Shelby said. “Look, I’m no expert, but I am a mother, and I think Kathleen might have needed more help than the school gave her, at least early on. Maybe you’re right, and she grew past her problems and patched things up with her mother, and everything’s peachy. And I’ll admit it’s been a few years since I saw her, but she’s the last person I would have expected to move back and work for her mother. I would have imagined she’d head for someplace like California, to get as far away as she could.”

I looked at each of them in turn. “Okay, let me say what you’re not saying. You think Arabella’s daughter could be behind the incidents at Let’s Play?”

Shelby said carefully, “I wouldn’t rule it out, based on what I know of her.”

“But her boyfriend Jason was the first victim! And she’s got to have been working at Let’s Play for at least a couple of years. Why now?”

“That’s true. But maybe the incident with Jason was a mistake or a warm-up for the real thing. Or maybe it’s because Daddy’s back in town and that’s reopened a lot of old wounds.”

We all fell silent, briefly. Nolan had implied he hadn’t been in touch with his daughter since he’d arrived. Maybe he had ducked the question because he didn’t want to upset Arabella further. “What is it you think I-or we-should do, then? Talk to Arabella? Ask Caitlin directly if she’s killed anyone lately?”

“I don’t know,” Shelby said. “But it’s better to have the whole picture, don’t you think?”

“I guess.” I didn’t want to know this. I didn’t want to have to go to Arabella and ask her whether her daughter was a potential murderer, and I wasn’t about to complicate things by taking a vague suspicion to the police. So I made an executive decision: I would sleep on it. Maybe in the cold light of morning the situation would look clearer, or at least different. “I’d like a little time to think it over before I go to Arabella. She’s got enough to worry about right now as it is. Are you comfortable with that?”

Shelby stood up. “I think that’s fair, Nell. Maybe I’ll call Melissa tonight and see if she knows anything more.”

“Eric, are you good with this?”

“Sure. Let’s hope it’s just one of those weird coincidences.”

I hated that word.