Nighttime Is My Time

97

That night Jean had dinner with Charles and Gano Buckley at Craig Michaelson's home. Meredith was already back at West Point. "After the doctor checked her over, she insisted on going back today," General Buckley said. "She was still worried about her physics exam tomorrow morning. She is such a disciplined kid. She'll make a great soldier." He was trying not to show how shaken he had been when he learned how near to death his only child had come.

"Like the goddess, Minerva, she sprang full-fledged from her father's brow," Jean said. "It's exactly what Reed would have done." She lapsed into silence. She could still feel the unspeakable joy of the moment when the cop had cut her loose from the chair and she had been able to put her arms around Lily. She could feel the poignant beauty of the sound of Lily whispering, "Jean-Mother."

They had been taken to the hospital to be checked. There, she and Lily had sat side by side talking, beginning to catch up on nearly twenty years. "I always imagined what you looked like," Lily had said. "I think I pictured you just as you are."

"And I you. I'll have to learn to call you Meredith. It's a beautiful name."

When the doctor cleared them for release, he said, "Most women after your ordeal would be on tranquilizers. You two are troupers."

They had stopped in to see Laura. Seriously dehydrated, she was on an IV and sedated into a healing sleep.

Sam had returned to the hospital to drive them back to the hotel. But as they met in the lobby, the Buckleys arrived. "Mom, Dad," Meredith had called, and with sad understanding, Jean had watched her fly into their arms.

"Jean, you gave her life, and you saved her life," Gano Buckley said quietly. "From now on you will always be a part of her life."

Jean looked across the table at the handsome couple. They both appeared to be about sixty years old. Charles Buckley had steel gray hair, piercing eyes, strong features, and an air of authority that was balanced by the charm of his manner and the warmth of his smile. Gano Buckley was a delicately pretty, small-boned woman who had enjoyed a brief career as a concert pianist before she became a military wife. "Meredith plays beautifully," she told Jean. "I can't wait for you to hear her."

The three were going together to visit Meredith at the academy on Saturday afternoon. They're her mother and father, Jean thought. They're the ones who brought her up, cared for her and loved her and made her the marvelous young woman she is today. But at least now I'll have a place in her life. Saturday, I'll go with her to Reed's grave, and I'll tell her about him. She must know what a remarkable person he was.

It was a profoundly bittersweet evening for her, and she knew the Buckleys understood when, pleading exhaustion, she left soon after coffee was served.

When Craig Michaelson dropped her off at the hotel at ten o'clock, she found Sam Deegan and Alice Sommers waiting in the lobby.

"We figured you might want to have a nightcap with us," Sam said. "Even with all the lightbulb people here, they managed to save a table for us in the bar."

With tears of gratitude in her eyes, Jean looked from one to the other. They understand how hard tonight has been for me, she thought. Then she spotted Jake Perkins standing near the front desk. She beckoned to him, and he rushed over to her.

"Jake," she said, "I was so out of it this afternoon that I don't know whether or not I really thanked you. If it weren't for you, neither Meredith nor Laura nor I would be alive today." She put her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek.

Jake was visibly moved. "Dr. Sheridan," he said. "I just wish I had been a little smarter. When I saw those pewter owls on the dresser next to Mr. Amory's body, I told Mr. Deegan that I had found one on Alison Kendall's grave. Maybe if I had told him when I found it, they might have decided to get you a bodyguard right away."

"Never mind that," Sam said. "You couldn't know at that time that the owl meant anything. Dr. Sheridan is right. If you hadn't figured out that Laura might be in that house, they'd all be dead. Now, let's go inside before we lose that table." He considered for a moment and sighed. "You come too, Jake."

Alice was standing next to him. Sam could see that what Jake had just said had startled her.

"Sam, last week on her anniversary, I found a pewter owl at Karen's grave," she said quietly. "I have it at home in the curio cabinet in the den."

"That's it," Sam said. "I've been trying to remember what I noticed in your cabinet that bothered me, Alice. Now I know what it was."

"Gordon Amory must have been the one who put it there," Alice said sadly.

Sam put his arm around her as they walked into the bar. It's been a hell of a day for her, too, he thought. He had told Alice that The Owl had admitted to Laura that he had murdered Karen by mistake. Alice was devastated to learn that Karen had been killed only because she happened to come home that night. But she said that at least it took the cloud of suspicion off Karen's boyfriend, Cyrus Lindstrom, and at least now she could hope for some degree of closure.

"I'll take that owl out of the cabinet when I drive you home tonight," he said. "I don't want you to look at it again."

They were at the table. "It's closure for you as well, isn't it, Sam?" Alice asked. "For twenty years you never gave up trying to solve Karen's death."

"In that sense it's closure, but I hope it's still all right with you if I continue to drop in for a visit occasionally."

"You'd better, Sam, you'd just better. You've gotten me through the last twenty years. You can't quit on me now."

At the table Jake was about to sit next to Jean when he felt a tap on his shoulder. "Do you mind?"

Mark Fleischman slipped into the chair. "I stopped at the hospital to see Laura," he told Jean. "She's feeling better, although, of course, she's rocky emotionally. But she'll be okay." He grinned. "She said she'd be glad to go into therapy with me."

Jake took the seat on the other side of Jean. "I believe that if anything, this harrowing experience will prove to be a turning point in her career," he said earnestly. "With all this publicity she's bound to get a lot of offers. That's show business."

Sam looked at him. My God, he's probably right, he thought. And with that realization, he decided to order a double scotch instead of a glass of wine.

Jean had learned from Sam that Mark had driven all over town trying to find her, and then when Sam called him, he had rushed to the hospital where she, Meredith, and Laura had been taken. He had left without seeing her when he was assured that she was going to be released shortly. She had neither seen nor spoken to him all day. Now she looked directly at him. The tenderness with which he was looking at her made her deeply ashamed of the way she had mistrusted him. And at the same time it touched her deeply.

"I'm sorry, Mark," she said. "I'm so terribly, terribly sorry."

He covered her hand with his, the same gesture that a few days earlier had comforted and warmed her and made her feel a spark that had long been missing in her life.

"Jeannie," Mark said, smiling, "don't be sorry. I'm going to give you lots of chances to make it up to me. That I promise you."

"Did you ever suspect that it was Gordon?" she asked.

"Jean, the fact is that under the surface there was a lot going on with all our fellow honorees, not to mention the reunion chairman. Jack Emerson may be a shrewd businessman, but I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him. My father told me that Jack is known locally as a womanizer and a mean drunk, although he's never been known to be physically aggressive. They all believe that he burned down that building ten years ago. One of the reasons is that on the night of the fire, a security guard who probably was paid off by him did an unusual walk-through to be sure no one was still in the building. It was a suspicious thing to do, but it does suggest that Emerson has never wanted to kill anybody.

"I really believed for a while that Robby Brent could have been the one who killed the girls at your lunch table. Remember what a surly kid he was? And he was nasty enough at the reunion dinner to make me think he was capable of doing physical as well as emotional harm. I looked up references to him on the Internet. He'd talked to an interviewer about his fear of poverty and claimed that he had money buried all over the country on land that he owned but had registered in fictitious names. He was quoted as saying that he was the dumb kid in his smart family and was considered a nerd at school. He said that he had learned the art of ridicule because he was constantly the butt of jokes himself. He ended up hating just about everyone in town."

Mark shrugged. "But then, just when I was sure he was The Owl, as we now know him, Robby disappeared."

"We think he suspected Gordon and followed him to that house," Sam said. "There were bloodstains on the staircase."

"Carter has so much anger in him that I thought he might be capable of murder," Jean said.

Mark shook his head. "Somehow I never did. Carter continually vents his anger by his nasty attitude and also through his plays. I've read the scripts of all of them. You should read them sometime. You'll recognize some of the characters as people you've known. That's the way he gets his revenge against those whom he regarded as his tormentors. He didn't need to go beyond that."

Jean realized that Sam, Alice, and Jake were listening intently to Mark. "That left only Gordon Amory and you," she said.

Mark smiled. "Notwithstanding your doubts, Jeannie, I knew I wasn't guilty. The more I studied Gordon, the more suspicious I became of him. It's one thing to fix a nose that's been broken or to get baggy eyes tightened, but to totally alter your external appearance has always seemed somewhat bizarre to me. I didn't believe him when he said that he'd give Laura a job on one of his TV series. It was obvious to me that he resented her playing up to him at the reunion when he well knew that she was only trying to use him. But then this morning, when Gordon was in the hotel after you disappeared, I thought I had been wrong about him. Quite frankly, when I was driving around looking for you, I was frantic. I was sure that something terrible had happened to you."

Jean turned to Sam. "I know you talked to Laura at the hospital. Did she tell you whether Gordon revealed to her how he had managed to make four of the other deaths look like accidents, and Gloria's death look like a suicide?"

"Gordon bragged about that to Laura. He told her that he had stalked all the girls before he killed them. Catherine Kane's car skidded into the Potomac after he had tampered with her brakes. Cindy Lang wasn't caught in the avalanche-he accosted her on that slope and dropped her body in a crevice. There was an avalanche that afternoon, and everyone assumed that she had been caught in it. Her body was never recovered."

Sam took a slow sip of his scotch, then continued. "He called Gloria Martin and asked her if he could stop by for a drink. By then she knew how successful he was and how handsome he had become, so she agreed. But she still couldn't resist getting in a dig at him and ran out to buy the owl figure. Gordon got her drunk, and when she fell asleep, smothered her with a plastic bag and left the owl in her hand."

Alice gasped. "My God, he was so evil."

"Yes, he was," Sam agreed. "Debra Parker was taking flying lessons at a small airfield. The security there was lax. Gordon had a pilot's license himself, so he knew just how to sabotage her plane before she took off on her first solo flight. And Alison's death was simple-he just held her under the water in her pool."

Sam looked sympathetically at Jean. "And I know, Jean, that he told both you and Meredith that he ran over Reed Thornton with his car."

Mark had not taken his eyes off Jean. "When I saw Laura a little while ago at the hospital, she told me that he had three plastic bags with each of your names on them and that he was going to use them to smother you, Laura, and Meredith. My God, Jeannie, when I think of that, I go crazy. I couldn't bear to have anything happen to you."

Slowly, deliberately, he took her face in his hands and kissed her, a long, tender kiss that said everything he had not yet put into words.

There was a sudden flash, and they looked up, startled. Jake was now standing, his camera still trained on them. "It's only a digital," he explained, beaming, "but I know a good photo op when I see it."