On, Off

Chapter 22

Monday, February 14th, 1966

Mid-February saw the commencement of a thaw. It began to rain remorselessly on a Friday and didn’t stop until well into Sunday night. All the low-lying parts of Connecticut were under freezing water trying vainly to get away. The Finch house was cut off from Route 133 in exactly the manner Maurice Finch had described to Carmine; Ruth Kyneton’s streamlet had risen so high that she had to pin out her washing in gumboots; and Dr. Charles Ponsonby came into the Hug complaining bitterly about a flooded wine cellar.

Thwarted by the intensity of the deluge and tormented by stiffening leg muscles, on Monday at dawn Addison Forbes decided to take a short run around the East Holloman area, then down to the water’s edge at his jetty. There he had built a boat shed to house his little fifteen-footer, though few were the times that his frame of mind prompted him to launch it for a leisurely sail on Holloman Harbor. For the last three years leisure was a sin to Addison Forbes, if not a crime.

A squad car was parked suspiciously near Forbes’s rather precipitous driveway, its occupants giving him an admiring wave as he leaped past, intent on concluding his run. Sweat rolled off him as he plunged down the bushy slope from the road; three days of downpour had melted the frozen snow, hence the flooding all over the state, and the ground under Forbes’s running shoes was saturated, slippery. Years ago he had planted a row of forsythia at the bottom of the incline – how wonderful it always was when that harbinger of spring burst into yellow blossom!

But in February the forsythia hedge was rigid brown sticks, so when Forbes noticed a jarring patch of lilac on the ground beneath it, he stopped. A split second later he saw the arms and legs emerging from the lilac patch, and his treacherous heart suddenly surged in his ears like a tidal race. He clutched at his chest, opened his parched mouth to yell, could not. Oh, dear Lord, the shock! He was going to have another coronary, this had to trigger another coronary! Hanging on to the back of an old park bench Robin had put there for “dreaming on,” he inched around it until he could sit and wait for the pain to clamp down, old and ineradicable instinct causing him to flex his left hand constantly as he waited for the pain to shoot down the arm and into it. Eyes dilated, mouth agape, Addison Forbes sat and waited. I am going to die, I am going to die…

Ten minutes later the pain hadn’t arrived, and he could no longer hear his heart. Its pulse had slowed precisely as it did after all his runs, and he felt no different than he did after all his runs. A huge jerk shot him to his feet, and that didn’t cause pain either; he turned his gaze to the lilac patch with its arms and legs, then took the slope up to the house in long, rhythmic steps, joy welling inside him.

“Her body is down by the water,” he said, coming into the kitchen. “Call the police, Robin.”

She squeaked and fluttered, but made the call, then came to him, her hand seeking his pulse.

“I’m fine,” he said irritably. “Don’t fuss, woman, I’m fine! I have just undergone a colossal shock, but my heart didn’t falter.” A dreamy smile played around his lips. “I’m hungry, I want a good breakfast. Fried eggs and bacon, raisin toast with plenty of butter, and cream in my coffee. Go on, Robin, move!”

“They conned us,” Carmine said, standing at the water’s edge with Abe and Corey. “How could we have been so dumb? Watching all the roads, not even thinking of the harbor. They dumped her here from a boat.”

“The whole east shore was frozen until Saturday night,” Abe said. “This had to be last minute, it can’t be where they planned to dump her.”

“Bullshit it isn’t,” Carmine said positively. “The thaw made it easier, that’s all. If the water had stayed frozen, they would have walked across the ice all the way from a street we’re not patrolling. As it is, they could use a rowboat, bring it in close enough to throw her out. They never set foot on the shore.”

“She’s frozen solid,” Patrick said, coming to join them. “A lilac party dress sewn with pearls, not rhinestones. Some lacy fabric I’ve never seen before – not proper lace. The dress fits better than Margaretta’s, at least for length. I haven’t turned her over yet to see if the back is buttoned up. No ligature marks, and no double cut in the neck. Apart from a few wet leaves, she’s very clean.”

“Since they never set foot on shore, there won’t be anything here. I’ll leave you to it, Patsy. Come on, guys,” he said to Abe and Corey, “we have to ask every householder with water frontage if they saw or heard a thing last night. But Corey, you’re going to cast our net wider. Take the police launch and go around the tankers and freighters moored anywhere in the harbor. Maybe someone came up on deck to suck in fresh air after days of being stuck belowdeck, and saw a rowboat. That’s the kind of thing a seaman would notice.”

“It’s a repeat of Margaretta,” said Patrick to Silvestri, Marciano, Carmine and Abe; Corey was out on the water in the big police launch. “Faith’s shoulders were narrower and her breasts were small, so they managed to button up the dress. There wasn’t a mark on it, which means she must have been wrapped in a waterproof nylon sheet for the trip in the boat. Something finer and smoother than ordinary tarpaulin. Boats always have a couple of inches of water slopping around in their bottoms, but the dress was bone dry, unstained.”

“How did she die?” Marciano asked.

“Raped to death, like Margaretta. What I don’t know is if their new ultimate tool is deliberately designed to kill, or whether they would prefer it did its job more slowly – over, say, several assaults with it. As soon as Faith died they put her in a freezer, but not a household job. More like a supermarket one. It’s long enough to fit Margaretta flat out, and wide enough that both girls were positioned in it with their arms extended away from their bodies and their legs somewhat apart. They dressed both girls after they were hard as rocks. Faith’s panties were modest, but lilac instead of pink. Bare feet, bare hands. Faith has two misshapen toes from an old break, left foot. That will make her easy to identify if her family ever comes out of its furor.”

“Do you think the same person made both dresses?” Silvestri asked. “I mean, they’re different yet the same.”

“I’m no expert on party dresses. I think Carmine’s lady should look at them and tell us,” Patrick said with a wink.

Carmine flushed. So it’s that obvious, is it? So what if it is, anyway? It’s a free country, and I’ll just have to hope that we never need Desdemona’s testimony to nail these sons of bitches. A police lawyer would tell me that Desdemona is the most serious mistake I’ve made on this case, but I’m prepared to go with my gut instinct that she’s irrelevant, despite the attempt on her life. Love wouldn’t cause me to lose my cop instincts. God, but I love her! When she appeared on my balcony I knew in a second that she meant more to me than I do. She’s the light of my entire existence.

“Have you had any joy tracing the pink dress, Carmine?” Danny Marciano asked.

“No, none. I’ve had someone check in every store that sells kids’ dresses from one end of the state to the other, but hundred-dollar-plus party dresses seem too rich for Connecticut tastes. And that’s weird, considering that Connecticut has some of the wealthiest areas in the whole nation.”

“Wealthy mothers of little girls spend their lives driving their Caddies from one shopping center to another,” Silvestri said. “They go to Filene’s in Boston, for Chrissake! And Manhattan.”

“Point taken,” said Carmine with a grin. “We’re examining Yellow Pages from Maine to Washington, D.C. Who’s for a stack of hotcakes with bacon and syrup next door?”

At least he’s eating again, thought Patrick, nodding his consent to this plan. God knows what he sees in that Limey woman, but his ex-wife she ain’t. He’s not hooked on a looker for the second time, though the more I see of her, the less I think of her as downright unattractive. One thing for sure, she has a brain and she knows how to use it. That’s bound to entrance a man like Carmine.

“Oh, Addison went to the Hug,” said Robin Forbes to Carmine chirpily when he arrived back at the house.

“You sound happy,” he said.

“Lieutenant, for three years I’ve lived in hell,” she said, moving around with a spring in her walk. “After he had that massive heart attack, Addison became convinced that he was living on borrowed time. So afraid! The jogging, nothing but raw fruit and vegetables – I’d drive all the way to Rhode Island to find a piece of fish he wouldn’t reject. He was positive that a shock would kill him, so he’d go to any lengths to avoid a shock. Then this morning he finds that poor little girl, and he’s shocked – really shocked. But he doesn’t even feel a twinge, let alone die.” Eyes twinkling, she jigged. “We’ve returned to a normal life.”

Having no idea that Addison Forbes harbored homicidal fantasies about his wife, Carmine left after another walk around the property thinking that it was indeed an ill wind blew nobody any good. Dr. Addison Forbes would be a much happier man – at least until Roger Parson Junior’s lawyers found a challengeable clause in Uncle William’s will. Was it a part of the Ghosts’ scheme to destroy the Hug as well as beautiful young girls? And if it was, why? Could it be that in destroying the Hug, they were really destroying Professor Robert Mordent Smith? If so, then they were well along the road to success. And whereabouts did Desdemona fit? He had spent their breakfast together grilling her in true, remorseless police fashion: had she seen something she’d buried below all conscious memory, had she been walking some street when a girl had been abducted, had someone at the Hug said something inappropriate to her, had anything unusual entered the tenor of her days? To all of which, bearing his questions patiently, even taking the time to puzzle over them, she returned firm negatives.

After a fruitless cruise through the Hug, Carmine climbed back into the Ford and aimed for the Merritt Parkway, which traveled to New York on the Trumbull side of Bridgeport. Though he did not expect to be permitted to see the Prof, he could find no reason why he ought not inspect as much of Marsh Manor as possible, ascertain for himself what the Bridgeport police had reported: that it would be easy for an inmate to break out of the place.

Yes, he decided, turning in through the imposing pineapple-topped gates, agoraphobia would keep more patients inside Marsh Manor than security patrols. There were no security patrols.

Right. Where to next? The Chandras. Their estate was off the Wilbur Cross where Route 133’s seemingly aimless course brought it into an area of farms and barns in pleasant fields and apple orchards. Too late to have another talk with Nur Chandra at the Hug – he had finished there last Friday, as had Cecil.

The house wasn’t on the scale of the Marsh Manor funny farm, but the estate reminded Carmine of a Cape Cod compound, half a dozen residences scattered around it; though this, in ten acres, was much larger. If it impressed Carmine at all, it was in letting him see how much organization went into making living luxurious for two people and a few kids with money to burn. No doubt the Chandras employed a manager, a deputy manager and a specialist manager as well as the army of turbaned lackeys. The whole thing structured so that the Chandras themselves never gave a moment’s thought to so much effort. A metaphorical snap of the fingers, and whatever was wanted appeared immediately.

“It’s highly inconvenient,” said Dr. Nur Chandra, speaking to Carmine in his imposing library, “but necessary, Lieutenant. The Hug was perfect for my needs, even to – and including – Cecil.”

“Then why go?” Carmine asked.

Chandra looked scornful. “Oh, come, my good man, surely you can see that the Hug is past tense? Robert Smith won’t return, and I am told that the Parson Governors are seeking a way out of financing the Hug. So I would rather go now, while things are in flux, than wait until I have to step over yet more bodies. I need to get out while this monster is still killing, so that I am quite removed from suspicion. For you won’t catch him, Lieutenant.”

“That sounds good and logical, Dr. Chandra, but I suspect that the real reason you’re anxious to hustle yourself off right now concerns your monkeys. Your chances of taking them with you in the middle of the present chaos is much higher than after the Hug’s situation occupies more Parson attention than a will. You are, in effect, making off with close to a million dollars in Hug property, however your contract may be worded.”

“Oh, very shrewd, Lieutenant!” Chandra said appreciatively. “That is precisely why I am leaving now. Once I am gone and my macaques gone with me, it will be a fait accompli. Disentangling the situation, legally and logistically, would be hideous.”

“Are the macaques still at the Hug?”

“No, they’re here in temporary quarters. With Cecil Potter.”

“And when are you leaving for Massachusetts?”

“Things are already in motion. I myself will go on Friday with my wife and children. Cecil and the macaques go tomorrow.”

“I hear you’ve bought a nice place outside Boston.”

“Yes. Very much like this, actually.”

In walked Surina Chandra clad in a scarlet sari encrusted with embroidery and gold thread, her arms, neck and hair blazing with jewels. Behind her were two little girls about seven years of age – twins, Carmine thought, astonished at their beauty. But the emotion was gone in a second as his eyes took in their apparel. Matching dresses of lace covered in rhinestones, with stiff, full skirts and little puffed sleeves. Both an ethereal ice-green.

Somehow he got through the introductions. The girls, Leela and Nuru, were indeed twins; demure souls with enormous black eyes and black hair in braids as thick as hawsers straying over their shoulders. Like their mother, they smelled of some eastern perfume Carmine couldn’t like – musky, heavy, tropical. They had diamonds in their earlobes that left the rhinestones for dead.

“I love your dresses,” he said to the twins, hunkering down to their level without approaching them too closely.

“Yes, they are pretty,” said their mother. “It’s difficult to find this sort of children’s wear in America. Of course they have lots sent from home, but when we saw these, they appealed.”

“If it isn’t a rude question, Mrs. Chandra, where did you find the dresses?”

“In a mall not far from where we’re going to live. A lovely shop for girls, better than any I’ve found in Connecticut.”

“Can you tell me where the mall is?”

“Oh, dear, I’m afraid not. They all look much the same to me, and I don’t know the area yet.”

“I don’t suppose you remember the name of the store, then?”

She laughed, white teeth flashing. “Having been brought up on J. M. Barrie and Kenneth Graham, of course I do! Tinker Bell.”

And off they drifted, the twins waving back at him shyly.

“My children have taken a fancy to you,” said Chandra.

Nice, but unimportant. “May I use your phone, Doctor?”

“Certainly, Lieutenant. I’ll leave you in private.”

You sure can’t fault them on manners, even if their ethics are different, Carmine thought as he dialed Marciano, his fingers trembling.

“I know where the dresses come from,” he said without preamble. “Tinker Bell. Tinker Bell, two words. There’s one in a mall outside Boston, but there may be others. Start looking.”

“Two stores,” said Marciano when Carmine walked in. “Boston and White Plains, both in classy malls. You’re sure of this?”

“Positive. Two of Chandra’s little girls were wearing dead ringers of Margaretta’s dress, except green in color. Thing is, which Tinker Bell would our Ghosts patronize?”

“White Plains. It’s closer unless they live near the Mass border. That’s possible, of course.”

“Then Abe can go to Boston tomorrow, while I take White Plains. Jesus, Danny, we’ve got a break at last!”

Chapter 23

Tuesday, February 15th, 1966

The Tinker Bell at White Plains was located in a mall of smart clothing and furniture stores interspersed with the inevitable delis, fast-food outlets, drugstores and dry cleaners. There were also several restaurants catering more for lunch than dinner. It was a new structure on two levels, but Tinker Bell was too canny to situate itself one floor up. Near the entrance on the ground.

It was, Carmine noted as he surveyed Tinker Bell from the outside, a very large premises entirely devoted to clothing for girl children. They had a sale going for overcoats and winter wear; no cheap nylon stuff in here, all natural fiber. There was even, he saw, a section devoted to real furs through an archway that said Kiddiminx. Several dozen customers browsed the racks even at this early hour, some with children in tow, some alone. No men. How many shoplifters in a place like this? the cop wondered.

He entered with as much confidence as he could muster, looking – and feeling – utterly incongruous. Apparently he had a neon sign on his forehead blinking COP on and off, as women moved quickly away from him and the store assistants started to huddle.

“May I see the manager, please?” he asked one hapless girl who didn’t make the huddle in time.

Oh, good, they could remove him from the floor! The girl led him immediately to the back of the merchandise and knocked on an unmarked door.

Mrs. Giselle Dobchik ushered him into a tiny cubicle stuffed with cardboard boxes and filing cabinets; a safe sat to one side of a table that served as Mrs. Dobchik’s desk, but there was no room for a visitor’s chair. Her response to the sight of his badge was unruffled interest; but then, Mrs. Dobchik struck him as the kind whom little ruffled. Mid-forties, very well dressed, blonde hair, red-varnished nails not long enough to snag the goods.

“Do you recognize this, ma’am?” he asked, removing the shell-pink lace dress Margaretta had worn from his briefcase. Out came Faith’s lilac dress. “Or this?”

“Almost certainly Tinker Bells,” she said, beginning to feel the inside seams, and frowning. “Our labels have been removed, but yes, I can assure you that they’re genuine Tinker Bells. We have special tricks with the beading.”

“I don’t suppose you know who bought them?”

“Any number of people, Lieutenant. They’re both size tens – that is, for girls between ten and twelve years of age. Once past twelve, a girl tends to want to look more like Annette Funicello than a fairy. We always have one of each model and color in each size in stock, but two is a strain. Here, come with me.”

Following her out of her office and over to a large area of glittery, frilly party dresses on dozens of long racks, Carmine understood what she meant when she said two the same size and type was a strain; there must have been upward of two thousand dresses in hues from white to dark red, all picked out in rhinestones or pearls or opalescent beads.

“Six sizes from three years to twelve years, twenty different models, and twenty different colors,” she said. “We’re famous for these dresses, you see – they walk out as fast as we can get them in.” A laugh. “After all, we can’t have two girls in the same model and color at the same party! Wearing a Tinker Bell is a sign of social status. Ask any Westchester County mom or child. The cachet extends into Connecticut – quite a few of our clients drive in from Fairfield or Litchfield Counties.”

“If I may collect my dresses and briefcase, Mrs. Dobchik, could I buy you some lunch? A cup of coffee? I feel like a bull in a china shop here, and I can’t be good for business.”

“Thanks, I’d appreciate the break,” said Mrs. Dobchik.

“What you said about two girls wearing the same Tinker Bell to the same party leads me to assume that you do keep fairly detailed records,” he said, sucking at a chocolate malted through a straw – too much kid stuff.

“Oh, yes, we have to. It’s just that both the models you’ve shown me have been perennials for some years, so we’ve sold a big bunch of them. The pink lace has been out now for five years, the lilac one for four. Your samples have been so abused that it’s not possible to tell exactly when they were made.”

“Whereabouts are they made?”

She nibbled on a cruller, clearly enjoying her role as an expert.

“We have a small factory in Worcester, Mass. My sister runs Boston, I run White Plains, our brother runs the factory. A family business – we’re the sole owners.”

“Do men ever come in to buy?”

“Sometimes, Lieutenant, but on the whole Tinker Bell clients are women. Men may buy lingerie for their wives, but they usually avoid buying party dresses for their daughters.”

“Would you ever sell two dresses in the same size and color to the same buyer on the same day? Like, for twins?”

“Yes, it does happen, but it involves a wait of a day for us to get in the second dress. Women with twins order in advance.”

“What about someone’s buying, say, my pink lace and my lilac whatever-it-is -”

“Broderie Anglaise,” she interrupted.

“Thanks, I’ll write that down. Would someone buy two models in different colors in the same size on the same day?”

“Only once,” she said, and sighed in reminiscent pleasure. “Oh, what a sale that was! Twelve dresses in the ten-to-twelve size, each one a different model and color.”

The hair on Carmine’s neck stood up. “When?”

“Toward the end of 1963, I think it was. I can look it up.”

“Before we go back and I get you to do that, Mrs. Dobchik, do you remember who this buyer was? What she looked like?”

“I remember very well,” said the perfect witness. “Not her name – she paid cash. But she was in the grandmother age group. About fifty-five. Wore a sable coat and a snappy sable hat, had blue-rinsed hair, good but not overdone make-up, big nose, blue eyes, elegant bifocal glasses, a pleasant speaking voice. Her bag and shoes were matching Charles Jourdan, and she wore longish kid gloves in sable brown like the shoes and bag. A uniformed chauffeur carried all the boxes out to her limo. It was a black Lincoln.”

“Doesn’t sound as if she needed food stamps.”

“Heavens to Betsy, no! It remains the biggest single sale in party dresses we’ve ever had. One-fifty each, eighteen hundred bucks. She peeled hundred-dollar bills off a two-inch stack.”

“Did you happen to ask her why she was buying so many party dresses in the same size?”

“Sure I did – who wouldn’t? She smiled and said she was the local representative of a charity organization that was sending the dresses to an orphanage in Buffalo for Christmas gifts.”

“Did you believe her?”

Giselle Dobchik grinned. “It’s just as believable as buying twelve dresses in the same size, isn’t it?”

“I guess so.”

They returned to Tinker Bell, where Mrs. Dobchik produced her record of the sale. No name, cash tendered.

“You took the numbers of the bills,” Carmine said. “Why?”

“There was a counterfeit scare at the time, so I checked with my bank while the girls were boxing everything up.”

“And they weren’t counterfeit?”

“No, they were the real McCoy, but the bank was interested in them because they’d been issued in 1933 right after we went off the gold standard, and were in near-mint condition.” Mrs. Dobchik shrugged. “Ask me did I care? They were legal tender. My bank manager thought they’d been hoarded.”

Carmine scanned the list of eighteen numbers. “I agree. They’re consecutive. Very unusual, but no help to me.”

“Is this a part of some big, exciting case?” Mrs. Dobchik asked, walking him to the door.

“Afraid not, ma’am. Another hundred-dollar bill scare.”

“We now know that the Ghosts had planned the second series of murders before they started on the first,” Carmine said to his fascinated audience. “The sale was made in December of 1963 well before the very first victim, Rosita Esperanza, was abducted. They ploughed through a dozen girls at the rate of one every two months for two years with twelve Tinker Bell dresses packed in mothballs against the day when they’d be used. Whoever the Ghosts are, they are not following a moon cycle, which is what the psychiatrists want to think now that they’re down to one every thirty days. The moon has nothing to do with the Ghosts. They’re cycling on the sun – twelves, twelves, twelves.”

“Does finding out about Tinker Bell help?” Silvestri asked.

“Not until there’s a trial.”

“But first, find the Ghosts,” said Marciano. “Who do you think Grandma is, Carmine?”

“One of the Ghosts.”

“But you said these aren’t women’s crimes.”

“I still say that, Danny. However, it’s much easier for a man to disguise himself as an elderly woman than a young one. Rougher skin and creases don’t matter as much.”

“I love the props,” Silvestri said dryly. “Sable coats, a chauffeur and limo. Could we try the limo angle?”

“I’ll get Corey on to it tomorrow, John, but don’t hope. The chauffeur was the other Ghost, I’m picking. Funny, that. Mrs. Dobchik could remember every detail about Grandma down to bifocal glasses, but not a thing about the chauffeur apart from a black suit, cap, and leather gloves.”

“No, it’s logical,” said Patrick. “Your Mrs. Dobchik is in the clothing business. She caters to wealthy women every day, but not to workingmen. The women she files in her memory, and she knows every kind of fur, every make of French bags and shoes. I’ll bet Grandma never took her kid gloves off for a second, even when she peeled hundreds off her stack.”

“You’re right, Patsy. Gloved throughout.”

Silvestri growled. “So we’re no closer to the Ghosts.”

“In one way, John, yet we have made progress. Since they leave no evidence and no one has come forward with a description, we’re looking for a needle in a haystack. How many people in Connecticut, three million? As states go it’s pretty small – no big cities, a dozen small ones, a hundred towns. Well, that’s our haystack. But I wasn’t long into this case before I realized that looking for the needle isn’t the way to go. The Tinker Bell dresses may seem like one more dead end, but I don’t think that’s true. They’re a new nail in the coffin, another piece of evidence. Anything that tells us a fact about the Ghosts gets us that much closer to them. What we’re looking at is a jigsaw puzzle made of cloudless blue sky, but the Tinker Bell dresses have filled in a blank space. The amount of sky is growing.”

Carmine leaned forward, running with his idea. “First off, one Ghost has become two Ghosts. Secondly, the two Ghosts are as close as brothers. I don’t know what color their skin is, but what they see in their collective mind is a face. More than anything else, a face. The kind of face you don’t see on white white girls, nor very often on black black girls. The Ghosts work as a team in the true sense – each has a specific set of tasks, areas of expertise. That probably extends to what they do with and to their victims once captured. The rape turns them on, but the victim has to be a virgin in every sense – they’re not interested in heavy petters with intact hymens. One Ghost gives the victim her first kiss, so maybe the other Ghost deflowers her. I see the teamwork persisting – you get to do this, I get to do that. About the actual killing, I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that the subservient Ghost does it. He cleans up. The only reason they keep the heads is the face, which means that when we find them we are going to find every head going back to Rosita Esperanza. While ever their activities weren’t known to the police, they got a kick out of the daylight abductions, but from Francine Murray on, they sweated. I’m beginning to think that they switched to the night because of police awareness, not as part of a consciously designed new method. Night abductions are less risky, simple as that.”

Patrick sat with eyes narrowed as if focused on something very small. “The face,” he said. “This is the first time I’ve heard you discard all the other criteria, Carmine. What makes you think it’s just the face? Why have you discarded color, creed, race, size, innocence?”

“Oh, Patsy, you know how often I’ve been fixed on all of them and each of them, but I’ve finally settled for the face. It came to me on the drive – wham!” He palmed a fist, wham! “Margaretta Bewlee told me. My black pearl after a dozen creamy ones. What did she have in common with the other girls? And the answer is, a face. Nothing except a face. Feature by feature, hers is the same as all the others. I got sidetracked by her differences, so much so that I overlooked the one similarity – the face.”

“What about the innocence?” Marciano asked. “She had that too.”

“Yes, it’s a given. But innocence isn’t what drives our pair of Ghosts to abduct these particular girls. The face does. If a girl doesn’t have the face, all the innocence in the world won’t interest the Ghosts in her.” He paused, frowning.

“Go on, Carmine,” Silvestri prompted.

“The Ghosts – or maybe one Ghost – knew someone with the face. Someone they hate more than the rest of humanity put together.”

He dropped his head in his hands, clutched at his hair. “One of them, or both of them? The dominant one, for sure, whereas the submissive one might just be along for the ride on one fantastic roller-coaster – he’s the servant, he hates whomever the dominant one hates. When you said to me that the Ghosts aren’t interested in breasts, Patsy, you filled in another chunk of sky. The flat chest, the plucked pubes. They should suggest that the owner of the face was pre-pubescent, and yet – if so, why don’t they abduct pre-pubescent girls? They don’t lack the balls or the brains to do it. So is the owner of the face someone that at least one of the Ghosts knew from childhood to young womanhood? Hated more as woman than as child? That’s the riddle I have no answer for.”

Silvestri spat out his cigar in excitement. “But they have gone further with the child aspect on this second dozen, Carmine. A little girl’s party dress.”

“If we knew who owned the face, we’d know who the Ghosts are. I spent the whole drive back from White Plains mentally searching through every Hugger’s house looking for that face on someone’s walls, but it isn’t on any Hugger’s walls.”

“You still believe it’s the Hug?” Marciano asked.

“One of the Ghosts is definitely a Hugger. The other one is not. He’s the half who does the staking out, maybe some of the abductions unaided. It has always had to be a Hugger, Danny. Yes, you can argue that bodies might have been put in any of the medical school dead animal refrigerators, but where else than the Hug is it possible to get two to ten bulky bags from a vehicle to the refrigerator unobserved? The fewer in one trip, the more trips. People come and go in the parking lots twenty-four hours a day, whereas the Hug’s parking lot is key-card gated and utterly deserted at, say, five in the morning. I noticed that there’s a big shopping cart chained to the Hug’s back wall to help a researcher take his books and papers inside. I am not saying that the Ghosts couldn’t have used other refrigerators, I am simply saying that using the Hug’s is simplest and easiest.”

“Simple and easy is better,” said Silvestri. “The Hug it is.”

“You’d best hope it isn’t Desdemona, Carmine,” said Patrick.

“Oh, I’m positive it isn’t Desdemona.”

“Ah!” Patrick cried, tensing. “You suspect someone!”

Carmine drew in a deep breath. “I don’t suspect anyone, and that’s my worst worry. I should suspect someone, so why don’t I? What I do have is a sense that I’m missing something right under my nose. In my sleep it’s crystal clear, but when I wake it’s gone. All I can do is go on thinking.”

“Talk to Eliza Smith,” said Desdemona, her head on Carmine’s shoulder; he had moved her into his apartment the day after her visitor. “I know you don’t really tell me anything significant, but I am convinced that you believe the Ghost is a Hugger. Eliza has been a part of the Hug since its inception, and while she has never stuck her nose into what she shouldn’t, she does know an awful lot other people don’t. The Prof talks to her sometimes, such as when he’s in hot water over the staff – Tamara is quite a strain, Walt Polonowski has his moments, and so does Kurt Schiller. Eliza took a psych major at Smith and went on to take a Ph.D. in psych from Chubb. I’m not a fan of psychologists, but the Prof has a lot of respect for Eliza’s opinions. Go and talk to her.”

“Does the Prof ever need to talk about you to Eliza?”

“Certainly not! To some extent I travel on an outer orbit that’s out of step with all the other orbits – a bit like four-five music. I’m seen as an accountant, not as a scientist, and that makes me of no importance to the Prof.” She snuggled. “I’m serious, Carmine. Talk to Eliza Smith. You know perfectly well that it’s talk will solve this case.”

Chapter 24

Monday, February 21st, 1966

The aftermath of the thaw kept Carmine too busy to see Mrs. Eliza Smith until almost a week later than Desdemona’s urging him to. Besides, he couldn’t see for the life of him what Mrs. Smith might be able to bring to his investigation. Especially now that the word was out that the Prof would not be returning to the Hug.

Temperatures soared and the wind decided to die; from a freeze it turned into ideal demonstration weather, cool enough for warm clothes but not unpleasant. The icy lid on statewide racial unrest melted; violence broke out everywhere.

In Holloman, Mohammed el Nesr sternly forbade rioting, as it was no part of his plans at this stage in his genesis to court arrest and search warrants. Alone among the discontented clots of black people raising hell, the Black Brigade and its leaders were sitting on a formidable arsenal of weapons rather than whatever firearms could be looted from gun shops or private houses. And now was not the time to reveal the presence of that arsenal. Despite which, Mohammed demonstrated relentlessly. If he had hoped for bigger crowds, the numbers who congregated were sufficiently large to put shouting, fist-waving groups outside City Hall, the County Services building, Chubb Administration, the railroad station, the bus station, M.M.’s official residence, and, of course, the Hug. All the placards dwelt upon the Connecticut Monster’s whiteness, inviolability and racially selective murder victims.

“After all,” said Wesley/Ali eagerly to Mohammed, “what we want is to highlight racial discrimination. Whitey’s teenaged girls are safe but no one else’s are – and that’s a fact not even the Governor’s ivory tower can dispute. Every industrial city in Connecticut is at least eighty percent black, which puts us in the catbird seat.”

Mohammed el Nesr looked like the eagle he was named for, a magnificently proud, hawk-nosed man of imposing height and build, his cropped hair hidden beneath a hat he had designed himself, with some of the look of a turban, yet flatter on top. At first he had worn a beard, then decided that a beard obscured too much of a face no camera could make seem bestial, or cruel, or ugly. His leather Black Brigade jacket’s white fist was embroidered rather than stamped, he wore it on top of combat fatigues, and he moved like the ex-military man he was. As Peter Scheinberg, he had risen to the rank of full bird colonel in the U.S. Army, so he was indeed an eagle. An eagle with two law degrees.

Inside their lining of mattresses his headquarters at 18 Fifteenth Street were stuffed with books, for he read insatiably on the law, politics and history, studied his Koran fervently, and knew himself a leader of men. Yet he was still groping for the right way to accomplish his revolution; industrial cities might enjoy big black majorities, but Whitey owned the entire nation, which by and large wasn’t hugely urban. His first inspiration had been to recruit Black Brigaders among the armed services’ plethora of black men, only to find that very few black soldiers, no matter how they privately felt about Whitey, were inclined to enlist. So upon discharge – an honorable one – he had migrated to Holloman, thinking that a small city was the best place to start wooing the restless ghetto masses. That the stone he threw into the Holloman pond would spread its ripples ever outward to embrace other and far bigger places. A superlative orator, he did get invitations to speak at rallies in New York City, Chicago, L.A. But the local leaders in each place were jealous of their sway, didn’t regard Mohammed el Nesr as important. At fifty-two years of age, he knew that he lacked the money and the nationwide organization to weld his people as they needed to be welded. As was equally true for other autocrats, the people were pointing out to him that they refused to be led whither he would take them. Infinitely more wanted to follow Martin Luther King, a pacifist and a Christian.

Now here was this skinny little sansculotte from Louisiana giving him advice – how had he let that happen?

“I’ve been thinking too,” Wesley/Ali burbled on, “about what you said a couple of months ago – do you remember? You said our movement needed a martyr. Well, I’m working on it.”

“Good, Ali, you work on it, man. In the meantime, get back to your brainchild, the Hug. And Eleventh Street.”

“How’s next Sunday’s rally coming on?”

“Great. Looks like we’ll pull in fifty thousand black people on the Green come midday. Now fuck off, Ali, let me get on with writing my speech.”

As ordered, Wesley/Ali fucked off to Eleventh Street, there to spread the word that Mohammed el Nesr was going to speak next Sunday on Holloman Green. Not only did everyone have to be there, but everyone also had to persuade their neighbors and friends to be there. Mohammed was a brilliant, charismatic orator, raved his disciple, well worth listening to. Come along, find out just how thoroughly Whitey was screwing black people. No black girl child was safe, but Mohammed el Nesr had answers.

What a pity, thought Wesley/Ali in one corner of his perpetually busy mind, that no one white would think to shoot Mohammed el Nesr down. What a martyr he would make! But this was staid old Connecticut, not the South or the West: no neo-Nazis, Klanners or even typical rednecks. One of the original thirteen states, a haven of free speech.

Whatever Wesley/Ali thought, Carmine knew that Connecticut had its share of neo-Nazis, Klanners and rednecks; he also knew that most of it was talk, and talk was cheap. But every rabid black hater was being watched, for Carmine was determined that no one was going to draw a bead on Mohammed el Nesr on Sunday afternoon. While Mohammed planned his rally, Carmine planned how to protect him: where the police snipers would be, how many cops he could put in plain clothes to patrol the outskirts of an anti-white crowd. No way was a bullet going to cut Mohammed el Nesr down and make a martyr out of him.

Then on Saturday night the snow returned, a February blizzard that left eighteen inches on the ground overnight; a shrieking sub-zero wind ensured that no rally would take place on Holloman Green. Saved by the winter bell yet again.

So today Carmine was at liberty to drive out to Route 133 and see if Mrs. Eliza Smith was home. She was.

“The boys went to school, very disappointed. If the snow had only waited until last night, no school today.”

“I’m sorry for them, but very glad for me, Mrs. Smith.”

“The black rally on Holloman Green?”

“Exactly.”

“God loves peace,” she said simply.

“Then why doesn’t He issue more of it?” asked the veteran of military and civilian warfare.

“Because having created us, He moved on to someplace else in a very large universe. Perhaps when He did create us, He put a special cog in our machinery to make us peace loving. Then the cog wore down, and whammo! Too late for God to return.”

“An interesting theory,” he said.

“I’ve been baking butterfly cakes,” Eliza said, leading the way into her mock-antique kitchen. “How about I make a fresh pot of coffee and you try some?”

Butterfly cakes, he discovered, were little yellow cakes Eliza had gouged the hilly tops off, filled the hollows with sweetened whipped cream, then cut the tops in two and put them back the wrong way up; they did look quite like fat little wings. They were, besides, delicious.

“Take them away, please,” he begged after scoffing four. “If you don’t, I’ll just sit here and eat the lot.”

“Okay,” she said, stuck them on the counter and sat down as if she meant to stay. “Now, what brings you here, Lieutenant?”

“Desdemona Dupre. She said you were the one I should talk to about the Hug people because you know them best. Will you fill me in, or tell me to go take a running jump?”

“Three months ago I would have told you to go take that jump, but now things are different.” She toyed with her coffee cup. “Do you know that Bob isn’t returning to the Hug?”

“Yes. Everybody at the Hug seems to know that.”

“It’s a tragedy, Lieutenant. He’s a broken man. There has always been a dark side to him, and since I’ve known him all my life, I’ve known about his dark side too.”

“What do you mean by a dark side, Mrs. Smith?”

“Utter depression – a yawning pit – nothingness. He calls it one of those, depending. His first fully fledged attack happened after the death of our daughter, Nancy. Leukemia.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“So were we,” she said, blinking away tears. “Nancy was the eldest, died aged seven. She’d be sixteen now.”

“Have you a picture of her?”

“Hundreds, but I put them away because of Bob’s tendency to depression. Hold on a minute.” Off she went to return with an unframed color photograph of an adorable child, obviously taken before her illness ate her away. Curly blonde hair, big blue eyes, her mother’s rather thin mouth.

“Thank you,” he said, and put the picture face downward on the table. “I take it he recovered from that depression?”

“Yes, thanks to the Hug. Having to mother the Hug held him together. But not this time. He’ll retreat into trains forever.”

“How will you manage financially?” he asked, not realizing how longingly he was looking at the butterfly cakes.

She got up to pour him more coffee and plopped two cakes on his plate. “Here, eat them. That’s an order.” Her lips seemed dry; she licked them. “Financially we have no worries. Both of our families left us with trust funds that mean we don’t have to earn livings for ourselves. What a horrific prospect for a pair of Yankees! The work ethic is ineradicable.”

“What about your sons?”

“Our trusts pass to them. They’re good boys.”

“Why does the Professor beat them?”

She didn’t attempt to deny it. “The dark side. It doesn’t happen often, honestly. Only when they carp at him the way boys do – won’t leave a touchy subject alone, or won’t take no for an answer. They’re typical boys.”

“I guess I was wondering if the boys are going to join their father in playing with the trains.”

“I think,” Eliza said deliberately, “that both my sons would rather die than enter that basement. Bob is – selfish.”

“I had noticed,” he said gently.

“He hates sharing his trains. That’s really why the boys tried to trash them – did he tell you that the damage was disastrous?”

“Yes, that it took four years to rebuild.”

“That’s just not true. A little boy of seven and another of five? Horse feathers, Lieutenant! It was more a business of going around picking things up off the floor than anything else. Then he beat them unmercifully – I had to wrestle the switch off him. And I told him that if he ever hurt the boys that badly again, I’d go to the cops. He knew I meant it. Though he still beat them from time to time. Never in a furor, like he did over the trains. No more sadistic punishments. He likes to criticize them because they don’t measure up to their sainted sister.” She smiled, a twist of the lips that didn’t register amusement. “Though I can assure you, Lieutenant, that Nancy was no more a saint than Bobby or Sam is.”

“You haven’t had it easy, Mrs. Smith.”

“Perhaps not, but it’s nothing I can’t handle. So long as I can handle life, I’m okay.”

He ate the cakes. “Superb,” he said with a sigh. “Tell me about Walter Polonowski and his wife.”

“They got themselves hopelessly tangled in a religious net,” Eliza said, shaking her head as if at incredible denseness. “She thought he’d disapprove of birth control, he thought she’d never consent to birth control. So they had four kids when neither of them really wanted any, especially before their marriage was old enough to let them get to know each other. Adjusting to life with a stranger is hard, but a lot harder when that stranger changes in front of your eyes within scant months – throws up, swells up, complains, the works. Paola is many years younger than Walt – oh, she was such a pretty girl! Very much like Marian, his new one. When Paola found out about Marian, she should have buttoned her lip and kept Walt on as a meal ticket. Instead, she’ll be raising four kids on alimony peanuts, because she sure can’t work. Walt is not about to give her a cent more than he has to, so he’s going to sell the house. Since it’s encumbered by a mortgage, Paola’s share will be more peanuts. Adding to Walt’s troubles is Marian, who is pregnant. That means Walt will have two families to support. He’ll have to go into private practice, which is a genuine pity. He does really good research.”

“You’re a pragmatist, Mrs. Smith.”

“Someone in the family has to be.”

“I’ve heard a rumor from several people,” he said slowly, not looking at her, “that the Hug will cease to exist, at least in its present incarnation.”

“I’m sure the rumors are true, which will make the decisions easier for some Huggers. Walt Polonowski, for one. Maurie Finch for another. Between Schiller’s attempted suicide and finding that poor little girl’s body, Maurie Finch is another broken man. Not in the same way as Bob, but broken all the same.” She sighed. “However, the one I feel sorriest for is Chuck Ponsonby.”

“Why?” he asked, startled at this novel view of Ponsonby, the man he had simply assumed would be the Prof’s heir. No matter how the Hug changed, Ponsonby would surely survive the best among them.

“Chuck is not a brilliant researcher,” Eliza Smith said in a carefully neutral voice. “Bob has been carrying him ever since the Hug opened. It’s Bob’s mind directs Chuck’s work, and both of them are aware of it. A conspiracy between them. Apart from me, I don’t think anyone else has the slightest idea.”

“Why should the Professor do that, Mrs. Smith?”

“Old ties, Lieutenant – extremely old ties. We come from the same Yankee stock, the Ponsonbys, the Smiths and the Courtenays – my family. The friendships go back generations, and Bob watched quirks of fate destroy the Ponsonbys – well, so did I.”

“Quirks of fate?”

“Len Ponsonby – Chuck’s and Claire’s father – was enormously rich, just like his forebears. Ida, their mother, came from a moneyed Ohio family. Then Len Ponsonby was murdered. It must have been 1930, and not long after the Wall Street crash. He was beaten to death outside the Holloman railroad station by a gang of itinerants who went on a rampage. They beat two other people to death as well. Oh, it was blamed on the Depression, on bootleg booze, you name it! No one was ever caught. But Len’s money had vanished in the big crash, which left poor Ida virtually penniless. She funded herself by selling the Ponsonby land. A brave woman!”

“How did you come to know Chuck and Claire in particular?” Carmine asked, fascinated at what could lie behind public façades.

“We all went to the Dormer Day School together. Chuck and Bob were four classes ahead of Claire and me.”

“Claire? But she’s blind!”

“That happened when she was fourteen. Nineteen thirty-nine, just after the war broke out in Europe. Her sight had always been poor, but then she suffered retinal detachments in both eyes simultaneously from retinitis pigmentosa. She literally went totally blind overnight. Oh, it was a terrible business! As if that poor woman and her three children hadn’t gone through enough already!”

“Three children?”

“Yes, the two boys and Claire. Chuck’s the eldest, then came Morton, and finally Claire. Morton was demented, never spoke or seemed to realize that other people lived in the world. His light didn’t go out, Lieutenant. It was never switched on. And he had fits of violence. Bob says that these days they’d diagnose him as autistic. So Morton never went to school.”

“Did you ever see him?”

“Occasionally, though Ida Ponsonby was afraid he’d fly into one of his rages and used to shut him up if we came over to play. Mostly we didn’t. Chuck and Claire came to Bob’s or my house.”

Mind reeling, Carmine sat battling to maintain his calm, to keep the strands of this incredible story separated as they must be – a demented brother! Why hadn’t he picked up that there was something wrong in the Ponsonby ménage? Because on the surface there was nothing wrong, nothing wrong at all! Yet the moment that Eliza Smith said three children, he knew. It began to fall into place. Chuck at the Hug, and mad brother somewhere else…Aware that Eliza Smith was staring at him, Carmine forced himself to ask a reasonable question.

“What does Morton look like? Where is Morton now?”

“Looked like, was, Lieutenant. Past tense. It all happened at once, though I guess there was a little time in between. Days, a week. Claire went blind, and Ida Ponsonby sent her to a blind school in Cleveland, where Ida still had family. Somehow there was a link to the blind school there – an endowment, I think. It was difficult to get into a blind school back then. Anyway, no sooner had Claire gone to Cleveland than Morton died, I think of a brain hemorrhage. We went to the funeral, of course. The things they inflicted on children in those days! We had to tiptoe up to the open casket and lean in to kiss Morton’s cheek. It felt clammy and greasy” – she shuddered – “and it was the first time in my life that I smelled death. Poor little guy, at rest at last. What did he look like? Chuck and Claire. He’s buried in the family plots at the old Valley cemetery.”

Carmine sat with his hypothesis demolished to ruins. No way in a fit Eliza Smith was making any of this up. The Ponsonby tale was true, and all it amounted to was a well-attested fact: that some families, for no reason that made sense, suffered whole strings of disasters. Not accident prone: tragedy prone.

“Sounds as if there’s a weakness in the family,” he said.

“Oh, yes. Bob saw that in medical school, as soon as he’d done genetics. Madness and blindness ran in Ida’s family, but not in the Ponsonbys. Ida went crazy too, a little later on. I think the last time I ever saw her was at Morton’s funeral. With Claire in Cleveland, I didn’t visit the Ponsonby house anymore.”

“When did Claire come home?”

“When Ida went completely mad – not long after Pearl Harbor. Chuck and Bob were never drafted, they spent the war years in pre-med and medical school. Claire had been in Ohio for two years – long enough to learn Braille and find her way around with a white stick the way blind people do. She was one of the first ever to have a guide dog. Biddy’s her fourth.”

Carmine got to his feet, devastated by the magnitude of his disappointment. For one moment he had genuinely thought it was all over; that he had done the impossible and found the Ghosts. Only to discover that he was as far from the answer as ever.

“Thanks for filling me in so well, Mrs. Smith. Is there any other Hugger you think I should know about? Tamara?” He took a breath. “Desdemona?”

“They aren’t murderers, Lieutenant, any more than Chuck and Walt are. Tamara is one of those unfortunate women who can’t pick a good man, and Desdemona” – she laughed – “is British.”

“British says it all about her, huh?”

“To me it does. When she was a kid, they starched her.”

He left Eliza at her front door and plodded back to the Ford.

However, there was one thing he could do, should do: see Claire Ponsonby and find out why she’d lied to him about the date of her blindness. And maybe too he just wanted to see her – look at the face of a living, breathing tragedy. Father and the family fortune lost when she was five, sight when she was fourteen, all her freedom when, at sixteen, she had to come home to care for a demented mother. A job that lasted about twenty-one years. Yet he had never felt the slightest vibration of self-pity emanate from her. Some woman, Claire Ponsonby. Only why had she lied?

Biddy started barking the moment the Ford turned into the driveway of 6 Ponsonby Lane; Claire was at home then.

“Lieutenant Delmonico,” she said in the open doorway, holding Biddy’s collar.

“How did you know it was me?” he demanded, entering.

“The sound of your car. It must have a very powerful engine because it rumbles while it’s idling. Come into the kitchen.”

Through the house she went without as much as brushing a single item of furniture, into the over-warm room with the Aga stove.

Biddy lay down in the corner, eyes fixed on Carmine.

“She doesn’t like me,” he said.

“There are few people she does like. What can I do for you?”

“Tell me the truth. I’ve just been to see Mrs. Eliza Smith, who informed me that you weren’t blind from birth. Why lie to me?”

Claire sighed, slapped her hands on her thighs. “Well, they say your sins will find you out. I lied because I so much loathe the questions that inevitably follow when I tell the truth. Such as, how did it feel after you couldn’t see? Was it a heartbreak? Was it the most terrible thing that’s ever happened to you? Is it harder to be blind after you’ve seen? And on, and on. Well, I can tell you that it felt like a death sentence, that my heart did break, that it is indeed the most terrible thing that has ever happened to me. You’ve just opened my wounds, Lieutenant, and I am bleeding. I hope you’re satisfied.” She turned her back.

“I’m sorry, but I had to ask.”

“Yes, I can see that!” Suddenly she swung around, smiled at him. “My turn to apologize. Let’s start again.”

“Mrs. Smith also told me that you and Charles had a brother, Morton, who died suddenly, very close to the time you went blind.”

“My, Eliza’s tongue did wag this morning! You must be quite something to look at – she always had an eye for a handsome fella. Pardon my being catty, but Eliza got what she wanted. I didn’t.”

“I can pardon the cattiness, Miss Ponsonby.”

“No more Claires?”

“I think I’ve hurt you too much to call you Claire.”

“You were asking me about Morton. He died just after I was sent to Cleveland. They didn’t bother to bring me home for the funeral, though I would have liked to say my goodbyes. He died so suddenly that it was a coroner’s case, so there was time to bring me home before they released his body for burial. Despite his dementia, he was a sweet little guy. Sad, sad, sad…”

Get out of here, Carmine! You’ve outworn your welcome. “My thanks, Miss Ponsonby. Thanks a lot, and sorry to have upset you.”

A coroner’s case…That meant Morton Ponsonby’s death would be on file at Caterby Street; he’d send a uniform to dig it out.

On the way back to Holloman he called in at the ancient burial ground in the Valley, a cemetery that had run out of plots for newcomers ninety years ago. It contained Ponsonby graves by the score, some of them older by far than the earliest picture on the Ponsonby kitchen wall. The newest memorial stone belonged to Ida Ponsonby, died in November of 1963. Before her, Morton Ponsonby, died in October of 1939. And before him, Leonard Ponsonby, died in January of 1930. A trio of tragedies that a grave archaeologist would never have known about from the bald, uninformative epitaphs. The Ponsonbys did not wear their sorrows on their sleeves. Any more than did the Smiths, he thought when he found Nancy’s grave. Bald and spare, no reason for her death given.

What, he wondered, back in the car, would Chuck Ponsonby do without the Hug? And the Prof’s research tips? Go into general practice? No, Charles Ponsonby didn’t have the manner. Too aloof, too austere, too elitist. It might even be, thought Carmine, that no other medical job would be forthcoming for Chuck, and if that were so, then he could have no reason to destroy the Hug.

He walked into Patrick’s office with a growl and flung himself sideways into the armchair that sat in one corner.

“How goes it?” asked Patrick.

“Don’t ask. You know what I could do with right now, Patsy?”

“No, what?”

“A nice shoot-out in the Chubb Bowl parking lot, preferably with machine guns. Or a nice stroll into the middle of ten hoods holding up the Holloman First National. Something refreshing.”

“That’s the remark of an inactive cop with a sore butt.”

“You’re darned right it is! This is a talking case, endless talking, talking, talking. No shoot-outs, no robberies.”

“I take it nothing came out of the sketch Jill Menzies made from the Tinker Bell woman’s description?”

“Not a thing.” Carmine straightened, looked alert. “Patsy, at ten years longer on this troubled earth than me, do you recall a murder at the railroad station in 1930? Three people were beaten to death by a gang of hoboes or something like that. I ask because one of them was the father of Charles and Claire Ponsonby. As if that wasn’t enough, he turned out to have lost all the family’s money in the stock market crash.”

Patrick thought deeply, then shook his head. “No, I don’t remember it – my mother censored everything I heard when I was a kid. But there’ll be a case report on it buried in the archives. You know Silvestri – he wouldn’t throw out a used Kleenex, and his predecessors were just as bad.”

“I was going to send someone out to Caterby Street to pick up yet another case file, but, since I have nothing better to do, I might wander out that way and have a look myself. I’m curious about the Ponsonby tragedies. Could they be Ghost victims too?”

Only a little more than a week to go before the Ghosts struck again; February was a short month, so maybe the date set for their next abduction was early in March. Possessed by a creeping dread, Carmine would have driven to Maine at this time of year to look at some unpromising archival lead, but Caterby Street was much closer than Maine. Paper storage was every public servant’s nightmare, be it police records, medical records, pension records, land rates and taxes, water rates, any of a hundred different categories. When the Holloman Hospital was rebuilt in 1950, a whole subbasement was reserved for archives, so they weren’t hurting. Commissioner by 1960, John Silvestri had fought fiercely to keep every scrap of paper the police had, going back to when Holloman had owned one constable and the theft of a horse was a hanging offense. Then a local concrete firm went bankrupt, and Silvestri hounded all of officialdom for the money and authority to buy the premises, three acres on Caterby Street, an area of industries famous for dirt and racket, therefore not prime property. The three acres and their contents went for $12,000 at auction, the Holloman Police the successful bidders.

On the land sat a vast warehouse in which the concrete firm had kept its trucks and spares, equipment of all kinds. And once the dust had been scoured out and the rest of the lot tidied up, all the police archives had been placed in the warehouse on steel-framed shelves. The roof didn’t leak – a main consideration – and two big attic fans, one at either end, meant sufficient air circulation to keep mildew down in summer.

The two archivists lived a comfortable life in an insulated trailer parked alongside the warehouse entrance; the peon half ran a broom over the warehouse floor occasionally and took trips to a nearby deli for coffee and edibles, while the qualified half did a Ph.D. thesis on the development of criminal trends in Holloman since 1650. Neither half was in the least interested in this Lieutenant weird enough to come to Caterby Street in person. The qualified half simply told him whereabouts to look and went back to her thesis, and the peon vanished in a police pickup.

The records of 1930 occupied nineteen large boxes, whereas the coroner’s records of 1939 ran to almost that many: crime had increased greatly during the nine-year gap. Carmine dug out the case of Morton Ponsonby in October of 1939, then looked in the first of 1930’s boxes for Leonard Ponsonby. The format of a record hadn’t changed much between then and now. Just sheets of legal-sized paper enclosed by a manila file folder, some sheets stapled together, others floating free. In 1930 they hadn’t owned a system that kept the sheets bound to the folder – nor, probably, an office staff to deal with files once they were closed and moved out of the “current” drawers.

But there it was, where it was supposed to be: PONSONBY, Leonard Sinclaire, businessman, 6 Ponsonby Lane, Holloman, Conn. Aged 35. Married, three children.

Someone had placed a table and an office chair under a clear plastic skylight; Carmine carried the two Ponsonby files to it, and one thin, unnamed file that contained the details of the two other murders at the railroad station.

He looked at Morton Ponsonby’s record first. Because the death had been so sudden and unexpected, the Ponsonby’s doctor had declined to sign a death certificate. There was nothing in this to suggest the man suspected foul play; simply, he wanted an autopsy done to see if he had missed anything during the years when Morton Ponsonby had been almost impossible to approach, let alone treat. A typical pathology report that started off with the hackneyed phrase of the time: “This is the body of a well-nourished and ostensibly healthy male adolescent.” But the cause of death had not been a brain hemorrhage, as Eliza Smith had said. The autopsy did not reveal the cause of death, which meant that the pathologist wrote it off as due to heart failure, possibly consequent on vagal inhibition. The guy wasn’t in Patsy’s league, but he did run the full gamut of tests for poisons without finding any, and he noted the presence of psychosis in the medical history. No changes in the brain were present to indicate cause of the psychosis. The boy’s penis, he noted, was uncircumcised and very large, whereas the testes were only partially descended. For 1939, a thorough job. Carmine was left with no doubts that Morton Ponsonby was no more and no less than a hapless victim of the family’s tendency to tragedy. Or maybe what it really said was that Ida Ponsonby’s genetic contribution to her offspring was unsatisfactory.

Right, on to Leonard Ponsonby. The crime happened halfway through January of 1930, in the midst of two feet of snow – one of the colder winters, to produce January blizzards. The train, which had originated in Washington, D.C., had come in from Penn Station in New York City, running two hours late due to frozen points and a snow slide off a steep bank onto the line. Rather than sit inside and perish, the passengers had elected to dig the line free of snow. One car had held about twenty drunks in a group, jobless men hoping for work in Boston, the train’s ultimate destination; they had been the most reluctant shovelers, boozed up, angry, aggressive, working only to keep warm. When the train reached Holloman it stopped for a quarter-hour, enabling the through passengers to buy snacks from the station café, a cheaper alternative than the train’s under-patronized dining car.

Ah, here was the most interesting news! Leonard Ponsonby was not disembarking! He was boarding the train to travel to Boston, for so said his ticket. He’d chosen to wait outside in the cold, and, according to one observant passenger, he appeared furtive. Furtive? Ponsonby had shown no inclination to display himself in the warmth of the station waiting room, nor did he climb aboard as soon as the train pulled in. No, he stayed outside in the snow.

The time was 9 P.M., and this Boston train was the last one for the day. It steamed off on its journey while the station staff made the rounds to lock the waiting rooms, ladies’ room and toilets against the army of vagabonds tramping the nation in search of work or hand-outs, though the twenty-odd drunks had not left the train in Holloman. Somewhere between Hartford and the Massachusetts border they jumped off into the night, which was why they had come under suspicion and why, after fruitless inquiries, they had ended in bearing the blame.

Leonard Ponsonby was lying in the snow with his head beaten to a pulp; near him lay a woman and a female child, their heads also reduced to pulp. Ponsonby’s wallet contents identified him, but the woman and child carried nothing to say who they were. Her old, cheap pocketbook held one dollar and ninety cents in coins, an unironed handkerchief and two cookies. A carpetbag contained clean but very cheap underwear for a woman and a girl child, socks, stockings, two scarves and a little girl’s dress. The woman was quite young, the child about six. Ponsonby was described as well dressed and prosperous, with $2,000 in notes in his wallet, a diamond stick-pin in his tie, and four valuable diamonds in each of his platinum cuff links. Whereas the woman and child had been summed up in one powerfully suggestive word: “breadline.”

To Carmine’s sensitive nose, three weird murders. One man, prosperous, on his own, plus a breadline woman and child not connected to him. Robbery not a motive. All three skulking outside in the snow when they should have been inside warming their hands on a steam radiator. Of one thing he was sure: the gang from the train had had nothing to do with these murders.

The real question was, which one was the intended victim? The other two were mere witnesses, killed because they had seen the wielder of the blunt instrument that had done for all three with a degree of savagery commented upon in the otherwise tersely sloppy police report. Heads, the intended victim was Leonard Ponsonby. Tails, it was the woman. If the coin stood on its edge, then it was the little girl.

There were no photographs whatsoever. The information about the woman and her presumed daughter or relative of some kind was contained in their slender file next to Ponsonby’s thicker one in the January Box 2 archives. All three had died a blunt-instrument death confined to their skulls, mashed to pulp, but the detective hadn’t been smart enough to see that Ponsonby had to have been the first victim; the woman and child looked on, paralyzed with fear, until the woman’s turn came, and then the child’s. Had Ponsonby not been first, he would have put up a fight. So whoever had held the blunt instrument – Carmine’s experienced money was on a baseball bat – had crept up through the snow and struck Ponsonby before he noticed anyone approaching. Another ghost, how extraordinary.

When he went outside to see the archivists, they had locked up their trailer and gone for the day – half an hour early. Time, John Silvestri, to turn the blinding beam of your duty supervisors upon Police Archives at Caterby Street. The three files in his left hand, Carmine departed too: those cockroaches would not discover any missing files until he chose to return them. A pair of cool little bureaucratic crooks, secure in the knowledge that, provided the records didn’t burn, no one would be interested enough in their existence to worry about them. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

On his way back to the County Services building he called in to the Holloman Post morgue, to find that Leonard Ponsonby’s odd and horrible death had made the front page. Mindless violence outside of domestic crime was almost unheard of in 1930; it was the kind of thing had newspapers screaming about escaped lunatics. Of gangland killings there were plenty during the long years of Prohibition, but they didn’t fall into the category of mindless violence. Indeed, even after it was established that no lunatic had escaped from an asylum, the Holloman Post stuck to its guns and insisted that the killer was an escaped lunatic from somewhere out of the state.

What with one thing and another, he was late meeting Desdemona in Malvolio’s.

“Sorry,” he said, sliding into the booth opposite her. “You now have a preview of what life is like when your boyfriend is a cop. Scads of missed appointments, a lot of dinners gone cold. I’m glad you’re not a cook. Eating out is the best alternative, and nowhere better than Malvolio’s, a cop diner. They’ll doggy-bag anything from a whole meal to one spoonfull of apple pie the minute someone raps on the window.”

“I quite like a cop boyfriend,” she said, smiling. “I’ve ordered, but asked Luigi to hold off for a while. You’re far too generous, never letting me pay at least my share of the bill.”

“In my family, a man who let a woman pay would be lynched.”

“You look as if you’ve had rather a good day for a change.”

“Yes, I found out bunches of things. Trouble is, I think that they’re all red herrings. Still, it’s fun finding out.” He reached across the table to take her hand, turned it over. “It’s fun finding out about you too.”

She squeezed his fingers. “Ditto, Carmine.”

“In spite of this terrible case, Desdemona, my life has improved over the last days. You’re a part of it, lovely lady.”

No one had ever called her a lovely lady before; she felt a rush of confused gratification flood through her, went a bright red, didn’t know where to look.

Six years ago in Lincoln she had thought herself in love with a wonderful man, a doctor; until, passing his door, she heard his voice through it.

“Who, Desperate Desdemona? My dear chap, the ugly ones are always so grateful that they’re well worth wooing. They make good mothers, and one never has to worry about the milkman, does one? After all, one doesn’t gaze at the mantelpiece while one is poking the fire, so I shall marry Desdemona. Our children will be clever into the bargain. Also tall.”

She had started making plans to emigrate the very next day, vowing to herself that she would never again lay herself open to that kind of pragmatic cruelty.

Now, thanks to a faceless monster, here she was living with Carmine in his apartment and perhaps taking it for granted that he loved her the way she loved him. Words were cheap – hadn’t the Lincoln doctor proved that? How much of what he had said to her originated in his job, his protectiveness, his shock at what had almost happened to her? Oh, please, Carmine, don’t let me down!

Chapter 25

Friday, February 25th, 1966

Day Thirty since Faith Khouri’s abduction would arrive in one week’s time, and no one, including Carmine, had reason to believe that they stood a better chance now to prevent another murder than they had four months ago. When had any other case gone on so long in the face of so much manpower, so many precautions, warnings, such statewide publicity?

They had agreed that the general procedure would be the same: every suspect in the state would be placed under round-the-clock surveillance from Monday, February twenty-eighth, until Friday, March fourth. That encompassed the thirty-two Holloman suspects. Their act had become tighter, more seamless; in the case of Professor Bob Smith, for instance, Marsh Manor’s deplorable security would be offset by four teams of watchers from the Bridgeport police. Unless he targeted a victim in Bridgeport, the Prof would have to swim the Housatonic River if he headed east, or evade six roadblocks if he headed west. That represented the greatest difference between last month’s plan and this new one: squad cars and uniforms as well as plain clothes and unmarkeds, and roadblocks everywhere. They had agreed at a statewide meeting that if the Ghosts were caught at a roadblock before they had a chance to abduct, then so be it. Any known suspect in a roadblock situation meant a large red mark in the record and concentrated surveillance. If that meant February/March was a bust for the Ghosts, then March/April would see new police methods and possible suspects.

Carmine himself had decided not to man a watch; it wasn’t likely that the beginning of March would see zero Fahrenheit temperatures, so he was better off somewhere in clear radio contact with everyone else, and with a gigantic map of Connecticut pinned to a wall at his elbow. Two consecutive Ghost strikes in the far east suggested that this time the Ghosts would head north or west or southwest. The Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island state police had agreed to patrol their Connecticut borders thicker than flies on a carcass. It was war to the teeth.

Thinking more of an evening with Desdemona than about a case grown so stale it was wearisome, late that afternoon Carmine took the Ponsonby case files back to Caterby Street.

“Do you still have unclaimed personal property going back to 1930?” he asked the Ph.D. half of the archive duo; the peon half was nowhere to be seen. Nor was the police pickup. And damn, he hadn’t remembered to tell Silvestri what was going on out here.

“We should have personal property going back to Paul Revere’s hat,” she said sarcastically, not amused that he had filched her files, nor worried at her own absence last Monday.

“These two murder victims,” he said, waving the very thin and unnamed file under her nose. “I want to see their personal effects.”

She yawned, examined her nails, glanced at the clock. “I’m afraid you’ve left your run too late, Lieutenant. It’s five and the place is closed for the day. Come back tomorrow, we’re open.”

Tomorrow Silvestri was going to have the whole tale, but why not give the bitch a sleepless night before the axe fell? “Then I suggest,” he said pleasantly, “that first thing in the morning you get your peon to use his pickup legally by delivering the box of personal effects to Lieutenant Carmine Delmonico at the County Services building. If the requested box isn’t delivered, my niece Gina will wind up sitting at your desk. She’s eager for a county job in an out-of-the-way corner because she needs to study. She wants to join the FBI, but it’s one helluva hard entrance exam for a woman.”

Chapter 26

Sunday, February 27th, 1966

At 11 A.M. on the Sunday before surveillance was due to begin Carmine walked into the police part of the County Services building feeling lonely, restless and tense.

Lonely because last Friday night Desdemona had announced that if the weekend was anything like bearable, she was hiking the Appalachian Trail right up on the Massachusetts border. Since he loved her presence in his bed, this took him aback; nor would she listen to his protests about wasting a squad car getting her there and back again. It worried him that his expectations from this relationship were so different from those he had felt with Sandra. Albeit incongruous in both roles, she had been wife and mother, tucked into a special compartment he never bothered to open while he was on the job. Whereas Desdemona hovered somewhere in his mind all the time, and it had nothing to do with the part she played in his case. Simply, he actively looked forward to his time with her. Maybe it was an age thing: still in his twenties when he had met Sandra, into his early forties when he met Desdemona. As a parent he hadn’t worked out too well, but as a husband he had been far worse. Yet he knew that the answer for Desdemona wasn’t as lover. Marriage, it had to be marriage. Only did she want marriage? He plain didn’t know. Hiking the Appalachian Trail seemed to argue that her need of him wasn’t in the same league as his of her. Yet she was so loving when they were together, and she hadn’t at any time reproached him for neglecting her in favor of his work. Oh, Desdemona, don’t let me down! Stay with me, cleave to me!

Restless because Desdemona’s desertion had left him with two days to fill in and no one to fill them in with; Silvestri had forbidden him to poke his nose into any case other than the Ghosts, with the single exception of the racial situation if it exploded. And now, with a reasonably fine, above-freezing Sunday, was Mohammed el Nesr busy? Not busy demonstrating or rallying, at any rate. His quiescence was no mystery. Like Carmine, Mohammed was waiting for the Ghosts to abduct another victim this week, freshen up pain and indignation. The big rally would go on next Sunday, for sure. Taking desperately needed cops away from the Ghosts. A pain in the ass, but good strategy on Mohammed’s part.

Tense because Day Thirty was almost upon him.

“Lieutenant Delmonico?” asked the desk sergeant.

“That was me when I last looked,” Carmine said with a grin.

“I found an antique evidence box stuck behind those packages when I came in this morning. No name on it, which I guess is why you never got it. Then I found a tag with your name on it yards away.” He bent down, fumbled under his counter and came up with a big, square box that looked not unlike those in current use.

The belongings of the woman and child beaten to death in 1930! He’d forgotten all about them, so absorbed in surveillance planning had he become. Though he had remembered to ask Silvestri to light a fire under the archives bitch and her peon.

“Thanks, Larry, I owe you one,” he said, picked up the box and took it to his office.

Something to do with a Sunday morning if your beloved is on a route march through wet leaves.

No fetid relics of a crime thirty-six years old puffed out of it when he pulled the lid off; they hadn’t bothered keeping the clothes the pair were wearing, which meant there must have been blood all over them, including footwear. Since no one had thought to record the exact distance of “near” Leonard Ponsonby, for all that Carmine knew some of the blood might have been his. No one had even drawn a sketch to show how the bodies had lain in relation to each other. “Near” was as much as he had to go on.

The pocketbook was there, however. By habit he had donned gloves to remove it gingerly so he could examine it with his more sophisticated eyes. Homemade. Knitted, as women did in those days of no money, with two cane handles and a lining of coarse cotton fabric. No clasp. This woman couldn’t afford even the cheapest cowhide, let alone leather. The pocketbook contained a tiny purse in which sat a silver dollar, three quarters, one dime and one nickel. Carmine put the money purse on his desk. A man’s handkerchief, clean but not ironed; calico, not linen. And, in the bottom, fragments and crumbs of what he presumed were the two cookies. The mother had probably stolen them from the station café so the child would have something to eat on the train, and that might be why they were hiding out in the snow. The autopsies had said both stomachs were empty. Yes, she’d stolen the cookies.

The carpetbag wasn’t a large one, though it was old enough to have been one of those the northern predators had carried south with them after the Civil War. Faded, balding in places, never elegant even when new. He opened it with gentle reverence; in here resided almost everything that poor woman had owned, and no thing was more touching than the mute evidence of lives long over.

On top were two long woollen scarves, hand knitted in varicolored stripes, as if the knitter had scrounged for scraps. But why were the scarves in the bag when the weather was so awful? Spares? Under them were two pairs of clean women’s panties made of unbleached muslin, and two much smaller pairs that obviously belonged to the child. A pair of knitted kneesocks and a pair of knitted stockings. On the bottom, carefully folded between torn tissue paper, a little girl’s dress.

Carmine stopped breathing. A little girl’s dress. Made of pale blue French lace exquisitely embroidered with seed pearls. Puffed sleeves on dainty cuffs, pearl-studded buttons up the back, silk lining, and beneath that, stiffened net gathered to hold the skirt out like a ballerina’s tutu. A 1930 precursor of a Tinker Bell, except that this one had been completely handmade, every pearl sewn on separately and firmly, none of the stitching done by machine. Oh, the things the 1930 cops had missed! On the left breast the word EMMA had been picked out in dark, purplish pearls.

Head whirling, Carmine laid the dress on his desk and then stood just staring at it for what might have been five minutes or an hour; he didn’t know, hadn’t looked at his watch or the clock.

Finally he sat down and put the carpetbag on his lap, opening it as widely as its rusting jaws would allow. The lining was worn, had come apart on one side seam; he put both hands inside the bag and felt around, eyes closed. There! Something!

A photograph, and not taken on a box Brownie. This was a studio portrait still mounted in a cream cardboard folder stamped with the name of the photographer. Mayhew Studios, Windsor Locks. Someone had written what looked like “1928” on the frame below, but in pencil now so faint it was a best guess.

The woman was seated on a chair, the child – about four years old – seated on her knees. In this, the woman was much better clad, wore a string of real pearls around her neck and real pearls in her earlobes. The little girl wore a dress similar to the one in the carpeting, EMMA showing up clearly. And both of them had the face. Even in black-and-white their skins had a suggestion of café au lait; their hair was densely black and curly, their eyes very dark, their lips full. To Carmine, gazing at them through a wall of tears, they were exquisite. Destroyed in all their youth and beauty, every vestige of it bloodied to pulp.

A crime of passion. Why had no one seen that? No killer would waste his essence on a torrent of blows were hate not the motive. Especially when the skull under the bludgeon belonged to a little girl. There’s no way these two female creatures weren’t connected to Leonard Ponsonby. They were there because he was there, he was there because they were there.

So it’s Charles Ponsonby after all. Though he wasn’t old enough to do this. Nor Morton, nor Claire. This was mad Ida a decade and more before she went mad. Which means that Leonard and Emma’s mother were – lovers? Relatives? One was as likely as the other; Ida was ultra-conservative, no touch of the tar brush for her. So many questions to ask! Why were Emma and her mother so destitute in January of 1930 when Leonard was with them carrying $2,000 and flaunting diamond jewelry? What had happened to Emma and her mother between the prosperity of the 1928 Windsor Locks photo and their impoverishment of January 1930?

Enough, Carmine, enough! Nineteen thirty can wait, 1966 cannot. Chuck Ponsonby is a Ghost – or is he the Ghost, doing all of it alone? How much help does Claire give him? How much help is she capable of giving him? Can one Ponsonby be a Ghost and the other not? Yes, because of Claire’s blindness. I know she’s blind! Chuck could move around in some secret, soundproof basement and she’d never know. I’m positive it’s soundproof. The screams have to be kept in, and the screams are very loud.

Charles Ponsonby…A bachelor stay-at-home who couldn’t produce original research to save his life. Always in someone else’s shadow – mad mother’s, mad brother’s, blind sister’s, far more successful best friend’s. Doesn’t bother matching his socks, keeping his hair combed, buying a new tweed jacket. An archetypal absentminded professor, too timid to pick up a rat without wearing a furnace glove, nondescript in that way which suggests a radical failure in ego, despite the veneer of intellectual snobbishness.

But can this Charles Ponsonby be the portrait of a multiple rapist/murderer so brilliant that he’s run rings around us ever since we discovered that he existed? Seems impossible to believe. The trouble is that no one has a portrait of the multiple murderer except that sex always seems involved. Therefore every time we unearth a specimen, we have to dissect him minutely. His age, his race, his creed, his appearance, the victim type he chooses, the personality he presents to the world, his childhood, background, likes and dislikes – a thousand thousand factors. About Charles Ponsonby we can certainly say that on his mother’s side there is a family history of madness as well as blindness.

Carmine replaced the contents of the evidence box exactly as he had found them and took it down to the desk.

“Larry, put this in security storage right now,” he said as he handed it over. “No one is to go near it.”

Then before Larry could reply, Carmine was out the door. It was time to take another look at 6 Ponsonby Lane.

The questions milled in his head, swarming wasps in search of the nest called answers: how, for instance, had Charles Ponsonby managed to get from the Hug to Travis High and back again while convincing everyone that he had been in conference on the roof? Thirty precious minutes before Desdemona found him and the others there, yet all six on the roof swore that no one was absent long enough to go to the john. How reliable was the attention span of an absentminded researcher? And how had Ponsonby gotten out of his house on the night Faith Khouri was snatched when it had been so closely watched? Did the contents of the 1930 evidence box represent enough hard evidence to wring a search warrant out of Judge Douglas Thwaites? The questions swarmed.

He came down Route 133 from the northeast, which brought him to Deer Lane first. In the Council’s view, the four houses on its far side had not warranted tar seal; Deer Lane’s 500 yards were traprock gravel. At its end it flared into a circular patch that gave sufficient parking for six or seven cars. On all sides the forest came down to the road – secondary growth, of course. Two hundred years ago this would have been cleared and farmed, but as the more fertile soils of Ohio and westward beckoned, farming had ceased to be as profitable for Connecticut Yankees as the assembly line precision industries Eli Whitney had started. So the woods had grown back in profusion – oak, maple, beech, birch, sycamore, a few pines. Dog-woods and mountain laurel to bloom in the spring. Wild apple trees. And the deer had come back too.

His tires crunched audibly over the gravel, which reinforced his opinion that the cars watching Deer Lane at its junction with 133 on the night Faith Khouri vanished would have heard a vehicle as well as seen the white vapor from its tailpipe. And the only cars parked on Deer Lane that night had been police unmarkeds. So while it was possible that Chuck Ponsonby had walked up the slope behind his house minus a flashlight, where would he have gone from there? He hadn’t stored his vehicle any closer than some distance up 133, or if the vehicle belonged to a partner, it hadn’t picked him up any closer than that. A walk that long at zero Fahrenheit? Unlikely. Freezers were warm by comparison. So how did he do it?

Carmine had a precept: if you are forced to take a stroll on a nice day, then do it near a suspect; and if the stroll involves a forest, take along a pair of binoculars to watch the birdies. Binoculars slung around his neck, Carmine walked up the slope among the trees in the direction of the spine that looked down on number 6 Ponsonby Lane. The ground was a foot deep in wet leaves, the snow melted except in the lee of an occasional boulder and in crannies where the warmth hadn’t penetrated. Several deer moved out of his way as he walked, but not in alarm; animals always knew when they were on a reserve. It was, he reflected, a pretty place, peaceful at this time of year. In summer the whining buzz of lawn mowers and shrieks of laughter from cookouts would ruin it. He knew from previous police combing that no one ventured out of the car park, even for illicit sexual encounters; the twenty-acre reserve contained no beer cans, ring pulls, bottles, plastic detritus or used rubbers.

Once on top of the ridge it was surprisingly easy to see the Ponsonby house. The trees of their slope had been drastically thinned to make a woodsy statement: a clump of three-trunked American birches, one beautiful old elm tree looking healthy, ten maples clustered in such a way that their fall leaves would make a stunning display, and nursery specimens of dogwood that would turn the grounds into a pink-and-white dreamland in spring. The thinning must have been done a very long time ago, as the stumps of the removed trees had disappeared from sight.

Lifting his binoculars, he surveyed the house as if it were fifty feet from him. There was Chuck up a ladder with a chisel and a blow-torch, chipping at old paint the proper way. Claire was sprawled in a wooden outdoor chair near the laundry porch, Biddy at her feet; the scant breeze was kissing his face, so the dog hadn’t scented his presence. Then Chuck called out. Claire got to her feet to walk around to the side of the house so unerringly that Carmine was amazed. Yet he knew that Claire was blind.

How did he know that so certainly? Because Carmine left no stone unturned, and Claire’s blindness was a stone in his path. Sometimes he used the services of a women’s prison warder, Carrie Tallboys, who struggled to support a promising son, therefore was available for hire outside working hours. Carrie had a curious talent that involved acting out a role so convincingly that people told her a great deal they ought not have. So Carmine had sent Carrie to see Claire’s ophthalmologist, the eminent Carter Holt. Her story was that she was thinking of donating some money to retinitis pigmentosa, as her dear friend Claire Ponsonby suffered from it before she went completely blind. Ah, well he remembered the day Claire came in with bilateral retinal detachments – so rare, for both eyes to go at once! His first big case, and it had to be one that lay beyond his power to heal. But, protested Carrie, surely nowadays it could be cured? Definitely not, said Dr. Holt. Claire Ponsonby was irretrievably blind for life. He had looked into her eyes and seen the damage for himself. Sad!

Carmine watched blind Claire talk animatedly to Chuck, who came down his ladder, linked his arm through his sister’s, and took her inside through the laundry porch. The dog followed them; then came the faint strains of a Brahms symphony. That was it: the Ponsonbys had had sufficient fresh air. Though – wait, wait! Oh, yes, sure. Chuck emerged, gathered up his tools and took them and the ladder to the garage before returning to the house. He did have an everything-in-its-place side to him, but obsession?

Letting the binoculars fall, Carmine turned to make the trip back to Deer Lane. It was more difficult going downhill through masses of slimy, decaying leaves; not even the deer had yet made paths, though by summer there would be many. Immersed in thoughts of Charles Ponsonby and his contradictions, Carmine started to hurry, on fire now to get back to his office and chew the puzzle over at leisure. Also chew some lunch at Malvolio’s.

The next thing his feet went from under him, he was plunging forward, both hands outstretched to take the impact of his fall. Dead leaves went flying in wet, clotted clumps as he landed on his palms with a dull, hollow boom. He slid onward, scrabbling for a hold, before his momentum gradually slowed down and he could stop. Two ruts marked the progress of his hands, gouged deeply into the humus. Cursing softly, he rolled over and picked himself up, feeling the sting of abraded skin but relieved to discover that he hadn’t done himself worse harm. Stupid, Carmine, stupid! Too busy thinking to watch where you’re going, you dodo.

Only why a hollow sound? Curious because that was the kind of man he was, he crouched down and excavated one of the channels a palm had made; six inches deeper he uncovered a wooden plank. Digging frantically now, he pushed the leaves away until he could see a part of what was there: the surface of what might be an old cellar door.

Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus! Suddenly galvanized, he was scraping the leaves back where they had been, pushing them down, packing them down, forehead dewed with sweat, breath grating. When he was fairly satisfied that he had evened out the evidence of his fall, he squirmed backward on his rump before standing again to survey his work. No, not good enough. If someone were to examine the area closely, they would notice. He took off his jacket and used it to gather more dead leaves from a hundred feet away, brought them back and distributed them, then threw the jacket down and used it like a broad broom to obscure every trace of his intrusion. Finally, gulping and gasping, he was positive that no one would suspect what had happened. Now get the hell out of here, Carmine! That he did on his knees, scattering leaves in his wake; he was almost to the parking lot before he rose. With any luck, deer would browse through in their constant search for winter forage.

Back in the Ford, he prayed that Claire’s remarkable hearing didn’t extend as far as a grunty engine on Deer Lane. He put his foot gently on the gas pedal and rumbled to the corner in first gear. Part of him was dying to transmit his news to Silvestri, Marciano and Patrick, but he decided not to call them from Major Minor’s love retreat, doing a brisk Sunday business. Better to turn back into the northeast and depart the way he had come. It wouldn’t kill him to wait.

Not such a long walk at zero Fahrenheit after all, Chuckie baby! And no need for a flashlight on the house side of the ridge, because you have a tunnel that doesn’t surface until way down the reserve’s slope. Someone – was it you, or long before you? – dug deep below the ridge, made the distance shorter. In Connecticut, hundreds of miles from the Mason-Dixon Line, it certainly wasn’t dug for escaping slaves. My bet is that you dug it yourself, Chuckie baby. On the night that you snatched Faith Khouri all you had to do was get out; by the time you returned with her, we had left the neighborhood. That was one of our mistakes. We should have maintained the watch. Though, to be fair to us, we wouldn’t have caught you returning; we were watching Ponsonby Lane and your house, we didn’t know about the tunnel. So that time the luck was with you, Chuckie baby. But this time the luck is with us. We know about the tunnel.

Since he was ravenous and wanted a little more time to think, Carmine lunched at Malvolio’s before summoning his cohorts.

“I now understand the full significance of an old cliché,” he said as Patrick, the last to arrive, came through Silvestri’s office door.

“Which old cliché is that?” Patrick asked, sitting down.

“Pregnant with news.”

“Behold three expert midwives, so give birth.”

His words crisp, his sequence of events logical and correct, Carmine led his audience step by step through the things that had happened after he saw Eliza Smith.

“It all sprang from her – what she said, how she said it. My catalyst. Culminating in a fall down a hillside – talk about luck! I have had so much luck on this case,” he said when the tale was over and his audience had managed to close their jaws.

“No, not luck,” Patrick objected, eyes shining. “Pigheaded, hardassed determination, Carmine. Who else would have bothered to follow up on Leonard Ponsonby’s death? And who else would have bothered to look in an evidence box thirty-six years old? Chasing up a crime marked unsolved because you’re one of the very, very few people I can think of who know that when lightning strikes the same place twice, something is conducting it there.”

“That’s fine and dandy, Patsy, but it didn’t amount to enough to take before Judge Thwaites. I found the real evidence by sheer accident – a fall on a slippery hillside.”

“No, Carmine. The fall may have been an accident, but what you found was no accident. Anyone else would have gotten up, then brushed his clothes” – Patrick picked dead leaves off Carmine’s ruined jacket – “and limped away. You found the door because your brain registered a wrong noise, not because the fall uncovered the door. It didn’t. And anyway, you wouldn’t have been on the hillside in the first place if you hadn’t found our face in a picture taken about 1928. Come on, take some of the credit!”

“Okay, okay!” Carmine cried, throwing up his hands. “What’s more important is to decide where we go from here.”

The atmosphere in Silvestri’s office almost visibly fizzed with elation, relief, the wonderful and inimitable joy that comes with the moment a case breaks open. Especially the Ghosts case, so dark, so haunting, so tediously long in the breaking. No matter what hitches were to come – they were too seasoned to believe that none would – they had enough of the answer to move forward, to feel that the end wasn’t far away.

“First off, we can’t assume that the legal system is on our side,” Silvestri said through his cigar. “I don’t want this shit getting off the hook on some technicality – especially a technicality his defense can pin on the police. Face it, we’re the ones who usually wear the rotten eggs. This will be a big trial, coverage nationwide. That means Ponsonby’s defense won’t consist of two-bit shysters, even if he doesn’t have much money. Every legal shit heap who knows Connecticut and federal law will be clawing to get on Ponsonby’s defense team. And clawing to plaster us with rotten eggs. We can’t afford a single error.”

“What you’re saying, John, is that if we get a warrant now and bust in through Ponsonby’s tunnel, all we’ll really have is something that looks like an operating room in a doctor’s house,” said Patrick. “Like Carmine, I’ve always believed that this turkey doesn’t have a blood-soaked, filthy killing premises – he has an O.R. And if he’s only one-half as careful about leaving traces in his O.R. as he is on his victims, we might come out of it with nothing. Is that the way your mind is going?”

“It is,” said Silvestri.

“No mistakes,” said Marciano. “Not one.”

“And we’ve already made carloads of them” from Carmine.

A silence fell; the elation had died completely. Finally Marciano made an exasperated noise and burst into speech.

“If the rest of you won’t, then I’ll say it. We have to catch Ponsonby in the act. And if that’s what we have to do, that’s what we have to do.”

“Oh, Danny, for God’s sake!” Carmine cried. “Put another girl’s life in jeopardy? Put her through the horrors of being abducted by that man? I won’t do it! I refuse to do it!”

“She’ll get a fright, yes, but she’ll get over that. We know who he is, right? We know how he operates, right? So we stake him out – no need to stake anyone else out -”

“We can’t do that, Danny,” Silvestri butted in. “We have to stake everyone out the same as we did a month ago. Otherwise he will notice. Can’t be done without a full stakeout.”

“Okay, I concede that. But we know it’s him, so we give him extra-special attention. When he moves, we’re there. We follow him to his victim’s home and we let him grab her before we grab him. Between the grabbing, the tunnel and the O.R., he can’t possibly walk out of court a free man,” said Marciano.

“It’s circumstantial, is the problem,” Silvestri grumbled. “Ponsonby has committed at least fourteen murders, but our body count is four. We know the first ten victims were incinerated, but how are we going to prove that? Do you read Ponsonby as the confessing type? I sure as hell do not. Since sixteen-year-old girls run away from home every day, there are ten murders we’ll never convict him for. Everything rides on Mercedes, Francine, Margaretta and Faith, but nothing ties him to any of them beyond a supposition as frail as blown glass. Danny is right. Our only hope is to catch him in the act. Bust in there now, and he’ll walk. His lawyers will be good enough to persuade a jury to let Hitler or Stalin walk.”

They glared at each other, faces perplexed and angry.

“We have another problem,” Carmine said. “Claire Ponsonby.”

Commissioner Silvestri was not a profane man, but today – a Sunday too – he was breaking his own rules. “Shit! Piss!” he hissed. Then, in a bark, “Fuck!”

“How much do you think she knows, Carmine?” Patrick asked.

“I can’t even guess, Patsy, and that’s the truth. I do know that she’s genuinely blind, her ophthalmologist says so. And he is Dr. Carter Holt, now Professor of Ophthalmology at Chubb. Yet I’ve never seen a more adept blind person than she is. If she’s the bait dangled in front of a nunnish sixteen-year-old filled with the desire to do good, then she’s an accomplice to rape and murder even if she never enters Ponsonby’s O.R. What better bait than a blind woman? However, a blind woman is very noticeable, which is why I’m inclined to dismiss the theory. She’d be walking ground she doesn’t know the way she knows Six Ponsonby Lane, so how fast could she move? How would she know her target unless Chuck is at her side? Oh, I’ve spent a lot of this morning wondering about Claire! I keep seeing her outside St. Martha’s school in Norwalk – did you know that the sidewalk has been in bad shape for over a year due to council repairs to pipes? With two girls disappearing in the same place, someone would have noticed her. To me, Claire would have needed practice walks on a sidewalk mined with holes. I wound up concluding that Claire would be more a handicap to Chuck than an asset. I guess she could have watched the victim as he drove back to his lair, but that seems flimsy. Yet he must have had a sighted accomplice – who was the chauffeur, for instance?”

“You want to rule out Claire?” Silvestri asked.

“Not entirely, John. Just as an unlikely abduction helper.”

“I agree she shouldn’t be ruled out entirely,” said Patrick, “but I can’t believe she’s capable of much help of any kind. That’s not to say she doesn’t know what her brother’s been doing.”

“There’s a colossal bond between them. Now we know what their childhood was like, the bond makes more sense. Their mother murdered their father, I’d stake my life on it. Which means Ida Ponsonby was mentally unstable long before Claire came home to look after her. It must have been hell.”

“Would the children have known of the murder, Carmine?”

“I have no idea, Patsy. How would Ida have gotten home in a blizzard in 1930? Presumably in Leonard’s car, but did they plough the roads back then? I don’t remember.”

“The main ones, sure,” said Silvestri.

“She must have had blood on her. Maybe the kids saw it.”

“Speculations!” Marciano said with a snort. “Let’s stick to the facts, guys.”

“Danny’s right as usual,” said Silvestri, paying him back by putting the cigar butt under his nose. “We start watching people tomorrow night, so we’d better work out the changes now.”

“The most important change,” said Carmine, “is that Corey, Abe and I watch the tunnel entrance in the reserve.”

“What about the dog?” Patrick asked.

“A complication. I doubt it would eat drugged meat, guide dogs are trained not to take food from strangers or off the ground. And as it’s a spayed female, it won’t stray looking for canine company. It hears us, it will bark. What I can’t be sure of is that Chuck won’t take Biddy with him to guard the tunnel door in his absence. If he does, the animal will smell us.”

Patrick laughed. “Not if you’re wearing eau de skunk!”

The rest of them reared back, appalled.

“Jesus, Patsy, no!”

“Well, Abe and Corey, at any rate,” Patrick modified, looking devilish. “Even one of you would be enough.”

“One of us won’t be wearing eau de skunk, and that’s me,” Carmine said, scowling. “There must be another way.”

“Not without tipping Ponsonby off. We can’t kidnap the dog, that’s for sure. This isn’t some yokel with a half-baked plan, this is an M.D. who’s been ahead of us every inch of the way. If the dog goes missing, he knows we’re on to him, and that will be the end of his abductions,” Patrick said. “The ace up his sleeve is his tunnel door in the reserve, and we have to make him think it’s still his secret. He may be protecting it – trip wires, alarm bells or buzzers you step on like a land mine, a light up a tree – before you go near it, check it out, for God’s sake. So sure, he’ll be using the dog. How, I don’t know, just that he will. If I were he, I’d slip a little Seconal in Claire’s last drink for the evening.”

“Patsy, you are so devious!” said Silvestri, grinning.

“Not in Carmine’s league, John. Come on, everything I’ve said is logical.”

“Yes, I know. But where do we find eau de skunk?”

“I have a whole bottle of it,” Patrick said with a purr.

Carmine looked at Silvestri, menace in his face. “Then the Holloman police budget will have to include literal gallons of tomato juice. I can’t ask Abe and Corey to dab eau de skunk behind their ears without offering them a bathtub full of tomato juice in the mornings.” He frowned, looked frustrated. “Do we have a bathtub anywhere in the cells, or just showers?”

“There’s a big iron tub in a room out the back in the old part of the building. Right about the time Leonard Ponsonby was clubbed to death, it was used to pacify lunatics before they got sent off with the men in white coats,” said Marciano.

“Okay, have someone scrub the place out and disinfect it. Then I want that tub brimming with tomato juice, because I think Abe and Corey both have to wear it. If they’re forced to split up, the dog won’t smell the clean one.”

“It’s a deal,” said Silvestri, his expression indicating that he deemed the meeting over.

“Whoa! We can’t break up yet,” said Carmine. “We still have to discuss possibilities. Like, is Ponsonby working alone, or does he have an accomplice we know nothing about? Assuming that Claire isn’t involved, why suddenly do we dismiss the likelihood that there are two Ghosts? Ponsonby does have a life outside the Hug and his home. He’s known to go to art exhibitions, even if that means he takes a day or two off work. From now on we tail him wherever he goes. Our best people, Danny, our very best. Smooth as silk, male and female – and no clumsy two-way radios. The new lapel mikes to switch personnel, so no relief tails are to get out of radio range – the devices are as weak as weasel piss. Our technical stuff is improving, but we could really use a Billy Ho and a Don Hunter. If the Hug does fold, John, it might be a good idea to bring them on board. Attach them to Patsy’s department, which maybe ought to incorporate the word ‘forensics’ in its name. And don’t say it, John! Find the money, goddamn it!”

“If Morton Ponsonby were alive, we’d know the identity of the second Ghost,” said Marciano.

“Danny, Morton Ponsonby is not alive,” Carmine said patiently “I’ve seen his grave, and I’ve also seen his autopsy report. No, he wasn’t murdered, just dropped dead very suddenly. No poisons detected, though no real cause of death found.”

“Mad Ida might have struck again.”

“I doubt it, Danny. Apparently she was a little thing, and Morton Ponsonby was a healthy male adolescent. Hard to smother with a pillow. Besides, no fluff in the airway.”

“Maybe there was a fourth child,” Marciano persisted. “Ida mightn’t have registered its birth.”

“Oh, let’s not get carried away!” Carmine cried, clawing at the air. “First off, with Leonard dead, who was to father this mysterious fourth child? Chuck? Get real, Danny! The presence of a kid gets known – these weren’t newcomers to Ponsonby Lane, they owned Ponsonby Lane! Been in the district since shortly after the Mayflower. Look at Morton. Off the planet, but folks knew he existed. There were mourners at his funeral.”

“So if there’s a second Ghost, he’s a stranger to us.”

“At the moment, yes,” said Carmine.

Chapter 27

Wednesday, March 2nd, 1966

Monday night and Tuesday night passed without incident, save for Abe’s and Corey’s perpetual cursing. To exist in a miasma of skunk was a torment amounting to torture, for no brain in creation had ever managed to do what brains normally did with smells, horrible or otherwise: blot them out after a little time had elapsed. Skunk stuck, skunk was the absolute olfactory pits. Only their affection for Carmine had persuaded them to consent, but once the skunk was applied, they rued it. Luckily the bathtub in the old section of the County Services building was large enough to fit two men in it at one time, otherwise a very old friendship might have soured.

The weather continued fine and above freezing; perfect for abductions. No rain, no wind.

Carmine had tried to think of every contingency. Besides Abe, Corey and himself concealed where they had an unobstructed view of the tunnel door, there were unmarkeds on each corner of Deer Lane, on each corner of Ponsonby Lane, one in front of Major Minor’s reception office, one in the spot where Carmine had hidden himself a month ago, and more on Route 133. These vehicles were for effect; Ponsonby would be expecting them because he must have seen the ones on Deer Lane a month ago. The real shadowers were concealed up the driveways of the four houses on Deer Lane. No car was already parked in them; Carmine surmised that the car Ponsonby used was definitely well down Route 133. Though it wasn’t either of the cars in his garage, the station wagon and the red Mustang convertible; they had been there a month ago, and they were there now. Perhaps his accomplice provided the transportation? In which case, Ponsonby walked to a rendezvous.

“At least you get to wear nose plugs,” Carmine comforted as the three crept up the slope, secure in the fact that Ponsonby was still driving home from the Hug. “I may not be wearing any eau de skunk, but I do have to smell the pair of you. Man, do you stink!”

“Mouth breathing isn’t much help,” Corey groused. “I can taste the fucking awful stuff! And I finally know why it drives dogs insane.”

Falling back on the talents of the departmental bird watcher, Pete Evans, they had constructed a good hide twenty feet from the door without a tree trunk between it and them. All three lay flat, but able to take turns in rolling on their sides to prevent their muscles locking up; one man was sufficient to keep vigil provided that the other two were alert.

There had turned out to be no warning devices, even a trip wire; given his own tumble, Carmine had thought them unlikely. Ponsonby was positive his tunnel was his secret. His conceit on the subject was interesting, as if it lived in a different part of his psyche from Dr. Charles Ponsonby, researcher and bon vivant. In fact, Ponsonby was a mass of contradictions – afraid of picking up a rat, unafraid of police interception.

While Carmine waited out the boring hours, he pondered on the tunnel. Who had made it? How old was it? Despite cutting off the extra distance ascending and descending the ridge involved, it had to be at least three hundred yards long, maybe longer. Even if it was too small in bore to permit a man to do other than crawl down it on his belly, what had happened to the soil and small rocks taken out of it? Connecticut was a land of dry stone walls because its farmers had removed the stones from their fields as they ploughed. How many tons of soil and small rocks? One hundred? Two hundred? How was it ventilated, for ventilated it must be? Had those two old barns from upstate New York provided the timber for shoring up?

At 2 A.M. on that cloudy night came a faint noise, a groaning that gradually increased, then changed to the soft whine of well-lubricated hinges occluded by particles of dirt. Dryer than when Carmine had fallen, the covering of dead leaves cascaded to the far side as the door opened toward the three men in their hide. The shape that emerged from a black cavity was just as black; it poised, crouching, gave a tiny mew of disgust as a strong odor of skunk wafted its way. The dog’s head popped up, then disappeared immediately. Biddy would not be doing guard duty tonight. They could hear Ponsonby coaxing the dog out, but no dog came. Skunk.

The arrangement was that Carmine would follow Ponsonby while Corey and Abe remained by the tunnel entrance; he waited with breath suspended as the shape straightened to a man’s height, so dark that it was difficult to see amid the shadowy lightlessness of this moonless, starless night. What is he wearing? Carmine asked himself. Even the face was invisible. And when the shape began to move, it went silently, hardly a whisper of feet on the forest floor. Carmine too wore black, had blackened his face and put on sneakers, but he didn’t dare approach the shape too nearly – twenty feet minimum, praying that Ponsonby’s head covering made it harder for him to hear.

Ponsonby flitted off down the slope toward the circular end of Deer Lane. Just short of the parking area Ponsonby veered in the direction of Route 133, still concealed by the woods, which continued on this side all the way to 133. Now that the ground was more level, Carmine found his quarry actually harder to see; he was tempted to diverge the short distance to the road, on which he could make better progress, but Holloman Council’s parsimony denied him this. Gravel.

The sweat was pouring off him, blinding him; he brushed it out of his eyes quickly, but when he looked to where the shape had been at the start of his gesture, it wasn’t there. Not because Ponsonby had realized he was being followed, Carmine was sure. A quirk of fate. He had left his tunnel door open; the moment he thought he was followed, he would have returned to it, and in that direction he definitely hadn’t gone. He was still heading for Route 133, lost in the darkness.

Carmine did the sensible thing, took to the gravel and ran as quietly as he could toward the humdrum Chrysler parked on Deer Lane’s forested corner.

“He’s out, but I lost him,” he said to Marciano and Patrick after he climbed in and shut the back door gently. “Ghost is the right word for him. He’s wearing black from head to foot, he makes no sound, and he must have better eyes than a night bird. He also must know every inch of this forest. There’s nothing else for it now, we have to wait for him to come home with some poor, terrified girl. God, I didn’t want it to go that far!”

“Do we get word out on the radio?” Marciano asked.

“No, since we have no idea what kind of vehicle he’s using. He might have something sitting on his dashboard good enough to tune into every band we have. You wait here until I buzz you on my two-way that he’s back at his tunnel, give me ten minutes, then you and the rest close in on the house. That’s still best.”

Carmine got out of the car and took to the trees, working his way back to the parking area and then up to the hide.

“I lost him, so now we wait.”

“He can’t be going far,” Corey said low-voiced. “He’s too late to get farther than Holloman County.”

When Ponsonby returned around 5 A.M. he was a little easier to see; though the body slung around his shoulders was wrapped in black, it gave him more bulk, added noise to his footsteps. Instead of coming up from Deer Lane, he approached the gaping door from its side, dumped his cargo on the ground in front of the hole and insinuated himself into it before dragging the bundle down in his wake. The door closed, apparently worked by a lever, and the night went back to its usual foresty sounds.

Carmine’s finger was actually on the call button of his two-way to send Marciano the signal when he heard something: he froze, nudged his companions to keep still and quiet. A figure breasted the ridge above and began the descent to the door, led by the panting, grizzling, reluctant dog, torn between its guiding duties and the unbearable stench of skunk. Claire Ponsonby. She carried a big bucket and a rake. Desperate to get away, Biddy kept whining and straining at its harness while she hung on to the loop, forced to work one-handed, trying to persuade the dog to stay. First she used the rake to cover the door with the leaves already heaped to one side, then she emptied her bucket of leaves on top of them and raked again. Finally she gave up fighting the dog, shrugged and turned to let Biddy lead her up the incline.

“What do we do now?” Abe asked when the sound of her progress had died away completely.

“We give her time to get back to the house, then we call out the troops as planned.”

“How did she know where to bury the evidence?” Corey asked.

“Let’s find out,” said Carmine, standing up and walking to the camouflaged door. “That, I think.” His foot lifted a piece of plumber’s pipe, apparently painted a mottled brown, though it was hard to tell in the absence of light. “The dog knows the way to the door, but it can’t tell her when she’s reached it. When she feels the pipe she knows she’s at the top edge of the door. After that, easy. Or it would have been on other occasions. Tonight she had a spooked dog to deal with, and you could see that it really threw her off.”

“So she’s the second Ghost,” Abe said.

“Looks like it.” Carmine pressed the button on his two-way. “Okay, are we ready for the trip to hell? We have nine minutes before Marciano moves.”

“I hate to undo all Claire’s good work,” Corey said with a grin, scraping leaves aside.

The tunnel was large enough to crawl on hands and knees, and was square; easier, Carmine supposed, to shore up with the planks that covered walls and ceiling. About every fifteen feet was a small ventilator shaft that appeared to be made from four-inch piping. No doubt the pipe barely poked above the ground, had a grating, and wasn’t uncovered until the moment came to use the tunnel. Tread on a pipe outlet, and you wouldn’t even know you had. Oh, the time! The effort! This was the work of many years. Dug by hand, shored up by hand, the rocks and soil hauled away by hand. In his relatively crowded life, Charles Ponsonby would not have had sufficient leisure to dig this. Someone else had.

It seemed to go on forever; at least three hundred yards was Carmine’s guess. A five-minute hurried crawl. Then it ended in a door, not a flimsy wooden affair but solid steel with a massive combination dial and a wheel lock like a ship’s companionway watertight door.

“Jesus, it’s a bank safe!” Abe cried.

“Shut up and let me think!” Carmine stared down the beam of his flashlight, dancing with motes and mites, thinking that he should have known what kind of door it would be to keep contamination out. “Okay, it’s logical to assume that he’s inside and doesn’t know what’s happening outside. Shit, shit, shit! If Claire’s the second Ghost and didn’t use the tunnel, then there has to be another entrance to the killing premises. It’s inside the house and we have to find it. Move your ass, Corey! Move!”

Another frantic crawl, followed for Carmine by a headlong gallop down the slope to the Ponsonby house. Lights were going on as people woke to the wail of sirens; the lane was choked with cars, an ambulance stood by. Biddy thrashed, snarling, in a dog-pound net, while Claire stood blocking Marciano’s path.

“Cuff her and tell her the charges, Danny,” Carmine gasped, grabbing at a porch pillar to steady himself. “She covered the secret door with leaves, and that makes her an accessory. But we can’t get into the killing premises from the tunnel, he’s got a bank vault door blocking it. I’ve left Abe and Corey guarding the tunnel – get some men up there and relieve the poor guys so they can wallow in tomato juice.” He rounded on Claire, who seemed fascinated by the handcuffs, feeling what she could of them with spidery fingers. “Miss Ponsonby, don’t make yourself more than an accessory to murder, please. Tell us where the house entrance to your brother’s chamber of horrors is. We have absolute proof that he’s the Connecticut Monster.”

She drew a sobbing breath, shook her head. “No, no, that’s impossible! I don’t believe it, I won’t believe it!”

“Take her downtown,” Marciano said to two detectives, “but let her have her dog. Best get her to untangle it, it’s pretty mad at us. And treat her right, make sure of that.”

“Danny, you and Patrick come with me,” said Carmine, able to stand unsupported again. “No one else. We don’t want cops all over the house before Paul and Luke start examining it, but we have to find the other door before Chuck can do anything to that poor girl. Who is she?”

“We don’t know yet,” Marciano said miserably as he followed Carmine inside. “Probably no one in her home is up yet, it isn’t even six.” He tried to look cheerful. “Who knows, we might give her back to her folks before they even know she’s gone.”

Why did he think it was in the kitchen? Because that was the room wherein the Ponsonbys seemed to live, the hub of their universe. The ancient house itself was like a museum, and the dining room was no more than a place to park their concert hall speakers, the hi-fi and their record collection.

“Okay,” he said, leading Marciano and Patrick into the old kitchen, “this is where we start. It was built in 1725, so its walls should sound fragile. Steel backing doesn’t.”

Nothing, nothing, nothing. Except that the room was freezing because the Aga stove wasn’t alight. Now why was that? Discovery of a gas stove hidden by paneling and a gas hot water cylinder in a closet had shown that the Ponsonbys didn’t roast in summer, but summer was a long way off. Why therefore was the Aga out?

“The answer has something to do with the Aga,” Carmine said. “Come on, let’s concentrate on it.”

Behind it was its water reservoir, still hot to the touch. Groping, Patrick’s fingers found a lever.

“It’s here! I’ve found it!”

Eyes closed, breathing a prayer, Patrick tugged. The whole stove moved outward and to one side on a pivot, smoothly, silently. And there in the stone chimney alcove was a steel door. When Carmine,.38 drawn, turned its knob, it opened smoothly, silently. Suddenly he hesitated, slipped the pistol back into its holster.

“Patsy, give me your camera,” he said. “This isn’t a shoot-out situation, but Danny can cover me. You wait here.”

“Carmine, that’s an unnecessary risk!” Patrick cried.

“Give me your camera, it’s the weapon of choice.”

An ordinary wooden door stood at the bottom of a flight of stone steps. No lock, just a knob.

Carmine turned it and stepped into an operating room. His eyes took in nothing save Charles Ponsonby bending over a bed on which lay a moaning, stuporose girl already stripped naked, bound by a broad canvas band that confined her arms from just below the shoulders to just above her wrists. Ponsonby had removed whatever he wore for his forays into sleeping homes, was himself naked, his skin still wet in places from a quick shower. Humming a happy little tune as his experienced hands assessed his prize’s conscious state. Dying for her to rouse.

The camera flashed. “Gotcha!” said Carmine.

Charles Ponsonby swung around, mouth agape, eyes blinded by the brilliant blue light, no fight in him.

“Charles Ponsonby, you are under arrest on suspicion of multiple murder. You don’t have to say anything, and you are entitled to legal representation. Do you understand?” Carmine asked.

It seemed not; Ponsonby compressed his lips and glared.

“I’d advise you to call your lawyer as soon as you reach downtown. Your sister’s going to need one too.”

Danny Marciano had opened another door and now emerged carrying a shiny black raincoat. “He’s alone,” he said, holstering his weapon, “and this is all I could find. Put your arms in it, you piece of shit.” Once he had bundled Ponsonby into the coat, he took out his handcuffs. The ratchets clicked cruelly tight.

“You can come down, Patsy!” Carmine called.

“Jesus!” was all Patrick could find to say as he gazed about; then he went to help Carmine wrap the girl in a sheet and carry her up the stairs, Marciano and Ponsonby in their wake.

When they put him in the caged back of a squad car, Ponsonby seemed to come back into the real world for a moment, watery blue eyes wide, then he flung his head back and began to laugh, a shriek of monumental mirth. The cops who drove the car away kept their faces expressionless.

The victim, her identity still unknown, was rolled into the waiting ambulance; as it moved off, Paul’s and Luke’s van arrived, scattering the residents of Ponsonby Lane, who had gathered in murmuring, marveling groups to watch the circus at number 6. Even Major Minor was there, talking avidly.

“May I have my camera back?” Patrick asked Carmine as they entered the killing premises, Paul and Luke behind them.

Everything was either white or stainless steel silver-grey. The walls were paneled in stainless steel; the floor was what looked like grey terrazzo, the ceiling steel interrupted by a blaze of fluorescent tubes. No dirt from the tunnel could penetrate this glaringly pristine place, for that door was airtight as well as a foot thick. Vents and a faint susurration betrayed very good air-conditioning, and the room smelled clinically clean. The bed was on four round metal legs, a stainless steel platform surmounted by a rubber mattress sheathed in a rubber cover, over which was spread a fitted white sheet, not only clean, but ironed. The ends of the restraint were pushed into grooves along the edges of the platform and locked into place by rods that were slightly smaller in bore than the grooves. There was also a stainless steel operating table, bleakly bare. And, more horribly explicit, a meat hook and hoist suspended from the ceiling above a declivity in the floor that held a big drain grille. There were glass-fronted cabinets of surgical instruments, drugs, injection equipment, cans of ether, gauze swabs, adhesive tape, bandages. One cabinet held a collection of penis sheaths, including the nightmare that had killed Margaretta and Faith. A water blaster and a steam cleaner sat in one closet, another held rubber mattress covers, linens, cotton blankets. A large supermarket chest freezer sat against one wall; Carmine opened it to reveal an immaculate interior.

“He discarded all the linen and covers after each victim,” Patrick said, lips pinched together.

“Look at this, Patsy,” Carmine said, flipping a curtain.

Someone called down the stairs. “Lieutenant, we know who the victim is! Delice Martin, a boarder at Stella Maris Catholic girls’ school.”

“So he didn’t need a car,” Carmine said to Patrick. “Stella Maris is only half a mile away. He carried the girl across his shoulders all the way back.”

“Drawing attention to himself, grabbing a victim so close to Ponsonby Lane” was Patrick’s comment.

“In one way, yes, but in another, no. He knew we had all the Huggers pinned down, so why should it be him? To the end, he believed the tunnel was his secret. Now will you come and look at this, Patsy? Look at it!”

Carmine pulled an ironed white satin curtain aside to show an alcove lined in polished white marble. An altarlike table held two silver candlesticks with unburned white candles in them, as if something was to be deposited on a silver platter that stood atop an exquisitely embroidered cloth. A sacrifice.

On the wall above were four shelves, each of the top two supporting six heads; two more heads sat on the third, and the fourth was empty. The heads were not frozen. They were not in jars of formalin. They had been immersed in clear plastic the way gift shops sold beautiful butterflies.

“He had problems with the hair,” said Patrick, clenching his fists to stop his hands trembling. “You can see how much better he gets with practice. Painfully slow, those first six heads! A clamp to hold the head upside down in his mold while he poured a little plastic in, let it set, poured some more in. He made a breakthrough on the seventh head – probably devised a way to get the hair as hard as concrete. Then he could fill the mold in one pour. I’d like to know how he dealt with anaerobic decay, but I’d be willing to bet that he removed the brains, maybe filled the cranial cavity with a formalin gel. Under that tasteful gold foil frill, the necks are sealed off.” Patrick retched suddenly, controlled himself with an effort. “I feel sick.”

“I know liquid plastic is prohibitively expensive, but I thought it didn’t work for specimens this large,” Carmine said. “Yet even Rosita Esperanza’s head looks in good condition.”

“It doesn’t much matter what the textbooks or manufacturers say. These fourteen contradictions tell us that Charles Ponsonby was a master of the technique. Besides, the mold is snug, not much bigger than the head. A quart of plastic would be too much.”

“Turn your talismans into butterflies.”

The two technicians had come to look, but not for long; it would be their job to take down each head, box it for evidence. But only after every inch of the place had been photographed, sketched and catalogued.

“Let’s have a look in the bathroom,” Patrick suggested.

“He brought Delice Martin in,” Carmine said after looking, “tossed her on the bed, then came in here and showered. That’s what he wore to abduct her.”

It was a black rubber diving suit of the kind worn by those who didn’t go deep – thin, light. Ponsonby had removed its colored stripes and bands, dulled its gloss. A pair of heelless, smooth-soled rubber boots stood on the floor primly together, and a pair of thin black rubber gloves were folded neatly on a stool.

“Supple,” said Carmine, flexing one of the boots between his gloved hands. “A failed researcher he may be, but as a killer Ponsonby is phenomenal.” He replaced the boot exactly.

They walked back into the main room, where Paul and Luke had begun the photography; they would be days and days on the many tasks Patrick would call for.

“The heads are all the evidence we need to charge him with fourteen counts of murder,” Carmine said, closing the curtain. “Funny, in a way, that he kept them so prominently displayed, but it doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that anyone would ever find this place. Ponsonby will fry. Or else he’ll get fourteen consecutive life sentences. I hope our Ghost dies in prison, abused every single day by every other inmate. How they’ll hate him!”

“It’s a good thought, but you know as well as I do that the warden will isolate him.”

“Yeah, a pity, but true. I just want him to suffer, Patsy. What’s death, but an eternal sleep? And what’s isolation in a prison, but the chance to read books?”

Chapter 28

Thursday, March 3rd, 1966

For reasons he didn’t want to explore, Wesley le Clerc could never think of himself as Ali el Kadi in his aunt’s house. So it was Wesley le Clerc who dragged himself out of his bed at six o’clock; Tante Celeste insisted that he do. Having spread his mat and prayed, he went to the bathroom for what he called his four S’s – shampoo, shower, shave and shit.

Mohammed’s rally was all together, and, anyway, Mohammed said he was to be a model Parson Surgical Supplies employee as well as his Hug spy. At Wesley’s workplace he had moved on from Halstead mosquito forceps to instruments for microsurgery, and his supervisor was talking about some special training that would enable Wesley to improve or even invent instruments. With the federal government leaning hard on equal-opportunity employment, a gifted black worker was precious in more ways than mere excellence; he or she was a statistic to keep Congress at bay. None of which mattered to the frustrated Wesley, who burned to strike a blow for his people now, not in some remote future when he had his ass-wipe piece of paper to say he’d passed the Connecticut bar exam.

Otis was just leaving for the Hug when Wesley walked into the kitchen. Tante Celeste was manicuring her nails, which she kept long, crimson and rather pointed to emphasize her slender, tapered fingers. The radio was blaring; she turned it off and got up to serve Wesley his breakfast of orange juice, cornflakes and wholemeal toast.

“They caught the Connecticut Monster,” she remarked, smoothing margarine on the toast.

Wesley’s spoon plopped into the sloppy cereal, splashed the table. “They what?” he asked, wiping up the milk before she saw what he’d done.

“They caught the Connecticut Monster about fifteen minutes ago. It’s all over the news, they haven’t even played a song yet.”

“Who is he, a Hugger?”

“They didn’t say.”

He reached to turn the radio on. “So I’m bound to hear about it now?”

“I guess so.” She returned to her nails.

Wesley listened to the bulletin with bated breath, scarcely able to believe his ears. Though the Monster’s identity had not been revealed, WHMN was in a position to know that he was a senior professional medical man, and that there was a female accomplice. The two would be appearing before Judge Douglas Thwaites in the Holloman district court at 9 A.M. today for arraignment and the fixing of bail.

“Wes? Wes? Wes!”

“Huh? Yeah, Tante?”

“You okay? Not gonna pass out on me, are you? One bad heart in the family is enough.”

“No, no, Tante, I’m fine, honest.” He pecked her on the cheek and went to his room to don his floppiest jacket, gloves, a knitted cap. Though it was a sunny day, the temperature wasn’t very much above freezing.

When he arrived at 18 Fifteenth Street he found Mohammed and his six intimates in a panicked huddle; three days were all they had to reorganize the theme of the rally, somehow make capital out of this unexpected development. Who could ever have dreamed that those incompetent pigs would make an arrest?

With a sheepish, apologetic smile Wesley slipped past them and entered what Mohammed referred to as his “meditation room.” To Wesley it looked more like an arsenal, its walls smothered in racks that held shotguns, machine guns and automatic rifles; the handguns were stored in a number of metal cabinets that had once resided in a gun store, their drawers specifically designed for handgun display. Boxes of ammunition stood on the floor in high stacks wherever there was room.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the armaments, this was always the most peaceful place in the house, and it had what Wesley now needed: a table and a chair, white Bainbridge board, paints, pens, brushes, rulers, scissors, a guillotine. Wesley took a sheet of 18 x 30 Bainbridge board and ruled off a section 8 inches wide, then cut it with a Stanley Sheetrock knife braced against a ruler. Not much room for a message, but it wasn’t going to be a long one. Black letters, white background. And where was Mohammed’s spoiled brat of a son’s hockey outfit? He’d seen it lying somewhere now the kid had discovered Allah didn’t intend for him to be a hockey star. The latest fad was high-jumping because of some champion at Travis High.

“Hey, Ali! Busy, man?” Mohammed asked, coming in.

“Yeah. I’m busy making you a martyr, Mohammed.”

“Turning me into one, you mean?”

“No, manufacturing you one out of someone less important.”

“You kidding?”

“Nope. Where’s Abdullah’s hockey gear?”

“Two rooms over. Tell me more, Ali.”

“Don’t have time right now, I have a lot to do. Just make sure your TV is tuned into channel six at nine this morning.” Wesley picked up a paintbrush, but didn’t dip it in the black paint. “I need privacy, Mohammed. Then they can’t prove that you were in the know, man.”

“Sure, sure!” Grinning, palms held out, Mohammed mockingly bowed himself out of the meditation room, leaving Wesley alone.

When Carmine walked into the station it seemed like a hundred cops were there to shake him by the hand, clap him on the back, beam at him foolishly. To the press Charles Ponsonby was still the Connecticut Monster, but to every cop he was a Ghost.

Silvestri was so happy that he lumbered to his door and gave Carmine a smacking kiss on the cheek, hugged him. “My boy, my boy!” he crooned, eyes glistening with tears. “You saved us all.”

“Oh, come on, John! Can the histrionics, this case went on so long it died of sheer old age,” Carmine said, embarrassed.

“I am recommending you for a medal, even if the Governor has to invent one.”

“Where are Ponsonby and Claire?”

“He’s in a cell with two cops for company – no way this bozo is going to hang himself, and there’s no cyanide capsule up his rectum either, we made sure. His sister’s in a vacant office on this floor with two women officers. And the dog. At worst she’s an accomplice. We haven’t any evidence to suggest she might be the second Ghost, at least not evidence that will impress Doubting Doug Thwaites, the pedantic old fart. Our holding cells are clean, Carmine, but not designed to accommodate a lady, especially a lady who’s blind. I thought it good policy to treat her in a way her lawyers can’t criticize when she comes to trial – if she comes to trial. At the moment, that’s moot.”

“Has he talked?”

“Not a word. From time to time he howls with laughter, but he hasn’t said a thing. Stares into space, hums a tune, giggles.”

“He’s going to plead insanity.”

“Sure as eggs are eggs. But people insane according to the M’Naghten rules don’t plan a killing premises down to the last fine detail.”

“And Claire?”

“Just keeps saying she refuses to believe her brother is a multiple murderer, and that she’s done nothing wrong herself.”

“Unless Patsy and his team can find a trace of Claire in the killing premises or the tunnel, she’ll walk. I mean, a blind woman and her guide dog empty a bucket of dead leaves in the deer reserve and rake them nice and flat? A halfway competent lawyer could prove that she thought she was carrying deer chow to empty where brother Chuck had made them a feeding place. Of course we can always hope for a confession.”

“In a pig’s eye!” Silvestri said with a snort. “Neither of that pair is the confessing kind.” He shut one eye, kept the other open and fixed on Carmine. “Do you think she’s the second Ghost?”

“I don’t honestly know, John. We won’t prove it.”

“Anyway, they’re being formally arraigned in Doubting Doug’s courtroom at nine. I wanted it in a less public venue and kept quiet, but Doug’s sticking to his guns. What a picnic! Ponsonby’s only item of clothing is a raincoat, and he refuses to put on a stitch more. If we force him and he gets a teensy-weensy bruise or cut, they’ll cry police brutality, so he’s going to court in a raincoat. Danny put the cuffs on him too tight, that’s bad enough. The cute bastard’s chafed himself raw.”

“I suppose every journalist who can get to Holloman in time will be outside the courthouse, including channel six’s anchors,” Carmine said, sighing.

“Why wouldn’t they? This is big news for a small city.”

“Can’t we arraign Claire separately?”

“We could if Thwaites would play ball, but he won’t. He wants both of them in front of him at once. Curiosity, I think.”

“No, he wants a preview that will help him make up his mind about Claire’s complicity.”

“Have you eaten, Carmine?”

“No.”

“Then let’s grab a booth at Malvolio’s before the rush.”

“How are Abe and Corey? De-skunked?”

“Yeah, and nursing grudges. They wanted to be with you down in that cellar.”

“I feel sorry about that, but they had to be de-skunked. I suggest you squeeze the Governor for a couple more medals, John. And a big ceremony.”

The Holloman courthouse was on Cedar Street at the Green, a short walk from the County Services building, yet one that the Ponsonbys could not make. A few enterprising journalists complete with photographers were outside the station entrance when Ponsonby was hustled out with a towel thrown over his head, his raincoat buttoned from neck to knees, where someone had secured it with a safety pin to make sure it couldn’t be jerked open. No sooner was Ponsonby on the sidewalk than he started to wrestle with his escorts, not to escape, but to rid himself of the towel. In the end he was put into the caged squad car unveiled, amid a blue blizzard of flashbulbs; no one was taking any chances on the light. His car had drawn away when Biddy came out, leading Claire. Like her brother, she would not allow anyone to cover her head. Her escorts were conspicuously gentle with her, and the vehicle that took her down the block to the courthouse was Silvestri’s official car, a big Lincoln.

The crowd around the courthouse was so huge that traffic had been entirely diverted from Cedar Street; a line of police with arms linked ebbed and surged in time to the pushing of the people they were trying to contain. Perhaps half the crowd was black, but both halves were very angry. The press were inside the cordon, cameramen with cameras at shoulder level, news photographers clicking away on automatic, radio announcers babbling into their microphones, channel six’s anchorman doing the same. One of the journalists was a small, thin black man in a bulky jacket; he inched forward amid smiles and murmured apologies, hands tucked inside his coat for warmth.

When Charles Ponsonby was removed from the squad car the journalists rushed at him, the thin little black man in their forefront. One thin black hand emerged from the jacket and went up to his head, jammed a strange hat on it, a hat supporting a strip of white cardboard that said in neat black letters WE HAVE SUFFERED. All eyes had gone to the hat, even Charles Ponsonby’s; no one saw Wesley le Clerc’s other hand come out holding a black Saturday night special. He put four bullets in Ponsonby’s chest and abdomen before the closest cops could draw their guns. But no fusillade cut him down. Carmine had jumped to shield him, roaring at the top of his voice.

“Hold your fire!”

And it was all there on TV, every single millisecond of the deed, from the WE HAVE SUFFERED hat to Charles Ponsonby’s look of amazement and Carmine’s suicidal leap. Mohammed el Nesr and his cronies watched it unfold, rigid with shock. Then Mohammed sagged back in his chair and lifted his arms in exultation.

“Wesley, my man, you have given us our martyr! And that big dumb-ass cop Delmonico saved you for a trial. Man, what a trial we will make it!”

“Ali, you mean,” said Hassan, not understanding.

“No, he’s Wesley le Clerc from now on. It has to look as if he acted for all black people, not just for the Black Brigade. That’s the way we’ll work it.”

It happened two minutes before Claire Ponsonby’s car was due to arrive, so she wasn’t witness to her brother’s fate. At first she was stranded in a moving mass of bodies, then police managed to clear enough space for the Lincoln to reverse back down Cedar Street to the County Services building.

“Jesus, Carmine, are you crazy?” Danny Marciano demanded, face ashen, body shaking. “My guys were on automatic pilot, they would have shot the Pope!”

“Well, luckily they didn’t shoot me. More importantly, Danny, there were no flying bullets to wing a cameraman or kill Di Jones – how could Holloman survive without her Sunday gossip column?”

“Yeah, I know why you did it – and so do they, give them that much credit. I gotta go disperse this crowd.”

Patrick was kneeling by Charles Ponsonby’s head, thrown up and back, an expression of outrage on its lean, beaky face; a lake of blood was spreading from beneath his body, thinning as it flowed onward.

“Dead?” Carmine asked, bending down.

“As a doornail.” Patrick brushed a hand across the fixed, disbelieving eyes to close them. “At least he won’t walk, and I for one think there’s a Hell waiting for him.”

Wesley le Clerc stood between two uniformed cops, looking harmless and insignificant; every camera was still aimed at him, the man who had executed the Connecticut Monster. Rough justice, but justice of a kind. It never occurred to anyone that Ponsonby had not been tried, might conceivably have been innocent.

Silvestri came down the courthouse steps wiping his brow. “The judge is not amused,” he said to Carmine. “Christ, what a fucking fiasco! And get him out of here!” he yelled at the men holding Wesley. “Go on, take him in and book him!”

Carmine followed Wesley into the squad car cage and sat back on the stained and smelly seat, his head turned sideways. Wesley was still wearing that fool hat with its heartrending message: WE HAVE SUFFERED. But the first thing Carmine did was to inform Wesley of his situation loudly enough for the cops in the front seat to hear. Then he plucked the hat off, turned it between his hands. A hard plastic hockey helmet that he had attacked with tin snips to fit it snugly around his ears. Jam it on, and it would stay in place long enough to be seen.

“I guess you thought it would come off in the hail of cop bullets you expected to cut you down, yet there it was on top of your head to the bitter end. It even survived getting into this shit-heap car. You’re a better craftsman than you realize, Wes.”

“I have done a great thing,” Wesley said in ringing tones, “and I will go on to do greater things!”

“Don’t forget that anything you say may be used in evidence.”

“What do I care about that, Lieutenant Delmonico? I am the avenger of my people, I killed the man who raped and murdered our women children. I am a hero, and so I will be regarded.”

“Oh, Wes, you’ve wasted yourself, can’t you see that? What gave you the idea, Jack Ruby? Did you think for one minute that I’d let you die the way he did? You have such a good mind! And, more’s the pity, if you had only done what I asked you to do, you might have made a real difference to your people. But no, you wouldn’t wait. Killing is easy, Wes. Anybody can kill. To me, it indicates an IQ about four points higher than plant life. Charles Ponsonby would probably have gone to prison for the rest of his days. All you did was let him off the hook.”

“Was that who it was? Dr. Chuck Ponsonby? Well, well! A Hugger after all. You don’t even begin to understand, Lieutenant. He was just a means to my end. He gave me the chance to become a martyr. Do I give a fuck whether he lives or dies? No, I do not! I am the one who must suffer, and suffer I will.”

As Wesley le Clerc was being led away to the cells Silvestri stomped in, chewing fiercely on his cigar. “There’s another one we’ll have to watch every second,” he growled. “Let him commit suicide and there’ll be hell to pay.”

“He’s also a very bright guy and manually skilled, so taking away his belt and anything he can tear into strips won’t prevent his trying if that’s the way his mind is going. Personally I don’t think it is. Wesley wants everything aired in public.”

They entered the elevator. “What do we do with Miss Claire Ponsonby?” Carmine asked.

“We drop the charges and release her forthwith. That’s what the D.A. says. A bucket of dead leaves is not enough evidence to hold her, let alone charge her. The only thing we can do is forbid her to leave Holloman County – for the time being.” The jowly face screwed up like a colicky baby’s. “Oh, what a pain in the ass this case has been from start to finish! All those beautiful, sainted young girls dead, and no one to bring them real justice. And how the hell do I handle the relatives about the heads?”

“At least the heads represent the closing of a door to the families, John. Not knowing is worse than knowing,” Carmine said as they left the elevator. “Where is Claire?”

“Back in the same office.”

“Mind if I do the deed?”

“Mind? Be my guest. I don’t want to see the bitch!”

She was sitting in a comfortable chair, Biddy lying at her feet, ignoring the two uncomfortable young women ordered never to take their eyes off her. Since she couldn’t see, somehow that seemed an unpardonable invasion of her privacy.

“Why, Lieutenant Delmonico!” she exclaimed, straightening as he walked in.

“No V-8 engine in my car to give me away this time. How do you do it, Miss Ponsonby?”

She achieved a simper that made her look old, sly, pinched, pitiful; something about the expression gave him one of those lightning flashes of insight so vital to his police career. It said that she was definitely the second Ghost. Oh, Patsy, Patsy, find me something to put her in the killing premises! Find me a photograph or a movie of her and Chuck in the middle of rape and murder. Grow up, Carmine! There is nothing. The only memorabilia they keep are the heads. What use is a picture, still or moving, to a blind person? What use, for that matter, is a head?

“Lieutenant,” she said with a purr, “you carry your V-8 with you wherever you go. The engine’s not in your car, it’s in you.”

“Have you been informed that your brother, Charles, is dead?”

“Yes, I have. I also know that he did none of the things you say he did. My brother was a highly intellectual, fastidious and terribly kind man. That peasant Marciano accused me of being his lover – pah! I’m glad that I don’t have a cesspool for a mind.”

“We have to take every possibility into account. But you’re free to go, Miss Ponsonby. All charges have been dropped.”

“So I should think.” She tugged the loop on Biddy’s harness.

“Where are you going to stay? Your house is still a crime scene under police investigation and will remain so for some time to come. Would you like me to phone Mrs. Eliza Smith?”

“Certainly not!” she snapped. “If it hadn’t been for that woman’s tale-telling, none of this would have happened. I hope she dies of cancer of the tongue!”

“Then where are you going?”

“I will be at Major Minor’s until I can move back into my home, so be warned. I intend to retain lawyers to watch for my interests as owner of Six Ponsonby Lane, therefore I suggest that you damage nothing. The house committed no crime.”

And out she swept. Winner take all, Carmine. Ghost or no Ghost, that is one formidable woman.

He went back to the house that committed no crime, though he hadn’t offered to drive Claire to Major Minor’s. Silvestri had donated his Lincoln for that. They were now entering upon the saddest time in any case – the flat, uninspiring aftermath.

By the time everyone arrived at the Hug, the news that the Connecticut Monster had been caught was, in news terms, quite old. Each face looked smoother, younger, and each pair of eyes glowed. Oh, the relief! Perhaps now the Hug could return to normal, for obviously the Monster was not a Hugger.

Desdemona hadn’t seen Carmine since she returned from her hike, nor had she expected to, with the Ghost watch keeping him away. But just as she was about to leave for her escorted squad car trip to the Hug on this Wednesday morning, the phone rang: Carmine, sounding curiously unemotional.

“There’s a TV in the Hug boardroom as I remember,” he said. “Turn it on and watch channel six, okay?” Click! He hung up.

Feet dragging, crushed at his impersonal tone, Desdemona unlocked the boardroom and pushed the button on the TV just as the wall clock registered 9 A.M. Oh, how she didn’t want to see this! No sooner had she gotten through the Hug door than all and sundry were whooping that the Monster had been caught. As if the cops in her squad car hadn’t been full of it! Now she would have to see what Carmine had been up to in the night marches, and she feared that. Presumably he was unhurt, but for three nights she had been eaten by worry, even terror. What would she do if he never came home again? Oh, what on earth had possessed her to declare her independence by hiking the weekend before his Ghost watch commenced? Why hadn’t she realized that he wouldn’t come home on Sunday night? All her hopes had been pinned on that as she walked the magic of the woods: how she would throw her arms around him and tell him she couldn’t live without him. But – no Carmine. Just the echoes of his richly red apartment.

The TV shimmered into life. Yes, there was the courthouse, surrounded by a crowd many hundreds strong, journalists everywhere, police everywhere. One cameraman from channel six apparently had found himself a perch on top of a van roof and could pan the whole scene; another was in the crowd, and a third on the sidewalk near an arriving squad car. She spotted Carmine standing with a big uniformed captain she recognized as Danny Marciano. Commissioner Silvestri was at the top of the courthouse steps looking very smart in a uniform twinkling with silver braid. Then from out of the back of the squad car emerged Dr. Charles Ponsonby. Her heart seeming to squeeze up, Desdemona watched with jaw dropped. Ye gods, Charles Ponsonby! A Hugger. Bob Smith’s oldest and best friend. I am witnessing, she thought, the extinction of the Hug. Are the Parson Governors watching this in New York City? Yes, of course they are! Our channel is a network affiliate. Have the Parson Governors found that escape clause? If they haven’t, they will redouble their efforts after this bombshell.

What happened next was so fast it seemed over before it had begun: the little black man, that hat saying WE HAVE SUFFERED, the sound of four shots, Charles Ponsonby going down, and Carmine deliberately putting himself in front of the little black man still holding a squat, ugly pistol. When Carmine did that as the cops all around slapped leather, Desdemona felt herself die, waiting frozen in time for the sound of a dozen guns reflexively cutting him down. His roar of “Hold your fire!” came clearly on the airwaves. Carmine stood miraculously unharmed, the cops were holstering their weapons and moving to grab the little black man, who made no attempt to evade them. She sat shivering, hands over her mouth, eyes starting from their sockets. Carmine, you fool! You idiot! You flaming soldier! You didn’t die – this time. But I am doomed to the fate of a soldier’s woman, always.

Whom to tell first? No, best tell them all at once, right this moment. The Hug had a speaker system: Desdemona used it to summon every Hugger to the lecture theater.

Then she went to Tamara’s office; someone would have to man the phones. Poor Tamara! A shadow of her old self since Keith Kyneton had slammed his door in her face. Even her hair seemed to have wasted away, lackluster and unkempt. She didn’t even react, just nodded and continued to sit staring into space.

The news of Charles Ponsonby’s secret activities broke upon the people in the lecture theater like a clap of thunder: gasps, exclamations, a degree of incredulity.

To Addison Forbes, it was God in the burning bush: with no Ponsonby or Smith in the way, the Hug would become his. Why would the Board of Governors search elsewhere when he was so eminently suitable? He had the clinical experience that drove researchers to produce, his reputation was international. The Board of Governors liked him. With Smith and Ponsonby gone, the Hug under Professor Addison Forbes would go on to bigger and better things! And who needed the conceited Great Panjandrum from India? The world was full of potential Nobel Prize winners.

Walter Polonowski hardly heard Desdemona’s crisply succinct summary; he was too depressed. Four kids from Paola, and a fifth coming up from Marian. With a wedding band looming, Marian was shedding her mistress’s skin to reveal a new epidermis striped in wifely colors. They are serpents, we are their victims.

To Maurice Finch, the news brought sorrow, but sorrow of a peaceful kind. He had always thought that to give up medicine would be tantamount to a death sentence, but the events of the past few months had taught him that this need not be so. His plants were patients too; his skilled and loving hands could tend them, heal them, help them multiply. Yes, life with Cathy on a chicken farm looked very good. And he’d beat those mushrooms yet.

Kurt Schiller was not surprised. He had never liked Charles Ponsonby, whom he had suspected of secret homosexuality; Chuck’s attitude was a little too subtly knowing, and the art whispered of a nightmare world beneath that anonymous exterior. Not its subject matter, more an emanation from Chuck. In Kurt’s book he had gone down as one of the chains-and-leather boys, heavily into pain, though Schiller had always assumed Chuck was on the receiving end. The passive type, scuttling around to serve some terrifying master. Well, evidently he, Kurt, had been wrong. Charles was a true sadist – had to be, to have done what he did to those poor children. As for himself, Kurt expected nothing. His credentials would guarantee him a post no matter what happened to the Hug, and he had the germ of an idea about transmitting diseases across the species barrier that he knew would excite the head of any research unit. Now that the photograph of Papa with Adolf Hitler was ashes on the hearth and his homosexuality was out in the open, he felt ready for the new life he intended to lead. Not in Holloman. In New York City, among his peers.

“Otis,” Tamara shouted from the door, “you’re needed at home, so get going! I couldn’t make hide nor hair out of what Celeste was saying, but it’s an emergency.”

Don Hunter and Billy Ho ranged themselves one on either side of Otis, helping him out of the row of seats.

“We’ll take him, Desdemona,” Don said. “Can’t have his wonky heart playing up if he’s needed.”

Cecil Potter watched channel six’s footage replayed on CBS in Massachusetts, Jimmy on his knee.

“Man, will you look at that?” he asked the monkey. “Uh-uh! Hooee! I am so glad to be outta there!”

When Carmine opened his door that evening Desdemona charged at him, weeping noisy tears, pummeling his chest angrily. Her nose was running and her eyes drowned.

Hugely gratified, he put her tenderly on the new sofa he had acquired because easy chairs were all very well and good for talk, but nothing beat a sofa for two people to smooch on. He let the storm of tears and ire abate, rocking her and murmuring, then used his handkerchief to clean her up.

“What was all that about?” he asked, knowing the answer.

“You!” she said, hiccoughing. “Bloody huh-huh-hero!”

“Not bloody, and no hero.”

“Bloody hero! Stepping in front to take the buh-buh-bullet! Oh, I could have killed you!”

“It’s great to see you too,” he said, laughing. “Now put up your feet and I’ll fix us a couple of snifters of X-O.”

“I knew I loved you,” she said later, calmed down, “but what a way to learn how much I love you! Carmine, I don’t want to live in a world that doesn’t have you in it.”

“Does this mean that you’d rather be Mrs. Carmine Delmonico than live in London?”

“It does.”

He kissed her with love, gratitude, humility. “I’ll try to make you a good husband, Desdemona, but you’ve already had a televised preview of what a cop’s life entails. The future won’t be any different – long hours, absences, stray bullets. However, I figure someone’s on my side. So far I’m still in one piece.”

“As long as you understand that whenever you do foolhardy things, I’ll bash you up.”

“I’m hungry” was his answer. “How about some Chinese?”

She heaved a huge sigh of satisfaction. “I’ve just realized that I’m not in danger anymore.” A tinge of anxiety crept into her voice. “Am I?”

“The danger’s over, I’d bet my career on it. But there’s no point in looking for a new apartment. I’m not letting you leave this one. Sin is in.”

“The trouble is,” he said to her as they lay in bed, “that so much of it remains a mystery. I doubt Ponsonby would ever have talked, but when he died all hope of that died too. Wesley le Clerc! Tomorrow’s problem.”

“You mean Leonard Ponsonby’s murder? The identity of the woman and child with the face?” He had told her everything.

“Yes. And who dug the tunnel, and how did Ponsonby ever get all that gear into his killing premises, from a generator to a bank vault door? Who did the plumbing? A major job! The floor of the place is thirty feet below ground. Most house basements are damp at ten, fifteen feet, but this is as dry as an old bone. The county engineers are fascinated, looking very forward to tracing his drains.”

“And do you think that Claire is the second Ghost?”

“ ‘Think’ isn’t the right word. My gut says she is, my mind says she can’t be.” He sighed. “If she is the second Ghost, she has managed to get away clean.”

“Never mind,” she soothed, stroking his hair. “At least the murders are at an end. No more abducted girls. Claire couldn’t do it on her own, she’s female and grossly handicapped. So count your blessings, Carmine.”

“Count my stupidity, you mean. I’ve bungled this case from start to finish.”

“Only because it’s a new sort of crime committed by a new sort of criminal, my love. You’re an extremely competent, highly intelligent policeman. Regard the Ponsonby case as a new learning experience. The next time things will go better for you.”

He shuddered. “If I have my druthers, Desdemona, there will be no next time. The Ghosts are a one-off.”

She said no more, just wondered.

Chapter 29

Friday, March 11th, 1966

It took just over a week for Patrick, Paul and Luke to go through everything that the Ponsonby killing premises had to offer, from operating table to bathroom. The final report from Patrick and his forensics team pointed out very clearly that it was just as well they had caught a naked Charles Ponsonby bending over a naked abducted girl tied to a bed rigged for torture.

“The place was cleaner than Lady Macbeth. His fingerprints everywhere, yes, but it’s his place underneath his house, so why not? But of blood, body fluids, shreds of flesh or human hairs – no scintilla, iota or anything else microscopically small. As for Claire, no fingerprints, even on the lever behind the stove.”

They had pieced Ponsonby’s cleaning techniques together, staggered at the amount of work involved, the obsessiveness. A medical man, he knew that heat fixed blood and tissue, so the hose he used first and the water blaster he followed that with were fed by cold water; the talisman alcove was sealed off by a steel slider. When every surface was dry again, he steam blasted it. Finally he wiped everything down with ether. His surgical instruments, the meat hook and its hoist, and the penis sheaths were soaked in a blood-dissolving solution before being subjected to the rest of the treatments. They were also autoclaved.

When the room yielded nothing, they started on the drains with a compressor-driven vacuum, which sucked water containing no organic matter. Backwashing didn’t work, leading the county engineers to think that the effluent was not deposited in a septic tank. Ponsonby had his outlet in an underground stream, of which there were many in the neighborhood. Their sole remaining hope was to dig down to his pipes and follow them.

The moment the county engineers began to excavate her garden for no better reason than flogging an already dead horse, Claire Ponsonby took out a lien against willful destruction of her property, and respectfully petitioned the court to grant a blind woman permission to live in said property without perpetual and extremely distressing harassment by the Holloman police and their allies. Given that Charles Ponsonby had been positively identified as the Connecticut Monster and that nothing going on at 6 Ponsonby Lane was necessary to produce further evidence of this, Miss Ponsonby had had enough.

“The well is bottomless and the pump chugs out three horses,” said the chief county engineer, thwarted and angry. “Since there’s a twenty-acre deer park as well as five-acre house lots, the water table is high and local consumption low. You haven’t gotten any organic matter because the bastard must have put thousands and thousands of gallons down after every killing. The residue is on the bottom of Long Island Sound. And shit, what does it matter? He’s dead. Close the case, Lieutenant, before that nasty bitch starts suing you personally.”

“It’s a total mystery, Patsy,” Carmine said to his cousin.

“Tell me something I don’t already know.”

“Obviously Chuck was wiry and strong, but he never struck me as an athlete, and his Hug colleagues were convinced he couldn’t change the washer on a tap. Yet what we found is marvelously constructed out of expensive materials. Who the hell put in a terrazzo floor and isn’t owning up to it now that the secret’s out? Ditto the plumbing? No one’s reported a missing plumber or terrazzo worker since the war!” Carmine ground his teeth. “The family has no money, we know that. Claire and Chuck lived so well that they must have spent every cent he earned. And yet there’s two hundred grand’s worth of labor and material down in the ground. Damnit, no one admits to having sold them the linen or the plastic liquid for the heads!”

“To quote the county engineer, what does it matter, Carmine? Ponsonby is dead and it’s time to close the case,” Patrick said, patting Carmine’s shoulder. “Why give yourself a coronary over a dead man? Think of Desdemona instead. When’s the wedding?”

“You don’t like her, Patsy, do you?”

The blue eyes dimmed but refused to look away. “Past tense might be more accurate. I didn’t like her in the beginning – too strange, too foreign, too aloof. But she’s different these days. I hope to come to love her as well as like her.”

“You’re not alone. Your mom and mine are shivering in their shoes. Oh, they gush enthusiastically, but I’m not a detective for no reason. It’s a façade to mask apprehension.”

“Made worse because she’s noticeably taller than you are,” said Patrick, laughing. “Moms and aunts and sisters hate that. You see, they were hoping that the second Mrs. Delmonico would be a nice Italian girl from East Holloman. But you’re not attracted to nice girls, Italian or otherwise. And I much prefer Desdemona to Sandra. Desdemona has brains.”

“They last longer than faces or figures.”

The case was officially closed that afternoon. Once the Medical Examiner’s report was filed the Holloman Police Department was obliged to admit that it could find no evidence to implicate Claire Ponsonby in the murders. If Carmine had had the time he might have gone to Silvestri and asked to reopen the murder of Leonard Ponsonby and the woman and child in 1930, but crime waits for no man, especially a detective. Two weeks after Charles Ponsonby was shot dead, a drug case was occupying all of Carmine’s attention. Back on familiar ground! Criminals he knew were guilty, his wits engaged in gathering the evidence to bring them to justice.

Chapter 30

Monday, March 28th, 1966

The axe fell on the Hughlings Jackson Center for Neurological Research at the end of March.

When the Board of Governors convened in the Hug boardroom at 10 A.M., all the Governors were present except Professor Robert Mordent Smith, who had been discharged from Marsh Manor two weeks before, but wouldn’t emerge from his basement and its trains. An embarrassment for Roger Parson Junior, who hated to think that his judgement of Bob Smith had been so erroneous.

“As the business director, Miss Dupre, please take a seat,” Parson said briskly, then looked at Tamara quizzically. “Miss Vilich, are you up to taking minutes?”

A legitimate question, as this Miss Vilich didn’t resemble the woman whom the Parson Governors had known before today. Her light had gone out, so Richard Spaight fancied.

“Yes, Mr. Parson,” Tamara said tonelessly.

President Mawson MacIntosh already knew what Dean Wilbur Dowling only suspected; however, the one’s certain knowledge and the other’s strong suspicion produced contented faces and relaxed bodies. Chubb University was going to inherit the Hug, so much was certain, together with a huge amount of money that wouldn’t be devoted to neurological research.

Half glasses perched on his thin blade of a nose, Roger Parson Junior proceeded to read out the legal opinion that had rendered his late lamented uncle’s last will and testament null and void in respect of the trust fund that financed the Hug. It took forty-five minutes to read something drier than dust in the Sahara, but those forced to listen did so with expressions of alert and eager interest save for Richard Spaight, upon whom the most wearisome aspects of the affair would devolve. He swung his chair to face the window and watched two tugs escort a large oil tanker to its berth at the new hydrocarbons reservoir complex at the foot of Oak Street.

“We could, of course, simply absorb the hundred-fifty million capital of the fund plus its accrued interest into our holdings,” Parson said at the conclusion of his peroration, “but such would not have been William Parson’s wish – of that we, his nephews and great-nephews, are very sure.”

Ha ha ha, thought M.M., like hell you didn’t want to absorb the lot! But you dropped the idea after I said Chubb would sue. The best you can do is snaffle the accrued interest, which in itself will make a nice, plump addition to Parson Products.

“We therefore propose that half of the capital be deeded to the Chubb Medical School in order to fund the ongoing career of the Hughlings Jackson Center in whatever guise it will assume. The building and its land will be deeded to Chubb University. And the other half of the capital will go to Chubb University to fund major infrastructure of whatever kind the university’s board of governors decides. Provided that each infrastructural item bears William Parson’s name.”

Oh, yummy! was written all over Dean Dowling’s face, whereasM.M.’s face remained complacently impassive. Dean Dowling was contemplating the Hug’s transformation into a center for research on the organic psychoses. He had tried to persuade Miss Claire Ponsonby to donate her deceased brother’s brain for research, and had been politely refused. Now there was a psychotic brain! Not that he had expected to see any gross anatomical changes, but he had hoped for localized atrophy in the prefrontal cortex or some aberration in the corpus striatum. Even a little astrocytoma.

Mawson MacIntosh’s thoughts revolved around the nature of the buildings that would bear William Parson’s name. One of them had to be an art gallery, even if it remained empty until the last of the Parsons was dead. May that day come soon!

“Miss Dupre,” Roger Parson Junior was saying, “it will be your duty to circulate this official letter” – he pushed it across the table – “among all members of the Hughlings Jackson Center, staff and faculty. Closure will be Friday, April twenty-ninth. All the equipment and furniture will be disposed of as the Dean of Medicine desires. Except, that is, for selected items that will be donated to the Holloman County Medical Examiner’s laboratories as a token of our appreciation. One of the selected items will be the new electron microscope. I had a chat, you see, with the Governor of Connecticut, who told me how important – and underfunded – the science of forensic medicine has become.”

No, no, no! thought Dean Dowling. That microscope is mine!

“I am assured by President MacIntosh,” Roger Parson Junior droned on, “that all members who wish to stay may stay. However, salaries and wages will be reassessed commensurate with standard medical school fiscal policy. Faculty members wishing to stay will be put under Professor Frank Watson. For those who do not wish to stay, Miss Dupre, you will arrange redundancy packages incorporating one year’s salary or wages plus all pension contributions.”

He cleared his throat, settled his glasses more comfortably. “There are two exceptions to this ruling. One is Professor Bob Smith, who, alas, is not well enough to resume medical practice of any kind. Since his contribution over the sixteen years of his administration has been formidable, we have arranged that he be compensated in the manner prescribed herein.” Another sheet of paper was thrust at Desdemona. “The second exception is you yourself, Miss Dupre. Unfortunately the position of business director will cease, and I am led to understand from President MacIntosh that it will be impossible to find you an equivalent position within the university. Therefore we have agreed that your own redundancy package will consist of what is listed in here.” A third piece of paper.

Desdemona took a peek. Two years’ salary plus all pension contributions. If she married and quit working altogether and income-averaged, she’d do quite well.

“Tamara, turn the coffee pots on,” she said.

“I give Dean Dowling two years to ruin the place,” she said to Carmine that evening. “He’s too much a psychiatrist and too little a neurologist to get the best out of a well-run research unit. All the nuttier varieties of researcher will fool him. Tell Patrick not to be bashful about equipment, Carmine. Grab it while the going’s good.”

“He’ll kiss your hands and feet, Desdemona.”

“He oughtn’t, it’s not my doing.” She sighed contentedly. “Anyway, your bride comes with a dowry. If you can afford to keep me and however many children you deem sufficient, then my dowry ought to buy us a really decent house. I love this apartment, but it’s not suitable for raising a family.”

“No,” he said, taking her hands, “you keep your dowry for yourself. Then if you change your mind, you’ll have enough to go home to London. I’m not short of a buck, honest.”

“Well,” she said, “then think about this, Carmine. When he read Roger Parson Junior’s circular, Addison Forbes went right off the deep end. Work under Frank Watson? He’d rather die of tertiary syphilis! He announced that he’s going to work with Nur Chandra at Harvard, but I would have thought that Harvard isn’t short of clinical neurologists, so I hope Addison isn’t holding his breath. The thing is, I love the Forbes house with a passion. If the Forbeses do move, I suppose it will sell for heaps of money, but do we have a financial hope of buying it? Do you rent, or do you own this?”

“It’s a condo, I own it. I think we’ll be able to spring for the Forbes house, if you like it so much. The location is ideal – East Holloman, my family neighborhood. Try to like my family, Desdemona,” he pleaded. “My first wife thought they spied on her because Mom or Patsy’s mom or one of our sisters was always calling around. But it wasn’t that. Italian families are close knit.”

Though she hadn’t really changed in appearance, somehow to Carmine she wasn’t as plain as she used to be. Not love blinding his eyes; love opening them was a better way to put it.

“I’m rather shy,” she confessed, squeezing his fingers, “and that makes me seem snobby. I don’t think I’m going to have any trouble liking your family, Carmine. And one of the reasons why I’m so keen on the Forbes house is its tower. If Sophia ever wanted to come home, perhaps attend the Dormer Day School and then the bruited coeducational Chubb, it would make such super digs for her. From what you’ve told me, I think Sophia needs a real home, not Hampton Court Palace. If you don’t catch her now, in another year she’ll be skipping off to Haight-Ashbury.”

Tears came into his eyes. “I don’t deserve you,” he said.

“Rubbish, you must! People always get what they deserve.”