Paper Doll

chapter five

THE HOUSE WAS very still. The soft sound of the air conditioner made it seem stiller, and only the sound of a clock ticking somewhere in another room broke the hush.

I put the family history away and opened the case file Quirk had given me. Sitting on the green leather couch in the silent room of her nearly empty home, I read the coroner’s description of Olivia Nelson’s death. I read the crime-scene report, the pages of interview summaries, the document checks, I plowed through all of it. I learned nothing useful. I didn’t expect to. I was simply being methodical, because I didn’t know what else to be. Quirk had turned everything he had loose on this one and come up with nothing.

I put the file down and got up and walked through her house. It was richly decorated in appropriate period. Nothing didn’t match. At the top of the stairs I turned right toward the master suite. The cops had already noted that the Tripps had separate bedrooms and baths. The bedrooms were connected by a common sitting room. It had a red-striped Victorian fainting couch, and two straight chairs and a leather-topped table with fat legs in front of the window. There was a copy of Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, on the table. It seemed brand-new. It was bound in red leather and matched the tabletop. Against the wall opposite the window was a big mahogany armoire with ornate brass hinges. I opened it. It was empty. The room was as cozy as a dental lab. I went through the sitting room to her room. It was clearly hers: canopied queen-size four-poster, antique lace bedspread, heavy gathered drapes with a gold tone, thick ivory rug, on the wall at the foot of the bed a big nineteenth-century still life of some green pears in a blue and white bowl. Her bureau drawers were full of sweaters and blouses and more exotic lingerie than I’d have expected. There was a walk-in closet full of clothes appropriate to an affluent Beacon Hill pillar of the community. She had maybe thirty pairs of shoes. Her jewelry box was full. She had a lot of makeup.

I sat on her bed. It had about seven pillows on it, carefully arranged as she had left them the last time she was here, or maybe the maid had arranged them this morning. I listened to the quiet. It was a cool day outside, in the low seventies, and the air conditioner had cycled off. I was out of earshot of the clock. I heard only the quiet, and the more I listened the more I heard it. Nothing moved. No one whispered the butler did it.

I stood up and walked across the room and through the sitting room and into Loudon Tripp’s bedroom. It had been created by the same sensibility as the rest of the house. Hers, I assumed, or her decorator’s. Except that it had no canopy, the big four-poster bed was identical to hers, the fluted mahogany bedposts shaped like tall Indian clubs. On the bedside table was a thick paperback copy of Scott Turow’s new novel. A television remote lay next to it. There was a still life on the wall, and an identical armoire stood in the same position that it stood in Olivia’s room. I opened it. There was a big-screen television set on an upper shelf, connected through a hole in the back to electrical and cable outlets behind the piece. On the lower shelves were magazines: Sports Illustrated, Forbes, Time, two back copies of The New York Times Magazine, and a current TV Guide. The rest of the rooms were unrevealing. The children’s rooms were gender appropriate, impersonal and perfectly coordinated. There were guest rooms on the third floor.

I went back down to the living room and picked up the picture of Olivia Tripp and sat on the satin-covered couch and looked at it. She was blonde and wore her short hair in the sort of loose blonde way that wealthy WASP women affect. Her skin looked healthy, as if she exercised out-of-doors. Her eyes were wide apart. Her nose was straight, and quite narrow with nostrils that flared sort of dramatically. Her mouth was a little thin, though she’d made it look more generous than it was with the judicious use of lip pencil. There was a strand of pearls just above the point where her neck disappeared into airbrushed gossamer. She looked to be in her early forties.

She was forty-three when she died. Not planning to, no time to get ready for if, walking along in her good clothes, maybe a small aftertaste of Oreo cookie in her mouth, maybe thinking about her children, or her husband, or sex, or sleep, or good works, maybe trying to remember the lyrics to a song by Harry Belafonte. And somebody appearing in the shadows, faceless and silent in the quiet summer night, with a long-handled hammer. Like an old stone-age savage, armed.

But that was to come. The face in the expensive portrait showed no hint of that. It looked out at me tranquil and personless, and devoid of meaning.

“What the hell are you looking at?” a voice said, and I looked up, and there were the children.