Robert B. Parker’s the Hangman’s Sonnet

48

When Jesse strode into the station the next day at seven, Molly was at the front desk. He was surprised to see her.

“What are you doing here?”

“Running up my overtime,” she said. “My chief’s a sucker.”

“You always this funny at this hour?”

Molly ignored him. “How was dinner with Her Highness?”

“All right.”

“Care to expand on that?”

“No.”

She shook her head at him. “After those effusive answers, I shouldn’t give you this.”

“Give me what?”

Molly handed him two sheets of paper. “Those are the names, addresses, and phone numbers of people who stayed at Maude Cain’s over the years.”

“You do good work, Officer Crane. Play your cards right and your chief might actually authorize some of that overtime he promised.”

“I’ll just remind him of how this place ran when Suit was on the desk and Gabe was rehabbing.”

“All right, Crane. I surrender. Make us some appointments and get someone in to cover the desk here.”

“Us?”

“You heard me, Molly. Us.”

Molly smiled in spite of herself and grabbed the list back out of Jesse’s hand.

Their third appointment was in Salem with a Mrs. Deanna Banquer. She lived in a beautifully maintained saltbox house, its redbrick chimney sticking up through the center of the roof. A low hedge surrounded her lot. A pea-gravel walkway, bordered on both sides by carefully trimmed boxwoods, led from the curb to the house. Mrs. Banquer threw open the front door when Jesse’s Explorer pulled up. And when Molly and he got out of the SUV, she stepped out of the house and came to greet them. It had been Jesse’s experience that very few people were this enthusiastic about speaking to the police. On those rare occasions when he ran into someone this eager and cooperative, the results, in terms of evidence or information, were often less than sparkling.

The first two visits hadn’t gone well, either. It wasn’t that the people they’d spoken to weren’t cooperative; they just had nothing helpful to say. Their first stop was in Paradise with a man named Brad Mercer. Mr. Mercer was in his forties and had rented a room from Maude Cain for two months in the late nineties. He had inherited a house in the Swap from his uncle Jack. The house was in tired condition and Mercer had to stay off-premises until the work on the house was completed.

“She was a lovely woman, good cook, too.”

But beyond that, Mercer had little to say. He paid her in cash by the week. His room was on the second floor and faced the cove. Nothing unusual had happened during his stay. He didn’t recall much about any of the other lodgers, though he was sure there were others there at the time he rented there.

Their second stop was equally unproductive. Swan Harbor was a tony village just north of Paradise. Jim Born was fifteen years on the job in town after doing twenty as a Boston cop. While his wife sold their house in Boston, he’d stayed at the Cain house for a few weeks.

“It was way less expensive than anything available in Swan Harbor.”

But when Molly asked him about his time in the Cain house, Born gave an unsatisfying yet completely understandable answer.

“You’ll have to forgive me, Molly, but that was during Nine-Eleven. Mostly I stayed in my room and watched TV. I don’t recall much about those weeks except watching the planes slam into the Trade Center.”

“Hello, hello,” said Banquer as she met them halfway down the walkway. “You must be Officer Crane, and you’re Chief Stone.”

They all smiled and shook hands. Deanna Banquer was about five-six, in her late fifties or early sixties, with short hair that was in the final stages of conversion from mostly red to mostly gray. She had stunning blue eyes and a disarming smile. Jesse thanked her for her time, then she led them into the low-ceilinged house. She showed them into the kitchen, poured them all lemonade, and then joined them at the table.

“So, Chief Stone, what is it about my time at Maude’s house in Paradise I can help you with?”

“Jesse. Call us Jesse and Molly, okay?”

Banquer smiled that smile of hers. “Wonderful. And please call me Deanna.”

“Molly tells me you two discussed Maude Cain’s death. I know you’ve read about it in the paper and heard it on the news.”

“Horrible. Horrible. She was such a lovely woman. Very kind and generous to a fault.”

Molly asked, “Why were you renting a room from her?”

Deanna’s smile turned suddenly shy. “I’m originally from Ohio and I was trying to establish state residency so I could finish up college at UMass. I had visited this area as a kid with my family during a driving vacation. So I figured I might as well live in Paradise while I established residency, and Maude’s hardly cost anything.”

Jesse asked, “This was when?”

“The seventies. July of ’76 thru July of ’77. I had a good job at a restaurant here in Salem. Funny,” she said, her eyes getting a faraway look about them, “I never did finish school. I met my husband-to-be at the restaurant one day and... Sorry.”

Surprisingly, they’d gotten more information from Deanna than they had from their earlier visits. She was very fond of her time in Paradise with Maude, and Maude had been fond of her.

“Maude’s husband had died a few years earlier and they never had children. I missed my family terribly and so we spent a lot of time together. She would tell me about her family’s history. She was very proud of what they had done for Paradise.”

Jesse took out his phone and showed Deanna the ring. “Did Maude ever mention—”

Deanna lit up. “She loved that ring. She even let me try it on once. God, it was beautiful.”

“So she didn’t keep the ring a secret,” Molly said. “Other lodgers knew about it?”

“No, I don’t think so. She swore me to secrecy. She said I was the only person she had ever shown it to, certainly the only person she had ever let try it on.”

Jesse asked, “Do you remember any of the other people staying there while you lived with her?”

Deanna’s expression did an about-face, souring. “There was one asshole, Evan. He gave Maude a hard time. He was always high, drank a lot, but he seemed to have a lot of money. So whenever Maude asked him to leave, he would pay her off. As nice as her house was and as rich as her family had been, she was pretty broke. I didn’t like that she let him stay, but I understood it. She needed the money. When he tried breaking into my room one night, she threw him out once and for all.”

After that there wasn’t much more for them to discuss. Deanna said that she and Maude had kept in touch for a while afterward, but once Deanna had a family of her own, their conversations grew less frequent.

“I hope you find the ring,” she said to them as they were leaving. “She was a woman who didn’t care about wealth, but she did love that ring.”