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He heard the thunder of footsteps and turned to find Adria on the landing. “Don’t come down here and for God’s sake keep the kid upstairs!” he ordered.
“What—” She stared past him to the blood creeping from the bathroom and onto the bedroom carpet. “Oh, God.”
“It’s Ginny—call 911!”
“Mrs. Bassett already has.”
But Zach wasn’t listening. He forced himself to return to search for a pulse, to find some sign of life, but he knew that it was useless. Ginny Slade, the only witness to what had happened to London Danvers all those years ago, was dead.
24
“You’re saying she didn’t kill herself?” Adria asked after giving her statement to the police. She was seated in an interrogation room, her chair on one side of an old Formica-topped table, Zach leaning on wainscoting near the door. The room was bare save for the ever-present smell of smoke, an overflowing ashtray, and a trash can half filled with empty plastic coffee cups.
The man in charge was John Fullmer, an investigator who wore thick glasses and whose one vanity seemed to be to disguise his baldness by combing long, sandy-colored strands of hair from the back of his head forward.
Fullmer was full of nervous energy. He smoked and chewed gum at the same time, alternately popping his stick of Wrigley’s spearmint and taking a drag from his Camel.
It had been hours since Zach had discovered Ginny’s body and Adria had believed that Ginny, knowing that she would be exposed as a kidnapper, had decided to end her own life. Fullmer had other ideas.
Warming her hands around a strong cup of coffee, Adria asked, “But how would someone have known where to find her?”
“We’re not sure yet, and we don’t like to give out the kind of information that only the killer would know, b
ut there are clues. The window had been forced, so it looks like someone was in the house, waiting for her.” He took off his glasses and polished them with the hem of his shirt. His gum snapped loudly.
Zach stared at Adria. “It’s because she’s left-handed,” he said flatly. “The knife was in her right hand and she was left-handed. The slashes were angled wrong.”
The detective’s head snapped up and he stared at Zach, long and hard. “You know that?”
“I remember.” Zach’s gaze traveled to the center of the room but Adria guessed he was miles away, lost in a time when he was only a boy.
“How?” Adria asked.
“Because once…a long time ago when London was still living with us, Ginny had a pair of scissors—used them for mending, I think. She left them out once and I picked them up. I had to open some package and couldn’t find my knife. I tried to use her damned scissors, but they didn’t work. I couldn’t figure it out for a minute, then I discovered they were left-handed. Unique at the time. Ginny caught me and had a fit, told me to leave her things alone.” He shrugged. “We didn’t get along all that well.” His gaze focused on Adria again. “But that’s no surprise.”
The detective drew on his cigarette, then crushed it in the full tray. “I don’t have an official report on cause of death. We’ll have to wait for the M.E. for that, but there were signs of a struggle—footprints in the blood and the splatter pattern—that suggests she was killed. It looks like someone subdued her, took the knife, wrapped the fingers of her right hand around it and opened her veins. End of story.”
Adria shuddered and rubbed her arms.
The detective dumped the ashtray into the trash, before lighting up again.
They talked for a while more, then were allowed to leave. “Look, we know you two didn’t do old Ginny in,” the detective said, handing them each a card, “but we might have a few more questions…”
Zach’s eyes met Adria’s. “You can find us through Danvers International, or the Hotel Danvers in Portland,” he said, scribbling the numbers on the back of a business card for his construction company in Bend.
They left the station and Adria felt drained, her entire life turned inside out.
So she was London Danvers.
So she would inherit millions of dollars.
So what?
“Come on, I’ll buy you dinner,” Zach offered, though he looked as tired as she. Beneath the shadow of his beard his tanned skin seemed paler, his eyes haunted. The strain was telling on them both and she wondered how long they could keep up this charade, pretending that the attraction they felt for each other didn’t exist. “I know a great place in Chinatown. We’ll stay in town tonight, then go home and break the news.”
Home. Would she ever think of Portland as home?
She shuddered to think how quickly Ginny’s life had ended. “Who do you think could have done it?”
