It was nearly eight o’clock when Robert Stephens turned to his son. “Come on, Neil, we’d better get home,” he urged.

Their car was parked across the street from police headquarters. As soon as Stephens turned the ignition key, the phone rang. Neil answered it.

It was Dolores Stephens. She had gone home when they left for the museum. “Any word about Maggie?” she asked anxiously.

“No, Mom. We’ll be home soon, I guess.”

“Neil, I just received a phone call from a Mrs. Sarah Cushing. She said that her mother, Mrs. Bainbridge, is a resident at Latham Manor, and that you were talking to her today.”

“That’s right.” Neil felt his interest quicken.

“Mrs. Cushing’s mother remembered something that she thought might be important and called her daughter, who looked up our number trying to track you down. Mrs. Bainbridge said that Maggie mentioned something about a bell she had found on her stepmother’s grave. She asked if placing a bell like that was some sort of custom. Mrs. Bainbridge said it just occurred to her that Maggie might have been talking about one of Professor Bateman’s Victorian bells. I’m not sure what any of this means, but I wanted you to know right away,” she said. “I’ll see you in a while.”

Neil gave his father the details of the message Dolores Stephens had passed along. “What do you make of it?” Robert Stephens asked his son as he started to put the car into drive.

“Hold it a minute, Dad. Don’t pull out,” Neil said urgently. “What do I make of it? Plenty. The bells we found in Maggie’s studio must have been taken from her stepmother’s grave and from someone else’s, probably one of the women from the residence. Otherwise why would she have asked that question? If she did go back to the museum last night, which I still have trouble believing, it was to see if any of the bells Bateman claimed were in that box were missing.”

“Here they come,” Robert Stephens murmured as Bateman and Payne emerged from the police station. They watched as the men got into Payne’s Jaguar and, for a few minutes, sat in the car, talking animatedly.

The rain had ended and a full moon brightened the already well-lighted area around the station.

“Payne must have taken dirt roads when he came down from Boston today,” Robert Stephens observed. “Look at those wheels and tires. His shoes were pretty messy, too. You heard Bateman yell at him about that. It’s also a surprise that he owns that retirement place. There’s something about that guy I don’t like. Was Maggie dating him seriously?”

“I don’t think so,” Neil said tonelessly. “I don’t like him either, but he obviously is successful. That residence cost a fortune. And I checked on his investments operation. He has his own firm now, and clearly he was smart enough to take with him some of Randolph and Marshall’s best clients.”

“Randolph and Marshall,” his father repeated. “Isn’t that where Dr. Lane said his wife used to work?”

“What did you say?” Neil demanded.

“You heard me. I said that Lane’s wife used to work at Randolph and Marshall.”

“That’s what’s been bugging me!” Neil exclaimed. “Don’t you see? Liam Payne is connected to everything. He owns the residence. He must have had the final say in hiring Dr. Lane. Doug Hansen also worked for Randolph and Marshall, although for only a brief time. He has an arrangement now whereby his transactions go through their clearing house. I said today that Hansen had to be operating out of another office, and I also said that he’s clearly too stupid to have worked out that scheme for defrauding those women. He was just the front man. Someone had to be programming him. Well, maybe that someone was Liam Moore Payne.”

“But it doesn’t all quite fit together,” Robert Stephens pro tested. “If Payne owns the residence, he could have gotten the financial information he needed without involving either Hansen or Hansen’s aunt, Janice Norton.”

“But it’s much safer to stay a step removed,” Neil pointed out. “That way, Hansen becomes the scapegoat if anything goes wrong. Don’t you see, Dad? Laura Arlington and Cora Gebhart had applications pending. He wasn’t just turning over the apartments of residents. He was cheating applicants when there were no apartments.

“It’s obvious that Bateman uses Payne as a sounding board for his problems,” Neil continued. “If Bateman had been upset because Maggie inquired about the Latham Manor incident, wouldn’t he be likely to tell Payne about it?”

“Maybe. But what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that this Payne guy is the key to all this. He secretly owns Latham Manor. Women there are dying under what seem to be unexceptional circumstances, yet when you consider how many have died recently, and factor in the similarities -all of them pretty much alone, no close family to check on them-it all starts to look suspicious. And who stands to gain from their deaths? Latham Manor does, through reselling those now-empty apartments to the next name on the list.”

“Do you mean to say that Liam Payne killed all those women?” Robert Stephens asked, his tone incredulous.

“I don’t know that yet,” his son replied. “The police suspect that Dr. Lane and/or Nurse Markey may have had a hand in the deaths, but when I talked to Mrs. Bainbridge, she made a point of saying that Dr. Lane was ‘kind,’ and that Markey was a good nurse. My hunch is, she knows what she’s talking about. She’s sharp. No, I don’t know who killed those women, but I think Maggie had come to the same conclusion about their deaths, and she must have been getting too close for comfort for the actual killer.”

“But where do the bells come in? And Bateman? I don’t get it,” Robert Stephens protested.

“The bells? Who knows? Maybe it’s the killer’s way of keeping score. Chances are, though, that if Maggie found those bells on graves and looked up those women’s obituaries, she had started to figure out what really happened. The bells might signify that those women were murdered.” Neil paused. “As for Bateman, he seems almost too weird to be able to take part in anything as calculating as this. No, I think Mr. Liam Moore Payne is our connection here. You heard him make that idiotic suggestion to explain Maggie’s disappearance.” Neil snorted derisively. “I bet he knows what has happened to Maggie and he’s just trying to ease the pressure of the search.”

Noting that Payne had started his car, Robert Stephens turned to his son. “I take it we’re following him,” he said.

“Absolutely. I want to see where Payne is going,” Neil said, then added his own silent prayer: Please, please let him lead me to Maggie.

88

Dr. William Lane dined at Latham Manor with some of the charter members of the residence. He explained Odile’s absence by saying that she was devastated to be leaving her dear friends. As for himself, while he regretted having to give up something that had been so pleasant an experience, it was his firm belief that, as the axiom goes, “the buck stops here.”

“I want to reassure everyone that this sort of outrageous indis cretion will never happen again,” he promised, referring to Janice Norton’s violation of privileged information.

Letitia Bainbridge had accepted the invitation to dine at the doctor’s table. “Do I understand that Nurse Markey is filing an ethics complaint against you, stating that, in effect you stand by and let people die?” she asked.

“So I gather. It isn’t true, of course.”

“What does your wife think about that?” Mrs. Bainbridge persisted.

“Again, she’s truly saddened. She considered Nurse Markey a close friend.” And more the fool for it, Odile, he added to himself.

His farewell was gracious and to the point. “Sometimes it is appropriate to let other hands take the reins. I’ve always tried to do my best. If I am guilty of anything, it is of trusting a thief, but not of gross negligence.”