12

FRANK LOOKED AROUND THE VANDAMM ESTATE in Mamoraneck with new eyes. He thought of Alicia VanDamm and wondered if she had been violated in this very house. If what Sarah Brandt believed was true, and Sylvester Mattingly had raped her and gotten her with child, then it might well have happened here, far away from prying eyes and ears.

Frank hesitated a moment before knocking on the front door, wondering if one reason he’d been taken off the case was because of his last, unauthorized visit here. But this time when the housekeeper opened the door, she looked more resigned than outraged at his presence.

“Just like a bad penny, ain’t you?” she said. “You keep turning up.”

“I’d like to look around Miss VanDamm’s room again,” he said, telling only a partial truth.

“You already did that. What do you think, that she came back from the dead and put something there you couldn’t’ve found before?”

“This time I know what I’m looking for,” he replied, concealing his surprise that she didn’t seem to be aware that VanDamm hadn’t authorized his previous visit. Could the woman have neglected to mention it to her employer?

“And what would that be?” she asked skeptically.

“A diary.”

Mrs. Hightower’s eyes grew large in her homely face. “What would you be wanting with that?” she demanded.

“I think it might give me some clues about the identity of her killer. You knew the girl kept a diary, I take it.”

Mrs. Hightower sniffed derisively. “Everybody knew it. She wrote in it all the time. For a girl who never went anywhere or did anything except ride that mare of hers, she sure found a lot to write about, I’ll tell you that.”

“Did you ever read what she wrote?”

“Of course not!” She was thoroughly outraged at the very suggestion. “Nobody would do a thing like that.”

“Not even her personal maid? Maybe Lizzie knows what it said. Maybe Lizzie knows where it is.”

“Not likely,” Mrs. Hightower insisted, “but I guess we won’t see the back of you until we ask her, now will we?”

Frank merely smiled expectantly until Mrs. Hightower finally admitted him.

This time she put him in a small front room where he waited until Lizzie had been summoned.

“Mr. Detective,” the maid said in dismay when she saw him. “Have you found out who killed Miss Alicia yet?” She was wringing her hands in her apron and looked on the verge of tears.

“Not yet,” Frank said, trying to sound kind while knowing he wasn’t being very reassuring, “but I’m hoping you can give me some help. Do you know where Miss Alicia kept her diary?”

“Oh, cor, she kept it locked up, nice and safe, because she didn’t want anybody never to read it but her, but it ain’t there now.”

“How do you know?”

“Because they sent me to look for it right after she disappeared.”

“Who sent you?”

“Why, Mrs. Hightower, who else?”

Who else, indeed. Frank could think of many possibilities, but the truth was probably that Mrs. Hightower would only have acted on orders from the VanDamms. This meant they knew what the diary must contain, and that would explain why they’d ordered Sylvester Mattingly to find it. Now if only Frank could find out what it said, too.

“Can you show me where she kept it?” Frank asked.

“I can, but only if Mrs. Hightower says it’s all right,” she said, glancing nervously toward the door, at which Mrs. Hightower might well be listening.

Mrs. Hightower seemed willing to do anything if it would get Frank closer to leaving, so Lizzie escorted him upstairs to Alicia’s room. She showed him a small chest which he’d searched on his last visit. It held mementos of Alicia’s childhood, awards won in school, some trinkets that had probably held some sentimental value, but nothing that could remotely be called a diary.

By now Lizzie was openly weeping, not making a sound but allowing the tears to flow freely down her face. Frank felt a twinge of guilt and wondered when he had become so sentimental. In other days, he would have been jubilant at the sight of those tears, knowing they would make the person he was questioning more open and forthcoming.

“Lizzie, Mrs. Hightower said Miss Alicia wrote in her diary a lot. Do you know what she wrote about?”

The girl shook her head in silent despair. “Sure and I don’t. She wouldn’t let me see it, not ever. I couldn’t’ve read it, even if she did, of course, but I’d never of wanted to. She wrote in it all the time, and sometimes she cried. I don’t want to know what made her cry. If she had secrets, she should be allowed to keep them, don’t you think?”

Frank didn’t think, so he ignored the question. “Did she have any other place she hid her diary?”

“Oh, no, sir. This was the place. She could lock it up, and she carried the key around her neck so nobody could find it accidental. But when she disappeared, the chest was open and the key was on the table there.” She pointed to the dressing table. “She must’ve took her diary with her. That’s the only other place it could be.”

Frank sincerely doubted this, since Ham Fisher hadn’t found it when he searched her room at the Higgins house, either. He started to ask her if there was anyone else who might know or to whom she might have entrusted her diary when he realized he didn’t have to ask. He already knew: the groom, Harvey.

The stables were dim and strangely silent when Frank entered. He gave himself a moment for his eyes to adjust from the bright sunlight outside. The familiar and comforting scent of horses and straw and manure assailed him, swamping his senses at first so that he didn’t notice it. But the silence was too great, too complete. Oh, he could hear the horses shuffling in their stalls and the hum of swarming insects and the scurry of rodents in the hay, but something was missing. The place was too still, as if its life force had been sucked out. As if it was empty of human habitation.

Except the other servants had told him Harvey was in the stables. No one had seen him come out, and he didn’t appear to be anywhere else, so he had to be here. Except Frank knew he wasn’t.

“Harvey!” he called into the void. A horse knickered, but no one else responded.

Frank’s nerves tingled as his body prepared instinctively for whatever he encountered. “Harvey!” he tried again, making his way farther into the stable. He glanced into each stall as he passed, seeing nothing amiss. Everything was as it should be except for the oppressive silence that seemed to muffle even his own footsteps. The little mare that Alicia had ridden peeked out at him, blinking her sad, brown eyes. A bay gelding stamped his hoof in the next stall but offered Frank no comment as he walked by.

One by one, he passed each stall until he came to the last one, and that’s where he found Harvey, hanging by his neck from the rafter.

SARAH SHOULD HAVE expected her mother to be entertaining at this time of the day, but she never would have imagined the scene she encountered. The maid hadn’t seemed surprised to see her this time and conducted her to the dining room without even being asked. When she saw who was there, she realized the girl must have simply thought she was another invited guest to the elaborate formal tea party her mother was hosting.

The group of ladies sitting around her mother’s enormous table represented some of the oldest families in New York, and all of them had known Sarah since she was a babe. If that wasn’t bad enough, she saw Mrs. Astor-Mrs. William Backhouse Astor, Jr., matriarch of the Astor clan and designated as “the” Mrs. Astor to distinguish her from the less important Mrs. Astors in the family.

Every instinct warned her to flee, but it was already too late. She was well and truly caught, and couldn’t leave without embarrassing her mother.