38

A S O’CONNOR STEPPED INTO THE FOYER, THE LAST OF THE FOUR TO ENTER the Ducane home, he felt himself surrounded by ghosts. The house was much as he remembered it. He thought of the four murder victims-of Katy, Todd, and the baby, but most especially of the nursemaid, whose blood he had seen on that rainy evening more than twenty years ago. He thought of all that had happened that evening in so short a space of time, and much of it centering around this household.

He recalled the urgency with which Jack had insisted he look for Katy that night-how Jack hadn’t cared about his own injuries (or sending O’Connor out into the rain) half as much as he cared about Katy. He remembered now that Jack said something had been troubling her. He remembered the note to Jack, asking if Mitch was her father, and wondered if that was what had disturbed her that evening. He felt sad for her, thinking of her now from nearly the same age Jack had been, while she had been about the age Max Ducane was now.

When Max turned on the lights, the cleanliness of the house only emphasized its emptiness, made it into a well-kept museum, and added to O’Connor’s feelings of disquiet.

He watched Irene and Lefebvre. As Lefebvre looked around, nothing in his facial expression gave away his thoughts or feelings. He had a large brown envelope in his hands-crime scene photographs, he had told them. Irene, he thought, should never let anyone talk her into getting into a poker game. She was bothered, he could see-by the thought of what had gone on here twenty years ago, or perhaps because the house seemed frozen in another decade. She had a small camera with her, the one she had brought to the groundbreaking ceremony, hanging by a strap around her neck. She wasn’t using it.

“I thought you said this place has been empty for twenty years,” she said to Max. “There’s no dust.”

“Lillian has paid someone to keep it clean,” Max said. “Weird, huh?”

“Seriously weird.” She glanced uneasily at O’Connor. “I mean… Lillian seems to have moved on with her life, but then there’s this house, sitting here.”

He thought of his protectiveness of Maureen’s room, how hard it had been when his eldest sister had moved into that room. “The families of the missing can’t live in the same way other people do. If you know what happened to someone-that the person moved away, or died, or chose to be with someone else-your mind can let go, even if your heart takes a little longer to do the same. When a person you love is missing, inexplicably gone, perhaps you want to cling to anything associated with them, anything solid and normal, any reminder that they were here. If you keep a place for them, they might return. You worry that if you stop remembering them-and memories do fade-then the missing person will disappear in a more final way. That seems as if it would be a horrible betrayal, and so you fight it. And besides, the physical gives you something to focus on, other than the endless questions.”

He became suddenly self-conscious, and especially aware of a change in Lefebvre’s scrutiny.

Irene said, “Max, you’ve lived away from Las Piernas, so you probably don’t realize that O’Connor is kind of famous around here for all he does to help families of missing persons, and to help find the identities of John and Jane Does.”

“You were going to show us the house, Max?” O’Connor said quickly.

“I suppose we should start upstairs,” Max said, and led them up the large, curving staircase.

“Check out the phone,”he said to Irene, pointing to one that sat on a small marble-topped hall table.

The phone would have been an old one when Katy lived here; it was made of black Bakelite, and had no dial on it.

“An extension only,” O’Connor said.

“So is this place exactly the way it was the last time you were here?” Irene asked.

“No,” Max answered, before O’Connor could reply. “Lillian hired someone to repair the door off the kitchen, and she’s had the place painted. I think…well, a new floor was put in the nursery. Let’s go there first.”

As he led them into it, he said, “At least I can stop wondering if this used to be my room.”

“Did you wonder?” Irene asked.

“Not really,” he said. At the doubting looks of the others, he moved over to the empty bassinet and ran his fingers lightly along its rim. “I mean, everyone who is adopted has that fantasy at some point in his childhood-you were always the kidnapped prince, of course, and never the abandoned pauper. Warren seemed so certain that I had once been this little prince, I asked myself if it could be possible. But if you mean, did I ever have some mystical experience in here, some faint memory from infancy? No.”

O’Connor thought of the way the room looked that night-really looked. Not this sanitized shrine.

The bloodstains.

He heard paper rustling and saw Lefebvre opening his envelope. Photographs. Lefebvre set a small stack of them on the changing table. Almost against his will, O’Connor drew nearer to look, standing next to Irene.

In stark black-and-white, the top photo showed him what the room had looked like when Dan Norton had arrived, when Rose Hannon’s body still lay on the floor. He saw what Dan had seen that long-ago night-the bloodstains and the position of the body indicated that she had been crawling on the floor toward the bassinet. The poor woman had bled to death trying to reach the baby.

Max glanced over their shoulders, shuddered, and moved away.

“There was another member of the house staff. A maid, right?” Irene asked, picking up the photo and looking through the next three. They were far more gruesome shots of the body.

“Yes. She wasn’t implicated,” Lefebvre said.

She handed the photos back to Lefebvre. “I’m just thinking that Gus Ronden must have known a lot about this household. He knew that the Ducanes wouldn’t be at home, and that the baby wouldn’t be with his mother. He knew that Rose Hannon would be here alone with the child.”

“He might have come here ready to kill two women,” Lefebvre said.

“Maybe,” Irene said. “But that would be much more chancy, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” O’Connor said. “But Dan and I both checked up on the other maid. Doesn’t seem likely at all that she knew Gus Ronden.”

“Is she still living?” Irene asked.

“Yes,” Lefebvre said. “Why on earth does that make you smile?”

“Because you wouldn’t know she was alive unless you had already contacted her. What did you find out?”

“That I should watch what I say around you.”

“You’ve both lost me, I’m afraid,” said Max.

“You have to think of everything that was going on in Las Piernas that night,” Irene said. “Too much was going on at once for it to be explained as just a random, terribly unlucky night.” She frowned in concentration. “I think it was supposed to look as if the Ducanes happened to drown on the night of a kidnapping. In the end, that’s the way most of Las Piernas looked at it, right? A horrible coincidence, and the kidnapping of the child was sad, but the Ducanes’ tragedy at sea was a combination of foolishness and unpredictable weather.”

“Don’t forget Jack’s beating,” O’Connor said.

“I haven’t,” she answered. “I’m as sure as you are that the beating was planned, but I doubt he was supposed to see the burial of the car.”

“I agree,” Lefebvre said. “No one was ever supposed to find that buried car. They didn’t dump Jack Corrigan in a grove and hope he’d wake up in time to watch-I think that was a mistake. If they had wanted him to see it, they would have given him a front-row seat and a ride back to town. Instead, they tried to kill him.”

“They came damned close to succeeding,” O’Connor said.

“Okay,” Irene said, “but back up. We’ve found the car. So we know there wasn’t simple coincidence at work. Think about it-there had to be a ring-master of this circus. That person knew about the Ducanes’ yacht, and that they planned to take it out that night.”