11

With a mixture of pain and resentment rolling through him, Jack followed Gia down the hallway. For months he had nurtured a faint hope that someday soon he would make her understand. As of now he knew with leaden certainty that that would never happen. She had been a warm, passionate woman who had loved him, and unwittingly he had turned her to ice.

He studied the walnut paneling, the portraits on the walls, anything to keep from watching her as she walked ahead of him. Then they were through a pair of sliding doors and into the library. The dark paneling continued in from the hall, and there was lots of dark furniture: overstuffed velvet chairs with antimacassars on the arms, Persian rugs on the floor, Impressionist paintings on the walls, a Sony Trinitron in the corner. It looked lived-in.

He had met Gia in this room.

Aunt Nellie sat lost in a recliner by the cold fireplace. A chubby, white-haired woman in her late sixties in a long dark dress adorned with a small diamond brooch and a short string of pearls. A woman used to wealth and comfortable with it. At first glance she appeared depressed and shrunken, as if she were in mourning, or preparing for it. But as they entered she pumped herself up and arranged her face into a pleasant expression, putting on a smile that wiped away a good many of her years.

“Mr. Jeffers,” she said, rising. Her accent was thickly British. Not Lynn Redgrave British; more like a reedy Robert Morley. “So good of you to come.”

“Good to see you again, Mrs. Paton. But just call me Jack.”

“Only if you call me Nellie. Would you care for some tea?”

“Iced, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all.” She rang a little bell on the endtable next to her and a uniformed maid appeared. “Three iced teas, Eunice.” The maid nodded and left. An uncomfortable silence followed in which Nellie seemed to be lost in thought.

“How can I help you, Nellie?”

“What?” She looked startled. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry. I was just thinking about my sister, Grace. As I’m sure Gia told you, she’s been gone for three days now… disappeared between Monday night and Tuesday”—she pronounced it Chew sday—”morning. The police have come and gone and find no evidence of foul play, and there’s been no demand for ransom. She is merely listed as a missing person, but I’m quite certain something has happened to her. I shan’t rest until I find her.”

Jack’s heart went out to her, and he wanted to help, but…

“I don’t do missing-persons work as a rule.”

“Yes, Gia did say something about this not being in your line”—Jack glanced over to Gia but she avoided his gaze— “but I’m at my wits’ end. The police are no help. I’m sure that if we were back home we’d have more cooperation from Scotland Yard than we’ve had from the New York Police. They simply aren’t taking Grace’s disappearance seriously. I knew you and Gia were close and remembered Eddie Burkes mentioning last year that your assistance had proven invaluable at the Mission. Never would tell me what he needed you for, but he certainly seemed enthusiastic.”

Jack was seriously considering placing a call to “Eddie”— hard as it was to imagine someone calling the U.K. Mission’s security chief “Eddie”—and telling him to button his lip. Jack always appreciated referrals, and it was nice to know he had made such an impression on the man, but Burkes was getting just a little bit too free with his name.

“I’m flattered by your confidence, but—”

“Whatever your usual fee is, I daresay I’ll gladly pay it.”

“It’s a question of expertise rather than money. I just don’t think I’m the right man for the job.”

“You’re a detective, aren’t you?”

“Sort of.” That was a lie. He wasn’t any sort of detective; he was a repairman. He could feel Gia staring at him. “The problem is, I’m not licensed as a detective, so I can’t have any contact with the police. They mustn’t know I’m involved in any way. They wouldn’t approve.”

Nellie’s face brightened. “Then you’ll help?”

The hope in her expression pushed the words to his lips.

“I’ll do what I can. And as far as payment goes, let’s make it contingent on success. If I don’t get anywhere, there’ll be no fee.”

“But your time is surely worth something, dear fellow!”

“I agree, but looking for Vicky’s Aunt Grace is a special case.”

Nellie nodded. “Then you may consider yourself hired on your terms.”

Jack forced a smile. He didn’t expect much success in finding Grace, but he’d give it his best shot. If nothing else, the job would keep him in contact with Gia. He wasn’t quitting yet.

The iced tea arrived and Jack sipped it appreciatively. Not a Lipton or Nestea mix, but fresh brewed from an English blend.

“Tell me about your sister,” he said when the maid had left.

Nellie leaned back and spoke in a low voice, rambling now and again, but keeping fairly close to hard facts. A picture slowly emerged. Unlike Nellie, the missing Grace Westphalen had never married. After Nellie’s husband was killed in the Battle of Britain, the two sisters, each with one-third of the Westphalen fortune, emigrated to the States. Except for brief trips back home, both had lived on Manhattan’s East Side ever since. And both were still loyal to the Queen. Never in all those years had the thought of becoming U.S. citizens ever crossed their minds. They very naturally fell in with the small British community in Manhattan, consisting mostly of well-heeled expatriates and people connected with the British Consulate and the United Kingdom’s Mission to the United Nations—”a colony within the Colonies,” as they liked to call themselves—and enjoyed an active social life and huddled with their countrymen during the Falkland Islands crisis. They rarely saw Americans. It was almost like living in London.

Grace Westphalen was sixty-nine—two years older than Nellie. A woman of many acquaintances but few real friends. Her sister had always been her best friend. No eccentricities. Certainly no enemies.

“When did you last see Grace?” Jack asked.

“Monday night. I finished watching Johnny Carson, and when I looked in to say good night, she was propped up in bed reading. That was the last time I saw her.” Nellie’s lower lip trembled for an instant, then she got control of it. “Perhaps the last time I’ll ever see her.”

Jack looked to Gia. “No signs of foul play?”

“I didn’t get here until late Tuesday,” Gia said with a shrug. “But I do know the police couldn’t figure out how Grace got out without tripping the alarm.”

“You’ve got the place wired?” he asked Nellie.

“Wired? Oh, you mean the burglar alarm system. Yes. And it was set—at least for downstairs. We’ve had so many false alarms over the years, however, that we had the upper floors disconnected.”

“What do you mean, ’false alarms’?”

“Well, sometimes we’d forget and get up at night to open a window. The racket is terrifying. So now when we set the system, only the downstairs doors and windows are activated.”

“Which means Grace couldn’t have left by the downstairs doors or windows without tripping an alarm…” A thought struck him. “Wait—all these systems have delays so you can arm it and get out the door without setting it off. That must have been what she did. She just walked out.”

“But her key to the system is still upstairs on her dresser. And all her clothes are in her closets.”

“May I see?”

“By all means, do come and look,” Nellie said, rising. They all trooped upstairs.

Jack found the small, frilly-feminine bedroom nauseating. Everything seemed to be pink or have a lace ruffle, or both.

The pair of French doors at the far end of the room claimed his attention immediately. He opened them and found himself on a card-table-sized balcony rimmed with a waist-high wrought iron railing, overlooking the backyard. A good dozen feet below was a rose garden. In a shady corner sat the playhouse Vicky had mentioned; it looked far too heavy to have been dragged under the window, and it would have flattened all the rose bushes if it had. Anyone wanting to climb up here had to bring a ladder with him or be one hell of a jumper.

“The police find any marks in the dirt down there?”

Nellie shook her head. “They thought someone might have used a ladder, but there was no sign. The ground is so hard and dry, with no rain—”

Eunice the maid appeared at the door. “Telephone, mum.”

Nellie excused herself and left Jack and Gia alone in the room.

“A locked room mystery,” he said. “I feel like Sherlock Holmes.”

He got down on his knees and examined the carpet for specks of dirt, but found none. He looked under the bed; only a pair of slippers there.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for clues. I’m supposed to be a detective, remember?”

“I don’t think a woman’s disappearance is anything to joke about,” Gia said, the frost returning to her words now that Nellie was out of earshot.

“I’m not joking, nor am I taking it lightly. But you’ve got to admit the whole thing has the air of a British drawing room mystery about it. I mean, either Aunt Grace had an extra alarm key made and ran off into the night in her nightie—a pink and frilly one, I’ll bet—or she jumped off her little balcony here in that same nightie, or someone climbed up the wall, knocked her out, and carried her off without a sound. None of those explanations seem too plausible. “

Gia appeared to be listening intently. That was something, at least.

He went over to the dressing table and glanced at the perfume bottles. There were dozens of them; some names were familiar, most were not. He wandered into the private bathroom and was there confronted by another array of bottles: Metamucil, Philips Milk of Magnesia, Haley’s M-O, Pericolace, Surfak, Ex-Lax and more. One bottle stood off to the side. Jack picked it up. It was clear glass, with a thick green fluid inside. The cap was the metal twist-off type, enameled white. All it needed was a Smirnoff label and it could have been an airline vodka bottle.

“Know what this is?”

“Ask Nellie.”

Jack screwed off the cap and sniffed. At least he was sure of one thing: It wasn’t perfume. The smell was heavily herbal, and not particularly pleasant.

As Nellie returned, she appeared to be finding it increasingly difficult to hide her anxiety. “That was the police. I rang up the detective in charge a while ago and he just told me that they have nothing new on Grace.”

Jack handed her the bottle.

“What’s this?”

Nellie looked it over, momentarily puzzled, then her face brightened.

“Oh, yes. Grace picked this up Monday. I’m not sure where, but she said it was a new product being test marketed, and this was a free sample.”

“But what’s it for?”

“It’s a physic.”

“Pardon?”

“A physic. A cathartic. A laxative. Grace was very concerned—obsessed, you might say—with regulating her bowels. She’s had that sort of problem all her life.”

Jack took the bottle back. Something about an unlabeled bottle amid all the brand names intrigued him.

“May I keep this?”

“Certainly.”

Jack looked around a while longer, for appearances more than anything else. He didn’t have the faintest idea how he was even going to begin looking for Grace Westphalen.

“Please remember to do two things,” he told Nellie as he started downstairs. “Keep me informed of any leads the police turn up, and don’t breathe a word of my involvement to the police.”

“Very well. But where are you going to start?”

He smiled—reassuringly, he hoped. “I’ve already started. I’ll have to do some thinking and then start looking.” He fingered the bottle in his pocket. Something about it…

They left Nellie on the second floor, standing and gazing into her sister’s empty room. Vicky came running in from the kitchen as Jack reached the bottom step. She held an orange section in her outstretched hand.

“Do the orange mouth! Do the orange mouth!”

He laughed, delighted that she remembered. “Sure!” He shoved the section into his mouth and clamped his teeth behind the skin. Then he gave Vicky a big orange grin. She clapped and laughed.

“Isn’t Jack funny, Mom? Isn’t he the funniest?”

“He’s a riot, Vicky.”

Jack pulled the orange slice from his mouth. “Where’s that doll you wanted to introduce me to?”

Vicky slapped the side of her head dramatically. “Ms. Jelliroll! She’s out back. I’ll go—”

“Jack doesn’t have time, honey,” Gia said from behind him. “Maybe next trip, okay?”

Vicky smiled and Jack noticed that a second tooth was starting to fill the gap left by her missing milk tooth.

“Okay. You coming back soon, Jack?”

“Real soon, Vicks.”

He hoisted her onto his hip and carried her to the front door, where he put her down and kissed her.

“See ya.” He glanced up at Gia. “You, too.”

She pulled Vicky back against the front of her jeans. “Yeah.”

As Jack went down the front steps, he thought the door slammed with unnecessary force.