The Dead Can Tell: A Detective McKee Mystery. Helen Reilly

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      Sara Hazard’s gloves, her purse, her keys were in the tangled wreckage of the car that had been fished up out of the East River. Her body wasn’t recovered for twenty-two days.

      They were twenty-two days of unmitigated hell for Steven Hazard. Interviews with the police, with the searchers, with the detectives of the Missing Persons Bureau; it was the uncertainty that was the worst. August went by and September came and the days mounted into weeks. There was no news of any kind. Where Sara Hazard had been there was simply a void.

      Steven Hazard’s friends rallied around him, did what they could, Mary Dodd and Kit Blaketon, Pat Somers, his chief in the office and two or three others. He saw Cristie only once during that terrible interval. They met like strangers.

      Steven showed no desire to be alone with Cristie. He was silent, remote, wrapped in a shroud of doubt and fear and torturing suspense. The South American trip was off. National Motors had sent another man to the Argentine.

      For once anticipation of the dreadful ordeal that lay somewhere ahead lagged behind actuality when it finally came.

      Sara Hazard’s body was discovered floating in the waters off the North Beach airport by the boat patroling the sea-plane lanes. It was taken to the morgue and subjected to extensive examination and various tests. Steven Hazard was summoned. The clothes had already been identified as the missing woman’s, black silk suit, underwear with her monogram on it. Toeless sandals still clasped the once pretty feet, now shapeless and swollen. The hat was gone and the hair that had been bright gold was no longer bright. It was bleached and stained and bedraggled from long immersion in the shifting tides of the river.

      The brown eyes were mercifully closed. But the body itself was a bloated and hideous caricature of the beautiful Sara Hazard. Not nice, not easy to take.

      Steven Hazard looked at her under the watchful gaze of a group of officials. Assistant District Attorney Dorrens said, “You must allow for—certain differences. The—er—water, you know, and the length of time . . .”

      Steven Hazard said, “Yes.” The captain of the detective district raised an eyelid carefully. He indicated the clothing, the hair, what was left of the teeth, a bracelet embedded in the flesh. Hazard stood beside the drawer looking down. An iron rein held his emotion, his outraged sensibilities in check. He identified the body.

      After a long moment he said huskily, “Yes. That’s—my wife. That’s—Sara.” He turned away.

      An autopsy was duly performed. Sara Hazard had been neither shot, strangled, poisoned nor stabbed. The lungs were full of water. She had been alive when she went into the river. She had been drowned as a result of the crash.

      What had happened was clear. A late party, a projected excursion elsewhere. The Hazard convertible with the top down had been parked in its usual place when it wasn’t in the garage, at the top of the sharply inclined street around the corner from the apartment hotel. Sara Hazard had lost control. The car had turned over when it hit the fence before diving into the river. She had fallen out, to be battered back and forth for all those days in the swiftly moving currents until her body turned up off the airport.

      It was on the twenty-fifth of August that the fatal crash occurred. It was on September sixteenth that the body was found. Two days later Sara Hazard’s body was buried in the little cemetery a couple of miles away from the Hazard farmhouse in lower Dutchess County. A cold September rain beat down on the handful of mourners. Cristie Lansing wasn’t there. Mary Dodd and Kit Blaketon were, and Pat and Cliff Somers and Steven’s chief.

      That was on Wednesday. On the succeeding Monday, Steven Hazard returned to the office. Work was good for him, took him out of himself. His friends encouraged him. He began to look more normal. He went to the World’s Series with Pat, spent an occasional evening at the Dodd house. Mary Dodd was very kind to him, very gentle. So was Kit Blaketon.

      Steven was too much wrapped up in himself to notice the change in Kit or that Cliff Somers no longer dropped in at all hours. Mary didn’t say anything. She talked of his work, of the future, made him talk.

      Steven had closed the apartment on Franklin Place. He put the things in storage and moved to his club. He called Cristie once or twice, but it wasn’t until after the first of October when a refreshing tingle of frost was turning the leaves, that he began seeing her regularly again. The first meeting was awkward, they were stiff and shy with each other.

      The stiffness began to wear off. Steven would call Cristie from the office and they would meet for a quiet dinner and a play. They didn’t do much talking. There were so many things that had to be left unsaid.

      The shadow of Sara persisted. Cristie began to wonder with a dull ache at her heart what was going to happen and whether Steven would ever speak to her again as he had spoken that day in the little café around the corner from Margot’s.

      Late one afternoon in the middle of the month, Margot St. Vrain called Steven at his office and asked him to the penthouse for dinner and the evening. Steven thanked her, but said he had an engagement to dine with Mary Dodd and Kit Blaketon. Margot suggested that he bring the two women over after dinner. She said Harry Woods, the song writer, was going to be there, that he was going to try out a new number for them.

      Steven spoke of Margot St. Vrain’s invitation to Mary Dodd during dinner and Kit was enthusiastic about the idea. She hummed, “When the red red robin comes bob, bob, bobbin’ along” with a touch of her old gayety and said, “Let’s, Mary, I’d adore meeting Harry Woods. He’s marvelous, absolutely grade A.”

      Mary was agreeable. While Kit was getting her hat, Mary told Steven she had been a little worried about the girl but didn’t tell him why.

      When they arrived at the penthouse, Margot received them cordially. Her fiancé, Euen Firth, her cousin Johnny St. Vrain and Harry Woods were there. Woods was a lean gaunt fellow with an attractive smile.

      Steven introduced Mary and Kit. Woods resumed his place at the piano. Cristie came in during the middle of the new song. She slipped quietly into a chair near the door, a slim snow-white and rose-red figure in dark crimson wool that brought out the cherry-blossom texture of her skin, the dark cloudiness of her hair. She didn’t single Steven out particularly. She gave him a smiling nod, accepted Kit Blaketon’s sizing-up stare, returned Mary Dodd’s pleasant half-smile and waved a hand to Johnny, leaning over the piano.

      The song over, they all congratulated Woods. Euen Firth reappeared, followed by a colored maid wheeling a small bar. Drinks were served. Conversation became general.

      As usual Euen helped himself to the liquid refreshment, his weak, good-natured face outfitted with a placating and permanent smile.

      Cristie was waiting for a chance to talk to Steven, but to her annoyance Euen devoted himself to her. Her attention wandered. Toward what she hoped was the end of a long story about a Mexican and a goat, she glanced up. To her surprise, Euen wasn’t looking at her; he was looking at Steven who was talking to Margot and Miss Dodd on the other side of the room. There was no vacuity in Euen. His eyes were owlish, intent. As she watched, his aimlessness returned. He put a hand on her shoulder and finished his tale, echoing Cristie’s polite mirth with a cheerful guffaw.

      Cristie was puzzled. It was no more than that, then. Another man and woman came in, and, later, Pat Somers arrived. He was accompanied by his brother Cliff. Cristie hadn’t seen either of them since the night of the party. That was what she called it herself, the only thing she permitted herself to call it. She averted her mind swiftly, pulled down a shutter. The act was СКАЧАТЬ