Last to Die r-10 Page 17

  “So, based on what the witness told you,” said Dr. Owen, “this doesn’t sound like an accidental death.”

  “Unless she accidentally climbed over the railing and accidentally flung herself off the roof.”

  “Okay.” Dr. Owen stripped off her gloves. “I have to agree. Manner of death is suicide.”

  “Except we never saw it coming,” said Maura. “There was no warning at all.”

  In the dark, she could not see the expressions of the two cops, but could imagine them both rolling their eyes.

  “You want a suicide note?” one detective said.

  “I want a reason. I knew the woman.”

  “Wives think they know their husbands. And parents know their kids.”

  “Yes, I hear the same thing all the time after suicides. We had no warning. I’m fully aware that families are sometimes clueless. But this …” Maura paused, aware of three pairs of eyes watching her, the distinguished ME from Boston, trying to defend something as illogical as a hunch. “You have to understand, Dr. Welliver’s job was to counsel damaged children. To help them heal after severe emotional trauma. It was her life’s work, so why would she traumatize them further by making them see this? By dying in such a spectacular way?”

  “Do you have an answer?”

  “No, I don’t. Neither do her colleagues. No one on the faculty or staff understands this.”

  “Next of kin?” asked Dr. Owen. “Anyone who might provide insight?”

  “She was a widow. As far as Headmaster Baum knows, she has no family left.”

  “Then I’m afraid it’s just one of those unknowns,” said Dr. Owen.

  “But I will do an autopsy, even though the cause of death seems apparent.”

  Maura looked down at the body and thought: determining cause of death will be the easy part. Slice open skin, examine ruptured organs and shattered bones, and you’ll find answers. It was the questions she could not answer that troubled her. The motives, the secret torments that drove human beings to kill strangers or take their own lives.

  After the last official vehicle finally left that night, Maura made her way upstairs to the faculty common room, where most of the staff had gathered. A fire was burning in the hearth, but no one had turned on any of the lamps, as if none of them could bear any bright light on this tragic night. Maura sank into a velvet armchair and watched firelight flicker on the faces. She heard a soft clink as Gottfried poured a glass of brandy. Without a word he set it down on the table beside Maura, surmising that she, too, could use a stiff drink. She gave a nod and gratefully took a sip.

  “Someone here must have a clue why she did it,” said Lily. “There had to be some sign, something we didn’t realize was significant.”

  Gottfried said: “We can’t check her emails because I don’t have her password. But the police searched her personal effects, looking for a suicide note. Nothing. I spoke to the cook, the gardener, and they saw nothing of significance, not a single sign that Anna was suicidal.”

  “I saw her in the garden this morning, snipping roses for her desk,” said Lily “Does that sound like something a suicidal woman would do?”

  “How would we know?” Dr. Pasquantonio muttered. “She was the psychologist.”

  Gottfried looked around the room at his colleagues. “You’ve all spoken to the students. Do any of them have an answer?”

  “No one,” said Karla Duplessis, the literature teacher. “She had four student sessions scheduled today. Arthur Toombs was her last appointment, at one P.M., and he said she seemed a little distracted, but nothing else. The children are as bewildered as we are. If you think this is difficult for us, imagine how hard it is for them. Anna was tending to their emotional needs, and now they find out she was the fragile one. It makes them wonder if they can count on us. If adults are strong enough to stand by them.”

  “Which is why we can’t look weak. Not now.” The gruff words came from a shadowy corner of the room. It was Roman the forester, the only one who was not indulging in a comforting glass of brandy. “We have to go about our business as we always do.”

  “That would be unnatural,” said Karla. “We all need time to process this.”

  “Process? Just a fancy word for moping and wailing. The lady killed herself, there’s nothing to be done but just move on.” With a grunt he rose and walked out of the room, trailing the scent of pine and tobacco.

  “There’s the milk of human kindness for you,” Karla said under her breath. “With Roman setting the example, no wonder we’ve got students killing chickens.”

  Gottfried said, “But Mr. Roman does bring up a valid point, about the importance of maintaining routine. The students need that. They need time to mourn, of course, but they also need to know that life goes on.” He looked at Lily. “We are going ahead with the field trip to Quebec?”

  “I haven’t canceled anything,” she said. “The hotel rooms are booked, and the children have been talking about it for weeks.”

  “Then you should take them as promised.”

  “They’re not all going, are they?” said Maura. “Given Teddy’s situation, I think it’s too dangerous for him to be out in public and exposed.”

  “Detective Rizzoli made that perfectly clear,” said Lily. “He’ll stay here, where we know he’s safe. Will and Claire will stay behind as well. And of course, Julian.” Lily smiled. “He told me he wants more time alone with you. Which is quite the compliment, Dr. Isles, coming from a teenager.”

  “This still feels wrong, somehow,” said Karla. “To take them on a fun field trip when Anna’s just died. We should stay here, to honor her. To figure out what drove her to this.”

  “Grief,” said Lily quietly. “Sometimes it catches up with you. Even years later.”

  Pasquantonio harrumphed. “That happened, what? Twenty-two years ago?”

  “You’re talking about the murder of Anna’s husband?” asked Maura.

  Pasquantonio nodded and reached for the brandy bottle to refill his glass. “She told me all about it. How Frank was snatched from his car. How his company paid the ransom, but Frank was executed anyway, and his body was dumped days later. No arrest was ever made.”

  “That must have enraged her,” said Maura. “And anger turned inward results in depression. If she carried that rage all these years …”

  “We all do,” said Pasquantonio. “It’s why we’re here. Why we choose this work. Rage is the fuel that keeps us going.”

  “Fuel can also be dangerous. It explodes.” Maura looked around the room, at people who had all been scarred by violence. “Are you certain you can handle it? Can your students? I saw what was hanging from that willow tree. Someone here has already proven he—or she—is capable of killing.”

  There was an uncomfortable moment of silence as the teachers looked at one another.

  Gottfried said, “It is something that concerns us. Something that Anna and I discussed yesterday. That one of our students may be deeply disturbed, perhaps even—”

  “A psychopath,” said Lily.

  “And you have no idea which one?” said Maura.

  Gottfried shook his head. “That was what bothered Anna the most. That she had no idea which student it might be.”

  A PSYCHOPATH. DEEPLY DISTURBED.

  That conversation left Maura uneasy as she climbed the stairs later that night. She thought about damaged children and how violence can twist souls. She thought about what sort of child would kill a rooster for amusement, slice it open, and display it with entrails hanging in a tree. She wondered in which room, in this castle, that child now slept.

  Instead of returning to her room, she kept climbing the stairs to the turret. To Anna’s office. She had visited the room earlier that evening, with the state police detectives, so when she stepped into the office and flipped on the lights she expected no surprises, no new revelations. Indeed, the room appeared as they’d left it. The quartz crystals, dangling in the window. The stubs of incense sticks, burned down
to gray ash. On the desk was a stack of charts, the top one still open to a police report from St. Thomas. It was Teddy Clock’s file. Nearby was the vase of roses that Anna had cut that morning. Maura tried to imagine what might have gone through Anna’s head as she snipped the stems and inhaled the perfume. This is the last day I will smell flowers? Or had there been no thoughts of time running out, no farewells to life, just an ordinary morning in the garden?

  What made this day turn out so tragically different?

  She circled the room, seeking any lingering trace of Anna. She did not believe in ghosts, and those who refuse to believe will never encounter one. But she paused in the room anyway, inhaling the scent of roses and incense, breathing the same air that Anna had only recently breathed. The roof walk door through which Anna had stepped out was now closed against the night chill. The tray with the teapot and china cups and covered sugar bowl was on the side table, where it had been the morning that Jane and Maura had sat in this office.

  The teacups were clean and stacked, the pot empty. Anna had taken the time to rinse and dry the teapot and cups before she’d ended her life. Perhaps it was a final act of consideration to those who’d have to tidy up in the aftermath.

  Then why had she chosen such a messy way to die? An exit that had splattered blood on the path and forever stained the memories of students and colleagues?

  “It doesn’t make sense. Does it?”

  She turned to see Julian standing in the doorway. As usual, the dog was at his feet, and like his master Bear looked subdued. Weighed down by sorrow.

  “I thought you’d gone to bed,” she said.

  “I can’t sleep. I went to talk to you, but you weren’t in your room.”

  She sighed. “I can’t sleep, either.”

  The boy hesitated in the doorway, as though to step into Anna’s office would be disrespectful to the dead. “She never forgot a birthday,” he said. “A kid would come down to breakfast and find some funny little gift waiting. A Yankees cap for a boy who liked baseball. A little crystal swan for a girl who got braces. She gave me a present even when it wasn’t my birthday. A compass. So I’d always know where I was going, and would always remember where I’ve been.” His voice thinned to a whisper. “It’s what always happens to people I care about.”

  “What does?”

  “They leave me.” They die was what he meant, and it was true. The last of his family had perished last winter, leaving him alone in the world.

  Except for me. He still has me.

  She pulled him into her arms and held him. Julian was as close to a son as she’d ever have, yet in so many ways they were still strangers to each other. He stood stiffly in her arms, a wooden statue embraced by a woman who was equally uneasy with affection. In this way they were sadly alike, hungry for connection, yet untrusting of it. At last she felt the tension go out of him, and he returned the hug, melting against her.

  “I won’t leave you, Rat,” she said. “You can always count on me.”

  “People say that. But things happen.”

  “Nothing will happen to me.”

  “You know you can’t promise that.” He pulled away and turned toward Dr. Welliver’s desk. “She said we could count on her. And look what happened.” He touched the roses in the vase; one pink petal dropped off, fluttering down like a dying butterfly. “Why did she do it?”

  “Sometimes there are no answers. I struggle with that question far too often in my own job. Families trying to understand why someone they love committed suicide.”

  “What do you tell them?”

  “Never to blame themselves. Not to feel guilty. Because we bear responsibility for our own actions alone. Not for anyone else’s.”

  She didn’t understand why her answer made his head suddenly droop. He ran a hand across his eyes, a quick, embarrassed swipe that left a glistening streak on his face.

  “Rat?” she asked softly.

  “I do feel guilty.”

  “No one knows why she did it.”

  “Not about Dr. Welliver.”

  “Then who?”

  “Carrie.” He looked at her. “It’s her birthday next week.”

  His dead sister. Last winter, the girl had perished, along with their mother, in a lonely Wyoming valley. He seldom talked about his family, seldom talked about anything that had happened during those desperate weeks when he and Maura had fought to stay alive. She thought he’d put the ordeal behind him, but of course he hadn’t. He is more like me than I realized, she thought. We both bury our sorrows where no one can see them.

  “I should have saved her,” he said.

  “How could you? Your mother wouldn’t let her leave.”

  “I should have made her leave. I was the man in the family. It was my job to keep her safe.”

  A responsibility that should never fall on the shoulders of a mere sixteen-year-old boy, she thought. He might be as tall as a man, with a man’s broad shoulders, but she saw a boy’s tears on his face. He swiped them with his sleeve and glanced around for tissues.

  She went into the adjoining bathroom and unspooled a wad of toilet paper. As she tore it off, a sparkle caught her eye, like glittering bits of sand scattered on the toilet seat. She touched it and stared at white granules adhering to her fingers. Noticed that there were more granules sparkling on the bathroom tiles.

  Something had been emptied into the toilet.

  She went back into the office and looked at the tea tray on the side table. Remembered how Anna had brewed herbal tea in that china pot and poured three cups. Remembered that Anna had added three generous teaspoons of sugar to her own cup, an extravagance that had caught Maura’s eye. She lifted the lid to the sugar bowl. It was empty.

  Why would Anna pour the sugar into the toilet?

  The telephone rang on Anna’s desk, startling both her and Julian. They glanced at each other, both rattled that someone was calling a dead woman.

  Maura answered it. “Evensong School. This is Dr. Isles.”

  “You didn’t call me back,” said Jane Rizzoli.

  “Was I supposed to?”

  “I left a message with Dr. Welliver hours ago. Figured I’d better try again before it got too late.”

  “You spoke to Anna? When?”

  “Around five, five thirty.”

  “Jane, something awful’s happened, and—”

  “Teddy’s okay, right?” Jane cut in.

  “Yes. Yes, he’s fine.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “Anna Welliver is dead. It looks like a suicide. She jumped off the roof.”

  There was a long pause. In the background, Maura could hear the sound of the TV, running water and the clatter of dishes. Domestic sounds that made her suddenly miss her own home, her own kitchen.

  “Jesus,” Jane finally managed to say.

  Maura looked down at the sugar bowl. Pictured Anna emptying it into the toilet and walking back into this room. Opening the roof door and stepping outside, to take a short walk to eternity.

  “Why would she commit suicide?” asked Jane.

  Maura was still staring at the empty sugar bowl. And she said: “I’m not convinced she did.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO BE HERE FOR THIS, DR. ISLES?”

  They stood in the morgue anteroom, surrounded by supply cabinets filled with gloves and masks and shoe covers. Maura had donned a scrub top and pants from the locker room, and she was already tucking her hair into a paper cap.

  “I’ll send you the final report,” said Dr. Owen. “And I’ll order a comprehensive tox screen, as you suggested. You’re welcome to stay, of course, but it seems to me …”

  “I’m only here to observe, not interfere,” said Maura. “This is entirely your show.”

  Beneath her bouffant paper cap, Dr. Owen flushed. Even under harsh fluorescent lights it was a youthful face with enviably smooth skin that had no need for all the camouflaging creams and powders that had started to creep into Maura�
��s bathroom cabinet. “I didn’t mean it that way,” said Dr. Owen. “I’m just thinking about the fact you knew her personally. That has to make this hard for you.”

  Through the viewing window, Maura watched Dr. Owen’s assistant, a burly young man, assembling the instrument tray. On the table lay the corpse of Anna Welliver, still fully dressed. How many cadavers have I sliced open, she wondered, how many scalps have I peeled away from skulls? So many that she had lost track. But they were all strangers, with whom she shared no memories. She had known Anna, though. She knew her voice and her smile and had seen the gleam of life in her eyes. This was an autopsy any pathologist would avoid, yet here she was, donning shoe covers and safety glasses and mask.

  “I owe this to her,” she said.

  “I doubt there’ll be any surprises. We know how she died.”

  “But not what led up to it.”

  “This won’t give us that answer.”

  “An hour before she jumped, she was acting strangely on the phone. She told Detective Rizzoli that food didn’t taste right. And she saw birds, strange birds, flying outside her window. I’m wondering if those were hallucinations.”

  “That’s the reason you asked for the tox screen?”

  “We didn’t find any drugs in her possession, but there’s a chance we missed something. Or she hid them.”

  They pushed through the door into the autopsy room, and Dr. Owen said: “Randy, we’ve got a distinguished guest today. Dr. Isles is from the ME’s office in Boston.”

  The young man gave an unimpressed nod and asked: “Who’s going to cut?”

  “This is Dr. Owen’s case,” said Maura. “I’m just here to observe.”

  Accustomed to being in command in her own morgue, Maura had to resist the urge to claim her usual place at the table. Instead she stood back as Dr. Owen and Randy positioned instrument trays and adjusted lights. In truth, she did not want to move any closer, did not want to look into Anna’s face. Only yesterday she had seen awareness in those eyes, and now the absence of it was a stark reminder that bodies are merely shells, that whatever constituted a soul was fleeting and easily extinguished. Emma Owen was right, she thought. This isn’t an autopsy I should watch.