She paused for a minute to watch three orderlies walking three residents (one of the latter actually looked as if he might know where he was), then went inside. The lobby was high-ceilinged and pleasant, but beneath the smells of floor wax and furniture polish, Holly could detect a faint odor of pee wafting out from deeper in the building. And something else, something heavier. It would have been foolish and melodramatic to call it the smell of lost hope, but that was what it smelled like to Holly, just the same. Probably because I spent so much of my early life staring at the hole instead of the doughnut, she thought.
The sign on the main desk read ALL VISITORS MUST CHECK IN. The woman behind the desk (Mrs. Kelly, according to the little plaque on the counter) gave Holly a welcoming smile. “Hello, there. How may I help?”
To this point, all was ordinary and unremarkable. Things only went off the rails when Holly asked if she could visit Peter Maitland. Mrs. Kelly’s smile remained on her lips, but disappeared from her eyes. “Are you a member of the family?”
“No,” Holly said. “I’m a friend of the family.”
This, she told herself, was not exactly a lie. She was working for Mrs. Maitland’s lawyer, after all, and the lawyer was working for Mrs. Maitland, and that qualified as a kind of friendship, didn’t it, if she had been hired to clear the name of the widow’s late husband?
“I’m afraid that won’t do,” said Mrs. Kelly. What remained of her smile was now purely perfunctory. “If you’re not family, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave. Mr. Maitland wouldn’t know you, anyway. His condition has deteriorated this summer.”
“Just this summer, or since Terry came to visit him in the spring?”
Now the smile was gone entirely. “Are you a reporter? If you are, you are required by law to tell me, and I will ask you to leave the premises at once. If you refuse, I’ll call security and have you escorted. We’ve had quite enough of your kind.”
This was interesting. It might not have anything to do with the matter she had come here to investigate, but maybe it did. The woman hadn’t gone all poopy, after all, until Holly mentioned Peter Maitland’s name. “I’m not a reporter.”
“I’ll take your word for that, but if you’re not a relative, I still must ask you to leave.”
“All right,” Holly said. She took a step or two away from the desk, then had an idea and turned back. “Suppose I had Mr. Maitland’s son, Terry, call and vouch for me. Would that help?”
“I suppose,” Mrs. Kelly said. She looked grudging about it. “He would have to answer a few questions, though, to satisfy me that it wasn’t one of your colleagues pretending to be Mr. Maitland. That might sound a trifle paranoid to you, Ms. Gibney, but we have been through a lot here, a lot, and I take my responsibilities very seriously.”
“I understand.”
“Maybe you do and maybe you don’t, but it wouldn’t do you any good to speak to Peter, in any case. The police found that out. He’s in end-stage Alzheimer’s. If you talk to the younger Mr. Maitland, he’ll tell you.”
The younger Mr. Maitland won’t tell me anything, Mrs. Kelly, because he’s been dead for a week. But you don’t know that, do you?
“When was the last time the police tried to talk to Peter Maitland? I’m asking as a friend of the family.”
Mrs. Kelly considered this, then said: “I don’t believe you, and I’m not answering your questions.”
Bill would have gotten all chummy and confidential at this point, he and Mrs. Kelly might even have ended by exchanging email addresses and promising to stay in touch on Facebook, but although Holly was an excellent deductive thinker, she was still working on what her analyst called “people skills.” She left, a bit disheartened but not discouraged.
This kept getting more interesting.
6
At eleven o’clock on that bright and sunny Tuesday morning, Holly sat on a shady bench in Andrew Dean Park, sipping a latte from a nearby Starbucks and thinking about her queer interview with Mrs. Kelly.
The woman hadn’t known Terry was dead, probably none of the Heisman staff knew, and that didn’t surprise Holly very much. The murders of Frank Peterson and Terry Maitland had happened in a small city hundreds of miles away; if it had made the national news at all during a week when an ISIL sympathizer had shot eight people in a Tennessee shopping mall and a tornado had leveled a small Indiana town, it would only have been as a blip far down on Huffington Post, there and gone. And it wasn’t as if Marcy Maitland would have been in touch with her father-in-law to tell him the sad news—why would she, considering the man’s condition?
Are you a reporter? Mrs. Kelly had asked. We’ve had quite enough of your kind.
All right, reporters had come to call, also the police, and Mrs. Kelly, as the out-front person at the Heisman Memory Unit, had had to put up with them. But their questions hadn’t been about Terry Maitland, or she would have known he was dead. So what had been the great big fracking deal?
Holly set her coffee aside, took her iPad from her shoulder-bag, powered it up, and verified that she had five bars, which would save her from having to go back to the Starbucks. She paid a small fee to access the archives of the local paper (duly noting it for her expense report), and began her search on April 19th, the day Merlin Cassidy had dumped the van. Also the day it had almost certainly been re-stolen. She went through the local news carefully, and found nothing relating to the Memory Unit. That was true for the following five days, as well, although there was plenty of other news: car crashes, two home invasions, a nightclub fire, an explosion at a gas station, an embezzlement scandal involving a school department official, a manhunt for two missing sisters (white) from nearby Trotwood, a police officer accused of shooting an unarmed teenager (black), a synagogue defaced with a swastika.
Then, on April 25th, the front page headline screamed that Amber and Jolene Howard, the missing Trotwood girls, had been found dead and mutilated in a ravine not far from their home. An unnamed police source said “those little girls were subjected to acts of unbelievable savagery.” And yes, both girls had been sexually molested.
Terry Maitland had been in Dayton on April 25th. Of course he had been with his family, but . . .
There were no new developments on the 26th of April, the day Terry Maitland had visited his father for the last time, and nothing on the 27th, the day the Maitland family had flown home to Flint City. Then, on Saturday the 28th, the police announced that they were questioning “a person of interest.” Two days later, the person of interest was arrested. His name was Heath Holmes. He was thirty-four years of age, a Dayton resident who was employed as an orderly at the Heisman Memory Unit.
Holly picked up her latte, drank half of it in large gulps, then stared off into the shadowy depths of the park with wide eyes. She checked her Fitbit. Her pulse was galloping along at a hundred and ten beats a minute, and it wasn’t just caffeine pushing it.
She went back to the Daily News archives, scrolling through May and into June, following the thread of the story. Unlike Terry Maitland, Heath Holmes had survived his arraignment, but very much like Terry (Jeannie Anderson would have called it a confluence), he would never be tried for the murders of Amber and Jolene Howard. He had committed suicide in Montgomery County Jail on June 7th.