The Killing Club Read online

  Katie kept studying the helter-skelter letters, turning the paper this way and that, tugging at her long, straight, brown hair.“Absolut.”

  “What?”

  “I think some of these letters are from Absolut ads.I’m always pulling pages from those glossy magazines, you know.For us to use at school for collages? This font looks like the Absolut ads.But is it a real threat?”

  I told her I had no idea.The problem was, there had to be a why.For what reason would anybody decide to murder a member of the Killing Club? And I couldn’t think of one.

  Garth and I looked at each other.Finally he shrugged.“Still, be really funny if somebody was planning to kill us all, wouldn’t it?”

  “You and I always had a different idea of what was really funny.”

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  He followed me out, trying to help me on with my ski jacket, but I was too quick for him.Treading my way through Katie’s sculptures, I’d made it almost inside the Mustang when he turned me around, kissed me on the mouth, said, “Good night, Jamie,” opened my car door for me and then walked away.

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  B A R C L A Y

  BY THE END OF THE week we had confirmation that the fire at the Tymosz house had started no earlier than eight that night and no later than nine thirty.Since the nosy condo neighbor had definitely seen Megan and Sam kissing in the third-floor hall of Park Apartments at 9:40, and since this same woman had indignantly taken down the license plate number of Megan’s Acura MDX at 7:50, because Megan was illegally parked in a “Residents Only” space right next to Sam’s Chrysler Crossfire, it was not possible that they’d made it to Glen Valley and back in time to murder Ben.Not to mention that Sam’s neighbor said she had heard (presumably by pressing her ear against the door) “disgusting noises nonstop all night.”

  Rod put Danny and me on a series of holdups at convenience stores.

  As for Ben, he said the file was closed.“Coroner’s report said accident.

  Chief Waige’s saying accident.”

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  I didn’t like Warren Waige, the longtime Gloria police chief.I couldn’t imagine what Gert Anderssen saw in him—except maybe herself: He was tall, trim and white-haired.He was also more interested in keeping his job than in doing it.The result was that Rod worked all the time.“You don’t even have time for a vacation, how are you going to have time for a wedding?” I asked him.

  “Doesn’t a wedding take only about fifteen minutes?”

  “Somebody pulled the nails out of Ben’s basement door.”

  “Ben tripped, fell, died in a fire.Just drop this whole Killing Club business.”

  I wondered if he really meant forget about Garth, but I didn’t ask him.Anyhow, I figured Garth had gone back on the train, home to the fast-talking Ashley.

  SO I TRIED TO let Ben’s death go.

  On Sunday Rod and I did some Christmas shopping in Appleton Mall, along with half of Gloria.There was another Rotarian Santa in the plastic igloo where Ben had volunteered.

  Every Sunday I visit with Clay, for Gina’s sake.Often I bring him home to Dock Street for dinner with Dino and my dad.I really don’t like Clay’s father, Barclay, or his grandmother Meredith Ober, who arranged to replace my sister with the Philly deb.Sometimes it’s a struggle even to like Clay.He’s a thirteen-year-old boy, dancing in an emotional Mix-master.In some ways, I preferred his old preteen explosions to this new, quiet, sullen contempt.But there are times, not many anymore but still a few, when I can get him to laugh, and then I see Gina in his face.

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  The Ober house sloped down to the prettiest curve on the Deep Port River.The house had belonged to Barclay’s mother’s family for a long time.They were Ettens and very proud of the fact.Ettens had started the ironworks factory in 1799, built a ten-mile mule trans-way to lug their freshly made cannonballs to the ships in Deep Port Harbor—thereby personally winning the War of 1812, at least according to Mrs.Ober.Her family had kept the iron business going until after World War I, when a fire had burned down the old forge and the new shell-loading factory both.Rusted iron vats could still be found along the paths in Etten Park.

  Ettens had won state offices, had even once gone to Congress, but then had fallen into a long slow decline.Just like their house.

  By the late 1960s, the house, named River Bend, had sunk into such disrepair, it was in danger of being torn down.There’d been talk that Harry Ober, a juggernaut of a developer, who’d already covered a third of the county in cookie-cutter houses, had bought the surrounding land and was going to raze the old estate to build yet another of his subdivisions.Instead, he married Meredith Etten.She was the last of her clan and everyone said she’d married Harry Ober to save River Bend, for which she clearly had a great passion, spending the next decades meticulously restoring it to some dream of past perfection.But maybe she’d loved Harry too.

  The couple spent a fortune on the place.It was an 1851 white-framed black-shuttered Georgian with six columns, four outbuildings (including a stable), three floors, two wings (both with side porches), a pool, a pond, a gazebo, a tennis court, a guest cottage and a dock with boats.

  Clay stood on the dock, throwing things to or at a pair of hissing swans.From a distance, he looked like an adult; too much like his dad for me.“Where’re your folks?” I called.“Are they having a party?” As I’d 8 5

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  walked around to the front of the house from the gravel drive where I’d parked, I’d noticed five or six luxury cars angled onto the grass edge.

  Clay kept his back to me and didn’t answer until I was standing next to him, at which point he tossed a tray full of pricey-looking minuscule canapés into the water for the gluttonous swans.Finally he mumbled,

  “Inside, belting it down with the rest of the rich and full of themselves.”

  My sister had always been a sucker for the world of the wealthy.Before she let Barclay get her pregnant (and I guess that was the only way she could force the wedding over his mother’s objections), she had practiced being rich by studying the pictures in home-decorating magazines.

  River Bend looked like the pictures.

  “Well, here’s to the poor and full of themselves, like me.” I grinned at Clay and raised an imaginary glass.

  He took a disheveled joint from his car-coat pocket, twisted and lit it, staring at me defiantly the whole while.I pulled the thing out of his mouth and tossed it nonchalantly at the swans.They pecked, then spit it away.Marijuana doesn’t taste as good as beluga on buttered bread.

  He scowled.“You can get fined a thousand dollars for littering the river like that.”

  I sat down on the dock’s edge.“Yeah? You and me both.Did you get that from Dino?”

  “Dino? Hah.”

  “I know what you mean.I don’t want you riding around with him, okay? He speeds and he’s, well ...”

  “Wasted.”

  “Right.You know, take the keys away from him.”

  “He’s the grown-up!”

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  “Dino? Hah.”

  Clay sank into a slump beside me.His fancy sneakers were untied, their loose laces floating in the water.Like his chapped hands, his feet looked oddly large.He stared at them too, as if they were unfamiliar to him.

  I didn’t say anything.Sometimes it worked.Sometimes it didn’t.But with Clay, it was the only way in.

  After a while, I heard a car drive off, crunching the gravel on the other side of the house.First one, then several close together.

  “My fuckin’ dad’s sending me to fuckin’ Rowley in the fall.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “You’re a cop.You don’t know anything.”

  “So, tell me.”

  Clay kicked at the swans.The two birds considered fighting back, then glided i
ndifferently away.“It’s in Vermont.It’s where he wanted to go to fuck-ass boarding school and didn’t get to because he was too stupid!”

  “Whose idea is this?”

  “His.Grandma too.He’s such a liar.He keeps telling me he was this big Hart High football star.It’s bullshit.”

  I couldn’t argue.“Yeah, pretty much.”

  “He didn’t win a single game.He was always sitting on the bench.Father Connie told me the only guy Hart ever had that could play was Ben Tymosz.”

  “Right.” We’d had this conversation before.

  “And so what, right? Even he couldn’t win the championship.They lost the fuckin’ championship, and everybody keeps lying about it!”

  “True enough.”

  Clay shifted abruptly into his other gear; he had two—slow silence 8 7

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  and fast rant.“I hate him.He thinks he’s oh yeah macho man, dragging his buds out to pop little birds.You know what they do? They poke the doves’ eyes out with pins, so the flight pattern’ll be ‘more interesting.’ ”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Ask him.Meanwhile, you ever seen my dad’s gun room? Grandma calls it the billiards room but it’s all about guns.He keeps it locked up.

  Like that’s going to keep me out of it.He’s got telescopic lenses big enough you could see Osama bin Laden in a fuckin’ cave in Afghanistan.

  He’s got a scope on this big-ass crossbow so he can kill Bambi without ever looking at him! That room is like a fuckin’ temple to death.Why would you want to cut off deer’s heads and stick them up on your walls?”

  “I don’t know.” I let this sit a while. “So, I take it you don’t want to go to Rowley? You’d rather stay here, go to Hart High, even if they really weren’t state champs?”

  “You’re not funny.”

  “Well, I try.”

  Clay said he didn’t care one way or the other where he went to school.When I offered to talk to Barclay about Rowley, he laughed.“Fat chance.”

  “Things with your dad not good?”

  He said they were the same old shit.Then he added that things were actually worse for his stepmother, Tricia, than for him.He surprised me by saying that Tricia was “okay.”

  “You like her? It’s hard for me to get a feel for her.”

  “She got religion so she tries to be nice.Hey, she’s better than Slime and the Dragon Lady”—these were his pet names for Barclay and Meredith Ober.

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  Gina’s mother-in-law had been her greatest enemy, preoccupying her thoughts, stirring her emotions more deeply than the son ever had.

  Barclay had just been their battleground.Gina won the siege against Meredith when she married the heir.She lost the war when she died young.

  Clay now told me that Tricia (who three years ago had shocked the Obers and disappointed the country club by suddenly converting to Catholicism) was headed to the Holy Land right after the New Year.She was going there with a church group of women her age from Immaculate Conception led by Father Keith Connor.Father Connie was here at River Bend all the time with her and a group of other wealthy women who had turned to the church for society, or love.Clay didn’t blame Tricia for leaving “this fuckin’ hellhole” behind as soon as she could, even to go to stupid Jerusalem, where she’d probably be blown up.

  “How did my mom ever stand Grandma? Maybe Mom died just to get away from her, you know?”

  I pulled his near leg up to the dock floor; he let me tie the sneaker, for old time’s sake, I guess.“Well, they sure didn’t get along.But if she possibly could have, if she’d had a chance, your mom would have stayed alive.

  She tried as hard as she could.Because she wanted to hang around you, kid, see what you were going to be like.That’s the last thing your mom ever said to me, did you know that? She said, ‘I fuckin’ hate it, I’m not going to watch Clay grow up, because he’s going to be something else!’ ”

  He pulled his foot away, but almost reluctantly.“She didn’t say that.”

  “She sure did.”

  Clay thought about that a while.“Well, I fuckin’ hate it that she died instead of Grandma.”

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  “So did she! Totally fuckin’ hated it!” I grabbed him in a hug, shook him until he laughed.

  “Shit.Here they come.” Clay scrambled to his feet, leaping off the side of the dock and loping along the green riverbank until he disappeared behind the guest cottage at the far end of the drive, heading toward an old, small, brick summer kitchen, long unused, that he’d turned into his own private place.

  They weren’t really coming toward the dock.The three—Barclay, his wife and his mother—were just standing on the terrace looking at me.So I joined them.“Happy holidays,” I threw out.

  Barclay’s mother, the Dragon Lady, took the lead.She always had.

  “Jamie, why didn’t you come inside? The caterers are cleaning up now; everyone’s gone.Tricia’s church friends.

  ” She made the word church

  sound like something stuck on the bottom of her shoe.

  “I just dropped by to say hi to Clay.”

  “That boy.” She shook her narrow head on her narrow neck.Mrs.Ober was the thinnest human being I’d ever seen not on a respirator.In fact, she looked elegant, white hair in a pageboy, neck strung with pearls.She either had a dozen black Chanel sweaters with gold buttons, or she wore the same one all the time.“At least come look at the tree, it’s beautiful this year, and have a cocktail.” She lifted her martini at me. I’d known the woman, vaguely, for more than twelve years and had never seen her without a glass in her hand, although I’d never seen her intoxicated either.

  Neither Barclay (who was tossing his car keys from hand to hand) nor his wife had said a word.

  Tricia Ober was an attractive woman.She looked as if her mother-in-law had cloned herself in a laboratory, except she wasn’t quite as thin, 9 0

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  her hair was a honey pageboy, her Chanel sweater was pale gray and she wore a tiny gold cross.

  “How you doing, Tricia? Clay tells me you’re off to the Middle East with a group from Immaculate Conception.That’s great.”

  Barclay answered for her.“After the holidays.It’s one of Connie’s tour-hoppers through Nazareth, Bethlehem, that kind of junk.”

  If Tricia was offended by her husband’s description of these holy sites, she didn’t say so.Instead she asked if I’d had a good talk with Clay.

  I tried to bring up the boy’s unhappiness at the prospect of going to boarding school.

  Mrs.Ober quickly assured me that Rowley was the best thing for him.Hart High simply couldn’t provide Clay with the kind of constructive structure he needed.

  “I’m not sure ‘constructive structure’ is really what—”

  Barclay jumped in, but talked to his mother, not me.“Jamie’s got this idea Clay’s some perfect Wally Cleaver but wait’ll she has kids of her own.

  If she ever does.” His smile reminded me of why I’d always hated Barclay Ober.He was hateful.I didn’t like anything about him, including the perfectly in-the-style-of-the-moment clothes, shoes, haircuts, watches, cars, drinks and dishes to order in restaurants.I didn’t like the toothy all-American gym-built way he looked.But for some reason Gina had gen-uinely thought he was “a hunk.”

  I had to ask him.“Barclay, do you poke out the eyes of doves?”

  “What?” Mrs.Ober looked assaulted, as if I’d torn her skirt off and used it to wipe up dog shit.

  He looked at me exasperated.“I hunt doves.Mourning doves, they’re bred for it.It’s like a mink coat.They raise them.” To him it appeared to 9 1

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  be an explanation.“Wing-shooting.I don’t blind them.I’ve heard sometimes guides in South America do.”

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, Barclay.” Mrs. Ober was disg
usted.

  I laughed.“Yeah, Barclay, shoot something your own size.”

  Tricia glanced at me; if I hadn’t known better I would have said it was a look of gratitude.

  “There’s nothing wrong with hunting if you follow the law.” He gave Tricia a look.“Your best friend, Father Connie, comes hunting with me all the time.’Course he’s really fund-raising, right?”

  Still tossing his car keys in the air, Barclay abruptly told us that he had to leave for the office for a little while; a problem had suddenly come up at Ober Land Development and Realty that he needed to get a jump on before Monday morning.The announcement seemed to surprise and disturb his mother and wife, although we all were very pleasant about saying good-bye.Minutes later, Barclay’s car started up.

  The two women stared at each other, then Tricia’s hand flew up to her tiny cross and her eyes flickered down to study the terrace fieldstone.

  Her eyes looked so unhappy, it made me wonder why she was waiting till after New Year’s to fly off to the other side of the world, even to a war zone.

  It also made me wonder where Barclay was going.So as soon as I rounded the house, I broke into a trot.My Mustang was old but it was fast.

  By the time Barclay’s black SL600 reached the open gates of the Ober estate, I was close enough behind him to see that he was headed into town.

  The offices of Ober Land Development and Realty Company were in the opposite direction.

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  D E B B I E

  THREE HUNDRED YEARS AGO,while stripping the forests and shipping the hardwood home to England, Captain Thomas Ricks had paid his respects to the mother country by laying out the north-south streets of Deep Port with the names of English counties.Kent, Norfolk, Sussex, Surrey and so on.The east-west streets had been given more practical names, usually telling you where they were (Dock, River, Hill), or what was happening in them (Miller, Forge).There weren’t any millers or forges these days or even any docks on Dock Street.The names were just names now.

  Deklerk’s Bar sat crookedly at the corner of River and York.Barclay’s SL600 drove slowly past it, found another Mercedes parked on River and squeezed aggressively into the space behind, nudging the sedan’s bumper as if to shove it out of the way.From across the street he clicked his car locked and waited while it blinked obediently back at him, then slowly 9 3