Carolyn G. Hart_Henrie O_02 by Scandal in Fair Haven

Athletic clothes. Tennis shoes. Of course.
    I would ask Craig. I felt confident he was a good player. But probably not quite good enough to beat Patty Kay.
    The hallway walls were covered with framed photographs. I scanned them quickly. The teenage girl, the same one in the album in her purse, had to be Brigit.
    Definitely not a case of like mother, like daughter.
    The girl’s thin face was almost colorless, her wispy blondish hair mousy, her lips often tightly pressed together. Brigit seemed caught in a perpetual pout. Except in a number of photos in costume. Class plays, more than likely. The only photos in which she was smiling were a half dozen taken with Craig. These revealed a delicate, fawnlike beauty that her sullen demeanor had obscured in the other likenesses.
    There were many photos of Patty Kay and a laughing, tanned, relaxed Craig. Playing tennis, as I’d expected. White-water rafting. Hiking, in European train stations. Skiing. Horseback riding.
    I walked on down the hall and looked through an open door.
    Into chaos.

7

    Captain Walsh blocked the doorway to Patty Kay’s office. He surveyed the dumped-out desk drawers, the shards of glass in the smashed bookcase fronts, the gouged surface of the once-elegant mahogany desk, the emptied file cabinets, and the cardboard files in untidy heaps.
    I looked past him and shivered. There was a viciousness at work here that frightened me: Ink splattered against the cheerful daisy wallpaper, photos ripped from a bulletin board and scattered in pieces, papers ground beneath a heel, a lamp used like a baseball bat on the desktop, an upended aquarium and the limp bodies of the fish on the sodden rug.
    Captain Walsh turned toward me and crossed his arms over his midriff. His expressionless eyes slowly moved to my face. “Interesting thing is, Mrs. Collins, this office was undisturbed when my men searched the house Saturday.” “So somebody broke in between Saturday night and this afternoon.”
    “Broke in?” Chief Walsh inquired. “Shall we check, Mrs. Collins?”
    We made a survey of the ground floor together.
    No broken windows. No smashed-in doors.
    But the back door was unlocked.
    Once again Captain Walsh stood, feet braced, arms crossed. “The house was secure when we left Saturday night.” He pointed at the door. “That was definitely locked.”
    “Craig could have unlocked it on Sunday and, with a good many other things to think about, not locked it when he left.”
    “He could have.” Chief Walsh’s voice was flat. He turned and pointed at the madras patchwork purse on the butler’s table. “There’s Mrs. Matthews’s handbag. And there are a great many valuable articles in this house. Silver, right out on the dining room table. VCR. Can you describe any missing items?”
    He knew I couldn’t. “We’ll have to wait until Craig gets home to answer that.”
    “Yes.”
    “Patty Kay’s office is a mess,” I said sharply.
    “Yes. I’ll agree to that.”
    We glared at each other.
    I got the picture.
    Captain Walsh believed I’d planned a diversion.
    Now I crossed my arms. “I didn’t touch that office, Captain.”
    “No, ma’am.”
    “Are you going to investigate this?”
    “Of course, ma’am. I’ll make a full report.”
    As the captain’s black unmarked pulled away—and I have to hand it to the Fair Haven police, it arrived four minutes after I phoned—I marched down the drive andcrossed the street. As I waited by the white rail fence for the riding mower to come toward me, I admired the two-story colonial overlooking the sloping lawn. A cream Mercedes turned into the next driveway. A cocker spaniel bounded into a tangle of underbrush, his high, excited bark announcing pursuit of a squirrel or cat. Toward the end of the curving street, Cheryl Kraft strode briskly up another manicured drive.
    This was the kind of neighborhood where people noticed strangers. Most assuredly every eye on King’s Row Road would have been turned toward the