The Cradle Will Fall

BILL Kennedy rang the bell of the Lewis house. Tall, prematurely white, and scholarly, Bill was an orthopedic surgeon at Lenox Hill Hospital. He had not heard about Vangie Lewis' death until he returned home.

Briefly Molly had told him about it. 'I called and asked Chris to come to dinner. He doesn't want to, but you go drag him here.'

As he walked between the houses, Bill considered what a shock it would be to come home and find he had lost Molly. But no one in his right mind could think that the Lewises' marriage had been anything like his and Molly's. Bill had never told Molly that one morning when he was having coffee at a drugstore in Manhattan he'd seen Chris with a very pretty girl in her early twenties.

Chris Lewis opened the door, and Bill saw the sadness in his eyes. He gripped the younger man's arm. 'I'm terribly sorry.'

Chris nodded woodenly. The meaning of the day was sinking in on him. Vangie was dead. Had their quarrel driven her to kill herself? He felt lonely, frightened and guilty. He allowed Bill to persuade him to come to dinner. Numbly reaching for a jacket, he followed Bill down the street.

Bill poured him a double Scotch. Chris gulped it. Calm down, he thought, calm down. Be careful.

The Kennedy kids came into the den to say good night. Nice kids, all of them. Well behaved too. Chris had always wanted children. But not Vangie's. Now his unborn child had died. Another guilt. His child, and he hadn't wanted it. And Vangie had known it. What had, who had driven her to kill herself? Who? That was the question. Because Vangie hadn't been alone last night.

He hadn't told the police. They would start an investigation. And where would that lead? To Joan. To him.

The motel clerk in New York had seen him leave last night. He'd gone home to have it out with Vangie. Let me go, please. I can't spend any more of my life with you. It's destroying both of us.

He'd arrived at the house sometime after midnight. He'd driven in, and the minute he opened the garage door he knew something was up. Because she'd parked the Lincoln in his space. No, someone else had parked her car in his space. Vangie always used the wider side of the garage. And she needed every inch. She was a lousy driver. But last night the Lincoln had been expertly parked in his spot on the narrower side.

He'd gone in and found the house empty. Vangie's handbag was on the chaise in their room. He'd been puzzled but not alarmed. Obviously she'd gone off with a girl friend to stay overnight, taking a suitcase and leaving her heavy purse behind.

The house had depressed Chris. He'd decided to go back to the motel. And then this morning he'd found Vangie dead. Somebody had parked the car for her before midnight. Somebody had driven her home after midnight. And those shoes. The one day she'd worn them she'd complained endlessly about how the right shoe dug into her ankle.

For weeks now she'd worn nothing but those dirty moccasins. Where were they? Chris had searched the house thoroughly. Whoever had driven her home might know.

He hadn't told the police any of this. He hadn't wanted to involve Joan. Besides, maybe the shoes really weren't that important. Vangie might have wanted to be fully dressed when she was found. That swollen leg embarrassed her.

But he should have told the cops about his having been here, about the way the car was parked. 'Chris, come into the dining room. You'll feel better if you eat something.' Molly's voice was gentle.

Wearily Chris brushed a hand over burning eyes. 'I'll have something, Molly,' he said. 'But I'll have to leave pretty quickly. The funeral director is coming to the house for Vangie's clothes.'

'When is the funeral?' Bill asked.

'The coffin will be flown to Minneapolis tomorrow afternoon, and the service will be the next day.' The words hammered in his ears. Coffin. Funeral. Oh, Vangie, he thought, I wanted to be free of you, but I didn't want you to die.

At eight he went back to his house. At eight thirty, when the funeral director came, he had a suitcase ready with underwear and the flowing caftan Vangie's parents had sent her for Christmas.

The funeral director was quietly sympathetic. He requested the necessary information quickly. Born April 15. He jotted down the year. Died February 15-just two months short of her thirty-first birthday, he commented.

Chris rubbed the ache between his eyes. Something was wrong.

'No,' he said. 'Today's the sixteenth, not the fifteenth.'

'The death certificate clearly states that Mrs. Lewis died be tween eight and ten last night, February fifteenth,' the man said.

'You're thinking the sixteenth because you found her this morning. But the medical examiner pinpointed the time of death.'

Chris stared at him. Waves of shock swept over him. He had been home at midnight and the car and Vangie's purse had been here. He'd assumed that Vangie had come in and killed herself sometime after he drove back to New York.

But at midnight she'd been dead two to four hours. That meant that after he'd left, someone had brought her body here, put it on the bed and laid the empty glass beside it. Someone had wanted to make it seem that Vangie had committed suicide.

'Oh, Lord,' Chris whispered. At the last moment Vangie must have known. Someone had forced that poison into her, viciously killed her and the baby she was carrying.

He had to tell the police. And there was one person they would inevitably accuse. As the funeral director stared at him, Chris said aloud, 'They're going to blame it on me.'

DR. HIGHLEY hung up the phone slowly. Katie DeMaio suspected nothing. Her office apparently wanted nothing more of him than to discuss Vangie Lewis' emotional state. Unless, of course, someone had questioned Vangie's apparent suicide, perhaps raised the possibility that her body had been moved. The danger was still great.

He was in the library of the Westlake home-his home now. The house was a manorlike Tudor with archways, marble fireplaces and Tiffany stained-glass windows. The Westlake house. The Westlake Hospital. The Westlake Maternity Concept. The name had given him immediate entree, socially and professionally. Marrying Winifred Westlake and coming to America to carry on her father's work had been a perfect excuse for leaving England. No one, including Winifred, knew about the years before Liverpool, the years at Christ Hospital in Devon.

Toward the end she had started to ask questions.

It was nearly eleven o'clock and he hadn't had dinner yet. Knowing what he was going to do to Edna had robbed him of the desire to eat. But now that it was over, he craved food. He went into the kitchen. Hilda had left dinner for him in the microwave oven-a Cornish hen with wild rice. He just needed to heat it up.

Because he needed the freedom of the house, the privacy of his library, he'd gotten rid of Winifred's live-in housekeeper. She had looked at him with sour, sullen eyes, swollen with weeping. 'Miss Winifred was almost never sick until…' She was going to say 'until she married you,' but she didn't finish.

Winifred's cousin resented him too. He had tried to make trouble after Winifred's death, but couldn't prove anything. They'd dismissed the cousin as a disgruntled ex-heir.

Selecting a chilled bottle of wine from the refrigerator, Highley sat down to eat in the breakfast room. As he ate, his mind ran over the exact dosage he would give Katie DeMaio. Traces of the heparin and the Coumadin might show in her bloodstream if there were a thorough autopsy. But he could circumvent that.

Before going to bed, he went out to the foyer closet. He'd get those moccasins safely into his bag now. Reaching into one pocket of the Burberry, he pulled out a misshapen moccasin. Expectantly he put his free hand in the other pocket-first matter-offactly, then rummaging frantically. Finally he pawed through the overshoes stacked on the closet floor.

At last he stood up, staring at the battered moccasin he was holding. The right one. The one he had tugged off Vangie's right foot. Hysterically he began to laugh.

Somehow in the dark the moccasin had fallen out of his pocket. The one he'd found after crawling around in the parking lot like a dog was the one he'd already had. Somewhere the left moccasin that Vangie Lewis had been wearing was waiting to trace her footsteps back to him.

KATIE had set the clock radio for six a.m., but she was wide awake long before. Her sleep had been troubled; several times she'd almost started to jump up, frightened by a vague, worrisome dream. Shivering, she adjusted