once! His first big case, and it had to be one that lay beyond his power to heal. But, protested Carrie, surely nowadays it could be cured? Definitely not, said Dr. Holt. Claire Ponsonby was irretrievably blind for life. He had looked into her eyes and seen the damage for himself. Sad!
Carmine watched blind Claire talk animatedly to Chuck, who came down his ladder, linked his arm through his sister’s, and took her inside through the laundry porch. The dog followed them; then came the faint strains of a Brahms symphony. That was it: the Ponsonbys had had sufficient fresh air. Though – wait, wait! Oh, yes, sure. Chuck emerged, gathered up his tools and took them and the ladder to the garage before returning to the house. He did have an everything-in-its-place side to him, but obsession?
Letting the binoculars fall, Carmine turned to make the trip back to Deer Lane. It was more difficult going downhill through masses of slimy, decaying leaves; not even the deer had yet made paths, though by summer there would be many. Immersed in thoughts of Charles Ponsonby and his contradictions, Carmine started to hurry, on fire now to get back to his office and chew the puzzle over at leisure. Also chew some lunch at Malvolio’s.
The next thing his feet went from under him, he was plunging forward, both hands outstretched to take the impact of his fall. Dead leaves went flying in wet, clotted clumps as he landed on his palms with a dull, hollow boom. He slid onward, scrabbling for a hold, before his momentum gradually slowed down and he could stop. Two ruts marked the progress of his hands, gouged deeply into the humus. Cursing softly, he rolled over and picked himself up, feeling the sting of abraded skin but relieved to discover that he hadn’t done himself worse harm. Stupid, Carmine, stupid! Too busy thinking to watch where you’re going, you dodo.
Only why a hollow sound? Curious because that was the kind of man he was, he crouched down and excavated one of the channels a palm had made; six inches deeper he uncovered a wooden plank. Digging frantically now, he pushed the leaves away until he could see a part of what was there: the surface of what might be an old cellar door.
Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus! Suddenly galvanized, he was scraping the leaves back where they had been, pushing them down, packing them down, forehead dewed with sweat, breath grating. When he was fairly satisfied that he had evened out the evidence of his fall, he squirmed backward on his rump before standing again to survey his work. No, not good enough. If someone were to examine the area closely, they would notice. He took off his jacket and used it to gather more dead leaves from a hundred feet away, brought them back and distributed them, then threw the jacket down and used it like a broad broom to obscure every trace of his intrusion. Finally, gulping and gasping, he was positive that no one would suspect what had happened. Now get the hell out of here, Carmine! That he did on his knees, scattering leaves in his wake; he was almost to the parking lot before he rose. With any luck, deer would browse through in their constant search for winter forage.
Back in the Ford, he prayed that Claire’s remarkable hearing didn’t extend as far as a grunty engine on Deer Lane. He put his foot gently on the gas pedal and rumbled to the corner in first gear. Part of him was dying to transmit his news to Silvestri, Marciano and Patrick, but he decided not to call them from Major Minor’s love retreat, doing a brisk Sunday business. Better to turn back into the northeast and depart the way he had come. It wouldn’t kill him to wait.
Not such a long walk at zero Fahrenheit after all, Chuckie baby! And no need for a flashlight on the house side of the ridge, because you have a tunnel that doesn’t surface until way down the reserve’s slope. Someone – was it you, or long before you? – dug deep below the ridge, made the distance shorter. In Connecticut, hundreds of miles from the Mason-Dixon Line, it certainly wasn’t dug for escaping slaves. My bet is that you dug it yourself, Chuckie baby. On the night that you snatched Faith Khouri all you had to do was get out; by the time you returned with her, we had left the neighborhood. That was
Since he was ravenous and wanted a little more time to think, Carmine lunched at Malvolio’s before summoning his cohorts.
“I now understand the full significance of an old cliche,” he said as Patrick, the last to arrive, came through Silvestri’s office door.
“Which old cliche is that?” Patrick asked, sitting down.
“Pregnant with news.”
“Behold three expert midwives, so give birth.”
His words crisp, his sequence of events logical and correct, Carmine led his audience step by step through the things that had happened after he saw Eliza Smith.
“It all sprang from her – what she said, how she said it. My catalyst. Culminating in a fall down a hillside – talk about luck! I have had so much luck on this case,” he said when the tale was over and his audience had managed to close their jaws.
“No, not luck,” Patrick objected, eyes shining. “Pigheaded, hardassed determination, Carmine. Who else would have bothered to follow up on Leonard Ponsonby’s death? And who else would have bothered to look in an evidence box thirty-six years old? Chasing up a crime marked unsolved because you’re one of the very, very few people I can think of who know that when lightning strikes the same place twice, something is conducting it there.”
“That’s fine and dandy, Patsy, but it didn’t amount to enough to take before Judge Thwaites. I found the real evidence by sheer accident – a fall on a slippery hillside.”
“No, Carmine. The fall may have been an accident, but what you found was no accident. Anyone else would have gotten up, then brushed his clothes” – Patrick picked dead leaves off Carmine’s ruined jacket – “and limped away. You found the door because your brain registered a wrong noise, not because the fall uncovered the door. It didn’t. And anyway, you wouldn’t have been on the hillside in the first place if you hadn’t found our face in a picture taken about 1928. Come on, take
“Okay, okay!” Carmine cried, throwing up his hands. “What’s more important is to decide where we go from here.”
The atmosphere in Silvestri’s office almost visibly fizzed with elation, relief, the wonderful and inimitable joy that comes with the moment a case breaks open. Especially the Ghosts case, so dark, so haunting, so tediously long in the breaking. No matter what hitches were to come – they were too seasoned to believe that none would – they had enough of the answer to move forward, to feel that the end wasn’t far away.
“First off, we can’t assume that the legal system is on our side,” Silvestri said through his cigar. “I don’t want this shit getting off the hook on some technicality – especially a technicality his defense can pin on the police. Face it, we’re the ones who usually wear the rotten eggs. This will be a big trial, coverage nationwide. That means Ponsonby’s defense won’t consist of two-bit shysters, even if he doesn’t have much money. Every legal shit heap who knows Connecticut and federal law will be clawing to get on Ponsonby’s defense team. And clawing to plaster us with rotten eggs. We can’t afford a single error.”
“What you’re saying, John, is that if we get a warrant now and bust in through Ponsonby’s tunnel, all we’ll really have is something that looks like an operating room in a doctor’s house,” said Patrick. “Like Carmine, I’ve always believed that this turkey doesn’t have a blood-soaked, filthy killing premises – he has an O.R. And if he’s only one-half as careful about leaving traces in his O.R. as he is on his victims, we might come out of it with nothing. Is that the way your mind is going?”
“It is,” said Silvestri.
“No mistakes,” said Marciano. “Not one.”
“And we’ve already made carloads of them” from Carmine.
A silence fell; the elation had died completely. Finally Marciano made an exasperated noise and burst into speech.
“If the rest of you won’t, then I’ll say it. We have to catch Ponsonby in the act. And if that’s what we have to do, that’s what we have to do.”
“Oh, Danny, for God’s sake!” Carmine cried. “Put another girl’s life in jeopardy? Put her through the horrors of being abducted by that man? I won’t do it! I refuse to do it!”
“She’ll get a fright, yes, but she’ll get over that. We know who he is, right? We know how he operates, right? So we stake him out – no need to stake anyone else out -”
“We can’t do that, Danny,” Silvestri butted in. “We have to stake everyone out the same as we did a month ago. Otherwise he will notice. Can’t be done without a full stakeout.”
“Okay, I concede that. But we know it’s him, so we give him extra-special attention. When he moves, we’re
