Linda Farstein AC 07 Entombed

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"It depends what she was talking about."
"Someone was trying to find Emily. Someone she didn't want to hear from ever
again."
I thought I knew where he was going. "Amelia Brandon. Her daughter?"
Kroon was silent.
"Look, Teddy, we know the letter that Emily wrote to her sister about Amelia
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is one of the documents you opened the night of the murder. That's why I don't
believe you were all that surprised when Amelia showed up at your door this
morning. There's got to be a different reason you turned the child away."
"Fear, Miss Cooper. Plain and simple fear. Can you understand that?" He
pushed himself up from the sofa and walked away from the two of us.
"Of course I can accept that." Better than you'll ever imagine. "But it would
help if you told us who you're afraid of."
He balanced himself against the windowsill as he shouted at me, "How the hell
am I supposed to know if you people can't figure it out?"
"So what did you do?" Mercer asked. "Send the kid back out on the street as a
test balloon? See what kind of trouble she attracts? I want to find that girl,
Teddy, before we have another tragedy on our hands."
Kroon exhaled. "Emily had been sick since she got that phone call from
Amelia, maybe a week or ten days before she was killed. She'd promised her
sister never to have any contact with the child."
"We know that. Sally Brandon talked to us when she was here. But Amelia's got
to be out of college by now-she was bound to find out sooner or later."
"Some sort of legal papers had been arranged for the Brandons when Emily gave
up the baby, but apparently no one ever destroyed the original birth
certificate on file at the hospital. Amelia hadn't gone looking for trouble.
She simply wanted to come here to meet Emily, to find out why her mother had
abandoned her. She wanted to know who her father is."
"Wasn't his name on the birth certificate, too?" I asked.
"No. That just said 'unknown' in the space for the father's name."
"Do you know who he is?"
Kroon nodded his head up and down. "Emily told me that same week. The NYU
professor whom she slept with the time she came to the city for her college
interview. Noah Tormey is his name."
"Did Emily actually speak to Amelia?"
"Only once. You see, the child didn't have a phone number for Emily. Her home
phone is-was-unlisted. So Amelia rummaged through her mother's papers but the
only things she came up with were some occasional clippings of articles with
Emily's byline that Sally must have saved. The girl began to call the
editorial departments of the magazines, and once she did that, Emily got calls
from her former colleagues, telling her that someone named Amelia Brandon was
trying to reach her."
"So Emily phoned her?" Mercer asked.
"Absolutely not. She'd made a promise to her sister that she wasn't going to
break. But she was tormented by the fact that Amelia was determined to track
her down. There was no way to put the cat back in the bag. I guess one of the
other writers on the magazine staff finally gave the child Emily's phone
number."
"Take us to Saturday afternoon before the murder," Mercer said, "when Emily
called you with her-what did you say- premonition?"
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Kroon wiped his brow. "I was at work, like I told you. The store was busy and
I'm afraid I didn't take her as seriously as-well-as it turned out I should
have."
"You couldn't have known what would happen to her," I said.
"Emily had been at home all morning, sleeping late, I'm sure. She went out
for the papers and some groceries, and when she got back there had been a
series of calls. Three, I think she said. All of them hang-ups."
I looked at Mercer, who had studied the outgoing and incoming activity on
Emily Upshaw's phone records. He nodded his head and mouthed the words "pay
phone."
"Emily couldn't imagine who had called, but she was concerned that it had
something to do with Amelia's attempts to find her. Every time we had met
during the week, she'd been soliciting my help with what to do about telling
her sister."
"And your advice?"
He shrugged. "Be honest with her. There was nothing to hide anymore."
"The hang-up caller, did he or she phone back?"
"Yes. That's what prompted Emily's panicked call to me. It was that
doctor-you know, the one with the Asian name who was found dead last week."
"Dr. Ichiko?" I asked.
"Exactly."
"Did Emily know him?"
"No," he said. "She told me that she'd never met him."
Mercer walked over to Kroon. "But you just told us her phone is unlisted."
He sniffled and answered, "Emily's name was in the file the doctor had kept
on Monty, when Ichiko had treated him back in his college days. Apparently,
Monty had talked about her in session, as the woman he lived with, the person [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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