Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 101, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 610 & 611, March 1993

“I was never against you. I was told to learn the other kid’s parentage to make sure she wasn’t a McCauley.” He had refused to let Charles fire him off the investigation and had wound up learning more than he wanted to, and was responsible for it. “I’ve found out that the girls are the illegitimate twins of a sociopathic runaway; I hate to think I might be the cause of their ever finding it out. So I’m on your side.”

Mary Jane nodded. They heard someone come into the little lobby. “Excuse me.”

She went into the reception area. Through the once-again half-open door, Tom glimpsed a big middle-aged guy in a white shirt on the far side of the counter, and heard him say he’d need a room for three nights. Then the door to the outside opened again.

A strained female voice said, “Are you Mary Jane Crayle?”

Mary Jane said, “Yes.” The guy in the white shirt said something unintelligible. There was a shockingly loud booming explosion and Mary Jane came hurtling backward through the door as another explosion lifted half the skull from her head. She went down in a welter of blood and brain and bone fragments.

Tom was on his feet but stupid with shock, unable to move or do anything but look at the ruin of Mary Jane lying on her back, one eye staring up at the ceiling...

Then noise got through to him, yelling and struggling beyond the reception desk. He began to respond, crossing the room on shaky legs, going through the door.

On the other side of the desk the big man was holding a double-barreled shotgun out at arm’s length. The other fist had a grip on the upper arm of one of the Marchand twins, in jeans and a sweatshirt, with a blue bandanna tied over her hair. She was doing her best to fight free, pummeling and scratching and kicking her booted feet. The big man was simply too big and too powerful, and not at all gentle, though his face was slack-jawed and almost as gray as his hair. As Tom ducked under the counter to make a grab for the girl’s other arm, the big man tapped her on the head with the barrel of the shotgun.

She stopped fighting. For an instant she looked terribly surprised, then her face puckered up and she began to cry. She went limp and sank to the floor, sitting awkwardly, crying as unselfconsciously as a two-year-old.

The big man put the shotgun on the counter, looked through the door to the living room. He began to retch, clapped a hand over his mouth, and barely made it out the door.

The girl raised her hand to explore where the gun barrel had hit her, a couple of inches above the hairline.

The hand was pale and pampered.

16

From the other end of Mary Jane’s apartment came the sound of someone rattling a doorknob and pounding on an obviously locked door. The big man’s white-shirted back almost blocked the view through the half-glass door to the driveway and the parking lot. Beyond him a growing number of pale, worried people were collecting and trying to see in, and he was doing his best to dissuade them. Katherine still sat on the floor holding a hand to her head and crying. Tom picked up the phone behind the desk.

First he called the sheriff’s sub-station and reported the shooting. Then he called the Morgan-Scherer office. This time he had trouble getting through to Alan, but finally managed to. Alan came on the line irritated and peremptory.

“This had better be good.”

“It isn’t,” Tom said. “Katherine just killed Mary Jane. Shotgun, both barrels. At the Beachfront Motel, Malibu.”

Silence. Then a shocked whisper. “Killed her own mother?”

“No, but Katherine doesn’t know that. Estelle Marchand was the mother of both girls. Get on down here, will you?”

“Of course, but... Why?”

Tom shrugged, hung up.

Why was a beast. Because the McCauleys weren’t exactly unknown, speculations about why would hit the media and there’d be no hope of any damage control. Everyone would learn all the facts and deceptions. Katherine, deceived from the start, would know. Shannon would know. Katherine had shotgunned to death the only member of her “family” — supposed or otherwise — who had ever, unreservedly but too briefly, placed her first. Even Mac had sought a surrogate grandchild in Tom, and tried to find an additional granddaughter to make a co-beneficiary. And Charles, who was without love but was a skillful bean-counter, had counted her a prize among his beans, had substituted arithmetic for intuition and lavishness for generosity of heart, and had been forever unreachable to the kid locked within the polished exterior that was the armor Katherine learned to present to the world.

He heard sirens approaching from a few blocks away. He came back from behind the counter and knelt beside Katherine, who was still crying. He put an arm around her shoulders and drew her head onto his chest. No reaction, no protest; she just went on crying with an implicit trust that he wouldn’t scold her for it.