The sign on the main desk read ALL VISITORS MUST CHECK IN. The woman behind the desk （Mrs. Kelly, according to the little plaque on the counter） gave Holly a welcoming smile. “Hello, there. How may I help?”
To this point, all was ordinary and unremarkable. Things only went off the rails when Holly asked if she could visit Peter Maitland. Mrs. Kelly’s smile remained on her lips, but disappeared from her eyes. “Are you a member of the family?”
“No,” Holly said. “I’m a friend of the family.”
This, she told herself, was not exactly a lie. She was working for Mrs. Maitland’s lawyer, after all, and the lawyer was working for Mrs. Maitland, and that qualified as a kind of friendship, didn’t it, if she had been hired to clear the name of the widow’s late husband?
“I’m afraid that won’t do,” said Mrs. Kelly. What remained of her smile was now purely perfunctory. “If you’re not family, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave. Mr. Maitland wouldn’t know you, anyway. His condition has deteriorated this summer.”
“Just this summer, or since Terry came to visit him in the spring?”
Now the smile was gone entirely. “Are you a reporter? If you are, you are required by law to tell me, and I will ask you to leave the premises at once. If you refuse, I’ll call security and have you escorted. We’ve had quite enough of your kind.”
This was interesting. It might not have anything to do with the matter she had come here to investigate, but maybe it did. The woman hadn’t gone all poopy, after all, until Holly mentioned Peter Maitland’s name. “I’m not a reporter.”
“I’ll take your word for that, but if you’re not a relative, I still must ask you to leave.”
“All right,” Holly said. She took a step or two away from the desk, then had an idea and turned back. “Suppose I had Mr. Maitland’s son, Terry, call and vouch for me. Would that help?”
“I suppose,” Mrs. Kelly said. She looked grudging about it. “He would have to answer a few questions, though, to satisfy me that it wasn’t one of your colleagues pretending to be Mr. Maitland. That might sound a trifle paranoid to you, Ms. Gibney, but we have been through a lot here, a lot, and I take my responsibilities very seriously.”
“I understand.”
“Maybe you do and maybe you don’t, but it wouldn’t do you any good to speak to Peter, in any case. The police found that out. He’s in end-stage Alzheimer’s. If you talk to the younger Mr. Maitland, he’ll tell you.”
The younger Mr. Maitland won’t tell me anything, Mrs. Kelly, because he’s been dead for a week. But you don’t know that, do you?
“When was the last time the police tried to talk to Peter Maitland? I’m asking as a friend of the family.”
Mrs. Kelly considered this, then said: “I don’t believe you, and I’m not answering your questions.”
Bill would have gotten all chummy and confidential at this point, he and Mrs. Kelly might even have ended by exchanging email addresses and promising to stay in touch on Facebook, but although Holly was an excellent deductive thinker, she was still working on what her analyst called “people skills.” She left, a bit disheartened but not discouraged.
This kept getting more interesting.
6
At eleven o’clock on that bright and sunny Tuesday morning, Holly sat on a shady bench in Andrew Dean Park, sipping a latte from a nearby Starbucks and thinking about her queer interview with Mrs. Kelly.
The woman hadn’t known Terry was dead, probably none of the Heisman staff knew, and that didn’t surprise Holly very much. The murders of Frank Peterson and Terry Maitland had happened in a small city hundreds of miles away; if it had made the national news at all during a week when an ISIL sympathizer had shot eight people in a Tennessee shopping mall and a tornado had leveled a small Indiana town, it would only have been as a blip far down on Huffington Post, there and gone. And it wasn’t as if Marcy Maitland would have been in touch with her father-in-law to tell him the sad news—why would she, considering the man’s condition?
Are you a reporter? Mrs. Kelly had asked. We’ve had quite enough of your kind.
All right, reporters had come to call, also the police, and Mrs. Kelly, as the out-front person at the Heisman Memory Unit, had had to put up with them. But their questions hadn’t been about Terry Maitland, or she would have known he was dead. So what had been the great big fracking deal?