The Lost Years Read online

  7

  Charles Michaelson and Albert West had driven together from Manhattan to pay their respects to their old friend and colleague Jonathan Lyons. Both men were experts in the study of ancient parchments. But the resemblance between them ended there. Michaelson, impatient by nature, had a permanent frown in the creases of his forehead. Added to that, his imposing girth was enough to strike fear in the hearts of unprepared students. Sarcastic to the point of cruelty, he had reduced many PhD candidates to tears during their defense of doctoral theses they had submitted to him.

  Albert West was small and thin. His students joked that his tie brushed against his shoelaces. His voice, surprisingly strong and always passionate, captivated his listeners when, in his lectures, he introduced them to the wonders of ancient history.

  Michaelson had long been divorced. After twenty years his irascible temper became too much for his wife and she left him. If that event caused him any heartache, he never showed it.

  West was a lifelong bachelor. An avid sportsman, he enjoyed hiking in the spring and summer and skiing in the late fall and winter. As often as possible he spent his weekends on one of those activities.

  The relationship between the two men was the same one they had shared with Jonathan Lyons—it was based on their passion for ancient manuscripts.

  Albert West had been trying to decide if he should share with Michaelson the call he had received from Jonathan Lyons a week and a half ago. He knew that Michaelson considered him a competitor and would be offended if he learned that Jonathan had consulted Albert first about a two-thousand-year-old parchment.

  On the way back from the luncheon, West decided he had to ask the question. He waited until Michaelson had turned onto West 56th Street from the West Side Highway. In a few minutes Michaelson would be dropping him off at his apartment near Eighth Avenue and then driving across town to Sutton Place, where he lived.

  He decided to be direct. “Did Jonathan talk to you about the possibility that he had found the Arimathea letter, Charles?” he asked.

  Michaelson glanced at him for a split second before stopping the car as the light changed from yellow to red. “The Arimathea letter! My God, Jonathan left a message on my cell phone that he thought he had found something of tremendous importance and would like to have my opinion on it. He never said what it was. I called back later the same day and left word that of course I’d be interested in seeing whatever he had. But he didn’t get back to me. Did you see the letter? Did he show it to you? Is there any chance that it’s authentic?”

  “I wish I had seen it, but the answer is no. Jon called to tell me about it two weeks ago. He did say he was convinced that it was the Arimathea letter. You know how calm Jonathan usually was, but this time he was excited, sure that he was right. I warned him how often these so-called finds turn out to be fakes and he calmed down and admitted that he might be rushing to judgment. He said he was showing it to someone else and would get back to me, but he never did.”

  For the next few minutes the men were silent until they reached Albert West’s apartment building. “Well, let’s hope to God that if it was authentic, and he had it in his home, his crazy wife doesn’t come across it,” Michaelson said bitterly. “If she did, it would be just like her to tear it up if she thought it was important to him.”

  As Albert West opened the car door, he said, “I couldn’t agree with you more. I wonder if Mariah knows about the letter. If not, we’d better alert her to look for it. It’s beyond priceless. Thanks for the ride, Charles.”

  Charles Michaelson nodded. As he steered the car away from the curb, he said aloud, “Nothing, not even a letter written by Christ to Joseph of Arimathea, is priceless if the right bidder can be found.”

  8

  At the church Detectives Benet and Rodriguez had observed Lillian Stewart slipping into the Mass late and leaving early. They followed her to the cemetery and, using binoculars, observed her going to the grave, then Richard Callahan joining her in her car and putting his arms around her.

  “And what do we make of that?” Detective Rodriguez asked as they drove back to the prosecutor’s office in Hackensack, stopping only to pick up coffee. Finally they were in their office reviewing their notes on the case.

  Simon Benet’s forehead was drenched in perspiration. “Wouldn’t it be nice if the air-conditioning worked in this place?” he complained. “And will you tell me why I didn’t get iced coffee?”

  “Because you don’t like iced coffee,” Rodriguez said calmly. “Neither do I.”

  They exchanged a brief smile. Simon Benet thought again that he always admired Rita’s ability to deftly ferret out discrepancies in anyone’s account so that it seemed she was only anxious to help the witness, rather than to catch that person in a lie.

  Together they made a good team.

  Benet started the conversation. “That caregiver, Rory, sure likes to talk. She was a fountain of information about what was going on in the house Monday night. Let’s go over what we have.” He began to read from his notes. “Rory has weekends off, but the weekend caregiver asked her to switch because she had a family wedding. Rory agreed, but then the caretaker couldn’t make it back by Monday evening, and Professor Lyons told Rory to go home anyhow, that he could take care of his wife by himself for one night.”

  Benet continued. “She said that Professor Lyons had been in New York that day and seemed tired, and even depressed, when he got home at five o’clock. He asked how his wife had been, and Rory had to tell him that she had been very agitated. The housekeeper, Betty Pierce, served dinner at six o’clock. Rory was planning to meet a friend for a late dinner in Manhattan but sat with them at the table. Mrs. Lyons kept talking about wanting to go to Venice again. Finally, to appease her, the professor promised they would go back there soon and have a second honeymoon.”

  “Which was obviously the wrong thing to say,” Rodriguez commented. “Because according to Rory, Mrs. Lyons got upset and said something like, ‘You mean you’ll take me instead of Lily? I don’t believe you.’ After that she wouldn’t look at him again, closed her eyes, and refused to eat anything. Rory took her upstairs, got her into bed, and she fell asleep immediately.”

  The detectives looked at each other. “I don’t remember whether or not Rory said anything about what medication she gave Mrs. Lyons that night,” Benet admitted.

  Rodriguez answered. “She said Mrs. Lyons was so tired that it wasn’t necessary, that when she came downstairs, Betty Pierce was just leaving, and the professor had carried his second cup of coffee into his office. Rory looked in on him to let him know that she was on her way out.”

  “That’s pretty much it,” Rita concluded. “Rory checked the front door on her way out to be sure it was locked. She and Betty Pierce always left by the kitchen door because their cars were parked in the back. She swears that door was locked too. She never knew Professor Lyons kept a gun in a drawer in his desk.”

  They both closed their notebooks. “So what we have is a house that normally would have a caregiver in it, no sign of a break-in, a woman suffering from dementia who had been angry at her husband and was found hiding in a closet holding the gun that killed him. But she was very consistent in saying, ‘So much noise… so much blood.’ That could mean the shot woke her up, and she’d be an easy person to set up if she didn’t do it.” Benet tapped his fingers on the arm of the chair, a habit when he was thinking aloud. “And we couldn’t talk to her immediately in the house or in the hospital because she was so hysterical, and afterward she was heavily medicated.”

  “We also have a daughter who’s angry about her father’s relationship with his mistress and who probably has the guardianship of her mother in case of her father’s death,” Rita said. “And here’s another angle. If Jonathan Lyons had ever decided to divorce his wife, Kathleen, and marry Lillian Stewart, their assets would be split, and Mariah Lyons would have ended up with full responsibility for her mother.”

  Simon Benet leaned ba
ck in his chair, pulled out his handkerchief, and mopped his brow. “Tomorrow morning, we’ll try to talk to the mother and to Mariah again. As we both know, most cases of this kind turn out to be family affairs.” He paused. “And let’s talk to somebody about getting the air-conditioning fixed!”

  9

  It was three o’clock when the funeral car deposited Mariah; her mother, Kathleen; and Rory back home after the luncheon at the Ridgewood Country Club.

  As soon as they were inside the house, Rory said soothingly, “Now, Kathleen, you didn’t sleep well last night and you were up very early. Why don’t you get into something comfortable, then you can take a nap or watch television?”

  Mariah realized she was holding her breath. Dear God, please don’t let Mom insist on going into the closet in Dad’s study, she thought. But to her relief, her mother willingly accompanied Rory up the stairs to her bedroom.

  I honestly don’t know how I could have dealt with another scene right now, Mariah thought. I need some quiet time. I need to think. She waited until she was sure her mother and Rory would be in her mother’s bedroom with the door closed, then she hurried upstairs to her own room. She changed from her skirt and jacket into a cotton sweater, slacks, and sandals, and went back downstairs. She went into the kitchen, made a cup of tea, and carried it into the breakfast room. There she settled into one of the comfortable padded chairs and leaned back with a sigh.

  Every bone in my body is aching, she thought as she took a sip of tea and tried to focus on the events of the week. I feel as if everything that happened since I arrived here Monday evening is a blur.

  Trying to think unemotionally, she began to relive that evening, starting with the arrival of the police. Mom was in such a state that they sent for an ambulance, she remembered. In the hospital I sat beside her bed all night. She was moaning and crying. I had blood all over my blouse from where I leaned over Dad and put my arms around him. The nurse was good enough to give me one of those cotton jackets the patients wear.

  I wonder what happened to my blouse? Usually they hand your clothes back to you in a plastic bag when you leave a hospital, even if they’re soiled. I’m sure that the police kept it as evidence because it had blood on it.

  It was just as well Mom wasn’t released until Tuesday evening because that way she didn’t see all of the police activity in the house. It had been declared a crime scene. They took Dad’s study apart. Betty told me that they were dusting everywhere for fingerprints. She said they were dusting all the downstairs windows as well as the doors. The bottom drawer of Dad’s desk, where he kept his gun, was open when I got home Monday night. But that drawer was always locked.

  Mariah shook her head at the unwelcome memory that her mother was incredibly skilled at finding keys no matter where they had been hidden. Unwillingly, she thought of the incident last year when her mother had sneaked out of the house stark naked in the middle of the night. It was when the previous weekend caregiver was supposed to be taking care of her but had forgotten to put the alarm on in her mother’s room. It was small consolation to remind herself that the new weekend caregiver was excellent.

  But Mom could never have walked into Dad’s study and used the key to open his desk drawer with him sitting there that evening, she thought.

  That gun could have been somewhere else for months or even years. I’m sure, or I think I’m sure, that Dad lost interest in going to the shooting range ages ago.

  Even the warm cup she was cradling in her fingers could not prevent the chill that washed over Mariah’s body. He used to take Mom to the range with him, she thought. She wanted to see if she’d be any good. That was about ten years ago. He said she was a pretty good shot back then.

  Trying to avoid the terrible implication of where that train of thought was going, Mariah forced herself to think about the conversation she’d had with Father Aiden just before they left the club. Dad went to see Father Aiden nine days ago and told him that he thought he had found the letter Jesus may have written to Joseph of Arimathea. Dad claimed he had confirmed the fact that it was the parchment stolen from the Vatican Library in the fourteen hundreds. Who was that expert who saw it? But wait a minute. Father Aiden said that Dad was troubled because one of the experts had been interested only in its financial value. If Father Aiden got it straight, that would mean that Dad showed it to more than one person.

  Where is the parchment now? My God, is it here, in Dad’s files? I’ll have to look for it, but what good would that do? I wouldn’t recognize it among all the other parchments he was studying. But if Dad did have it and if Dad intended to return it to the Vatican Library, was it stolen after Dad was shot?

  The ringing of the telephone in the kitchen made Mariah jump up and run to answer it. It was Detective Benet. He asked if he and Detective Rodriguez could drop over in the morning at about eleven o’clock and have a talk with Mariah and her mother.

  “Of course,” she said.

  Mariah realized that the reason she was whispering was because her throat had tightened so much that she could hardly speak the words.

  10

  Lloyd and Lisa Scott, a couple in their late fifties, had been next-door neighbors of Jonathan and Kathleen Lyons for twenty-five years. Lloyd was a successful criminal defense attorney, and Lisa, a former model, had turned her love for jewelry into a business. She made her own designs in crystal and semiprecious stones for a long list of private clients. Some of her designs were the products of her imagination. Others were inspired by the beautiful gems she had collected from all over the world. Her personal collection was now worth more than three million dollars.

  With his balding head, prodigious girth, and pale blue eyes, Lloyd seemed an unlikely match for his beautiful wife. After thirty years of marital bliss he sometimes still woke up at night and wondered what she saw in him. His great pleasure was to indulge her love for what he jokingly called her trinkets.

  Agreeing that it was a nuisance to keep going back and forth to the safety-deposit box at the bank, they had recently installed a supposedly burglar-proof safe bolted to the floor of Lisa’s dressing-room closet, as well as a state-of-the-art alarm system.

  The Scotts kept a pied-à-terre in Manhattan for their occasional overnights in New York for business or social events. But as Lloyd’s reputation and income had continued to grow, neither one of them had any real interest in leaving the handsome brick and stucco Tudor-style house that Lloyd had inherited from his mother. They liked their neighbors and the neighborhood. They had a view of the Ramapo Mountains from their back porch. They both were passionate travelers and preferred to spend their money on first-class accommodations all over the world, rather than on “McMansions or an oceanfront home in the Hamptons,” as Lloyd put it.

  They were in Japan when they heard about Jonathan’s death and did not arrive home until the morning after the funeral. Knowing Kathleen’s condition so well, they both had been concerned that she might be involved in the tragedy.

  As soon as they set down their bags in Mahwah that Saturday morning, they rushed next door. The bell was answered by a visibly distressed Mariah. She broke in on their attempts to offer condolences. “Two detectives are here,” she said. “They’re talking to Mom now. They called last night and asked to come and speak to us.”

  “I don’t like that,” Lloyd snapped.

  “It’s because she was alone with Dad that night…” Mariah’s voice trailed off as she tried to stay composed, but then she burst out, “Lloyd, it’s meaningless. Mom doesn’t even get it. She asked me why Dad didn’t come to breakfast this morning.”

  Lisa looked at her husband. As she had expected, his face was settling into what she called his “take no prisoners” expression. Frowning slightly, his brow creased, his eyes narrowed behind his glasses, he said, “Mariah, this is my territory. I don’t want to butt in, but whether your mother understands what’s going on or not, she should not be answering questions from the police without legal counsel. Let me sit in with y
ou and be sure we keep her protected.”

  Lisa cupped Mariah’s face in her hands. “I’ll see you later,” she promised as she turned to go.

  It was a hot day even for August. Back in the house Lisa lowered the temperature on the air conditioner and walked to the kitchen, glancing into the living room as she passed it. It was in perfect order and the warm feeling that inevitably followed a vacation enveloped her. No matter how nice the trip was, and how much we enjoyed it, it’s always great to get home, she thought.

  She made a decision not to nibble on anything. She’d skipped the breakfast snack on the plane, but she figured that when Lloyd got back they could have an early lunch. He’d be hungry too. Without looking, she knew the refrigerator had been stocked by their trusted housekeeper of twenty-five years. Again pushing back the urge to treat herself to something like a cracker and cheese, she retraced her steps to the foyer, picked up the carry-on bag that contained the jewelry she had traveled with, and went upstairs to the master bedroom.

  She laid the bag on the bed, opened it, and removed the leather pouches containing the jewelry. At least this time I listened to Lloyd and didn’t bring as much as usual, she thought. But I sure wish I’d had the emeralds with me for the captain’s dinner on the ship.

  Oh well.

  She removed the rings and bracelets and earrings and necklaces from the pouches, spread them on the coverlet of the bed, and looked over them carefully, checking once again to be sure that everything she had taken with her had come back in the carry-on bag.

  Then she transferred them to the tray on her vanity table, carried it into her dressing room, and opened the door of the closet. The steel safe, dark and formidable, was there. She tapped in the combination to unlock it and tugged at the door.

  There were ten rows of drawers with various-shaped velvet-lined compartments. Lisa pulled out the top one, gasped, then frantically yanked out drawer after drawer. Instead of her beautiful and valuable jewelry sparkling up at her, she was staring at a sea of black velvet.