Exposé: First of the Sally Harrington Mysteries (The Alexandra Chronicles Book 5) Read online

  Exposé

  a novel by

  Laura Van Wormer

  Author & Company

  Connecticut New York Colorado

  Exposé is the first of a The Sally Harrington Mysteries*, six books that fall between book 5 and 11 of what has been nicknamed “The Alexandra Chronicles”, books in which the characters Alexandra Waring and Cassy Cochran appear.

  Riverside Drive

  West End

  Any Given Moment

  Talk

  Exposé

  The Last Lover *

  Trouble Becomes Her *

  The Bad Witness *

  The Kill Fee *

  Mr. Murder *

  Riverside Park

  Other Novels

  Benedict Canyon

  Jury Duty

  Just for the Summer

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where the name of actual persons, living or dead, are used, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict any actual events or change the entirely fictional nature of the work.

  ISBN: 1620710307

  ISBN: 978-1-62071-030-2

  Library of Congress Catalog Number: 00503502

  Copyright © 1999, 2014 by Laura Van Wormer

  All rights reserved. No part of part of this book may be used or reproduced in any electronic manner without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews. For information please address: Author & Company, LLC, P.O. Box , Cheshire, CT 06410-9998

  For Chris

  With grateful thanks to my talented editor and publisher, Dianne Moggy, and her editorial assistant, Miranda Stecyk, and the whole terrific group at MIRA Books. I also wish to thank Lynn Goldberg for her wisdom and expertise, and too, of course, my longtime friend and agent, Loretta Barrett, and her associates, Kirsten Lundell and Nick Mullendore.

  Finally, a special word of thanks to the community of Meriden, Connecticut. It's a wonderful place.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part I Connecticut

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part II

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Part III

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Part IV

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Part V

  Chapter 60

  Part I

  Connecticut

  1

  I am the reporter at the Castleford Herald-American who argues the most with our editor, which means said editor has more or less assigned Crazy Pete Sabatino and his conspiracy theories permanently to me.

  "And you know those kids on the milk cartons?" Pete is whispering as he leans forward in my cubicle at the paper.

  "You mean the missing children?"

  "Yes," he answers solemnly. "They're taking them. The Ma­sons are."

  The linchpin of Pete's conspiracy theory is that George Bush and six other Masons secretly rule the world. I must confess, this theory does not frighten me the way it's supposed to, no doubt because I am White Anglo-Saxon Protestant myself, de­scended from a long line of New England Republicans. (Though it should be noted that my voting record sometimes wildly strays from ancestral patterns.)

  "The Masons are taking the children to the aliens for genetic research," Pete continues. "Remember the alien vortex I told you about?"

  "In Long Island, near the Brook Haven labs," I say patiently. "Where you said we shot down the TWA flight because we were shooting at an alien ship coming into the vortex."

  "Right. That's where they're taking the children." When I don't say anything, he stresses, "Look, Sally, I've read about this, I've talked to people about it, and I've seen evidence. I know. I know."

  Crazy Pete has not always been this way. My neighbor, who used to take piano lessons right after Pete at Mrs. Fothergill's when they were young, said it was only after Pete turned six­teen and refused to play anything but "Tara's Theme" from Gone with the Wind—over and over and over—that people be­gan to suspect he might be slipping a cog or two.

  At eighteen he went off to the University of Connecticut at Storrs for three weeks and then came back home to live with his parents, where he has been ever since. He is a bright man, and feeds his insa­tiable curiosity about conspiracies and the new world order through a series of books and pamphlets and videos he orders from rural-route post office box addresses in Texas and Califor­nia. Pete also watches TV programming that can only be brought in by the enormous satellite dish he has built on top of his father's house, and listens to radio shows received by his forty-foot shortwave radio tower, also located on his father's roof.

  If I'm thirty, Pete's got to be around forty. His mother's dead now, but his father's still around, a retired construction worker who seems oblivious to his son's role as the earth's savior from George Bush and the aliens. Pete has a part-time job at the li­brary, cataloging historical documents on microfiche, and everyone agrees he is nice enough, clean enough and bright enough, if only he didn't start in on the aliens. (Conspiracy the­ories regarding the Republican party are usually okay in Castle­ford, since the populace is overwhelmingly Democratic.) And then there's Pete's habit of slipping into the library's commu­nity room after hours to play—what else?—"Tara's Theme" on the piano, but with great and mighty flourishes that come only from decades of practice and that frankly give everybody the creeps.

  "What kind of genetic research," I ask Pete, pencil poised over paper, "are the aliens doing with these children?"

  "They're still trying to perfect our race so we'll stop destroy­ing the planet."

  At that moment my editor, Alfred Royce Jr., appears from around the corner. Al is sixty-one, but is still a junior because his father is still going strong at ninety. And since his father holds majority ownership of the paper, Al is running it, al­though popular opinion often leans toward lynching him. This opinion is most often expressed by his sister, Martha, who has l
ately been barred from the executive suite under charges of treason.

  "Hey, Pete, how are you?" Al says.

  Pete just nods, looking a bit sullen.

  "Is our star reporter, Sally Harrington, getting it all down right?"

  "Yes. She's good, Al, but you never seem to print anything."

  "When we get the facts exactly right, when we get the sub­stantiation we need," Alfred promises, "the stories will run." He has been saying this for the three years I've been here. "So listen, Pete, tell me what you've got on Dudleytown."

  I look at my boss. Dudleytown is the ruins of a community on a mountaintop between Cornwall and Litchfield in northwest Connecticut. It was a settlement founded by the Dudley family in the 1700s, which died out altogether by 1900, with several stories of violent and dreadful deaths attached to it. The area residents today, of course, hate ghost hunters trespassing on their property to get up to the ruins of the town, so they have begun a vigilant campaign to pretend that no such place exists, which in turn has only accelerated interest in the area.

  "Oh, yeah, Dudleytown," Pete says seriously, nodding, "that was a genetic experiment that didn't work out. You know that we... us... mankind… is on its fourth attempt. The first three combinations didn't work. We are a combination of thirty-two alien species bred with the ape."

  "But do you think it's really haunted?" Al asks him, ignoring the biology lecture.

  "The Masons don't want anyone up there, you know," Pete says. "They're trying to pretend Dudleytown never existed."

  "Why?" I ask.

  "Because there's still evidence of the alien landings up there, where the ships used to come in. The Masons killed everyone in the town because they threatened to develop into a superior race. A race that would threaten the Masons' world domina­tion."

  "Well that's good enough for me," Alfred announces. "Sally, I want you to take Devon with you to Dudleytown and find out what's what. Get lots of pictures."

  I look at him. "When?"

  "Why not today?"

  "Because," I answer, "I'm in a suit and heels and going to the special meeting of the city council regarding the HUD investi­gation into the downtown housing project."

  "Don't worry, I'll send Michelle," he tells me.

  Michelle is an intern who will not dare object if Al cuts out all of the salient facts from her story since she'd do anything to get a job that has a paycheck attached. (It should be explained that the staff of the Castleford Herald-American is actually very good at reporting the news of our four-town area of two hundred thousand people—that is, as long as an unfavorable news story doesn't affect one of Al's fraternity brothers from Dartmouth or anyone serving on the executive golf committee at the Castle­ford Country Club.)

  "Oh, well, if you're sending an ace reporter, how can I ob­ject?" I turn to Pete. "Perhaps you'd like to come with us to Dudleytown. So we can take some pictures of that evidence of alien landings."

  He looks horrified. "My God, they'd get me for sure. There's no way I could go up there without them knowing."

  "Well, what about us?" I protest, looking innocently up at my boss. "Who's going to protect us?"

  "Oh, they won't do anything," Pete assures me. "Since you haven't done anything about them yet, they think you don't know."

  "Don't know what?" I ask.

  "That they murdered your father," Crazy Pete says.

  2

  It wasn't that I believed Crazy Pete's claim that the Masons killed my father, but it was the way he said it, the abruptness of it, that got to me.

  I was nine and my brother was five when Daddy died in the great Castleford flood. He had been volunteering with the rest of the city to save what they could after the reservoir dam broke, and while my father was examining the new high-school gymnasium, part of the wall gave way and fell on him.

  My father was a self-employed architect who did not carry as much life insurance as he should have. But then, he had only been thirty-four years old, his business had only just hit its stride (people said that if he'd survived the flood, he would have been a millionaire, thanks to the rebuilding that followed), he was healthy and strong, and thoughts of death had been very far from his mind.

  My mother, I'm pretty sure, had no idea the extent (or lack) of life insurance Daddy had been carrying. She never said anything to us about finances, but simply went back to teaching grade school to keep body and soul together. My maternal grandparents helped us when they could and we managed to hang on to the house.

  My father had been born and raised in Castleford, a small city in central Connecticut that began as a farming village, grew into a town and, after the railroad came through in the l800s, boomed into an industrial city. My father's full name was Wil­bur Kennett Harrington, but everyone called him "Dodge," be­cause he was a star running back, first for Castleford High and then for Yale in nearby New Haven.

  Dad's family had once been extremely well-to-do but my grandfather, a hopeless gam­bler and big-time drinker, had destroyed the family's fortune. Over a period of fifteen years he managed to squander all of the wealth his ancestors had accumulated over two centuries, and the day before the sheriff came to repossess the estate, Grand­dad figured the best way to deal with the problem was to sim­ply shoot himself in the pool house after dinner.

  The Castleford my father knew as a child was chosen by a na­tional news magazine as one of the best places to live in the en­tire United States during the late 1940s and 1950s. Good jobs at the factories, excellent schools, ample land, inexpensive hous­ing and gorgeous parks and lakes and mountains earned Cas­tleford its reputation as a residential nirvana.

  By the time I was a kid in the 1980s, however, Castleford was being cited as a vic­tim of poor city planning, an industrial dinosaur. The plants and factories had cut way back—many had actually shut down or moved south—working-class neighborhoods staggered downward into welfare slums, school test scores fell, the hous­ing market tanked, and litter began to blow over the commu­nity's once-regal Victorian streets. The worst humiliation was a new highway that enabled travelers to bypass the city entirely.

  I wasn't even allowed to go downtown, not that I wanted to. The movie theaters of my father's day had closed, and so had the restaurants, the hotels, the skating rink. Buildings were boarded up. There was nothing to do in Castleford except "go to the mall" on the new highway, which my mother wouldn't let me do, either, that is, until I was sixteen and got a job at the Gap.

  The economy of central Connecticut has improved as new technology moved in, and Castleford has vastly changed for the better. It still has a bad rap, though. A recent headline read "1/3 Castleford on Welfare or SS."

  I love Castleford. Even during the worst time. Much of the Castleford my father introduced me to is still very much alive. There are beautiful urban and suburban neighborhoods, stun­ning churches and classic New England farmland scenes. And, always, always, Castleford has those splendid mountains, the Hanging Hills they're called, and we have thousands upon thousands of acres of parkland left to us by our ancestors.

  There's still even some old money in town, big money.

  Our house—where my mother still lives—was a wonderful place for a child. On one side was, and still is, a working farm, on the other, the mansion my father grew up in, which, in sub­sequent years, became a convent.

  My mother, the former Isabel "Belle" Ann Goodwin of New­port, Rhode Island, met my father at a dance while she was a coed at Mount Holyoke. They married the day she graduated. As a wedding present, my maternal grandparents bought this five-acre parcel of the old Harrington estate that my parents desperately wanted, and also gave them the down payment to build a small home my father designed. Made of stone, the house looks as though it's been there for two hundred years. That was Daddy's thing, adapting historic designs for homes and buildings by using modern materials and technology. He built our house as the first stage of what he hoped would one day be the center portion of a new Harrington mansion.

>   As children, Sarah Goodwin Harrington, aka Sally (that's me), and Robert Wilbur Harrington, aka Rob (that's my little brother), had free reign. We roamed the hills and pastures and woods, paddled a canoe in the pond, fished, built tree houses and had adventures galore.

  It's true, though, that my mother was very sad for a very long time. I remember that. How, around us, she was all smiles and hugs and enthusiasm, and how, when she was not looking, I saw the worry and heard the deep, sorrowful sighs.

  Once, when I was ten, I heard my mother crying. I got out of bed and saw her in the kitchen, her head down on the table, cry­ing, asking my father to tell her what to do.

  I didn't go to her that night, but I never forgot it. And every time I thought things were really great, I'd look carefully at my mother and then, yes, I could see that the pain was still there. And then after a while I knew that the quiet sadness in me and my brother might never ever go away, either.

  We missed Daddy very much. We still do.

  "Sally," Devon is shouting. "Sally!"

  "What?" I finally answer, whipping around and nearly pok­ing my eye out with a tree branch. It's the middle of a hot July afternoon and I am, at this point, tired and very cranky. We've been tramping around for hours, and to my knowledge, no Pu­litzer Prize has ever been awarded to a journalist looking for ghosts and aliens.

  "I hate to say it, Sal..." Devon begins, looking up from the map in his hand.

  I just stand here, waiting. I stopped at home to change into khaki shorts on the way here, and a t-shirt and hiking boots. I've pulled my hair back in a ponytail.

  Devon nervously fingers the strap of his camera case. Not a good sign. "I think we're on the wrong mountain. I think Dudleytown's over there somewhere." He's pointing across the ra­vine that has just taken us two hours to climb. At the bottom is a rushing stream; on the other side, a ravine wall as steep as this one was.

  I sigh, shaking my head in defeat, wiping the perspiration from my forehead and then swatting at the gnats that are buzzing my head despite a generous application of Cutter's. "Look, Devon," I finally say, pointing, "can't you just take a picture of that rock and make it look spooky so we can call it a day?"