Murder in the Hearse Degree Read Free Page B

temper.”
    “A person can have a temper and still not hit people.”
    “I’m not making excuses for him.”
    “I hope not. You’d find me hard to convince.”
    “It’s a difficult relationship to explain. Mike and—”
    I held my hand up to stop her. “I’m not asking you to explain it, Libby. I’m of the opinion that one strike and you’re out, but it’s not my marriage, it’s yours.”
    “It might not be for long.”
    “Are you pulling the plug?”
    “Something has happened. I mean besides Mike’s hitting me.” She moved over to an armless chair and settled onto it. “Our nanny is missing.”
    “Your nanny?”
    “Yes.”
    “What do you mean ‘missing’?”
    “Missing, Hitch. She’s gone. She disappeared.”
    “When did this happen?”
    “Just this past Friday night. Or Saturday morning. I guess it depends how you want to look at it. Her name is Sophie. She’s very sweet. We’ve only had her a month or so. She’s around twenty-two, twenty-three? Great with the children. She’s from Hungary originally. Her father died and her mother remarried an American who brought them both over. She’s very quiet. Pretty much keeps to herself. I’m worried.”
    “Have you spoken to her friends? Anything like that?”
    “She doesn’t have any. Or if she does she hasn’t brought them around. For the most part, after the children go to bed, Sophie goes to her room and reads or watches videos. Though the thing is this last week she started going out. She didn’t say where she was going and it’s not really my business to pry. It did seem to me though that she was in a peculiar mood. Sort of preoccupied. But I didn’t think anything particular about it.”
    “How about a boyfriend?” I asked.
    “I suppose it’s possible. She’s shy. Maybe she wouldn’t feel comfortable telling me.”
    “So what happened?”
    “Like I said, it was this past Friday. Mike was working late. No surprise there. I wasn’t feeling so great. I was coming off a cold I’d had most of the week and I was bushed, so after Sophie and I put the kids to bed I went to bed early. Sophie said she was going out. The next morning I got Toby and Lily up. Mike was up and out already, on his run. He jogs down to the river and across the bridge to the Naval Academy campus every morning. I looked in Sophie’s room and she wasn’t there. Her bed was still made. She hadn’t come home the night before.”
    “Has she ever done anything like that before?”
    “Never. Our last nanny was a regular party girl, but not Sophie. She’s just the opposite, in fact. Which has been fine by me.”
    “Did you call the police?”
    “That’s the thing, Hitch. We didn’t. Not right away. And I could kick myself. At first we just waited for Sophie to come back. I wasn’t real thrilled that she would stay out all night like that and not tell us, but maybe she’d suddenly gotten a life. I was still going to read her the riot act, of course. We waited all through Saturday. Nothing. I did want to call the police by late Saturday, but Mike overrode me. He insisted we hold off. Mike deals with the police practically every day. He said they don’t respond to a missing persons call until the person has been missing for forty-eight hours. If they’re an adult, that is. Which Sophie is. So what did I know? I argued with him a little bit, but he kept saying we didn’t want to overreact. He said most of the calls the police get are people overreacting.”
    “What about her parents?” I asked. “Maybe she decided to go home for a visit.”
    “I’ve been trying that. Her mother and stepfather live up on Long Island. All I’ve gotten is a phone machine. I’m guessing they must be away on vacation or something. And I’m certainly not going to leave a message on their phone machine saying, ‘Hi, your daughter is missing. Call me.’ ”
    “Could Sophie have maybe gone on vacation with them?”
    Libby shook her head. “I wish I could think so. But