Peter Pan Must Die by John Verdon Page A

continuity, beauty, peace, and privacy. As far as Gurney could see, it was about everything except death. But he was not about to say that. He wanted her to keep talking.
    Emmerling and Agnes Spalter had three children, two of whom died of pneumonia before they were out of their cribs. The survivor was Joseph. He married a woman named Mary Croake.
    Joseph and Mary had two sons, Carl and Jonah.
    The mention of these names, Gurney noticed, had an immediate effect on Paulette’s tone and expression, bringing back to her lips an almost imperceptible twitching.
    “I’ve been told they were as different as two brothers could be,” he said encouragingly.
    “Oh, yes! Black and white! Cain and Abel!” She fell silent, her eyes fixed in anger on some memory.
    Gurney prompted her. “I imagine Carl could be a difficult person to work for.”
    “Difficult?”
A bitter one-syllable laugh erupted from her throat. She closed her eyes for a few seconds, seemed to reach a decision, and then the words came rushing out.
    “
Difficult?
Let me explain something to you. Emmerling Spalter became a very wealthy man buying and selling large tracts of land in upstate New York. He passed his business, his money, and his talent for making it along to his son. Joe Spalter was a bigger, tougherversion of his father. He wasn’t someone you’d want for an enemy. But he was rational. You could talk to him. In his hard-as-nails way, he was fair. Not nice, not generous. But fair. It was Joe who hired my husband as the Willow Rest resident manager. That was …” She looked lost for a moment or two. “Oh, my, time is becoming so difficult. That was fifteen years ago. Fifteen.” She looked at her coffee cup, seemed surprised that it was still in her hands, and laid it down carefully on the table.
    “And Joe was Carl and Jonah’s father?” prompted Gurney.
    She nodded. “Joe’s dark side all went to Carl, and everything that was decent and reasonable went to Jonah. They say there’s some good and bad in all of us, but not in the case of the Spalter brothers. Jonah and Carl. An angel and a devil. I believe Joe saw that, and the way he tied them together as a condition for inheriting the business was his attempt at solving the problem. Maybe hoping for some kind of balance. Of course, it didn’t work.”
    Gurney sipped his coffee. “What happened?”
    “After Joe passed away, they went from being opposites to being enemies. They couldn’t agree on anything. All Carl was interested in was money, money, money—and he didn’t care how they made it. Jonah found the situation unbearable, and that’s when he set up the Cyberspace Cathedral and disappeared.”
    “Disappeared?”
    “Pretty much. You could reach him through the Cathedral website, but he had no real address. There was a rumor that he was always on the move, living in a motor home, managing the Cathedral project and everything else in his life by computer. When he made an appearance here in Long Falls for his mother’s funeral, that was the first time anyone had seen him in three years. And even then, we didn’t know he was coming. I believe he wanted to make a total break from everything connected with Carl.” She paused. “He might even have been afraid of Carl.”
    “Afraid?”
    Paulette leaned forward and picked up her coffee, holding it again in both hands. She cleared her throat. “I don’t say this lightly.
Carl Spalter had no conscience
. If he wanted something, I don’t think there would be any limit to what he might do.”
    “What’s the worst thing—”
    “The worst thing he ever did? I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. But I do know what he did to
me
—or what he
tried
to do to me.” Her eyes brightened with anger.
    “Tell me.”
    “My husband, Bob, and I had lived in this house for fifteen years, ever since he accepted his position here. The downstairs always served as the Willow Rest business office, and the little upstairs apartment went with