I returned to my Audi, still parked in front of Merodie’s house. The car was broiling. The AC worked well but took time to cool the interior, so after I started the engine and turned the air-conditioning on full, I slid out of the car and shut the door behind me. While waiting for the Audi to become habitable, I glared at Merodie’s house. The stench of death was still in my nostrils, hair, and clothes and probably would be for some time to come.
I turned away from the house and looked across the lawn toward Mollie Pratt’s place. For a moment I thought I saw her watching me from behind her living room drapes, but then she disappeared.
5
Woodbury, located southeast of St. Paul, was nearly an hour’s drive from Anoka. Yet more than distance separated the two cities. Anoka was old, with a history and traditions that stretched back to 1680. Woodbury, on the other hand, was brand-spanking new—I had a Carl Yastrzemski autographed baseball that was older. It wasn’t even a city when Yaz won the Triple Crown in 1967, yet it was now home to over sixty thousand residents.
The private street where Priscilla St. Ana lived served a quintet of estates that somehow all bordered on different holes of the Prestwick Golf Course. Like most of Woodbury, the five houses looked like they had all been built yesterday. I parked in front of the one with red brick, white trim, and a slate gray roof set way back from the street, only a little more pretentious than its four neighbors. It reminded me of an Italian villa, or at least what I supposed an Italian villa to look like, having never actually seen one.
I hurried along the tile walkway to the front door of the estate—I couldn’t think of it as a house—and used the bell. A doughlike woman of indeterminate age answered. She was dressed in a fawn-colored uniform and demonstrated no emotion or interest when I announced that I had an appointment to meet Priscilla St. Ana. With a curt “Wait here,” she closed the door, leaving me outside with no way of looking in. She returned a few moments later with instructions.
“Follow me, please.”
I trailed the maid into the immense house, moving through sumptuous, decorator-perfect rooms that would have caused my father to faint dead away at the excess. ‘Course, my father was a man who used the same toaster for thirty years and believed the automatic icemaker that came with the refrigerator I bought when we moved to Falcon Heights was an unnecessary luxury. I told him that since I was now filthy, stinking rich I intended to surround him with a lot of unnecessary luxuries. He fought it every day of the six months he had left to live.
The maid guided me through French doors and onto a sprawling patio of red tile and salmon-colored marble that was surrounded by lush garden flowers, a low hedge, and several trees that couldn’t have been more than a few years old. In the center of the patio was a huge swimming pool, its walls and floor painted sky blue. Deck furniture of rich redwood with wide arms and lacquered patio furniture with thick cushions were mixed together and scattered around the pool in no discernible pattern.
I heard the thumping sound of a diving board and looked up just in time to see a young woman wearing a bright yellow one-piece swimsuit twisting, turning, somersaulting, straightening, and slicing into the water. An ice cube dropped into a tumbler of scotch made a bigger splash than she did.
Between the pool and the house was a round table with a glass top, an immense opened umbrella protruding from the center of it. On top of the table was a half-filled pitcher of fresh-squeezed orange juice and a single glass, also half filled. An enormous white towel was draped over one of the chairs. The maid stopped in the shadow of the umbrella and announced, “Ms. St. Ana will be with you in a moment.”
I sat down and watched the young woman climb out of the pool. She went back to the board and made another dive and then another and another. Not once did she acknowledge my presence. After her fifth dive, she used the ladder to pull herself out of the pool and walked to the table. She reached for the towel, moving close enough for me to see that her sun-drenched skin was flawless and to smell the chlorine in her fine auburn hair. I watched her use the towel to buff her body; the swimsuit stretched tight over taunt muscles and gentle curves.
She glanced at me with chocolate-colored eyes that glittered with intelligence.
“I’m Silk,” she said.
“Yes, you are.”
“You’re here to see Priscilla.”
It wasn’t a question, but I answered yes just the same.
She squeezed her long tresses between the folds of the towel, breathing lightly with the effort. Beyond question, she was a lovely girl, and she looked almost exactly like her mother had in the photograph I discovered in Merodie’s house—the one of Merodie holding an infant.