I can’t help it. I whistle. “John made a $1.7 million down payment?”
“Yes,” she says. “He wanted the mortgage to be manageable in case anything ever happened to him.”
“Well, is it?” I ask.
She avoids my eyes. “Pretty much,” she says, but I’m thinking that accountants, even in Silicon Valley, don’t end up at the high end of the wage scale.
I admit to being fascinated with money. Well, not for money itself, but how people acquire and spend it. Having so little myself, I’m always wondering about this when I see people driving expensive new cars or dining in the pricey restaurants that line the streets in Palo Alto. Or how they afford those houses, for that matter. According to a local realtor I’d buttonholed at a party, the tiny house Peter and I squeeze into would sell for a cool million. Of course, no one would actually buy it to live there. It’s what they call a “scrapper” in these parts, and Peter and I dread the day our landlady tells us she’s cashing out.
“I know you’re on shaky ground,” I tell MJ. She looks startled, so I add, “legally.” She sighs deeply. “Deborah could conceivably claim this house as a part of John’s estate that she’s entitled to.”
“I’ve consulted a lawyer. Deborah would have to sue me in civil court. She’s assured me she won’t go to the trouble,” says MJ.
“Why not? $1.7 million plus whatever equity has accrued in the past five years is a lot of money,” I say.
MJ shrugs. She looks unhappy. “I think she sympathizes with me. I think she knows that my life is shattered enough,” MJ says. “I couldn’t give this up.” This being the garden. Of course she couldn’t. But somehow I don’t see Deborah as an altruistic benefactor. I wonder what her game is.
“I mean, I’d just die going back to a small townhouse or apartment,” she says. “For the first time in my life I have a real home. This means everything to me.”
So she would die for it.
Would she kill for it?
I bring out Claire’s photograph. She shakes her head and waits for me to explain.
I quail a little inside, but start.
“We have reason to believe that Dr. Taylor intended to marry this young woman, and . . . separate . . . from the rest of you. Start a clean slate with a new wife. A real wife, like Deborah was.”
A long pause.
MJ stares at me, her face impassive. “Well?” she asks.
“Do you understand what I’ve just said? Dr. Taylor intended to leave you. All of you. Supposedly he was planning to break the news on May 11, the day after he was killed. He never got the chance.”
MJ surprises me. Deborah had greeted the news with her usual reserve and stateliness. Frankly, I expected histrionics from MJ. Instead, something crystalizes in her, right in front of my eyes. Is she sitting up straighter? Looking at me more directly? Tensing her jaw? Whatever it is, I honestly have no clue whether MJ had known about Claire. She isn’t descending into hopelessness or panic. She isn’t falling apart, as I would have expected. Rather, she appears resolute. As if she’s preparing to fight a battle.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I ask her. But she’s shut down, as if she’s closed the door on old adversaries, of which I am one.
MJ begins pulling the flowering buds from the basil plants clumped at the base of the bench. She does so with expert hands, as if snapping off little green heads. A deft assassin, I think, and suddenly feel uncertain. The afternoon is still. No noise except for the drone of bees. The butterflies flitter silently around us. We’re so far from main roads I don’t even hear any traffic noise. I can’t remember the last time I’d been in a place without the hum of cars. I see certain possibilities in MJ that I hadn’t before. A ruthless hardening within. She snaps off another bud and I think again, assassin.
“Why should this change anything for me?” she finally says, not looking up. “He’d already gone and married someone else, so I was already betrayed once. Why does another betrayal matter?
“It is different,” I say. “With Helen, he had no plans to leave you. You still had your life together, your house, your garden. But if he’d gone through with marrying Claire Fanning, you could have been left with nothing.”
“You’re saying I have a motive for killing my husband,” she says, and the air is so charged I actually find myself wondering whether I ‘d put my gun on that morning. Then I think, crazy.
“Yes,” I say. I see now that any warmth I felt toward MJ was just stupid me wanting to be liked. We are opponents, have been from the start.
“You have my alibi. I assume you’ve confirmed it,” she says.
“Yes, but . . .” I hesitate, knowing that what I’m about to say might be even more unwelcome than the news about Dr. Fanning.
“But my brother has none, right?”
“How did you know?”