In the kitchen, I pulled on the latex gloves, picked up the Maker’s Mark at the base with my thumb and forefinger and slipped it into the clean plastic bags. The whole package went into my briefcase.
On my way out, I stopped to look up at the poster of Kylie Ballantine in the stairwell. “What could you tell me?” I demanded. “Were you Calvin Bayard’s lover? Were you Augustus Llewellyn’s? What secret do those New Solway people care about so much that they killed your young champion to protect it?”
The vital silhouette floated above me-above all the petty concerns of the people she had known. Kylie Ballantine had moved on, had not let her life be mired in the bitterness the McCarthy era had generated. She had struggled financially, but unlike that crew of wealthy people, she had shrugged off the wounds of those turbulent times. Even if she’d known hardship, Ballantine had been fortunate to die with her powers intact, her spirit strong. Unlike Calvin Bayard, whose mind once overmatched Olin Taverner’s, and now was happy to watch the cook boil milk.
My fingers clenched on the handle of my case. I started toward the front door, trying to make myself think about the best way to deliver the Maker’s Mark to Cheviot Labs, but the image persisted: urine masked by talcum, Calvin’s nurse shepherding him toward the kitchen.
My hand was on the front doorknob when I stopped. The house around me was quiet as death. The nurse, Theresa Jakes. Who had seizures, Catherine Bayard told me; Granny mustn’t know about them.
I hadn’t wondered where the phenobarb had come from. But there it was, right out in New Solway where Theresa took it to control her own seizures. Where Ruth Lantner, the housekeeper, threatened to tell Renee about them if Theresa slept through Calvin’s wanderings again.
I turned around and walked back to stare again at the poster. Nothing happened at New Solway that Renee didn’t know about. Even if Ruth Lantner hadn’t told her about Theresa’s seizures, Renee would have found out somehow. Renee exulted in her organizational skills: during the day she juggled details of a mammoth commercial enterprise; at night she stayed effortlessly on top of a major domestic one.
If she had killed Marc, it would have been to protect Calvin’s reputation. But Calvin didn’t need protecting. He was the man who had stood up when few people would, who had confronted Taverner and Bushnell and walked away.
Fragments of conversations passed through my head. They turned on each other like rats in a proverbial barrel, Augustus Llewellyn said last night. Pelletier’s Boy Wonder, skimming the cream from Pelletier’s work, from Pelletier’s love life.
Who had sent Taverner that picture of Kylie and told him where it had been taken? Who wanted people to give money to ComThought’s legal defense fund without coming forward himself? What had Llewellyn done to get that money from Bayard? Taverner had kept a dastardly secret about Calvin Bayard, only because Bayard knew one just as bad about Taverner. That truth had been staring me in the face for days. I just hadn’t wanted to see it.
Not about the hero of my youth. Not Calvin. Not, not. My knees buckled. I collapsed on the stairs.
CHAPTER 49
Terrorist on the Runor in an SUV
I sat under Kylie’s picture a long time. Someone else might have access to phenobarbital-it was a common drug, it didn’t have to have come from the Bayards. It didn’t have to be Renee who used it to dope Marc’s whisky-it could have been Theresa Jakes herself, or Ruth Lantner. Ruth Lantner could have had the necessary strength to push Marc into that pond if he was close to death already. But she had no reason to do so.
What about Edwards Bayard, determined to protect Olin Taverner’s memory? After all, it was Edwards who had broken into Olin’s apartment last week, Edwards who held a grudge against his parents, who was desperate to establish some kind of ascendancy over those two strong personalities.
The cold in the hallway was getting into my bones and making my sore shoulder ache. I wanted it to be Llewellyn or Edwards, rather than Renee -I liked her, I didn’t like her son. But the truth, oh the truth, was—if Calvin Bayard had done-had done things I didn’t want to say, even in the silent space of my own mind-I couldn’t bear it. He had done much that was good. Didn’t that count?
If Renee had killed Marcus Whitby, she’d done it to keep the world from knowing her husband had betrayed Kylie Ballantine. Couldn’t I let it go, to keep Calvin’s reputation intact? In these times, any whiff of wrong