I sat in my car, shaking. When I was a student I had daydreamed about being held in Calvin Bayard’s arms. The nightmarish way my old fantasy had come true made me sick to my stomach. The man who’d stood up so valiantly to the Walker Bushnells and Olin Taverners of America now derived pleasure from watching the cook boil milk. It was too much. I couldn’t bear it.
My eye caught a movement at one of the front windows. Ruth waiting for me to leave. I found a bottle of water in the backseat and drank it down. Not the pint of rye Philip Marlowe would have used, but it steadied me just the same.
I drove slowly down Coverdale Lane. At Larchmont Hall, I pulled in through the gates, trying to regain my composure. In the twilight, the whitewashed brick looked more than ever like the prop to a Gothic novel. But my Gothic ideas about why Renee Bayard had dug a moat around her husband were wrong: she merely didn’t want people to know he had Alzheimer’s.
Maybe Calvin really had somehow gotten hold of a key to Larchmont Hall. Maybe he did wander over there, and Catherine really did follow him-and was protecting him and the family secret. But why keep it a secret? Was it Renee’s own pain he couldn’t bear her husband’s diminishment and
didn’t want the world to know? Or were there majority publishers at Bayard who only let Renee hold the CEO spot because they thought Calvin was guiding the reins behind scenes? I couldn’t make sense of it.
I got out of the car and walked up the drive to the pond. I couldn’t see much in the growing dusk, but the sheriff’s deputies hadn’t treated this like a crime scene. No tape, no signs of any investigation. Only the scarring along the grass where I’d dragged Marcus Whitby’s body showed that anyone had been here.
I looked at the water in distaste. The dead carp was starting to bloat. I’d come back tomorrow with a wet suit and crawl along the bottom, in case Whitby’s keys, or some other personal item, had fallen out of his pockets, but I wouldn’t enjoy doing it.
I got in my car and continued down Coverdale to Dirksen. It wasn’t until I found myself staring at the pink brick of Geraldine Graham’s condo that I realized I’d headed away from the tollway. Darraugh had asked me to drop the investigation, so I was dropping it-but it would be rude not to pay a farewell visit to his mother.
The guard at Anodyne Park’s entrance approved my admittance. This time, the maid Ms. Graham had imported from Larchmont Hall let me into the apartment. She took my jacket, then asked me to wait in the entryway while she checked with “Madam.” A comedown from my wait at the Bayard mansion-not even a chair, let alone a view of the woods. There was a painting, a small piece, soft pinks and greens that resolved itself into a mountainscape as I examined it.
The maid returned and escorted me out to the sitting room, where Ms. Graham sat drinking coffee from an elaborate service. Perhaps when her maid was with her she couldn’t escape her mother’s rituals. I began to understand why she might relish living alone in her great age.
“That will be all, Lisa.” Ms. Graham dismissed the maid and looked at me over the rim of her coffee cup. “So, young woman, you won’t come when I send for you, but you do show up unannounced on your own whim?”
“Darraugh told me to stop the investigation into your old home. Did you know that?”
“He phoned this morning to tell me.” She bit off the words.
“Did he explain why?” I walked over to the sideboard and poured myself a cup from the Crown Derby pot.
“He’s always disliked Larchmont enough not to want to invest energy in its care. I think he suspects I made up lights in the attic as a way of forcing him to pay attention to the place. Or maybe to force him to attend to me.”
The bitterness in her fluty voice made me ask, “Why didn’t Darraugh want to keep it? Was it unpleasant for him, growing up there?”
She gave me what I was starting to think of as her Queen Victoria look: subjects will remember that they cannot interrogate the monarch. After a moment, she said stiffly, “Darraugh has never enjoyed country life.”
My eyebrows went up. “He had to spend his boyhood getting up to slop the pigs, which gave him a lasting disgust for the sights and smells of the country?”
“You’re impertinent, young woman.”