Before turning in to the Ashfords’ private drive, I called Lotty’s clinic nurse for any fresh news about Leydon. Jewel Kim put me on hold and returned to say that Leydon was still unresponsive but still able to breathe on her own. It was impossible to know how she was doing.
Ashford money, like Salanter money, had come originally from steel, although the Ashfords had been in the production, not the scrap, end of the business. At one time, Ashford mills stretched from Gary, Indiana, to the Canadian border, with a bunch of iron-ore mines tucked in here and there along the way.
I don’t know what they did for money now that the mills were closed, but they didn’t seem to be suffering. Trees, grass, flowers, shrubs were all well enough tended that the Parterre Club would have admitted the Ashfords on sight. I saw a dark-skinned man in an orange vest cleaning out the ornamental pond, while another was riding a mower around the three acres of lawn.
When I reached the house, a Lincoln Navigator was in the drive, but I didn’t see a BMW. That was a relief—Sewall was presumably downtown, doing whatever he did all day long; it was his wife I’d come to visit.
I didn’t know her well: we’d met at a handful of big events—her wedding to Sewall, and fund-raisers for that small circle of causes where our ideas of the worthwhile intersected. Lyric Opera was the only one I could think of.
A maid answered the front door. That was a change from the last time I’d been here—the elder Mrs. Ashford liked butlers. Perhaps women’s lib had reached the North Shore. The maid took my card and went to find Faith.
The house was built in two wings around a wide hall that led directly from the front door to a garden room and the grounds beyond. I watched the maid walk down the hall and out through the garden room. After a few minutes, Faith came hurrying toward me. She was wearing cutoffs and a dirty T-shirt, but she’d dropped a tool-filled apron and kicked off her clogs in the garden room.
“V. I. Warshawski. You were with Leydon in the church yesterday, Sewall told me. What a terrible ordeal. Sewall was very upset.” She looked at her dirty hands. “I’ve been staking up my dahlias and the weather is unforgiving. I know you and Leydon were—are—good friends. I hope you haven’t come here in person because there’s bad news?”
The dahlias and Leydon seemed to be vying for the front of her mind. “Leydon’s condition hasn’t changed, but she isn’t worse, which I guess is a good thing,” I said. “I came to find out what she was doing the last few months. Leydon hired me to make some inquiries for her, but she fell before she could give me any background and we hadn’t talked for a time.”
“Oh, my.” Faith pushed some sweaty wisps of hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand, leaving a dirty smear across her forehead. “I don’t know—we don’t see her that often. Sewall and she—and then, I suppose if you’ve known her a long time you know that sometimes she can be, well, a little unpredictable.”
“That’s a charitable way of putting it,” I said. “Leydon is the most brilliant person I’ve ever known, but I know how maddening she can be.”
Faith smiled gratefully. “Can you come out back with me? Mother Ashford will be as unforgiving as the weather if I stand here dropping dirt on the floor; this marble was imported from Carrara when they built the house in 1903 and she just about killed Terence—my eleven-year-old—when she caught him skateboarding on it.”
I followed her to the back of the house, to a large stone patio on the bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. Stairs led down to the beach, which was littered with water toys, including a small sailboat. A trio of boys was windsurfing twenty or thirty yards from shore; farther out we could see a phalanx of sailboats.
Dahlias of all colors and sizes filled the borders around the patio, and Faith looked at them wistfully before gesturing me to a wooden deck chair. She used a cell phone to ask the maid, or a maid, to bring us iced tea.
“Sewall mentioned that Leydon had left the hospital a week or so ago,” I said.
Faith nodded. “She has an apartment in Edgewater, but she was getting very wound up. One weekend she drew pictures on all the walls, not just in her own apartment but all over the halls. She wouldn’t stop, she wouldn’t take her medication. In the end the building manager called Sewall and he got the police to take her to Ruhetal.”
Ruhetal was a state mental hospital in Downers Grove, one of the suburbs west of Chicago. It annoyed me that Sewall wouldn’t use Leydon’s own money to get her private care, but I tried to put the feelings aside.
“I don’t suppose you know what the pictures were about?”
Faith looked again at her flowers, and a wagon filled with stakes and twine. “No, I never went down there and if the manager described them to Sewall, he never said. You don’t think they were valuable, I mean, you don’t think they were real art, do you? We had to pay to have them painted over!”