In other words, Keniston hoped that Griff was enough of a stooge, and sufficiently hung up on Keniston’s crazy daughter, to fall into an obvious trap. Which he proceeded to do with alacrity.
Next thing Griff knew, he was on an airplane, watching dawn break over the Atlantic, too excited to sleep. Memories of Kate washed over him like a delirium. It had been nearly four years since he’d been in her presence, but her face was etched in his mind. He couldn’t believe he would get to look at that face again, so soon. It was almost too much to contemplate. That whole first day, he wandered around Paris in a daze, letting the reflected light from the limestone buildings dazzle his eyes, stopping here and there for a coffee or a pastry to restore his flagging energy. He had her address in his pocket but he couldn’t bring himself to call on her yet. The anticipation of seeing Kate was so sweet that he didn’t want it to end. Plus, naturally, given the things Keniston had told him, Griff was afraid of what he might find.
The next day, Griff timed his visit for late afternoon, when he’d been told Kate would be alone in the apartment. She was living in Montmartre in a dump of a fifth-floor walk-up with that musician guy. Keniston must have had the detectives on them, because he knew all the details of their comings and goings. She answered the door herself, in jeans and a dirty T-shirt, looking like she’d just woken up.
“Griff? I can’t believe it. What are you doing here?” she said, but she looked happy to see him.
“Passing through on business,” he said, and mentioned the name of a mutual friend he’d been told she was in touch with by way of explaining how he’d gotten her address.
He was shocked at her appearance but careful to hide his reaction. She looked much worse than he’d imagined—emaciated frame, lank hair, shadows under her eyes. He glanced at her arms and thankfully didn’t see needle marks. That would’ve been too awful. Cocaine, yes, but heroin was a trailer-park drug, wrong for her. She wasn’t the Kate he remembered, but she was still recognizably herself. He almost loved her more like this. Maybe, finally, she needed him.
“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” he asked, when they were still making small talk at the door after a couple of minutes.
“The place is a wretched dump. I won’t inflict it on you.”
“Come out with me then. I saw a tabac on the corner. Let me buy you a coffee and we can gossip for a bit. I have an hour to kill before my next meeting.”
She hesitated.
“Come on, Kate. It’s not often I get to Paris.”
Griff had thought through his approach very carefully. He knew better than to tell her that her father was concerned and had asked him to come over, or that Griff had missed her terribly, or anything that placed her under any obligation. He smiled nonchalantly, and finally, she nodded.
“All right. Hold on a second,” she said.
She marched off to the next room, and came back a moment later covered up in dark sunglasses and a baggy jacket.
The tabac was dim inside, with a greasy tile floor and a couple of small tables crammed in a corner. They sat down at one, and his heart rolled over in his chest at the touch of her knees under the table. The place reeked of cigarette smoke. Kate smoked one cigarette after another, Marlboro reds. Griff cast his memory back but couldn’t recall a time when she’d had a tobacco habit like that. Another bad sign. He bought her a coffee laced with brandy. As she sipped it, spots of color returned to her cheeks and the tremor disappeared from her voice. He talked of trivial things that he knew would entertain her. The apartment he was having decorated, which friends would be in the Hamptons this summer, a boat show he’d been to with a cousin of a friend of Kate’s from Odell. He kept up the patter, which felt a bit like trying to lure a timid bird out of a tree.
“New York seems so far away,” she said wistfully. “I miss it.”
“Why not come back for a visit?”
“I can’t. I’ve been staying away.”
“Yes, I noticed. Why is that?” he asked.
“That trouble at the bridge freshman year. Don’t you remember?”
“That’s what’s keeping you in Europe? Not because you prefer it here?”
She nodded. “I’m afraid to go back.”
“Seriously? Why?”
She wouldn’t answer.
“Kate, I don’t know what happened that night, and I’m not asking you to tell me. But I’m certain that if you were in trouble over anything, they would have come after you by now.”
“Do you really think so?”
He watched the pulse beat in the hollow of her throat. He’d forgotten that pulse. He used to kiss it sometimes.
“I do,” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said, and shook her head miserably. “I can’t believe it would just go away.”
“Do you want to tell me what happened?” he asked, his voice gentle. “Maybe I could advise you better if I knew.”
She brought the coffee cup to her lips, then put it down again and stared into it. “Lucas died,” she said finally, in a tiny voice.
“I knew that. But it was a suicide. Right?”
She raised her eyes to meet his. He’d never seen her look so desperate before. Her hand on the table moved toward the pack of cigarettes, but before she reached it, he stopped it with his own.
“You can tell me anything. I would never think less of you,” Griff said.
“You should.”
“I won’t. What happened that night, Kate?”
She looked past his shoulder, to the bright outline of the door. He turned to follow her gaze, surprised to see daylight outside. In here, it felt like the depths of night.
“I don’t know what happened,” she said, in a dead tone. “I was out of my mind, I guess, from a lot of stuff. He broke up with me. I did too many lines, and my breathing got funny. Carlisle got to me. The fishbowl.”
“I know, I know.” He squeezed her hand tighter.
“Anyway,” she said, and fell silent, pressing her lips together.
Griff saw that was as much as he would ever get out of her about what happened at the bridge. It was enough to give him the picture. She’d killed the guy, basically, pushed him off the bridge. He’d suspected; now he knew. It bothered him somewhat. Not enough to change his feelings about her.
“What does your father say?” Griff asked.
“We don’t talk much. But one time recently, he said I should come home. That everything was quiet, was how he put it.”
“You should listen to him, Kate. I think you feel guilty, and that’s why you’re hesitating.”
“Shouldn’t I feel guilty?” she asked, meeting his eyes tentatively.
“Maybe you should. But not so much that you ruin your life. Everybody else has graduated and moved on.”
“Not Lucas.”
He shrugged. What could he say to that?
“I never paid for what I did,” Kate said.
“It seems to me that you’re paying very much. Look at you, look how thin you are.” He pulled her hand toward him, and circled her wrist with his fingers. “So thin. You’re killing yourself over this, slowly but surely. That won’t do anybody any good.”