She could just vanish. All she needed was a place to stay, and to make certain that nobody ever recognized her. Then she could commit the murder whenever it suited her.
I mean, there’s no better alibi than being dead, is there?
Chapter Twenty-seven
ALTHOUGH I MET Ben and Marcie for dinner the following night, I said nothing to Ben about my newly minted theory – I wanted to keep turning it over in my mind like some complex architectural model to see if it held together.
In return for Marcie’s home-cooked meals I had invited them to Nobu and, somewhere between the shrimp tempura and the yellowtail, I did, however, mention that I had changed my mind – I would be happy to take part in the seminar.
They both stared at me. It was Marcie who spoke first. ‘Let me guess, you’ve found Jesus too?’
I smiled, but – men being men – there was no way I was going to embarrass either myself or Bradley by talking about the shrine I had seen at Ground Zero and the emotions I had experienced when I read about his bravery.
‘Maybe it’s being home again,’ I said. ‘But I think it’s time to give something back to the community.’
Bradley almost choked on his sake. He and Marcie exchanged a glance. ‘That’s wonderful,’ Bradley said. ‘Why not join Neighbourhood Watch too? Just out of curiosity – any chance of telling us the real reason?’
‘Not really,’ I replied, smiling back, thinking quietly about the sixty-seven floors and the fact that the man in the wheelchair, to judge by his photo, was a heavy-set guy.
The silence stretched on, and at last Marcie realized I had no intention of explaining any more and she launched into a new subject. ‘Have you thought about going back to your childhood home?’ she asked.
Surprise changed sides. I stared at her like she was crazy. ‘Greenwich, you mean? What – press the intercom and ask the corporate raider if I could take a look around?’
‘You can try that if you like, but having met him, I don’t think it’ll work,’ she said. ‘I just thought you might have seen the bit in New York magazine.’
I lowered my glass of water and looked a question at her.
‘A local garden society is showing the grounds to raise money for charity,’ she explained. ‘If you’re interested, Ben and I would be happy to go with you.’
My mind was spinning – go back to Greenwich? – but I didn’t pause. ‘No, but thanks. It’s just a house, Marcie – it doesn’t mean anything to me. It was all a long time ago.’
Naturally, as soon as we had separated after dinner, I bought a copy of the magazine and, the next day, I called the Connecticut Horticultural Society and purchased a ticket.
Bill would have loved it. ‘Two hundred dollars to see a few trees? What’s wrong with Central Park?’
It was a glorious Saturday morning, the sun climbing in a cloudless sky, as I wound through Connecticut’s leafy avenues. I could have told the cab to take me up the drive to the front of the house, but I wanted to walk – I figured it would be best to give the memories a chance to breathe. The huge wrought-iron gates were open and I gave my ticket to an old lady with a rosette and stepped into the past.
It was amazing how little had changed in twenty years. The sycamores still formed a canopy over the pea-gravel drive, the European beeches continued to add depth to the hillsides and in their cool glades the rhododendrons were as beautiful as ever. Halfway up the drive there was a break in the foliage, designed to give visitors their first view of the house. If it was meant to shock, it never failed.
I paused and looked again at Avalon. It stood in the distance, its facade reflected in the broad waters of the ornamental lake. Bill’s grandfather had gone to England in the 1920s and stayed with the Astors at Cliveden, their stunning Italianate pile on the Thames. He returned with dozens of photos, showed them to his architect, and told him to ‘build something like that, only more beautiful’.
The house was finished six months before the Crash. Along with Marjorie Merriweather Post’s Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, it was the last of the great American mansions of the twentieth century.
My eye tracked along its walls of Indiana limestone, aglow in the morning light, and found the three tall windows at the northern end. It was my bedroom and maybe you can imagine how a room like that felt to a kid from my part of Detroit. The memory of those frightening days carried my eyes down to the lake where I had spent so much time walking alone.
Under a row of pin oaks I saw the grass promontory from which, years later, Bill taught me to sail. As a child he had spent his summers in Newport and fell in love with the twelve-metre yachts which competed for the America’s Cup. One day he came home with scale models of two of the greatest boats ever to have had keels laid down. Australia II and Stars and Stripes were over five feet long, their sails and rudders remote-controlled, driven only by the wind and the skill of the operator. God knows how much they cost.
I can still see the madman now, sprinting down the lake, trimming his sails, trying to cover my wind and beat me around every buoy. Only when I had defeated him three times in a row did he take me out on Long Island Sound and teach me the real thing in a two-man dinghy.
I don’t think I’m a boastful person, so maybe you will trust me when I say that sailing was the one thing for which I had a natural gift. Apart from deceit, of course. So much so that one Saturday, sitting on the upturned hull, Bill told me he thought I had a chance of going to the Olympics.
Knowing I always kept myself apart from others, he had the good sense to suggest one of the solo classes – a Laser – and worked hard with me every weekend. It didn’t matter in the end – when I was about sixteen, lost and angry about life, having nothing else to rebel against, I gave it up. I told him I wasn’t going to sail again, and I thought in my naivety and cruelty that the look of disappointment on his face was some form of victory. A hundred times I must have thought of ways to take it back, but I wasn’t smart enough to understand that an apology is a sign of strength, not weakness, and the opportunity vanished with the summer.
As I stood on the drive after so many years and looked at the lake again, I realized why I had come back. He was dead but I wanted to talk to him.
I made my way up to the old house. Marquees for the silver-service lunch stood on the lawns and the doors into the house were roped off – only committee members and VIP guests with passes were making it past the security guards. Getting inside might have presented a problem for even a highly trained agent, but not to someone who had spent their childhood in the house.
At the back of the service buildings I found the door into a gardeners’ change room had been left unlocked, moved through it quickly and entered the cavernous garage.
On the wall on the far side, I reached above a set of workshop shelves and hit a button hidden under a row of power sockets. A section of the shelves creaked open – an underground passage led into the house. Built by Bill’s father, ostensibly to access the garage in icy weather, its real purpose was far different.
According to the old housekeeper, the colonel – having conquered Europe with the Sixth Army – came home and launched a similar campaign with the maids. He established his headquarters on the daybed in his study, a room which offered a long view of the drive and gave that week’s subject plenty of time to get herself dressed, head down the passage and into the garage before the colonel’s wife reached the front door. The housekeeper always said the plan was so good her boss should have made General.
I paused in the passage and listened for any sound from the study. Nothing, so I turned the handle and stepped through the door concealed in the room’s antique panelling.
Grace would have had a coronary. Gone were her priceless English antiques and the Versailles parquetry, replaced by plaid couches and a tartan carpet. Over the old fireplace, acquired from some chateau, where her finest Canaletto had once hung, was a portrait of the owner and his family, staring at some far-off point as if they had just discovered the Ne
w World. The only possible improvement would have been if it were painted on black velvet.
Ignoring their heroic gaze, I crossed the room and opened the door into the entrance hall. I heard voices – all the good and the great were congregating in the formal living rooms – but the two gorillas at the front door had their backs to the interior, so they didn’t see me head up the stairs. At the top, it was one of those moments.
The raider hadn’t turned his decorator loose on the first floor, so the years promptly fell away and my childhood was all around me. I walked down the beautiful corridor – I think I said it was the quietest house I had ever known – and opened the door at the north end.
The layout of the rooms was unchanged, the weight of the past almost palpable – a large sitting room, a bathroom, walk-in closets and a bedroom overlooking the woodland. There were a dozen other similar suites in the house, and it was obvious the raider’s family had never used this one.
I stood silently for minutes without end, just remembering, until at last I perched on the bed and looked at a seat built into a bay window. Whenever Bill came to talk, he always sat there, his face framed against the copper-beech trees in the woods behind. Slowly I let the focus of my vision blur, and I swear it was as if I could see him again.
In my heart, I told him all the things I had never been able to say in life. I said he had cared for me when he’d had no obligation of blood or friendship to do so and I told him that, to my mind, if there was a heaven, there would always be a place for someone who did that for a child. I confessed that whatever good was in me came from him but the acres of darkness were all my own, and I told him that he was forever in my thoughts and there wasn’t a day went by when I didn’t wish I could go sailing again to make him proud. I asked for his forgiveness for not being the son he had so desperately wanted and, after that, I sat in stillness.
If anybody had walked in and seen me with my head bowed they would have thought I was praying, and I must have stayed like that for a long time because the thing that stirred me was the sound of a violin. The two hundred dollars had bought not only the silver service lunch but an accompaniment by a chamber ensemble, and I guessed everybody was starting to head into the tents. I stood up, took one last look at my past and headed for the door.
Chapter Twenty-eight
I CAME DOWN the stairs and was halfway across the foyer, twenty feet from the front door and freedom, when I heard her. ‘Scott …? Scott Murdoch? Is that you?’
The voice was familiar, but I couldn’t put a face to it. I kept walking – another few paces and I would be safe, swept up in a crowd approaching the exit. Four paces now. Three—
Her hand caught hold of my elbow and brought me to a stop. ‘Scott – didn’t you hear me?’
I turned and recognized her. She was wearing the purple rosette of a committee member and I realized I should have known she would be there – she had always loved gardens. It was the one thing she and Grace had in common and it was the primary reason for their friendship.
‘Oh, hello, Mrs Corcoran,’ I said, smiling as best I could. She happened to be Dexter’s mother, the creep who had been on the Caulfield squash team with me, and I had suffered through any number of team-building events at her house.
‘I can’t believe it’s you. What are you doing here?’ she said.
‘You know – just looking around … for old times’ sake,’ I replied. Her eyes flicked across my jacket and failed to find the identity tag that would have given me entry. I could tell she was desperate to ask how the hell I had got past security, but she decided to let it ride.
‘Walk me to lunch,’ she said, linking arms with me. ‘We’ll catch up on everything, then I’ll introduce you to the owner. Delightful man.’ Her voice dropped conspiratorially. ‘Nothing he doesn’t know about the markets.’
But I didn’t move, an edge to my voice. ‘No, I was just leaving, Mrs Corcoran – I’ve seen everything I wanted to.’ She looked at me, and I think in that instant she realized the visit had meant something important to me.
She smiled. ‘You’re right. Silly of me. Forget the owner – he’s an awful man, to be honest. The wife’s even worse – fancies herself as a decorator.’ Her laugh had always been brittle, like a glass breaking, and it hadn’t altered.
She took a step back and ran her eye up and down. ‘You look well, Scott – the years have been good to you.’
‘You too,’ I said, shaking my head in fake wonder. ‘You’ve barely changed.’ I couldn’t believe I was saying it, but she nodded happily – flattery and delusion were part of the air she breathed.
We continued to look at each other for an awkward moment, neither of us quite sure what to say next. ‘How’s Dexter?’ I asked, just to get over the hurdle.
A shadow of confusion fell across the tightly drawn skin of her face. ‘That’s strange. Grace said she wrote to you about it.’
I had no idea what she meant. ‘I didn’t have any contact with Grace for years. Wrote to me about what?’
‘That’d be Grace,’ she said, doing her best to smile. ‘Not interested unless it was about her. Dexter’s dead, Scott.’
For a moment I couldn’t get the gears to mesh: he was a strong guy – always sneering at people – but still, dead? That was a bit extreme. Because I was an outsider who never spoke to anyone and he was loathed, the rest of the squash team always made sure we were paired together and, more than anyone, I had to endure his racquet-throwing and taunts.
His mother was watching my face, and I was thankful I didn’t have to fake it – I was genuinely shocked. She herself was fighting to blink back the tears – no easy thing given how much skin the plastic surgeons had cut away over the years.
‘I asked Grace to tell you, because I knew how tight you two were,’ she said. ‘He was always saying how often you would go to him for advice, not just on the court either.’
Corcoran said what? I would have rather gone to Bart Simpson for advice. Jesus Christ.
‘We can be honest now, Scott – you didn’t belong, did you? Dexter said that’s why he always stepped forward to partner you – he didn’t want you to feel like you were excluded. He was always very thoughtful like that.’
I nodded quietly. ‘That was a part of Dexter a lot of people didn’t see,’ I said. I mean, what else could I do – he was her only child, for God’s sake. ‘What happened?’
‘He drowned – he was at the beach house by himself and went for a swim one night.’
I knew the stretch of beach – it was dangerous even in daylight; nobody in their right mind would go swimming there in the dark. Fragments of things I had heard drifted back – he had flunked out of law school, ugly stories about hard drinking, time spent at a rehab clinic in Utah.
‘Of course there were spiteful rumours,’ his mother said. ‘You know what people are like – but the coroner and the police both agreed it was an accident.’
I remembered his grandfather had been a prominent judge – on the Supreme Court – and I figured somebody had put the fix in. If there was a note in the house I suppose it was handed privately to his parents and they destroyed it.
I’ve had too much experience of death for someone my age but even that couldn’t inoculate me. I always thought it would be me, but Corcoran – the dumb sonofabitch – was the first of my class to pass from this world, and it must have taken the colour from my face.
‘You’re pale,’ Mrs Corcoran said, touching my arm to comfort me. ‘I shouldn’t have said it so directly but, Scott, I don’t know any correct—’
She was swallowing hard and I thought she was going to cry but, thankfully, she didn’t. Instead she forced herself to brighten. ‘And what about you – still in the art business?’
Grief hadn’t unhinged her – that was the legend I had created for friends and family when I first went into the field for The Division. Legally, nobody was allowed to know of the agency’s existence, so I had spent months crafting my cover story before the Direc
tor finally signed off on it.
Arriving at Avalon unannounced one Sunday, I told Grace and Bill over lunch that I was sick of Rand, sick of research, sick of psychology itself. I said the greatest thing the two of them had given me was an interest in art and, as a result, I was leaving Rand to start a business dealing in early twentieth-century European paintings, basing myself in Berlin.
As legends went, if I do say so myself, it was good – it allowed me to travel anywhere in Europe for my real work and at the same time provided a reason to lose contact with my former acquaintances until I was virtually forgotten. And, obviously, it had been believable – here I was, so many years later, listening to a woman who had been a friend of Bill and Grace asking me about the art racket.
I smiled. ‘Yes, still chasing canvases, Mrs Corcoran – still squeezing out a living.’
She looked from my cashmere sweater down to my expensive loafers, and I realized my mistake – out of deference to Bill’s memory I had dressed up for the occasion.
‘I suspect more than squeezing,’ she said, eyes narrowing.
I didn’t want her to think my fictitious business was successful, or else people might start asking why they had never heard of it, so I took the almost revolutionary step of telling the truth. ‘I was lucky,’ I said. ‘Maybe you already know – Grace left me some money.’
She paused. ‘I would have bet everything I owned against that,’ she said softly.
‘Yeah, she could be pretty aloof,’ I replied, ‘but underneath I suppose she must have felt something.’
‘Obligation, if you ask me,’ she replied tartly. ‘They’re dead now, so I don’t suppose it matters – Grace never wanted you, Scott, not even from the beginning.’
Whatever difficulties I’d had with my stepmother, I had never expected to hear it put so bluntly. I wondered if Mrs Corcoran was exaggerating, and a look of doubt must have crossed my face.