“We didn’t ask him much about Drayton himself,” she observed.
“I think Ms. Blessant will be able to tell us what we wish to know.”
“The grieving widow?”
“She isn’t a widow, and for all we know, she may not be grieving.”
“The insurance policies speak for themselves. So might the will. A hundred thousand dollars that doesn’t go to some frou-frou museum might end up lining her pockets instead.”
Khattak grinned. “Newhall said they weren’t going to take the money.”
“I’m thinking given Drayton’s Barbie doll taste in women, maybe Newhall’s real beef is that Drayton didn’t waste much time on him. He may have focused a little more on the lady with the strange name. Mink something. Maybe she had plans for the museum that Newhall didn’t know about. Maybe the blessed Blessant wanted to put a stop to that.”
Khattak looked at her, his cat-eyes shrewd. “So you’re no longer proceeding on the accident theory.”
“Murder, murder everywhere,” she replied airily. She could smell the freshness of the lake in the air. They had arrived at Ayre Point, a street that was bordered on one side by a park, its shade trees spread wide in stately indifference. Bluffs, park, forest, and lake made it splendor to splendor without the people and their crumbling homes.
Ayre Point consisted of a succession of 1970s-style houses: bricked-up bungalows with low roofs and small front yards, vans and pickup trucks serving as one wing of a crowded assembly. Rachel smoothed down her slacks, tweaked the lapels of her jacket. Remembering last night, she’d abandoned her ponytail, content to brush her sleek hair down her shoulders. Nothing could be done with it, and not for lack of trying. It was like Asian hair minus the silky gloss. She’d secured her side part with one of her mother’s gold hair slides, a fact that made her self-conscious when she thought of her no-nonsense hockey team. She shrugged it off. Melanie Blessant wasn’t going to bother about her. Not once she got a look at Khattak, who epitomized the female holy grail of tall, dark, and handsome, if you subtracted a certain ascetic quality.
Nobody likes a preacher boy. She chuckled to herself. Whether he was saint or sinner, she didn’t know. His private life was difficult to read. What was far more explicit was the reaction of every woman who came within his radius. Although why she was so sensitive to it was a quality she preferred not to examine in herself.
Melanie Blessant’s house was at the corner, its green roof steeply sloped over an exterior of dust-colored brick. Cement slabs piled on top of each other provided access to a front door. Telephone wires and a giant fir tree blocked any view afforded by the bay window that fronted the street. Maples covered the rest of the space.
Straddling a pair of lawn chairs on the neatly mown front yard were two teenage girls. They were sipping lemonade, dressed in the teen uniform of blue jeans and jerseys. One was listening to her iPod. The other was reading a book.
Rachel checked her watch. They should have been in school.
Khattak showed his identification, greeted them politely, and asked for the woman he assumed was their mother.
“Mad Mel’s not here right now,” the older girl informed them, setting aside her book.
Rachel took a closer look at them. These were the girls from the photograph on Drayton’s desk, so much alike in appearance that they had to be sisters. They were tawny-haired and bright-eyed, with the clean young limbs of saplings. The younger girl removed her earphones, her face as clear as the cup of a lily rising on its stem.
“Don’t call Mum that, Hadley,” she scolded without heat. The face she turned to the older girl bore the kind of warmth that Rachel had long since ceased to expect of siblings. The girl tugged her sister up from her lawn chair and extended her hand in a mimicry of adult courtesy. Khattak shook it gravely.
“I’m Cassidy Blessant and this is my sister, Hadley. Our mum won’t be home until later this afternoon.”
“Would you happen to know where she went?”
“She’s in her natural habitat,” Hadley drawled. “Getting closer to Chris in death than he’d ever let her in life.”
“Hadley!” The younger girl’s face fell. Spoonfuls of light that leaked through the trees splashed across her clear complexion.
Hadley shrugged. “It’s true. You may not like it, God knows I don’t, but that is in fact what our dear, devoted mother is doing. Going through Christopher’s things as we speak, hoping to dig up one final, pricey bauble.”
“You’re referring to Christopher Drayton, the man who fell to his death from the Bluffs?” Khattak asked the question gently.
Cassidy’s face clouded in response. “Mum’s really upset about it. They were in love. They were going to get married and we were all going to live in Christopher’s house.”
Her childlike manner of expressing herself coupled with the wistfulness in her voice made Rachel appreciate that she was a child. At most, a very young thirteen.
“Bull.” Hadley contradicted her without compunction. “Chris didn’t want that crazy wedding and I never had any intention of leaving Dad. If Mel had ever shacked up with him, I’d have gone to Dad in a flash.”
Cassidy bit her lip. “Chris was really good to us, Hadley. You said you loved your Italian lessons with him. He was nice to us. We had our own rooms whenever we stayed over.”
“Did it ever occur to you that he wanted something in return? Like Mel at his beck and call? She wouldn’t have been much use to him if she’d had to come home to us every night. And if she abandoned us, as she obviously wanted to, there’d be no reason left for us not to go to Dad.”
“I don’t want to go to Dad. I loved it with Mum and Chris.”
Her lip trembled and Rachel felt a pang of compunction. They had let the dialogue between the sisters play out because it was more revealing than anything they could have asked, but Cassidy was too young to face up to Hadley’s brutal truths. If, in fact, any of it was the truth.
“Where is your father?” she asked, curious.
“Our parents are divorced,” Hadley said bluntly. “We’re the prize they fight over to make each other miserable. Or at least, Mel makes our dad miserable, since he’s the one who actually cares about us. Mel only wanted custody for one reason. She keeps us for the money. My dad has a lot of it.”
Her attention switched beyond them to a boy on the other side of the street. She shook her head at him. It was a small movement that Rachel caught. She was warning him off. The boy didn’t appear to notice. He was dressed with considerable panache in slim-fitting jeans that tapered down to his ankles and a loose shirt with its sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Beneath the long-sleeved shirt was a blue Dr. Who T-shirt that bore the legend, Time Travel, It’s Easier by Blue Box. The hair that fell forward across his brow had been styled with close attention. He crossed the street toward them, and once he brushed past her, Rachel caught the unmistakable tang of marijuana on his clothes.
“These are cops,” Hadley said, her voice fierce. “They’re looking for Mel.”
The boy ignored her, genially tugging at Cassidy’s red-gold hair. “What’s up, Goldilocks? You look like someone’s stolen your porridge.”
She responded at once, her face lighting up. “Hadley’s being mean about Mum. Make her stop, Riv.”
Rachel liked his aura of emo-chic, but she really hoped that the name he presented to the world wasn’t some hippie-go-lucky version of River.
It was a hope dashed. He extended his hand, looking up at her from under his sideswept bangs, through meltingly long eyelashes. “Marco River,” he said. “Most people call me Riv.”
He really did belong in a boy band, Rachel thought, suppressing a grin. “That’s a great name,” she said. His smile in response was good-natured.
“My parents call me Marco, of course. So does Mink—but you know how it goes with the kids.” He shrugged one arm over Hadley’s shoulders, the other over Cassidy’s. Both girls seemed to relax in his presence.
Ra
chel couldn’t decide if she was more disarmed by his candid blue eyes or his casual charm.
“Hadley’s my girlfriend but Cassie’s my best girl,” he went on.
Apparently, smoking pot made one loquacious.
“Mink Norman?” Khattak asked. “Do you know her?”
The sharpness of the question didn’t faze him.
“Sure. We all do. Hadley and Cass have summer jobs at the museum, and Mink lets me hang around if I’m useful.” He grinned at the girls. “Which as anyone will tell you, I am.”
“I imagine so.” Even saying it, Rachel felt a hundred years old. This good-looking boy, like all men of varying sizes, ages, and temperaments, had probably dismissed her already, but he was somehow managing to be generous with his charm. His easy smile encompassed her along with the girls.
She waited to see if there was anything else Khattak chose to ask.
“The Andalusia Museum,” he said. “The same one Christopher Drayton took such an interest in.” He made it a statement, the kind he often used as a fishing line.
“Ringsong,” Hadley corrected sharply. “It’s named after the great Andalusian poetic tradition, a blending of cultures and faiths, the holy and the vernacular.”
“She writes the descriptions for the exhibits,” River said drily. “That’s why she talks like that.”
Rachel couldn’t resist. She smiled back at him, liking his sense of humor. It was a cheerful teasing absent of mockery. Hadley poked him in the ribs.
“Is that all you wanted to know?” she asked Khattak. “Do you need to know where Chris’s house is?”
“We’ve been there, thank you. I apologize if we’ve disturbed you.”
“Wait,” she said. “Why are you looking for Mel? Why did you want to know about Chris? He was nice to everyone,” she added, reluctantly.
Cassidy reached out and squeezed her sister’s hand. “He really was nice,” she confided. “It’s too bad for Mum. He made her so happy.”
Hadley might have said otherwise, Rachel thought, but she was not as abrasive a sibling as she’d seemed at first. Or perhaps the boy mellowed her. She opened her mouth, only to shut it without saying anything.
Khattak was careful with his answer. “These are routine inquiries into an accidental death, to make sure we haven’t missed anything.”
Not careful enough. Riv’s fingers tightened on each girl’s shoulder.
“Like what?” he asked. “What could you have missed?”
“Depression, financial concerns, health worries. At this stage, we simply don’t know.”
Hadley and Riv exchanged a quick glance.
“Cass,” Hadley said. “Go into the house.”
“Why? I want to hear too.”
Hadley signaled the boy with a subtle movement of her eyebrows.
“Take her in, Riv. I’ll fill you in later.”
She wouldn’t, Rachel guessed, but Riv obeyed her at once. So he possessed the charm while this possibly no more than fifteen-year-old girl held the actual authority. Hadley waited to hear the door close and then she rounded on them.
“Are you talking about suicide? Do you think Chris killed himself?”
“I’m not sure we should discuss this any further without your mother present.”
“Forget my mother. You’ll get more sense out of me than you’ll ever get from her. The only thing she can concentrate on is whether Chris left her anything and which of her little black dresses she should wear to his funeral. Now, I want to know. Did Chris kill himself?”
“Why would you think that?” Khattak countered.
Hadley tossed her long hair back over her shoulders. “Well, why would you be here if something wasn’t wrong? Why would you even care?” Her expression altered, lost its edge. “Look,” she said in a rush, “I didn’t mean any of that other stuff. It’s not Chris’s fault that I wanted to live with my dad. He’s my dad and I love him. Chris knew that. I’m sure he understood. It’s just—he didn’t want that big wedding Mel was always on about, so he couldn’t have thought that Dad would just allow us to move in. Do you think Chris thought it might still happen?”
She was looking for reassurance, for some kind of expiation. If she had resisted Drayton’s parental overtures and Drayton in turn had come to view his future as grimly unmarked by the things he wanted most, there might well have been some connection between Hadley’s fears and Drayton’s stark reality.
“Did you notice anything different about him these last few weeks?” Rachel asked, neither confirming nor denying Hadley’s suspicions.
Hadley stilled. She was standing close enough to them that Rachel could tally the freckles on the bridge of her nose and spy out the gold flecks in her intelligent brown eyes. Unlike Marco River, no whiff of marijuana rose from her clothing.
“He was a bit more serious, maybe,” she offered, then added swiftly, “I don’t know why. He spent more time in his garden. He was really happy with the landscaping Aldo and Harry had done at the back.”
Rachel considered this. A man improving his property, whether for the sake of its value or for his own creature comfort, hardly seemed the kind of man to contemplate a spine-crushing end to his existence.
And what explained the gun and the absence of candles?
“Did the power ever go out at his house?”
Hadley looked blank, as well she might.
Rachel hastened to clarify her question.
“Did he use a lot of candles during the evening?”
Because if he had, that might explain one mystery, although it didn’t account for the gun.
Hadley grimaced as an unpalatable thought surfaced. “Maybe he and Mel did? I mean, I think he tried to be discreet around Cass and me,” she said, weighing her words. “But he wasn’t perfect.”
Meaning, Rachel translated, that this more than on-the-ball teenager had quickly deduced that her mother was having sex with her tutor.
Khattak cut across her thoughts.
“Why Italian lessons instead of other languages?”
“Oh, that. He was fluent in Italian because of the businesses he’d owned in Italy. He said we could pick what we wanted to learn. I would have chosen Spanish, but he didn’t speak Spanish. I couldn’t see the point of German or Russian, and Cass has always wanted to go to Italy. For the fashion,” she tacked on, fondly.
Khattak’s face tightened with sudden knowledge. Rachel began to feel irritated. She didn’t mind that the boss wanted her to look at the scene with fresh eyes and come to her own conclusions. What she minded was that she had no context for filtering the information that was coming through in dribbles from the people who had known Drayton.
Was the business in Italy significant? Did Drayton’s fluency in Russian matter? Did the books on Albania suggest a financial interest in trans-European organized crime? What about the unfamiliar 9-millimeter gun? How could she make any of these deductions if she didn’t have the faintest idea of what they were investigating? The dark halls of her imagination were pretty unlikely to conjure the truth from smoke.
She sighed.
“Who are Harry and Aldo?” she asked for want of anything more to the point.
Hadley gave her the quintessential teenage shrug, embodying all things from indifference to disgust. She was rubbing her shoes in the spongy grass, which when Rachel did it was a sure sign of boredom.
“Gardeners. They have a local landscaping business that’s doing pretty well. They did the gardens at Winterglass and at the museum. They take on plenty of individual jobs like Chris’s house as well.”
More connections to Drayton. They’d been on Nathan Clare’s list, she remembered. Not on the guest list for his dinner parties, but mentioned tangentially. The Osmond brothers, like the singing group. Maybe they were Mormons too.
She wanted to scuff her own shoes.
“I guess we’ll head over to Mr. Drayton’s house then. Does your mum have a key?”
“Not to everything,” her daughter said, wit
h no small measure of satisfaction. “Just the front door. She’s been dying to get into his office, but I guess despite their amazing mystical connection, Chris still had his secrets.”
The bitter words stabbed at the air like fingers of lightning. They left her looking after them with her thin arms crossed over her chest, her eyes like bronze metalwork, unblinking and inscrutable.
5.
I took my mother’s head into my hands and I kissed her.
I never felt anything so cold before …
In the car, he didn’t wait for Rachel to ask. “I know nothing of Drayton’s past or any businesses he might have run. I’ve only suspicion, Rachel. I’m not even sure I’d call it that.”
“What would you call it, then?”
“Dread.”
Rachel accepted this without knowing why. Maybe it was the hunted look in his eyes.
The day was warming up, a languid sleeve of blue draping the air with heat. As she did most days when the outdoor ice rinks were closed due to warmer than average temperatures, Rachel cursed mightily at global warming. She hadn’t spent a lifetime recycling to suffer these miniature blows.
“You’ve known Nathan Clare for years,” she said after a while. “Haven’t you ever seen this house or museum or whatever you want to call it?”
“Ringsong? I haven’t. It must be newly built. We’ll go there after this stop.”
This stop was Drayton’s house, with its burnished aisles of flowers, the autumn grass rising vast and green, a backdrop to roses with gleaming thorns and orange-shouldered lilies that shifted against bright filaments of air.
The Osmond brothers knew what they were doing. And the back of the house, where the windows of Drayton’s study broached the glassy expanse of lake, must have been even more peaceful. A place of dreams. A place to lose oneself in a solitude of light. A whimsical thought. One to be expected from a student of literature though not necessarily from a hockey-playing policewoman.
“I’ll meet you in a moment,” Khattak said. “I’d like to see what the landscapers have done around the house.”
More secrets. Or a chance to size up Melanie Blessant on her own. She could take it either way.
The Unquiet Dead Page 4