“I wish I didn’t have to go, but I do.” Emma’s eyes filled with tears. She slumped down in one of the chairs by the fire, which was going out. “Are you all right for the next party? Shouldn’t you be leaving?”
“The rest of my staff is taking care of it, and I’ll be finished here soon, anyway. But the question is, Are you all right? And I don’t mean the flu.” 126
Emma answered in a slightly manic torrent of words. “I thought it was a coincidence, so I didn’t mention it before, but now I’m not so sure. I’ve been getting a million hang-up calls since all this started.
It’s horrible, Faith. I’ve been going crazy. The phone rings ten or twelve times in a row, and every time I pick it up, there’s no answer. Just breathing. At first, I kept asking who it was, but now I don’t say anything, either, and after a while, there’s a click. I tried letting it ring, except then the machine would pick it up, and I don’t want Michael to think anything’s wrong. Besides, they just keep calling—whether I answer or not. Over and over and over again. It’s getting so that every time the phone rings, I’m afraid to pick it up.” She shuddered and wrapped her arms together.
And exactly how does Emma think she is going to hide the current state of her emotions from her husband? Faith wondered. Emma was close to the edge now, about to burst into frightened sobs.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence. And if you went to the police, they could have the phone company trace the calls. You can’t keep this up! You really will make yourself ill!”
Emma shook her head; her hair fell over her face, a curtain of red gold. “No police,” she whispered.
Several people were coming out of the study, Michael Stanstead among them. The party was definitely over. “We’ll meet you there, then. Sign of the Dove, in half an hour.”
At the sound of her husband’s voice, Emma hastily blotted her eyes on the insubstantial lacy hem of her dress, tossed her hair back, and sat up.
“Everything was perfect,” she said loudly to her friend. “You saved my life, Faith.” 127
* * *
* * *
* * *
Saturday was a blur of work, and when Faith locked the door of the catering company’s kitchen in the wee hours of Sunday morning, she vowed to hire more help in the New Year—and, more immediately, sleep until noon.
The phone rang at nine. Fighting her way to consciousness, leaving behind what was possibly a pleasant dream involving Richard and a beach—she couldn’t quite grab on to it—Faith picked up the receiver.
“Um,” she said.
“I didn’t wake you, did I?” Emma asked anxiously.
“No,” Faith lied, wondering why people always lied about being awakened and why no one ever simply said, “Yes, I was happily comatose until the damn phone rang.” Then suddenly, she was wide-awake.
Emma. Anxious.
“What’s happened?” Something had to have happened.
“I got another card. It was mixed in with the mail, but it didn’t have a stamp. I’ve been dropping all the cards into that big bowl on the table in the hall until I had a chance to open them.”
“And you just did,” Faith said, finishing for her, now agitated herself. She knew the blackmail wouldn’t stop, yet there was always the faint possibility that she might be wrong. “What does it say this time?” Emma lowered her voice. She’d been practically whispering to start, and now her words verged on inaudible. “I can’t tell you.”
Faith managed to catch the phrase. “You’re afraid Michael will overhear or you just plain can’t tell me?”
“Both,” she whispered.
128
“Look, Emma, tell Michael you’re going to church, or shopping, or whatever you do on Sunday mornings and get yourself over here immediately.” Faith took a quick shower. Normally, she did some of her best thinking under the strong, warm spray, but today her mind was on autopilot. She lathered, rinsed, and got out, then dressed and made a pot of coffee. She was looking at the toaster with a slice of bread in it when she realized she had virtually no memory of her previous actions. She focused on the matters at hand, first pushing the toaster control down, then thinking about this latest blackmail attempt. The card could have been in the pile for days— or someone could have slipped it in on Friday night. Someone at the party.
The buzzer sounded, and in a few moments Emma was sitting at the small table Faith had placed between the two front windows overlooking West Fifty-sixth Street.
“Are you hungry? English muffin?” Faith asked, pouring coffee. She firmly believed that food enhanced mental processes.
“I don’t want anything to eat, thank you. I’d probably throw up.”
“You’re not . . .” Faith began. Why not complicate matters a little further.
“No,” Emma said sadly. “I wish I were. You have no idea what it’s like getting your hopes up every month.
We’ve been trying for over a year now. The doctor says I need to relax. Michael has been an angel. Did I tell you he’s taking me with him in January for this business thing in the Caribbean someplace? He says he just wants me to sit in the sun on a beach. I know he’s as disappointed about not having a baby as I am, but he never shows it—or blames me.”
129
It was on the tip of Faith’s tongue to ask why their infertility was necessarily Emma’s “fault,” but this was not the time. Of course Michael would need heirs—a bunch of little Stansteads to cluster round for the family Christmas card sent to constituents. Oddly enough, politicians still seemed to think that the way to win the hearts and minds of the electorate was by sending these yearly missives with wife or husband, progeny, and dog posed in front of a fireplace. Cards most vot-ers promptly tossed out.
“I’m sure you’ll get pregnant; you did before.” Faith blurted the words out, then realized that what she had meant to sound reassuring hadn’t quite come off that way.
Emma didn’t seem to notice. “That’s true, but it’s why I feel so guilty. It’s like this is a kind of judgment on me for all of that.”
“Oh, Emma, come on! You were pushed into a terrible situation. None of it was your fault.” Emma was staring out the window. New York was in a deep freeze. Records were being shattered. On the corner, a man and his wife from Maine had set up a Christmas tree lot, as they did each year, she’d been told. The whole neighborhood had adopted them, greeting them as the first harbingers of the season, their reappearance each Christmas something you could count on—a grown-up city dweller’s version of believing in Santa. They offered the couple showers, a bed when the temperature dipped below zero. The gaily trimmed tree they’d set up on the roof of the di-lapidated camper they lived in for these few weeks was a welcome sight against the dreary morning sky.
“Look,” Faith said, “let’s take one thing at a time.
Your doctor is probably right. God knows, you’ve been 130
under enough stress lately. Why don’t you show me the card and tell me all about it. All, ” she repeated.
Emma dug the card out of her bag. It was from the same series. A Victorian child with blond ringlets was holding a huge present. “Season’s Greetings” was printed on the large red bow. Inside, the greeting was grim:
What do you think Michael’s chances of getting elected will be when people find out he’s married to a murderer?
131
Six
Obviously, this was yet another item on Emma Stanstead’s “Things I May Not Have Mentioned” list.
A major item.
“Don’t tell me,” Faith began as Emma started to sob.
“You were in Fox’s apartment the day he was murdered.”
“I was there, but I didn’t kill him!” she shrieked.
“Of course you didn’t!” Faith grabbed a box of tissues and moved Emma over to the couch. Faith hadn’t imagined Emma could ever make a noise like the one that had just issued from her mouth. She’d finally flipped out.
Emma began to shake. Just shake, soun
dlessly now.
Faith threw the down comforter from her bed around Emma’s shoulders and went to get her a cup of fresh coffee. Emma held it tightly, slowly moving it to her mouth, taking small sips. Faith felt as if there should be a dog sled nearby.
“He wasn’t dead. I didn’t see that, thank God, but I could have. If the killer had come sooner.” She closed 132
her eyes and drank again. Her pain, moving in waves from beneath the quilt, was searing.
“You went to his apartment at three, the way you always did, right? And left when?”
Emma opened her eyes, looking directly at Faith. “I only stayed an hour. I’ve felt so guilty ever since. I had to be back uptown for a cocktail party. A cocktail party! If I had stayed longer, my father might still be alive.”
“Or you might be dead, too,” Faith said briskly. She was beginning to understand why hysterical people get slapped across the face. Anything to bring them back.
Since she’d seen Emma that first night in the kitchen, Faith had had the same impulse. Anything to ground her in what passed for reality—and what seemed to work best was the verbal equivalent of a slap.
Emma came to—for the moment. She sat up straighter.
“I never thought of that.” She put the cup down on the low table in front of the couch.
“But it wasn’t likely,” Faith pointed out. “Whoever is blackmailing you knows you were at your father’s apartment that day, which means he or she saw you.
Saw you leave and then went in. Don’t you see? The killer waited until you left. You were meant to be kept alive. You’d be no use to anyone dead. How would they get the money?”
“That’s a relief—I think,” Emma said, kicking off her shoes and curling up on the couch with the quilt pulled over her. She was looking a whole lot better.
“Someone was watching, yet how would they know you’d be there? It couldn’t have been a coincidence.
Someone has to have been watching you for a while.” Someone knew Emma’s schedule, her every move.
133
Faith didn’t give voice to the rest of her speculations. Emma had all she could take for now. But suppose someone, say Lucy, knew or had found out about Emma’s real parentage and either knew or supposed that Emma was seeing Fox. Easy enough to follow her.
New Yorkers are street-smart, but in a heads-down sort of way. You don’t make eye contact. And Emma, whose thoughts tended to be very far away from the immediate, would not have been paying attention to what was going on around her anyway—like someone following her. And New York is a big, crowded city.
Following someone, particularly Emma, would not have been hard.
“Did your father seem any different from usual? Ap-prehensive?”
“No, if anything, he was extremely cheerful. Maybe he’d finished that big book, the one you were asking about the other day. I remembered after I talked to you that I hadn’t heard any typing that day. And there weren’t any papers on the table. Usually, it was pretty messy. When I gave him the bialys, he said they would be a perfect celebration.”
“So, the two of you clinked breadstuff and made merry?”
This continuing picture of Nathan Fox the doting father was far removed from Nathan Fox the flaming radical.
“I didn’t eat anything. I wasn’t hungry. Besides, I wanted him to have them. I’d brought some cream cheese. I made him a glass of tea. He’d taught me how.
He drank his tea in a glass. He said his father always did.” Emma said in wonderment—at the custom and maybe a little at her startling culinary accomplishment.
Nathan Fox, Norman Fuchs, wasn’t disguised as an 134
old Jewish man. He was an old Jewish man, Faith thought.
“Did you ask him what he was celebrating?” Emma looked downcast. “No, at the time, I kind of thought it was because I was there. I’d missed the week before.”
“And I’m sure that’s what he meant.” Maybe, Faith thought, qualifying to herself. “What did you talk about?”
“Daddy always liked to hear what I’d been doing.
Where I’d gone. Who I’d seen. He knew quite a lot of people. Michael and I had been to the opening of ‘The Age of Napoleon’ at the Met’s Costume Institute the night before. It really is a wonderful show. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should go. I told him about dancing with my Michael by the Temple of Dendur. It was a lovely evening, although terribly crowded. Anyway, that got us talking about Napoleon. Daddy was very big on him and planned to write a book about whether he’d subverted the goals of the French Revolution or not, which of course he’ll never do now—
Dad, not Napoleon. Although, I suppose both. Daddy was always quoting him, history was ‘a set of lies agreed upon,’ that kind of thing. He thought Napoleon had been misunderstood in many ways.” This was all very interesting. It didn’t surprise Faith in the least to discover that Fox had had a Napoleon fixation. And about the Met—she had heard both the show and the opening were spectacular, but she had more questions. More pertinent questions.
Emma’s prints were spread over the apartment, what with the tea making and all, but the police wouldn’t have had anything to connect her with them. And surely the killer hadn’t left any. But getting back to the 135
business of the book—Emma must know something more.
“Did he show you a finished manuscript?”
“No, he must have put it somewhere. In his file cabinet, probably.”
A logical deduction.
Emma continued. “I told you before that he never actually said what it was about. I merely assumed it was like the other books. Political. The masses being oppressed. That kind of thing.”
Had it occurred to Emma that Nathan Fox the revo-lutionary regarded her as a class enemy? Probably not, since it was Nathan Fox, the radical chic darling of the Upper East Side, who was pumping her week after week for details of the life he obviously very much missed. It was all going on without him—the repartee, the gossip, the affairs, the beluga.
“And then you left?”
“Then I left.” Somehow the three words uttered in this completely flat tone sounded more tragic than all of Emma’s earlier outcries put together. There was very little to say after this, and during one of the silences Emma dozed off, exhausted by the surfeit of emotion.
Faith stood up and went to the window. The Christmas tree sellers, in bright red stocking caps and down parkas, were doing a brisk business. She’d planned to get a small tree herself. It was her first Christmas in her very own place. Maybe next year. She was going to be too busy. Emma’s latest revelation brought several parts of the picture into sharp focus. Faith now knew that Fox’s murder and Emma’s blackmail were the work of the same hands. It was highly unlikely that the blackmail operation had just happened upon the mur-136
der, which just happened to occur the day and time of Emma’s habitual visits. Which upped the ante consid-erably. Before, Emma had been in danger. Now that Faith knew they were dealing with a killer or killers, it was mortal danger.
A family was looking at trees. The kids kept dragging out Rockefeller Center–size pines; the parents, tabletop versions. Somewhere on that lot, they’d find the perfect one, something in between—and each side would feel victorious.
Emma, Emma. Faith looked at her friend—oblivious in sleep’s sweet escape. She’d been right all along. Of course she couldn’t go to the police. Once they discovered she’d been at Fox’s apartment so close to the time of death—the newspaper had said 4:00 P.M.—she would immediately become a suspect.
Could even be charged. It would all make very good sense to the district attorney’s office. Discovering her father’s whereabouts, Emma kills him and fakes a burglary to protect her husband’s political future. And the blackmail? She could have written the notes herself. The only hard piece of evidence was a tape—
which she’d destroyed. And her motive? That was easy. Faith had known from the start Emma would do anything for Michael. Do anything to
keep him from leaving her once he found out who she really was—
and she’d managed to convince herself that was what he’d do, be forced to do to save his career . . . and face. No, this was not one of those times when your friend Mr. Policeman would be of much help. This was one of those times when the only person who could help was, unfortunately, you—or rather, your nearest and dearest friend.
And Faith had to move quickly. Before Emma lost 137
all her money, was arrested, made the tabloids, cracked up, or all four.
Outside, the family had tied their purchase on top of a child’s red wagon and started off, the father pulling, one of the kids holding the precariously balanced tree steady. Faith sighed. She wouldn’t be stringing any popcorn and cranberries herself this year.
Instead, as soon as Emma woke up and left, Faith would continue her investigation. Although, with this latest revelation, it seemed as if she was starting from the beginning. She decided to take a ride out to Long Island. Garden City, Long Island. People looked for houses on the weekends—and Todd Hartley was a real estate agent. Wasn’t it Dorothy L. Sayers who said,
“Suspect everybody?”
Faith knew how to get to Long Island. It wasn’t like New Jersey. She knew where Long Island was. Theo-retically, she knew where Jersey was, too. You could see it directly across the Hudson from the West Side.
There was a tunnel underneath you could take to go there. But it wasn’t like Long Island. She could find her way around the island—or rather, across the island from west to east to the Hamptons—with no stops in between. I’m not going anywhere near as far today, she thought with some relief, remembering the traffic back to the city on Sunday summer nights, exit names—
Eastport, Patchogue, Islip, Amityville—passing at a snail’s pace.
Garden City was at the near end of the island, close to Queens. She’d studied the map while Emma slept and planned her route. There weren’t any of those little black dots AAA uses to mark the scenic roads.
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