“Why?” Defiantly. “What are you going to do if she does?”
“Borrow it. But without her knowing.”
Vanessa’s brow crinkled in thought. “What do you need it for?”
“To sell to Hollywood. To worship in my spare time. To decorate the mantelpiece. What difference does it make what I want it for?”
“I’m just asking.” Sharply, followed by a sulk. “You don’t have to jump down my throat.”
Julia softened. “I’m sorry, honey. Let’s just say it’s my ace in the hole.”
Her daughter thought this over. “How?”
“How, what?”
“How are you going to borrow it without Smith knowing?”
“Oh, that part’s easy. You’re going to borrow it from Smith, and I’m going to borrow it from you.”
Vanessa immediately shook her head. “I can’t borrow it. I’m Smith-grounded. I’m not allowed to see her. I’m not allowed to talk to her. I’m not allowed to IM her or e-mail her or text-message her or anything. I’m not even allowed to sit next to her in the cafeteria. Ergo, I can’t borrow it.”
Julia put her hands on her hips. “Vanessa Amaretta Carlyle, I have known you since the night you came out of my womb, squealing and fighting all the way. You are a Veazie from your beautiful braids down to your lovely brown toes. You always do everything your own way. I refuse to believe that you’ve followed all those rules just because we told you to, and I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to learn that you haven’t followed any of them.” Lifting a hand to forestall a squawked objection. “Now, listen to me. I don’t care if you’ve broken the rules before or not. I’m giving you a dispensation now. Be discreet. Don’t let anybody know what you’re up to. But borrow the thing from Smith and get it to me.”
The teen’s mouth was hanging open. “And I bet you don’t want me to tell Dads, right?”
“I’ll deal with your father.”
“Yeah. I bet you will.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
A sudden smile, like winter’s thaw. “It means I like this new you. I love her.”
Julia smiled. “You know what, honey? I love her, too.”
(III)
THAT BRUCE HAD HAPPENED UPON Julia Carlyle being accosted by the stranger that night was attributable at least partly to luck. He did not follow her every evening. He was one man, he had a whole department to run, and every minute he stole for the Zant case was a minute he could not spend on a more productive endeavor. Surveillance was most intrusive of all, which was why he indulged in it rarely. On the other hand, Tony Tice’s warning about his clients becoming active worried him. And the lawyer was right. They would not bother to go after Bruce. If they chased anybody, it would be someone who could actually give them information.
Like Julia Carlyle, who Tice believed to be Zant’s Black Lady.
He had tracked Julia to the meeting at the home of Tonya Montez, then met some friends for dinner and still been back in time to catch her as she left. He had decided to follow, just to see if her back was clean—in particular, if Jeremy Flew was in the picture—but had spotted the stranger instead.
Bruce had watched, and waited, and finally intervened when he saw the man grab her arm.
The stranger had stopped resisting once he felt Bruce’s gun in his back, for he had no way of knowing that the university’s rules did not allow any campus officer, even the director, to carry a gun if not in uniform; or that what he felt in his back was only a wooden tube. They parked in a municipal lot, hidden by yellow school buses. The interrogation was unpleasant. Once Bruce found the gun in the stranger’s waistband, he would have turned the man over to the police, except that he also found a syringe and a set of plastic handcuffs. Bruce gave him-self a moment. This was not some ruffian, out to put a scare into Julia Carlyle. This was a man who intended to take her along.
Tony Tice’s clients were indeed becoming active. The stakes of the game had changed, and he had to change them back, fast.
Bruce dropped the man he had interrogated at the university hospital, flashing his credentials and spinning a tale, knowing the stranger would not contradict him. From the Mustang he called the lawyer to say they had a deal. If Bruce Vallely were to get his hands on Kellen Zant’s surplus, he would deliver it to Tony’s clients.
CHAPTER 49
AGAIN THE COMYNS MIRROR
(I)
MARY MALLARD CAME AND WENT, leaving behind information every bit as startling as she had promised. According to her sources, the President of the United States and Senator Malcolm Whisted had recently had at least two and possibly three off-the-record meetings. Leaks would soon be published, said Mary, to the effect that they were discussing foreign policy, both men wanting to look presidential and nonpartisan. But Mary’s sources said no aides were present, and the meetings were long.
In return, Julia told her about encountering Cameron Knowland in New York. She kept to herself what she had found there. She had never told Mary about the Comyns mirror either.
After Mary left, Julia checked the family calendar. One of the meetings had occurred when Lemaster was in Washington. But when she asked, he repeated Bay Dennison’s dictum that a rumor was not rendered more likely to be true because the rumormonger refused to give his name.
“That’s not a denial,” Julia had said.
“I didn’t hear an accusation,” he answered calmly.
Meanwhile, she had been searching for BCP 83. Kellen had promised to send her back to her God, and Julia guessed that BCP stood for the Book of Common Prayer. But when she checked all the copies in the house—both the 1928 version favored by Lemaster and the more modern texts used by nearly all Episcopal churches—no notes or cards or photos fell out of page 83, or any other page. She spent an afternoon back at the Kepler Library, sorting through every edition of the book she could find, in every available language, but came away disappointed. She even found herself making excuses to visit the offices of div school colleagues who might have a copy on their shelves. She would stand there chatting with Suzanne de Broglie or Clay Maxwell about faculty appointments or the state of the physical plant, and pick up, as if idly, any Book of Common Prayer in sight.
No luck.
One afternoon, Julia arrived early for a meeting with Claire Alvarez, who was held up at a campus event. An assistant invited Julia to wait in the dean’s office. Claire stepped inside a few minutes later to find her deputy on the rolling stepladder, pulling down from a high shelf in a glass-fronted cabinet the aged copy of the prayer book to which every dean, by long tradition, added a new dédicace before passing it on to the next. Claire Alvarez expressed no surprise. She smiled beatifically, the only way she ever displayed anger, and, remarking that she, too, drew inspiration by reading from time to time what others had written there, plucked the book gently from Julia’s fingers.
But Julia held on long enough to establish that there was nothing stuffed inside.
As their meeting ended, the dean put a hand on Julia’s shoulder and said, her voice dripping sweetness and affection, that people had told her that the dean of students seemed to have missed quite a few days of work lately. Not that anyone took attendance, naturally, but was everything all right at home? It was? And with Vanessa, too? Yes? Marvelous, Claire Alvarez assured her, just marvelous. Oh, and, by the way, should she happen to have the chance, she wouldn’t mind, would she—only if it comes up in conversation, naturally!—but perhaps she wouldn’t mind mentioning to her husband that the div school was still hoping that Lombard Hall would look favorably on the request for a supplemental capital appropriation to help with the chapel roof?
That same night Julia drove up to Saint Matthias, because the church was open late for the weekly prayer meeting, and, feeling foolish, spent over an hour afterward straightening up the books in the pews—no, please, I don’t need help, I can handle it, thanks!—still without result.
Another day, at Kepler, she pulled Suzanne de Broglie aside af
ter a faculty lunch, because Suzanne spent more time in the archives than any other professor. Suzanne, always impatient around actual people, cut her off before the question was finished. The sub-basement, she said. That was the level of the stacks used least. The sub-basement.
Now it was Friday night, and Julia, still agitated, settled at the piano, because the other way she relaxed was to play. Jeannie was sleeping over with friends, and Lemaster was out of town again, so it was just Julia and Vanessa in the house. Vanessa had her door closed and, very likely, her earphones on. She would not be disturbed. So Julia did a couple of finger exercises and then began to play. Not classical this time but her beloved Broadway. She did a medley from The King and I, and another from The Sound of Music, stopping here and there because the instrument seemed to be in need of a tuning. She remembered Tonya Montez sitting at the keyboard and wondered whether the chief Sister Lady might have damaged something when she slammed the lid. She grew irritated. This piano was worth a fortune. Duke Ellington had played it, often. And Tonya had treated it like a—
Wait.
Was it possible?
Julia went upstairs to the master suite, opened the drawer of her vanity, pulled out Granny Vee’s mirror, the one Seth Zant had returned to her after Kellen held it hostage for twenty years. She turned on the lights around the dressing mirror, held up the William Comyns to examine its back. Yes, as she had thought before. The W•C hallmark had been scratched out, replaced with backward letters that, translated, were E•K.
Granny Vee’s mirror. E•K.
Duke Ellington’s given names, as jazz fans and everyone of a certain age in the darker nation knew, were Edward Kennedy.
Edward Kennedy Ellington.
Back down in the living room, she examined the piano. She did not pause to ask herself how Kellen could have gotten into the house to hide whatever he hid. Knowing he had done so was enough. This was why he had come to the house the night he died. He wanted to retrieve whatever he had left here, but saw the sitter’s car, panicked, turned, sideswiped the lampposts on his way to the road.
Julia began to search. She looked inside the piano bench, but there was only the sheet music. She looked under it. She looked inside the piano. Under it. In every cranny. And saw nothing. Not a scratched message, not a piece of paper, not a photograph.
Nothing.
Julia stood up, frustrated and sweating. All right, she had erred. Suppose she had the E•K right, but not the piano. Could Kellen have meant Amaretta’s Harlem townhouse, where the piano used to sit? But she had just been there—
A footfall behind her.
“Dance with me,” said Vanessa, her voice soft and caressing. “Like you did last month. I liked that.”
“It’s late, honey. I think—”
“Just for a little while? Please?”
How could she refuse? So dance they did, in the family room, gently, as smooth jazz played. Probably they wept a bit, but neither discussed it. When Julia at last tiptoed into her bedroom, it was well past one. She used the bathroom and hung up her robe, and found on her pillow a long white envelope. She remembered her daughter’s long-ago habit of leaving little scraps of paper around to tell Mommy she loved her.
That girl, said Julia to herself, smiling.
Then she noticed the bits of tape hanging off it and bits of shellac hanging off the tape.
“Is that what you were looking for?” asked Vanessa, who had crept up behind her again.
(II)
“YOU FIND EVERYTHING,” said Julia, frustration and admiration mixed in her tone. As a small child, Vanessa had spoiled more than one Christmas Eve by gleefully announcing that she had discovered where Mommy and Daddy had hidden the presents. Finally, they had stopped hiding them at home.
“Most things,” said Vanessa complacently.
“Have you—”
“Read them? Uh-huh. It’s pages from some guy’s diary.” She took the envelope from her mother, but only to pull out the sheaf and hand it over. “All the reasons DeShaun couldn’t have done it. Like how Gina’s prints weren’t in the car, or Gina’s blood, and how the fact that somebody saw them talking doesn’t mean she ever got into the car. Look at the last page.” Julia, reading fast, had found the place already. “See what he says there? He wanted to investigate some more, but they wouldn’t let him. He said he and his deputy went to this meeting, and at the meeting they ordered him to stop.” She had to stop for a moment to allow her mouth to catch up with her mind. “Only the thing is, he doesn’t say who was at the meeting. I don’t know why you care,” Vanessa continued, one hand trembling. “It was DeShaun. Anybody who says it wasn’t, is lying. I’m like the world’s leading expert—”
“Why are you so adamant, honey?”
“I’m not adamant. I’m right.”
“You know I have to check. I have to be sure.”
Voice suddenly small: “I know.”
Julia read the pages for a third time. Nothing new here, except for one tiny phrase.
Julia looked at her daughter. The braids had fallen in front of Vanessa’s face so that her voice seemed disembodied. “Moms? Are you okay?”
Julia said, “This changes everything.”
CHAPTER 50
HOUSE OF TOYS
(I)
FRANK CARRINGTON LIVED in a pretty but exhausted Victorian not far from the Town Green—the spot where, in the official story, poor DeShaun Moton had picked up Gina Joule the night he supposedly murdered her. Julia stood on the front step. Icicles dangled from aging gutters. A part of her knew she should not be here, especially with Vanessa in tow, but the teenager had refused to wait in the car. Julia was feeling like a bit of a teenaged sneak herself. She had picked her daughter up from Smith’s house, where she had gone, secretly, to borrow the device that now snuggled in her mother’s purse. She could not afford to wait another day, because Old Landing wore a CLOSED sign, and Vera Brightwood said Frank was leaving town.
“I just stopped by to see Shirley,” she lied almost before Frank had the door fully open: Mrs. Carrington had taken a bad fall on the ice two days earlier, providing Julia with the necessary excuse. “How’s that ankle?”
“It’s better.” Glancing past her to Vanessa, who stood fidgeting on the walk. “I’ve sent her to her folks in Vermont.” Inclining his head. “I think I might follow her.”
“Why?”
“I warned you, Julia. I told you there are things I shouldn’t talk about. Well, you made me talk about them, and—well, there are people who aren’t too happy with me. Let me put it that way.” He caught her look. “Oh, no, don’t you worry. You’re married to the great Lemaster Carlyle. Nobody can touch you. But everybody can touch me.”
Julia asked if she and Vanessa could come in for a minute anyway, and he told her that he had nothing more to say. Then he let them in anyway, as she had known he would, because she was his best customer, and because he was the sort of man who could be pushed.
“Mind the toys,” he warned, leading them into a low room in the back of the house.
“Toys?”
“Uh-huh.”
They turned out to be toys of war. Model airplanes, tanks, ships, painted soldiers in their neat and—Julia suspected—precisely correct ranks. Dominating them all were the displays, the maps and battlefield dioramas that lay everywhere, their terrains painfully worked to include hills and little green trees and roads and rivers and crisp cards that gave places and dates, alongside little plastic markers to represent armies and navies.
Julia, who loved peace, was aghast.
But she asked anyway, to be polite, and Frank grew increasingly excited as he took them on a tour of the many battles he had never fought but obviously would have handled better than the generals in charge—Thermopylae, First Manassas, Second Manassas, Waterloo, the Bulge, and others that she forgot again a moment after he pointed them out—while Vanessa, who Julia had hoped would impress, stood like furniture, imprisoned by her shyness. He moved figures a
round on the boards with loving fingers.
“Very impressive,” Julia murmured.
Then the three of them sat around the room drinking Diet Cokes. In the middle of the floor, Frank seemed to be working on his most ambitious project yet, a diorama that took up most of the floor. Paints and bits of card and plastic armies were scattered all over the rug, and Julia envisioned poor Shirley trying to get him to straighten up after himself.
“So, what can I do for you?” he finally said. “Because, I told you, I’m all through talking about Gina Joule.”
Vanessa perked up at the name, then lapsed into her torpor once more.
“I’ve found part of the diary,” said Julia.
“Seriously? Arnie’s diary?”
“Yes.”
He nodded, and almost smiled. “So you should take it to the police. The papers. Get the truth out.”
“Unfortunately, I don’t have enough of it to do that. But the part that I have does raise an interesting question.” She glanced at her daughter, who seemed to be dozing. “You told me last month that the day Arnold Huebner announced that the investigation was closed, he went to a meeting. He didn’t make his decision until after the meeting was over. Remember?”
“I remember.” But the haunted look was back in his eyes. He was the best source she had, perhaps the only source left alive, and something had him terrified.
“In the diary, Arnold Huebner says the same thing. That there was a meeting. But he doesn’t say who the meeting was with.” When this did not draw him, Julia went on. “You know, don’t you? You know who he met with.”
“The first selectman. That’s no secret.”
“Who else was there?” Stubborn silence. “In the diary, Arnold Huebner says ‘they’ told him to stop. Not just one person. At least two. So who else told him? Come on, Frank. I’ve read it over ten times. You know what else? Arnold Huebner didn’t write ‘I’ went to the meeting. He wrote ‘we.’ And you were his principal deputy. Not Ralphie Nacchio. You. I think you were at that meeting, Frank. I think you know who ordered Arnold Huebner to drop the case. I think that’s why you’re afraid, but it’s also why you’ve looked for the diary all these years. You admired Arnold Huebner and you watched them make him bend. You want whoever really killed Gina brought to justice. You just didn’t want to risk your family to do it. You needed a proxy. You needed me—”
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