Finally she looked up. “Did you know that Edison would be leaving for Shreveport, flying his plane?”
The seconds ticked past as he searched her face. “What if I did?”
“I’m just trying to get what happened straight in my mind.” But that was not all. Another possibility was slowly creeping in upon her. It was so devastating that she felt the blood drain from her face. She moistened her lips. “What else did he tell you?”
He studied her through narrowed eyes. “A great deal, though none of it very important. Why?”
She could breathe again. He would certainly think her past important since it must, inevitably, reflect on his father and the Staulet Corporation. “There was nothing said—nothing that would cause you to think Edison might be better dead?”
A short laugh escaped from him. “I thought you were satisfied on that point. For the record, I’ve never made a habit of trying to kill the people who might cause me trouble.”
She lifted a hand to her face and was not surprised to find it trembling. “No, no, I know that. I just…Somebody did try, and Josh may die. I can’t get away from that. Normal people don’t do such things, but it’s not always easy to tell who is normal.”
Quietly he said, “You won’t find out by asking.”
“No, I suppose not.” She herself had said as much to Anne, then forgotten it. She gave him a tight smile, relieved that he wasn’t angry, though she did not know why he wasn’t; she had fully expected his anger.
The cause was, perhaps, his own abstraction, for he made an aborted gesture, as if he would reach out to touch her. Before it was completed, he drew back as from a fire. He curled his fingers around the tube of papers in his other hand, and the crackling sound was loud as they were crushed.
“What is it?” he asked. “Something’s wrong, something more than worry over Josh Gallant, threats against Edison, or even against you. Has someone hurt you?”
That he could read her so well, could see her disturbance when others had not, was disturbing. “Not really.”
“But they tried, is that it? Who was it? Gallant’s wife?”
She shook her head in a quick negative. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does. It can’t have been Erin or Doug Gorsline. Gallant then. He must have been at the hospital.”
She had seen this relentless quality before in his business dealings, but this was the first time she had experienced it. “It was nothing much—a difference of opinion.”
“Over what? Whether you would or would not let him make love to you? I thought so. How far did he go?”
Irritation at his persistence flared through her. “If you want to know if he succeeded, the answer is no!”
“But he tried, tried hard?” When she did not reply, his face hardened. “Why are you protecting him? Why is everyone protecting him? What is it about him that makes you and Margaret and even his wife do it?”
“It could be we’re protecting ourselves,” she said, her gaze level as she willed him to understand.
“Is that it, or are you all in love with him?”
“Of course not!” she said scornfully.
“You might as well be. The effect’s the same, immunity for him for whatever he does.”
“It can’t be helped.”
“Yes, it can, and should be. Men who never have to face the consequences of what they do come to think they are privileged and so do things the average man wouldn’t dream of doing.”
“Are you saying it’s my own fault Edison attacked me?”
“No, but there is an old saying: If an enemy attacks you one time, it’s his mistake. The second time, it’s yours.”
“I don’t want revenge, only peace.”
“Sometimes they are one and the same, if it puts an end to the danger.”
She searched the clear gray depths of his eyes. “I suppose so.”
There had always been this hardness somewhere inside him. It had made it possible, all those years ago, for her to believe that he would use her attraction to him to seduce her, then be rid of her. It had been a long time before she could acknowledge that he was as just as he was implacable.
They stood looking at each other for a long moment. He glanced down at the crumpled papers in his hands, then back up to the delicate planes of her face. His gaze lingered on the hollows under her eyes. “Are you all right?”
Did he mean physically or mentally? Was he inquiring, with that general question, if Edison had hurt her or if she was in distress over what had occurred between them the night before? Or did he just want to know if she was going to be able to cope with the fast-moving events? In any case, the answer was the same.
“I’m fine,” she said.
He reached to flip the mangled profit-and-loss statements he held onto a silver holding tray on the hall sideboard, then put his arm around her shoulders. “Come on then,” he said, “time to go to bed.”
For one wild second, she thought he meant with him, hoped he meant with him. It would be an affirmation that the love they had made together meant something. More than that, the thought of lying in his arms was like the prospect of reaching a haven. She wanted nothing more than to lose herself in a man’s arms—this man’s arms—to forget everything that had happened this week and in the past.
But he released her as they neared the end of the hall where the stairs rose on one side and his bedroom door opened on the other. “Good night,” he said again.
“Good night,” she answered, and moved away up the stairs, alone. She had reached the upstairs hall before she heard his door close softly behind him.
Riva didn’t sleep. She took a bath and put on her gown. She turned out the light, climbed into her bed, and closed her eyes. She fluffed her pillow just so and pulled the sheet to the exact position she liked. It didn’t help.
She lay staring into the darkness until her eyes burned. She refused to think of Noel. What was the point? Thinking would not help. She thought instead, deliberately, of Edison.
The words he had said to her, the things he had done, played over and over in her mind. There was something important in them, she knew, something she could not quite capture. She thought until her mind turned in circles, forced herself to review every word, every nuance of meaning in them, until the cells of her brain ached like a muscle suffering from overexertion.
She could come to only one conclusion. It was vague at best. Still, the decision drawn from it was plain enough.
Edison, with his egoism and selfish demands and careless tinkering with human lives, had turned one of the people around him into a murderer. She, in her fear and pride, had helped him. There was only one thing to be done.
TWENTY-TWO
“THIS IS RIVA STAULET. May I please speak to Doug Gorsline?”
“One moment, please.”
Riva could feel her palm sweating where she held the receiver as she waited for whoever had answered the phone in the newspaper newsroom to find Doug. She prayed that he was there. She was not sure she could force herself to call again. The actual deed she planned held no real terror. The preliminaries were what she found unnerving.
“Hello?”
She gave herself no time to think. At the sound of Doug’s voice, she said at once, “This is Riva Staulet and I need your help. I want to set up a press conference. Can you tell me how to go about it?”
The pause as comprehension sank in was infinitesimal. He did not ask why or even what for. All he wanted to know was when and where. When she suggested the following morning at Bonne Vie, he said, “I’ve got it, Mrs. Staulet. Consider it done.”
“Thank you, Doug, I’m very grateful.”
She was, too, and not just for what he was doing but for his making it so easy.
If it had to be done, it was just as well that it was easy. It had taken twenty-odd years to build her life at Bonne Vie. There would now be twenty-odd hours to wait until it was over. Then it would take twenty minutes, maybe less, to tear it apart.
There would be time, however, to say good-bye. She did not doubt that it would be necessary. Noel would not want her at Bonne Vie once he knew, and the house was his. There would be no public opinion, no disapproving friends of his father to prevent him from throwing her out. No doubt he would be generous with other assets, since he was a fair man, but he would want the stain on his father’s memory—and perhaps on his own—removed. And who could blame him?
Riva left her room to walk out onto the upper gallery overlooking the drive. She listened to her footsteps echoing on the wooden floor as she slowly paced its length. Reaching out, she ran her hand along the railing. She knew every nick and dent in its long length, was familiar with every loose baluster. The outside walls of the house would need repainting soon. She would have to remember to leave a note for Noel with the exact name and number of the peach-pink-colored paint, and the same for the antique white of the columns and railings and the dark green of the shutters. There was a special place where replacement hardware for the shutters could be bought; he should know that, too. And he would have to be reminded to keep an eye on the ferns growing on their stands beside the doors with their fronds moving gracefully in the warm breeze. If someone wasn’t told to water them, to turn, repot, and fertilize them, it would never get done. They would be dead within two weeks after she left.
She paused in the middle of the gallery to look down the long, dark green tunnel of the oak trees lining the drive. They were beautiful with the morning sunlight falling through their branches, making shifting shadow patterns on the ground below. So ancient were they that they seemed hardly to have changed since she came to the house. Oh, there had been a limb or two lost in high winds or a crisis caused by insects, but for the most part they seemed to go on and on in perfect symmetry, weathering all storms. They would be there long after she was gone. How many people they must have seen come and go, how many more they would see.
She had been so young when she first came to Bonne Vie, so full of awkwardness and wonder. She had married Cosmo out of gratitude and affection. She had meant to make him a good wife, to be what he wanted, and had succeeded in the end almost against her will. She had not expected to fall in love with his son, had not wanted to tumble headlong into an affair.
She had been in love with Noel, the first, the only time she was really in love. How deep her feelings had gone was something she had not known herself until he had left Bonne Vie. She had never stopped loving him, not really. Seeing him at intervals over the years had been a painful pleasure. The news of his marriage had been like a sword to her heart, one drawn out only with the news of his divorce. She could not have said which hurt more, however; the fact that he was no longer free or, later, that he was free again and she was not.
And yet she had enjoyed her years as chatelaine of the big old house; Cosmo had seen to that. He had given her everything a woman could desire and more, had surrounded her with unceasing, unquestioning love and attention. She had reveled in the responsibility of being an active partner in the corporation with him, had learned to love his home and take pride in being his hostess there. She had grown confident within herself so that she took pleasure in entertaining and lost her self-consciousness at being entertained. However, she never quite lost her awe of the public figures she met: the presidents and other statesmen, the famous writers and actors and others in the arts; the well-known sports figures; and those whose claim to public recognition came from inherited wealth. Still, she moved among them with ease, and if she was never quite as assured as she looked, no one ever knew it.
She had never wished for Cosmo’s death. When it came, it was a loss of immense magnitude, one made more poignant instead of less so by the knowledge of what he had done to separate her from his son. It proved that he had known how she felt and had moved to keep her. In doing so, he had sacrificed his son’s love. He had chosen her over his own flesh and blood, and been forced to live with the bargain while knowing it could, and probably should, have been otherwise. It was a burden for Riva to be the cause of that choice, a burden to be so terribly loved.
Time was strange. Sometimes, as she thought back on the hours she had spent with Noel in the gardener’s shed, it seemed like yesterday. Other times, it was as if it had happened to another person in another life or else to lovers in a dream. Sometimes she could remember every word Noel had said, every look, every touch. And sometimes she could not be certain the memories were not something she had made up in her mind, purest fantasies.
She loved him still. If she had ever doubted it, in those days after the funeral when they were so far apart while living under the same roof and working in the same building, she would have known it after the night of the storm. Why should she not love him? He had risked his life to save hers, then had held her against her terrors, keeping her safe. His arms had been a haven, a home. There had been such a sense of belonging, of perfect accommodation, of completion.
She had not been alone in her feelings, she knew. For a short time it had been as it was on the island. He had wanted her, needed her for a few brief moments. She had meant something to him beyond an unfortunate mistake of his father’s, and of his.
Constance had spoiled it. For whatever reason, Noel’s ex-wife had spoken the words that brought back the guilt and the old pain and once more turned what she and Noel felt into something sordid and ugly.
But it could never be erased, not as long as she drew breath. It would live inside her as one more forbidden memory, joining the others she had held for more than two decades.
Riva went through the house, touching an antique vase of fragile china or the smooth, cool side of a silver bowl, pausing to finger the cut work of a tablecloth or memorize the colors of a portrait. She visited the kitchen, then took a turn outside, stopping here and there to sniff a gardenia or a rose or to pull a weed from a bed of begonias.
She saved the folly for last. Inside its shelter, she stood for a long time with her eyes closed and her back resting against the knee of the great, serene bronze Buddha. In her mind, it was raining, though the sun rose higher and higher in the sky, shining down hot and without mercy.
Finally Riva sighed and started back toward the house. There were other things still to be done.
Margaret cried out, “You’re going to what? But you can’t!”
She was lying like an invalid propped up on pillows on a chaise longue she had had moved into her room. The remains of her breakfast tray sat to one side, and a stack of magazines spilled over the surface of a small table beside the chaise, colliding with a bottle of nail polish and a pharmacist’s bottle of tranquilizers. It had been nearly three days now since she had been out of her room. Her face was blotched and bloated from crying, and she had not combed her hair or changed her clothes since she had shut herself away. It was Boots who regularly brought the pills to his wife. He had sobered enough to perform that service, but he did not linger in Margaret’s room. When he was not needed, he escaped to the garage with George, where the two sat talking about Vietnam and football and duck hunting.
Riva looked at her sister with mingled concern and exasperation. “I would have thought you’d be glad to know that Edison isn’t going to get off scot-free for what he did to you.”
“You’re about to brand me a liar to everyone I know, a woman who has claimed her sister’s child as her own all these years! You’re going to do this to me, and you expect me to be glad?”
“Why not? It was a generous thing.”
“But I’ve always been so against people who keep things hidden, unwed mothers and all that sort of thing. What will people say? What will Erin think?”
Riva signed w
ith weary patience. “There’s nothing I can do about your hypocrisy, Margaret.”
“You’re so cruel, too cruel, Riva. You don’t understand. My heart, oh, my heart.”
Riva gave her a long look. “Isn’t it odd that your heart never troubled you through Edison’s rough handling? I would have thought it would have been an appalling strain.”
“Are you suggesting I’m faking it?” Margaret sat up on the chaise, her listlessness giving way to wrath.
“I have no idea. Are you?”
Her sister fell back on her pillows again and turned her gaze to the ceiling. “I’ll die with a heart attack because no one will believe me. That, and the fact that no one understands what I went through, how I feel, is enough to drive me crazy.”
“I’m sorry, but if you go on hiding in this room and brooding as you’ve been doing, it won’t be surprising.”
Margaret’s mouth opened, then shut. Finally she said, “You’ve grown hard, Riva. This isn’t like you at all. You would never have thought of saying such a thing to me a few months back.”
“I suppose I wouldn’t, but that’s all to the good. I have to be hard now.”
“You’re going through with it, then?”
“Yes, I am.” The words sounded more firm than Riva felt at the moment, but they had to be said.
“You—you aren’t going to tell how I was raped?”
“There’s no reason why I should do that, and anyway, it’s your business.”
Margaret closed her eyes. “Thank God for that much.” After a moment, her eyelids flew upward again. “But what if Edison takes it into his head to make it public, telling all about it in that nasty, mocking way he has? I’ll never be able to hold my head up again. Never!”
Riva controlled her voice with an effort. “He has to be stopped, don’t you see? He can’t be allowed to go on doing the things he’s done.”
“If I can forget it after what he did to me, I don’t see why you can’t do the same thing.”
“I did forget it, years ago, or tried to. As a direct result, he tried to have me killed. Doesn’t that mean anything to you, Margaret? What if he does the same to someone else, someone less protected?”
Crimes of Passion Page 141