I began to exchange the lamps Elaine had chosen with lovely porcelain antique lamps I found on the third floor. According to Jane Barr, Elaine had banished them when she redecorated the mansion. I set framed family pictures on the mantel, and placed photograph albums dating back one hundred years on top of the grand piano.
I once heard a prominent journalist say that in her home, books were the interior decoration. The bookcases by the fireplace in the living room contained expensive but modern tchotchkes. I packed many of them away and replaced them with some of my books which I had shipped to the mansion before the wedding. Peter and I joked that those boxes constituted my dowry. When Elaine came to the house on Saturday, it would be her first visit since I had made my changes. I would be watching for her reaction.
I had told the guests for Richard’s dinner to arrive at seven o’clock. It seemed like years had passed since Peter and I had dinner with these same guests the week after we returned from our honeymoon. I decided to wear the same silk shirt and velvet slacks that I’d worn that night. I could tell I wouldn’t be wearing those slacks again until after the baby was born. Then I let my hair fall loose on my shoulders. I knew I was dressing for my husband, not these people.
I had left that page from People magazine on top of my dresser, hoping that if I kept looking at it I would find the information Greco was sure was there. When I was about to go downstairs, I impulsively picked up that page and took it with me. I placed it on top of Peter’s desk in his library, where it would be easy to see when we were having coffee. I had said I wanted to draw out the real killer-if he or she was in that small group. If there really was significance to that page, then maybe one of them would react to it. Frankly, I thought Greco was putting far too much weight on it.
At precisely seven, the chimes sounded, and the first of my guests arrived.
73
Go easy, Richard,” Elaine Carrington cautioned as she watched her son pour a second vodka for himself. “We’ll be having cocktails at the mansion, and then wine at dinner.”
“I would never have guessed that,” Richard said.
Elaine eyed her son anxiously. He’d been on edge ever since he arrived, which meant he probably had placed some bets after getting a few more of his hot tips. But maybe not, she thought, trying to reassure herself. He knows I can’t cover his losses anymore.
“What do you think will happen after Peter is convicted?” Richard asked abruptly. “Will Kay just rattle around in the mansion all by herself?”
“She’s having a baby,” Elaine replied sharply. “She won’t be alone for long.”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“Kay didn’t tell me that. I found out because Linda Hauser’s daughter ran into Kay at Dr. Silver’s office.”
“That doesn’t prove she’s pregnant.”
“Trust me. She is. In fact, I’m going to ask her tonight, and I’ll bet she’ll admit it.”
“So we have an heir to the Carrington fortune,” Richard said with a sneer. “Isn’t that wonderful?”
“Don’t worry. I plan to be the ultimate stepgrandmother. Kay already understands that I hid that shirt to save Peter, and she’s grateful for that. Not giving it to her was a big mistake-she’d have been forever in my debt. Now she sees me as a blackmailer who didn’t deliver.”
“Which you are.” Richard said.
Elaine slammed down the glass of wine she had been sipping. “Don’t you dare talk to me like that! If it weren’t for you, I’d be living on the interest of ten million dollars as well as a million a year. Between your gambling and your lousy investments, you’ve drained me dry, Richard, and you know it. You’ve put me through the tortures of the damned, and now you insult me! Go to hell, Richard! Go to hell!”
Her face crumbled as her son crossed the room in two strides. “Hey, none of that,” he said soothingly. “It’s you and me against the world-including the whole damn bunch of Carringtons. Right, Mommy?” His voice became teasing. “Come on, Momma-mia, make up with me.”
“Oh, Richard,” Elaine said with a heavy sigh. “You remind me so much of your father. Turn on the charm, let’s make up. That was his routine.”
“You were crazy about my father. I remember that.”
“Yes, I was,” Elaine said quietly. “But even when you’re crazy about someone, at some point you can have enough. Remember that, Richard. And forget that second vodka. Have another at the mansion. It’s time to go. We’re due at seven.”
74
Vincent Slater was the first to arrive for the dinner. As usual, he parked in the driveway behind the mansion and took out his key, planning to enter through the French doors that opened into his office.
The key did not turn-the lock had been changed.
Damn her, he thought, damn her! Kay Lansing, the landscaper’s daughter-she’s now making Peter Carrington’s home off-limits to the one person who has protected Peter from the time he was a young boy. And continues to protect him, Slater thought grimly. If she only knew!
If I’d given her the shirt, she would have showed it to that detective, and that would have been it. She puts on an act of being so crazy about Peter, but the way it’s going, this will end up with him rotting in prison while she enjoys the Carrington fortune.
Maybe. But then again, maybe not, he thought.
His anger rising with every step, Slater walked around the mansion, nodded curtly to the guard on duty, and went to the front door. For the first time in nearly thirty years, he pressed his finger on the doorbell and waited to be invited inside.
75
It was Slater,” Gary Barr told his wife as he entered the kitchen. “You can count on him being Johnny-on-the-spot. The clock chimes seven, and there he is, ringing the doorbell.”
“Why are you so mad at him? He’s always been nice to you.” Jane Barr was putting cheese puffs in the oven. She closed the oven door and turned to her husband. “You need to change your attitude, Gary, although it may be too late. I can tell Mrs. Carrington isn’t comfortable with you around. That’s why most nights she’s been telling us not to wait to serve dinner.”
“She was the one who got Slater on the phone to tell me to run that fool’s errand in New York. She was in on searching the house. She even had you answer the phone so she’d be sure you wouldn’t run over there for any reason.” Too late, Gary Barr realized that he had said too much. Jane knew nothing about Peter Carrington’s dress shirt, nor did she realize that their home had been searched.
“What are you talking about?” Jane demanded. “Who searched what? Why?”
The doorbell rang again. Saved by the bell, Gary Barr thought as he rushed to answer. This time it was Elaine Carrington and her son Richard.
“Good evening, Mrs. Carrington, Mr. Walker.”
Elaine ignored him and brushed by as she headed inside.
Walker paused: “I would suggest that, for your own good, you return what you took from my mother’s home. I know more about you than you think I know, and I’m not afraid to use it.”
76
Barbara Krause and Tom Moran had stayed in the office long after the rest of the prosecutor’s staff had said good night and scurried away for the weekend. After Barbara received the phone call, she told Moran to get out the Susan Althorp file so that they could review the statements Ambassador Althorp had made at the time of his daughter’s disappearance.
The ambassador had phoned Barbara, asked for the appointment, and said it was necessary to make it that late because his lawyer would be accompanying him.
“We always considered it possible that he was the one who did it,” Moran said, “although it seemed only remotely possible. But now that his wife is dead, maybe he needs to come clean. Otherwise, why would he bother to bring a lawyer with him?”
Promptly at eight o’clock, Althorp and his lawyer were escorted into the prosecutor’s office. Krause’s first impression of Althorp was that he looked sick. The ruddy complexion she had remembered when she l
ast saw him was now pasty, and his face had become jowly.
He looks like a guy who just suffered a blow to the solar plexus, she thought.
“My wife has been buried,” Ambassador Althorp began abruptly. “I cannot protect her any longer. After the funeral, I told my sons something that I have kept secret for twenty-two years. In turn, one of them then told me something that Susan had confided to him the Christmas before her death, and this new information changes everything. I believe that there has been a terrible miscarriage of justice, and I share responsibility for it.”
Krause and Moran stared at him in stunned silence.
“Ambassador Althorp wishes to make a statement,” his lawyer said. “Are you prepared to take it?”
77
Elaine did not comment on the changes I had made in the living room, which I interpreted to mean that she was not pleased with them. She carried it off well, although I could understand how she must be feeling. Six months ago she knew nothing of my existence. She had lived in this house for the five years she was married to Peter’s father, and after his death had stayed on, running the place until Peter married Grace Meredith. Now it was mine.
“That was when things changed. Mrs. Elaine moved into the other house, and Peter invited us to come back,” Jane Barr had confided to me. “Mrs. Grace Carrington took the people on the staff that she especially liked and shifted them to the apartment. That’s where she really lived and did her entertaining, so even though there was a new mistress in the house, Mrs. Elaine pretty much had the run of the mansion, even though she didn’t actually live here anymore.”
In the years following Grace’s death, Elaine had become a kind of de facto lady of the house. Then I had come along to spoil it.
I was aware that without me in the picture, she was the closest thing to a relative that Peter had, and it would have been only natural for him to turn to her for comfort if he went to prison. And Peter was generous.
Vincent Slater was either acting very cool to me, or he was afraid of me. I wasn’t sure which it was. I couldn’t decide whether he felt I had betrayed Peter by hiring Nicholas Greco, or was afraid that Greco would find out something that would incriminate him. Greco had suggested the possibility of an “unholy alliance,” as he had put it, between Vince and Barr. I really hadn’t had time to give that possibility much thought.
I will say in Richard Walker’s behalf that he was the one who made the evening. He told anecdotes about the years he had spent working at Sotheby’s when he was in his early twenties, and told us about the elderly art connoisseur in London who had hired him now. “He’s quite a delightful guy,” Richard said, “and it’s a perfect time to make the move. I can get out of my lease for the gallery and even get a bonus in giving up the space. My apartment is in the hands of the broker, and we already have offers on it.”
For a little while we avoided talking about Peter, but then at dinner it became impossible to ignore the fact that we were here, dining in his home, while he was in a jail cell. “I did give him some good news,” I said. “I told him we were having a baby.”
“I guessed it!” Elaine said triumphantly. “I told Richard only a couple of hours ago that I was going to ask-I had my suspicions.”
Both Elaine and Richard gave me big, seemingly heartfelt hugs.
That left my other guest, Vincent Slater. Our eyes met, and I saw an expression in his that frightened me. I couldn’t read it, but for an instant the image of Peter’s other pregnant wife, floating in the pool, flashed through my mind.
By nine o’clock, we were having coffee in the library. By then we had run out of things to say to one another, and there was a kind of forced attitude of civility. I felt so much hostility in the room that I resolved I would never bring these people into Peter’s special space again. I could tell that all three of them despised Gary Barr. I knew Elaine suspected him of stealing Peter’s shirt. Greco had confirmed that Barr admitted to the theft, and we knew that Vincent had then found it and taken it himself.
I could not be sure if any of them, including Barr, had noticed the page from People magazine lying on the corner of Peter’s desk. I had placed it in such a way that it was hard to miss. I still didn’t understand how it could be important, but if it drew a reaction from one of my guests, then I might have a clue.
At nine thirty, they all got up to go. By then, the stress of the evening had begun to exhaust me. If any of these men was the one I heard being threatened by Susan Althorp all those years ago in the chapel, I was not going to find out about it tonight.
We stood by the front door for a few minutes as Vincent and I wished Richard all good luck in London. He told me that if possible, he would be back for Peter’s trial, to lend moral support. “I love that guy, Kay,” Richard said. “I always have. And I know he loves you.”
Long ago, Maggie had told me that you can love a person without loving everything about that person. “Monsignor Fulton Sheen was a great speaker who had a television program about fifty years ago,” she had reminisced. “One day he said something that really impressed me. He said, ‘I hate communism, but I love the communist.”
I think that was a good comparison to the way Peter felt about Richard. He loved the person and despised his weakness.
After I closed the door behind Elaine and Richard and Vincent, I walked back to the kitchen. The Barrs were about to leave. “The cups are all washed and put away, Mrs. Carrington,” Jane said anxiously.
“Mrs. Carrington, if you need anything during the night, you know we’ll be there in a minute for you,” Gary Barr said.
I ignored his remark, but did say that I thought everyone had enjoyed the dinner very much. I bid them good night and they left by the kitchen door; I double-locked it behind them.
It had become my habit at the end of the day to sit for a while in Peter’s library. It made me feel close to him. I could relive the moment I walked into this room for the first time and saw him sitting in his chair. I could smile as I remembered the way his reading glasses slipped from his face when he stood up to greet me.
But tonight I didn’t stay there long. I was exhausted, both emotionally and physically. I was beginning to fear that Nicholas Greco would not be able to come up with anything that would help in Peter’s defense. He was so cautious when I asked him about what he had learned. Maybe he was even finding information that would hurt Peter.
I got up from the chair and walked over to the desk. I wanted to be sure to take the page from People magazine upstairs with me. I didn’t want to forget it. Greco had been so insistent that I show it to Peter on the next visiting day.
I had anchored the page with Peter’s handsome antique magnifying glass, and it was covering a section of the background in the picture of Marian Howley.
Part of the section magnified included a painting on the wall behind Howley. I lifted the magnifying glass and studied the painting intently. It was a pastoral scene, identical to the one I had replaced in the dining room. Taking the page and magnifying glass with me, I ran upstairs to the third floor. I had changed a number of the paintings, and had to dig it out from within a stack I had placed on the floor, each painting covered and carefully wrapped.
The frame was heavy, and I was cautious not to overdo the pulling and lifting, but finally I got it out. I propped it against the wall and then sat cross-legged on the floor in front of it. Using the magnifying glass, I slowly began to examine it.
I’m not an art expert, so the fact that this painting did not in any way stir me was not a test of its value. It was signed in the corner-Morley-with the same flourish as the one now hanging in the dining room. The two paintings were essentially identical in content. But the other one compelled attention; this one did not. The date on this one was 1920.
In 1920, had Morley painted this scene and then gone on to create other similar scenes, only with greater skill? It was possible. But then I saw what could only be visible by careful examination: There was another name under Morley’s s
ignature.
“What do you think you’re doing, Kay?”
I whirled around. Vincent Slater was standing in the doorway, staring at me, his face white, his lips a thin hard line. He began walking across the room to me, and I shrank away from him.
“What do you think you are doing?” he asked again.
78
In Barbara Krause’s office, a court stenographer had been summoned to take down the statement given by Ambassador Charles Althorp. More composed now than he had been when he entered the office, Althorp’s voice was steady when he began to speak again.
“At the time of her disappearance, I did not reveal that I had learned my daughter, Susan, had developed an addiction to cocaine. As investigator Nicholas Greco pointed out to me the other day, had I told that to the police when Susan disappeared, the investigation might have moved in another direction.”
He looked down at his folded hands as if contemplating them. “I thought that by keeping a tight rein on Susan, and cutting off her allowance, I would force her to stop using drugs. Of course, I was wrong. Greco told me that the afternoon of the party in the Carrington mansion, the present Mrs. Carrington, who was then six years old, overheard a woman blackmailing a man because she needed money. Greco believes-and now I do as well-that it was Susan she heard. Hours later, Susan disappeared.
“For years I have kept the secret of Susan’s addiction. I told my sons about it as we stood next to their mother’s grave. Had I revealed it earlier, a great injustice might have been avoided.” Althorp closed his eyes and shook his head. “I should have…” His voice trailed off.
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