The Seduction of Water

by Carol Goodman

  “Instead, let us turn back to the pearl ferronière, whose miraculous reappearance saved Catalina from a loveless marriage. What became of it? Because it was considered the agent of miraculous intervention, the della Rosas gave the ferronière to the Convent of Santa Maria Stella Maris, where it was placed on the brow of a statue of the Virgin Mary. Now, you might think it odd to adorn a statue of the Virgin Mary with such an elaborate piece of jewelry, but remember, the use of the ferronière as an adornment for the Madonna was not without precedent.”

  Here Gordon flips backward in his slide collection to the Lippi Madonna.

  “Of course the della Rosa ferronière was more elaborate than this one. It had diamonds, as well as pearls, and a large emerald tear-shaped briolette, but these features were readily absorbed into the iconography of Mary. And remember, this convent was dedicated to Mary Stella Maris—Mary, Star of the Sea—a metaphor for the Virgin going back to the thirteenth century. What better adornment for a statue of Mary Stella Maris than pearls, which come from the sea, and a sea-green emerald, bright as a star? Unfortunately the statue was destroyed during the war, but we do have a fifteenth-century painting by an unknown artist that we believe was inspired by the statue, depicting the della Rosa ferronière.”

  Gordon has to flip through several slides to get to the picture. Of all the paintings he’s shown tonight this one is probably the least remarkable as a work of art. It looks like half a dozen portraits of Mary you might see on devotional cards, the colors cartoonish, the figure of the Madonna somewhat lumpish, the composition awkward. She’s sitting on a rock in front of a vista of sea and sky, looking for all the world as if she’s on a picnic at the beach. What takes my breath away, though, is the ornament in her hair. A net of pearls and diamonds holds back her hair and drapes over her forehead, ending in a tear-shaped emerald.

  “As you can see, not only is the face of Mary copied from Catalina’s portrait, the ferronière is the same one worn by Catalina della Rosa in her bridal portrait.”

  The portrait of Mary shifts to the right side of the screen and on the left side appears the portrait of Catalina della Rosa in her bridal parure, her green eyes set off by the enormous emerald briolette resting in the middle of her forehead.

  “And the same,” Gordon says, signaling for Natalie to turn on the lights, “as the necklace worn by our gracious hotel manager, Miss Iris Greenfeder.”

  As the lights go on the audience turns toward me.

  “Perhaps if you’d stand up . . .” Gordon is saying, but I’m already up and approaching the screen where the two images have grown paler in the light.

  “Remarkable, isn’t it?” Gordon asks me. “Natalie noticed it first when I was showing her the slides for the show.”

  “Is that the original della Rosa ferronière?” a woman in the audience asks.

  I turn around and find myself the focus of the room’s attention.

  “No, not at all,” Gordon explains. “The original della Rosa ferronière remained in the convent of Santa Maria Stella Maris until the outbreak of the Second World War. We think the abbot hid the necklace in the catacombs below the church to keep it from the Nazis, but unfortunately the church was bombed in the last days of the war and the necklace was not found in the rubble. The abbot had been killed by sniper fire only hours before the church was destroyed. Most authorities believe it was destroyed, but there is another theory that the ferronière was removed from the church and hidden in a villa south of Venice that belonged to a descendant of the della Rosa family. I’m in the process of researching that possibility . . .”

  “Where’d you get that necklace, Miss Greenfeder,” one of the restitution claims lawyers asks me in a rather challenging tone of voice. It’s the second time tonight I’ve been accused of wearing stolen property. Fortunately Natalie Baehr comes to my rescue.

  “It’s only glass and paste,” she says, standing and turning to address the crowd. “I copied it from a description in a story that Professor Greenfeder’s mother wrote.”

  “Well, then,” the lawyer asks, “where did your mother see the necklace—if it’s been missing since the war?”

  I turn to Gordon for help. I can see that his “little surprise” isn’t going as he had anticipated, but he maintains a calm I wouldn’t have thought him capable of. “We don’t know,” he says, “but I imagine she saw a copy of the Stella Maris Mary, which is widely copied and hung in churches dedicated to Mary, Star of the Sea.”

  “Yes,” I say, the pieces finally coming together, “there’s a St. Mary Star of the Sea in Brooklyn. My mother had me christened there because that’s where she was christened.”

  “There we are!” Gordon says to me, and then, turning, addresses the room. “We’ve solved at least one mystery of provenance tonight. The provenance of an image.” Gordon lays his hand on my elbow and with his other hand motions for me to return to my seat. I feel like the volunteer in a magic show dismissed from the stage. I sit down, too dazed to follow the rest of Gordon’s lecture.

  When the lecture is over I follow the rest of the guests out to the terrace, which has been set up for predinner cocktails. I should be checking to make sure everything is running smoothly in the kitchen and dining room, and that Harry’s plans for the fireworks are in place, but instead I take a glass of champagne from the bar and sit down in Half Moon. I sit in the semicircle that faces the hotel and look up at the glowing facade. It looks like a fairy-tale palace tonight, illuminated by the floodlights Harry had installed just last week. The chandelier on the second-floor landing is ablaze with candlelight, each crystal drop glittering like a tear.

  I notice Jack standing on the edge of a group, looking at me, and pat the seat next to mine to invite him over.

  “I wasn’t sure if I’d make your boyfriend jealous,” he says, sitting down next to me.

  “For one thing, I don’t think he’s my boyfriend anymore, and for another, I haven’t seen him around.”

  I see Jack struggling with the urge to ask more questions but, to his credit, he changes the subject. “You must be excited about Gordon’s discovery. Another clue to your mother’s life and art.”

  I take a sip of champagne and look up at the second-floor window. A few guests are standing on the landing, no doubt admiring the chandelier. “It made me feel like an idiot,” I say. “All these years I’ve been tracing the influence of fairy tales and Irish folk legends on her work and I never thought to look at the church. A Catholic girl from Brooklyn! I’ve never even been to that church, St. Mary Star of the Sea, except for when I was three.”

  “Well, you’ll go now. I bet that portrait is there and something about Catalina della Rosa—who knows, maybe they’ve got a piece of her in a box . . . a whattayacallit . . .”

  “A reliquary,” I say. “That’s what this whole project of mine is beginning to feel like. A grab bag of relics of my mother. A bag of bones. Do you know, Phoebe Nix warned me not to write something that might show her mother in an unfavorable light? Then, tonight, she accused me of wearing her mother’s dress.” I don’t tell Jack that the dress might actually have belonged to Vera Nix.

  “She sounds like a nut job.”

  “Exactly. Look at what a lifetime of living in her mother’s shadow has done to her. I don’t want to end up like her.”

  “Then maybe you should get away from here. Why don’t we go back to the city, Iris.” I feel Jack’s hand on mine. I know it’s the moment I should turn to him—he’s giving me a chance to repair the rupture between us—but instead I find my eyes glued to the tableau unfolding on the second-floor landing. The knot of guests has dispersed, replaced by a lone figure—a slim woman in a plain, straight dress. It’s hard to tell from here, with the chandelier candlelight between us, but I think it’s Phoebe Nix.

  “Damn, Jack, look, I think that’s Phoebe outside Joseph’s door. She’s been pestering him all week to get him to tell her more about her mother when she was up here. I bet she’s going to ask him if he re
members her wearing this dress.”

  The door to Joseph’s suite opens, but I can’t see who’s there. The lights must be off in the living area. Phoebe goes into the room for a moment but comes out quickly, closes the door behind her and walks away, toward the elevators. A few minutes later I see another figure coming from the direction of the elevators—not Phoebe, though; a man.

  “Isn’t that your friend?” Jack says. At some point Jack’s hand lifted off mine. I didn’t notice until now.

  “Yes, that’s Aidan. He’s probably returning a painting to the locked closet.” I notice, though, that Aidan isn’t carrying anything. He pauses outside Joseph’s door and then lets himself in, leaving the door open. Then he disappears into the dark room.

  I turn away from the brightly lit window and see that Jack has been watching me all along. “You didn’t answer my question, Iris. About coming back to the city with me.”

  Over Jack’s shoulder I see the dark valley and the lights along the river. Little specks of light—like fireflies—spangle the air above the river too and for a moment I think the fireworks display that Harry has planned for tonight has already started, but then I blink and the lights go away. They were only the afterimage of the chandelier candles I’d been staring at. I look back at Jack to give my answer, but before I can a sharp crack rends the still night air.

  “It must be the fireworks,” I say, looking back over the valley.

  Jack shakes his head. “It came from the hotel.”

  I turn so quickly that the chiffon swag on my dress catches on the rough wood of the bench and I hear something tear. A figure on the second-floor landing is walking, no, stumbling, toward the window. For a moment he’s caught in the light of a hundred candles and then the light seems to explode around him. I think it’s the chandelier falling, but it’s the reflection of the chandelier in the window splintering into a million shards as the man on the landing falls through the glass.

  I’m standing before I remember getting up and kneeling beside the man who is splayed out on the terrace before I realize I’ve even started moving. Splinters of glass dig into my knees and the palm of my left hand, which I use to steady myself as I use my right hand to gingerly feel for a pulse, but I don’t need the silence of his flesh to tell me that Joseph is dead.

  PART III

  The Selkie’s Daughter

  Chapter Twenty-four

  A week after Joseph died I took the train back to the city. I was surprised to see that the trees along the Palisades were still green. It felt like years since I had glimpsed the first hints of autumn color in the woods behind the hotel and for a moment I imagined that I had somehow fallen asleep and missed the turning of the year only to awaken in a new spring. If only I could go back to this past spring, I thought, back to the night Aidan showed up on my doorstep, back to the train ride when I promised to help get him the job at the hotel. But there would be no going back. Joseph was dead and Aidan was gone, wanted for his murder.

  When we finally got into Joseph’s suite—I was reluctant to leave Joseph on the terrace even though it was clear that nothing could be done for him and it took some time before Harry was able to get up from the ledge where he had been checking the fireworks preparations—it was empty. The Hudson River School paintings were gone, although the lock on the closet showed no signs of forced entry. There were some signs of struggle in the living area: a broken lamp, an overturned chair, one of Joseph’s crutches lying on the floor, a splotch of fresh blood on the carpet near where the crutch lay. Even before the DNA tests confirmed that the blood belonged to Aidan (cross-matched with samples from his prison record), the detective from Kingston had already established a fairly convincing scenario for what had happened in Joseph’s suite.

  It was not my evidence alone that placed Aidan in the suite minutes before the gunshot was heard. When questioned, Phoebe admitted—somewhat reluctantly, I noticed—that she had passed him in the hall after she left Joseph’s suite. “He told me that he was making a last check on the paintings as per Harry’s orders.”

  Harry denied that he had sent Aidan on any such mission. “In fact, I hadn’t seen the boy all evening and I was annoyed that he wasn’t downstairs supervising such an important event.”

  Of course, no one knew exactly what had happened once Aidan entered the suite. I told Detective March twice that it was too dark inside the room to see anything from where I was on the terrace. When he asked the question a third time Jack interrupted and told the detective that he’d been sitting right next to me on the terrace and what I said was true: you could see the hallway on the second-floor landing because it was lit by the chandelier, but the lights must have been off in Joseph’s suite and you couldn’t see into it from where we were seated.

  “But at least you were facing the window when the gun was fired?” Detective March asked Jack. “While Ms. Greenfeder was . . .”

  “I was looking out over the valley,” I said. “I thought the sound was the beginning of the fireworks display, but then Jack said it came from the hotel . . .”

  “Can you tell us if you saw Joseph Krupah leave the room before or after the gun was fired?” Detective March asked Jack.

  “I’m not sure, but I think he was in the doorway, or maybe a foot or two into the hall, when I heard the sound. He was limping and I thought, What’s he doing out without his crutches? and then when I heard the sound he fell forward, toward the window, and then he fell through it.”

  The gun was found two days later, caught in some brush on the ledge below the terrace—as if someone had tried to throw it off the side of the mountain but hadn’t thrown it far enough. It was Harry Kron’s gun—reported to the police as stolen a month earlier—and it had been wiped clean of fingerprints.

  “Would Mr. Barry have had access to your suite the night your gun was stolen?” Detective March asked Harry when the gun was found. He’d asked Harry and me to meet with him in the Sleepy Hollow Suite, which had been cordoned off as a crime scene since the night of the murder. I hadn’t been in the suite since that night and I’d expected to feel uneasy because of the blood on the carpet or the remains of fingerprinting powder that still lingered on the furniture and woodwork, but what upset me most was sitting in the same seat by the window where I had sat only a week before talking to Joseph, under the specter of the Headless Horseman whose fiery severed head seemed to leer at me from the painted wall. Now Detective March sat in the wing-backed chair where Joseph had sat, Harry sat in the matching chair on the other side of the window, and I was perched on the footstool in between the two.

  “I leave it to my manager to decide who has a master key,” Harry said, deferring the question to me.

  “He shouldn’t have had one that night,” I said, “because Mr. Kron hadn’t promoted him to special-events coordinator yet . . . he was just working in the garden . . .”

  “And you don’t generally give out master keys to the gardening staff?” Detective March asked me with barely disguised disdain. I was convinced he had taken a dislike to me the minute I confessed that I’d looked away from the window at the crucial moment and that aversion was strengthened when I explained that I had knowingly hired an ex-convict to work in the hotel.

  “No, but all the maids have master keys . . .”

  I saw Detective March write something in his notebook and guessed that it was a note to question all the maids as to whether or not they had given their master keys to anyone that night. I knew that Paloma would probably lie for me and deny giving me her key that night, but I guessed that she would lie badly and that the lie would cost her. I’d seen too many maids called into my father’s office after a guest had reported some valuable item stolen from his or her room. I’d seen them come out, their faces bleached with fear and guilt, even the ones who were exonerated hours later when the watch or billfold showed up in the guest’s own pocket.

  “I lost my key that night,” I told the detective, meeting his eyes as he looked up from his notebook, not
out of bravery but because it was easier to face his antipathy than the look of disappointment in Harry’s face. “I think I lost it in the library where Gordon del Sarto was giving his lecture that night.”

  “I believe Mr. Barry helped set up the slides for that,” Harry said.

  “So Mr. Barry might have found the key and let himself into Mr. Kron’s suite . . .”

  “But why? I mean, I know how much Aidan wanted to avoid going back to prison. He wrote a beautiful essay about it . . .” The look on Detective March’s face stops me from further praising Aidan’s eloquent rendition of Tam Lin.

  “That’s very nice, Ms. Greenfeder. I’m glad to know my tax dollars are going toward teaching prisoners to express themselves. Tell me, do you know why Mr. Barry was in prison?”

  “He told me he was in a car with his cousin that turned out to be stolen and to have stolen guns in the trunk. He said he didn’t know about the guns, but he did know his cousin was involved in raising money for the IRA.”

  Detective March made a choking sound in the back of his throat, which I supposed was his version of a laugh. “Uh-huh. Did he mention that when the car was pulled over he ran?”

  “No, but . . .”

  “And that the officer who pursued him was hit by another vehicle and died?”