“I did,” Deloitte muttered. “He wouldn’t listen. You’ve got to understand, Nina, people like the Outrays, they have no sense of limitation. Anything they want to do is okay because they’re the ones doing it.”
“Lèse majesté?”
Deloitte shrugged.
“And is that what happened with Susan and Tracey Forrester? Randy Outray felt like murdering them, so he did?”
Deloitte said nothing. Kerrin looked impassive.
I waited for her to say something, anything, to reaffirm my loyalty to her. Nothing but a slowly widening silence followed me out the door.
• • •
Feeling too restless to go home and mindful of the chocolate cake, I took the Sanderson’s dogs to the ravine and let them off their leads while I jogged. The crisp air energized them. Caleb and Kelsey lunged through the fluffy drifts like puppies, snuffling excitedly at unimaginable scents. Sighting what appeared to be an especially deep, downy pile, Caleb bounded away in a graceless rush and dove into it head first. Hanna Barbera would have made much of the moment. The dog lay flat out while, in gentle slow motion, snow slid down the face of the rock it had hidden and dropped in a cloud onto his back. I laughed out loud. From under his snowdrift, Caleb gave me a baleful look. Canine pride had suffered a blow. The dog picked himself up, shook out his coat, and stalked away with as much dignity as he could muster.
The woods had a silvery, quiet look. Sunshine glimmered through ice crystals in the air and glinted off crusted tree limbs. Mine were the first human tracks on the path. When I was small, Kerrin always took me out in fresh fallen snow to make angels. I walked behind her, carefully fitting my own small boots into her larger footprints, pretending she was King Wenceslas and I was the page. Whenever she said “here!” the two of us fell giggling to the ground, waving our arms and legs. Some days we left whole flights of angels in our wake.
My instinctive reaction to the criticism of my sister in the Express had been defensive. It had hurt to see our private tragedy so publicly displayed. But Kerrin herself had quashed my sympathy, and her outrage reminded me that a relative stranger moved behind the familiar facade. The character I had assigned her so many years ago was of my own imagining; I had already learned that lesson.
On the path ahead, Kelsey nosed at a set of rabbit tracks. She must have decided they were too old to be worth pursuing because she only followed them for a step or two before abandoning the scent and running on. We had reached the half-way point in the loop, the spot where two months ago yellow crime scene tape had marked a murder scene. The tape was gone now, the birch trees gray skeletons against the sky. I thought of the woman and the little girl who had died on that spot, beauty and innocence, gone from a world that seemed content to let such things run through its fingers like water. I thought about Simone Outray’s bitter outbursts and of the pain in David Maitland’s voice when he talked about his sister. I felt old loyalties shift like sand beneath my feet.
There was a movement in the bushes at the edge of the clearing, then a soft plop as a clump of snow was dislodged from a branch. I jerked around to see who was there, heart thudding, mind all at once full of nameless terrors.
It was only the rabbit. He had been joined by a friend and the two of them froze, noses quivering, when they saw me. I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. The sound alarmed the animals into retreat and they vanished back into the brush like clumsy ghosts.
I was shivering, though not with cold. I whistled the dogs to me and snapped on their leads. We had come far enough; it was time to go home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The library was crowded. High school kids were doing homework and socializing in roughly equal proportion. It would be a while before a computer terminal came free and I needed to access the library’s archives. What I wanted I didn’t think I could find from the comfort of my home, though Brent William might have been able to point me in the right direction.
As I waited, I thumbed through a copy of Harris’s History of Kingsport. I didn’t hold out much hope of finding the answers I was looking for there. Or anywhere, really. Could anything, any fact or hint from the past, anything in the history of the Outray family, confirm a dysfunction severe enough to explain Randy’s grotesque act? If so, I needed to find it myself, without courtroom rhetoric or legal hyperbole. Otherwise, I couldn’t remain part of Kerrin’s mock jury. Whatever loyalty I felt toward my sister could not outweigh the abhorrence I felt for her client.
According to Harris, the founding fathers of Kingsport, Jeremiah Outray among them, had fled various parts of Europe for the new world, where a combination of brains, brawn and ambition had resulted in fortunes in gunpowder, oil, railroads, and lumber. It was interesting to note where the boldness and drive that had led its original settlers to prosperity had dwindled in a few generations to complacency. Where Jeremiah and his sons had exerted themselves to create new lives, their grandsons had felt less compulsion to labor. By the end of the Second World War, the family holdings were so extensive that perhaps it seemed beside the point to do anything more than simply enjoy them.
I slid the book back onto the shelf just as a kid with the body of a football player and a mouth full of jumbled teeth quitted the desk I had been waiting for. I commandeered the vacant seat an instant before a pouty blonde slid into it and called up the database I was looking for. I would start with John and Zoe Outray.
There seemed nothing remarkable in either of their early lives. Both had gone to the usual schools, with the usual results, had “come out” with the usual fanfare and gone on to sit on various boards and committees. I glossed over long descriptions of houses, yachts, horses, clothes, jewelry, wedding, wedding presents, and wedding guests. The birth of a son after five years of marriage had been heralded as a major achievement. Great things were predicted for the future of this golden boy; the women’s magazines had fairly cooed over images of the angelic cherub and his stunning mother. Simone’s arrival six years later had been acknowledged with much less hoopla, which may have been unjust but was hardly surprising. Having fulfilled her duty by producing a perfect heir to the family name, Zoe had already moved on to the next stage of her life, as benefactress to various charitable concerns.
There were the usual clips of the family on holiday, skiing at Aspen, sunning in Hawaii. Running the pictures together like a slide show, it was fascinating to see the development of the Outray children. Simone did not share her brother’s good looks but there was something in the bone structure of her face that could, if allowed, have lent her character and a kind of grace. Given her mother’s wide-eyed, smooth skinned elegance, I was surprised that so little effort seemed to have been taken with the daughter. But it was clear, skimming through the passage of years, that the mother had gradually distanced herself from her second child. Randy, looking the epitome of the spoiled little rich kid, was at the forefront of most of the pictures; Simone stood on the fringes. I wondered which had come first, the chill and disenchantment of Zoe’s worldly sophistication, or Simone’s lack of warmth. Perhaps there was ice on both sides, and one had merely reinforced the other.
The Outrays lived their lives on quite a different plane than I did and the constant run of social engagements made me wonder if they ever spent a quiet evening at home, as a family. On the whole, I thought not. Randy and Simone were given over to the care of a succession of nannies, sent to the right schools and taken on the right holidays. There was some mention of The Loftwood School, which surprised me, as it was a parochial school with a reputation for spartan living conditions and harsh discipline. Moreover, it was a girls’ school. Randy might have benefitted from such restraint but I would have thought his sister too susceptible to its rigid morality. Maybe that was where she had acquired the expression of permanent disapproval with which she seemed to view the world.
I had, I suppose, expected to find some evidence of a
domineering father, a demanding mother, of goals being set for the son that were impossible to reach. Instead, I found over-indulgence and great wealth allied to an almost total lack of purpose. In trying to reconcile that history with the murder in the woods, I could only think of Leopold and Loeb, two young men who, for no other reason than to see what it would feel like, killed a fourteen-year old boy with as little compunction as they might have felt in stepping on an ant. I didn’t care what a psychiatrist might make of that. Pitiable though it might be for anyone to be so totally without conscience, as far as I was concerned, there was no possible excuse for such an action, nor any hope of redemption.
• • •
It was almost dark by the time I left the library. On the way home, I wandered over to the corner to see if Yuri was roasting chestnuts today. People hustled past with the preoccupied air of those who know exactly how few shopping days were left until Christmas. Shopkeepers kept extended store hours in order to accommodate those with lists more extensive than mine.
It had been a very busy day, Yuri apologized, but if I was not in too much of a hurry, he would heat a new batch of chestnuts just for me. While I waited, I studied the display at Irina’s newsstand. The usual atrocities in Africa and the Middle East competed for attention with the diet secrets of the rich and famous. Aliens had been spotted in Montana; a woman in California had just given birth to triplets, each of whom was a different color; and the CIA was plotting to put a new tsar on the Russian throne.
“This one ought to appeal to you,” I told Irina.
“Perhaps,” she answered gravely, “they will make Yuri Tsar.”
I laughed. “Will you ever go back to Russia, do you think?”
Irina shook her head. “There is nothing for me there.”
“No family? Brothers or sisters?”
“No. I had only one sister and she is gone, many years ago. She was sent to labor camp.”
“Why?”
“She was poet. Nineteen-year old poet. An enemy of the people.”
Fifty years hadn’t eased the pain. “You still miss her.”
“She is still my sister,” Irina said simply.
• • •
It was dark when I got home. There was a message from David, canceling our dinner date. He sounded hurried and distracted and I tried hard not to mind.
A pile of documents littered the harvest table. Brent William had dropped off copies of his business plan, budget projections, market analysis, all the groundwork for “Roadblocks.” I had agreed to go over it for him and give him a formal assessment.
I opened a bottle of wine and got out some crackers and spinach dip. I plugged in my iPod, shut the blinds, and straightened the pillows on the couch. I penciled a note in the margin of Brent’s outline, trying to give his work the attention it deserved while Robbie Williams crooned in the background. There was a lot of information to wade through. Brent had been very thorough.
The music shifted to an instrumental arrangement of the love song from a film about a doomed love affair. Something in its muted melancholy found too ready an echo in me. I reached over and turned it off.
I felt tired and depressed. Too much had happened in the last few weeks and the pleasant things had somehow faded back out of mind, leaving me with an oddly flattened feeling.
I knew what it was. I had lived with loneliness a long time. It was something that was always there. I had learned to accept it, even — sometimes — to enjoy it, but on evenings like this one, the desperate self-sufficiency I had contrived was not quite enough.
I tuned in to Radio Kingsport. Red Reilly’s late night phone-in lines were jammed. The subject was vigilante justice. The callers were more pro than con and they based many of their comments on what they read in the Express.
I turned off the radio and turned on the TV for the eleven o’clock news. Outside the Outray estate, thirty-five women and a handful of men marched under a banner that read: “Join the Clubbe. Get away with murder.”
At nine-thirty, a scuffle had broken out between a few of the marchers and the security guards John Outray had hired to disperse them. In the confusion, one of the side gates to the property had been left unattended. A dozen protesters had swarmed the house, hurling eggs and oaths in roughly equal proportion. It took the guards, aided by the police, almost an hour to round up all the troublemakers and take down their names. News at Eleven had coverage of the incident and the commentator sounded almost gleeful as she identified Ian Forrester in the crowd. He had the dead eyes of a zombie. With a shock, I recognized David beside him, tugging at his arm and trying to pull him out of camera range.
It wasn’t until a little after two A.M. that one of the guards patrolling the Outray garden noticed the door to the indoor pool was ajar. A few minutes later, he discovered the body of Randy Outray floating face down in the shallow end. He had been shot in the back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“What a very dark horse your David turned out to be,” Sonja Reid said archly. “It’s rather exciting in a way to think of him being here, practically stalking young Randy Outray right in my own living room.”
We were sitting in her library sorting out the last of the Party accounts, my own included. Without its masses of flowers and the glittering panoply of the Christmas ball, the house looked overexposed. The only remaining concession to the season was a perfectly symmetrical tree, trimmed in gold, coldly elegant in the curve of the main staircase.
For Sonja, the drama of having an accused murderer in her home had been overshadowed by the thrill of having brought him face to face — maybe — with his killer. It hadn’t taken the police long to sort out who David was. Everyone involved in the demonstration had been questioned. No one had been arrested because no weapon had been found and so far, the police had only circumstantial evidence pointing to potential suspects. The suspects it pointed to most strongly were Ian Forrester and David Maitland.
Predictably, Kerrin was furious when she learned who David was and she wasted no time in telling me so.
“What the hell did you think you were playing at?” she had screamed, ignoring the distraction of the coffee mug I waved at her. “No wonder the Express knew so much about the case we were preparing.”
Resolutely, I filled my own mug, cradling its reassuring warmth in my hands. I said, “I didn’t know what David’s involvement was until after the Reid’s party. And then I sort of figured it was up to him to tell you himself. Why did you invite him to be on the mock jury anyway? You didn’t know him from a hole in the ground.”
“Mel recommended him. He’d worked with him on some deal or other and when Maitland said he was going to be in town for a while, it seemed like a gift — someone totally outside the community, with no preconceived biases either way in the case.” She threw up her hands. “Not that we need a case anymore. The goddamn defendant is dead.”
“And you think David is responsible for that?”
“He may not have pulled the trigger, but he must have known what was in his brother-in-law’s mind. Either way, he’s guilty.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“What?”
“He wouldn’t take the law into his own hands like that,” I said, wondering if my words sounded as false as they felt. Much as I wanted to believe they were true, I couldn’t dodge the memory of David, saying in that hard little voice, “I want to see that justice is done.”
Admittedly, where men were concerned, my instincts were more than a little rusty. How well did I know David, after all?
Kerrin said, “He probably knew who you were, all along. You made the perfect conduit for him. Why else would he have hit on you?”
Why else, indeed.
Something of what I was feeling must have shown on my face, because Kerrin said quickly, “I didn’t mean it like that, Nina. It’s just, kn
owing who he is now, the whole thing looks so contrived. Surely you can see that.”
I didn’t answer.
Kerrin’s mouth tightened. Her voice wavered a little. “You know, Nina, sometimes it’s a whole lot easier to think that you’re in love, than to accept that you’re alone,” she said.
There was no point in arguing. It would have been a very odd Cinderella indeed who could have ventured out of the dreary seclusion of my life, into contact with David’s particular brand of warmth and humor, without something of the sort happening. But even if he wasn’t Prince Charming, I wasn’t prepared to jettison him without a hearing.
Sonja’s voice intruded on my reverie. She was nattering on about her other guests in a way that left no doubt they had been only a backdrop for her centerpiece, the Outrays. Sonja invariably built any social function around personalities. It was no wonder she had been so nervous beforehand; if the Outrays had failed to attend, her soiree would have been just another fancy dress party.
“You spent quite a bit of time with Simone,” Sonja said. Her tone invited confidences. “Tell me, what did you think of her? Isn’t she just too pathetic for words?”
“Actually, I did feel rather sorry for her,” I said. “It must be a very difficult time for all of them.”
“Oh, sure. But the rest of the family seems to be handling it with so much more … style. Of course, Simone has always been the odd duck in that group. She is so very ordinary.”
I said drily, “Being ordinary is not a heinous sin.”
“Oh,” Sonja said, “Don’t you think so?”
I concentrated fiercely on the bills in front of me, aware of Sonja’s speculative gaze and trying to ignore it. After a few minutes, I got twitchy and said, “Is there something you wanted?”
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