Now, thought Kincaid, are we going to hear the stock conservative solution, or is he genuinely concerned? His eyes swept the circle of faces, expecting expressions of kindly interest.
The response seemed quite out of proportion. Penny MacKenzie’s eyes had filled and tears hung quivering on her lower lashes. “Excuse me.” The whisper was almost inaudible. She thrust her sherry glass into Maureen’s hand and fled the room.
“What on earth?” Patrick spoke into the silence that followed the banging of the reception room door. “Did I put my foot in it, somehow?”
“I don’t know,” Maureen answered. “I believe Penny and Emma cared for their ailing father for a long time. Maybe the reminder upset her.”
“How difficult for her,” said Janet Lyle, and they nodded sympathetically. All except Hannah, who, Kincaid noticed, had gone very pale, and looked, for the first time since they had met, her age.
“I’d better be off, myself.” Hannah gave a brittle smile and left the room without so much as a glance at Patrick.
“Dear god, it’s catching,” Cassie spoke for the first time. “Poor Patrick. Let’s hope you haven’t the same effect on the voters.” Until then she had stood at the back of the group and left them, for once, to their own devices. Her tone was caustic.
Before Rennie could respond, his wife appeared in the doorway of the bar. She walked as if she were treading on egg shells, with the exquisite care of the very drunk. The yellow scarf trailed over her shoulder like a banner. “What’s the matter,” she said with great deliberation, “has someone got their feelings hurt?”
The croquet mallet hit the ball with a satisfying smack. Brian Hunsinger whooped with delight as his ball slammed his sister’s well away from the wicket. “I got you. I got you,” he shrieked and swung his mallet again in pantomime.
“Baby!” yelled Bethany. “I won’t play with you. You cheat. It was my turn.”
“Was not.”
“It’ll be too dark to play soon.” Angela broke into the squabble. “Come on, Beth. It’s your turn now. I’ll bet you can knock Brian’s ball halfway to the drive.”
Angela as peacemaker. Quite a change, Kincaid thought, from the sullen child who sat in corners and spoke to no one. He stood on the steps and watched the three children. At the other end of the garden Emma MacKenzie and John Hunsinger sat together companion-ably on the stone bench. Certainly they seemed in better accord than the group that had just broken up inside.
Patrick Rennie had hustled his wife out of the room, his face flushed with embarrassment. “Too bad. Poor Patrick,” Marta Rennie said over her shoulder as her husband maneuvered her through the doorway. The last thing they heard was an echo of her spiteful giggle from the entrance hall.
Cassie turned on her heel and left the room without a word. Graham, who had been as silent as Cassie all evening, said, “Shit. Maybe she’s got the right idea,” and disappeared into the bar.
Maureen looked around as if surprised to find her husband and children not attached to her. “Oh dear, the kiddies haven’t had their tea,” she said and hurried from the room.
“Well, it was a nice party. I mean, until…” Janet ducked her head, her eyes straying in her husband’s direction.
“Appalling. Absolutely appalling. How the man has the nerve to stand for public office with a wife like that, I can’t imagine.” Eddie stalked from the room, and Janet followed with a last apologetic glance at Kincaid.
Cassie pulled her sweater over her head in irritation. The angora fiber woven into the sweater’s wool had rubbed her skin until it felt as if it had been scrubbed with a wire brush. But the color, a dull olive, flattered her, and she had dressed with special care. Not that it had mattered. She could have worn a flour sack for all the difference it had made.
Nothing had gone right for her since the minute she walked into the sitting room for cocktails.
Nothing had gone right for her, in fact, since that dreadful row with Sebastian on Sunday afternoon. Cassie dropped her sweater where she stood, kicked off her linen slacks in the direction of the bedroom and shrugged herself into an old satin dressing gown left lying across the armchair the night before. She’d made little effort to imprint her personality on the bland chintz-and-oak atmosphere of the cottage. She even preferred to make love in the big house, when she could manage it.
The brief flicker of pleasure on her face at the thought vanished as she remembered the last time she had met a lover there. She’d known exactly what she must say, must do, and it had slipped out of her control, somehow, all her intentions retaining no more force than a trickle of water. All the carefully gathered strands of her life seemed to be falling from her hands, one by one.
The gentle tapping on the cottage door jerked Cassie out of her reverie. Anger rushed through her. She yanked open the door. “I told you never to-”
Duncan Kincaid stood there, with his infuriating cat-that-ate-the-canary grin. “Expecting someone else? I’ll go away again.”
After a moment Cassie pulled the door wide and stepped back, not speaking until she had closed it behind him. “What are you doing here?” She drew the dressing gown more tightly around her body.
Kincaid gazed around the room, hands in his pockets, and Cassie suddenly remembered the clothes discarded on the floor. She bent and picked them up, threw them into the bedroom and shut the door.
“Nice.” Kincaid indicated the cottage. “Do much entertaining here?”
Cassie held herself in check, refusing to be baited. Just what in hell did he know? “Just you.” She smiled at him with a trace of her former poise. “Like a drink?”
Kincaid shook his head. “No, thanks. We’ve just had an object lesson in the evils of alcohol, don’t you think?” His smile invited her to share his amusement at the debacle of the cocktail party, but Cassie wasn’t to be drawn.
“Cassie.” He perched himself on the arm of one of the overstuffed chintz armchairs and regarded her with an open, friendly look that she found even more alarming than the smile. “If you and Graham Frazer were together the night Sebastian died, why didn’t you say so? It’d be so much easier on both of you.”
Turning away from him, she walked around the counter into the kitchen. “Coffee, then?” She filled the coffee pot, the ritual movements buying her time to think. How much did he know? What could she gain by denial?
“Look, Duncan. Don’t give me that sympathetic tone, as if my welfare were tops on your list of priorities. I’m not stupid. And just what makes you think I was with Graham that night?” She kept her voice level, bantering.
“You’ve been having an affair with him for quite some time. It seemed likely.” Kincaid rose from the chair and pulled up a stool across the counter from her, making her feel trapped in the tiny kitchen. The electric kettle sang and she poured the boiling water into the drip pot. Mugs hung on a rack next to the pot. She plunked two on the counter and stared at them, biting her lip. Pansies and roses intertwined gaily around their surfaces. They were cottage property, not her own.
“What makes you think I’ve been having an affair with Graham?” Some coffee missed the mug and splashed onto the counter as Cassie poured.
Kincaid accepted the mug. Cassie pulled her hand back quickly, hoping he hadn’t noticed its slight trembling. “What puzzles me,” he said, ignoring her question, “is why you’ve made such a point to keep it secret. You’re both single, consenting adults. And I don’t think for a minute that Angela would be shocked.”
Cassie wrapped her long fingers around the mug until it grew too hot to bear, as if pain might sharpen her wits. Honest entreaty, she decided, was the way to play it. “It’s Graham. It’s this custody thing. Right now he only has extended visitation. The hearing’s coming up soon and he’s petitioning for complete custody. He feels he won’t be considered a responsible parent. The whole thing’s stupid, really, if you ask me. He’s only doing it to spite Marjorie.” She took a sip of the hot coffee and winced as it scalded her tongue. �
��I’ll have to own up to your Chief Inspector Nash, of course. I didn’t realize it was going to be so important.” Kincaid sat silently, watching her across the rim of his cup as he sipped, and Cassie heard herself sounding as fatuous as she felt.
“Of course,” Cassie continued, digging herself in deeper by the minute, “I’d rather it not become general knowledge about Graham and me. To tell you the truth, it’s just about finished between us, and it wouldn’t do my professional standing much good if it were to get about. So I thought…”
“So you thought,” Kincaid finished for her when she trailed off, “you’d just conveniently not mention it. I can’t say I blame you. I’m sure it all seemed a great fuss about nothing. What did it matter where anyone was when Sebastian decided to plug himself into the swimming pool? There’s only one little problem. I think Chief Inspector Nash is very shortly going to come to the conclusion that Sebastian had a little unsolicited help getting himself killed. And then it matters very much what everyone was up to on Sunday night.”
Kincaid gave her a brief, encouraging smile, as if he had uttered nothing out of the ordinary, and he spoke as quietly and casually as he had begun. A tremor of fear ran through Cassie’s body. A moment passed before she trusted herself to speak. “I thought… I wasn’t here. We weren’t here. Graham and I.”
Kincaid’s eyes widened. “Surely not with Angela-”
“No. In the empty suite. We always met in the empty suites, when we could. We were together all the time. It was after midnight when I came back here.”
“And you didn’t think, didn’t wonder why Sebastian’s bike was still parked outside?”
“No.” The word hung between them, charged, and Cassie felt she had been judged and found wanting.
“You didn’t see or hear anything else, anything not as it should be?”
“No.” She couldn’t tell him about the note. Quickly scribbled, wedged into her door, it proved someone else had been abroad in the late hours of that Sunday evening. And it had driven all thought of Sebastian, or anything else, from her mind.
“Thanks, Cassie. For the coffee.” Kincaid stood up and Cassie came around the bar and followed him to the door.
As he opened it she touched his arm and he paused. “Will it… Do you think it will all have to come out? About Graham and me?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not. But I wouldn’t count too much on Nash’s discretion.”
She nodded. “What made you change your mind? About Sebastian committing suicide?”
“I didn’t. I never thought for a moment that he had.” The door clicked softly shut as he left her.
* * *
Hannah stood just inside the open French door of her suite, the room unlit in the gathering dusk. The children’s voices came easily to her, but she couldn’t see them without stepping out onto the balcony and she didn’t want to be seen. Her emotions were so raw she felt she might be transparent even from a distance.
The reality of what she had done, what she still contemplated doing, seized her with cold fingers. She’d been living in some fairy-tale never-never land, where all stories had happy endings, and she was the fairy godmother, coming to right a lifetime of wrongs. Dear god, what a fool she had made of herself!
Her oft-played scenario had never included sexual attraction, so when the whirl of feelings caught her up so swiftly she hadn’t realized at first what was happening. The knowledge crept in insidiously, and some feral part of her mind toyed with the idea of riding with it, letting it take her where it would. She could just not tell him the truth, and there was no other way he would ever know.
The sudden vision of herself brought on by the cocktail party conversation had shocked her to her senses, terrified that she could have contemplated such utter folly. She had never, when she built detailed pictures in her mind of what their relationship would be, imagined herself as… old. Never imagined growing older, never imagined being pitied and dependent. Whether she told him the truth or not, she would still have to face the ultimate fact. Or simply walk away, returning to the sterility of her life as if nothing had happened. And what about Duncan? What must he think of her, flitting about from man to man like some middle-aged butterfly. She felt she owed him some explanation, but she couldn’t tell him all of it, not until she had come to some resolution. A sense of urgency clutched her. It would have to be soon.
Penny knew how the rabbit felt, trapped by hounds, spurred by cunning. If she went out the front door she’d run right smack into her sister, and Emma was the last person she wanted to face. She didn’t want to see anyone-any attempt to explain her behavior would humiliate her even further.
In the end she’d gone upstairs and down the long corridor to the rear stairs and the pool exit. From there it had been easy enough to make her way along the path to the tennis court, screened by trees and heavy shrubbery. She sat huddled on her favorite bench above the court, her small figure almost indistinguishable in the dim light.
Emma and the children must still be out in the garden, for she could hear the little boy’s high-pitched voice above her, fading in and out on the breeze. It was quite funny the way Emma got on with Brian and Bethany. They’d never really known any children-no nieces and nephews to care for, no close neighbors running in and out begging milk and biscuits-and Penny was never quite sure what to say to them. Emma, however, just bossed the small pair about in her usual gruff way. The children seemed to accept it without question and they all got on remarkably well together.
Is that, Penny wondered, the way Emma would treat her, with that same gruff kindness, but in her case stained by pity? Would people speak about her the way they had spoken about poor Mrs. Lyle, and commiserate with Emma behind her back? Would she reach the point where Emma didn’t dare leave her alone, a danger to herself and others? It was an unbearable thought. The tears came again, unbidden, and Penny sat helplessly as they ran down her face and leaked salt into the corners of her mouth. Emma would tell her to stop wallowing and buck herself up, but Penny had never been much good at maintaining what Emma called an even keel.
Penny sniffed and searched in her pocket for a handkerchief. She’d have to try to pull herself together, for Emma’s sake as well as her own. Besides, she had a moral obligation that needed her attention. She had made up her mind at the cocktail party. It would never do to cast false suspicion on someone. What she had seen must have another, logical explanation, and the only fair way to find out was to ask.
CHAPTER 9
Kincaid broke two eggs into the skillet next to the bacon and congratulated himself on mastering an unfamiliar cooker. It had taken some adjusting and a grease burn on his thumb to get the temperature just right, but the bacon had come out perfectly. He turned the eggs as the toast sprang up in the toaster, and by the time he’d transferred the bacon and toast to his plate the eggs were ready as well.
The knock came as he was pouring his coffee.
Hannah Alcock leaned against the wall outside his front door, hugging herself in her long, Aran cardigan. She wore no make-up, her lips pale in contrast to the bruised hollows beneath her eyes.
“Hannah. Come in.” Kincaid led the way into the suite and pulled out a chair at the tiny table for her. “Are you all right? You don’t look at all well this morning.”
“Didn’t sleep.” She slumped down in the chair as if it had taken all her effort to stand up.
“Can I get you anything? Toast? Coffee?”
“Coffee would be nice, thanks.”
Kincaid poured another cup and sat down opposite her, pushing the milk and sugar across the table. She stirred her coffee for a moment before meeting his eyes, then tried a wan smile. “I feel an idiot coming here like this. I thought I’d say ‘we need to talk’, but I realized it’s not true, really. It’s I who needs to talk.” Hannah paused and looked away for a moment, moving her shoulders in a little self-deprecating shrug. “I feel I owe you some explanation for the way I’ve behaved. It’s not-”
“Why should you feel that?” Kincaid asked, puzzled. “I’ve no reason to pass judgment on you.”
“Oh god, Duncan, don’t protest. It only makes this more humiliating for me. Then I start to think I was only imagining that there was… I don’t know… some feeling, some rapport… between us. It’s happened to me once or twice before. You meet someone, spend an evening together, find yourselves talking as if you’d known each other for years, saying things you wouldn’t say to people you had known for years.” Her smile was rueful. “It’s a rare gift, an evening like that, and one I hadn’t planned on.”
At least, thought Kincaid, she was more honest than he. There had been some spark of affinity, of possibility, between them and he had felt hurt to find her sharing the same sudden intimacy with Patrick Rennie. Not merely sexual jealousy, although there was a bit of that as well, but more a sense of confidence betrayed. “All right, Hannah. I’ll grant you that.” He looked at her carefully, noted the unaltered porcelain complexion and fine bone structure, noted also the drawn look around the shadowed eyes. “But it’s more than that, isn’t it? You’re not just worrying about my sensitive feelings.”
Hannah was shaking her head before he’d finished the sentence. “No. I mean yes. I don’t know.” Her hand jerked as she spoke, and her undrunk coffee slopped a milky pool on the table’s surface. “About Patrick. It’s not what you think.” The lift of Kincaid’s eyebrows would have done Peter Raskin credit. “I know how it must look.” She met Kincaid’s eyes. “That I’ve gone middle-aged gaga over any man who looks at me twice. It’s not like that at all. Oh, Jesus, I wish it were that simple.” She dropped her face into her hands, fingers splayed across her eyes.
“Hannah…” Kincaid reached out a hand to touch her, drew it back.
Through her fingers she said, “You have to understand. I thought I’d made a perfect life for myself. I was smart, capable, respected. I’d been lucky enough to find work that I loved.” Hannah raised her head. “People usually think I didn’t have a chance to marry. The old sexually deprived spinster stereotype. God!” she said bitterly. “You’d think we’d grown past that, but we haven’t. Women are still judged first as a commodity, a man’s appendage. If you don’t have a man you don’t measure up. Simple. As for sex-” she gave a harsh laugh “-sex is easy. It’s marriage that terrified me. Losing control.” Hannah pushed her cup forward with her fingertips and looked out the French door. “My parents ordered every aspect of my life, what I ate, what I wore, how I cut my hair, who I saw, even what I thought. The one step I might have taken for myself they… took out of my hands. So I swore I would never let anybody else do that to me. Can you understand that?”
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