A classic Martha Gardiner question. As always, by inflection and nuance, telegraphing the way you’re supposed to answer.
“Of course not,” Logan says. “Have you discovered something new in the case? More than I told the investigator who interviewed me recently?”
She hasn’t changed, I’m amused to see. Wiry and taut, her hair infiltrated with leaden gray, the corners of her mouth turned permanently down. And trying to keep the upper hand.
“Just following up on a few things.” Martha glances at me, the signal to take out my yellow pad. I’m sitting on the other end of the couch, and it’s so low it’s making Logan taller than I am. It’s also annoying that I have to take notes. It’ll make Logan think I’m an underling, that I don’t have any power. I smile, just to myself. Wrong.
“How did Danielle Zander come to be hired in your office?” Gardiner asks.
“As I told your investigator,” Logan’s voice sounds weary, or condescendingly patient, “the senator had told me privately that Ms. North here was a bit over her head. Senator Rafferty indicated I could hire someone to…” She pauses, as if reliving the conversation. “To make things run more smoothly. Danielle worked under my supervision, and then, of course, I left the—”
“But why Ms. Zander, in particular?” Martha interrupted. “Did you have a, say, statehouse Human Resources person who handled job applications? How did that work?”
“We do. Did. Do.” Logan corrects herself. “Annabella Rigalosa. I assumed the senator somehow obtained her résumé via that channel. It seemed unimportant at the time, Ms. Gardiner. Standard.”
“Rigalosa,” Martha repeats, making sure I got the name. “Do you need a spelling?”
“Got it. I’m familiar with Ms. Rigalosa.” I say, all calm, but inside I’m seething. Over my head? Bull. How dare she? And with me sitting right here? Rachel. Stop. I extinguish my flare of anger. She’s probably making that up, probably jealous of me because Rafferty chose me, chose me, to replace her. So who’s the one who’s over her head? Not me, sister. And then, remembering what I’m supposed to be thinking about, “Is Annabella still at the statehouse?”
“How would I know?” Logan answers.
Martha shoots me a Shut up look. “Ms. Concannon?” Her voice is soft as a windless day. “You said you ‘left’ the senator’s employ prior to Ms. Zander’s death. Was there any animosity between you two? You and Ms. Zander?”
Logan surprises me by laughing. A full-throated head-tilted-back laugh. The sound itself unsettles the space between them. She stops herself. “I’m so sorry. That was entirely inappropriate. It’s simply been so long, and Ms. Zander’s death, sadly, seems like it happened so long ago. But to answer your question, Ms. Gardiner, no. Ms. Zander was a low-level staffer, one who showed considerable promise, I must say, but nonetheless was, I fear, barely a step above a fetch-and-carry. I didn’t have time for animosity.”
“So if Ms. Zander was not part of the equation, may I ask about Mrs. Rafferty? The senator’s wife? What was your relationship with her?”
“Nina Rafferty?”
This is getting good. All questions I asked myself, so intently, six years ago. All answers I never got. All answers I need.
Martha nods. “Yes. Nina Rafferty.”
Logan shifts in her chair, tucks a strand of graying hair behind one ear. She’s put on earrings, apparently dressing for our visit, unless she ordinarily wears earrings around the house. Clip-ons, I see. I wonder if Martha noticed. I write that down, just in case.
Logan lets out a breath, half shrugs. “Political wives, or shall I say, spouses, are always an issue. But Nina Rafferty was no problem. Smart, self-sufficient, flexible.”
“Jealous?” Martha asks. “Was she also jealous?”
I remember the telephone conversation I’d overheard. The one with me in the reception area and Logan in her office. The one I still wondered if it had been about me. The one where Logan Concannon used the words “Nina” and “ballistic.”
Plus, Martha could have just as easily asked me that one. I knew full well Nina was jealous, or suspicious, and certainly observant. According to what Jack put into evidence at Nina’s arraignment, Tom Rafferty had his own personal secrets. Maybe Nina did, too. Now Martha was trying to find out whether Logan Concannon had secrets as well. I could have told her that answer, too.
“Ms. Gardiner,” Logan finally says. “Can you possibly tell me the point of all this? You use the word ‘jealous.’ No, she never told me she was jealous. She never told me anything, frankly. As a result? I am hardly the person to ask about Nina Rafferty’s personal psychology. Perhaps there are others…” She actively doesn’t look at me in her studied silence. “Others who are more, shall we say, familiar. Since the charges against Mrs. Rafferty were dropped, I assume she is not your target.”
“Truth is our target.” Martha’s voice has gained an edge. “Were there any times that Senator Rafferty’s behavior was in any way untoward? Specifically, to female staff members. Anyone in particular?”
I’m writing writing writing. Eager to hear what Martha wants to know about, keeping a list of it all. I remember that day at the arraignment, when Martha’s “interviewee” revealed Rafferty was having “illicit relationships” with women in his office. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of it, six years be damned. That kind of reputational sideswiping with public humiliation, humiliation not by name but, equally destructive, by insinuation, branded me with a permanent scarlet letter. Since Nina’s case was tossed, Jack never got the files. The files with the list of the women’s names.
“This is a situation that one must monitor, constantly and carefully,” Logan says. “One person’s ‘untoward’ is another’s congeniality.”
“I’m not as concerned with what ‘one’ must do, Ms. Concannon, as I am about the specifics of your time in Senator Rafferty’s office. Did you get any complaints, even informal, about his behavior? Did you suspect—let me put it this way. We’re involved in a murder investigation, so don’t filter your response by what you might think is relevant. Let me make that decision.”
Me, Martha says. Not us. But fine. I’m the apprentice. Am I finally about to hear the list? Certainly Danielle Zander, recipient of the gold necklace, would be on it. And certainly Nina Rafferty would be angry about that. Enough to kill her?
Logan Concannon rattles off more platitudes and stalling time fillers about sexual harassment policies and the prohibitions about “intraoffice liaisons,” her actual words. but a thought hits me so hard I almost flutter a hand to my throat, like a forties-movie ingenue.
What if it turned out that Logan was the jealous one? What if Logan, faithful Logan, was, beneath her snakeskin veneer, a loyal lapdog, a devoted companion, a woman who lived the fantasy that her boss, for whom she’d slay dragons, would somehow see the light and carry her off to another life? What if Logan, graying, sinewy Logan, had been so twisted with jealousy over Danielle, the sweetly vulnerable but unmistakably attractive newcomer she had to hire, that she went off the rails and killed her? If she’s capable of reputation-ruining career-ending political murder, why not the real thing?
Talk about being jealous. Logan had been suspicious enough of me, that’s for sure. She’s the one who wanted to “talk” to me that Monday morning. Maybe I should mention that encounter to Martha. I’d labeled it as snooping about my personal life. But maybe, instead of being personal about me—maybe it could be personal about Logan.
“Let’s move on,” Martha says. “Why did you leave the employ of Senator Rafferty?”
Oh, excellent. Eager to hear this.
“Does that matter?”
“Everything matters,” Martha says.
Logan Concannon’s eyes go hard. Her shoulders square, and her chin goes up. “You’ll find out, I assume,” she says. “If you don’t already know. Someone reported to the police that I—I!—was having a relationship with my employer, Senator Rafferty.”
I stare at her, my pen f
rozen mid-sentence. She’s going there?
“Reported?” Martha’s voice doesn’t miss a beat. Level and even, as if Logan had said it was sunny outside. “Was it true?”
“Must we talk about this?”
“We must.”
Logan’s eyes widen, then she crosses her arms in front of her, her back ramrod. “No. That’s beyond comprehension. But we could not allow even a whisper of such a thing. So I quit.”
“You said someone ‘reported’ it. Do you know who reported it?”
“No.”
I want to ask, Do you suspect it might have been Nina? But I keep quiet.
“Let’s go on,” Martha says. “Tell me where you were, Ms. Concannon, on the weekend preceding the murder of Danielle Zander.”
“But—” Logan looks annoyed now.
“I know you’ve answered that.” Martha’s voice is placating again. “But humor me.”
Logan rattles off a list of dates and events, alibis and connections and proofs. Half the time she was home alone. I sneer to myself as I write it all down. Easy-peasy to come up with a reasonable alibi, everyone knows that. And “home alone” can be effective, because how can anyone prove you weren’t? It’s especially a snap for a single person. Simply check the TV listings and say you were watching whatever was really on. You can even leave the TV on, in case there’s a way they could check. But Martha can recross the alibi bridge with her if she needs to. Maybe Logan’s annoyed because she thought the cops had already bought her alibi, and now she’s worried they didn’t?
But I wish Martha would get back to the jealousy question. That’s where I predict she can nail her.
Martha was right. I am the perfect person to work on this.
MARTHA GARDINER
Martha stepped back from the demilune table in her hallway, tilting her head, assessing her newest arrangement. The pale-blue hyacinths and white tulips and spiny green ferns, fresh from her tiny garden, were duplicated in the ceiling-high mirror behind them, a mirror that had graced the entryway to her Beacon Hill apartment since her grandparents had owned it in the days when the Esplanade’s now-iconic Hatch Shell was brand-new. Back then, though Grandpa Leggett had signed up to fight Nazis, his father’s influence kept him desk-safe in Washington at the War Department.
Through her lattice of lavender-tinged windows, originals, Martha could see the early evening sun streaming through the elm trees on the green expanse of Boston Common, couples and puppies and children winding the same paths where Abigail Adams strolled, and then Lucy Stone and Margaret Fuller. Those women had made a difference, and she would, too.
She plucked a tulip from behind a stubborn green hyacinth leaf and replaced the flower front and center. The flowers were from the square of green courtyard behind her building, hardly a garden, more of a patch, the one place she felt responsibility only to nature. Sometimes, when the wind was right, she could smell the brine of the harbor, or see an optimistically wayward gull headed for the Atlantic.
The hyacinth shifted, and now a fern blocked the tulip. Using her thumb and forefinger, Martha pinched off an offending leaf. Perfect. Gardiner the gardener, her father used to joke. When he could still joke.
The graceful bay windows, her inherited Persian rugs, the polished mantle over the fireplace. The lines of silver-framed family photos. She’d lived here since she was a girl—after her college dorm years in Cambridge, of course, but after it had seemed more sensible to stay here, while her mother was sick and then her father, and then, alone, she kept the place to herself. Familiar and orderly and set in its ways. She refused to think of it as her personal metaphor.
She used her family wineglass for this evening’s cabernet—who else would she use them for?—and wondered, yet again, about her choices. No pets, no friends, no hobbies except for her patch of green. Only … She took a deep breath and looked into her remaining wine. Only justice.
The file lay open on the supple saddle-leather couch, tempting her, yet again, to read the documents. What did she think she would find after all these years? Most people kept scrapbooks of their wins, their glory days, to reassure themselves when they failed.
Martha kept files of her losses. To remind her of her failures. To prod her to prevent them.
The last of the wine, and she could afford no more. If all went as planned, there were big days coming up. And a knock on the door—she checked her watch—in five minutes.
She moved aside the paisley throw pillows and settled herself into the corner of the couch, toeing her pumps to the floor. She’d dropped Rachel off at the office an hour before, directing her to type up her notes on the Logan Concannon interview. It was busywork, sure, but Rachel had no choice. Let her complain to her damn husband, Martha thought. How fortuitous that now Martha had access to Jack Kirkland. She smiled with the sweetness of it. The possibilities. The power. It was better than wine.
Opening the file of newspaper clippings, she imagined someone else watching her doing this, an old-fashioned thing.
Why don’t you just search online, they’d wonder?
The feel of the newsprint calms me, she’d have to admit. It makes the stories real. And the facts true. She turned another page in the file, the pinked edges of the unmounted newspaper clips thinned and frayed from her repeated touch.
There were no clips on Logan Concannon’s connection to the death of Danielle Zander. The newspaper stories from back then showed the snow-covered crime scene, each arriving footprint impossibly obliterating whatever was buried beneath it. A nobly ravaged Tom Rafferty, all thoughts and prayers, as if those would solve the brutal murder of his young and seemingly unsophisticated staffer. A photo of him at a news conference. Jack Kirkland, too, was in the shot, a slithering menace darkening Martha’s every thought.
She turned to the next clipping, to stop her focus on Jack. But it was worse, even worse. NOT NINA—the Globe headline almost made her gasp, though she’d seen it hundreds of times. And in the Herald—GARDINER BLOWS IT. JACK WINS AGAIN. Martha closed her eyes with the memory. Pride goeth, her father used to warn her. And Martha had taken the fall. And it was Jack Kirkland’s fault, his fault she was humiliated, and defeated, and fired—
Turn the page, Martha. Channel your anger. Use it to win.
A photo of Danielle Zander, there seemed to be only one. A pixie smile, those perfect teeth and innocent eyes. No family, how could that be? Where did she come from? No one seemed to know, and even Lewis Millin came up empty, with a random maybe-cousin not replying to their inquiries. Danielle would have been what, about thirty-five now? Martha had to protect her, her memory at least. Stand up for her. Avenge her.
Martha paused, thinking of her own beginnings at a too-stuffy law firm. About which women got ahead, which ones made it, and why.
Women full of their own youth and beauty and the power that comes with it. The power they think comes with it. The Monicas, she used to call them, before that White House intern came into a different kind of power. The wannabes, then, who used their allure to assuage the fear of aging men, men who’d passed their prime, and tried, with whatever currency they’d accumulated, to make themselves immortal. Younger women could provide the mirage for a while, until each one pushed too hard or demanded too much or threatened. It was always the interloping manipulative woman who suffered in those toxic relationships, not the equally reprehensible man.
Well, Martha corrected herself, feeling a smile come to her face again and her chest relax. Not always.
And there was the doorbell. Six thirty P.M., right on time. She’d taught her well.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
RACHEL NORTH
I’m feeling confident and enthusiastic, free, car windows down, May breeze blowing, my hair loose—with a handle on this investigation and a vision of my future. But when I turn in to the driveway of our house, there’s an unfamiliar car parked at our front door. Not in my place at the back, but near the front. Where visitors park. Jack has a guest?
My dashbo
ard clock says it’s almost six thirty, so I’m home earlier than usual. I ease beside the black two-door, a cute buzzy sports car of some kind, and manage to get into my regular place without dinging the shiny intruder. Close my car door. Stand in the driveway, hands on hips, listen to the wheating of an insistent cardinal, and stare at the house. Who’s here?
Unlocking the kitchen door, I pause. Listen. Wait. Jack doesn’t meet clients at home. He has a perfectly good office for that. This is personal. It has to be.
On a typical Monday, Jack would not be home yet at all. If he did come home early, he’d be in his chair, drinking his first wine and watching the news. Alone. “Hey you,” he’d say when I arrived. “Hey you,” I’d respond. And it would be a usual night.
But today, silence. Silence and an unfamiliar sports car.
What do I do? Sneak out, pretend I wasn’t here, see how he explains it later? Or if he even mentions it?
I consider that briefly. Should I retreat and reenter later, all smiley and good-wifey and hey-you? And see what he says?
But no. I mean, why? This is my house. I live here, just as much as he does. We live here.
I drop my briefcase and purse on the dining room floor, aware that I’m doing it quietly. My ears are turned to parabolic, trying to hear. Is there a murmur, maybe, from the living room? The house seems alien. There’s something off-kilter. Strange. I can almost physically feel the space is different.
But there’s nothing to do but find out. If I tiptoe along, surreptitiously and eavesdropping the whole way, and it’s only, like, the electrician, that’s going to be embarrassing. Maybe it is a client, who somehow couldn’t make it to Boston and agreed to come to our home instead. Lovely, some murderer or violent criminal is in my living room right now. Which would be better, a serial killer in the living room or another woman upstairs?
But a secret lover—ha ha—would hardly park her snazzy car in our driveway.
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