She shrank away from my touch. “You went out on a date?” she cried, with as much horror as if I’d confessed to grave robbing or shoplifting from Saks.
“Megan, it wasn’t a date. We had a drink and we talked.” I wondered how much she could sense, even if her mind hadn’t yet articulated her real suspicion.
“Where?” she asked dully, avoiding my eyes.
I swallowed. “At his house.”
She flushed crimson. I wasn’t sure what the correct response was, but I didn’t want her to have to deal with anything more. “Megan, nothing happened.”
She did look up at me then. “Liar!”
My mother would have slapped me, and did, for such an infraction, but these were different times. I took a breath and counted to ten. “You will go up to your room and go to bed this instant,” I told her. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore tonight.”
She looked at me, still angry but with the beginnings of regret. “Sorry,” she mumbled, and averted her eyes.
“Get some sleep,” I told her.
Easier said than done, of course. My heart was going into overdrive and my skin itched all over, sure signs that unconsciousness was several hours away. I had never seen more than a few dozen sheep in my whole life, and I was fairly certain that attempting to count them would be futile.
My mind unrolled the day’s scenarios like text on the computer screen. Meredith White pointed a lacquered finger at me, accusing me of insignificance. Steve glanced at me, looked away with indifference. Henry Eastman patted my arm with unnerving compassion. Jeff—was Jeff laughing at me behind my back, certain that I’d fall for anything that looked at me with a slow burn, that ministered to my vanity and my need for male attention? Was I so undesirable I had made him literally shrivel? The images made me thrash on the bed. I turned the pillow over to the cool side and tried to think of anything but the evening’s embarrassing events.
I had to stop this. I was trying to hold on to my old life, and I was clinging to stasis like a scared child. It was time for reinvention. Change had come to claim me: My husband had left, my children were growing up, and some of my friends had metamorphosed into acquaintances. There was no going back; it was silly to hold on to the firm like a reef in a storm when most of the people there were, and always had been, Steve’s colleagues. It was stupid to start a relationship, even a one-night stand, with one of the partners. It was time, as Eleanor’s friends had urged her, to get on with my life.
Braver people than I actually did this to themselves, put themselves at risk again by leaving their secure jobs or moving to Costa Rica or whatever just to see how things would turn out. It was asking too much to be grateful for having my old life jerked out from under me like a rug, but at least I should be moving forward. If I didn’t, I could end up like Eleanor.
I pondered that a little and wondered if I could wind up drowned in a hot tub, having offed myself on pills and expensive wine. The wine part would be difficult; Steve had taken most of the good bottles out of the Eurocave when he took off, claiming that he had selected them specially and I wouldn’t know the difference anyway. Most of what was left was the white zinfandel we had laid in for a party of family members whose powers of discrimination were no more acute than mine.
I didn’t feel so confident about the pills. I didn’t take anything, but what if Eleanor had had trouble sleeping, too? When I had known her, she had seemed angry and purposeful, not overly medicated. Still, I could see the appeal of gulping tranquilizers—it was better than living life in the grips of a constant, relentless rage.
You had to sort of admire a woman like that, someone who wouldn’t bow to change or give up, but you wouldn’t necessarily want to be that person. I contemplated Eleanor, threatening her husband unless he gave her old life back to her. Trying to drag the firm into it until even gentle Henry Eastman was irritated with her scenes. I bet that more than once Barclay had wished Eleanor was dead.
The thought caught me up short.
Of course he had wished her dead. And now he was paying for it with a pronounced sense of guilt.
No, that didn’t hold water. Barclay Hampton was about as introspective as a tomato. Nothing more complex than a middling case of midlife crisis had ever ruffled the waters of his tranquility, and when he left Eleanor, cheating her out of her rightful share of their assets, it had been with a chilling display of sangfroid. If he was guilty or disturbed, as I had seen at the funeral and as Tricia had indicated, he must really have something to be guilty or disturbed about.
Like killing his ex-wife.
The thought sprang full-blown into my head and refused to go away. I didn’t exactly sit bolt upright in bed, but all thought of sleep vanished in an instant.
I turned the idea around in my mind to examine it. I wanted to be objective, to discover the reasons why the vision of Barclay as killer seemed so satisfactory, so right. The truth is, I think I must have believed it, deep down, all along. Ever since I had learned what he did to Eleanor, how he had destroyed so much of her safety and happiness, her cause had taken possession of me to a far greater extent than could realistically be explained by my (not unjustified) fears that I might find myself in the same predicament. I didn’t want to be objective about why I found the notion of Barclay the murderer, literally as well as figuratively, emotionally attractive. I would deal with that later.
I kept coming back to the image of Eleanor’s bloated body, naked in her hot tub, washing her pills down with Bâtard-Montrachet ’85. As a scenario for suicide, it had always troubled me. It didn’t square with my impression of Eleanor or with what I would want for myself.
Just for a moment I would go with my instincts and assume that the suicide theory was wrong.
That left only two options. Accident was one of them.
The other was homicide.
Half a lifetime of watching Mystery on PBS and dipping into detective fiction from Christie to Cornwell brought the protocol of murder investigations quickly to mind. First you had to have a method and a motive.
The first issue, means, was easy enough. Eleanor was alone and defenseless. Did he slip pills in her drink? Did he hire a hit man to inject her with drugs? Well, probably not, much as I would have liked to imagine him placing a transatlantic phone call to one of Tricia’s remote Sicilian relations. It just didn’t fit with the Barclay I knew, and I was winging this whole thing on the strength of gut feeling alone.
The motive part was even easier. My mind raced ahead to the obvious conclusion, but I forced myself to backtrack, to take just one step at a time. Everybody who had met Eleanor in recent years had wished she were dead at one time or another, even if only half seriously. Wanting to stop that tidal wave of impassioned revenge would be reason enough. How much would it take before you would give anything to rid yourself of a person who told your friends, your business associates, and the world in general that you had stolen her life, that you had engaged in legal and emotional terrorism, and that you were a ridiculous, middle-aged fool in love with a hot numero half your age? And even if the goods Eleanor had on him were no longer legal tender, so to speak, he could scarcely have been thrilled with the idea of what she could put into circulation.
Still, wanting to shut people up, while understandable, was probably not sufficient motive for murder unless you were in the Cosa Nostra or had a lot more to hide than a new wife and a hair transplant. Barclay had shown every sign of exasperation and disgust, but so far none—at least to my knowledge—of murderous rage.
What about a financial motive, then? You might argue that Eleanor was costing him a lot of money, that with her out of the picture the savings in alimony payments alone would pay for a cozy villa in the south of France or at the very least a princely condo in Palm Desert.
However, I couldn’t really buy that one, either. The gist of Eleanor’s box of materials, condensed into one vociferous howl of outrage, was that Barclay had lied about his assets in the first place, and then he and his at
torney, Jay Thompson, had bludgeoned her into a pared settlement that was only a fraction of what she deserved. As Patrick Dunn, the Great Mediator, had explained to me, no-fault divorce was a repudiation of more idealistic times and the rather courtly notion that the man had to pay for breaking up the home. No-fault divorce, and Barclay’s duplicity, had left Eleanor up the creek without a paddle.
If Barclay was suffering from the loss of income his support of Eleanor had created, he certainly hadn’t shown any signs of it. In fact, he had made noises about becoming a judge—which, if I was not mistaken, would reduce his income stream by somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters. A guy with a yen for expensive cars and a high number on the waiting list for membership in the Fairbanks Ranch Country Club could not be contemplating a move like that unless his financial security was independent of the annual sum he grudgingly paid out to his ex-wife.
With a growing sense of both certainty and dread, I had to face the obvious conclusion, the one at the end of this path of speculation. I already suspected that Eleanor must have been blackmailing Barclay with something she learned he had done. Maybe it was bad enough that he had killed her over it.
Suddenly I saw Eleanor standing in her pink suit, her hand clutching my arm in hot despair. “You won’t believe what they’ve pulled,” she’d said. “It will help when your turn comes.” Well, my turn had come, and she had clearly believed she was handing me some leverage in negotiating my divorce.
She’d gone through the firm files, she’d told me, but her attorney, Barclay’s racquetball partner, wouldn’t let her use what she had.
A matter you’ve misunderstood entirely, Barclay had written. Could that be it? I had thought she was referring to the fraud he had perpetrated on her, but Barclay of all people would know that the statute of limitations had run out. If Eleanor was blackmailing her ex-husband, it had to be with something else she had discovered in his files, something that would damage his ambitions enough to make it worth getting rid of her.
There were so many illegal things lawyers could do, it boggled the mind. All you had to do was look at the summaries of disciplinary actions in the pages of the old California Lawyers for confirmation. And these weren’t errors and oversight sorts of problems, like I-accidentally-missed-the-filing-date-and-cost-my-client-a-million-dollars-as-a-result. These were the biggies, like my-client-was-a-widow-with-Alzheimer’s-and-somehow-all-the-money-from-her-trust-fund-of-which-I-was-the-sole-trustee-ended-up-in-my-investment-account-in-Grand-Cayman. You get the idea. It might be something like that. These days it would be much more difficult to blackmail somebody for personal reasons, because there is hardly anything you can do that other people would strenuously object to.
The thing that chilled me, lifting up the little hairs on my neck, was that I didn’t know what it was, but I certainly knew where it was, if it existed. Downstairs, locked in a drawer in my office. If Barclay had killed Eleanor over something that was in the box, he wouldn’t think he was safe so long as there was a possibility I might have it. Somebody had already broken into the garage. What was next? Whatever happened, the only way I could protect myself was to find out the meaning of Eleanor’s papers, and fast.
Means, and Barclay’s alibi, were matters for the police, although I did think I could do a bit of sleuthing to determine whether anyone could actually verify his presence at the firm on the evening of her death. Still, all I had was a theory, and not one shred of evidence. Nobody with a badge would want to talk to me unless I had more than that, especially since the popular and more comfortable view was that she had drunk and drugged herself into such a stupor that she had drowned herself, either accidentally or on purpose. I couldn’t even get help in crossing the street unless I had more than a strong suspicion that the victim’s ex-husband had something to hide.
It was far too late to do the sensible thing, which would be to forget all about it and get on with my life. That’s what everyone had told Eleanor, and look where disregarding their advice had gotten her. And resurrecting the Woman Scorned from her unquiet grave hadn’t made me all too popular, either, and that was before I’d thought up the murder theory. Still, the status quo didn’t look so safe anymore. I was going to have to find out if Barclay killed Eleanor, and why.
I’d wanted a new direction, and now I had no choice. Reinvention. Well, why not?
11
Personally, I have always thought that Wordsworth was full of it about that “emotion recollected in tranquility” business. All right, he produced some great poems, and maybe he did them after reflecting on what he experienced rather than in the heat of passion. But I’ve always thought it was more a metaphor for settling, for forgetting about your love affairs and sinking comfortably into a life of orthodoxy and conservatism. The late Wordsworth might have found himself very much at home in La Jolla.
Anyway, what I was after was not poetry but truth, and despite the exaggerating influences of scratchy sheets and a fevered imagination, I was inclined to trust the insights of my late-night epiphany. If I’d rushed to my desk to write down a sonnet, no one would have thought twice about it, but a common sense solution to a problem that had bothered me for some time probably required a daylight review.
The prospect of tackling the mystery of Eleanor’s death, which I’d previously found too depressing to contemplate, now reanimated me with vigor. I would call David Sanchez without delay. I would look into Barclay’s alibi. I would…well, I would do something important, even if I wasn’t sure what it was. Still, it didn’t do a lot for the bags under my eyes. It had been a number of years since the loss of even an hour’s sleep didn’t manifest itself in deep antigravitational hollows above my cheekbones. I trudged downstairs in my jeans and an old shirt of Steve’s to make Sunday breakfast, a remnant of family tradition from happier days.
There was a note from Jason on the counter, along with an empty juice glass and cereal bowl. “Working on video with Danny,” he’d scrawled. “Back this afternoon to do homework.” Homework was underlined twice, so I’d get the point of how responsible he was being. The video was something he and Danny were working on as a semester project for their English class. Its contents were a bit of a mystery, but it seemed to require a lot of shooting at the beach.
Megan was sitting at the counter, too, in almost the same position as the night before. She looked as if she hadn’t slept well, either. She was listlessly pushing the remnant of a piece of toast around her plate.
I abandoned any ambitions I might have harbored for French toast, huevos rancheros, or homemade muffins. “Would you like anything else to eat?” I asked her. “I could pick up some croissants or some bagels.”
She pushed her hair out of her eyes and looked at me. “No, thanks, this is enough.” She shoved her plate aside. “Mom…”
I poured some instant coffee into the bottom of a cup. When Steve was home, we’d always had fresh-ground, in some hyphenated flavor redolent of the Spice Islands. Now it was too much trouble for one person; the coffee just got stale sitting around in the thermos all day.
“I’m sorry about last night,” she said.
I topped off the coffee with low-fat milk and one and a half Equals. “Apology accepted,” I told her. I set the mug down on the counter and sat down to face her. She tensed, the way I always had whenever my mother had displayed such clear indications of an impending heart-to-heart.
“Look, sweetheart, I know this is hard on you and Jason. It’s hard on Daddy and me, too. I don’t know what to tell you. I think we’ll probably get a divorce.”
She looked at me in that numb, stricken way animals do before you run over them with the car. We’d been over this before, but it still broke my heart.
“You don’t want to get back together, then?” she asked carefully, almost casually.
“I don’t know, Megan,” I told her honestly. “A lot of things have happened. I’m not sure it would be possible, even if we both wanted it.”
She nodded, trying to u
nderstand. I thought it was a brave gesture.
“I want you to know there isn’t anyone else. It’s nothing like that. I’m not even…interested right now. As far as I know, your father isn’t seeing anyone seriously, either.” I cleared my throat. I wanted to look down at my cup so I gazed right into her face. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t ever want to date, to see anyone else. I can’t promise you that, and I don’t think you should ask it of me even if it hurts you.”
“In other words I don’t have a choice,” she said moodily.
I reminded myself that she was moody about a lot these days; it went with the territory. “Look, you’re growing up,” I told her. “You might get married; you might not. You might have six children or none. You might eventually decide to live with someone. Would you want me to make those decisions for you? Even if the decisions you made might hurt me?”
“I guess not,” she said reluctantly. “But it’s different.”
“Yes, it is, a little,” I acknowledged. “But not entirely. People who love each other give up a lot to make each other happy, but nobody should ask too much.”
“How do you know what too much is?”
“Too much is giving in to Jason’s demand that we send you back to the hospital after you were born,” I told her.
She laughed. “Did he really want that?”
“Well, yes. We thought we had him all prepared—we’d showed him all the pictures and read him dozens of books about little brothers or sisters. He seemed pretty warm to the idea till we actually got you home and offered to let him hold you. I think he thought a baby was more like a puppy. He let us know in no uncertain terms that he didn’t approve of all the fuss being made over the newcomer and wanted you sent back right away.”
She laughed again. “That’s just like Jas. Did he throw a fit when he didn’t get his way?”
I smiled at the memory, although, as anyone new to sibling rivalry can tell you, it was a thoroughly exhausting period. “As I remember, he developed stomach aches that required lots of special attention.”
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