Death by Surprise (Carolyn Hart Classics) (9 page)

As chairs scraped and were replaced and everyone began to move toward the doorway, I saw Megan tug at Kenneth’s sleeve. He bent his head to listen, then shrugged, his hands turning palm upward.

I thought I could read that little scenario and it made me sad. Megan was asking who the Boutelle woman was and Kenneth was saying he didn’t know. I wondered what Kenneth was going to tell Megan if everyone admitted to seeing Francine except him? How long would it take Megan to put it all together? Not long. Megan was smart. She was like so many of her kind, bright, well educated, devoted to good works, and, in a quiet and tolerant way, totally convinced of her own superiority. She never thought about it. It was a given. The Megan Carlisles of this world live in a rarefied atmosphere, luxurious homes, servants, attentive children, civic involvement. All Megan lacked to complete the picture were children, handsome, gifted, and, of course, innately superior.

It suggested to me that Kenneth had been playing around. That surprised me. A lot. Not that I thought Kenneth too moral for extracurricular sex. I thought him too devoted. In his cold fish life, it always seemed to me that he had shown a surprising passion for Megan. I remembered the Christmas that they met. It was a debutante ball and a typical one. The girls, all in white, which always amused me, danced the first dance with their fathers. I was there, unwillingly, because mother was chairman of the ball committee. My own coming-out had been several years earlier. I was terribly bored that evening and had danced with dozens of eligible young men, none of whom interested me. Perhaps because they were so eligible. In any event, Kenneth and I ended up in a corner, trying, not too hard, to talk to each other. He was in his second year at law school and insufferably superior to a mere college senior. Then, abruptly, he caught my arm.

“That girl, the one over there by the fern. Who is she?”

I craned my neck. I happened to know because she was the younger sister of a girl my age. “That’s Megan Phillips.”

“I want to meet her,” and he had my arm and was steering me across the room.

I introduced them and Kenneth danced away with her. I don’t think she ever had a chance to know another man. I never saw such a determined courtship. They were married when Kenneth finished law school and I thought that surely theirs would be for ever after. To all appearances, it was. And Megan campaigned hard for Kenneth, even though fish fries and county fairs are not exactly her style.

Greg despised Megan. It was funny I should think of that, but I knew it was so. She represented everything he most detested: privilege, inherited wealth, and station.

Actually, Megan was quite likable. She had a gentle dry sense of humor quite at odds with her severe appearance. She was kindly even though it was often a
noblesse-oblige
response. She was crazy about Kenneth. You couldn’t miss that. It was in the way she looked up when he came in a room, the way she smiled when she caught his eye, the way she would reach out and lightly touch his arm.

So the whole thing was damn depressing. I felt tired suddenly. Tired of all the Carlisles and their problems. I had never cared for Kenneth and now it looked like he was cheating on the woman who truly loved him—and whom I thought he adored.

It reminded me that you can never be sure of anything— or anyone.

I would have bet a lot on Kenneth and Megan’s marriage.

I moved toward the back of the library and stood by the fireplace and looked moodily into the fire. It crackled and hissed, smelling comfortably of hickory. But I wasn’t comfortable. I wanted to go home.

Did I?

My apartment would be chilly, no fire laid, no eggshell thin china cups holding superb coffee. Greg probably wouldn’t call or come by. I hadn’t, after all, given him much reason to.

“K.C., will you pour, please?”

Grace’s voice, so perfectly civilized, so right, brought me back to the room. I turned and crossed to the coffee service and began to pour. Amanda brought in a platter of cookies.

As everyone settled into chairs or on couches. Mother began to talk.

And I thought, oh wow, this is going to tear it for Kenneth.

“. . . and I felt if we talked it over, among ourselves, we might come up with a solution. Kenneth, of course, can tell us what our rights are legally.”

Coffee spilled over the brim of the cup, splashing onto the saucer Edmond held.

“Hold up, K.C.”

“Sorry.”

“Here, Miss K.C. I’ll take that cup. Pour Mr. Edmond a fresh one.” As Amanda took the sloshing saucer, she bent near to me and said softly, “Don’t you pay her no never mind, Miss K.C. Your poppa he told me once, he said, ‘Miss K.C. will be the best lawyer of all, Amanda, you wait and see.’”

“It doesn’t matter.” But I couldn’t resist the bitter comment, “It’s so damn typical.”

Grace had called and asked me to come, even gone so far as to say I approached problems like my father, but when she needed legal advice, why, apparently only men counted as lawyers. Obviously, too, she hadn’t talked to Kenneth earlier. He looked stricken, then he rallied, “Aunt Grace, I’d be glad to help, but I’m afraid I don’t know what you are talking about.”

Grace can be obtuse sometimes. She said impatiently, “Why, Kenneth, of course you know. It’s that Boutelle woman and that awful article she is writing about all of us. She told me she had talked to you.”

For an instant, Kenneth looked grim and angry. Then he cleared his throat. “Oh. Of course. That reporter woman. I didn’t remember the name.”

“But Kenneth . . .” Mother began.

“As a matter of fact,” he interrupted hastily, “I talked to her very briefly. Very briefly. I declined to be interviewed. I could tell it was a scandal-mongering kind of thing and I told her I wasn’t interested.”

A child of three could have seen that Kenneth was lying. Megan was no child. Her narrow face looked suddenly pinched and old.

Grace continued to be dense. “But Kenneth, I thought . . .”

“I warned her that the Carlisle family would not tolerate a libelous article.”

Grace brightened. “So we can force her not to print it?”

“No,” I said quietly, taking pity on Kenneth. “There’s no way, Grace. However, we can sue the socks off her if we don’t like it.”

“K.C.,” Grace said sharply, “the point is, we don’t want it printed.”

“I understand what you want, Grace. The point is, there isn’t a damned thing you can do to stop her.”

“It’s blackmail,” Edmond said harshly.

Everyone looked at him.

“It’s blackmail, that’s all there is to it,” he said again.

“We could buy the magazine,” Sue suggested.

Edmond nodded. “It’s going to come down to that.”

“What good will that do?” Travis asked. “She can just sell the damned article somewhere else.”

Edmond shook his head. “Oh no, we will use a dummy company to buy the magazine, then instruct the editor to buy the article. When it is in his possession, we will destroy it. She cannot legally sell it elsewhere.”

I poured myself a cup of coffee and thought what a wonderful thing wealth is. Edmond was so confident of what money could buy, but I had known a few people in journalism. The editor of
Inside Out
was probably not the most likable guy in the world or he wouldn’t work for such a destructive organ, but his hackles would flare at the idea of being bought off. One way or the other, the article would see print.

“Fat chance,” I remarked.

They all looked at me.

“Sorry, friends, but I don’t think it will work to buy the magazine. Magazines aren’t hunks of cheese. You would never succeed in telling an editor what to print.”

“If we own it, we can control it.”

“If the editor is like some I’ve known, he will listen to you, mumble something in reply, print the damn article, and quit.”

“But we can. . . .”

I looked at Edmond with interest. “What can we do? Besides fire him and that will be too late.”

“We have to do something,” Priscilla said throatily.

“Pay up,” I said briefly.

“But that’s . . .” Edmond began.

“Blackmail,” I agreed. “But what else can you do, if you really don’t want her to write all these . . . interesting things about us?”

It was very quiet and no one exchanged glances.

“It’s quite absurd,” Lorraine said suddenly. She turned to Travis, “You haven’t talked to this woman, have you?”

“No, I . . . uh . . . haven’t had the pleasure. Just as soon not, considering the bother she’s causing.”

I recognized a particular tone in Travis’ voice, one of insouciance and carelessness. It was just the way he would answer Mother on those long-ago mornings when she would inquire what time he had come in the night before. “Oh, early on, Mater, early on.” I knew better. I glanced at Lorraine. She didn’t know her husband as well as I knew my brother. I wondered what Francine had on Travis. It could be anything from women to . . . anything.

“It’s a lot of money,” Priscilla said baldly.

Lorraine turned toward her. “How much does she want?”

“She asked me for fifty thousand,” Priscilla said.

Behind me, I heard a heavy sigh and then the tinkle of breaking china. I swung around. Amanda sagged against the wall. The coffee cup I had filled too full for Edmond lay in a shattered pile amidst a widening swirl of coffee on the parquet floor. Amanda held her hands tight against her chest.

I hurried to her, slipped an arm around her shoulders. “Mandy, what’s wrong?”

“The cup.” She tried to bend down to pick up the pieces.

My arm tightened and I held her. “Amanda, are you sick? What’s wrong?”

“My heart,” she whispered. “It . . . sometimes it does this. I have a pill. In the kitchen. It will be all right. But the cup . . . it is one of the Limoges. The pieces . . .”

Megan came up beside us. She said over her shoulder to the others, “Amanda is ill. K.C. and I will see to her.” Then gently, “Amanda, don’t worry about the cup. I’ll get it. You go with K.C. and get your medicine.”

Amanda and I moved slowly, together, toward the door. I wanted to kick and smash all the stupid priceless objects in the elegant room. They were killing Mandy. She was too old to have to work as hard as she had this evening, dinner for nine, then the clearing up, and still on duty bringing coffee and cookies to the library. Goddammit, how old did she have to get before Mother would let her rest? Or would she have a chance to grow old, to be the old, old lady I teased her about?

We had to stop three times before we reached the kitchen. I helped her to her old black rocker.

“The drawer. The little drawer.”

I knew which one she meant. It was a tiny watchpocket slim drawer in an old chest that sat just inside the pantry. It was Amanda’s chest. Her personal chest. That had been clear to us as children. We could open the huge cupboards, rearrange the seemingly endless rows of pots and pans, but the chest was Mandy’s and we must be invited before we touched it. That very exclusivity made it the focal point of the kitchen, exciting our childish fantasies. What
did
the bottom drawer hold? Why was the second drawer so hard to pull out? The little drawer was the most magical drawer of all. It was there that she put special treats, candy shaped like coins and wrapped in gold foil, tootsie rolls, and ice mints, and, greatest of all, the pack of cards she used for telling our fortunes. Kenneth and Sheila and Priscilla and I would watch with huge eyes as her fingers, moving so swiftly, would slap the cards into rows and, softly and sibilantly, for Mandy had her own taste for the dramatic, she would tell our fortunes, grand and glorious fortunes of journeys over the seas and wondrous loves, of mysterious strangers and dark adventure.

I pulled the drawer out and it was empty except for a vial of pills and her wedding rings which she always took off before she cooked. I hadn’t expected anything else, but it was like walking through a gate which had always opened into a lovely garden and finding only weeds and dust.

I opened the vial and gave Mandy one of the tiny nitroglycerine tablets. She put it under her tongue then rested her head back against the rocker.

She often sat in the rocker on somnolent summer afternoons. I could remember finding her there and the slow drowsy squeak of the rockers. Now she sat so still, looking so small and old, and the rocker never moved.

Tears began to trickle slowly down her cheeks.

I bent close to her. “Mandy, what is it? Do you hurt? Shall I call Rudolph?”

She shook her head.

I reached out and grabbed up her hands. “Mandy, I am going to call Rudolph. He will meet us at the hospital . . .”

“No. No.”

I could barely hear her.

“No,” she said wearily, so wearily. “I will go up to bed.” Then she tried to struggle up out of the chair. “But the dishes . . . and the coffee. Your mother doesn’t like for the coffee to get cold. I must . . .”

“Damn the coffee. And the dishes. I’ll take care of it. You need to rest.”

“It’s all right now,” she said. “It’s better now. The pain is better.”

The kitchen door opened behind us and Megan came through. “Amanda,” she asked quietly, “how are you feeling?”

Amanda nodded heavily. “Better, Mrs. Carlisle. Much better.”

“Oh, that’s good,” Megan said quickly. “I’ve talked to Jason. He called his wife and she is coming. They will take care of the dishes. You mustn’t worry about anything. The important thing is for you to rest.”

“I think we ought to take Amanda to the hospital.”

Megan nodded. “If she feels that she should go, then by all means. Although if it is angina . . .” Megan reached out and patted Amanda’s shoulder. “Is there still any pain? Any sensation of squeezing?”

I looked from one to the other, remembering now that Megan was a volunteer at the local hospital.

Amanda shook her head. “It’s all right now. The tablet always makes it go away. I’m just tired. So tired.”

Amanda was insistent that we not call Rudolph. I gave way finally and she and I went upstairs in the back elevator that had been installed when old K.C. III’s gout kept him from climbing the stairs.

Amanda was quiet as I helped her undress and slip into a white cotton gown and climb up into her high old-fashioned bed. Her room was on the third floor and looked out over the back garden. It was a nice room with an attached bath and it sparkled with cleanliness. I looked at the walls, covered with pictures of Rudolph and his family and of the four of us, Kenneth and Priscilla and Sheila and me.