Further Lane (11 page)

One more thing, Claire said, “She isn't always the automaton some people think. Hannah has her softie side, her vulnerable moments. Sea shells. She has a collection of sea shells from when she was a kid. They didn't have much money and shells were free for the picking up.”

“At Riverhead?” There were no sea shells there.

“No, down here at the ocean. Once a year the family would pile into the pickup truck for a day at the public beach in East Hampton. She looked forward to those outings all spring. Used to tell me about them when I was small, about walking the beach looking for shells and staring up at the big houses on the dunes. A little kid searching for shells and looking up to where the rich people lived. In houses like the one she bought and I live in now.”

I nodded. Let her talk. Maybe there'd be something else I could use in my story, like this about the sea shells and staring up at the big houses where the rich lived. Good stuff, that, the dead woman as more than just another rich bitch who'd scored big. And still swam in the night ocean.

“And for all of her famous, even ruthless, efficiency, Hannah can be a bit of a pack rat. With a roomful of junk. Not throwing away things that hold meaning, no matter how silly to anyone else, no matter how worthless otherwise. An old shoebox of sea shells. A beat-up old climbing rope from that Everest expedition when those people died and she didn't. Her first tennis racquet. Never had a racquet until she married Andy Cutting and he bought her one and she practiced at the cement courts behind the high school. Or against the handball wall behind the A & P. Rich people played tennis; it was important to Hannah that she learn how. At least be able to get the ball over the net. Stuff like that…”

I walked up to the Further Lane gate with her.

“That freak-show crowd she had to her last party. If she was so intent on impressing the WASPs, they were hardly…”

“Oh, that was defiance. She'd sucked up and been rejected so now she was being naughty.”

“But for a woman who became famous for teaching American women how their homes and their gardens and even they themselves ought to look and behave, to think of that bunch as her set, it doesn't make sense.”

Claire didn't look at me but at the gravel drive in front of her as she said, very softly:

“Hannah's got good taste in everything but people.”

At the head of the drive a pickup was parked, waiting. Not Claire's. In the dusk I could just see the driver's profile. Surly, he looked. Maybe he was pissed off that Claire'd come to my house to apologize. Or maybe this was just one of his surly days, when he wasn't doing Jimmy Cagney impersonations.

“Cheer up, Leo,” I called out brightly, “maybe you can run over a raccoon on your way out.”

Leo Brass didn't say anything; just looked at me, measuring an enemy.

TWELVE

I wasn't out to earn the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval …

Alix Dunraven was back in the morning.

I'd hoped she'd call eventually but I hadn't expected it to be this soon or that she'd show up in person.

“I got hopelessly lost,” she confessed. “Finally purchased a map at the stationer's. Couldn't make head nor tails of that, either. Might as well have been celestial navigation. I called Harry for divine guidance and he told me to throw myself on your mercy. So here I am, groveling, really, 'umble as Uriah Heep.”

She didn't seem to be groveling nor did she appear especially humble or in any way did she resemble the Uriah Heep either Dickens or I would recognize. But she was too good to look at to quibble. So I just grinned.

“Besides,” she said, “I didn't like the Mauve House awfully.”

“Too mauve?”

“Oh, decidedly too-too. A rum place, strictly poofter, of course, but being British, I'm more than accustomed to that. Many of my dearest friends, all great chums, are poofs. But this East Hampton bunch, oddly, are very stern about dogs. Those chaps usually dote on having poodles about.”

What I couldn't know and wouldn't until much later was that Evans ordered her back to me, convinced for some reason that I knew more than I was saying, about where the manuscript might be, Alix was to get close to me and find out. Even if it meant throwing herself at me and moving in. Nor did she or Mr. Evans seem to care about the bad name they were giving the poor Mauve House, which had always enjoyed an excellent reputation.

There was apparently great excitement back there in Manhattan at Random House. Hannah Cutting's book was going to be big when she was alive. But dead? With a sharpened stake of privet hedge through her breast? Huge! So went a wildfire of gossip through the hallways of the publishing company. The marketing people salivated. Even the salesmen were excited. And you know salesmen.

Trouble was, neither Evans nor anyone else knew where Hannah's manuscript was.

And in the book biz, if you can't find the book, you may have a little problem. Especially if the author is dead. Because trouble calls for a trouble-shooter, Harry Evans had whistled up Alix Dunraven, who filled me in in colorful detail about all these goings-on at Random where, amid considerable drama, a sales meeting had been informed:

“A bloody spear, hardened in flame, thrust through her black heart? My God! It's a cover of the
Times Book Review.
It's a network miniseries. It's bigger than a miniseries! A movie. No, ‘a major motion picture.' One that ‘reeks of Oscar!' With Streisand playing Hannah! Glenn Close! Sarandon! And Hanks in there somewhere…”

Except that, there was no book. No miniseries. No movie. No Oscar. No Streisand and Hanks.
Forrest Gump
sounded like a more promising idea when it was still moldering on Winston Groom's back burner.

Another major difficulty: Evans and his people were dealing with an author new to them. Hannah's first book, the national best-seller,
The Taste Machine,
and each subsequent effort, starting with
Hannah's House
and going on through
Hannah's Garden, Hannah's Kitchen,
and the like, had been published by bitter rival Simon & Schuster. And over there at S & S, where Michael Korda and the others who'd shepherded Hannah from best-seller to bestseller, knew Hannah Cutting and her writing methods intimately and in ways Harry's people couldn't, they were hardly likely to put themselves out to assist Random House in recovering a manuscript S & S probably believed ethically and morally should have been theirs.

The phone rang.

“Harry Evans here, Beecher. Has Lady Alix driven over yet this morning? I told her…”

That's how I learned about that title of hers. That it wasn't a corporate label but something regal and inherited, bigger than Lady Di's. Besides being gainfully employed by a prestigious London house, HarperCollins, and now temporarily by one of the biggest Manhattan book publishers, Alix had a curriculum vitae that resembled
Burke's Peerage.
Maybe the
Almanach de Gotha
as well. And looking as she did as a bonus.

Alix Dunraven's daddy was the fourth senior Earl in Britain. The family title dated back to Henry IV, whom the first Dunraven had served both gallantly and fiercely, slaying and eventually being slain, in the jolly tradition of the time and in the service of his liege master, the King. Lady Alix's square name was Alixandre (named for the unfortunate last Czarina of Russia, a third cousin several generations removed); she was twenty-six; she'd taken a double first at Oxford (in Greats and History, having written dissertations on “The Confessions of Saint Augustine” and “Clive of India”); worked briefly for British
Vogue;
had recently only just gotten out of a quasi-arranged marriage; and had been taken up by Harry when assigned to Random by the Tony Godwin Award folks. Evans, married to Tina Brown, was one of the few important men in Manhattan who really knew women. And in Alix he early saw not just a luncheon companion or a charmer, but someone he could dispatch to a little mess of one sort or another and be reasonably confident she would straighten things out and within an acceptable time frame. Would have made a good sleuth, a great crook. Scotland Yard and the Mafia both loved people like Alix: competent, swift, efficient. Ruthless?

No, a woman who looked like this couldn't be … ruthless. Well, perhaps.

Harry kept her around because she was beautiful, she was London, she was … good. Recently on a new tell-all yarn about the royals, a book she didn't write or edit, she'd been able to nail a few potentially embarrassing errors and to flesh out one or two anecdotes with firsthand information. You sent Alix out to do something; she usually did it. She wasn't all that professionally trained; with her, it was instinct. Sort of in the way I got Rose Kennedy to talk about the family, Alix had a knack for finding things. How big a job was it finding a lousy book manuscript that had gone missing? Which probably still resided quietly inside an IBM computer somewhere in the house. And, as he had once said of his own wife, Evans paid Alix a sincere compliment: “She has the cunning of a rat.”

Now the “cunning” Alix was attempting to co-opt me.

“Harry said you and he talk often. That you've been most helpful in this matter. He suggested I spend lots of time with you.”

I hadn't been very helpful at all, I wanted to say. Instead, “If you've checked out of the Mauve House, where are you staying?” I asked.

“Oh, I'm not staying. Just a day or so, until I find the manuscript.”

That's when I realized this gloriously beautiful but almost total stranger was actually moving in. Which immediately raised in me several powerful but conflicting emotions. She was confident about being allowed to move in, about eventually finding the book—confident about most things. She was also tall and slender, had that long, dark hair and those disarmingly innocent blue eyes, and was dressed by Ungaro. And now that the Mauve House had turned out to be too … mauve, she was descending on me. She and a dog I didn't like much and that she barely knew. When she saw hesitation in my face, she leapt right in:

“You're an author yourself and apparently very good at it. I'm a book editor, and we both understand that between writers and editors there's a kind of tacit but quite genuine entente cordiale. And here I am…”

When I didn't actually snarl, she smiled, and nodded toward the Jag's boot.

“There are three pieces of luggage there, if quite convenient.”

It wasn't quite convenient, but okay. Hardly the moment to play churl. Louis Vuitton, the three of them, matching and chic. Even her laptop had a Louis Vuitton carrying case. That was a first. Think of it. Louis Vuitton laptops!

As I reached into the boot to lift out the luggage, the poodle yipped and went at me, as if she suspected I was stealing them.

“Oh, gosh, I guess she thought—Are you hurt?”

“Hardly broke the skin,” I said through clenched teeth, intent on behaving gamely, but giving the poodle a dirty look.

So much for the entente cordiale.

Screw Harry for sending this bird,
and
her dog, to my father's house, giving her my name, my number. But I was after the Hannah Cutting story. And if that required offering bed and breakfast to Lady Alix Dunraven, so be it. What better source material could there be in getting Hannah's story than sneaking a first peek at Hannah's own book?

And maybe this kid could find it. For Random House. And for me.

And I felt the old pull, fiercely remembered from London in the spring when my girl ran off. Alix meant to use me to help her get Hannah's manuscript. And I was intent on using her for just about the same purpose. One of us was going to get screwed. And I didn't necessarily mean in bed though that was hardly an outcome to be dreaded if indeed it happened.

There were two bedrooms in the gatehouse and I lugged her Vuitton luggage upstairs to the smaller and put out some fresh bed linen and towels. I wasn't going to start making beds for the people at Random House, even ones whose daddies were earls and who looked like this. This wasn't a Holiday Inn and I wasn't out to earn the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. When Harry brought someone home to stay overnight, did Tina Brown change the sheets and put out fresh towels? While we were making our little domestic arrangements my phone rang downstairs.

It was Evans. Again. Checking up on the towels and fresh linen, I supposed. “Yes?” I said, being chilly about it.

“Hello, Stowe, good of you to take in a waif. She'll be no trouble, I assure you.”

She and Evans talked some more. Some nonsense I didn't quite get about E-mail in cipher. I enjoyed myself looking at her, this girl who was going to compete with me in tracking down Hannah Cutting's manuscript. What a joke. She wasn't in my league on a sleuthing job like this. Had she ever fled from Sarajevo or been chased by mullahs? Which of the two of us was it got Rose Kennedy to talk, and on the record, about Teddy and the family?

But Her Ladyship might turn out awfully pleasant to have around, you had to admit.

THIRTEEN

Next thing there'll be graffiti on the Presbyterian church …

Hideo Hegel and the Countess were still in town. His mansion's rental ran until October first. But they were packing, getting out. Orders from Tokyo. Did the Seven Samurai blame Hannah's death on Hideous? Or the sum total of all the grief she'd given them, alive and dead? Strange people, the Japanese. Eat their fish not only raw but still alive. I must ask Hideous about that sometime. But not now. He seemed reasonably happy to see me. The Countess, well, let's not get into that. Maybe she sensed I was a threat to her lover, her checkbook. Hegel gave me another facet of Hannah. I already sensed the contradictions, depending on the source: control freak, the swimmer with sharks, the gutsy loner, the instinctive genius, the sex symbol, the social-climbing alpinist, the pain in the ass, the admirable striver, the backstabbing bitch, the passionate lover, the anal-retentive mother, the uncanonized saint, the child of impoverished Polish Town collecting sea shells and staring up at the palaces of the wealthy. How true or accurate any of this was I didn't yet know. I was getting a wildly chaotic though more rounded view. Not yet a portrait, but more than a sketch.