Last Day (35 page)

She couldn’t remember finding the painting inside, but she had definite, clear memories of seeing Conor hold it in his hands. She could see the heart-shaped scrawl of blood. It reminded her of being sixteen, when she, Beth, Lulu, and Scotty had become blood sisters, pricking their fingers with sewing needles, marking the moment in blood on the endpaper of a book in Mathilda’s library.

It always happened this way after an episode. Pictures and memories filled her mind in bits and pieces, as if they had been chopped up with scissors. Dissociation was followed by an aura, cloudiness, and sickness, physiological complications of traumatic shock. Twenty-three years ago, the murky feeling could last for weeks. But more than two decades had gone by, and she had gotten better; her spirit had knit back together. She knew from experience, even though she doubted it every time, that this feeling would pass within the day.

The Porsche passed through the stone gates, tires rumbling up the long gravel drive to Mathilda’s house. An allée of beech trees lined the road, their trunks tall blue shadows, September leaves still green but dry, rustling in the interlocking branches overhead. Rounding the last bend, she almost wished to see Pete’s black car. She wanted a fight, to discharge the terrible, sick feeling that had been building inside, that always came when she got too close to those twenty-two hours, when her mind blacked out the worst of them and she felt the vertigo of lost time.

But Pete either wasn’t here or he had hidden his car. Kate’s stomach ached at the idea of seeing Nicola, and she felt it was a mistake, bad judgment, to let her and Tyler stay here. Popcorn jumped out of the convertible and went running out of sight to investigate the paths and hedges. Kate rang the doorbell; a minute later, Nicola answered.

“Kate, hello,” Nicola said, taking a step backward and looking worried. “Pete’s not here.”

“Good, I’m glad. I’m not here to see him.”

“I’ve been looking for a place to rent; I really have,” Nicola said. “If you’re here to tell me it’s time to go, Tyler and I can stay with my mother in Groton.”

“You’ve had Pete staying with you, haven’t you?” Kate asked.

“He shows up sometimes.”

Kate gave her a long hard stare. “And you don’t have the balls to tell him to leave?”

“I’m sorry!” Nicola said.

“You should be. For yourself and for Tyler. Where is he, by the way?”

“Sleeping,” she said.

“Can I see him?” Kate asked, surprising herself.

Nicola nodded. She was about five feet four inches, the same height as Beth. Following her, looking at her from behind, Kate felt a pang in
her heart. She wanted her sister back. Nicola wore shorts and a white T-shirt, and she was barefoot.

Tyler slept in a blue baby seat in the shade on the wide back porch, his chin tucked onto his chest, arms at his side. His yellow onesie had an orange lion on it. Kate crouched down beside him. She closed her eyes and thought of Matthew. She leaned closer, smelled Tyler’s clean baby smell of shampoo and lotion and sleep. When she opened her eyes, she saw that his had fluttered open, and he was looking straight at her.

“He doesn’t know me,” Kate said, leaning back. “I don’t want to scare him.”

“He’s not scared,” Nicola said. “Look, he’s watching you.”

Tyler’s brown eyes were enormous, unblinking as he regarded Kate. He unclenched tiny fists. His fingernails were perfect half moons. Kate pictured Beth as a baby. Even though Kate had been only two, she had signed on for a lifetime of loving and protecting her sister. Her mother used to let her help give Beth a bath, stick the tabs to close her diapers. Kate would lay her finger against the baby’s open hand, Beth would squeeze, and Kate would wish she’d never let go.

She had done the same with Sam, and now Tyler, letting him grab her index finger with a hard grip. She glanced up at Nicola, who was smiling. Nicola had brown eyes. Pete’s were bright blue. She was glad Tyler’s were brown.

Tyler began to fuss, and Nicola picked him up. A thousand birds called from the trees, and the flutter of leaves got louder. It was hurricane season, and Hilda, the latest threat, had skirted the leeward islands, on track to hit the Carolinas and spin out to sea before hitting the northeast coast. Even from so far away, there was an atmospheric disturbance right here on the Connecticut shore. Wild weather excited Kate, as it had Mathilda. The wind helped blow out the cobwebs of trauma.

“I came to ask you something,” Kate said.

“Of course, anything,” Nicola said, but she sounded apprehensive, as if afraid of what it would be.

“When you worked at the gallery, how often did Beth go down into the basement?”

“The basement?” Nicola asked. “Never. She wouldn’t. Because of what happened to her—to you—down there. Even my first month working—while I was cataloging all the sculptures on the shelves—I did it alone. She didn’t come down to supervise. I thought she would.”

“She must have sometimes,” Kate said. “Maybe when you didn’t see her.”

“I don’t think so. Only I did. And Pete, to do the framing.”

Kate flinched, picturing Nicola and Pete getting together in the basement while Beth worked upstairs.

Nicola chewed her lower lip, seemed to be thinking something over. She watched Kate for a minute.

“Kate, after Beth was killed, I saw Pete with baby clothes,” she said finally.

“Well, you two do have a son.”

“They weren’t Tyler’s. He threw them away. Or at least hid them.”

“Where?”

“The dumbwaiter. Kate, I think they were for Matthew.”

Kate couldn’t stand to hear Matthew’s name come out of Nicola’s lips. “My sister bought clothes for him. So did I. Beth was ready for him to be born. He was her son. She loved him as much as you love Tyler.”

“I took them out of the dumbwaiter. They’re in the yellow room upstairs.”

“Excuse me,” Kate said quietly, barely able to contain her emotions. Her head was spinning with the idea of Pete hiding Matthew’s clothes. Beth had bought them, so lovingly. She should be holding her baby now. He should be wearing the outfits she’d found for him.

Kate left Nicola standing there and walked into the house. She went upstairs, into the yellow room. Beth had stayed here when they were young. Had Nicola somehow known that? The buttery light was soft and welcoming.

Baby clothes were folded on the bed. Kate sat beside them. She looked without touching for a long time. Three onesies, striped in different bright colors. A sun hat printed with sailboats. Two blue soft terry cloth towels. A package of bibs with Winnie-the-Pooh characters on them. A blue baby blanket monogrammed
ML
that she had given Beth to hold her nephew. That had been the week before they’d died.

Seeing Matthew’s things made him even more real. Kate lifted the sun hat, each onesie, the towels, the blanket, and held them to her chest, just as if she were hugging him. She thought of how she would have liked to take him flying. They would take off, bank over the Sound, and see where they lived from the air. She would teach him to fly, just as Mathilda had done for her.

After a while, she took a deep breath. Instead of leaving Matthew’s things on the bed, she placed them in the top two drawers of the cherrywood bureau. It made her feel good to think that Beth had kept her clothes in the same drawers.

It felt like a secret, just for herself: keeping Matthew’s things in this room where Beth had stayed. Kate was glad she would always know where to find them, the baby clothes her nephew never got to wear.

She went downstairs, into her favorite room of the house: the library. It was warm and ordered, as it had been during her grandmother’s life. Tall windows admitted hazy white light that fell in patches on the wide-board pine floors, the antique Sarouk rug. The fireplace smelled faintly of smoke, hinting of fires from chilly days and cold nights when Mathilda was alive.

The bookshelves were perfectly arranged, not alphabetically or according to size, but by color. Although not an artist herself, Mathilda had appreciated the palette, and the books’ spines ranged through the spectrum from scarlet to violet.

Kate went to the dark greens. She removed a book—not a first edition; the girls had been careful about that—Vasari’s
The Lives of the Artists
. Kate turned to the last page, flipped it over, looked at the yellowed endpaper.

She saw the initials:
K
,
B
,
L
,
S
, written in blood.

They were surrounded by a heart, drawn in their own blood. Kate had been fifteen. It was a year before that day—she and Beth hadn’t yet seen the worst of life, still trusted the world. She remembered pressing her fingertip to the page, swooshing the shape, squeezing an extra drop of blood to make a complete heart. Her sister and friends had done the same, tracing over the marks she had left.

“Blood sisters,” they’d said, one by one, forming a circle and facing each other, pressing their palms together and clasping fingers.

“My secrets are your secrets,” Beth said.

“No secrets between us,” Scotty said.

“May our circle be free of secrets,” Lulu said.

“Forevermore,” Kate said.

“Promise, promise, promise, promise,” each of them said.

And with a kiss they’d sealed the promise of sisterhood, friendship, secrets, and blood, bonds that would never break.

But there had been lies, and hurts, and secrets, and broken bonds and promises.

Kate stared at the smudged heart. This was what she had come here to see. It looked exactly like the one drawn on the back of
Moonlight
: a blood heart, the symbol of the Compass Rose. She closed the book. Instead of putting it back on the shelf, she walked to the long mahogany table. Her family had a tradition of leaving books they wanted to return
to later, but soon, stacked here instead of reshelving them. She wanted to leave this one out so she could find it again easily.

As she was about to place it on the table, the book at the top of the pile caught her attention. An exquisite volume with green paper-covered boards over a green cloth spine, the title and author’s name stamped in gilt:
West-Running Brook
, by Robert Frost.

Where Beth had clearly left it, intending to read it again soon.

43

“Hey, Conor,” Winifred Sibley said, walking into Reid’s office. Tall and thin, with short white hair and bright-blue eyes, she gave him a huge smile, and he beamed back. She was the state’s chief accountant and a Reid family friend, and he had asked her to come to the Major Crime Squad to go over the Lathrops’ financials with him.

“Hi, Winnie,” he said, hugging her. “I’m really glad to see you.”

“And I you, as always. You’ve got a lot going on, kid,” she said, lifting her black briefcase.

“Hope you have something good for me in there,” he said.

“That depends on how you define
good
,” she said, giving him a wry smile.

“Why don’t we go into the conference room? It will be more comfortable there. Can I get you a coffee?”

“Yes, please,” she said.

“I remember,” he said.

He went to the break room and filled two mugs. It had been a busy, frustrating week. Judge Caroline Walker granted the warrants for Pete’s electronics, and the marshals executed them. They seized his computers and mobile phone. Analysts examined the hard drives, documenting his search history. Jennifer Miano had had her knee surgery; she had come through with flying colors, but it would be a long recuperation,
so Reid had scoured the reports alone. And he’d found no evidence that Pete had searched for instructions on how to beat a polygraph exam.

After entering the conference room, he handed Winnie her coffee and sat down on the other side of the long walnut table. She was about Reid’s dad’s age, and they had met when they were both young cops. Over the years his dad had decided he was happiest patrolling the streets of New London, and Winnie had used her business degree to rise through the ranks of the state police.

“How’s your brother?” Winnie asked.

“Tom’s great,” Reid said. “Other than giving me grief every chance he gets.”

“Ah, the two Reid boys. Still the same.”

Winnie started to unpack her briefcase. Reid watched her place two black vinyl three-ring binders on the table. Then she looked up and gazed at him with those clear, intelligent blue eyes.

“What, Winnie?” he asked.

“I recognized the connection right away. Beth Woodward. I know how much she and her sister mean to you. I remember everything about the gallery crime—I had just gotten my master’s in accounting, and I was assigned to go through the books.”

“Yeah, I know,” Reid said. “I remember that.”

“It was a bad one. Your father was worried about you,” she said. “He knew you’d carry it for a long time. And here you are again, same family.”

Reid stared out the window behind Winnie, at the rolling hills, blue in the afternoon shadows. He had the feeling she wanted to reach across the desk, touch his hand.

“I’m okay,” he said, steeling himself against the feelings: for how his father had cared about him, how Winnie did now.

“Anyway, let’s get down to business,” she said.

“The Lathrop family’s financials,” Reid said.

“Yes. And here’s why my work is so much easier than yours. I follow the numbers. They are so nice and tidy. There’s no blood, no death. They don’t care who the killer is, and they don’t lie.”

“So what do they say?” Reid asked.

Winnie pushed the two black binders toward him. “The one on the left contains balance sheets from the Lathrop Gallery. Their earnings and losses, salaries and benefits, the purchases and sales of art going back to the year Beth married Pete. The one on the right contains Beth’s trust documents.”

Reid reached for the one on the right. He flipped it open and saw that Winnie had annotated each page, marked some with brightly colored Post-it notes.

“It’s a complicated trust,” Winnie said. “Originally set up by Mathilda Harkness.”

Reid scanned the first page—there were a hundred more to go through.

“Can you boil it down for me?” he asked. “Mainly, what does Pete get and when does he get it? Half the gallery? Will he have to share it with Kate?”