The Ashford Affair (40 page)

“Not yet. I’m going to stay here for a bit.” A shadow fell across his face like a mask. “I need to think.”

Kenya, 1927

Addie woke with a headache.

She drew her elbows close, burrowing down into her cot, but it was no use. The light blazing through the canvas and the clattering noises outside her tent flap indicated it was past time to face a new day. One of the many disagreeable aspects of the safari was that the hunters rose so early in the morning. Addie had never liked either dawn or hunting, but there was very little getting away from it here.

There seemed to be even more clanking and clattering than usual this morning, bearers calling to one another in Swahili, someone singing, the cook banging pots about. The sounds hammered against her skull.

Addie rose reluctantly, wiggling into a pair of trousers and a loose blouse, standard gear on safari, although she still felt awkward and exposed in trousers rather than a skirt. She’d slept poorly last night. Frederick had stayed away for a very long time, and when he did reappear he was silent and brooding, hardly participating at all in the conversation at supper. There’d been dancing after, but Frederick had disappeared. Bea had disappeared, too, soon after, with Val Vaughn, reappearing an hour later, more animated than before. Raoul had been livid. He’d done his best to pick a fight with Vaughn, who responded by telling him to cool down and tossing a gin fizz in his face “to help.”

Addie hadn’t seen what happened after that. She’d gone to bed, thoroughly disgusted with everyone, including herself.

She hadn’t slept, though. Instead, she’d lain awake, debating futilely with herself over the moral merits of staying or going. The man or the tiger? For five blissful minutes she would convince herself that divorce was really quite common these days and Bea would be happier without Frederick anyway. Then she’d think of the girls, of the papers, of the scandal, of Bea, in braids and breeches, teaching her to ride, and she’d be right back where she started.

She’d finally drifted off to sleep in the wee hours, only to be awakened again by the sound of voices, angry voices, just barely hushed below the shouting level. It was Frederick’s voice, speaking fast and furious, and, in response, Bea’s tinkling laugh, and the sound of glass smashing.

Addie had waited breathlessly, but there’d been nothing more after that. By the time she got up the nerve to creep out of the tent, their light had gone out. Their voices had been just muffled enough that she couldn’t hear what they were fighting about. Raoul? Vaughn? Her? She’d curled into a ball, feeling sick to her stomach with resentment and guilt.

The sun stung her eyes as she lifted the flap of her tent. It must have been later than she’d thought. The morning mist had already lifted from the ground and the sun was strong and clear.

“Have you seen Bea?” Raoul was pacing back and forth in front of the fire, his boots painfully shiny in the morning light. “She’s not with you?”

“Why would she be?” Addie held up a hand, shading her eyes. She felt even blearier than usual this morning, her head heavy, her mouth like cotton wool. “Isn’t she up?”

Budgie looked up from the gun he was cleaning. “Not a sign of her.” He raised his eyebrows significantly. “Nor Val.”

“He’s meant to be reconnoitering today, isn’t he?” Trying to think was like slogging through treacle. Addie stifled a yawn. “Perhaps Bea went with him.”

Raoul muttered something rather nasty in French.

Budgie looked apologetically at Addie. “We three were meant to go out this morning. A bit late for it now, though.”

“I’m sure she just forgot,” said Addie as soothingly as she could. The sound of tinkling glass clattered in her memory. Bea in a rage was a volatile thing. Much as Addie loved her, she was beginning to lose patience.

Or was she just trying to justify wanting to steal Bea’s husband?

The flap of Frederick and Bea’s tent was flung upon and Frederick staggered through, into the light. He hadn’t shaved yet; there was dark growth on his chin, and a long, vicious-looking scratch down one cheek. Bea’s doing? Addie felt sick to her stomach.

“You look like all kinds of hell,” said Budgie cheerfully.

Frederick winced at the sunlight. “That good? Then I must look better than I feel. Good Lord, what was in those drinks last night?” He looked significantly at the silver coffeepot. “Is there coffee?”

Budgie waved at the table. “Help yourself.”

Addie made a move towards the table and made herself stop. There was no reason for her to pour Frederick’s coffee for him. It was gestures like that that gave her away.

Frederick carried a cup over to her. “You look like you need this.”

It was tea, not coffee, made just as she liked it, brick red with a dash of cream, no sugar. She wanted to howl with frustration. She wanted to fling the cup across the clearing and hear it crash against a tree. She wanted to storm and rage and break crockery like Bea.

Addie took the cup from him in hands that were surprisingly steady. “Thank you,” she said primly.

“Is that coffee?” Val Vaughn strolled into the clearing, unwinding his scarf from around his neck.

“Where’s Bea?” asked Frederick.

“Why would I know?” Vaughn helped himself from the pot on the table. “Is there any food left, or have you all scarfed it?”

“Didn’t Bea fly out with you?” asked Addie.

“Not this morning.” Vaughn lounged against the table, his leather flying jacket open over a white linen shirt. “I just did a quick loop to see which way the game was wending. Is the old girl still snoring away on her cot?”

“You’re lying,” said Raoul hotly. “You’ve run off with her.”

Vaughn eyed him askance. “I hate to point this out, de Fontaine, but to have run off with Bea, I would have to have run off. Unless you are all the victims of a rather convincing hallucination, I appear to be rather palpably present. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“I wouldn’t agree if you told me the grass was green,” retorted de Fontaine furiously.

“Wise lad,” said Vaughn. “It isn’t. It’s more of a beigy brown.”

De Fontaine made a wordless noise of frustration.

“Bea’s gone missing,” said Frederick to Vaughn.

Vaughn looked at the scratch on Frederick’s face but said nothing.

“Maybe she went for a walk?” suggested Addie. Bea had never been the walking type, but, as Vaughn had pointed out, it would be rather hard for her to have run off when anyone with whom she might have run off was right here in the clearing. Or, more likely— “Are all the cars here?”

“As far as I can tell,” said Vaughn. “I had the Hispano-Suiza, and the two Fords are in the clearing.”

Budgie set down his rag and cracked the pieces of his gun back into place with one swift, efficient movement. “This isn’t Sussex. It isn’t safe to wander about alone. Desborough. Come with me?”

“I’ll go,” said Raoul.

“Not by yourself,” said Budgie. “Dammit, man, I don’t need to lose two of you. Come with us. If she’s gone to bag something by herself, I’ll have a piece of her hide.”

He stalked off, and the other two followed, leaving Addie sitting on her crate and Vaughn standing by the table, looking contemplatively after them.

“Did you see anything from the aeroplane?” Addie asked tentatively.

Vaughn’s head turned sharply. He drained his coffee, waiting until the last drop was gone before he responded carelessly, “I was looking for elephants. They’re on a rather different scale.” He put down his empty coffee cup. “Shall we? We can’t let the Frog have all the fun.”

Vaughn always sounded as though he was speaking in subtext, but there was an odd undercurrent to his words that made Addie distinctly uneasy. The idea that he was willing to join the search at all was disturbing enough. She would have expected him to pour another cup of coffee, stretch out his legs, and announce it was no affair of his.

Addie heard herself asking, “Do you think she’s all right?”

Vaughn gazed out across the brush, his blue eyes hooded. “That depends.”

“On what?”

Vaughn looked down at her. “On how many of her nine lives she’s already used up.”

There was a shout from up ahead, and a burst of excitable French. Addie abandoned Vaughn, thrashing forward through the brush. All the men seemed to be talking at once, talking and expostulating.

Raoul held something up, waving it in the air, a creeper of some kind, long and brown and twisted.

“What is it? Is that—” Addie skidded to a stop next to Frederick and felt her breath catch in her throat.

That wasn’t a creeper Raoul was holding up. It was a scarf. A long chiffon scarf. It had once been a pale green, but now it was stained through, streaked with something that had dyed it a rusty brown.

“Call the bearers,” said Budgie sharply. “We need everyone to search.
Now.
”

TWENTY-THREE

New York, 2000

“Come in and close the door.”

Paul was waiting for her, kicked back in his massive magenta desk chair behind a glossy mahogany desk that looked like Paul had nabbed it from J. P. Morgan. He didn’t stand when she entered; he never did. It was part of the power play.

Behind Paul, on the credenza, sat the framed photos of Paul’s hypothetical children—hypothetical because Clemmie had never seen any hard evidence of their existence. The glass-covered shelves behind him were stocked with law books—no plebeian binders for Paul. Those were kept in Joan’s cubicle, along with all the rest of the actual apparatus of legal productivity.

Following his instructions, Clemmie closed the door gently behind her, holding her yellow legal pad under one arm, a black pen clipped to the top. Paul’s pens were for Paul only. Many an associate had learned that the hard way.

“I hope you had a good holiday,” he said in the false cheerful voice he used when he was trying to be chummy.

Clemmie stared at him. Really? He knew her grandmother had died; he’d bitched enough about Clemmie missing work for it.

She swallowed her snarky comment and crossed the office to her usual chair across from Paul’s desk. Deep breaths. Just suck it up. That was the only way to deal with Paul. In a day or so, the partnership announcement would be out and she’d never have to kowtow to the Pauls of the firm again. Instead, she’d be sitting with him at the partners’ lunch table and he could just lump it.

Yes, good image. She’d just hold on to that one. Once someone made partner, there was no way to unmake them. She could be as snarky to Paul as she liked and there’d be nothing he could do about it. It was a remarkably soothing thought.

Clemmie sat, balancing her yellow legal pad on the slippery polyester of her pin-striped skirt. “Joan said you wanted to see me?”

There was a plastic football Paul kept on his desk, a little novelty one. He tossed it up in the air and caught it again. “Yes.”

Up the football went again. And down. Clemmie waited. And waited. Meanwhile, her BlackBerry, attached to her waistband by its own special clip, buzzed and buzzed again.

Any year now …

“You’re probably wondering why I wanted to see you,” said Paul.

Clemmie sat up straighter in her chair. It was faux Louis XIV, with slippery satin upholstery. “If it’s about PharmaNet, I’ve been coordinating with Harold while I’ve been away,” she said briskly. “I have the latest copies of the internal reports as well as an indexed binder excerpting the pertinent testimony.”

Two paralegals had given up their New Year’s Eve for that.

“No, no.” Paul frowned. “Although now that you mention it—Joan!”

“Yes?” The suspiciously regular rattle of typing cut off and Joan popped her head around the door.

Clemmie had to hand it to her; Joan had put up with a daily dose of Paul for nearly five years now, even if she had gone on a bender at last year’s Christmas party and used a couple of cocktail franks to rather graphically illustrate just what she’d like to do to him if he made her retype his f-ing briefs one more time. No one had wanted to eat the cocktail franks after that.

Paul leaned sideways. “Tell Harold I want to see him once I’m done with Clementine. In, say … five minutes.”

“Gotcha.” Joan disappeared around the door.

Paul settled back in his chair, kicking it back. “Where were we?”

Clemmie had no idea. All she knew was that she needed coffee and she needed it now. “PharmaNet?”

Paul steepled his fingers. “I suppose you could say this does have to do with PharmaNet,” he said thoughtfully. “You are aware that you left us in a difficult position in London, leaving without warning.”

“I told you as soon as I—”

“Hmph.” Paul hushed her with a hand gesture. “It didn’t look good. Gordon wasn’t pleased. We’d told him we’d have a senior associate present and we walked in with a first year. Not good.”

“I certainly didn’t intend—”

“It was a highly awkward situation,” said Paul. “It’s not the sort of image we like to project.”

Awkward? It had been a hell of a lot more than awkward for her.

“My grandmother was dying,” said Clemmie flatly.

“Yes, you mentioned.” Paul waved that aside. “Even before that, though, some of your comments about PharmaNet’s marketing practices—I know you meant them just for our ears, Clementine, but you never know who might be listening. That was very unwise.”

Clemmie struggled to remember. Was this all because she had questioned their off-label marketing of drugs to the elderly? “I was trying to protect the best interests of the client.”

Paul shook his head sadly. “That’s just the problem, Clementine. If it had been an accident—but that sort of choice goes to your judgment.”

He looked at her intently, as though waiting for her to say something. Clemmie had no idea what he was waiting for.

“Sometimes,” she said, “reasonable people disagree.”

Paul looked at her pityingly. “In a law-school hypothetical, perhaps.” He took up the football, squeezing the plastic seams. Clemmie resisted the urge to snatch it away from him. She hated that damn thing. “As I’m sure you know, the partnership committee met last week. The announcement will be made tomorrow.”