The Ashford Affair (46 page)

The door opened and an undergrad trudged out, L.L. Bean backpack hanging from one shoulder. She didn’t look at Clemmie. Her stacked loafers scuffed against the floor of the hallway.

Clemmie waited until the undergrad was halfway down the hall and then knocked gently on the door.

“Come in,” said Jon’s voice, sounding very authoritative and un-Jon-like.

It wasn’t a large office. What there was appeared to be composed entirely of books, books slapped onto shelves seemingly haphazardly, some with plastic bindings, others with the faded faux leather of earlier editions. Jon sat at a large desk in the middle of it all, papers scattered in front of him. With his glasses on, surrounded by the tools of his trade, he looked more like Indiana Jones than ever. Minus the hat and whip, of course.

“Come in and take a seat,” he said in a monotone, making a final note in a ledger. He looked up and his whole expression changed. “Clemmie! Hey!” He looked pleased, she thought, pleased and a little bit wary. He jumped up and waved her in. “Is this about my grade on your midterm?”

Clemmie nudged a pile of books out of the way with her boot. “Is it midterm season already?”

“High midterm season.” Jon moved around her to shut the door before hurrying to shovel off a chair for her. “They got their grades back this morning. Since then, I’ve been the subject of an inventive mix of threats and cajolery.”

Standing in front of the desk, Clemmie pursed her lips. “Cajolery. Nice word. Any of it work?”

Jon forced a grin. “I was tempted by the bottle of wine, but figured that would count against me when it came to tenure decisions, so I told him to bring it to the department chair instead.”

Clemmie idly turned over a paper on Jon’s desk, a printout of a book review from a periodical called
Past & Present.
It looked more past than present. “What did you give the guy?”

“A B minus.”

The Ivy League equivalent of an F. “Ouch.”

“Trust me, it was deserved.” Jon leaned across the desk, just a little too eagerly. “Please. Sit down. Can I get you anything? A soda, some coffee? The department machine ain’t much, but it’s vaguely potable.”

“No, no, really, I’m fine. I pre-caffeinated. See? Full sentences.”

Jon sank back down into his chair. “That one wasn’t.”

Clemmie made a face at him. “Picky, picky.”

“Sit down at least. It’s good to see you.” There was a question tacked on, a question Clemmie wasn’t sure how to answer. He quickly added, “What are you doing out in the middle of the day?”

“The official story is that I’m taking some vacation time.” Clemmie dropped into the chair in front of his desk. It was vaguely eggshell shaped and made her recline farther than she would have liked. “The real story is that I didn’t make partner.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Clemmie squirmed upward, pushing against the pull of the chair. She planted her feet firmly on the floor. “I’m looking at some other options. One of our clients has already offered me a job in-house.”

It had been PharmaNet, of all people, PharmaNet, who had complained about her to Paul. Not that Paul had needed much impetus to blackball her. He’d disliked her from day one. The PharmaNet people had told her they liked her spunk and they wanted her on board. It wasn’t what she had planned, but she was intrigued, all the same. She could have a hand in shaping some of the policies that had bothered her; she would be on track for a general counsel job at a large corporation. Not to mention some other benefits of a slightly pettier nature.

“The plus side,” said Clemmie, “is that I’d get to give orders to my old boss. Oh, and it’s in London.”

“Are you going to take it?”

Clemmie settled back in the eggshell chair. “I might. It’s tempting.” She’d already spoken to her new friend, Tony, about possibly spending a few days at Rivesdale House while looking for a flat. She wished she were more romantically interested in Tony. It would tie everything up so neatly. “I’ve never lived in London, or anyplace other than New York. The longest I ever stayed anywhere else was—”

“Rome,” Jon filled in for her.

Their eyes met across the pile of papers.

“Mm-hmm,” Clemmie said quickly. “And that was just one semester. Anyway, it’s about time, don’t you think?”

Jon’s hand stilled on the handle of his coffee mug. His hazel eyes were steady on her face. “So is this a good-bye visit?”

“No! Nothing like that. Nothing’s decided yet.” Although PharmaNet was pressing her for an answer. “I had something else I wanted to talk to you about. Are you sure I’m not keeping you from your undergrads?”

“Quite sure.” He leaned forward, pushing miscellaneous papers out of the way. “I had something I wanted to talk to you about, too. On New Year’s Eve—I owe you an explanation—”

“No you don’t.” The chair creaked as Clemmie pushed it back. “Really, no explanations required. If you and Caitlin are back together, that’s great.”

“Together?” Jon rescued his coffee just in time to keep it from splashing onto someone’s midterm. The cup had a faded history department logo on it, now severely coffee stained. “We’re not back together. Caitlin just had a layover in New York. She needed someplace to stay. That’s all.”

It hadn’t looked like that was all. “It doesn’t matter,” said Clemmie with forced cheer. “As long as you’re happy—”

“We’re not back together,” Jon repeated more forcefully, then glanced guiltily over his shoulder. “She caught a plane to Paris the next day and that was that.”

Clemmie knew she should change the subject, but she couldn’t quite resist saying, “You looked pretty cozy.”

“We were married for three years,” said Jon. Looking down, he played with his cup, creating a pattern of overlapping coffee stains. “It had been a tough day. The idea of being with someone from a completely different part of my life was tempting—for about five minutes. It was just so easy. Until it wasn’t. We’re not right for each other and we never will be.”

Clemmie hated herself for how happy that made her. “I thought you’d decided no one would ever be right for you. The whole too screwed up to love thing.”

Jon winced. “It wasn’t a good time. I— Let’s just say seeing Caitlin helped clear some stuff up.”

“Hmm.” Clemmie decided to let it go for the moment. This wasn’t the time or the place. She crossed one leg over the other, against the general will of the chair. “Anyhoo,” she said, striving for cool, “I don’t want to waste your time during midterm season. I really came here to ask you a favor.”

Papers crunched under Jon’s elbows. So that was why academics liked to wear leather patches on their sleeves. “What kind of favor?”

“A research favor.” Clemmie took a deep breath. “I met up with Aunt Anna last week. She has a theory; that is, she thinks … that her mother—her real mother—didn’t die in Kenya.”

“Ah,” said Jon.

“Ah?” She didn’t like the sound of that “ah.” “You know about this.”

“I’ve heard her story,” Jon said carefully. “The death that wasn’t, all that sort of thing.”

“You don’t believe it.”

“I don’t have sufficient information to believe or disbelieve.”

Clemmie rolled her eyes. “That’s a cop-out.” With more force than she’d intended, she said, “I can’t believe that Grandpa Frederick murdered her. Or Granny Addie.”

“No,” said Jon, “neither can I. But”—she knew she wasn’t going to like that “but”—“you can’t rule out pure accident. They were on safari; it was dangerous. People died that way and the bodies were never found. People still die that way.”

“But what if she didn’t?”

“So what?” Jon lifted his glasses to rub his eyes. “Even if she were alive then, she’d be dead now. Long dead. She was older than your grandmother—than Addie, I mean. What does it matter whether she died then or later?” In a gentler voice he added, “You can’t find a replacement for Addie that way.”

“I’m not trying to find a replacement!” Catching herself, Clemmie eased back in her chair. “I just want to know what happened.”

“I don’t want to be a downer—” said Jon.

“A downer?”

“—but you might never know that.” Jon ignored the slur on his undergrad slang. “The sources might not be there. Or even if they are, they might be open to multiple interpretations. The facts might lead in multiple, inconclusive directions. That’s one of the downsides of professional history,” he added. “Most of the time, there is no truth, only various levels of interpretation. Fact is a construct we provide to the public.”

“Welcome to my life,” said Clemmie. “What do you think I do every day? I weave fact into argument. There are two stories for every single set of facts. In this case, though, there’s a simple answer. She died or she didn’t. If she didn’t, I want to know what happened.”

Jon held her gaze. “Why?”

She knew what he was fishing for and he was wrong. She wasn’t looking for a replacement for Granny Addie—well, not entirely. But this woman, this stranger, was a part of Clemmie somehow. She wanted to know what had happened to her. She wanted to know why her mother never spoke about her. She just wanted to know. And if it was as simple as it seemed, if she really had been eaten by a lion on safari, then that was that.

In some ways, that would be the easiest answer. It would mean that there had been no foul play and no betrayal, just the awkward circumstance of a woman marrying her cousin’s bereaved husband. Was that what Clemmie wanted? Maybe. It would give her Granny Addie back, not as a blood relation, but as the person she’d known and perceived her to be, not the sort of person who would maintain a bigamous marriage or threaten away her stepdaughters’ mother.

Clemmie couldn’t explain it to Jon when she wasn’t quite sure she understood it herself, so she just said, “Why does anyone try to solve unsolved mysteries? It’s not like most people have any personal stake in the Princes in the Tower or the Lost Dauphin, but they worry about their fates anyway. For that matter, why do you do what you do? It’s the same idea. You’re solving puzzles, finding out what happened.”

Jon glanced down at the muddle of papers and exams on his desk. “Right now, I’m grading a bunch of semi-illiterates.” He looked up and a slow smile broke across his face. “Okay. I’m in. Why do I feel like we should pinky swear or something?”

Clemmie grinned at him, giddy with relief. It felt so good to be part of a team, to know she wasn’t on her own. “Don’t go all Hardy Boys on me.”

The corners of Jon’s eyes crinkled. “I always preferred Nancy Drew.” Getting down to business, he said, “Anna inherited a bunch of papers from Addie. She hasn’t touched them.”

“Out of principle?” That was some serious grudge holding going on there.

“Something like that. I’ll take a look through, and if there’s nothing there I’ll start working some other angles. I have a few ideas. In the meantime…” He paused, as though debating with himself.

“Yes?” Clemmie prompted.

Jon cocked his head. “Have you considered talking to your mother?”

TWENTY-SEVEN

New York, 2000

Clemmie picked up a bunch of flowers on the way over to see her mother.

She wasn’t sure what they were, but they were long stemmed, with delicate purple and white petals, and they created a nice weight on her arm, all wrapped up in a cone of stiffened paper with the petals poking out of the top. The air smelled of spring, cool and moist, warm enough to walk with her coat unbuttoned and her gloves in her pockets, even if there was still just enough of a nip to the air to remind her that there had been snowstorms in March before.

She felt strangely lighthearted and free, walking through the city with her coat open and the breeze blowing her hair into her eyes. Jon had called to tell her that he’d been through a pile of Granny Addie’s papers and hadn’t found anything yet, just ledgers from the early days of the coffee plantation and Anna’s school reports. He was saving them, he said, to blackmail Anna at the next family dinner. The memory of the conversation made Clemmie smile.

It felt good having Jon back. Possibly too good.

Her mother’s new apartment was just off 1st Avenue, in the lower 70s. Clemmie walked up along 1st, past delis and drugstores and boutiques with
SALE
signs in the windows. There were old redbrick houses and newer, post-war constructions, tall buildings with wide windows and balconies, their pale bricks blindingly white in the sunshine. Her mother’s new building was one of those white-brick buildings, with a long awning that led down from the street into a busy lobby with a wide desk manned by no fewer than three doormen.

Clemmie was expected, they confirmed, and sent her up to 17C in a narrow elevator with mirrored walls that reflected her own red-nosed face back to her with unflattering accuracy. The walk had brought pink to her cheeks and turned her hair into something resembling a scrub brush.

“Clementine.” Her mother greeted her with a press of the cheek.

Clemmie was struck, for the first time, by how much she had to lean down to embrace her. “Sorry, I’m all cold,” she said. She brandished the flowers. “Oh, and these are for you.”

“You didn’t have to.” Somehow, when her mother said that, it really sounded as though she shouldn’t have.

“I know, but I wanted to.” Clemmie followed her mother through a narrow entrance hall into the living room, making sure to scrape her shoes on the mat along the way. “It’s finally starting to feel like spring.”

“I’ll put these in water and get the tea.” Her mother disappeared into the galley kitchen, closed off in the middle, but with a door out to the living room on one side and a small, mirror-walled dining nook on the other.

“Can I help?” From her vantage point, Clemmie could just see a very shiny metal garbage can, the dishwasher, and white cabinets with silver handles, but she could hear the sound of china clattering and the click of her mother’s electric kettle switching off. She must have put the water on as soon as the doormen had called up to say Clemmie was on her way. Clemmie was oddly touched by that.

Clatter, clank, swish. “No, just sit down.”

Clemmie sat. The couch was white, made up of multiple sections, stretching around in an L shape. It wasn’t at all what she would have expected of her mother, whose taste in interior decoration could best be described as
Masterpiece Theatre
meets Buckingham Palace, with lots of chintz and petit point and Dresden miniatures.