New England White (57 page)

CHAPTER 67

THE ILLUSIVE CALM

(I)

J
UNE
. Everything calm again, everything except Julia, who had simmered and percolated through three months of pretending that life was once more perfection. The renovations to the old mansion on Town Street, just where Hobby Road begins, had been completed, and the results, the architectural critics agreed, were breathtaking: Norm Wyatt’s finest work, the sublime and subtle merger of traditional and modern, the hidden technological marvels, the attention to the smallest curlicue of carpenter’s Gothic on the rebuilt veranda in the back, and the sweeping lines that made the house seem to rise from the landscape, proclaiming itself to matter, even if, in truth, it was no larger than any of the other aging great houses along this stretch of campus. Lemaster had moved almost full-time into the house in April, excepting only weekends and the odd weeknight, and the joke among the Sister Ladies, that the perfect Carlyles were testing what life would be like if they went their separate ways, was no more than half funny, because no more than half false.

By that time, Mary Mallard had moved to a rehabilitation center in Maine, nearer her mother, but Julia spent the spring driving up at least once a week to visit, for each was trying still to inch toward the truth. On one of these visits, Mary pointed out that Kellen must have had a source inside the conspiracy in order to begin his investigations in the first place; and Julia, although she had carefully screened from her partner the knowledge that the “conspiracy” had been undertaken by a bankrupt Harlem men’s club, suspected that Mary knew anyway. And then, one bright spring afternoon as they walked the grounds, Mary showed Julia a printout from the Internet Anagram Server. One was circled. Julia stopped and grew ashen.

“I’m sorry,” said Mary.

“I don’t believe it.”

“I’m not sure that’s the issue.”

Mary was, in this instance, correct, but her correctness tautened their relationship, and the fresh tension turned out to be more than their partnership could bear.

So they became distant correspondents instead of the close friends they had perhaps hoped to be.

As soon as school ended, Julia and the children packed up the grand house on Hunter’s Meadow and left the heart of whiteness to return to the city. Beth Stonington assured them, and everyone else who would listen, but mostly her competitors, that the selling price would be well north of two million, possibly close to three, given what was going on with property in the Landing these days. Why anyone would give up this idyllic existence to raise children in a dying city like Elm Harbor, neither Beth nor her friends and cronies could guess.

“It’s Lemaster’s job, honey, not yours,” Beth had explained to Julia, but only after she was persuaded that under no circumstances would her client change her mind; for there was no point in queering the sale for the sake of idle curiosity.

“It’s my job, too,” Julia assured her solemnly, but Beth told everybody that the gray eyes were lidded and puffy, as if she had spent a lot of time weeping. “Probably just allergies,” said the feistier among them, meaning it as a joke, although, as it happened, it was true.

So the family settled in. In the fall, Aaron would be returning to Exeter, where he was thriving. Perfect Jeans had been accepted into the fourth grade at Ogden, the principal feeder for Hilltop, the most exclusive private high school in town, and so, in the way such things seem to be decided these days, the brightness of her future was assured.

As to Vanessa, she had been admitted to some colleges, turned down at others, and left her deposit at one of the Seven Sisters, much to the relief of her parents. Then, without quite asking for permission, or even informing her mother and father until the deed was done, she arranged to defer admission, and announced that, upon turning eighteen in October, she was going to join Smith for a tour of the country, by car.

“You’re not allowed to drive,” said Lemaster.

“Excuse me, Daddy, but that won’t really be your call,” she answered with a firm politeness learned at her father’s feet, and proceeded to quote at length a relevant passage from George Orwell on the Spanish Civil War, trying to prove that meaning is dynamic, categories changing as the facts do their daily dance: “The soldier who was running away wasn’t a fascist, so Orwell couldn’t shoot him. And the girl who’s eighteen isn’t a child, so you can’t tell her what to do.”

“I’m not talking about the law,” he said testily.

“I am. At eighteen I’ll reach my majority. I’m not a danger to myself or others. I can go where I want, do what I want, right? You guys raised me. Now you’ll just have to trust that you raised me right.”

“You’re still my child—” Lemaster began.

“But not in the hierarchical sense. I have to honor you, the Bible says. But not obey. Not once I’m grown.” She raised her hands, palms outward. “I’m not defying you, Daddy. I’m doing what I have to do. The same way you did when you decided to go to divinity school instead of biz school like your parents wanted.”

“What does Dr. Jacobstein say?”

“To be sure and take my cell phone.”

Lemaster, to his wife’s surprise, retreated from abstract rules to the world of the practical: “Even if we do let you go, Smith doesn’t strike me as the most reliable companion.”

“Then we’re a perfect match, because I’m not terribly reliable either.”

She added that if they liked L.A. they might settle down there and look for work, in which case the deferment might be…extended.

“They won’t wait forever,” said her father, quite cross, and quite defenseless.

“They will for the right person. That’s what you always tell me.”

“Vanessa—”

“It’s time to grow up,” she said, and left, not specifying who among them needed the growth.

Later, Julia sat on Vanessa’s bed as the teen lay on her stomach programming her portable DVD player. Rainbow Coalition perched contentedly on the windowsill, licking her paws. “You don’t dance any more.”

“I’m bored with dirges.” She pointed. “I still have my war books, though. They’re making the trip. So don’t worry, Moms. I promise not to get completely cured without checking with you first.” Before Julia could come up with a bright answer, Vanessa kissed her. “I’m joking. But seriously. Some of the books will also be going.” She glanced at the cat. “I wish RC could go.”

“Is Gina going, too?” Julia asked, timidly. As her daughter seemed disinclined to answer, she tried again: “Or was the trip her idea in the first place?”

Daughter turned to look at mother, face obscured by the swaying braids, but Julia was fairly certain she saw a smile. Then Vanessa returned to her work.

(II)

A
FEW AFTERNOONS LATER
, having postponed as long as she decently could, Julia drove out to the Landing. She took a quick look at the house, to be sure the grass was being watered and cut and the real-estate agents and clients traipsing through had not yet ruined anything, then drove down to Main Street. She parked her new Escalade near the Town Green, where Vanessa had burned her father’s car, waved hello to a handful of surprised acquaintances, and crossed the street. At Cookie’s, Vera Brightwood professed herself delighted to see her and began making up an order of cappuccino truffles without waiting to hear exactly what Julia wanted, and Julia let her measure and wrap and cheat the scales, while going on and on about what the university people, present company excepted, were doing to the town.

Julia said, “I wanted to talk about what happened that night at your house.”

“What night was that?”

“The night they arrested Tice. That lawyer.”

Vera smiled her greedy porcelain smile. She had been angry that night, after Julia accused her of being Kellen’s “Black Lady,” the secret source who had managed his search for the diary. But no source would have been better. Vera knew the byways of the town’s history better than anybody. “I sued him,” said Vera. “Did you hear about that? For what he did that night. I’m going to take him to the cleaners.”

“I think he’ll be in prison for a while first.”

“Probably,” Vera agreed.

“I just had a question.”

“Mmmm-hmmm.” Adding, also unasked, some Jelly Bellys for the jar on Lemaster’s desk at Lombard Hall.

“How did Tony Tice know I’d be at your house that night? I’m sure he didn’t follow me. The man who was, ah, protecting me would have seen to that. And Tice didn’t live in the Landing. So how did he happen to show up?”

“I wouldn’t know, dear.”

“I was thinking you might. I was thinking that maybe the whole group of you had set out to avenge Gina. People everybody has down as—excuse me—shameless right-wingers, but you still didn’t like that innocent black boy suffering for what some rich white frat boy did. I think everyone in your group encouraged Kellen Zant, once you found out what he was working on. Maybe some people helped him indirectly, but everybody helped. Then I think he double-crossed you. Instead of going after justice, he went after money.”

“I have some wonderful cranberry-chocolate fudge.”

“I don’t think you’re violent people. I think you were shocked when Kellen got shot. Shocked and scared. I think Frank Carrington was a member of your group, and I bet he acted as shocked as anybody.” Julia pulled out the cash for her purchase, but Vera said it was on the house. “The night Kellen died, Frank had to know that he was about to close a deal to sell the diary. Well, how else could he have known except from somebody in your group? Senator Whisted’s aide, right? Grew up in the Landing, wanted to get revenge for Gina the same way the rest of you did, and maybe heard from Astrid what was up, and told the rest of you, including Frank.”

“We didn’t want to hurt anybody,” said Vera after a long think. “Gina was a good girl, Julia. Not like the girls who run around today. A good girl. Whoever did it deserves what he gets.” She eyed her best customer, who was probably making her last visit to the shop. Her uneasy half-smile reminded Julia of Latisha, her former assistant, who had finally gained protected status under the collective bargaining agreement after Minnie Foxon, without explanation, requested a transfer to another department. “What Kellen was going to do to him. What you’re going to do to him. Maybe what your husband is going to do to him.” She turned away, began to measure out peanut brittle. “But you’re wrong, Julia. We didn’t know about the diary. Who would have told us? Yes, I suppose you’re right, Mal Whisted’s man would have known. Maybe he told Frank. He certainly didn’t tell the rest of us.”

Julia popped a couple of Jelly Bellys into her mouth. In the mirror behind the counter, a rose-tinted Julia pondered with her. What exactly was Senator Whisted’s connection to the group? Helping them out or monitoring their progress? She had thought she had the sequence right: Frank kills Kellen to keep the diary secret, then kills Boris Gibbs when, after stealing the Vanessa File, Boris gets too close to duplicating Kellen’s research. The story was perfectly consistent. But was it true? she asked her reflection, as Vera sliced and wrapped. Why wouldn’t Frank have preferred to jolly Kellen along—or, if not Kellen, at least Boris—and then, when the diary came out of hiding, swipe it and destroy it?

The aide, Julia decided. Only Whisted’s aide would have known that Kellen had the diary. If he did tell Frank, it would only have been in the hope that the former deputy would act—but how could the aide have known that Frank was implicated? Was it possible that the phone conversation overheard by Tony Tice the night Kellen died might have been not with Frank Carrington, but with an aide to a United States Senator, perhaps threatening a double cross that made Kellen rush to meet him—

But behind the mirror’s surface was only a silvery reflection, and beyond that nobody could see.

Meanwhile, behind the shining counter, Vera Brightwood had perked up. “You know, Julia, I was glad when you built the house on Hunter’s Meadow Road, and I hated it when people tried to stop you, because I’ve always been for that open housing thing—”

Julia said she had to go to work.

“The papers say you quit your job.”

“I have a new one.”

“Doing what?” said Vera, hungry for fresh gossip to pass on.

“Teaching science,” said Julia.

Back in the Escalade, she turned her show tunes up high and drove toward the city, and the Nest, and Miss Terry’s school.

CHAPTER 68

WINNER’S CURSE

(I)

O
N
S
ATURDAY THERE WAS RAIN.
Julia returned to Kepler Quadrangle, but not to say goodbye. She had already endured the going-away party, and had intentionally chosen the weekend for this expedition because her former colleagues were unlikely to be around. They were not bad people, but they were no longer her people. They were Lemaster’s people. Part of his campus. His city. His world. She had escaped to the sanctuary of the divinity school after the humiliating end of her tenure in the public schools, but sanctuaries have a way of becoming prisons, and she had escaped again.

She was back for a reason.

She did not need a parking space because the div school was a block from the presidential mansion, and she did not need a key because a student held the door open. On the last night of his life, evading Tony Tice and scurrying off to Kepler, Kellen Zant had probably gained entrance the same way. He had vanished for almost two hours, then reappeared. But what would he have been doing inside the div school at that hour? The archives would have been locked. Classrooms, offices, everything would have been inaccessible.

Everything except for the chapel, open all night.

BCP 83.

She had misunderstood Kellen’s carving on Sugar Hill after all, assuming that he was trying to tell her the name of the book in which he had hidden the third clue. But the Book of Common Prayer would not, without more, draw her back to her God, as Kellen had promised to do. The answer was not in the pages. But the pages still pointed to the answer.

Julia entered the chapel through the heavy double doors to Kepler’s main hall and stood in the nave aisle, letting her eyes grow accustomed to the gloom, because the storm had darkened the windows, clerestory and stained glass alike. In the corner, a young woman was praying and, intermittently, sobbing, but the onetime dean of students did not go to her aid because interrupting a prayer was bad form. The chapel was otherwise empty.

Julia walked toward the altar. On page 83 of the 1928 version of the Book of Common Prayer—the only one Lemaster allowed in the house—the priest has finished consecrating the bread and wine and is busily delivering it to the people. On the night he died, Kellen must have made this very walk. He must have had a spot all picked out, for emergency use. Maybe all those visits to the chapel had not after all been for the purpose of annoying her.

Not for that sole purpose, anyway.

Julia mounted the choir steps. The main altar, stout New England pine, stood directly before her, but she gave it only the most cursory examination. Kellen, to the last, had his point to make. The old high altar of brick and darker wood with its carved words from John’s Gospel was built into the far wall, and used for almost no purpose, except, in classes on liturgy, to show future pastors what not to do. It was a relic of the days when priests in all the orthodox traditions turned their backs on the congregation when speaking
to
God, facing the assembly only when speaking
for
God.

Kellen must have found the symbolism impossible to resist. He was no God man, but of course his rival was.

Speaking to God.

With her back to the congregation, Julia stood in the middle of the altar, before the shining gold chamber where, once upon a time, the consecrated host had been reserved for future use. The chamber was locked. She felt along the cloth laid across the top—she no longer remembered what it was called—and came up empty. She glanced behind her before acting too foolish. The weeping student had departed, and Julia had the sanctuary—that word again!—to herself. She took a step back, measured by eye where precisely the priest would be standing as he moved from the bread to the wine, using her years of attendance at Saint Matthias, where Father Freed used only the high altar, as her guide. She stood a little bit to the right of center, then got down on her knees and reached up beneath the altar.

And pulled out a thick envelope.

She opened it, and went pale.

Not possible. Absurd. What she was looking at could not have been hidden beneath the altar because Kellen had it with him when he died. Time did not twist around. The dead did not walk. Such wondrous magic could not exist. Even here in the chapel of the divinity school, where generations of students and faculty had knelt in prayer to the Impossible, Julia Carlyle would not accept a supernatural explanation.

She was holding Kellen Zant’s missing cell phone.

(II)

J
ULIA SAT IN THE
E
SCALADE
, listening to her show tunes, watching the rain sluice across her windshield. She was out of breath and supposed she must have been running in confused terror, but at the moment she was a little vague on the details. She had hurried back to the presidential mansion and climbed into her car, and was heading toward a downtown office tower where her husband was addressing a coalition of local civic organizations. She parked the car, strode across the lobby in her jeans, and refused to stop when the doorman queried her, because she was no longer a stopper. On the top floor, ignoring the earnest pleas of the headwaiter, she walked through the restaurant to the large private dining room in the corner. Lemaster’s unsmiling assistant, Katie Chu, assured her that the president had almost finished his remarks, but Julia slipped past. She stood in the back of the room, unsmiling herself. Several heads turned. She stood dripping on the hardwood floor, hair a mess, not worrying whether the guests might be murmuring that the first lady of the university was as mad as her daughter. Lemaster was at the lectern. His eyes passed over her but did not linger. He fired off a series of jokes, everyone laughed, and then he was pumping everybody’s hand as he made his way past the tables. He kissed his wife’s chilly lips, slipped an unwanted arm around her waist, and led her out of the room as Katie Chu stayed behind to make his excuses.

They descended in silence until Julia, knowing she could never win a battle of patience with her husband, grew tired of her own anger. She pressed her head against his shoulder. He stroked her sopping hair. “I found the phone,” she said.

“I assumed you would.”

“You knew? About BCP 83?”

“Cameron told me.”

“Does he still think he can blackmail—whoever?”

Lemaster put a finger beneath her chin and tilted her face toward his. “I think he understands now.”

“Because only the Empyreals get to do that,” she suggested, but they had reached the lobby, and a couple of late arrivals who had missed the speech nevertheless wanted to shake the hand of the diminutive black scholar who was the most powerful man in the county. Her husband, like royalty, accepted the homage of commoners as his due. Julia wondered if he was also the most powerful man in the country. Or one of them. For a crazy moment she was bursting with pride, less for her husband than for her people, and, especially, for an unknown Harlem social club: the Caucasians, Granny Vee used to say, have no idea what we are capable of doing.

Together they walked out into the storm. Lemaster had ridden over with Katie Chu, so he and his wife drove home together in the Escalade. “What did Kellen really hide?” Julia asked, eyes closed as she leaned back in the seat, her husband’s favorite music thumping hard from the speakers. “In the chapel. Before you moved it. What was there?”

“Nothing important,” he said after a moment’s consultation with that little referee in his head. “Kellen thought he had the final proof, but he was wrong.”

“What was it, Lemmie?”

“What was what?”

“The proof. The surplus. What did he hide in the chapel?”

This time the wait was longer. Julia sat up. She supposed he was not going to answer. Outside the rain was falling harder and the wind was tossing over trash bins and lawn sculptures: summer’s version of the winter storm that started them down this terrible road. She wondered how long Lemaster had been outguessing her, and how he made prevarication seem so natural and right.

“A train ticket,” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

“That’s what Kellen hid beneath the altar. A train ticket, one way, Elm Harbor to Boston, dated February 18, 1973.”

Julia nibbled on her lip. “A way to prove which one of the frat boys went to Dennison for advice. The one who killed Gina.”

“I imagine that Kellen thought so.”

She asked the next question as casually as she could. “Whose name was on it?”

They were home. He pulled the Escalade neatly into the two-car garage, quite a bit smaller than what they had enjoyed out in the Landing, but they had junked the Volvo.

“What difference does it make?” he said at last.

“I just thought you might want to be sure you’re blackmailing the right man.”

“They were all the right men,” said Lemaster, and climbed out of the car. Julia took several minutes to compose herself, and then, unmeekly, followed.

(III)

T
HEY SAT UPSTAIRS
in Lemaster’s new study, which occupied most of the third floor, Kellen’s phone on the desk between them. Julia did not ask how her husband had come into possession of it. She did not want to know how deeply the tentacles of his unknown Harlem social club curled into the life of Harbor County, or the world beyond. She waited for him to tell her the story. She had no doubt that he would: otherwise he would never have left the cell phone in the chapel for her to find.

“I made a mistake,” said Lemaster. He sipped the wine she had brought upstairs. “A natural one, I suppose, given the circumstances, but still a mistake. One mistake led to others, and, well, here we are.”

Julia said nothing. Outside the window, as the storm abated, she could see the Gothic towers of the university farther up the hill. Her husband’s campus.

“That Casey is a runt,” he continued, toying with the sleek silvery phone, spinning it this way and that. “The backbone of an eel. That much was clear from the start. Sure, he might play the rebel poet to impress our daughter, he might pretend to be a nonconformist, but he isn’t like Smith. He isn’t like Vanessa. He would never break the rules, not in the middle of college admission season. He’s too ambitious, Jules. All right, his mother is dean of the law school, but I’m president of the university. He wouldn’t have wanted to get on my bad side. He knew perfectly well Vanessa wasn’t allowed in his car. It wouldn’t matter how she begged or what she promised. He would have said no. There is no way That Casey gave her a ride home from the movies the night Kellen was shot.”

Julia’s eyes snapped back from the window.

Lemaster nodded. “Remember when Casey told you Vanessa used to always run away when they went out together? I think he was trying to send you a message. You think so, too, don’t you, Jules?” He did not wait for her agreement. “He was telling you that she ran away the night Kellen died. He didn’t want to follow through on the implications, so he dumped it in your lap, and you decided—wisely—not to look any further. But we both know that’s what happened. And we both know how she got home that night, don’t we?”

She dropped her gaze to her lap. Her hands were trembling, just the way her daughter’s did. She covered one with the other but could not make the trembling stop. A buzzing deep in her brain became a ringing all through her body.

Lemaster, meanwhile, had flipped open the cell phone. He turned it on, waited for the software to boot, then clicked twice, displaying the list of recent calls. He slid it in her direction and she leaned over, not wanting to touch it with her trembling fingers. She squinted, trying to make her brain work. The last call Kellen had ever received had come from a number Julia recognized: Frank Carrington’s. The next-to-last was from a number she knew even better: Vanessa’s.

“Look at the time,” said Lemaster.

Julia did. Eight-seventeen p.m.

“That was the call Kellen took while he was on Main Street with Tony Tice,” Lemaster said. “The call that made him put Tony out of the car. The call he had to rush off and do something about.”

Julia found her voice. “But the way Tony told the story, it sounded like whoever was on the phone was threatening him—he was upset—and Vanessa had nothing to frighten him with—”

“Of course she did.”

Of course she did. So simple. So clear.

Vanessa wanted something from Kellen that night, and, if she did not get it, she was going to tell her father about his attentions.

Still Julia could not get her mind around the whole thing. “But what would she—what would she want him to—”

She stopped. Time flowed backward. Mary Mallard, showing her the anagram. Back. Back. Vanessa’s wild insistence in the kitchen of Hunter’s Heights that DeShaun, and only DeShaun, had done the killing. Back. Further. Vanessa’s insistence on writing a simply terrible term paper devoted to proving the same point. Back. Back. The burning of the Mercedes on the anniversary of Gina Joule’s death, culmination of the madness that had come upon her almost from the moment she began to look into the events of that Valentine’s Day night three decades ago. Flash forward again, Julia and Lemaster lying in bed the night that Janine Goldsmith slept over, Lemaster telling her that whoever killed Kellen need not have hated him to do it.

What else could it be?
Julia had asked.

Lemaster’s answer now rang like thunder:
Rational maximizing of self-interest.

And another, more painful image: Vanessa, outside Saint Matthias on that horrible Sunday, pulling Malcolm Whisted’s name from the hat, desperate to deflect her mother, who was circling closer to the truth. Julia said now, “Vanessa’s blog.
GAINFUL NONSENSES
. It’s an anagram.”

“Yes. Of
SINFUL SANE N. E. SONG
.”

“Not only that.” She scribbled the words Mary Mallard had pointed out.
GINA FLEES NUN’S SON
. Lemaster’s thick eyebrows did their bushy frown. “You went to Catholic school, Lemmie. And you were motherless. Get it? Nun’s son?”

“I get it,” he said softly.