Shattered Silk

Recovering from the demise of her unhappy marriage and planning to open the antique-clothing store of her dreams in Georgetown, Karen is suddenly confronted with a series of ominous and deadly events that threaten to turn her dream into a nightmare.

The second book in the Georgetown series, 1986

THEY
refused to let her drive them to the airport. National was one of the busiest airports in the country, traffic was terrible; even native Washingtonians avoided it when they could.

"Except for the damned members of Congress," her uncle Pat had bellowed, pounding on the table to emphasize his opinion. "They've got their chauffeurs and their air-conditioned limos, so it's no skin off their butts if the rest of us get high blood pressure and dented fenders trying to reach the damned terminal!"

Which, as her aunt Ruth pointed out, was not only unfair and exaggerated, but irrelevant.

Karen didn't argue. The last she saw of them was her aunt's fixed smile and anxious eyes, framed by the window of the taxi.

The taxi hesitated at the corner and, with an air of squaring its metaphorical shoulders, plunged into the maelstrom of traffic on Wisconsin Avenue. Then at last Karen let her own fixed smile crack and crumble and drop off her face. She rubbed her jaw, wondering if Ruth's face ached too, after all those weeks of determined cheerfulness.

It was a relief to let everything droop-lips, shoulders, spirits. Her feet dragging, she turned back into the house. Though it was only midmorning, the streets of Georgetown shimmered with the heat and humidity that are hallmarks of a Washington summer.

Like the other older homes in this fashionable section of the capital, which had been a flourishing town in its own right before the founders of the new nation moved in across the creek, Ruth's house dated from the early nineteenth century. It was built of red brick, in the formal Federal style, with a classic balance of windows and exterior ornament. Every brick of the facade and every stick of furniture within was familiar to Karen. She had lived with her aunt and uncle for a year while attending college, and had visited often since. But as she stood in the hall facing the famous floating staircase, she had a sensation of utter strangeness.

The change was not in the house but in herself. Only a month ago she had been a suburban housewife, settled in a routine as a fly is embedded in amber, with every reason to suppose her position was as permanent as the fly's. Jack's schedule was as fixed as her own. When he wasn't at the university he was at a meeting or a conference, or closeted in his office working on one of the endless stream of books and articles designed to ensure his rise up the ladder of academic success. When she wasn't doing housework she was typing his manuscripts or checking his footnotes or doing research for him. Everything she did was predictable, even the food she cooked. Jack was a meat-and-potatoes man, with no tolerance for ethnic- and health-food fads.

He had ordered steak the night he told her. He had suggested they go out to dinner, just the two of them-a rare occurrence in recent months. Afterward Karen realized she should have known something was wrong. But she didn't even suspect. His announcement, carefully timed to follow the cocktails, hit her with the stunning shock of a blow in the pit of her stomach.

Jack had mistaken her silence and her empty stare for calm acquiescence. He was relieved, he said, that she hadn't become hysterical. (Actually, he was rather disappointed; and he was visibly annoyed because she didn't eat the expensive meal he had ordered.) After dropping her at home, he had gone on to a meeting-Karen had a pretty good idea who would be at the meeting. The same person who had attended all the other meetings that had kept Jack so busy lately.

She went straight upstairs, packed a single suitcase, and called a cab. There was just enough money in their joint checking account to pay for a ticket to Washington, and she thanked God for modern banking methods as she withdrew cash in the light of the automatic teller.

It never occurred to her to "go home to Mother." When, several days later, she summoned courage enough to break the news to the woman who happened to occupy that role, she received, not an invitation to come home, but a shrill lecture. She must have done something. She must have failed in some way. She should not have left the house. She should have fought for her rights, and for her man…

The diatribe didn't, help Karen's morale, even though she sensed the fear behind her mother's anger.
It
must be your fault. Because if it isn't
-
if you were in no way
to blame
-
then this could happen to anyone. It could happen to me.

Not all the wives Karen knew harbored that hidden fear. Her sister Sara, for instance. Sara, who had also lived with Ruth and Pat while she attended Georgetown University, now lived on the West Coast and had her hands full with four exuberant young children and an exuberant, adoring husband. That was one of the reasons why Karen had not sought refuge with her sister, but it wasn't the only reason. Sara's shining happiness would have hurt like salt in a fresh wound.

Ruth, her own mother's sister, was another of the lucky ones. But Ruth and Pat were older, childless, their joy in each other more muted in expression if not in intensity.

On the face of it, Ruth's marriage should not have worked. After a brief and disastrous first marriage, of which she never spoke, she had waited till she was over forty before she married again, to a man who appeared to be her exact antithesis. Pat MacDougal's anthropological studies had taken him into many of the wilder parts of the planet and had invested him with a loud contempt for the hypocritical conventions of civilization, a contempt he was not at all inhibited about expressing. Pat was big and loudmouthed and clumsy; Ruth was petite and prim. Pat had a shock of flaming-red hair and a face that verified the theory of mankind's descent from a simian ancestor; Ruth's delicate features and fine bones were as dainty as those of a porcelain doll. Pat's language echoed with expletives; in moments of dire extremity Ruth had sometimes been heard to murmur a faint damn.

If Karen had wanted to find a scapegoat-and there were times when she definitely did want to-she could have blamed Ruth, not for the failure of her own marriage but for the marriage itself. She had met Jack while she was living with Ruth and Pat. Like Pat, Jack taught at the university. In some ways Jack reminded her of her uncle, the man who had made Ruth so happy she was a menace to single people.

And now Ruth was going with him to Borneo, to keep house in a jungle hut while Pat finished gathering the material for his book on magic and folklore. Ruth with her dainty pastel suits and her immaculate coiffures, Ruth who was now in her fifties. Her face had glowed like that of a bride when she told Karen of their plans.

It was amazing how their needs had happened to coincide, Ruth said. She wasn't worried about snakes or poisonous insects or the lack of sanitation, but she had been concerned about leaving her lovely house unoccupied for three months. She could have rented it-there were always visiting diplomats, politicians, and lobbyists looking for quarters in Washington, and many of them seemed to have more money than they ought to have had-but Ruth had a fastidious dislike of allowing strangers in her home.

"So you see, you're really doing me a favor," she had assured Karen. "An empty house is an invitation to burglars. I only hope…" The little puckers between her brows deepened, and she fell silent.

"You hope what?"

"That you don't mind being alone."

"Not at all. It's just what I need."

Ruth continued to look doubtful. "I'm not so sure. You do need time alone-time to think, plan, and," she added with a slight smile, "swear and scream and kick the furniture. Get your anger out of your system."

"I'm not angry."

"Then you should be." Ruth's voice rose slightly and the delicate pink in her cheeks deepened-for Ruth, unmistakable signs of extreme annoyance.

"Why?" Karen asked reasonably. "Anger doesn't solve anything. I don't blame Jack; it would be dishonest of him to pretend an emotion he no longer feels, and… Well, just look at me! I've rather let myself go the last few years."

Ruth's lips tightened; but for once her self-control failed and the words she had tried to repress burst out. "I'm not going to criticize Jack, but I wish to goodness you'd stop criticizing yourself! There's nothing wrong with being angry. It's much more constructive than resignation and-and self-pity."

Karen was so surprised at this uncharacteristic outburst she didn't notice the insult, but Ruth was immediately repentant. "Darling, I do apologize. I shouldn't have said that."

"Don't worry about me, Ruth. I'll be all right. We all have different ways of handling emotional problems."

"Hmmm. Well, I won't lecture you. But as I was about to say, although solitude serves a useful purpose, you're going to be alone here for an awfully long time. You need someone to talk to. I wish I hadn't agreed to go on this field trip."

"Don't even think of canceling!"

"I'm not. I won't. But I wish…"

"I had someone to talk to? You're forgetting Julie. The problem will be to get her to stop talking."

"Julie doesn't carry on conversations, she delivers monologues. But I am glad you found an old friend who is still in town, and it was thoughtful of her to offer you a job. You need something to occupy your mind."

They had been interrupted at that point by Pat, yelling from the top of the stairs: "Where the hell did I put my damned shoes?" Ruth had gone trotting off to find the missing objects. It was a routine they went through several times a day, and both of them obviously delighted in it.

Now they were gone, and the house felt very empty without them-especially without Pat, whose very passage through a room made small objects rattle and tinkle. Despite her many visits, this was the first time Karen had been alone in the house for more than a few hours-and never at night.

Karen went to the door of the parlor. It was a lovely room, achieving beauty without sacrificing comfort. The big overstuffed sofas in front of the fireplace invited people to relax, at their ease; the bookcases flanking the French windows held not elegant matched sets but a motley collection of books that had obviously been read and reread. The only thing that had changed within Karen's memory was the color scheme, which had once been Wedgwood blue, to match the tiles around the fireplace. The draperies were now soft rose, and the couches had been reupholstered in shades of pink and lilac.

Karen entered the room and stood by the front windows. The parlor ran the entire length of the house. The back windows opened onto the garden; through the translucent glass curtains she saw a pastoral vista of green leaves and bright flowers, highlighted by patches of sunlight and softened by cool gray shade. It was hard to believe that the garden was in the heart of a large city. Birds swung and sang in the branches, and Ruth's favorite roses were in full bloom. High walls, part brick and part wood, enclosed the entire back yard, which could only be entered through the house or by way of a narrow walled passage along the north side.

It was very quiet. When the satin draperies shifted slightly, Karen started and then let out a breath of laughter. The air-conditioning had just come on; there was a vent practically at her elbow, and the stream of cool air had moved the fabric.

She couldn't understand Ruth's oft-repeated concern about leaving her alone in the house. She was used to being alone. Jack was always going off to attend conferences and symposia-and "meetings." Their house was a prosaic, modern split-level in a subdivision of identical houses, and she had never been at all nervous. Was that why Ruth was worried-because this house was so old, with a history that went back a century and a half? The sort of house that might inspire an emotionally disturbed, unhappy person to start imagining the wrong things when a breath of wind shook the draperies or a board creaked in the night?

If that was Ruth's fear, it was groundless. Karen's eyes lovingly surveyed the room, from the gently moving draperies at the front to the sunlit garden beyond the back windows. The room had a feeling of peace. It was welcoming. The whole house had welcomed her back. It was like coming home.

She left the parlor and went along the hall to the kitchen. It was the only part of the house Ruth had changed after she inherited it from an elderly, childless relative. The appliances and cabinets were completely modern, but the brown tile of the floor and a corner cupboard containing Ruth's collection of teapots gave it a comfortable country look.

"Be sure you eat a good, healthy lunch," Ruth had ordered.

Karen made herself a cup of coffee-her fourth that morning-and sat down. She sat without moving for a long time, trying not to think or feel, letting the quiet sink into her bones. Every muscle in her body ached dully, after weeks of tension, of pretending a strength and calm she had not really possessed.

She knew what unspoken suggestion lay behind Ruth's remarks about needing someone to talk to. Ruth didn't mean Julie or even herself. She meant what she delicately termed "professional help"-a counselor or psychologist. Karen had tried-once. The woman was nice enough, but she was no help. She didn't answer questions, she asked them. "Why did you marry him?" "You say you let yourself become slovenly and unattractive-why did you do that?" "Did you resent the time you spent on his work?" "Why not?"

Why, why not? If Karen had known the answers, she wouldn't have had to go to a psychologist. Once was enough. She had canceled the second appointment.

Alone at last. She was half-dozing, head propped on her hand, when the telephone rang, and she started, spilling cold coffee across the surface of the table.

As she had expected, it was Julie. The latter's gravelly voice was unmistakable, as was her conversational style. Julie never said hi, or hello, or announced her own identity, but plunged right into the subject at hand with the air of a person who has no time to waste.

"Have they gone?" she demanded breathlessly.

"Yes, just a while ago. Why-"

"Are you coming to the shop?"

"I hadn't planned to. You said I could-"

"You have to learn the routine if you're going to take charge."

"I've been there every day for a month, and there's another week to go before you leave. Plenty of time. I really don't feel like it today. Besides, I promised Ruth-"