The Lost Years (14 page)

The waiter, a man in his sixties, nodded. “My mother too,” he said quietly.

She deliberately lingered over coffee, hoping against hope that the detectives would have cleared out before they got back home an hour and a half later. The squad cars in the driveway told her that they were still there, but when she went inside, she could see that they were about to leave. Detective Benet handed her an inventory of what they were taking with them. She glanced at it. Papers from her father’s desk. A box of documents that included a file of parchments. And her mother’s sketchbook.

She looked at Benet. “Is that necessary?” she demanded, pointing to the sketchbook. “If my mother looks for this, she’ll be upset that it’s gone.”

“Sorry, Ms. Lyons, we need to take it.”

“I warn you that the parchment file may contain something of indescribable value.”

“We know about the Joseph of Arimathea letter from Christ. I assure you we will find an expert to go through this file very, very carefully.”

Then they were gone.

“Let’s take a nice walk, Kathleen,” Delia suggested. “It’s so beautiful out.”

Kathleen shook her head obstinately.

“Well, then, we’ll just sit on the patio,” Delia said.

“Mom, why don’t you sit outside for a little while?” Mariah suggested. “Alvirah and Willy are coming, and I need to get ready for them.”

“Alvirah and Willy?” Kathleen smiled. “I’ll go outside and wait for them.”

Alone, Mariah began to tidy up the living room where the detectives had not completely closed the drawers of the secretary and had pushed aside the vase and candles on the cocktail table. The dining room chairs they had drawn up to it were still there. Next she went into her father’s study. The top of the big antique desk that had been
his pride and joy was now littered with some of the contents of the drawers. I guess what they left here wasn’t evidence, she thought angrily. It seemed to her that the essence of her father had been taken from the room. The bright afternoon sun revealed the worn spots on the carpet. The books that he had kept in meticulous order were piled haphazardly on the shelves. The pictures of her mother and father, and herself with both of them, had been turned down as though they had been a nuisance to the prying eyes of the detective she had seen here.

She straightened out the study, then went upstairs, where it was obvious that all the rooms had been thoroughly searched. It was five o’clock when the house was finally put back together, and from the window of her bedroom she saw Willy and Alvirah’s Buick parking in the driveway.

She was at the front door opening it before they reached the front steps. “I’m so glad to see you two,” she said fervently as Alvirah’s comforting arms went around her.

“I’m so sorry we were away this week of all weeks, Mariah,” Alvirah said. “I was wringing my hands that I was in the middle of the ocean and couldn’t be with you.”

“Well, you’re here now and that’s what counts,” Mariah replied as they went inside the house. “Mother and Delia are on the patio. I heard them talking a minute ago, so Mother’s awake. She fell asleep on the couch out there, which is good because she hasn’t been sleeping much at all since Dad was—” Mariah stopped, her lips unable to form the word she had planned to say, “murdered.”

Willy hurried to fill in the void. “Nobody gets much sleep when there’s a death in the family,” he said heartily. He hurried ahead and opened the sliding glass door that led from the living room to the patio. “Hello, Kathleen, hello, Delia. You girls getting the sun?”

Kathleen’s delighted laugh was enough reassurance for Mariah that Willy would keep her mother occupied for at least a few minutes.
“Alvirah, before we go out, I have to tell you. The police were here this morning with a search warrant. I think they’ve gone through every piece of paper in this house. They took the parchments my father was translating. I warned them that one of them might be an invaluable antiquity, a letter Christ wrote to Joseph of Arimathea. My father may have found it among that batch and believed it to be authentic.”

Alvirah’s eyes widened. “Mariah, are you serious?”

“Yes. Father Aiden told me about it at the funeral on Friday. Dad saw him the Wednesday before he died.”

“Did Lillian Stewart know about this parchment?” Alvirah demanded.

“I don’t know. I suspect he would have told her about it. For all I know she has it.”

Alvirah brushed her hand against her shoulder, turning on her hidden microphone. I can’t miss or misunderstand a word, she thought. Already her mind was awhirl.

Jonathan saw Father Aiden on Wednesday afternoon. Suppose Jonathan told him that he had decided to end the relationship with Lillian? Lillian saw Jonathan Wednesday night. Did he go straight up there, and if he did, what did he say to her? According to Lily, they never saw each other again and did not speak to each other in those five days.

Was she lying? Alvirah wondered. As I told Willy yesterday, somebody’s got to get the phone records of any calls from Jonathan to Lillian and from her to him between Wednesday and Monday night. If there aren’t any, it says to me that Jonathan told her it was quits…

It was too soon to suggest all this to Mariah. Instead, Alvirah said, “Mariah, let’s make a cup of tea and you try to catch me up on everything.”

“‘Everything’ is that I know the detectives believe my mother
killed my father. ‘Everything’ is that I wouldn’t be surprised if they arrested her,” Mariah said, trying to keep her voice steady.

As she spoke, the doorbell rang. “Pray God those detectives aren’t back,” she murmured as she went to answer it.

It was Lloyd Scott. He did not mince words. “Mariah, I just got a call from Detective Benet. Your mother is being charged as we speak. He is allowing me to take her down to the prosecutor’s office in Hackensack to surrender her, but we have to go now. She’ll be fingerprinted and photographed there and then they will admit her to the jail. I am so sorry.”

“But they
can’t
put her in jail now,” Mariah protested. “My God, Lloyd, can’t they understand her condition?”

“My guess is that, in addition to setting the amount of bail, the judge will order that she have a psychiatric evaluation before releasing her so that he can set appropriate conditions of bail. That means that by tonight or tomorrow, she’ll be in a psychiatric hospital. She won’t be coming home, at least not for a while.”

At the back of the house, Willy, Kathleen, and Delia were coming in from the patio. “So much noise… so much blood,” Kathleen was telling Willy, this time in a lighthearted singsong voice.

H
is secret retreat was in a seemingly vacant warehouse on the far eastern side of lower Manhattan. The upper-level windows of the warehouse were boarded. The metal front door was padlocked. In order to enter and exit, he had to drive around to the back, past an old loading dock, to a set of double-wide rusted metal garage doors that to anyone passing would look sagging and broken. But when the doors were opened with a remote he kept in his car, he could drive straight forward into the cavernous cement first floor.

He had gotten out of his car and was standing there now in that vast, dust-filled, empty space. If by any horrible mishap someone else ever managed to get in there, that person would find nothing.

He walked over to the back wall, the sound of his heels echoing in the stillness. He leaned down, pushed aside a grimy electrical outlet cover, and touched a hidden button. A lift slowly descended from the ceiling. When it reached the ground, he stepped onto it, then pushed another button. Slowly as the lift rose up, he closed his eyes briefly and readied himself to return to the past. When it stopped, he took a long breath in anticipation and crossed over the threshold. He switched on the light and once again was with his treasures, the antiquities he had stolen or purchased clandestinely.

The windowless room was as vast as the one below. But that was
the only similarity. In the center of the space was a carpet gloriously bright with intricate figures and designs. A couch, chairs, lamps, and end tables were grouped on it, a mini–living room amid a treasure-filled museum. Statues, paintings, wall hangings, and cabinets containing pottery and jewelry and table settings crowded every inch of space.

Immediately he began to feel the calmness that being surrounded by the past always brought to him. He was desperate to linger there but it was not possible. He could not even visit the upper two floors now.

He did allow himself to sit on the couch for just a few minutes. His glance darted from one object in his collection to the next as he feasted his eyes on the extraordinary beauty around him.

But none of it meant anything if he did not own the Joseph of Arimathea letter. Jonathan had shown it to him. He knew instantly that it was genuine. There was no possibility that it was a forgery. A letter written two thousand years ago by the Christ. It made the Magna Carta, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence worthless in comparison. Nothing, nothing, would or could ever be more valuable. He had to have it.

His cell phone rang. It was the prepaid kind and could not be traced to him. He only gave the number to one person, then discarded it and bought a new one as needed. “Why are you calling me?” he asked.

“It just came over the news. Kathleen has been arrested and charged with Jonathan’s murder. Isn’t that a good break for you?”

“It was utterly unnecessary for you to contact me about something I would have learned myself in a short time.” His voice was cold, but he also recognized that it showed a measure of alarm. She could not be trusted. Worse, it was clear that she had a growing sense of power over him.

He terminated the call. Then for long minutes that he could not afford to take, he considered the best way to handle the situation.

When he had thought it all through, he called her back and made an appointment to meet with her again.

Soon.

O
n Sunday evening Lillian Stewart reflected with great relief on her decision not to admit to the police that Jonathan had given her the parchment for safekeeping. She had already been contacted separately by two members of the dinner group. Each had told her flatly that if she had the parchment, he could quietly find her a buyer—and for a lot of money.

Her first instinct had been to tell the police that she had the parchment. She knew that if it was what Jonathan thought it was, it belonged in the Vatican Library. But then she thought of the five years she had given to Jonathan with nothing to show for it now except a lot of heartache. I’m entitled to whatever I can get for it, she thought bitterly. When I sell it to one of them, I want the money in cash, she decided. No wire transfer. If two million dollars suddenly shows up in my savings account, I know that the bank has to report that to the government. I’ll just put the cash in my safe-deposit box and take it out gradually, so that if they do check me out, I won’t be raising any red flags.

What would it be like to have two million dollars at my disposal? I still would rather have Jonathan, she thought sadly, but since I don’t, I’m going to do it this way.

Lillian looked at the clock. It was five of six. She went into the kitchen, poured a glass of wine, and carried it into the den. She
curled up on the sofa and clicked on the television. The six o’clock news would be coming on in a couple of minutes.