Last Day

by Luanne Rice

  They piled the trash bags next to the driveway. Kate made Earl Grey tea, and out of a sense of reclaiming Mathilda’s house, served it in Limoges cups she had loved as a child—the translucent white porcelain delicately painted with butterflies, tiny roses, forget-me-nots, and ladybugs. She tucked the large manila envelope under her arm and carried the tray out the side door.

  They sat on the side porch, the ceiling painted the palest shade of sky blue. The Compass Rose had had many tea parties in this exact spot. Mathilda had taught them to brew loose Darjeeling the way she had learned in England, when she had been stationed north of London during the war. Once the leaves had steeped enough, Kate poured the tea, and Lulu added extra sugar to hers.

  “I want to show you something,” Kate said after they’d finished the first cup.

  Lulu watched her reach into the envelope and pause. Kate felt torn—Lulu was her best friend and had loved Beth as much as anyone. But revealing her sister’s secret felt like a betrayal.

  “What is it?” Lulu asked.

  “I found these hidden in Beth’s desk,” Kate said. “She obviously didn’t intend for anyone to see them. I wouldn’t show them to anyone, even you, but I need help, to figure out what they mean.”

  She handed Lulu the key, laid the drawing on the white wicker table. Kate stared at the signature, JH. The nude figure study was beautiful, showed Beth’s soft curves, her wavy hair falling loosely over her shoulders, the gentle heaviness of her breasts and slightly rounded belly.

  “She’s pregnant here,” Lulu said, leaning closer. “But not very far along.”

  “I thought that too,” Kate said, noticing that Lulu didn’t express surprise. It wasn’t the fact Beth had posed without clothes—when they were young, living in an art town, they’d all picked up a hundred dollars per session as models for the Black Hall Art Academy’s figure-drawing classes. It had been no big deal—a prestigious college, their family’s art lineage, their grandmother’s blessing. But Beth’s pregnancy meant she had posed for this within the last year, and that’s what Kate found surprising.

  “It’s formal but also romantic,” Lulu said. “It doesn’t feel impersonal.”

  “Who is JH?” Kate asked. “I can’t think of anyone with those initials.”

  Lulu didn’t reply. She lowered her gaze from the drawing to the squat, almost square key. She lifted it up, bounced it in her hand as if judging its weight.

  “Heavy little thing,” she said.

  “Too small for a door, too wide for a safe-deposit box.”

  “American doors, maybe. But it reminds me of a Paris door key,” Lulu said. “They’re shaped just like this. Don’t you remember?”

  It was true, and Kate did remember. For her high school graduation, Mathilda had taken her, Beth, Lulu, and Scotty to Paris. They’d flown Air France from JFK at night, and while Mathilda and Ruth had sat in first class, the Compass Rose had occupied the first four seats in coach. Kate had loved the feeling of lift, the surge of big engines, the knowledge they were flying over the Atlantic, into the sunrise.

  In Paris, they stayed in a large apartment in a Belle Époque mansion in the seventh arrondissement, on rue de Varenne. The house was owned by Hubert and Karine Millet, friends of Mathilda and Ruth. The Millets had gone to Greece for the summer. Hidden from the street by high stone walls, it had an interior courtyard with a stone fountain and was filled with Renoir paintings and gilded Louis Quinze chairs that Mathilda warned them were antique and priceless and not to be sat upon.

  The graduation trip was a whirlwind of museums—the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, Centre Pompidou, Cluny, Musée Jacquemart-André, and Kate’s favorite, the exquisitely intimate Marmottan. Mathilda rented a car, and they drove out of town to visit Claude Monet’s home and gardens at Giverny and the port town of Honfleur, the site of so many Impressionist paintings. The vacation was centered on art.

  They visited the Normandy landing beaches and stood on the cliff looking across the English Channel, imagining the boatloads of Allied forces ready to storm the beaches. Ruth took Mathilda’s hand. Instead of facing out to sea, they looked up at the sky where the Eighth Air Force bomb groups and fighters had provided tactical air support on D-Day.

  Mostly they stayed in Paris. The Musée Rodin was a few doors down from their house. They had wandered for hours among its marble sculptures, orderly rose gardens, and reflecting pool, greeting the ghost of one of Mathilda’s most revered artists, Camille Claudel, Auguste Rodin’s model and thrown-away lover.

  Lulu was absolutely right—the key to the Millets’ tall front door had been exactly like the one Kate had found in Beth’s drawer.

  “Maybe Beth saved it,” Lulu said, fingers closing around the key. “From our trip. Maybe Mathilda gave it to her.”

  “But Mathilda would have left it with the concierge—she wouldn’t have taken it home with her.”

  “Then where’s it from?” Lulu asked.

  “I have no idea,” Kate said, but a dream formed in her mind—one in which Beth could have been happy and still alive. A hideaway, someplace she went with the artist who did the drawing. Somewhere she could have escaped Pete and everything he had put her through.

  Kate took the key from Lulu. The metal was warm from Lulu’s hand. Beth had held the key too. She had treasured it enough to hide it in the small box along with the drawing someone had done of her. The two objects radiated love. Through them Kate felt her sister’s passion.

  “Who can this be?” she asked again, pointing at the signature on the drawing. “JH?”

  Once again, Lulu didn’t reply. In the distance, they heard a car shifting gears as it climbed the hill, tires rumbling over gravel. Through a row of cypress trees, Kate spotted Pete’s big Mercedes sedan entering the turnaround.

  “Here we go,” Lulu said. “In honor of Mathilda, bombs away.” Had she invoked Mathilda’s name as a way of distracting Kate from the fact that she didn’t want to answer her question about JH?

  Kate put the key and drawing back into the envelope and headed toward the front of the house.

  “Goddamn it!” Pete bellowed as he raced around tearing open the trash bags.

  Pete’s reaction should have gratified Kate, but she was still mesmerized by the unfamiliar sense of desire—not truly hers but borrowed from her sister. The abstraction of passion filled her mind. Then it ran across her skin, a river of it. It made her shiver, and she wanted the feeling to last, to be hers, no one else’s.

  Maybe the key wasn’t to a house where Beth had already been but to one she had planned to go. A place where she could have been in love.

  But with whom?

  22

  Nicola had spotted Lulu on the beach, but they had avoided actually encountering each other. That was impossible here at the house. Lulu and Kate stood in the shade of an ancient copper beech tree, watching Pete ripping open the garbage bags.

  “You’re only going to have to pack them again,” Kate said.

  “This is uncalled for,” Pete said, sounding outraged.

  “I don’t think so. I want you out. This wasn’t your house to move into.”

  “Beth knew about it,” he said. “I’m not saying she was happy about the situation . . .” He glanced at Nicola. She had gotten out of the car with Tyler and was standing off to the side. She felt mortified to be there, facing Kate this way. “But she let them stay here.”

  Them, Nicola thought. Not us.

  “She was so caring,” Pete said. “She wanted the baby to have a good place to live until I could find somewhere else.”

  “She had her own baby to think about,” Kate said.

  “Your other son,” Lulu said.

  “Please, stop,” Nicola said. The mention of Matthew made her go weak in the knees. “We’ll leave.”

  “Hey, you stop,” Pete said loudly, practically yelling, scowling at her. “I’m dealing with this.”

  Nicola flinched, and Kate saw. Nicola felt shame, having Kate hear him talk to h
er that way. Kate drifted closer to her and Tyler. She moved like a sleepwalker, close enough so Nicola could feel her warm breath on her forehead. She was staring down at Tyler. Nicola’s arms tightened around him. She felt Kate’s eyes casting a spell on him. Nicola shivered, thinking of Maleficent, but Kate’s expression was gentle.

  “My sister’s baby didn’t get to be born,” Kate said.

  “Kate, I am so sorry about Beth,” Nicola said, the first chance she’d had to say it, or even see Kate.

  Kate didn’t raise her gaze from Tyler.

  “Could I hold him?” Kate asked.

  Nicola felt shocked by the request, but her instinct was to reach out, hand her baby to Kate. Pete came over and stood between them, blocking her. But Nicola stepped around him. Dark-red light stippled through the leaves of the copper beech, tiny flames from the sky. Nicola heard Pete swear as she put Tyler into Kate’s arms.

  Kate held Tyler awkwardly, a woman unaccustomed to holding an infant. Tyler had been asleep, but he stirred, opened his eyes wide, looking into a stranger’s face. Nicola’s arms tensed, ready to grab him back.

  “I wish I could have held my nephew,” Kate murmured.

  “I’m so sorry,” Nicola said again. Kate looked up, and for a long moment their eyes met and held. Kate’s were red rimmed, filled with emotion—rage, sorrow? No, it was anguish; Nicola recognized that now. She felt it herself, for Beth. Kate started to hand Tyler back to her, but Pete grabbed him. It startled Tyler, and he began to fuss.

  “Let’s go,” Pete said, facing Nicola. “We’ll check into a hotel. Something temporary.”

  “I’ve changed my mind,” Kate said. She stared at Pete with hatred. And then, as if she wanted to say the one thing that would hurt him most, “Nicola and Tyler can stay here. Not you.”

  “They’re my family,” Pete said. “Where they go, I go.”

  “Sam’s your family too,” Kate said. “She needs to be at home.”

  “I thought she was staying with you,” he said. “I thought you had poisoned her against me.”

  “Beth wouldn’t want me to do that. The last thing I want is for Sam to live with you. But you’re her father, and Beth would want you to take care of her. Sam wants that too. It’s already done, Pete. I dropped her off this morning. She’s waiting for you.”

  Nicola felt wild inside, hearing this exchange. Thinking about Beth, about Sam, about the mess she had helped create. What had she been thinking, that she and Pete and Tyler could ever have a normal life after this?

  “Kate’s right,” Nicola said, forcing her voice to stay calm. “Sam needs her home and her father. But I don’t think Tyler and I should stay here, Kate.”

  “Really? Where are you going to go? Nowhere near Sam, that’s for sure,” Kate said.

  Nicola panicked. Kate was right; she had nowhere to go. She couldn’t return to live with her mother and face all that criticism of Pete, the constant litany of how her mother believed he had murdered Beth.

  “So,” Kate said. “I assume you’ll stay.”

  Pete looked at Nicola with that intense expression that scared her. It was pure rage, and it contained a warning.

  He wanted her to say she would go with him, let him check her into that hotel, but she stepped back to let him know she would accept Kate’s invitation and stay here.

  “Thank you, Kate,” Nicola said, trying not to sound meek. “I would like to stay.”

  Kate put the key in her hand. Nicola’s fingers closed around it. Something made her look straight at Pete, and despite the hateful fury in his face, she didn’t look away.

  23

  After everyone left, Nicola put Tyler down for his nap and wandered through the house. It was so big the signal from the baby monitor wouldn’t carry from one floor to the other. She felt feverish. It might have been a slight sunburn, from the hour they’d spent on the beach, or it could be the heat of extreme pressure, a coal in her chest.

  The house didn’t have air-conditioning, but even on a muggy day such as this, it didn’t need it. The windows were open, and a fresh Long Island Sound breeze blew up the cliff from the estuary, circulating through the hallways and rooms. She thought of the lengths to which museums went to make sure galleries were temperature and humidity controlled to within a degree or a bar, but Mathilda’s collection filled the walls, and the trained conservator in Nicola saw no problems at all.

  A dumbwaiter ran between the upstairs and downstairs kitchens. Nicola felt its presence as if it were alive and calling to her, reminding her of what Pete had hidden there. She resisted its pull and walked into her favorite room—the library. The walls were papered in a color between rose and brick.

  A marble fireplace, laid with logs, dominated one walnut-paneled wall. Chest-high overflowing bookcases lined two more, and the fourth had French doors. Hung with thick draperies of expensive fabric, Clarence House’s Tibet pattern—playful striped tigers in shades of cinnabar, sage green, and pale citron—the doors overlooked the boxwood hedge maze; stone garden ornaments, including gigantic spheres from an eighteenth-century Irish castle; and a lawn sloping into various crags and valleys down toward the river. The effect was both exotic and very New England. This was how the upper class lived. Nicola had never felt more like a girl from the sketchy side of Groton.

  Small paintings by Willard Metcalf, Matilda Browne, Benjamin Morrison, William Merritt Chase, Henry Ward Ranger, and William Chadwick filled the walls above the bookcases; Childe Hassam’s Fifth Avenue in December hung above the mantel. It depicted New York at twilight under snow. The avenue was quiet; the day’s traffic had ceased. The sky seemed heavy yet charged, as if a blizzard had just passed. The painting’s electric quality came from the American and French flags flying from every building. The tableau was patriotic, but Nicola felt it warned that joy would be misplaced—World War I had ended, but the world remained uneasy. The blizzard could circle around, and another war was coming.

  The baby monitor crackled. It was Tyler fussing. Nicola left the library and walked up the wide center stairs. She looked into the room where she and Pete had slept. Their son lay peacefully in the white cradle. He was quiet, deep in slumber; he must have been dreaming.

  Why had Kate allowed Nicola to stay? Why had she accepted? She knew Pete had been furious by the way Kate had treated him. Perhaps, in a way, she was glad. He had swept her off her feet, but then he’d seemed not to have the foggiest idea of what to do about it. And it had made him angry.

  The smart, ambitious woman he’d fallen in love with had slipped under the weight of his dark moods. She didn’t like who she was becoming—quick to please him just to stop his anger, less likely to listen to herself than to him. Accepting Kate’s invitation had felt delicious, a reclamation of who she wanted to be, just as her rebellions against her mother had always helped her draw the line between their strong personalities.

  Nicola knew Detective Reid thought Pete had killed Beth, and most of the time Nicola fought that theory. She told herself that if she really believed it, she’d know physically; she’d be constitutionally unable to stay with him. So why, as her mother had asked, had she moved back home for those days in July? And why had she decided to stay here at Mathilda’s instead of letting him create another temporary nest for them at a hotel?

  The dumbwaiter was still exerting its gravitational force. She walked to the end of the second-floor hall, entered the small upstairs kitchen. Unused now, it must have been useful for household staff. It had a gas stove, old-fashioned icebox, and a cupboard full of Spode china with an inordinate number of eggcups. Perhaps the Harkness family, and whoever had lived here before them, had enjoyed breakfast in bed.

  Three days after Beth’s murder, Nicola had watched Pete enter this room with a canvas bag and a large claw hammer. When she heard the sound of nails being wrenched from the wall, she stood quietly in the hall, watching him. The dumbwaiter had been boarded up, and he removed the plywood. There in the opening was a small rectangular wooden box tha
t could be raised or lowered between kitchens by a rope and pulleys.

  When he reached into the canvas bag, her pulse began to race because she knew what was coming out—it was going to be Moonlight, the stolen Morrison cut out of its frame, and it was going to prove to her that Pete had killed Beth.

  But it wasn’t the painting. One by one, Pete removed toys from the bag. They were for a baby boy: a stuffed blue bunny, a blue teddy bear, a striped ball, a turquoise plastic teething ring. They weren’t Tyler’s. Pete glanced over his shoulder and saw Nicola. His eyes were blank. He showed no hint of emotion—the chill made Nicola want to cry out.

  He stared at her for a full minute. Then he turned back to what he was doing. She watched him tug on the ropes to lower the box full of what had to have been Matthew’s things, bought perhaps by Beth in anticipation of his birth, into the dark shaft. When he had begun to nail the boards back over the door, the hammer blows echoing down the hall, she had walked away. They hadn’t spoken about it then or since.

  He had completely replaced the wood covering the dumbwaiter, and she stared at it now. She could see the nailheads, the steel bright silver, polished by the recent hammer strikes. They glinted, calling attention to themselves. Through the baby monitor in her pocket, she heard Tyler waking up. She turned and walked down the hall to lift her son from the cradle and feed him.

  24

  Reid’s desk at the Major Crime Squad overflowed with photos of the Beth Lathrop crime scene, the report from the coroner, and a binder filled with transcribed interviews with witnesses. He cleared space and leaned on his elbows, a cup of coffee by his side, to read the autopsies of Beth and her baby, Matthew.

  The coroner had ruled that Beth had died of asphyxia by strangulation. She had received blunt force trauma to the head, the contours of the skull fracture consistent with being struck by the marble owl. But her death had been caused by someone using his hands, thumbs crushing Beth’s larynx.