Last Day

by Luanne Rice

  “You’ve had Pete staying with you, haven’t you?” Kate asked.

  “He shows up sometimes.”

  Kate gave her a long hard stare. “And you don’t have the balls to tell him to leave?”

  “I’m sorry!” Nicola said.

  “You should be. For yourself and for Tyler. Where is he, by the way?”

  “Sleeping,” she said.

  “Can I see him?” Kate asked, surprising herself.

  Nicola nodded. She was about five feet four inches, the same height as Beth. Following her, looking at her from behind, Kate felt a pang in her heart. She wanted her sister back. Nicola wore shorts and a white T-shirt, and she was barefoot.

  Tyler slept in a blue baby seat in the shade on the wide back porch, his chin tucked onto his chest, arms at his side. His yellow onesie had an orange lion on it. Kate crouched down beside him. She closed her eyes and thought of Matthew. She leaned closer, smelled Tyler’s clean baby smell of shampoo and lotion and sleep. When she opened her eyes, she saw that his had fluttered open, and he was looking straight at her.

  “He doesn’t know me,” Kate said, leaning back. “I don’t want to scare him.”

  “He’s not scared,” Nicola said. “Look, he’s watching you.”

  Tyler’s brown eyes were enormous, unblinking as he regarded Kate. He unclenched tiny fists. His fingernails were perfect half moons. Kate pictured Beth as a baby. Even though Kate had been only two, she had signed on for a lifetime of loving and protecting her sister. Her mother used to let her help give Beth a bath, stick the tabs to close her diapers. Kate would lay her finger against the baby’s open hand, Beth would squeeze, and Kate would wish she’d never let go.

  She had done the same with Sam, and now Tyler, letting him grab her index finger with a hard grip. She glanced up at Nicola, who was smiling. Nicola had brown eyes. Pete’s were bright blue. She was glad Tyler’s were brown.

  Tyler began to fuss, and Nicola picked him up. A thousand birds called from the trees, and the flutter of leaves got louder. It was hurricane season, and Hilda, the latest threat, had skirted the leeward islands, on track to hit the Carolinas and spin out to sea before hitting the northeast coast. Even from so far away, there was an atmospheric disturbance right here on the Connecticut shore. Wild weather excited Kate, as it had Mathilda. The wind helped blow out the cobwebs of trauma.

  “I came to ask you something,” Kate said.

  “Of course, anything,” Nicola said, but she sounded apprehensive, as if afraid of what it would be.

  “When you worked at the gallery, how often did Beth go down into the basement?”

  “The basement?” Nicola asked. “Never. She wouldn’t. Because of what happened to her—to you—down there. Even my first month working—while I was cataloging all the sculptures on the shelves—I did it alone. She didn’t come down to supervise. I thought she would.”

  “She must have sometimes,” Kate said. “Maybe when you didn’t see her.”

  “I don’t think so. Only I did. And Pete, to do the framing.”

  Kate flinched, picturing Nicola and Pete getting together in the basement while Beth worked upstairs.

  Nicola chewed her lower lip, seemed to be thinking something over. She watched Kate for a minute.

  “Kate, after Beth was killed, I saw Pete with baby clothes,” she said finally.

  “Well, you two do have a son.”

  “They weren’t Tyler’s. He threw them away. Or at least hid them.”

  “Where?”

  “The dumbwaiter. Kate, I think they were for Matthew.”

  Kate couldn’t stand to hear Matthew’s name come out of Nicola’s lips. “My sister bought clothes for him. So did I. Beth was ready for him to be born. He was her son. She loved him as much as you love Tyler.”

  “I took them out of the dumbwaiter. They’re in the yellow room upstairs.”

  “Excuse me,” Kate said quietly, barely able to contain her emotions. Her head was spinning with the idea of Pete hiding Matthew’s clothes. Beth had bought them, so lovingly. She should be holding her baby now. He should be wearing the outfits she’d found for him.

  Kate left Nicola standing there and walked into the house. She went upstairs, into the yellow room. Beth had stayed here when they were young. Had Nicola somehow known that? The buttery light was soft and welcoming.

  Baby clothes were folded on the bed. Kate sat beside them. She looked without touching for a long time. Three onesies, striped in different bright colors. A sun hat printed with sailboats. Two blue soft terry cloth towels. A package of bibs with Winnie-the-Pooh characters on them. A blue baby blanket monogrammed ML that she had given Beth to hold her nephew. That had been the week before they’d died.

  Seeing Matthew’s things made him even more real. Kate lifted the sun hat, each onesie, the towels, the blanket, and held them to her chest, just as if she were hugging him. She thought of how she would have liked to take him flying. They would take off, bank over the Sound, and see where they lived from the air. She would teach him to fly, just as Mathilda had done for her.

  After a while, she took a deep breath. Instead of leaving Matthew’s things on the bed, she placed them in the top two drawers of the cherrywood bureau. It made her feel good to think that Beth had kept her clothes in the same drawers.

  It felt like a secret, just for herself: keeping Matthew’s things in this room where Beth had stayed. Kate was glad she would always know where to find them, the baby clothes her nephew never got to wear.

  She went downstairs, into her favorite room of the house: the library. It was warm and ordered, as it had been during her grandmother’s life. Tall windows admitted hazy white light that fell in patches on the wide-board pine floors, the antique Sarouk rug. The fireplace smelled faintly of smoke, hinting of fires from chilly days and cold nights when Mathilda was alive.

  The bookshelves were perfectly arranged, not alphabetically or according to size, but by color. Although not an artist herself, Mathilda had appreciated the palette, and the books’ spines ranged through the spectrum from scarlet to violet.

  Kate went to the dark greens. She removed a book—not a first edition; the girls had been careful about that—Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists. Kate turned to the last page, flipped it over, looked at the yellowed endpaper.

  She saw the initials: K, B, L, S, written in blood.

  They were surrounded by a heart, drawn in their own blood. Kate had been fifteen. It was a year before that day—she and Beth hadn’t yet seen the worst of life, still trusted the world. She remembered pressing her fingertip to the page, swooshing the shape, squeezing an extra drop of blood to make a complete heart. Her sister and friends had done the same, tracing over the marks she had left.

  “Blood sisters,” they’d said, one by one, forming a circle and facing each other, pressing their palms together and clasping fingers.

  “My secrets are your secrets,” Beth said.

  “No secrets between us,” Scotty said.

  “May our circle be free of secrets,” Lulu said.

  “Forevermore,” Kate said.

  “Promise, promise, promise, promise,” each of them said.

  And with a kiss they’d sealed the promise of sisterhood, friendship, secrets, and blood, bonds that would never break.

  But there had been lies, and hurts, and secrets, and broken bonds and promises.

  Kate stared at the smudged heart. This was what she had come here to see. It looked exactly like the one drawn on the back of Moonlight: a blood heart, the symbol of the Compass Rose. She closed the book. Instead of putting it back on the shelf, she walked to the long mahogany table. Her family had a tradition of leaving books they wanted to return to later, but soon, stacked here instead of reshelving them. She wanted to leave this one out so she could find it again easily.

  As she was about to place it on the table, the book at the top of the pile caught her attention. An exquisite volume with green paper-covered boards over a green cl
oth spine, the title and author’s name stamped in gilt: West-Running Brook, by Robert Frost.

  Where Beth had clearly left it, intending to read it again soon.

  43

  “Hey, Conor,” Winifred Sibley said, walking into Reid’s office. Tall and thin, with short white hair and bright-blue eyes, she gave him a huge smile, and he beamed back. She was the state’s chief accountant and a Reid family friend, and he had asked her to come to the Major Crime Squad to go over the Lathrops’ financials with him.

  “Hi, Winnie,” he said, hugging her. “I’m really glad to see you.”

  “And I you, as always. You’ve got a lot going on, kid,” she said, lifting her black briefcase.

  “Hope you have something good for me in there,” he said.

  “That depends on how you define good,” she said, giving him a wry smile.

  “Why don’t we go into the conference room? It will be more comfortable there. Can I get you a coffee?”

  “Yes, please,” she said.

  “I remember,” he said.

  He went to the break room and filled two mugs. It had been a busy, frustrating week. Judge Caroline Walker granted the warrants for Pete’s electronics, and the marshals executed them. They seized his computers and mobile phone. Analysts examined the hard drives, documenting his search history. Jennifer Miano had had her knee surgery; she had come through with flying colors, but it would be a long recuperation, so Reid had scoured the reports alone. And he’d found no evidence that Pete had searched for instructions on how to beat a polygraph exam.

  After entering the conference room, he handed Winnie her coffee and sat down on the other side of the long walnut table. She was about Reid’s dad’s age, and they had met when they were both young cops. Over the years his dad had decided he was happiest patrolling the streets of New London, and Winnie had used her business degree to rise through the ranks of the state police.

  “How’s your brother?” Winnie asked.

  “Tom’s great,” Reid said. “Other than giving me grief every chance he gets.”

  “Ah, the two Reid boys. Still the same.”

  Winnie started to unpack her briefcase. Reid watched her place two black vinyl three-ring binders on the table. Then she looked up and gazed at him with those clear, intelligent blue eyes.

  “What, Winnie?” he asked.

  “I recognized the connection right away. Beth Woodward. I know how much she and her sister mean to you. I remember everything about the gallery crime—I had just gotten my master’s in accounting, and I was assigned to go through the books.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Reid said. “I remember that.”

  “It was a bad one. Your father was worried about you,” she said. “He knew you’d carry it for a long time. And here you are again, same family.”

  Reid stared out the window behind Winnie, at the rolling hills, blue in the afternoon shadows. He had the feeling she wanted to reach across the desk, touch his hand.

  “I’m okay,” he said, steeling himself against the feelings: for how his father had cared about him, how Winnie did now.

  “Anyway, let’s get down to business,” she said.

  “The Lathrop family’s financials,” Reid said.

  “Yes. And here’s why my work is so much easier than yours. I follow the numbers. They are so nice and tidy. There’s no blood, no death. They don’t care who the killer is, and they don’t lie.”

  “So what do they say?” Reid asked.

  Winnie pushed the two black binders toward him. “The one on the left contains balance sheets from the Lathrop Gallery. Their earnings and losses, salaries and benefits, the purchases and sales of art going back to the year Beth married Pete. The one on the right contains Beth’s trust documents.”

  Reid reached for the one on the right. He flipped it open and saw that Winnie had annotated each page, marked some with brightly colored Post-it notes.

  “It’s a complicated trust,” Winnie said. “Originally set up by Mathilda Harkness.”

  Reid scanned the first page—there were a hundred more to go through.

  “Can you boil it down for me?” he asked. “Mainly, what does Pete get and when does he get it? Half the gallery? Will he have to share it with Kate?”

  “No,” Winnie said. “Beth’s interest in the gallery goes directly to Sam, to be overseen by Kate. That includes the real estate, the works of art and all other assets, and the business itself. Pete receives nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Beth leaves him a lump sum of money from her own investment account.”

  “How much?” Reid asked, riffling through the pages.

  “One point five million dollars,” she said.

  That stopped Reid short. “Well, there’s a motive,” he said.

  “Until you consider that Beth’s entire estate is worth seventy-five million dollars. And add in the fact that Pete does not receive the money free and clear. It is in trust. And Kate is the trustee.”

  “So . . .”

  “It will be her discretion as to how much is paid out and when.”

  “Still, one point five is a lot,” he said.

  “Conor, he would have gotten much more in a divorce. They didn’t have a prenup. They have a sixteen-year-old daughter, and if he claimed he had helped Beth build the business, he could have a good case.”

  “Did he know what was in the will?”

  “The trust,” she said, correcting him. “The documents were on Beth’s computer in the gallery, attached to an email from her lawyer.”

  “I doubt she gave Pete her password,” he said.

  “Her computer wasn’t password protected. And our tech guys determined the trust documents were accessed after her death.” Winnie paused. “Beth’s Gmail account had a very easily guessed password.”

  “What, Sam’s birthday?”

  “Yes, combined with the name Popcorn and Beth and Pete’s wedding anniversary.”

  “Can Pete contest the trust?”

  “No. It’s brilliantly written and quite unbreakable. Pete is out of the business, will only be able to stay in the house if Kate, as trustee, allows it, and will walk away with a sum that, from what I gather by looking at his rather extravagant expenses, will be gone in two years. Unless he receives wise investment advice.”

  “So this means he would have been better off . . . ,” Reid said.

  “With Beth alive. A divorce would have been in his interests. Not murder,” Winnie said.

  “There goes his financial motive,” Reid said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have the feeling this isn’t what you wanted to hear. It doesn’t help your case against him.”

  And neither did the search of Pete’s hard drives, Reid thought. Ahab’s white whale had killed him in the end. That’s what obsession could do. He shook his head hard, as if he could clear out the fog. Winnie was right; her work was easier: numbers didn’t lie, and they didn’t care.

  “Eye on the ball,” Reid said out loud.

  “I’ve heard that before,” Winnie said.

  “Yeah. Dad always said it.”

  “You can do this,” she said. “You’re going to solve this case.”

  “I appreciate you thinking that,” he said.

  “I have no way of knowing whether Pete is your killer or not. He still might be, Conor. There are motives other than money.”

  “True,” Reid said, but his heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t want to talk anymore. He felt as if he had been building his whole case on a ton of emotions and not enough evidence. The opposite of keeping his eye on the ball. His father wouldn’t be proud of him, and Reid certainly wasn’t proud of himself.

  He hugged Winnie and walked her down the hall to the front door. Then he returned to his office and stared at his desk.

  It was time to start again.

  44

  Kate walked Popcorn along the city waterfront while Sam did homework upstairs in the loft. Dark water swirled with reflected oran
ge light. The rusty bulkhead and rocky shore were littered with old tires, broken pilings, the fiberglass core of a foundered boat, all exposed by the outgoing tide. Waves from the wakes of passing ferries sloshed the shore. Amid the cacophony of trains and ships, Kate sought white noise, but nothing stilled her thoughts of Moonlight hidden in the beehive oven, hearts of blood scrawled more than twenty years apart.

  On her way back from the walk, she saw someone sitting on the steps of the Maritime Museum across the street from her loft. When she got closer, the man stood. The streetlights illuminated him, and she recognized Jed. Popcorn hustled over, wriggling with pleasure as he reached down to pet him.

  “Hey, boy; hey, boy,” he said. Then, looking up at Kate, “I was waiting for you.”

  “How did you know where I lived?” she asked.

  “Beth showed me,” he said. “We’d take walks after finishing up at the soup kitchen, and she’d always steer me down here. She loved you, Kate.”

  Kate looked up at the sky at the mention of her sister.

  “I know,” she said.

  “She wanted to be closer to you,” Jed said. “She wanted you to know about us. Every time we walked by, she hoped you’d be coming out your door, leaving the building, and that you’d see us.”

  “Why didn’t she just bring you upstairs?”

  “She was afraid of how you would react. An accidental meeting would be okay, but she thought it would be too aggressive to throw it in your face.”

  Kate glanced up at the tall windows of her apartment. The lights were all on; Sam was still up.

  “What made you come here now?” Kate asked.

  “You’re the only other person in the world,” he said, “who loved her as much as I did. Sam, of course, but I can’t talk to her. I can’t stand how much I miss her, Kate. I just want to talk about her.”

  “Yes, I want that too,” Kate said.

  “Can I buy you a tea?” Jed asked.

  They walked two blocks to Witchfire Teahouse, open till midnight. Thessaly sat at a back table, reading tarot cards, not looking up when they brushed through strings of bells hanging in the entrance. They took a table, and Popcorn lay beneath it on the painted wood floor. A young waitress with a blue streak in her blonde hair and a ring in her nose took their order: a large pot of Earl Grey.