Stephen L. Carter

by New England White

  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)

  ON SATURDAY 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)

  JULIA SAT IN THE ESCALADE, 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)

  THEY 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.

  “That’s the reason. That’s Vanessa’s trauma. What sent her over the edge a year and a half ago.” Julia tapped the paper. “She thought you killed Gina Joule.” She picked up the page and tore it into strips, then got up and crossed the room to drop them into the shredder Lemaster kept conveniently nearby. “That was the trauma. That was the big secret. She was protecting you, Lemmie. The paper. The refusal to consider that it could have been anybody but DeShaun. The evidence is all over the place. She thought you did it.”

  “Preston put the idea in her head,” said Lemaster, tonelessly. “And it stayed there until—well, until recent events.”

  Julia picked up the cell phone, pushing the button to light the screen afresh. She held it close to her face, staring, until Lemaster took it gently from her hand. He closed the phone, turned it over, removed the battery. From a drawer he took a hammer. He smashed the cover, removed the memory chip, and smashed that, too. He shoved the mess neatly aside. Perhaps in recognition of his wife’s distress, he folded his hands over hers, and waited.

  “And that’s what this was all about. I thought you were protecting the President, or Mal Whisted, or the Empyreals and their stupid plan. But it was Vanessa.” Her vision blurred. “You didn’t want anybody to know that she was in Kellen’s car that night. To threaten him. To make clear, if he told anybody her father did it, she would tell the world how he had—had”—she could not pronounce the words—“paid inappropriate attention to her. If anybody knew, they would have thought she—oh, Lemmie.” Julia wiped her eyes. “You
had somebody swipe the phone for you, maybe you got rid of the records themselves, in whatever bunker the cell-phone company keeps them in. Could you have done that, Lemmie? Do you have that kind of”—she searched for the word—“authority?” Julia was on her feet. She did not remember rising but had backed physically away from her husband, and stood now near the window, staring at him, horror and admiration mixing, terrified of his conclusion, loving him for his instinctive use of the power the Empyreals had placed in his hands—using it to protect his own. “Will you get in trouble? For—for misusing the power they’ve entrusted to you? The Empyreals?”

  “I will if they find out.” Finally he smiled. “Sit down, Jules. Sit down and pour us some more wine.”

  (IV)

  “I CAN’T TELL YOU everything, Jules. Even now. But, yes, I have a little cache of evidence that I keep around. Not the evidence Empyreals hold on to, like the original of Jock’s confession.” Tapping the pages. “A few little items of my own. To keep my friends in line. My old college buddies. After all, if you think about it, they might kick at the bit one day, and try to get rid of me. Empyreals would never avenge me, you see. They are in this for the long haul. Their focus is the fortune of the darker nation, not the preservation of Lemaster Carlyle. So I’ve kept the cache around. Every year I lodge a fresh letter with our lawyer, telling him where it’s hidden. Scrunchy knows that. Mal knows that. They’re powerful men, but they keep away from me. And from my family.”

  “But Jeremy was here in case they didn’t.”

  “Well, yes. He was. Or in case some of their people, unfamiliar with the rules, got a little rough. At first I just wanted him nearby. But after I realized how many people were poking around—well, yes. After that I mostly wanted him in the house, or covering whoever was out, when he could. And I took other measures, too. Never mind what they were.”

  Other measures. She saw it at once. Trevor Land. Gina’s godfather. Trevor had been Lemaster’s man from the start. Through Trevor, Lemaster had arranged for Bruce to get involved with the investigation, knowing that Bruce was dogged, that he would often be around Julia and even Vanessa until he got his answers, and that he would be a formidable presence against any threat. All of this without ever exciting attention by publicly hiring a bodyguard.