These were the thoughts—the old questions—to which his mind had wandered that Saturday as he raked leaves with his son and chased his squealing daughter around the back yard. At night, he and Grace had hired a babysitter and gone out to dinner with a couple they knew from church, he an ER doctor and she a part-time pediatric nurse. Grace liked to socialize with people who were not “on the job,” because she felt it helped Zach forget police work for a while. The four of them ate pasta and drank red wine and laughed about raising kids. They discussed the mess in Europe, the spread of radical Islam, the rise of the new fascists, and the resurgence of the violent left. But all the while, Zach was thinking about Imogen Storm and Gretchen Dankl—and about Angela Bose as well.
He had run a check on Angela’s story about her father just that morning, a quick check online, hunting down articles and public records. He wanted to make sure that this Herman Bose of hers was not really an alias for Dominic Abend. But no, there was a Herman Bose, in fact, a Dutch shipping magnate, just as Angela had said. He was an impressive man, according to the news accounts. He had worked his way up from the docks until, a decade ago, at the age of sixty-nine, he had taken over the Amsterdam Line and made himself a billionaire. Rich, powerful, yet respected for his life of probity, he’d been married to the same woman for fifty-two years, the girl next door, whom he’d known since their first day of school together.
So much for Zach’s instincts and suspicions about the man’s daughter. Everything Angela Bose had told them had turned out to be true. So much for the faint whiff of corruption he thought he smelled around the beautiful Long Island recluse. Zach’s illness had affected his perceptions somehow, that’s all. Reasonable explanations. . . .
Then the old questions returned. That’s what had happened that Sunday in church. That was how his revelation got started.
He hadn’t been paying much attention to the service. The liturgy drifted in and out of his mind like music on a car radio.
“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth,” Mrs. Pennyworth was saying from the lectern in her thin, nasal voice. “Tell me, if you have understanding.”
The rest was blah-blah-blah to Zach as he thought about the look in Angela’s eyes when she’d examined the photograph of Dominic Abend. She had recognized him. He was sure of it. That wasn’t fever or his imagination.
His own gaze drifted around the church. It was a sweet old building, over a hundred years old, dark and solemn with its scarlet carpeting and walnut pews and interior. But the stained-glass windows were the pride of the place: the ascension above the altar, the life of Christ, nativity to resurrection, running along the eastern and western walls. Some old famous someone had done the pictures, Zach didn’t know who, but he liked the look of them, especially at this hour in the fall when the sun struck some of them just right and they glowed.
It was that hour now. He was looking at Lazarus on the wall at the end of his row of pews. The Reverend Gray had begun his sermon. “Whoever wishes to become great among you, must blah-blah-blah . . .” he was saying as Zach’s eyes wandered over Grace’s attentive profile to the stained glass beyond her.
It was just that magic moment—he had noticed it before—when the light from outside filled the Savior’s image so that he seemed almost to drift out of the surface of the glass into the air above the aisle, his hand uplifted, his mouth opened on the command: Come forth. And Lazarus—this also was a trick of the sun—seemed to be emerging from a darkness that extended backward into space, as if the artist had built the dead man’s very tomb into the pane. No wonder the woman—Mary? Martha? One of them, Zach had forgotten which—had fallen to her knees between them with her hands clasped beneath her pale cheeks and her awestruck lips parted.
And Zach was thinking: My family has been in the Netherlands for four hundred years. Wasn’t that what Angela Bose had said? My father is named Herman Bose. Von Bose, really, but he dropped the von because . . . what was it she had said? He didn’t like the aristocratic pretension. Something like that.
“And if we’re honest, don’t we all sometimes blah-blah-blah . . . ?” the Reverend Gray was saying.
So if her father was such an aristocrat, Zach wondered, why was he working on the docks? Working his way up to take over the company. Why hadn’t he just inherited the damned company, if he was such an aristo von crat?
Maybe her family had fallen on hard times. But that was certainly not the impression Angela had been trying to give them. With her ladylike manners and her china decorated with roses. Pa-pa lives in Amsterdam. Pa-pa. Who says that in real life anyway?
“It’s pride,” said the Reverend Gray.
And Zach thought: It is pride, isn’t it? But so what? So she was a social climber. That wasn’t what Zach had smelled on her. That wasn’t what he had seen in her youthful, beautiful—and yet somehow strangely withered face. He remembered the rumors that she had partied hard through her teens. Maybe that’s what had decayed her, maybe that’s where the smell of corruption came from. Still, she was only twenty-seven now, so why . . . ?
Out of the corner of her eye, Grace saw her husband turned her way and glanced up at him, smiling gently. His eyes flashed from the Lazarus scene to her, his wife, with her round cheeks still smooth and rosy. And Grace was in her mid-thirties. He smiled back at her.
Angela Bose was no twenty-seven, he thought. Her father had taken over the company ten years ago when he was sixty-nine, so he was seventy-nine or eighty now. He’d met his wife on their first day of school together, so she was the same age. Which meant she would have had to be fifty-two when she had her daughter. Possible, but not very likely.
So she’s older than she claims. What are you gonna do? he asked himself. Arrest a woman for lying about her age?
“We do not know the blah-blah-blah,” said Reverend Gray. “We do not know the blah-blah-blah or even the blah-blah-blah . . .”
The preacher’s voice sank to a murmur in Zach’s mind. The church sank into the background of his attention. The pews, the people, the space from roof to floor and wall to wall became flat and dim and insubstantial. Only the image on the window maintained its reality, the figures embedded in the depths of darkness or enriching the dimensions of the glass or ablaze with light and hovering in the air.
You can offer reasonable explanations for mysterious things, but the old questions always return. You can bury the questions, but they won’t stay dead. Lazarus, come forth.
Angela Bose was lying.
That was Zach’s revelation. Everything about her was a lie. She wasn’t as aristocratic as she pretended. She wasn’t as young as she pretended. She had recognized the photograph of Dominic Abend. And damned if she didn’t know about that dagger.
All of sudden, Zach’s hunter blood was up. He wished he could get out of his pew, get out of the church, go home, hit the computer, go to work. All at once, he was certain that if he delved only a little deeper into Angela Bose’s life, he would find that she was not the woman she pretended to be, and that the man who came to stay with her from time to time was not her father. It was Abend. Zach was on to him. He was sure of it. It was Abend.
Bonnie Childress, who had the best voice in the choir, a yearning mezzo-soprano with more depth of feeling than anyone would have suspected in the giddy Bonnie herself, serenaded their exit from the church with the wistful hymn Holy Darkness.
“Holy darkness, blessed night, heaven’s answer, hidden from our sight. . . .”
The children, who had returned to the pews from Sunday School after what Grace declared a lovely sermon (was it the part about blah-blah-blah or the part about blah-blah-blah that had touched her? Zach wondered), were clustered around their mother’s skirt as they moved up the aisle toward the door, steeling themselves for the dreaded handshake with the rector and eager to get to the much-beloved brownies of coffee hour laid out on the patio beyond. Zach was absent-mindedly patting Tom’s hair and distractedly smiling at people whose names he could never
remember. He was thinking that now, at last, for the first time, he had a genuine lead he could follow, something that all his cop instincts told him would put him once and forever on the trail of the man who was blanketing the city in an invisible mist of corruption and fear.
They were at the door, out the door, underneath the lintel, poised between the odorless warmth of the church and the grass and asphalt smells swirling through the chilly autumn sunshine. Little Tom was barely able to hold Reverend Gray’s hand and dutifully maintain eye contact while his whole body yearned brownie-ward. Little Ann seemed to squeeze herself up inside her bashful blush as the rector bent down to make a fuss over her pretty dress. Grace said, “Such a wonderful sermon, Frank,” and Reverend Gray tilted his head at her in response like a girl saying “Aww” over a bunny rabbit. (At the same time, Zach thought he saw the faintest twinkle of lust in the reverend’s eyes—for which he didn’t blame him one bit. Who wouldn’t want Grace if you could get her?) Then Zach shook Gray’s hand himself and said some damn thing while thinking, You’re a real nice fellow, padre, but I haven’t got the slightest idea what you just said. Then he turned away to take Grace’s elbow. He was about to murmur in her ear that he didn’t want to get caught here too long because he had work to do (though good luck trying to pry Grace away from coffee hour before she’d comforted the sorrowful, rejoiced with the rejoicing, gossiped every last bit of gossip, and helped wash every last plate and tray), when his eyes were drawn to a single figure standing motionless at the edge of the departing crowd.
The words died on his lips. Even his pulsing thoughts of Angela Bose and Dominic Abend burst like bubbles. His whole inner world turned heavy and sour.
Because there, on the sidewalk bordering the church lawn, stood Margo Heatherton.
Zach had forgotten how beautiful she was.
17
MARGO
Nothing about her was as it seemed. She was dressed modestly enough in a pink sweater and black skirt, her long blond hair tied back with a ribbon—but she was not modest; glamour came off her like body heat. Likewise, she was standing in an unobtrusive posture, her arms hanging down, her hands clasped together in front of her—but she was not unobtrusive; how could anyone miss her? Everyone else in the crowd was moving toward the curb, fanning out toward their cars, while she alone was still. When, inevitably, his eye was drawn to that stillness, she broke out in a bright, natural smile and gave him a friendly wave—and these, he thought, were also deceptive. There was nothing bright or natural or friendly about her being here, nothing at all.
It wasn’t hard for him to disengage from Grace. She was as eager to get to the ladies on the church patio as the children were to get to the brownies there. He only had to release her elbow and she was gone into the coffee-hour crowd. But he didn’t kid himself that she wouldn’t notice him talking to a beautiful stranger. Of course she would. So he became deceptive too. He put on a false smile and, with his hands in the pockets of his slacks, he forced his body to seem relaxed. He ambled down the front path to where Margo was waiting for him.
“Zach,” she said, her voice warm and gracious. “It’s so good to see you.”
She offered her delicate white hand and he took it. He was still smiling. Anyone watching from a distance would have thought they were exchanging pleasantries.
But he said, “Do what you’re gonna do, Margo. I won’t be blackmailed.”
And she, still warm and gracious, answered, “I don’t want to blackmail you, darling. But I do need to see you. Talk to you. I think you owe me that much—that much respect, at least, after what we had together.”
“Do I?” Still smiling.
“I think you do, yes. Unless you think I’m something—much lower than what I’d like you to think I am. Come see me, Zach. Please. If that’s blackmail, it doesn’t seem so high a price to pay to protect . . .” she made a movement of one petite hand at the church courtyard, at the clutches of women in red and blue and white and the circles of men in black and gray and the children chasing around their legs. It was a witty gesture, with one sophisticated eyebrow raised. It was meant, Zach knew, to signify the staid, respectable casserole conformity of these funny little church-going creatures—as opposed, he guessed, to the wild, natural passion of what they’d “had together.”
He followed her gesture, glanced at the church crowd over his shoulder, smiling at someone he pretended to know. His mind raced over the options and possibilities. He had been planning to confront her anyway, hadn’t he? He had only put it off because she had not contacted him for a few days and, in the heat of chasing Abend, he had allowed himself to hope she was going to let it go. But clearly she wasn’t, so his resolution had to remain strong. He’d done something wrong. He had to face it. He wasn’t going to compound it by letting her terrorize him into lie after lie.
When he looked back at her, she said, “Please, Zach, it really is important to me.”
He nodded once. “I’ll come.”
“Today,” she said. Still warm and gracious, except for her unrelenting eyes.
“If I can.”
“Good. You know where to find me.”
He nodded again. “I do.”
“It’s so nice to see you, Zach.”
“Who was that you were talking to?” Grace’s first question as they walked together to the family Ford. Of course. There was no possible universe in which his wife would not have noticed him talking to a beautiful blonde she didn’t know.
“That writer I told you about, the one who wanted me to help her with research about some novel. She was visiting the area. Saw me in the church.”
“She’s pretty.”
“She is.”
“Did you want to invite her back to the house for lunch?”
He shook his head, making a face. As if to say: he didn’t like the woman much and didn’t want to spend any more time with her than he had to. That was all Grace needed to know. Satisfied, she let the matter drop.
For Zach, however, the entire tone of the day had changed. A pall of melancholy had settled on it, as if the very air had darkened in the way it does before a storm. He resolved to go to see Margo as soon as he could. He had to. He had to let her have her say and answer her. And then it would be one way or another. It would be over or Margo would expose him to Grace. Better the worst than this not-knowing.
Watching his children chatter over lunch—half-listening to his wife regale him with church gossip—he felt with elemental force how much joy they gave him. They were his joy—they and the work he did—just the facts of them. They were what made his life come to life. Which is why the day had turned melancholy for him: he knew that this might be the end of that joy, its last unsullied hours.
He had promised to take the kids to the movies—some animated thing about talking cars or toys or something. He had promised, so he did it. But while he was only too glad to hide his anxieties in the flickering shadows, he was impatient the whole time, wanted to get out of there, to go to Westchester, to get the confrontation with Margo over and done with. By the time the dolls and soldiers and plastic racers had danced through their finale on the screen, it was late afternoon. He couldn’t bear any more waiting.
He had already laid the foundation of his excuses to Grace. He had told her about his revelation in the church. He had said he had to go in to the office to work the lead. It was the best sort of lie, the kind with a lot of truth in it. One more lie, he told himself. One last one. Then the truth will out, for joy or sorrow.
“I’ll be back in three hours,” he told her. An hour to get to Westchester, he figured. An hour with Margo at most. An hour home.
But Grace said, “You’ll get lost in your work and be there till midnight. I know you. Take a change of clothes in case you fall asleep on the cot in the locker room. I won’t wait up.”
When she kissed him at the door, he wove his fingers into her hair and pressed her mouth into his mouth for a long time, even with the kids in the next room. He
wished he could make her one flesh with him, like the Bible said. He wished he’d never touched another woman.
He drove the Ford north through the dying afternoon. The sun dropped toward the pastel trees that lined the highway to his left. It shone in through the driver’s window, making him squint, the way he did when he was focused on a crime scene. In fact, he was focused on his fantasies, fantasy rehearsals of what he would say to Margo, what she would say, how he would answer. Now and then, quick flashes of other fantasies snuck past his mental defenses. He saw her coming toward him naked. He could almost feel the satin of her flesh on his fingers. He could feel her throat in his hands. He imagined strangling her and disposing of her body so that he never had to deal with her again. But these were only surges of perverse imagination. Mostly, he rehearsed what he would say.
He came off the highway as the daylight started to fade. There was the shopping mall that he remembered from last time, and then the town of 19th-century clapboard houses, and then there was forest with mansions hidden in the trees.
He turned off onto the hard-packed dirt road. It was lined with evergreens and canopied with hardwood branches that blocked out the sky, so that it seemed night had already fallen here. After a mile or so, he turned the Ford into Margo’s driveway—wound down the hill into her garden, where orange and yellow flowers were turning colorless with dusk—and approached the stately two-story white clapboard set against the background of the forest preserve.
He parked the red Ford next to her black Mercedes. The house’s front door opened as he stepped out onto the gravel of the drive. Margo presented herself in the doorway like a grand hostess welcoming dinner guests. She was dressed in the same skirt and sweater she had worn to church, but the hair ribbon was gone. Her straight silky blond hair spilled free around her porcelain features.
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