With one last look behind him, Rollins pushed through the revolving door to find a uniformed security guard behind the marble reception desk in the high-ceilinged front hall. Rollins explained who he was.
“Oh, yes,” the guard replied. “You’re expected upstairs.”
The guard had Rollins sign in, then led him around to the elevators. The guard had to turn a key to activate one that would take him up to the seventeenth floor.
The elevator opened directly into the Richardson Brothers’ quarters, where a grandfather clock faced him, along with an oil painting of a clipper ship. He turned left toward a window that gave a partial view of the Atlantic—foggy and gray this morning—between the other high-rises that had sprung up along the waterfront. Unlike Johnson, which was so bright it sometimes made him squint, the Richardson offices were dimly and soothingly lit. With their dark wood paneling, leather furniture, and plentiful antiques, the offices reminded him of the Somerset Club, where his father sometimes took him for lunch after the divorce.
The door to the reception area was open, and Rollins made his way across the thick carpet silently. That was habitual with him, especially around his family. He’d always recognized the benefits of silence as he crept about the house, the little things you could learn. Now, he spotted his mother sharing a leather couch with Mr. Grove underneath a portrait of the founding Richardsons, with their grim visages and bright watch fobs. If Rollins hadn’t known better, he might have taken his mother and Mr. Grove for lovers, they sat together with such familiarity. Mr. Grove, a well-dressed, ruddy-cheeked gent who must be in his early sixties now, had been out to the house many times when Rollins was a child, often bearing a heavy leather bag filled with important-looking documents to sign. Now, he had something of a feminine aspect as he gazed over at Rollins’ mother, who, in her businesslike blue skirt suit, seemed somewhat bemused by all the fawning attention. Her hair was up in a tight bun, a new style for her, and it was grayer than before, and her face seemed somewhat drawn, but there was still the same glint in her eyes.
It was Mr. Grove who noticed Rollins first, and he caused Jane Rollins to turn. “Oh, there you are!” she declared, rearing back a little before she recovered herself. “What a pleasant surprise.” She checked her watch. “So prompt.”
Mr. Grove, seemingly oblivious to any hint of familial strife, immediately stood up and extended a hand. “Good to see you again, my boy.” His voice was soft and welcoming, like well-worn upholstery.
“Buy and hold,” Mrs. Rollins told her son. “That’s the key. I learned that from my father, just as he did from his.” She turned to Mr. Grove with a slight twinkle in her eye: “Wouldn’t you say that our conversation this morning underscores the soundness of that principle?”
“Oh, definitely,” Mr. Grove said obligingly. “I’m always glad to hear from you, and very glad you came in.” He rubbed his hands together as if trying to warm them. “Now, are you sure I can’t call you a cab or something?”
“I have a car waiting, and I’ve got my son here to help me along.”
For the first time, Rollins noticed that a wooden cane leaned up against the couch beside his mother. As she grasped it in her right hand, Mr. Grove alertly stepped toward her to help her to her feet.
“Why, thank you, Nick,” his mother said. She turned to her son. “I’ve been having a little trouble with my hip lately. But nothing to worry about. This damn rain doesn’t help though.”
Mr. Grove saw them out to the hallway. When the elevator arrived, he shook hands with them once more, helped his client into the elevator, and pressed the button for the mezzanine floor for them before stepping back out. He was smiling at them as the doors closed and the elevator descended.
Rollins’ mother raised her cane just outside the front door, and a black Lincoln Town Car came around from its spot in front of a fire hydrant across the way. As Jane Rollins led the way toward it, Rollins did his best to shelter his mother with his umbrella. Once they’d reached the car, he glanced about, checking for onlookers. And again, he saw none.
“You coming?” his mother asked from inside the car.
“Of course.” Rollins went around to the far side and climbed in.
“I thought the Harvard Club would be good,” Mrs. Rollins said.
Rollins said fine, but he had the feeling that he often had with his mother: that her plans were settled and irrevocable regardless of his own wishes.
She looked at Rollins out of the corner of her eye. Her head had dipped with age, as had her eyelids, and, up close, they gave her appearance an unsettling reptilian aspect that was not fully countered by the gold pins in her hair and her faded lipstick. “I have to watch them in there. Oh, they’re so very genteel. You saw our dear Mr. Grove. Such a kind man. But he’d ruin us in a second with some ghastly municipal bonds if I gave him half a chance or, God love us all, Internet stocks. No, I have to come show my face every few months, just to keep them in line.”
They were passing the back of the templelike Boston City Hall, across from the bustling tourist trap, Faneuil Hall. “You live over that way, don’t you?” she asked, tapping on the glass in the direction of the North End. “You’ll have to invite me to see your apartment one of these years. After a while, a mother gets curious, you know.”
“It’s kind of small. I’m not sure you’d like it.”
“I love small things.”
“Not to live in.”
“Well, perhaps not.”
His mother returned to the view, and started reminiscing about Government Center’s previous incarnation as Scollay Square, with its burlesque shows and prostitutes. Actually, she used the word “whores,” much to Rollins’ surprise. No doubt, she’d learned about such things from his father, who was always more attuned to what really went on in the world.
It wasn’t until they were in the small dining room at the Harvard Club (a massive edifice built, Rollins always thought, far more to a towering New York scale than to a cozy Boston one) that Rollins dared to enter potentially dangerous conversational territory. His mother had pulled out a snapshot that Richard had sent her of his children, and Rollins had said, he thought, all the right things, especially about Natalie, whom he genuinely did like. The photo reminded him of Neely’s picture from the Globe’s files and, despite his apprehensions, he decided to mention it. “I ran across a photograph of cousin Cornelia the other day.”
His mother had been babbling on quite cheerfully about Richard’s kids, but now a marked coolness came into her voice. “Oh?” His mother had never warmed to her niece, for reasons Rollins could never quite piece out. In attitude and temperament, they’d seemed perfectly suited. Like his mother, Neely had been very athletic and had gone on to captain the varsity lacrosse team at Smith. She’d always encouraged the children to play whiffle ball or croquet on the lawn in the two summers she stayed with them while her parents traveled abroad. She was a big sister to Rollins and his younger brother those summers, a bright bundle of good cheer. It went so well that Neely returned for a full year the following summer, even though her own parents stayed home. She was eighteen by then, and she’d finished boarding school, but her parents had decided she wasn’t ready for college. Rollins’ mother declared that she needed official duties, so she served as an au pair—baby-sitting mostly, but running the occasional errand as well—while she took art classes in town. His father was more enthusiastic about Neely than his mother was. Father could sometimes be roused to join in the merry lawn games that Neely organized, but Mother never could.
“A friend had it,” Rollins said, referring to the picture of Neely he’d run across.
“Why’d he show it to you?” His mother rearranged the silverware at her place setting.
“She.” He was happy to allude to Marj, especially if she remained unnamed.
“I guess everyone thinks you’re the big expert on Neely now,” his mother added dryly, answering her own question.
Rollins ignored the dig. “It
was a publicity photograph taken for her first book.”
“I never read it.” His mother smeared some butter on her roll.
“Yes, you did,” Rollins reminded her. He’d given her a copy for Christmas and saw her reading it at the breakfast table over her usual muffins the next morning. “You’re thinking of the second one.” That one, Forced Blossoms, had caused a stir, at least in the family, for its explicit sexuality. Words like “labia” had appeared several times in the text. “Remember, you said it was too gynecological?”
The old woman laughed gently. “Oh, yes, I suppose I did.” She added: “Now, you’re not going to tell me she’s turned up somewhere, are you?”
Rollins was struck by her tone of indifference to Neely’s fate. “No.”
“I do wonder what will happen to her money.” His mother said this idly, as if it were of no particular consequence. Rollins figured she had financial topics on her mind after the visit to Mr. Grove.
“There isn’t that much.” With the help of Al Schecter, who was looking into the case for an insurance company, Rollins had figured Neely was worth about $750,000 at the time of her disappearance, much of it in the form of her Londonderry property.
“Oh, but that was before her grandmother died—your uncle George’s mother, Alicia Blanchard.” His mother intensified a little, like a lamp turned up by rheostat. “She was extremely well-off, you know. Extremely.” Rollins’ understanding of that side of the family was somewhat dim, but he’d heard that Alicia’s husband, Joseph, had started up a telecommunications business on the side while he was a professor at MIT. “After old Joe died, she bought a palazzo in Venice overlooking one of the smaller canals, I forget which. I visited once with your stepfather. She was an artist, you know. Did portraits. Sort of blotchy ones. I never much cared for them, but a couple of them ended up in the Worcester art museum. She probably paid to put them there, knowing her.” Her face showed her disdain for such a maneuver. “She thought Neely’s father was a pill.” The dour and portly George Blanchard had gone into commercial real estate in Pittsburgh, although the family had continued to live up here. He’d done extremely well, far better than Jane Rollins’ own husband. “But she did admire Neely. Thought it was distinguished to have a poet in the family.”
The waiter interrupted to take their order. After some quick deliberations, Mrs. Rollins decided on the cod, while her son selected the chicken Caesar. They snapped their menus shut and handed them back.
“Neely’s sexual orientation didn’t bother her grandmother?” Rollins asked.
“Her what?” Jane Rollins interrupted.
“The fact that she was a lesbian?”
“Oh, that. Heavens, no. That might have been part of her appeal. Alicia was quite a freethinker. Left Neely just about everything, from what I heard. Ellie was furious, not that she needed the money, God knows.” Eleanor was his mother’s sister, Cornelia’s mother. “She thought it was a terrible slap in the face.”
“How much was it?” Rollins hadn’t known any of this.
“After the estate taxes, it might have been as high as four or five million. And that was—what? Four years ago, something like that. You know how the stock market has been going. It could be twice that now.”
This was astonishing. “Didn’t she know that Neely was…gone?”
“Certainly she knew. She was fascinated by the whole story. Absolutely fascinated. We had quite a lively correspondence about it. But she never cared for Ellie. In-laws can be like that, you’ll find. And George was so useless. She had no other children, and only the one grandchild. No, to her, Cornelia was the last great hope. I think she figured this might be some kind of inducement for her to come back.”
“She couldn’t come back if she was dead.”
“I never could convince her that she was.”
“You should have sent her my story, then.”
His mother’s face fell abruptly. The Beacon story had always been a sore point between them. Rollins knew, because she had never once mentioned it to him—although she had given her sister Ellie an earful, filled with terms like “appalling” and “public spectacle,” which Ellie had passed on to Rollins one afternoon over tea.
His mother gazed at him openmouthed for a moment—a most unmotherly sight; she looked like a flounder—before she composed herself. “Oh, that,” she said. “I don’t think we need to discuss that.” Then, perhaps realizing that she had raised her voice slightly, she smiled. Her public smile. The one she used to assure anyone who might be watching that she was, as always, enjoying herself immensely.
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Rollins said bravely, knowing that his words had some fight in them.
Jane Rollins did not respond, but merely glanced at her watch. “Where is that waiter? The service here is so slow.” After a brief, uncomfortable silence, she straightened herself up in her chair, took a small sip of water, and returned to her story of Neely’s grandmother as if, Rollins thought, the awkward intervening segment of the conversation had never occurred. “Alicia thought Neely had simply gone off somewhere. She saw her as a great romantic, with all her own—what do you call it? Wanderlust, that’s the word. A very stubborn lady, Alicia.”
“So what’s become of the money?”
Her face hardened again. “You aren’t planning to write any more about this, are you?”
“Mother, please.” It had been a long time since he had felt so provoked by her.
“I’d like some advance warning, that’s all.”
“You know I haven’t written anything in years.”
“And aren’t planning to?”
It was irritating the way she kept pushing at him, trying to control him, even now. Rollins was tempted to jump up from his seat, toss his napkin down on the table, and storm out of the dining room with a few choice words hurled in her direction. But such childishness—which he had never descended to, even as a child—would only have confirmed his mother’s opinion of him. Far better to wait, to let the feeling pass, as he knew it eventually would. “No, mother,” he replied finally. “That’s all done. No more journalism for me.”
She smiled again. “I can’t say that I’m sorry. I never thought it suited you, darling.”
Rollins said nothing. He missed his old job at the Beacon, burrowed in his tiny office, gathering his private store of information, then serving it up to the world in small, manageable doses. It seemed so much more meaningful than what he did now at Johnson.
“Do you?” she probed, clearly trying to press her advantage.
“Perhaps not,” he conceded.
His mother gave him a sideways look. “You do surprise me sometimes, you know. Now, Richard, he is what he is. Totally transparent. But, with you, I’m never sure. Sometimes I feel I don’t quite know you.”
Rollins was stunned. This observation, so calmly delivered, felt like a knife slicing into him. Her lack of understanding was all his fault; that was the implication. He tried to think of a suitable reply. But nothing came to mind—or, at least, nothing that would improve the situation or bring him some relief. His one consolation was that his mother seemed not to notice his distress. Having delivered herself of her dire pronouncement, she merely adjusted her hair a little.
“I haven’t any idea about the money,” she added airily. “It’s in her trust, I suppose.”
Rollins knew that Cornelia had such an account overseen by an old-line firm called Hadley and Poor up in Concord, New Hampshire. Schecter had found it, and had had a strained conversation about it with her trust officers, who couldn’t have been less helpful. Schecter told Rollins he sensed that they had been caught unawares by news of their client’s disappearance, but were trying to conceal that fact. After Schecter contacted them, he heard reports from one of his associates that a man in a gray suit had come out to Cornelia’s house to peer in the windows. After considerable back-and-forth, Hadley and Poor finally conceded that there had been no “activity” on Cornelia’s account since
August 27, 1993, about two weeks before the last day that she was known to be alive.
“So the money’s just sitting there?”
“I suppose so. Odd, isn’t it?”
“Very.”
“I wouldn’t have done it, I’ll tell you that. To let all that wonderful money go to waste? It’s absurd. But Alicia was extremely eccentric.” Jane Rollins noticed the waiter passing by an adjoining table. “Excuse me,” she called out to get his attention, and, when he came closer, she pointed out that she and her son had been waiting almost a half hour, a slight exaggeration. “I used to receive much better service here.”
The waiter, a graying Pakistani, stiffened. “I can only do what I can do, madam.” He turned on his heel, bound for another table.
“How unfortunate,” Mrs. Rollins said under her breath.
Rollins felt the harshness of the exchange deep in his gut, but his mother merely finished off the last of her bread.
“Your father proposed to me here, you know.”
“Here?” Rollins hadn’t known.
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