The Pact

by Jennifer Sturman

  “Well, that’s where I grew up. My family’s still out there, too.”

  “Do you have a large family?” asked Luisa. “Brothers, sisters?”

  “Two brothers. I’m the youngest.”

  “So is Rachel,” cried Hilary. “She’s the youngest, and she also has two brothers.” Thatta girl, I thought. Subtle to a fault.

  “What a coincidence,” said Peter. I smiled. He was being a good sport.

  “And did you go to university in California?” asked Luisa.

  “Yep. At Stanford. I did a double major in history and engineering.”

  “How interesting,” said Luisa. “You know, Rachel did a double major, too—economics and English.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Maybe somebody cloned me at birth and Peter and I are actually the same person.” They ignored me.

  “She was the only one of us to graduate summa,” added Hilary. “But she always made it look easy.” I shot her a threatening look, which she blithely pretended not to notice. “And how do you like San Francisco?” she continued, unabashed. “Have you ever though about moving to New York? Rachel’s very attached to New York.”

  I couldn’t handle it anymore. Another couple of minutes and they probably would be requesting bank statements and medical records.

  “I’m getting hot,” I announced to no one in particular. “I think I’ll take a dip.” I stood up and dove from the raft into the water. As I flipped onto my back I heard Hilary asking him why he didn’t have a girlfriend. At least the water was cold enough to promptly freeze any beginnings of a blush.

  I swam away from the raft in the opposite direction from shore. Once I got used to the water, it actually felt refreshing.

  I remained in the water until I felt my lips beginning to turn blue and then made my way back to the raft. As I climbed the ladder I heard Hilary discoursing on her most recent assignment in Pakistan. I smiled to myself. Peter had clearly realized that the best way to distract her from interrogating him was to get her going on her favorite subject—herself.

  “—nuclear capability,” she was saying. “If most Americans only knew the half of it, they’d be terrified.”

  “How was your swim, Rachel?” asked Luisa. We’d had an earful from Hilary on Pakistan and geopolitics on the drive up from New York the previous day.

  “Brisk,” I said, lowering myself down next to Peter. Hilary seemed to take that as a cue.

  “Well,” said Hilary. “I’m going to go in, too. Come on, Luisa. I’ll race you back to shore.” She jumped to her feet.

  I could see Luisa weighing her options. Did she value my friendship enough to voluntarily brave the lake water? Was it worth it, simply to leave me alone for an intimate tête-àtête with Peter? She slowly rose and inched over toward the edge of the raft, peering at the water suspiciously. “It still looks awfully cold.”

  She should have known better than to stand so close to the edge, especially when she’d been pushed in once. Hilary grabbed her around the waist and leaped off the raft, pulling Luisa in with her. She let out an even more blistering stream of curses this time, some of which I’d never heard in either Spanish or English. Hilary took off for the shore with long, effortless strokes, a California girl to the core. Luisa swore again and followed.

  My laughter joined with Peter’s. “Your friends are really…” He searched for the appropriate words.

  “Insane?” I asked.

  “Inquisitive is the word I was looking for.”

  “How did you bear up?”

  “Under the interrogation, you mean? Let’s just say that I’d rather be interviewed by the police for the rest of the weekend than face down those two again.”

  I appreciated his good-natured answer. I surmised from my friends’ willingness to leave me alone with him that he’d passed their exam with flying colors.

  “I don’t know if you could pull that off,” I warned. “I think Hilary’s already staked her claim to any of O’Donnell’s spare time.”

  “I don’t know if he’ll have any. They seem pretty intent on the investigation.”

  “Hilary’s always loved a challenge.”

  “Well, I think she’s found one. O’Donnell seemed all business to me.” His tone remained pleasant, but I sensed a note of tension.

  “Did they give you a hard time?”

  “The police? Let’s just say that Emma’s mother isn’t the only person who’s curious about the matter of Richard’s will. I guess they found copies of both the old and the new one in his room. And they also seem to have discovered that my company’s desperate for cash. They seemed pretty hung up on the idea.”

  “They can’t honestly believe that you would have…” my voice trailed off.

  “Who knows?” He shrugged. “The irony, of course, is that I don’t think Richard had much money to speak of. His mother did a pretty good job of running through his father’s estate, and Richard himself was the master of the highly leveraged lifestyle.”

  “I keep hoping they’ll decide the entire thing was an accident and pack it in.”

  “Richard wasn’t the sort to meet with accidental death. Untimely death—certainly. But accidental death? I don’t think so.” He seemed to be talking to himself as much as to me.

  “How—how are you doing?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  I chose my words carefully. “Well, everyone’s so casual. It must seem sort of inappropriate to you since you and Richard were actually close. And it must be hard, to be upset when the rest of us have barely skipped a beat.”

  He paused before answering. “You know, I told you last night that Richard and I weren’t really in touch. To be candid, we haven’t been really close since we were teenagers. I felt incredibly awkward when he asked me to be his best man, but I would have felt even worse refusing him. That’s not the sort of thing you say no to.”

  “No,” I agreed. “It’s not.” I had briefly thought about refusing Emma’s request to be her maid of honor. It had seemed so dishonest given how I felt about the groom. But her friendship was more important to me than taking a stand, and I’d realized that she was intent on going forward with the wedding, regardless of whatever stand I took.

  “Richard didn’t seem to have endeared himself to Emma’s friends.”

  “No, I’m afraid he didn’t.” I liked Peter too much to try to get by with a platitude.

  “I guess that all of the qualities that were so much fun when we were kids didn’t make him a lot of friends as an adult.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, curious as to what Richard had been like as a child. I’d always wondered whether he had been born an utter jerk or evolved into one.

  “Oh, stupid things, mostly. He always had a plan up his sleeve, a scheme of some sort. Not just silly pranks, but ways to get good grades without doing a lick of work, ways to get extra money from his mother, that sort of thing. He was always looking for shortcuts. And he had this incredible ability to pull anything off, because he could talk his way out of any situation. Our teachers loved him. They would fall for all of his lines. And he just sort of skated along on the basis of his charm and his wits.”

  “That sounds a lot like the Richard I knew,” I said, as noncommittally as I could.

  “It’s funny—my parents never liked him much. I think they were relieved when he went away to school and I wasn’t spending as much time with him. They thought he was a bad influence.” He gave a small laugh, remembering.

  “Well, it sounds like he didn’t have much of a family life to ground him in any way,” I commented, referring to the conversation we’d had in the kitchen before lunch.

  “No,” agreed Peter. “He didn’t.” He was quiet for a bit, but then he continued in a firmer tone. “Still, there comes a point when someone has to take responsibility for his own actions—you can’t just keep blaming your mother for screwing you up.”

  I thought about that, silently agreeing with him. I’d never had much patience for Fr
eud or the endless analysis of one’s childhood experiences that seemed to constitute so much of psychotherapy. So many people just seemed to use whatever happened in their childhoods as an excuse to keep them from moving forward. I thought about my most recent ex-boyfriend, a guy who spent more time with his therapist than he did with me. I’d heard the story about how his mother had lost him in the park one day on seven different occasions. Surely, thirty years later, he should have been able to get beyond that? And then, of course, there was all of that stuff about penis envy. What a hoax.

  “In a way,” Peter confessed, “I wasn’t surprised when you told me this morning that Richard was dead. It was as if I somehow always knew he’d come to a bad end. I just wish that there had been a way to make things turn out differently.”

  “There’s nothing you could have done,” I said. Reassuring words seemed called for.

  He shrugged again. “I know that, on a rational level. Still, I feel like I had some sort of responsibility to him. That I messed up somehow.” I knew exactly how he felt. I’d long since realized how fortunate I was to have such a close-knit group of friends. The loyalty we’d pledged to each other was more than idle words or a rush of ephemeral emotion. If anything were to happen to any one of them, I knew I would be asking myself the same questions.

  I looked at Peter. His brown eyes were pointed toward shore, but his gaze was unfocused, as if he were deep in thought.

  I reached over and put my hand on his arm. “There’s nothing you could have done,” I said again, this time more forcefully.

  He turned to me. “I hope you’re right.”

  “I know I’m right.” Our eyes locked for a long moment. I realized that I was holding my breath. His head drew a tiny bit closer and I was painfully conscious of the touch of his skin under my hand.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  I shook off the moment, suddenly scared, and drew back, my heart beating rapidly. “You won’t be thanking me when I beat you to shore.” I quickly jumped to my feet and dove back into the water, not turning to see if he was behind me.

  “Chicken,” I said to myself as I raced through the water. “Goose, wimp, wuss. Chicken.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Peter and I tied each other in the race to shore, but as we dried off our conversation felt stilted and awkward, as if we’d come close to a precipice and backed away. He put on his T-shirt and I knotted my sarong tightly around my waist, and we proceeded together up the path to the house. The entire way, I cursed myself for having succumbed to skittishness and let such an exquisite moment pass. Maybe to have let things go any further would have been to take advantage of Peter’s tenuous emotional state, but he had seemed willing to be taken advantage of. I sighed. If he hadn’t realized what a freak I was before, that fact had to be blatantly obvious now.

  We didn’t run into anyone as we passed through the kitchen door and headed up the back stairs. We parted ways on the second floor. We both wanted to shower, and Peter said he had some more calls to make for work. His diligence made me remember, somewhat reluctantly, my own responsibilities. I made a mental note to check Mr. Furlong’s fax machine for the papers from Stan after I’d showered and changed.

  I was halfway to Emma’s room and Peter had already mounted the first few stairs to the third floor when he stopped and turned. “Rachel,” he called.

  “Hmmm?” I answered, retracing my steps.

  “Thank you. For what you said out there. You made me feel a lot better.” The slight smile on his face was almost shy.

  “Of course,” I answered, embarrassed. I headed back down the hallway before he could see me beginning to blush all over again.

  Emma’s door was slightly ajar, and as I approached I heard a male voice within.

  “Look, Emma, you know what you have to do.” It was Matthew, I realized.

  “I can’t. You know I can’t. How can you even ask me to? You, of all people, should understand.”

  “Well, maybe I should do it.”

  “No! Promise me you won’t. Matthew, you can’t.”

  I heard him sigh. “I promise. But just for now, Emma.”

  I reversed a few paces, coughed loudly, and burst through the door with as innocent a smile as I could muster plastered on my face. “Hello,” I said brightly.

  Emma was sitting on her bed wearing a thick Irish fisherman’s sweater, much like the one she’d given me. Her knees were pulled up to her chest as she leaned against the headboard. Matthew was perched on the windowsill.

  “Hi, Rach,” said Emma.

  “How was your swim?” asked Matthew.

  “Chilly,” I answered.

  “In a good way?” asked Emma.

  “No, in a cold way. But it was a nice break.”

  “Speaking of breaks,” said Matthew, pushing himself off the sill, “I should get back downstairs and see if the police are done with Jane yet and if they’re ready for you, Emma. It’d be good to get your interview over with so that they can leave already. I’ll be back in a minute.” He slipped through the door, and I shut it after him. Emma remained on her bed, her arms wrapped around her knees, her eyes downcast.

  I started to sit down next to her, then remembered that my swimsuit was still wet. I took the place that Matthew had vacated on the windowsill instead. I wanted to confront her with what I’d heard—with all the questions I had—but she hadn’t been willing to tell me anything earlier. Still, one way or another, I was determined to get to the bottom of everything. I couldn’t help unless I had more information, and I couldn’t get any information if Emma kept hoarding her secrets.

  “So, how are you feeling?” I asked, easing into conversation.

  “Spacey,” she said. “I don’t know what was in the pill my mother gave me, but I still feel as if I’m in a cocoon of some sort.” I watched as she toyed with her engagement ring, a ruby surrounded by diamonds in an antique platinum setting. “I hear I missed quite a scene at lunch today,” she continued. “My mother sounds to have been in rare form. Grandmother Schuyler would be scandalized. I don’t think she’d approve much of a hostess suggesting that her guests are murderers.”

  I guessed that Matthew had recounted the lunchtime conversation for Emma. “Your mother was—well, I think she’s had an upsetting day,” I said, as delicately as I could. It’s one thing for someone to mock her own mother, however affectionately. It’s an entirely different thing for somebody else to concur, much less to point out that she’d consumed an entire bottle of wine unaided, no matter how much pressure the poor woman was under.

  Emma gave a soft laugh. “Very tactful, my dear.”

  “Thank you. Grandma Benjamin didn’t speak much English, but what she did say was always extremely polite. I try to do her memory proud.”

  “I bet they would have liked each other.”

  “Who? Our grandmothers?” I tried to picture it. Arianna Schuyler had been an icon of style in her time, with blood so blue it was practically royal. Grandma Benjamin, on the other hand, had been a Russian Jewish émigré. But she had been formidable in her own way. “You’re probably right,” I said, after I’d thought it over. “Although, I have a hard time imagining them gossiping over lunch at La Côte Basque.”

  “And what fabulous gossip today’s events would be.” She chuckled. “Poor Richard. He’ll end up getting more press by dying than he could have ever hoped for alive.” Her voice didn’t indicate even the slightest bit of grief or anguish.

  “You must be…” I hesitated, searching for the right words. She interrupted before I could find them.

  “Relieved?”

  “Emma! That’s not what I was going to say.”

  “It’s all right, Rachel. I am. Relieved. I mean, I’m sorry it all had to turn out this way, but I can’t say I’m sorry that I’m not ever going to be Mrs. Richard Mallory.”

  This was the opening I’d been looking for and I seized it. “If you felt that way, Em, then what was this all about? Why were you marrying him? Please,
Emma. If you tell me, then maybe I can help in some way.”

  She sighed. “Look, I told you before. I can’t tell you. Even if I could, it’s too complicated even to begin to explain. And, given the circumstances, it’s probably not wise. People would think that I did the evil deed myself.” I realized with a vague shock that I was glad to hear her say that. On some level, I had been scared to find out that she had, in fact, been guilty in some way of Richard’s death. Her words, while cynical, seemed to point to her innocence. I fought the urge to ask her directly about the late-night rendezvous Peter had mentioned.

  “Will you at least tell me what you think happened?” I asked instead. She replied with equal bluntness.

  “I think somebody put something in his drink that knocked him out, and then, when he was unconscious, pushed him into the pool. I mean, even if you weren’t very strong you could probably push him or roll him over the side into the water.”

  It chilled me anew to think that she’d already thought this through. Especially when, as far as I knew, she’d been the last person to see Richard alive.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” she continued, as if she were reading my mind. “I didn’t do it. I was ready to go through with the whole wedding, no matter how horrifying it would have been.” She gave a small shudder.

  “But even more horrifying,” she went on, “is that here I am, surrounded by the people I love most, and somebody had the guts to do what I never could have. And whoever it was did it for me.”

  “Em, you must realize you’re not responsible for this. For Richard being dead.”

  She shrugged. “Unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that, on one level or another, I am. If I’d been smart enough to stay away from him in the first place and to see through all the initial romance and excitement of it, he would have never gotten close to us and none of this ever would have happened. I wouldn’t have had to put anybody through all of this.”

  I thought about the romance and excitement. Emma had always had a weakness for men who were aggressively social and ambitious, men who were interested in her for all the wrong reasons. On some level, I guessed that she was trying to live up to what she felt her parents expected—that her own life be as high-profile and glamorous as their own. But, even if the initial attraction had been there early on and could be easily understood, I was still confused about why she’d continued the relationship once she’d gotten a clear sense of what Richard was all about.