The Pact

by Jennifer Sturman

It wasn’t my place to point out that if he’d been up at the house he would have been able to ascertain this for himself, firsthand. “She seems to be,” I replied. “Mrs. Furlong and Matthew have been keeping a pretty close watch over her.”

  “Poor girl.”

  “Yes.”

  “But there’s more strength in her than people realize.”

  “Yes, there really is,” I agreed. Not that I’d given her any credit for it, I thought glumly.

  “She must be exhausted, too,” he continued. “You all were up late last night, on top of everything else, weren’t you?” The inelegant way he asked this made me feel that he was fishing for something, but I wasn’t sure what.

  “Actually, I think Emma’s one of the only people who got a good night’s sleep. She went to bed right after the dinner.”

  “She did?”

  “Sure. I came in around two and she was sound asleep.”

  “She was?” He sounded relieved.

  “Yes,” I confirmed.

  But I was busy thinking that I didn’t like that tone in his voice one bit. It was as if he’d just laid some important concern to rest.

  As if he’d suspected his own daughter.

  A very simple, very innocent explanation, I chanted to myself. But no amount of chanting could banish the sick sensation from the pit of my stomach.

  CHAPTER 19

  Emma was still sequestered in the library with the detectives when we arrived back at the house. Jacob took up a position outside the library door to wait for his daughter to emerge, and I headed upstairs to the fax machine.

  I quickly replaced the toner with the fresh cartridge and called in to OS yet again. Cora had been replaced by the evening supervisor, who agreed to dig up the fax and resend it. She sounded harried and cautioned that she had a couple of rush orders to deal with so it might take a while for her to get to it. I told her that was fine, hung up the phone, and went downstairs. My own late night, early morning and midday cocktail hour was beginning to take its toll, and I was in dire need of some more caffeine.

  I took a can of Diet Coke from the refrigerator in the kitchen and stepped onto the porch, hoping for some quiet time to figure out the very simple, very innocent explanation for why Jacob had suspected his own daughter and to remind myself of all of the other reasons that there was a very simple, very innocent explanation for Richard’s death.

  I started to turn back when I saw Hilary sitting on the wide old-fashioned bench swing that overlooked the lake. Her nose was buried in a thick book, but I’d known Hilary long enough to recognize that the odds of finding quiet time with her around were about as slim as the odds of winning the lottery. But the spring on the screen door foiled my retreat, drawing the door shut with a small bang. Hilary turned at the noise.

  “Hey, Rach,” she called, motioning me over. I went to sit beside her, the swing rocking with my weight. I flipped open the can of soda and took a sip.

  “What’re you reading?” I asked. She showed me the title, something dry-sounding about oil, Islam, and politics in the Middle East.

  “Prepping for my next assignment,” she explained. “I pitched a series of articles about fundamentalism in Egypt, and there are a couple of magazines that have expressed an interest.”

  “That’s great. And there’s lots of indoor plumbing in Egypt, isn’t there?”

  “More than most of the places I go.”

  “That’s not a very high bar,” I commented.

  “So, have you heard any news?” she asked, gesturing in the vague direction of inside, and, presumably, the library where the detectives were ensconced.

  “No. You?”

  “No. I brought some iced tea in to the police a little while ago, when they were between interviews, but they weren’t very talkative. I’m beginning to think that O’Donnell must be gay.”

  “You know, Hil, it’s possible that he’s just busy doing his job. I’d imagine that most police detectives aren’t very flirtatious when they’re conducting an investigation.”

  “True, but do most of the people police interview for a murder case look like me?”

  There didn’t seem to be a good answer to that. I shrugged and took another sip of my soda instead.

  “What’s wrong, Rach?” asked Hilary. “You seem a bit cranky.”

  “I’m just stressed. We are in the middle of a murder investigation,” I reminded her.

  “Maybe you should take something. I’ve got some Xanax upstairs. It’s great for anxiety.”

  “What’re you doing with Xanax?” I asked, alarmed. Hilary was a handful all on her own; Hilary on drugs was too much to contemplate.

  “Oh, I’ve got a whole arsenal of stuff in my bag. You can get pretty much anything over the counter in Asia, so I stock up. Xanax, Halcion, Ambien. Nothing too serious. Just the sorts of things that help me sleep on red-eyes or deal with jet lag.” It occurred to me that if I hadn’t been so intent on convincing myself that there was a very simple, very innocent explanation for everything I might have found it disturbing to discover yet another person besides Matthew with the means to knock Richard out.

  “I think I’ll be all right,” I said, demurring on the Xanax.

  “Okay. But let me know if you change your mind.”

  “I’ll beep you. All drug dealers have beepers, right?”

  “Funny.”

  “I try.” I nursed my soda, and Hilary fell into an uncharacteristic silence. It lasted for a good thirty seconds, probably a record for her.

  “Rach?” she said, with a rare tentativeness.

  “Hmm?”

  “There’s something you should probably know.” Her words reminded me with a jolt that Luisa had said something remarkably similar before Matthew had interrupted her. That combined with Jane’s account of Hilary and Luisa’s nocturnal activities made me loath to hear what was on Hilary’s mind. I had a feeling that anything she might say would do little to contribute to finding a very simple, very innocent explanation.

  “What?” I asked, my heart beginning to beat faster. I took a bracing swig of my Diet Coke.

  “Here’s the thing—” began Hilary.

  “Do I want to hear this?” I interrupted.

  “I don’t know. And what I’m struggling with is if anyone wants to hear this. Or if anyone should hear this. But Luisa and I discussed it and we’ve chosen you as the guinea pig.”

  “Lucky me.”

  “Be quiet already and just listen,” she demanded. “We want to know what you think. Luisa tried before but she said she didn’t get the chance, and we agreed that the next one who got you alone would try again. You’re the analytical thinker in the group. Jane’s too eager to believe that everything was all an accident, and when you hear what I have to say you’ll understand that we couldn’t talk to Emma about it.”

  “So just tell me already.” Like the icy lake water, the best way to get this over with was probably to plunge right in.

  “Well, after we came in from the dock last night, Luisa and I went up to our room and were talking for a while about how horrifying the entire situation was. You know, about how Richard was such a pig and how incredibly unhappy Emma seemed. And eventually we decided to come back down. It was around four or so. We were just going to go into Richard’s room and give him a bit of a talking-to. We felt like we owed it to Emma.” She paused, as if she were reluctant to say what happened next. This was peculiar. Hilary hardly ever paused for breath when she was telling a story in which she played a leading role.

  “And…?” I asked, impatient. “Then what?”

  “Well, we found him sprawled out on a lounge chair next to the pool. We thought he’d just fallen asleep, and we tried to wake him up. It took us a few minutes to realize he wasn’t breathing.” She gazed before her, as if she were reliving the scene in her head, and shivered. “It was really creepy.”

  It may have been creepy, but it was nice to hear that she and Luisa didn’t seem to be the reason Richard wasn’t breathi
ng, especially now that I knew about Hilary’s arsenal of dubiously obtained prescription drugs. “And…?” I prompted again.

  “It was also worrying, for another reason. You see, when we came downstairs, we heard someone coming in from outside, and we ducked into the library so we wouldn’t be seen. We only caught a glimpse, reflected in a mirror in the hallway, so it was hard to be sure who it was, exactly.”

  “Who did you think it was?” I asked with a sinking sensation. I had a bad feeling about what she was going to say next.

  “We’re pretty sure it was Emma,” she continued. “So there we were. We’d just seen Emma on her way in from the pool. Then we found Richard dead, and there were two empty glasses beside him. It looked really, really suspicious. We couldn’t be sure of what had happened, and we knew that Emma would never have done anything to him, but it still didn’t look good for her. So we thought we’d try to make it appear as if Richard had had an accident of some sort. We picked him up and slid him into the pool. We were very careful to wipe away any fingerprints we may have left. Then we took the glasses into the kitchen, put them in the dishwasher, and ran it. On the superscrub function. And then we went back upstairs and waited until somebody found him.”

  “Geez,” I said. “You could have warned me. I nearly had a heart attack when I saw him.”

  “It never occurred to us that you would be up at the crack of dawn. There’s no precedent whatsoever for such behavior on your part. You usually sleep until noon on weekends. And I guess you managed to sleep though Emma leaving your room and coming back in, too.”

  I thought about this. I really was a deep sleeper; Emma had managed to sneak out without waking me. And it fit with what Peter had told me.

  “Maybe Emma thought he’d just passed out and went back to bed.”

  “Maybe. But do you really think that’s likely?”

  “Are you suggesting that Emma killed him?” I asked, an accusing note in my voice.

  “Look, Rach. I know that Emma wouldn’t hurt a fly, much less a cockroach like Richard. But how can you explain it?”

  “I don’t know. But Emma couldn’t have done it. Come on, Hil. We’ve been friends with Emma for half our lives, practically. Can you really imagine her killing someone so cold-bloodedly?”

  “Is cold-bloodedly a word?”

  “Hilary,” I replied, in my most threatening tone of voice.

  “Okay, okay. I don’t want to think Emma did it. But, for chrissakes, explain to me who did.”

  “God, Hil. I don’t know.” I was trying to sort through the logistics in my head. Peter said he saw Emma with Richard at the pool around three. And Hilary and Luisa had seen her around four. What could have happened in that one-hour window of time?

  “So. Now what?” Hilary asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Luisa and I decided that we shouldn’t tell anyone about this. But we wanted a second opinion. And, as I said, you’re the guinea pig.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Anytime.”

  I thought for a moment, looking out at the still waters of the lake. “I don’t think you should tell anyone else.”

  “Really?” Hilary sounded relieved. “We didn’t think so, either. But it’s reassuring to hear it from someone else.”

  Reassured was the last thing I felt, but I laid out my reasoning anyhow. “You and Luisa destroyed whatever evidence there might have been that would have proven who did kill Richard by cleaning everything up. You probably got rid of any fingerprints, and you washed the glasses. It’s a good news-bad news scenario. On the one hand, you made it hard to tie Emma to any crime. On the other hand, you also made it difficult to tie anyone else to it, to exonerate Emma by getting at who really killed him.”

  “So what will happen? If the police can’t tie anyone to it?”

  “I don’t know. Won’t they just have to chalk it up as an accident?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  It sounded good to me, too. But I still wanted to know what had happened during that mysterious, unexplained hour when Emma was alone with Richard.

  Somehow, that very simple, very innocent explanation seemed to be getting more and more elusive.

  CHAPTER 20

  Dinner that evening was about as pleasant as lunch had been. After Emma finished with the police, she met Lily’s suggestion of another sedative with an acquiescent nod and let Matthew and her parents lead her up the stairs to bed.

  I couldn’t see how Emma’s time with the police could have been anything but excruciating. O’Donnell seemed too thorough to cross her off the list of suspects simply out of courtesy. Between fighting off lines of questioning that called into doubt her own innocence and trying to protect the family and friends of whose innocence she was unsure, Emma, who was not an extrovert under the best of circumstances, must have been tested to the utmost. A deep, drug-induced sleep was probably a treat for her at this point. I, for one, would have been delighted to excuse myself from dinner and hop immediately into bed.

  Alas. I knew enough about being a houseguest to recognize that dinner was a mandatory event. O’Donnell and Paterson left for the night, but at their request, we were all staying on—in fact, we were all staying until we were given notice that we were free to go. The situation created a bit of a Catch-22, given that we all wanted to seem cooperative. To protest would suggest having something to hide. Nor could any of us claim we had anything else to do—we’d all planned to be here through the weekend for the wedding and the Sunday morning brunch.

  Jane and Sean once again took the lead on the culinary front, whipping up a gourmet feast of chicken marsala and asparagus risotto with their usual effortless grace in the kitchen. However, the quality of the cooking, the nice way Peter held my chair for me as we sat down, and even the fine Italian wines Mr. Furlong brought up from the wine cellar couldn’t begin to mitigate the tension and gloom that hung over the table like an uninvited guest. Mr. and Mrs. Furlong positioned themselves at opposite ends of the table and did their best to imitate how genial, well-mannered parents would behave when hosting a dinner for their daughter’s circle of friends, but few of us were feeling particularly talkative.

  Fortunately, Hilary was capable of talking at great length with minimal support from her dining companions. She had taken advantage of the downtime that afternoon to sneak in a nap and had materialized at dinner thoroughly refreshed, radiating so much energy that it made me tired just to look at her. She danced from one topic to another, drawing on her extensive travels as a journalist, delighting in unraveling for her captive audience the Byzantine political intrigues of countries I’d never even seen on a map. The only participation required from the rest of us was an occasional murmur of wonder or assent.

  Probably only a few people at the table caught the sharp edge in Mrs. Furlong’s voice when she commented that Hilary traveled even more than Matthew’s sister. “How is Nina?” she asked Matthew. “It seems as if she’s always gallivanting about from one exotic locale to the next. What a fascinating job your sister has, but it does seem to make for a difficult schedule. We were so sad that she couldn’t be here this weekend, although I guess, given the way things turned out, it’s just as well.” I snuck a peek at Mr. Furlong’s face to see how he reacted to the mention of Nina’s name. But his expression betrayed nothing as Matthew updated everyone on Nina’s trip overseas to cover the designer shows in Florence.

  I wondered again if Emma was right about her father’s affair; if he truly was involved with Nina, he had one of the best poker faces I’d encountered, even in my years of negotiating with some of the wiliest, most poker-faced deal makers on Wall Street. But Emma wasn’t one to jump to conclusions, and she’d seemed very sure of what she’d told me.

  Hilary neatly regained control of the conversation after this divergence, steering it away from Nina and back to herself. I found my mind wandering as she held forth. I was having that strange feeling again, as if we were trapped in an Agatha Christie no
vel gone wrong. I was confident that Emma was innocent, and I was trying to hold firm to my resolve to stop meddling, but the way every new piece of information seemed only to strengthen a case against Emma made it hard to sit silently by while events ran their course. I kept trying to take comfort in the knowledge that all of the things I knew—that Emma was so unhappy at the prospect of marrying Richard, that she’d been alone with him around the time he must have died—the police didn’t.

  The convenient thing about Hilary’s monologue was that it gave me the opportunity to collect my thoughts, to think through what could have happened in a structured, analytical manner. I still didn’t know what I would do if I got to an answer, but anything had to be better than being both anxious and clueless. One by one, I considered the options—or, more accurately, the potential suspects.

  Of course, the first, most obvious person to address wasn’t at the table but safely tucked away in one of the twin beds in her bedroom. From what Emma had said to me that afternoon, and from what I’d witnessed of her relationship with Richard, she had agreed to marry him under some form of duress. I couldn’t even begin to think of what he must have held over her; Emma, unlike most people I knew, led a remarkably blameless life. I briefly considered the idea that she might be pregnant, but then discarded it just as quickly. Beyond the fact that her birth control pills were sitting out in plain view on the counter next to her bathroom sink, she’d had several glasses of champagne the previous evening. And in this day and age, pregnancy wasn’t enough of a reason to marry someone, particularly if you were independently wealthy and had a strong emotional support network of family and friends.

  Regardless of how Richard had coerced Emma into their engagement, it was becoming increasingly clear that she had been desperately unhappy about it. So I guessed that was motive right there. And, according to Peter, she’d had opportunity. She, of all people, easily could have snuck something strong into Richard’s drink when she met him out by the pool. But on the amorality and sheer guts front, Emma just didn’t stack up. I’d once seen her trap a fly in a jar and set it free outside rather than simply swat it with a magazine, like a normal person would do. That was hardly the act of a person who could murder her fiancé in cold blood.