Across the table from me sat Matthew, another high-potential suspect. His motive was abundantly clear. As for opportunity, Matthew was a doctor—he probably had easy access to something that could have been used to knock Richard out. And, staying in the pool house with Richard, he probably had the opportunity to act once Emma had returned to bed. But, once again, I just couldn’t picture it. Matthew had dedicated his life to healing others, not to harming them. He’d shunned offers to join prestigious Park Avenue surgical practices in order to devote himself to a free clinic in one of the worst neighborhoods in South Boston. I was confident that I had more potential for evil in my little finger than Matthew had in his entire body. Besides, he of all people would realize that the medical examiner would be able to trace any drugs or poisons found in Richard’s bloodstream.
I turned my gaze to the head of the table, where Mr. Furlong sat. His relief at my reassurances that Emma had been asleep the previous evening might have been relief that he didn’t have to worry that she’d witnessed any treachery on his part rather than suspicions about what she may have done. Since he was staying in his studio last night, it would have been easy for him to move about without fear of being seen by someone in the house. The argument he’d had with Emma last night, the one Peter and I had overheard, left no doubt that he, too, was intensely opposed to the imminent marriage. He was also a fiercely protective father. Still, lots of fathers were unhappy about their daughters’ choice of husbands, but that didn’t mean they killed the groom before the wedding could take place. And I couldn’t help but think that if Mr. Furlong was going to kill someone, he’d do it in a far more violent and direct manner than poison. He probably wouldn’t even use a weapon but rely on his bare hands and ferocious will.
Mrs. Furlong sat opposite her husband at the foot of the table. I wondered what she had really thought of Richard. Before today, I had never heard her express anything but enthusiasm about Richard and the wedding. Except for her momentary lapse at lunch, she was usually so unfailingly polite that it was impossible to know what was really going on in her head. While her delicate exterior belied extraordinarily strong resolve, as well as a great deal of inner turmoil, surely her rigid sense of decorum would rebel against anything as inappropriate as doing in her daughter’s fiancé the night before the wedding? It would be the ultimate social faux pas, not to mention the way it had created a logistical nightmare, what with all of the plans we’d had to cancel that morning, the gifts to be returned, and the wedding announcement to be pulled from the New York Times at the very last minute.
Next to me sat Peter, who was eating with a gusto that I found very appealing. I was confident that Peter had no motive to kill Richard. Why, he’d clearly been just as shocked to learn about Richard’s will as any of us. So what if Peter’s company needed money? Richard could hardly have had enough to make a difference, especially if Peter needed to get his hands on it quickly. I guessed he’d had the opportunity, although he would have had to wait until after Emma and Richard’s rendezvous, which would have involved a lot of lurking around in an unfamiliar household without being seen. Besides, what kind of person would travel three thousand miles across the country to kill off his oldest friend? Peter was far too cute to be capable of such deceit. I crossed him off the list of suspects.
That left only my four roommates and Sean, an equally unpleasant set of potential candidates. Sure, we had made a pact many years ago, had joked about “wasting” a guy if he proved unsuitable. But like the pact we’d made to give up caffeine, it wasn’t actually practical. And when I considered my friends, I couldn’t believe that any of them had really seen fit to act on that long-ago promise.
What Hilary had told me out on the porch explained the noises Jane had heard coming from the room she and Luisa shared as well as their lack of surprise this morning. Still, Hilary also hated Richard, not only on Emma’s behalf but because he’d had the gall to break up with her, something that undoubtedly had made her blood boil. But if Hilary killed every man with whom she’d had a failed romantic encounter, there would have been a long and gory trail of bodies in her wake. While she was usually the one doing the breaking up, she was confident enough to take the occasional rejection in stride. Murder in a fit of passion, I could almost picture, but the way this had been carried out didn’t mesh with anything I knew about Hilary’s style or character.
Luisa, of course, had the best reason of any of us to hate Richard. There would have been a lovely sort of poetic justice, as she herself noted, to turning the tables, putting something in his drink and doing him harm, just as he had done to her. But more than a decade had passed since he had, by her own admission, raped her. And even if revenge was a dish best served cold, Luisa’s mantra of laissez faire when it came to the affairs of others would have prevented her from intruding on what was now Emma’s business.
I recognized that Hilary’s and Luisa’s account of finding Richard already dead could have been a cover story on their part, but I doubted this was the case. And while I knew that Jane and Sean hated Richard as much as the rest of us, murder, no matter how you sliced it, was not playing fair. Jane and Sean, with their athlete’s code of honor, were all about fair play.
Finally, there was me. It would be unfair not to turn my analytics inward. I had as much of a motive as anyone at the table, after all, between the professional harm Richard had done me and my friendship with Emma. And poison would have been right up my alley, given my inability to stomach any form of blood and guts. I’d once even passed out watching a particularly gruesome episode of ER. And that was just ketchup.
One of my favorite Agatha Christie’s had always been TheMurder of Roger Ackroyd, in which the narrator ultimately revealed himself as the killer. I was the first to confess that I was deeply ambitious, and the embarrassment Richard had caused me in my professional life was great. And I would do just about anything for Emma, who was the closest thing to family I had, with the exception of my actual family. I might have a killer instinct at work, but could I have a killer instinct in any other part of my life?
I laughed to myself. If Agatha Christie were writing today, would she replace Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, and Terrence and Tuppence with an overworked, admittedly avaricious investment banker? Many of the contemporary mysteries and thrillers I picked up in airports to sustain me through my business travels had female heroines, but they were usually FBI agents, private detectives or at least district attorneys. But Yuppies? I doubted that there was much of a market for MBAs turned amateur sleuths.
Besides, I didn’t even know how to knit.
CHAPTER 21
Dinner finally ended a little after nine, with the gathered company once again declining Mrs. Furlong’s strangely insistent urgings that we all try some wedding cake. It looked like all of that angel food and buttercream frosting was going to go to waste, and I, for one, usually reluctant to pass up anything involving disproportionate quantities of sugar and cream, was perfectly happy to let this opportunity pass me by. Mrs. Furlong sighed with regret then brightened up. “There’s always lunch tomorrow,” she said.
The “children,” such as we were, with an average age among us of thirty-two, assured the Furlongs that we would take care of the cleanup. They agreed without protest and left the dinner dishes to us. Mrs. Furlong admitted to a slight headache before excusing herself and retiring to her room. Given the way she’d been hitting the bottle, I was surprised that her headache was only slight. Directly after his wife disappeared up the stairs, Mr. Furlong bid us good-night and returned to his studio as if this were the usual course of events. I wondered what kind of work he could possibly be getting done with everything that had transpired. I guessed nothing stood in the way of genius, but his powers of concentration were remarkable. Or perhaps he was actually spending long hours on the phone with Nina, whispering sweet nothings across the Atlantic.
We cleared the table and made quick work of rinsing and stacking the dishes in the dishwasher. The rest of t
he evening stretched before us, and while I was tired, I was also increasingly aware that my time with Peter was limited. My analytics at dinner had left me somewhat reassured—if I, with a thorough understanding of the cast of characters and the events of the previous evening, could not figure out who was responsible for Richard’s death, the police would be at an even greater loss. Surely they’d be forced to give up their investigation and chalk the entire incident up as an accident, or at least an unexplained mystery? Inevitably, I hoped, they would give us all permission to leave at some point tomorrow, and while it was nice to be feeling less anxious about one of my friends being found out as a murderer, I now had time to worry about my romantic interests. Once we were free to go, Peter would return to California and I to New York, back to my empty apartment, my overflowing briefcase, and the never-ending stream of voice mails from Stan. To let any potential romance slip through my fingers, even if the object of desire did live on the opposite end of the continent, would be nothing short of a tragedy. I would be a fool to go to bed early, regardless of how tired I was.
“So, now what?” asked Hilary, as Jane flipped the switch to run the dishwasher. “It’s really too bad that we can’t go into town and check out the nightlife. There must be at least one great dive bar nearby, with a pool table and really cheesy jukebox. I wonder how O’Donnell spends his free time up here?”
“You really do have a one-track mind,” observed Sean. He seemed surprised, after all the years he’d known her, by Hilary’s tremendous ability to latch onto an objective and pursue it, refusing to yield to either obstacles or distractions.
“It’s important to stay focused,” responded Hilary flashing him a smile. Perhaps I should take her advice, I thought. I wondered how she’d handle the Peter situation if she were in my shoes.
“Why don’t we go into the living room and light a fire?” I suggested. “We could toast marshmallows or play Scrabble or something.” Probably not how Hilary would have handled it, but at least I’d presented an option that didn’t entail everyone going immediately to sleep.
Luisa laughed. “Parlor games? Oh dear. What have we come to?”
“I think that sounds nice and normal, which should be a refreshing change,” said Jane, neatly folding a dish towel and placing it on the counter by the sink. “Besides, I’m too wound up to go to bed right away.”
“Okay,” said Hilary. “But no charades. I hate charades. And no Pictionary. Lord, but that’s a stupid game. And no chess. It’s too slow. And no…” she headed toward the living room, trailing a list of the games she wouldn’t play behind her.
Matthew begged off and went to check on Emma, but the rest of us filed into the living room, where Sean skillfully built a fire in the old stone fireplace. I opened the wooden armoire that housed various board games, some dating from the 1950s: original editions of Chinese Checkers, Parcheesi, Dominos, and Life. Hilary squealed with delight when she unearthed the battered boxes for Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders, but these were rejected unanimously by everyone else. After some debate, we also rejected Scrabble as being too difficult to play with so many people.
“How about Monopoly?” asked Peter innocently. “I’ve always liked Monopoly.”
Jane groaned. “That’s because you’ve never played it with Rachel.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked indignantly.
“Are you a sore loser?” asked Peter.
“Of course not,” I said. “I never lose at Monopoly.”
“She’s more like a sore winner,” explained Luisa. “She rejoices in beating others mercilessly and then rubbing their faces in their defeat. And it’s not just Monopoly. Anything that involves dice or money or numbers turns her into a demon. There was one spring break when we had to ban Rachel from all of our card games because she was such a shark.”
“Hypercompetitive bitch would be a more accurate description,” said Hilary. They’d clearly exhausted their abilities to talk me up that afternoon on the raft.
“Well, in that case, maybe Rachel and I should be on the same team,” said Peter. Ah. A kindred spirit.
“Unless, of course, you’re all too chicken to play,” I added.
“Oh God, here we go,” said Jane, resigned. We paired off, Peter and I against Jane and Sean and Hilary and Luisa, and set the board up on the coffee table. I loved Monopoly with a passion that probably bordered on unhealthy. It was so much easier to make piles of paper money than it was to make piles of real money, and much more fun than dealing with Stan and his ilk. During the next ninety minutes, Peter proved that he could play Monopoly just as well as he could dance, which, in my book, was an even more desirable trait. Our strategies were perfectly aligned, and we acted as a seamless commando unit. Boldly, we stormed the board, buying up every property we landed on and mortgaging them all to the hilt so that we could buy yet more, then using our rents to build houses and hotels.
“This sucks,” said Hilary, after she and Luisa landed on a hotel-studded Park Place for the second time. I chortled with glee as they handed over the rest of their cash and two railroads to make payment. Jane and Sean hit it, too, on their next trip around the board, and it wiped them out. Hilary and Luisa lasted one more turn before turning over the rest of their properties.
Peter and I were happily counting our winnings when the losing teams announced, in unison, that they were going to bed.
“Winners get to clean up,” said Jane, gesturing to the debris of the game and the scattered coffee cups and glasses from after-dinner drinks.
“Are you sure you don’t want to play again?” Peter asked. “It’s not even midnight.” We were both energized by our stunning victory.
“I’d rather poke my eyes out with a stick,” said Hilary with a pout.
“Now who’s being a sore loser?” I asked.
“Good night, all,” said Sean with finality, steering Jane toward the door.
“Be good, you two,” called Hilary over her shoulder, unable to leave without at least one embarrassing parting shot. Luisa smiled tiredly and followed them out.
“Some people just flee from a challenge,” I said to Peter.
“Well, it must be disheartening to be so completely blitzkrieged. Maybe we can stir up a rematch in the morning once they’ve had time to recover.” He started sorting the multicolored bills and placing them back in their slots while I began gathering up the property cards.
“With those cowards? I doubt it.” I handed him the property cards and turned to rounding up the green plastic houses and the red plastic hotels. My hands felt clumsy as I fumbled with the small pieces, and I realized that my heart was starting to pound.
A moment of reckoning was drawing near. If one of us was going to make a move, the time was as ripe as it was going to get. And, except for the lingering memory of Richard’s body in the pool, I couldn’t have asked for a more romantic moment. The fire had burned down to dying embers, emitting a warm, orange glow that burnished the room with soft light. We were seated next to each other on the overstuffed sofa, and my arm still tingled from where it had brushed Peter’s as we’d moved our miniature top hat around the board.
Peter reached for the bag of houses and hotels, and I passed it to him. He took it in one hand and tossed it in the box while with the other hand he took gentle hold of my wrist. I froze, astonished by the overwhelming effect this simple action had. Trying not to blush, I slowly looked up at him.
“Hi,” he said softly. His dark gaze fastened on mine.
“Hi,” I answered back, unsure what else to say. His look was unexpectedly serious, and I felt a pang of alarm at the gravity of his expression. It suggested that he was about to deliver some very bad news. My heart began to pound yet faster.
“I know that this is—er, well, inappropriate, given the circumstances, and I have no idea what you’re thinking,” he began, while I fought the urge to jump up and flee before he could tell me why he wasn’t interested in me. I willed myself to stay calm.
“It’s just that I’ve been wanting to kiss you ever since I first laid eyes on you last night.”
I almost fainted with relief. And disbelief. “Really?”
“Really.” He nodded, his expression still serious.
“Me, too,” I admitted. I let my eyes linger on the smooth curve of his lips.
“Really?” He seemed surprised. Which was surprising, given the degree to which I’d done little but blush and giggle in his presence since we met.
“Really,” I confirmed, trying neither to blush nor giggle and for once succeeding.
“Good.” His eyes were still focused on mine.
I summoned up my courage. “So, are you going to?”
“Going to what?”
“Kiss me?”
He laughed and ran his free hand through my hair, tracing the line of my cheek with his index finger. “Well, since you put it like that.” He leaned forward and touched his lips to mine.
And I melted.
It had been a long while since I’d made out on a sofa with somebody’s mother sleeping upstairs. I made a mental note not to wait so long until the next time. Kissing Peter felt like coming home in a way that actually coming home didn’t even begin to replicate.
We must have spent the better part of an hour tangled up in each other’s arms. He was, hands down, the best kisser I’d ever encountered. And while my list of encounters was dwarfed by Hilary’s, a decade and a half of dating had added up.
“You’re an excellent kisser,” I told him when we came up for air. I was trying to remember what size the bed was in his room on the third floor and wondering how I could gracefully get us both into it without coming across like a complete slut.
The Pact Page 18
